S 01 Ep 8 | Turning Your Customers Into Your Biggest Champions

With Dean Stoecker, the Executive Chairman at Alteryx and author of The Masterpiece book, a manual for entrepreneurs.

Dean Stoecker is a visionary leader and influential entrepreneur in the field of data analytics and business intelligence. He is widely recognized as the co-founder, Chairman, and CEO of Alteryx, a leading data analytics company that empowers organizations to transform data into actionable insights.

Under Stoecker's guidance, Alteryx experienced significant growth and innovation, pioneering a platform that democratizes data analytics and enables users across various industries to make informed decisions through intuitive analytics tools.

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Introduction to the episode

(00:00-02:13)

AS: Welcome to a very special episode of the Experience-Focused Leaders podcast.

I am honored, delighted, and just generally thrilled to share some of the benefits of being coached by Dean over the last year or two with all of you. Dean Stoecker is the founder, CEO now Executive Chairman of Alteryx, which is a publicly listed company that he built from a founder to CEO for 24 years. Now he's an Executive Chairman and also an author of an amazing book called The Masterpiece which is a manual for entrepreneurs and anybody who wants to do something meaningful in their life.

So, Dean, without further ado, just tell a brief story of your journey to entrepreneurship. And yes, especially at the very beginning, where you started in a family of an entrepreneur. And how that has shaped your career and your decisions as a leader of Alteryx.

Not working for the man but trying to be the man

It turns out that when we started Alteryx, all three founders grew up in entrepreneurial households. I don't know if it's the DNA, but clearly, there is the influence that gets you excited about not working for the man but trying to be the man, change the world, get creative, and do different things.

And I learned a lesson that I had to control the supply chain myself. I outsourced too many things, and it ended up hurting me in the long run. So in each of these lessons and each of these ventures, I learned some really important things about what I would have to accomplish in starting a company.

(02:13-07:00)

DS: Alex, good to be with you and your audience. Well, I grew up in a family-run business, and even as a young kid, I can remember sitting around the dinner table with the family and my dad bitching and moaning about customers who wouldn't pay or couldn't make up their minds, or vendors who wouldn't sell to him for whatever reason. It was challenging, and I listened to this, and I thought, “Wow, do I really want to start a business someday? Because it sounds like it's really hard.” But I also saw how rewarding it was for my father.

And it took me a while. I didn't start until I turned 40. I think I've been on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money a few times after going public, and one time on set, he said to me when the cameras went off, “You know, Dean, you're not that young Silicon Valley CEO. So what would you tell your 25-year-old self?” And I said, “Well, Jim, I tell myself, don't wait till you're 40 to start a business.”

AS: This is a great story, but truth be told, you did start a few other businesses before you were 40. And for those of you that don't know, Alteryx is an amazing company that helps democratize data science. We'll dive into that in a little bit. But I love a few of the names of your previous entrepreneurial ventures. Sensible Socks was the one that kind of really arrived. They should have succeeded. You know, there was the chimney business.

So tell us a little bit about the trials and tribulations of those early attempts. And why did you start Alteryx? And why did that one succeed, in your view?

DS: I think the first three or four attempts were sort of laboratory experiments to see if I could pull it off or to see how far I could go without freaking out or losing a bunch of money, and each of these all had different elements of those things I just mentioned.

But Sensible Socks, of course, was still a great idea. I believe everyone's got a spare sock drawer, and I was gonna sell them as a pair and a spare, but it was all in packaging, marketing, and creativity. I wanted something engaging and immersive. I mean a lot like what RELAYTO does for creators.

AS: Create the most exciting socks and the opportunity in a way that will just blow. But it's still sensible like it was, but exciting.

DS: It was for the father or grandfather who had everything, and it was a novelty. But it was a good idea. I only went through the packaging, I prototyped a bunch of things, and they decided that. I started to have a family and a mortgage, and doing this at night, it consumed a lot of time, and I thought, “Ok, well, I think marketing-wise, I could pull something off.”

But chimneyless fireplaces are kind of close to my heart because I worked for my father, who built homes in the Colorado Rockies. It was always a pain in the ass to put in a fireplace because you had this long flew, and these were frames, so a little precarious up on ladders, 10 Ft outside, the 60-degree angle. And I came across gelled alcohol fireboxes where you would burn. It was actually the first, I would call it, fuel as a service.

