Jazz purchase is top 2020 Utah acquisition

By Brice Wallace 

Their names are at the top of the organizational chart, but the new owners of the Utah Jazz see every Utahn as part of the franchise.

“We’re all in this together,” Ryan Smith said as he and his wife, Ashley, were presented the M&A Award at the ACG (Association for Corporate Growth) Utah’s 17th annual Intermountain DealSource Summit, for their acquisition last year of the majority stake in the Jazz for $1.66 billion from the Miller family.

Smith said everyone involved in the transaction, every business owner and every person in the state should realize they have a stake in the Jazz, too. While acknowledging that the team is a business, Smith stressed it also is a community asset.

“You’re part of this. You’re part of Utah. You’re part of building this. You’re part of the Jazz,” he said. “We want you to laugh, and cry when we cry, and it’s going to be hard and there’s going to be good times, so we just want to enjoy it all together because it’s what we need. It’s what we need in the world right now.”

The summit also included a presentation of the Growth Capital Award to Lucid, founded by Ben Dilts and Karl Sun in 2010. Last year, the company secured $52 million in a Series D funding round on an evaluation of more than $900 million. The company started with Lucidchart, a web-based, proprietary platform that allows users to collaborate on drawing, revising and sharing charts and diagrams.

Smith took a different route in building Qualtrics, an experience management company where he is founder and executive chairman. The two-decades-old company did not take venture capital or outside capital for its first 10 years. In 2018, the founders sold the company to SAP, but last year worked with SAP to take Qualtrics public in Utah’s largest initial public offering on record — all while Smith was working out the transition of the Jazz ownership.

Now Smith hopes the Jazz deal will be a model for teams in the NBA and other leagues when they transition ownership, legacy and stewardship. As for the Jazz, he said he wants to make Utah proud, continue the legacy left by the Miller family “and hopefully we’ll have it for the next 35 years, right?”

During that time, Smith said he wants to use the Jazz as a platform to effect change in the community. “Qualtrics is 15 times to 20 times bigger than the Jazz, but the Jazz are much more visible than enterprise software. That’s just the way it is,” he said.

The goal is to set a standard for the rest of the now-fractured world to follow.

“I think that if we can look back 30 years from now and say, ‘Whoa, Utah managed the world differently, we all rallied behind one common goal of unity and love,’ like, man, that would be worth it all,” Smith said.

“We want to be the most loving, inclusive, friendly place. Everyone tells me Utahns are happy; let’s go be happy. We’re full of love; let’s go be that to everyone. … We have so much going for us. We just need to unite and say, ‘Hey, this is what we want Utah to be.’”

Lucid was launched in 2010 with Lucidchart and in 2020 passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue; launched new product LucidSpark in only four months; and opened its second global office in Melbourne, Australia. Lucid is also the creator of Lucidpress, a web-based desktop publishing software app used to create brochures, flyers, newsletters, magazine layout and design, and more.

Sun, co-founder and CEO, noted that the idea for the company began when Dilts and his team were struggling on a complicated product when using a diagramming software available at the time.

“Over the last decade, we’ve realized that that struggle that Ben had to working with his team to really get on the same page and really distill complicated, complex ideas and processes into clarity, was something that they were struggling with but it’s what a lot of teams struggle with,” Sun said. “And that’s where we’ve come. That’s why our mission is to help teams see and build the future.”

While those two award-winners were highlighted during the summit, ACG Utah also underscored the successes of the Utah deal community last year despite the impacts of the COVID pandemic. In 2020, more than 300 transactions were completed, including more than two dozen public offerings, as well as nearly 100 mergers and acquisitions and nearly 200 private placements.