About a month before Alteryx Inc. filed its March 2017 initial public offering, Chief Financial Officer Kevin Rubin was on a flight to the Czech Republic with Chief Executive Dean Stoecker to hammer out a deal to acquire metadata management and oversight specialist Semanta.
“We took a short trip to Europe to acquire the company in the middle of also trying to get on file,” Rubin told the Business Journal last week.
The deal was sealed, the first of several milestones the data analytics software maker achieved in a seminal year that included a $114 million IPO—the first in Orange County in years—as well as a $170 million secondary offering (nondilutive) and another acquisition.
“To do that while still managing growth is pretty remarkable,” said Rubin, who received the CFO of the Year Award in the public-sector category at the Business Journal’s 11th annual event on Feb. 15 at Hotel Irvine (see profiles of the other winners, pages 1, 5, 6 and 8). “None of it can happen without a strong team behind you.”
It’s a team Rubin’s helped build since taking the chief finance role nearly two years ago, leading IT, accounting, fulfillment, order management, tax, legal, and financial planning and analysis.
Among the hires: Christopher Lal, senior vice president, general counsel and corporate secretary, who brought governance and IPO chops from similar roles at publicly traded Tilly’s Inc. in Irvine and Aliso Viejo-based Sunstone Hotel Investors Inc.
Rubin oversees about 70 employees split roughly between the company’s Park Place headquarters and its suburban Denver office in Broomfield.
Mr. ‘FinTech’
He grew up in Los Angeles and spent his first 16 years working in the metro area, starting his career in the technology practice of Arthur Andersen before moving up the finance ladder at MRV Communications and then DataDirect Networks in Chatsworth, then joining Pictage Inc. in Torrance.
He’s an avid Lakers fan, skeptical of the cap-clearing moves the franchise made before the All-Star break.
“Our interests tend to be around the Lakers,” said Rubin, who also holds a soft spot for his alma mater, the University of California-San Diego, where his wife, Dana, also graduated. Their son Zachary is a freshman there.
Their youngest, Spencer, is on the freshman football team at Corona del Mar High School.
Rubin moved to OC in 2011 to take the top finance post at Newport Beach-based MSM Software, which came into prominence in 1965 with breakthrough simulation software that helped the Apollo 11 spacecraft land on the moon four years later.
He held the post for nearly five years before joining Alteryx at an important juncture for the company.
MSM was sold last year for $834 million to Swedish IT service provider Hexagon AB. The simulation software maker was taken private in late 2009 in a $390 million cash deal by Palo Alto-based private equity firm Symphony Technology Group LLC, fueling Rubin’s exit.
The international experience he gained there—at the time, MSC generated about 75% of its $200 million-plus in annual revenue overseas—coupled with a career largely spent at technology companies, led him to Alteryx.
Stoecker, the Business Journal’s Business Person of the Year in 2017 in the technology sector, was also a driving force.
“He’s just incredibly down-to-earth and very authentic,” Rubin said of co-founder Stoecker. “The kind of guy you’d follow into the fire.”
Alteryx enters the year with a tail wind and an eye on international expansion.
The company last year posted revenue of $131.6 million, up 53% from 2016. It posted an operating loss of $7.2 million, compared to a loss of $19.7 million the prior year.
Alteryx customers pay a subscription fee for its analytics software to integrate data, monetize content, forecast sales, map retail expansion plans, and compare sales and product placement, among other features.
McDonald’s uses Alteryx software to find store locations.
When Rubin joined the company, Alteryx had just entered London in its first overseas foray. Now that operation employs more than 75 as the software maker gains footholds in Germany, France and Singapore, and crafts hiring plans in Japan and across Asia.
The fast-growing company employs about 200 locally and more than 600 globally.
“We have no shortage of initiatives and opportunity this year,” he said. “The big theme is international growth.”