This is back in like 1985. And it was all about reducing the cost of installation. It was about a subscription model for grain alcohol cans of fuel. And I lost a quarter of a million dollars in this deal.

I started in 1997 after working in the data and analytics space for about 20 years. I worked for mostly content companies, divisions of AC Nielsen Donnelley, marketing Dun & Bradstreet.

Make your content ubiquitous

And what I learned is that in order to maximize the value of content, you have to make it ubiquitous. And the only way ubiquity happens in software is if you wrap that software in an easy-to-use, engaging interface that makes everyone want to play in the space. And then you had to apply analytic layers on top of it to make the data dance, to tell better stories, to get better outcomes.

But what they did is execution-wise, they put 33 cents of investment into data, 33 cents into software, and 33 cents into analytics. And lo and behold, they all became mediocre at everything. And I realized that you had to specialize.

(07:00-10:50)

And all the companies I worked with, I told them, “We gotta have data software and analytics if we're going to be successful.” And they agreed.

So I started Alteryx to specialize in a data agnostic platform, an analytic agnostic platform, an industry agnostic platform and, and we made it so inviting and engaging that at some point in time, 50 million citizen data scientists around the world will use Alteryx to solve simple to extraordinarily complex business challenges.

But it was a long journey. I started it and, I think in the book, I call it “The long emotional journey to creating something great”.

AS: “The emotional journey to creating anything great”. That's the official title of the book, The Masterpiece. I personally just devoured it. I used a script and, so I didn't have the paperwork. I just consumed it there, and in that book, even the altruistic journey wasn't a straightforward one. You use terms like “the Valley of Despair”, “the Swamp”, but I think we're keeping it PG on this podcast for now. It was pretty gruesome, and I'll come back to one of those episodes, but as you were just starting out, at the very beginning, this is something we didn't really talk about in our discussions. But when I read it in the book, I thought it was really great.

There was the quote that you use. I'm just gonna read it out here.

“All warfare is based on deception. Hence, when we are able to attack, we must seem unable. When using our force, we must appear inactive. When we are near, we must make the enemy believe we are far away, and when we are far away, we must make them believe we are near.”

And your very first big deal at the founding of Alteryx when you created this party, an invitation was a Mariachi band and inviting anybody to create a perception that you're a more stable, larger company. But then also you created a power walkthrough of the user's journey, which is really something near and dear to our heart before you even had the full software. And then you had the customer and the success. Tell us a little bit more about your thinking in this, creating this experience, and how you made yourself bigger.

“Art of War” for business

It struck me pretty clear that we all just want to create something great. We all wanna create a great family, great marriage, great friendship, great education, have a good job, and if you're as lucky as me, it's starting a business.

(10:50-21:52)

DS: I think any entrepreneur should read Sun Tzu's Art of War for business because there are lots of really great lessons in the book about how you survive, win a war without going into a battle. You talked about one of my favorite lines, “strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory. Tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat.”

The other thing you mentioned earlier was that this is true. I don't think there's ever been a linear path to success in entrepreneurship. Maybe Whatsapp, they sold that to me for $16 billion with no revenue in two years. That almost never happened. So it's gonna be for anyone who's started a business or thinking about starting a business, it's a long emotional journey and it takes these circuitous routes. Some things you can predict are gonna happen and others are like you're blindsided. So I needed Sun Tzu to kind of set me straight, keep me humble and try to figure out how to look around corners without spending a ton of money since we were self-funded.

So in May, it was May 16th of 1997, finally got the other partners on board, changed the operating agreement three times to get there. And we had a proposal. Our first deal was on the table. It was $125,000 for a company in Orange County, California, called Money Mailer sort of at the bottom tier of media in saturation mail.

The proposal was to build an analytics, a web based analytics platform for their sales reps. Not many people were doing this in 1997 on the web, we were doing big data analytics very early on and we were democratizing this complex process to individual sales reps that worked for franchisees of this business. But to win the deal, I had to make us look bigger, I didn't want a company to say to us, “We're not gonna buy it from you because you're three people.” And so I wanted this more than anything because I wanted to prove to myself that we had the hood spot to actually figure this out really, rather than lots of pain.

