Dean Stoecker is the Executive Chairman and Co-Founder of Alteryx, Inc. (NYSE:AYX). He served as its Chairman and CEO for 24 years, taking the company from a SaaS start-up to a global enterprise software company in the analytics and data science sector. He authored The Emotional Journey to Creating Anything Great…Anything, detailing his entrepreneurial career. Dean sits on the board of directors of SiteMinder, Limited. (ASX:SDR) headquartered in Sydney, Australia and Rosalind, Inc. a private SaaS company in San Diego, California. Dean is married, has two grown children and enjoys spending time with his four grandkids and his two Australian shepherds.
1. Walk us through your morning routine.
I am on an early to bed and early to rise schedule, usually on the pillow at 8:00 p.m. and up around 4:00a.m. followed by a pot of Peet’s coffee and tending to the dogs. I never have coffee past 9:00a.m. as after a pot you have reached the law of diminishing returns. Most of my work is through virtual calls but I will attend most board meetings or guest lectures in person. I counsel 6 start-up SaaS founders around the world and it is a big part of my daily routine. Some of them may eventually get part of my balance sheet too!
2. Do you have an exercise routine?
I walk most every day and try to get 4 or 5 miles in the effort. My aussies also keep me very active when I am not on the phone or on the golf course (where I always shoot a 72, depending on how many holes I play)! My most rigorous exercise routines, though, are working my ranch which takes a lot of my free time.
3. Do you follow a specific diet? Share a little about how you approach nutrition and any supplements/vitamins you take
Now that I am not traveling a half million miles a year, I am eating a lot healthier. I have not had red meat in nearly 20 years and have not been in a fast food restaurant in as many years. I love to cook because it is my thinking time and I can better control what is in my food. Plus my cauliflower crust pizza is to die for! I consume no supplements except melatonin, no sodas and only fresh squeezed juices.
4. How many hours do you sleep each night?
I enjoy sleep but frankly, I am not really good at it. Once my mind gets going it is hard to get back to shut eye. Six hours is the lower limit or the day is a slow grind and more than 8 hours I consider theft from my day’s activities.
5. What are some hobbies you enjoy?
I grew up in a family of home builders so I love to build things with my hands. I enjoy golfing with friends and I love architecture and design so going to galleries and touring great buildings around the world has been fun. My favs are the ruins of Machu’ Pichu, Peru, Church of the Spilt Blood in St. Petersburg, Russia, the Church of our Lady before Tyn in Prague, Czech Republic and La Sagrada Familia in Barcelona, Spain.
6. Do you have any life mottos or principles you follow?
I have had guiding principles both personally and professionally. On the personal front I have always believed that quitting only severs you from the possibility of success, so ‘never quit’. But winning can take a long time and trying to go faster might get you to success slower or maybe not at all so ‘it is ok to be the tortoise and not the hare’.
Professionally I have followed Sun Tzu who reminded me that strategy without tactics is the slowest route to victory and tactics without strategy is the noise before defeat so ‘align strategy and tactics’.
Corporate philanthropy is important to me and it was Buckminster Fuller who said that we are building all of the right technologies for all of the wrong reasons and we are never going to take care of spaceship earth very well or for very long if we do not see it as a common cause. So always ‘give back and pay it forward’.
7. How do you approach settings goals?
I try to set daily, annual and life goals. There are the ‘have to do’s’, the ‘need to do’s’, the ‘want to do’s’ and the big audacious goals that keep you pressing on. I am pretty diligent about placing these goals and milestones on my calendar and I enjoy my personal QBRs to make sure I am on track. And like dealing with Wall Street, I try to underpromise and over deliver.
8. What is your favorite way to learn new things?
Well, I am not a big fan of higher education and can honestly say that I did not learn that much in my structured BS or MBA programs as a young man. I enjoy reading, especially interesting news and science sites on the web. But most of my learning comes from people I encounter in life. I love talking with people who have different life experiences and perspectives. They might be board members or business colleagues and I am not ashamed to say I have learned a lot of interesting things from Uber and taxicab drivers.
9. If you could leave one piece of advice for someone younger, what would you share?
Well, I was on Jim Cramer’s Mad Money not long after our IPO in 2017 (I took AYX public when I turned 60) and after the cameras were off he asked me what I would tell my 25 year old self. I replied “don’t wait until you are 40 to start a business”. (here is another interview with Dean and Jim Cramer)
10. You have nearly 3,000 employees at Alteryx today — how do you manage such a large team and continue to have amazing outcomes as you have scaled?
When I retired from the CEO role in October 2020 we had about 1,900 associates. First, In order for any team to be rowing in the same direction you have to be abundantly clear on the strategic imperatives of the company. And you have to repeat them at every All Hand Meeting. For many years I used a Plan on a Page that had every associate, every people leader and every functional leader align their objectives, KPI’s/OKR’s to those imperatives. Mark Anderson is my successor and he is also highly focused on hiring stage fit/stage ready employees to get us to the next level.
11. Is there anything that you haven’t done that you still want to do?
While I have traversed the world many times in my career I have not been to Jerusalem, Cairo, Tierra del Fuego and a few other interesting places including Burning Man! I also have a couple of other business ideas out of the software world that I believe have legs. Anyone who has read my book knows that I am not short of interesting challenges.
Dean is always interested in sharing his experiences with start-up founders. If you wish to learn more, he can be contacted at dstoecker@alteryx.com