Data analytics software company Alteryx Inc. soared to more than $10 billion in market capitalization as a public company in 2020 before that value was slashed and the firm was sold to a pair of private equity firms.
Now, Irvine-based Alteryx has a new chief executive, Andy MacMillan, and the owners are looking for him to push the company to “new heights.”
“There’s a feeling among the board and the ownership group that there’s a lot of potential in this company that we’re here to unlock,” MacMillan told the Business Journal in an interview on Dec. 11.
MacMillan, who has a deep background as an executive at two software heavyweights in Silicon Valley, is taking over what was once the premier software company with headquarters in Orange County. Alteryx became a unicorn under the leadership of co-founder and prior CEO Dean Stoecker, who started the company in 1997 above a restaurant in the city of Orange.
Last year, sales climbed to almost $1 billion while executives cut its annual loss almost in half to $179 million.
In prior years, company executives would often say data is the new oil; however, the emergence of artificial intelligence led to questions about Alteryx’s relevance.
While the company often noted AI has long been part of its platform, it decided to emphasize the point earlier this year by changing its key product name from “Alteryx Analytics Cloud Platform” to “AI Platform for Enterprise Analytics.”
MacMillan said AI presents “an interesting opportunity” and acknowledged that “it’s never easy to go through a lot of transformation.” Alteryx has become a “very global company” with plenty of potential to unlock, he said.
“His wealth of experience, paired with his empathetic approach to leadership and deep enterprise software industry knowledge, will forge a new path to success,” Deven Parekh, managing director at Alteryx co-owner Insight Partners, said in a statement.
New CEO’s Wealth of Experience
In announcing MacMillan’s appointment on Dec. 5, Parekh added: “We can’t wait to see what Andy will achieve at Alteryx.”
Once one of OC’s highest-flying publicly listed companies, Alteryx was sold to private equity firms Insight Partners and Clearlake Capital Group L.P. earlier this year.
Clearlake and Insight Partners almost a year ago announced the deal to buy Alteryx for $4.4 billion, factoring in about $1 billion in debt. The market cap had slid to $2.5 billion in September 2023.
The completion of the sale was announced in March of this year.
Clearlake partner Prashant Mehrotra cited MacMillan’s “success in leveraging AI to drive product innovation and developing high-performing teams at scaled enterprise software companies.”
“We believe his leadership will help propel the company to new heights,” Mehrotra said in the announcement.
MacMillan’s background includes being vice president of product management at Oracle Corp., where he worked for five years, and chief operating officer of products at Salesforce, where he stayed for more than three years.
Oracle, which reported $53 billion in sales in fiscal 2024, currently has a $495 billion market cap (NYSE: ORCL) while Salesforce, which had $34.9 billion in sales in fiscal 2024, has a $340 billion market cap (NYSE: CRM).
MacMillan is known as a “product guy” rather than a salesman like prior CEO Mark Anderson.
“My background is actually in products, so I was a developer forever ago, but I mostly worked in product management,” MacMillan said. He calls himself “not a sales guy as much as a product and product-messaging person by background.”
For further excerpts from the interview, see story on this page.
Accelerating Innovation Supporting More AI
MacMillan, who lives in Burlingame outside San Francisco, joined Alteryx from privately-held Los Gatos-based UserTesting, where he served as CEO.
Among MacMillan’s top priorities in his new role will be accelerating Alteryx’s innovation in its core platform and supporting the development of additional AI capabilities.
“More than 8,000 customers globally rely on Alteryx to automate analytics to improve revenue performance, manage costs and mitigate risks across their organizations,” Alteryx says.
Its customers include top-drawer companies such as Visa, Dell, Netflix, Siemens and UPS, according to the Alteryx website.
Meanwhile, the company has moved its headquarters back to Park Place in Irvine from gleaming surroundings in the Spectrum Terrace area of the city, according to the website.
Clearlake is headquartered in Santa Monica while Insight is based in New York City.
Co-Founded by OC’s Dean Stoecker
As the deal was heading toward completion, Alteryx on Jan. 26 said it had appointed Kevin Rubin, the company’s chief financial officer, to serve as interim chief executive officer.
Rubin succeeded Mark Anderson, who stepped down as CEO and from the board of directors “to pursue other professional opportunities.” Anderson’s LinkedIn profile says he is a partner at Menlo Park-based Lightspeed Venture Partners and a president of revenue at Cloudflare, a San Francisco-based cloud-services provider with a $39.1 billion market cap (NYSE: NET).
After the sale, Alteryx was delisted from the New York Stock Exchange. In past years, Alteryx has run into penny-pinching clients and prospects, as well as stiff competition from much larger industry giants like Microsoft Corp. (Nasdaq: MSFT) and Oracle.
About 209 of its estimated 2,600 employees work in Irvine, according to the Business Journal’s annual list of software companies operating in Orange County.
New CEO For ‘Very Global’ Company Alteryx
Here are excerpts of the interview with Andy MacMillan, the new CEO of Alteryx, gave to the Business Journal on Dec. 11, less than a week after his appointment was announced.
The AI Opportunity
“I think it’s a fascinating company. I think it’s a company that has a really interesting opportunity around the emergence of AI and people really need to be able to get their data in order to tell a story that solves business problems as it relates to AI.”
No big office mandate
“I live in Burlingame just outside of San Francisco and pretty easy to get up and down here. So, I’ll be coming down.”
“We exist well beyond our headquarters. So I’ll be on the road going to our offices but also doing a lot of work across our global team.”
“I’m not driving a big office mandate.”
Especially for technology companies, “I believe in a lot of flexibility with accountability.”
Software Companies Feeling the Shift
“The market has shifted a lot, and I think a lot of software companies are feeling that.”
“By going private we’re sort of reorganizing ourselves to be successful going forward. And I think that’s better than being maybe trapped in the public markets where you can’t do as much transformation as rapidly. And I think that can be really challenging.”
“There’s a lot of optimism in the company. It’s never easy to go through a lot of transformation.”
“There’s a feeling among the board and the ownership group that there’s a lot of potential in this company that we’re here to unlock.”
“There’s a big opportunity coming in this space around AI.”
“I think there’s going to be an emerging role of somebody who’s an AI ops person or an AI business analysts, where companies are going to say we have to bring AI into our company but we also need our data to be organized and put together in such a way that it can work with AI. We as a company are very uniquely positioned to solve exactly that problem.”