Well, there were lots of painful steps but without getting into the swamp day one. And so, we had an open house to open the business and I invited the only proposal customer we had out there or the prospect — Godfrey Otuteye who was the CEO of Money Mailer. I specifically hired him for a Mariachi band. I had a Mexican buffet and I didn't want him to come in with an empty 600 square foot office. And so I brought in all the architects from next door. I brought in a bunch of the retailers from downstairs that were running antique shops, offered them free food and an open bar and of course, 75 people showed up. In the overflow space it looked busy and Godfred still hadn't shown up. He finally shows up and I offered him a drink. He had just come off of work. He looked kind of stressed and he said, “Can I get a tour?” And I said, “This is it, this is it, man.” But I had to make us look big. So I prepared an interactive proposal.

AS: Just a public service announcement, this is before RELAYTO, before even Alteryx. You were already thinking, How do you visualize what you're gonna do for the customer?

DS: It's all about immersive engagements and I wanted him to believe that this was real. And so I put together a wireframe, back in those days, it was Netscape and it was cool. It was called Smart Zones. I put in all the clicks into the wireframes and it took me probably 3-4 days to create this presentation. But I wanted him to feel like it was his idea. It was gonna be his way to accelerate growth at that Money Mailer.

And after a couple of drinks, he said, “I gotta go”, and I said, “Can you please, Godfred, come and sit at my desk? I wanna show you what we've put together.” And he sat down, he loved it. We were going through and navigating how a sales rep would sell more media, which advertisers to target and what zones to cover. And really, it was quite nice. Because he loved it so much. I pulled the contract out of my drawer, I slid it in front of him with a pen and I said, “Godfrey, can I get you to sign this?” And he said, “I've had too much to drink. So maybe tomorrow.” And so he did set it in the next day.

AS: That was a sleepless night because a lot was riding on this opportunity, right? For you at the time was, well—

DS: I think more than anything, right? I'm a sales guy at heart. I knew analytics was an immersive social experience.

He clearly got that. And so I knew we were on to something. And yeah, it was kind of a sleepless night because he said he had signed it in the morning and I dashed to the office at like 6 a.m. to see, and I waited. Sure enough, at like 8:15, the fax comes in and I realized that this was an opportunity that was gonna be big.

AS: That's an amazing story. Thank you for sharing it. I just thought it was so much fun to see how you could really create it. Not just a digital experience, right? But broadly, experience to make your organization look like it's ready for enterprise business and effective.

You've bootstrapped for the next 10 years. You bootstrapped the business 14 years, right before the first VC investment. And I think there's another episode when you're in that period journey, something struck me, there was a period you were going through tough personal times for divorce. There are some challenges in terms of how you were looking at the business to be more aggressive, to be more playing to win, and they were a little bit more risk averse in the game. And then you were very close to selling the business. Then there was a pivotal moment when you decided, after a conversation with a mentor, right? You decided to change and go big or go home.

Tell us a little bit about that period. I think everybody really aims to do something great, which is sort of the topic of your book. Whether by the way, it's business but also in family life and in the community. It reaches some tough moment and they need some guide. From your experience, how do you overcome it? So maybe tell us a little bit about that episode as well.

DS: It's interesting. As I look back at the last 20, well… What is it now? 26 years? I had the opportunity to travel the world, setting up offices for Alteryx, talking with customers in every continent, lots of countries, and different languages. And what I learned through all, whether I was talking to a customer, a prospect, a taxicab driver to the airport, or a baggage handler at the hotel.

I think that people get sort of jaded when they start a business thinking that it's gonna be a linear path, and it never really is. We went through a lot of stuff, the dot-com bubble burst, 9/11, the 2008 financial crisis, and COVID, and you learn a lot about your ability to navigate choppy waters, and, of course, in our case, it was without any money. We went for 14 years self-funded because they never really believed in us. Well, I was afraid to lose my money. The thought of losing somebody else was untenable.

AS: I think at the very beginning, you borrowed money from family members at exorbitant rates.

No one is ever going to love your idea

When I do mentoring for startups, I tell them no one is ever going to love your idea as much as you. So, even if you get financial support from people, it's not because they love your idea but because they believe in a pattern recognition that they've seen before.

