When Alteryx Inc. President Paula Hansen was an undergraduate majoring in electrical engineering at Virginia Tech in the early 1990s, she was in the minority as a woman among her male classmates, long before she joined the ranks of top tech executives.
“It was not uncommon for me to be one of three or four women in a class of several hundred back in those days,” Hansen said.
“I’m happy to hear those numbers are changing.”
Hansen, who graduated with a Bachelor of Science, has added another chapter to her trailblazing career, following a notable revenue-growing role at SAP and a high-level position at Cisco.
She was promoted to president, in addition to her role as chief revenue officer, of Irvine data analytics software company Alteryx (NYSE: AYX) as of Jan. 31. She had already been serving as chief revenue officer since May of last year.
Reigniting Growth
Hansen takes over the crucial dual role at a key time for the 25-year-old company that, until a stock slump beginning a little more than a year ago, was one of Orange County’s runaway success stories in the tech industry.
While the company’s market cap topped $10 billion just two years ago, its value has dropped back to $3.9 billion as of last week.
The stock decline has come as the company’s rate of revenue growth has slowed, bringing more Wall Street scrutiny to Alteryx, whose software allows data workers to turn huge amounts of information and data into actionable business decisions.
Alteryx had $536.1 million in revenue last year, an 8% increase from the 2020 level. Its “annual recurring revenue,” which it calls a better indicator of company strength, increased 30% in the same timespan.
Hansen leads an expanded, unified team that includes sales, marketing and customer success and services and will continue to report directly to CEO Mark Anderson, as the company steps up its cloud efforts.
Anderson said Hansen had built “an exceptional team to propel our next phase of growth” when her promotion was announced on Feb. 1.
During the company’s Feb. 15 conference call with analysts, Anderson also added that Hansen had been “hiring people that come from bigger companies, [with] a lot more experience selling to senior-level-executives but also being inclusive with IT.”
One such example of the company’s hiring focus: Alteryx this month named cloud marketing industry veteran Keith Pearce as chief marketing officer. Pearce, who served in executive roles at Genesys, Salesforce, and Allianz, joined as CMO effective Feb. 14.
Under Hansen’s leadership, “we have seen major improvements in our account coverage, partner engagement and execution discipline,” Anderson told analysts.
Earnings, Trifacta
Just a bit more than two weeks into Hansen’s new position, Alteryx released its latest earnings. The company beat Wall Street expectations on revenue, annual recurring revenue, and non-GAAP operating income.
“If you look at the execution improvement through Q3 and Q4 … I think it demonstrated the reasoning for the changes that we made and the fact that Paula’s fingerprints are all over it,” Anderson told analysts.
The biggest change of late: the purchase of San Francisco-based “data wrangling” company Trifacta, which is designed to speed Alteryx’s journey into the cloud.
The $475 million Trifacta purchase is, by far, the largest acquisition in the history of Alteryx, which was formed in 1997 by Dean Stoecker, Libby Duane Adams and Ned Harding.
Stoecker turned over the CEO role to Anderson in 2020 and is now executive chairman. Adams became the Alteryx chief advocacy officer in December 2020 while Harding had been serving as an adviser to the company.
Repositioning
Besides the Trifacta buy, Hansen told the Business Journal the company’s future is “very, very bright” following a heavy amount of work done last year.
“We have positioned the sales organization towards the part of the market where we see the most appetite for our innovation—so at the large enterprise base, the Global 2000,” she says.
Hansen adds: “I believe that we’re now in a place where our foundation has been laid, where we are ready to accelerate as we go into 2022.”
The Alteryx headcount has grown to about 2,000 globally to meet growing demand. A recent survey says 70% of organizations want to be more data driven than they were before the pandemic.
“The industry moves fast. Our customer expectations can adjust fast as well,” Hansen says.
She says her promotion is a “natural progression of the type of work that I’ve done in the past” following more than 25 years of leadership experience.
‘Tremendous Responsibility’
For Hansen, being in the top ranks among tech executives “feels like a tremendous responsibility.”
“You have to recognize that you’re a role model when you’re in a position like this” both for young women and men.
Over the years, she has encouraged young women to enter technology as a profession, and says she would like to see the process accelerated.
Hansen grew up outside of Pittsburgh, where her father was a lawyer, before heading south for college at Virginia Tech—officially Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in Blacksburg—and then moved West.
“I’ve been in California for almost 30 years, so it definitely feels like home.”
She’s built up an extensive résumé since the move.
As former CRO of SAP Customer Experience, which serves more than 10,000 customers across 150 countries, Hansen was responsible for the global sales strategy, go-to-market operations and customer success, according to Alteryx. She led a team of over 1,200 to grow the business to $1 billion of annual recurring revenue in 2020 making it SAP’s fastest-growing division.
Prior to SAP, Hansen served as vice president of Cisco’s Global Enterprise organization, and was “focused on digital transformation enablement for global enterprise customers across a variety of industries,” the company said.
She lives with her husband and two teenage boys in the Bay Area.
Hansen works out of the Alteryx Redwood City office near San Francisco, but “I spend a fair amount of my time in Orange County.”
