Alteryx Inc. Chief Executive Dean Stoecker and his wife, Angie, want to improve educational opportunities for disenfranchised high schoolers while curbing the national student debt crises.
That’s the guiding philosophy behind their private foundation, i-Rise, established last year with an endowment of a few million dollars.
“We want to focus on Orange County. We want this to be local more than anything else,” Dean told the Business Journal in a recent interview with the couple at the software company’s Park Place headquarters.
“There’s sort of a bubble here in Orange County where everyone thinks that everything is great,” he says. “You go down to the Santa Ana river bed and you’ll see it’s not.”
Poverty and aimlessness spread far beyond Santa Ana’s boundaries, Angie interjects.
“It’s Westminster, Garden Grove, Tustin, North County,” she says. “So many kids we’d like to help and we can do that.”
The foundation is taking some cues from the company Dean co-founded, Alteryx (NYSE: AYX).
The Irvine-based company about three years ago earmarked $500,000 to fund and develop a nanodegree program in Alteryx core product, data analytics, through Udacity, a booming online marketplace for continuing education and various certifications of specialization, like Android app development or Python coding.
Alteryx customers pay a subscription fee for its analytics software to integrate data, monetize content, forecast sales, map out retail expansion plans, and compare sales and product placement, among other features. Large chains like McDonald’s for instance, use Alteryx’ self-serve analytics to pick new store locations.
“It was an experiment for me and Angie to figure out how the nanodegree effort would change people views on academic life,” Dean says.
It may be too early to draw those conclusions, but there’s evidence the $1,295 program has boosted career development and income.
Since Udacity launched the self-paced, six-month curriculum, more than 6,700 students have enrolled and 900 have graduated, including nearly 500 this year. Among the takeaways:
• The percentage of full-time workers increased from about 67% to 85% after earning the degree
• Median salary increased by $7,500
“It helps people survive in the digital world, understanding how to process and organize data, how to apply arithmetic and algorithmic processes to that data to drive insights that lead you to make new and better business decisions,” Dean says of the nanodegree.
The program is helping to close a widening skills gap in enterprises around the globe, as well.
“There are only 2 million Ph.D. statisticians,” Dean says. “There’s a demand for tens of thousands more.”
The couple aren’t fans of the modern educational system, particularly higher learning. They’ve come to this meeting at the CEO’s glass-framed corner office armed with several statistics from the end of 2017 published by the New York Federal Reserve Bank to support their position.
• $1.4 trillion in student debt
• $44.7 million students in debt; 16.4 million with debt of $25,000+
• 73% of students with debt are under 40 years old
• 58% are behind on their payments
“We decided that i-Rise would be a 501(C)(3) to help elevate opportunities for the people who couldn’t and probably shouldn’t get a bunch of debt to go to school,” says Dean, a President Trump super-delegate at the 2016 Republican Convention in Cleveland and a man whose DNA has some libertarian markers. “A two to four-year university doesn’t make sense for everybody.”
The charter school advocate argues that technology changes twice by the time a student graduates from a four-year program. Angie contends that higher learning is more tilted to professorial research and publication “with a few of those years learning things you’ll never use once you get out of school.”
Dean, who earned a Bachelor’s degree in international business from the University of Colorado and an MBA from Pepperdine University, and Angie, who earned a business degree from Westfield State University in Massachusetts, both worked their way through school and didn’t take on debt, though tuition was a fraction then of what is now.
The duo has been brainstorming ideas and initiatives for months and will soon test some of them as students return from summer break.
Meetings with school counselors, administrators and potential scholarship recipients will begin in earnest. So will the selection of the first schools for the program. The couple also plans to reach out to OneOC, an ombudsman group which helps OC nonprofits navigate the landscape while providing volunteer, training, consulting and identifying sponsorship opportunities.
“We hope before the end of this year to have a handful of these scholarships,” Dean says. “We’ll ramp up when we can create a cookie cutter approach.”
Dean took Alteryx—a company twenty years in the making—public in March of last year, gave the first local initial public offering since June 2015 and the first in tech since December 2013. The IPO, which netted $114 million for less than 20% of the company, gave the software developer an $800 million market cap, and turned the Stoeckers into millionaires overnight.
Alteryx shares have tripled since then. The company continues to grow annual sales over 50% and add international markets; the company’s shares closed Thursday at $43.23, just shy of its all-time high, and good for a market value of $2.6 billion. Dean still has a 14% stake in Alteryx (appx. $375 million on paper) after recently selling about $15 million in stock.
Alteryx was just named for the third year in a row as one of the Best Places to Work in Orange County in the Business Journal’s annual survey. The distinction also helps inform who the Stoeckers are, why they formed i-Rise and are devoting an increasing amount of time and resources to its mission.
“You spend the first half of your life trying to accumulate wealth and you spend the second half of your life trying to figure out how to give it all away,” Dean says.