(21:50-23:50)

DS: I think most entrepreneurs come up with an idea and believe it is the greatest idea ever. When I do mentoring for startups, I tell them no one is ever going to love your idea as much as you. So, even if you get financial support from people, it's not because they love your idea but because they believe in a pattern recognition that they've seen before.

AS: An idea, for an entrepreneur, is like a baby. Your baby is never going to be ugly to you, and you're always going to cherish it.

DS: Well, I think that's a good analogy. I would say rather than carrying it for nine months, I carried it for 24 years. The longest delivery ever, but it was the most beautiful baby to me.

AS: By the way, this is a message to all employees: current, former, and future ones. I'm so jealous because if I had a chance to work for somebody like Dean, being in a company that he started with his values and DNA, it would have been great. I think it's a privilege to work with a “baby” that was nurtured with so much love over so many years. I don't know how easy it was for you, but it's a great outfit.

Leaders are defined by how many leaders they create

I think leaders have to be humble. You can't ever ask your team to do something that you wouldn't do yourself. I think a lot of people have a misconception of what leadership is. They think that leadership is all predicated on how many followers you have. And that's the exact opposite of what the truth is. The truth is leaders are defined by how many leaders they create.

(23:50-32:27)

DS: I think leaders have to be humble. You can't ever ask your team to do something that you wouldn't do yourself. I think a lot of people have a misconception of what leadership is. They think that leadership is all predicated on how many followers you have. And that's the exact opposite of what the truth is. The truth is leaders are defined by how many leaders they create.

The hardest part of building the business for me was finding a good company. Obviously, when you grow rapidly, you have to go outside to bring leaders in, but it's hard to find good leaders. To me, that was the riskiest part of the business. Once we raised $6 million in 2011, all of a sudden, things changed.

Imagine you're at $20 million in revenue roughly, and now you have other people's money to spend, and challenges are getting tougher, finding the right people and knowing when to step on the gas to go faster or slower. I always joked with people that this was not just an unconventional journey, making it a 20-year-old overnight success.

I was the tortoise for a long time. Part of that was by need because we hadn't raised money, and part of that was not knowing what to spend the money on. I mentor the CEOs not to raise money. I tell them, “Don't raise money until you've figured out the product market fit.”

AS: This is a really interesting take. You need to figure out what works and what doesn't, then scale it up.

DS: I think the expectation put on entrepreneurs is to go fast. People come out of great universities through entrepreneurship programs, and their first thought is I gotta go raise money. That's the last, you don't need money, you need help. The very first meeting that I had was when I decided to do a series because we had figured out the product market, and I understood Sand Hill Road's approach to entrepreneurship.

I met Ali's name, one of the most successful investors of all time, on Sand Hill Road. Had a meeting with him to raise $6 million, and I think people were surprised I even got a meeting in the first place. And he said, “So Dean, how long have you been doing this?” and I replied, “14 years,” and he said these exact words, “What's the matter with you?” And I thought what I said was, “Well, we built a great business, we put customers first, we're driving recurring revenue. It's an unbelievable business model, and now I'm ready to scale”.

AS: I think it would be helpful for other entrepreneurs or anybody launching a new initiative to keep the company alive until your product becomes a repeatable solution and you have found your niche. While the general population was getting ready to become data scientists, you had a very niche segment that helped you develop an amazing platform. So, describe to us a little bit of that journey of moving from a product perspective to a market perspective.

DS: I think anyone who starts a business ought to read Clayton M. Christensen’s “Disruptive Innovation”. I often talk with the CEOs of startups, and they build something that's very narrowly focused on an industry. I always encourage them to think about broadening the team. It is going to drive more value for them when they eventually figure out what part of the team is truly addressable.

Clayton Christensen talks about disruptive innovation, taking an old practice, relegated to a few in our world trained statisticians, and the world has 2 million trained statisticians. Then through UI/UX and a bunch of other things, democratizing it to a broader audience that wants to do those things but has been left void of the technologies to do so.

