Perched inside the company’s well-known VW bus at its Irvine headquarters, Alteryx co-founder and CEO Dean Stoecker recently gave data analytics enthusiasts a pep talk—with a discussion that ranged from a major philanthropic effort during the COVID-19 crisis to a call to help shape the future.
Stoecker held a wide-ranging Q&A session virtually on July 15, as the coronavirus pandemic drove up California’s numbers of new infections to increasingly dangerous levels.
He included a review of efforts to help contain the COVID-19 crisis with data analytics.
“We were helping healthcare workers and administrators of hospital networks try to figure out when they were going to run out of ICU beds or predicting how many masks or ventilators they might need,” Stoecker said of the global efforts.
“We saw people building algorithms to track [COVID’s] spread, using mobile devices with QR codes, capturing GPS coordinates,” Stoecker told the virtual audience.
Alteryx analytics even helped the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention provide data to the White House, said Stoecker, whose stake in the $11 billion-valued company makes him among the wealthiest residents of Orange County (see page 27).
ADAPTing
The company CEO said “it struck a nerve” when an estimated 120 million people lost their jobs worldwide in an earlier stage of the pandemic.
That led to the Advancing Data & Analytics Potential Together (ADAPT) program, which provides free data analytics training to workers who have lost their jobs. The program, part of the company’s Alteryx for Good philanthropic efforts, is designed to “get them back on their feet as quickly as possible.”
“I want to welcome the nearly 10,000 ADAPT users, unemployed, furloughed workers around the world who’ve come to this community that you built,” Stoecker said during the Q&A (for more, see page 27).
He told the Alteryx Community he is now getting emails from users in the ADAPT program.
“We might be able to hire some of them at Alteryx,” Stoecker said, as he encouraged his listeners to “adopt” a participant in the program from their local communities.
Future Shaping
Stoecker greeted his company’s “hundreds of thousands of users around the world,” and also had some advice for his listeners about what’s ahead.
“You can either define the future or it will define you,” he said. “It’s incumbent on you guys to contribute.
“I’m not suggesting that you have to build models that take us to Mars or that improve driverless cars. I’m talking about simple things that can change lives, like predicting when a hospital’s going to run out of beds because people are being hit by COVID.”
Analytics Oktoberfest
The company plans to have a huge, and in-person conference known as Analyticon in June 2021 in Dallas.
“I believe that COVID will dissipate. I believe that there’s going to be a pent-up demand for people to want to get out and socialize.”
Alteryx is expecting more than 6,000 attendees in person at the hybrid mega-event, with another 30,000 taking part online.
Stoecker’s imagination runs wild when he envisions what Analyticon will be:
“It’s going to be a cross section between a Southern Baptist revival and an Oktoberfest. It’s sort of like Coachella for the analysts. It’s kind of like South by Southwest for the data engineer. It’s kind of like Burning Man for the trained statistician. For the chief data officers in the C-Suite, it’s kind of like the Davos of analytics.”