The best example of this is 10 to 12 years ago, there were 100 million SLR cameras built in the US every year. Today, there are about 1 million SLR cameras built, yet we have 4 billion photographers. Well, that's because Apple figured out that if you build a great camera into a phone, you've got more functionality, and people actually probably use the camera more than they use the phone itself. So we did the same thing, and we wanted to find 50 million citizen data scientists, but we had to wait for them to emerge. We had to wait for them to fully understand that this capability was within their reach.

Analytics as a social experience

We've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that analytics is a social experience, and people want to have fun and play with data, they wanna brag about their results, they want to do it again and find bigger challenges.

(32:27-33:38)

DS: We've proven beyond a shadow of a doubt that analytics is a social experience, and people want to have fun and play with data, they wanna brag about their results, they want to do it again and find bigger challenges.

And I think making sure you have a broad team is important. It makes it even more challenging, though, because in our case, we didn't have the investment. So we waited for the platform to get built. We did a bunch of custom solutions, went from 100% services in the early days to rolling out the first version of Alteryx, then added more building block tools within the platform itself so that people could do amazing things.

We turned ordinary people into extraordinary analysts doing things that otherwise you would have to wait weeks for a trained statistician to perform.

Democratizing creative instincts

Back in the forties, they said it was going to be in the seventies. In the seventies, they said it was going to be in the nineties. In the nineties, they started pushing it out to 2030. And I just think we're never going to have a singularity. The AI revolution is going to be the closest we'll ever get, but humans would still be in the loop.

One of the innovations that you've spoken to us a lot about is you turn your customers into your biggest champions, making them part of your journey as a company.

(33:46-40:18)

DS: When people tell you that you change their lives, that's when you know that you've hit success. It's not when you make money. I mean, that's nice too, but any entrepreneur who goes into business because they want to make a bunch of money, I think they have their priorities kind of screwed up. RELAYTO is not any different. You're trying to democratize the creative instincts of people who otherwise would have to wait for some professional content creation team to build an overly complex PowerPoint presentation.

I believe everyone is a creator, all they need is a beautiful UI/UX. The other document people should read when going into the tech world to build software as a startup is J. C. R. Licklider’s “Man-Computer Symbiosis”, written in 1964. He talks about UI/UX. The way you democratize is that you develop a symbiotic relationship between the human and the machine. And naturally, most people point to him as being the guy who almost single-handedly developed online banking. He was credited with the computer mouse at Xerox PARC, the graphical user interface for Apple and Microsoft.

AS: First, you change the tools or you create new tools, and then those tools, if they enable you to do so much more, they can help you create, and that's effectively the beautiful genesis of simplifying the creation process. And then I think going back to your early idea of the power of data and analytics, you create something you are able to distribute your creations at scale across organizations in many cases in the data. But also, in some cases, maybe externally, and that just creates some positive virtual cycle. Because when you're getting the feedback, you have more incentives to create something even more.

DS: In fact, it is the reason I believe that singularity will never be achieved. We've been talking about singularity since Alan Turing in 1940, trying to resolve the German Enigma with the bomb. He was trying to take all the messages from Hitler every day and figure out what the Germans were doing. He kept pushing everything into the machine, and he finally realized they couldn't resolve it until they inserted human logic, and then they realized the computer can never live without the human, and the human can never live without the computer.

I just think you amplify human intelligence with immersive technology, technology that makes you love your job to ask harder questions for bigger data sets. With singularity, everyone's been pushing it out.

AS: Let's talk about humans, how do you create a better human experience? And that could be an experience for your team, right? In running, you're really an enlightened company where you're able to clone yourself, clone your DNA a little bit to folks, especially folks who are young in their career, who you could help shape how they think about their roles and their future.

I think it's obviously for anybody who is in marketing or sales or some sort of customer-facing function. One of the innovations that you've spoken to us a lot about is you turn your customers into your biggest champions, making them part of your journey as a company.

So how do you create these human experiences? In the beginning, we talked about your first big sale, right? And you really created an experience. What else would you like to share with our audience that you've done at Alteryx? Do you see some of the companies you mentor do well in this area?

Make products that are engaging

The focus is not discounting the human but empowering the human.

(40:18-46:00)

DS: Well, I think over the last 10 or 15 years, it's been proven time and time again that we've gone from systems of record to systems of engagement out in the line of business. For example, SAP versus Tableau or Netflix versus Blockbuster Video. I'm a big believer that Sears, Roebuck which owned 100 million customers in the US, should have been Amazon, but they missed it. In the camera issue, Kodak and Polaroid own the photo technology, and they're gone.

I think shell companies make royalties from people like Apple. But you have to make products that are engaging, and there's Oracle that might be the last company that's still systems of record, and IBM, perhaps, but even Microsoft figured out how to go from systems of record deep into engaging technologies out in the line of business.

The focus is not discounting the human but empowering the human.

AS: And it's interesting, even in your journey with Alteryx, I think you mentioned some of your earlier competitors were still very centric, right? They were selling the software, but it wasn't truly spread across the organization.

DS: I think it's important in the tech world that you have conversations about entering a B2B enterprise software company because it's a big opportunity with servers and cloud services. I think having an approach where you go to market, especially in the early part of the disruption, you have a B2C mentality, and that's what we did. We learned that going straight to B2B was really hard because they were going to block the human experience or control the human experience.

So we went right to the human, we went to the analyst who was drowning in VLOOKUPs in Excel and hated their job. And I must have heard that 1000 times in the weeks after rolling out Alteryx, people just hated their jobs: taking way too long to do what should be relatively easy.

At RELAYTO, people normally would take four days to make a PowerPoint presentation, so to be able to do that in a much shorter period of time. All of a sudden, I love my job. I'm more productive. I'm starting to tell my friends, and you know, being a creator can be pretty powerful because now you're empowering lots of other creators by just getting excited. I've heard at least twice in my career people told me that they wanted to name their babies Alteryx.

AS: I heard that, and I think this is still what we have to work out at RELAYTO. I'm not sure it's a cool name for a baby. We need to work, and maybe there's a rebranding in the future for us.

DS: I think it's important to have a B2C mentality. Unless your persona is selling to security people and data engineers. In our case, we were trying to liberate a different human to do the work that these 2 million scientists could never get to.

Buyer personas as astronauts, pilots, or passengers

(45:00-48:27)

AS: This is really fascinating. In reality, when you say B2C, not everybody is the same, right? You had roughly two to three personas. There are super users who don't need you and who wouldn't want to do something custom. Then there were the people doing the VLOOKUPs that were the digital or citizen data scientists, and there was something in between who were power users who could enable others to teach. But they weren't necessary, they were open to scaling out, or they were open to using your platform, which was in itself quite powerful as a differentiator for it. So tell us a little bit about this continuum from power users to budding power users.

DS: Well, the analogy I've often used over the years is you look at your personas as astronauts, pilots, or passengers. The astronauts are maybe those 2 million trained statisticians in our world that need to be able to write Python and SQL and do complex statistical functions by hand. And I've always believed that just because you could write Python or SQL, it's the 21st century. Why should you have to? So we made the platform available to the astronauts, the 2 million train statisticians. I mean, there's no surprise why NASA only has 50 potential astronauts in their program at any moment in time.

But there are also pilots, and those pilots can be the trainers for everyone else on the plane. Those pilots want to be able to do the same kinds of things but have it done in an easy-to-use manner, and then they want to be able to feed the people data and analytic opportunities by asking simple questions, whether they're in first class or coach. And so you can start to have gradations of the personas, but you have to build the platform that can address those personas.

We figured out that we're going to start with the pilots, we can migrate to the astronauts, and we're going to empower all the passengers, and all of a sudden, your team goes even bigger. You go from 50 million pilots being citizen data scientists to the 600 million people who are in Excel, who also hate their job and are probably causing more damage in Excel than they should. And now you've got people automating analytic tasks, and everyone becomes more productive. And, so for us, looking at these kinds of personas, I think It's important to be able to figure out your go-to-market, but it's also important to expand your team.

On the democratization of data-science

You have to pay attention to what your customers are doing and saying about you, your product, and the outcomes that they get. It's the only way you're going to figure out how to alter your product or platform to make it more immersive or to extend its capabilities to be able to solve things you never heard of.

(48:28-52:40)

AS: I think we talked a lot about who gets to participate in a community of other people like them, who get to save a few hours per day and spend more time with their family. There's also the impact of what they're doing for that business. And I think this is really exciting and motivating for us that we're building our company. I would imagine you had much more impact, obviously, given the size and scale of these organizations. Tell us a little bit about other examples, from Green Bay Packers to other organizations that are basically transforming their businesses and their customers' experiences through what you've done with the democratization of data science.

DS: You have to pay attention to what your customers are doing and saying about you, your product, and the outcomes that they get. It's the only way you're going to figure out how to alter your product or platform to make it more immersive or to extend its capabilities to be able to solve things you never heard of.

I can remember going to a meeting with the finance team at Walmart after they had been using our product for six or seven years. And their finance team said, “One of the things we would love you guys to do is put in financial formulas in your formula tool.” And I thought, “Well, we had no idea.” We were going to end up in the office of Finance, and so we went out and got an open-source library of financial formulas and discounted cash flows. But you have to pay attention to what your customers are doing.

So we built a platform that allowed you to configure a workflow around any use case. I resisted a vertical use case because I wanted to expand the capabilities of the platform. And so today, it's being used by oil companies to read data to predict when to shut a rig down because it turns out it costs $20 million to shut a rig down unnaturally, and it's another 20 million to start it back up. But if you can predict, you can save tens of millions of dollars.

It's being used by banks to do derivatives modeling to protect investors. It's being used by airlines to hedge fuel, and I've seen kids in their 20s coming out of college using Alteryx to solve $50-$100 million challenges in the business. And it's being used by Green Bay Packers and Dallas Cowboys for everything in the stadium, everything on-field player analytics, because they all use sensors and pads, capturing haptic data. We also sponsor McLaren, and they use Alteryx to design cars. They use it on the track analytics to figure out when Lando Norris needs to come into the pit to change a tire.

To me, it's so exciting to have built something that's broad-based that heretofore was very complex. But the most gratifying part is when you change people's lives, and people say, “I now spend more time with my kids,” it's like, “Wow, that was never really the stated goal of Alteryx, but it was the natural result of having been successful at everything else.”

Parting words

I would encourage anyone who starts a business to not ever give up, and I know that's hard to do because you have family and mortgages and things that compete with time and money. But if you quit, all you're doing is severing yourself from the possibility of success. And if you went into business because you had a good idea that no one else believes in, never quit! Because you're only severing yourselves from a future opportunity, your ability to create your own masterpiece.

(52:40-55:37)

AS: That's amazing, Dean. Just as we wrap up, I mean, you've helped change my approach to how we're building RELAYTO, and I want to thank you. I want to thank you for writing the book. So you shared some of your lessons, not just in a glorified version here, like an overnight success, but like the real deal with all the trials and tribulations, how you come out of it, and how you focus on moving and pushing yourself forward versus decomposing, as you say, taking a step back.

I think it's an amazing book. Couldn't highly recommend it. Check out the website alteryx.com, sign up, and do some amazing things if you're in a data-driven world. But what would be the last words that you would share other than start the business earlier? Broadly in the wisdom of your experience as an entrepreneur, as a father, and as a leader of men in the community, please leave some parting words with our audience.

DS: I would encourage anyone who starts a business to not ever give up, and I know that's hard to do because you have family and mortgages and things that compete with time and money. But if you quit, all you're doing is severing yourself from the possibility of success. And if you went into business because you had a good idea that no one else believes in, never quit! Because you're only severing yourselves from a future opportunity, your ability to create your own masterpiece.

AS: Beautifully put, Dean.Thank you so much. Where can people find you?

DS: You can send me a note on LinkedIn. I have no problem if people send me emails. [email protected]. I do a lot of mentoring for startups, Alex. We've been at it for a couple of years. It's been fun to see how you guys have grown and evolved as an organization. They're all businesses that I'm working with around the world. It's a lot of fun. Part of my obligation to give back is mentoring. So if you're in that dark swamp of despair, reach out. I might be able to help you out.

AS: Amazing.Thank you, Dean. Get inspired. Read the book!

DS: Thank you.

Sources

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Author

Experience-focused Leaders

Experience-focused Leaders is the #1 Multimedia Podcast! We talk to senior business & tech leaders about the experiences that move forward organizations, customers and society at large. True to form, we mix audio, video, web and eBook formats to turn these authentic conversations into personalized nuggets you'll remember & use.