Thread regarding Alteryx layoffs

Hellooooo Alteryx Board of Directors !!!

Knock Knock, McFly! Anybody home ?

Bueller ………. Bueller ……..?

Why are all of you ASLEEP AT THE SWITCH ?!?!?

8. BILLION. DOLLARS. MARKET. CAP. GONE.

POOF!!

At this point, I think we can safely assume that the board either feels like the current management team is doing a fine job, or is asleep at the switch.

There is really no other explanation.

It AMAZES me that the Board hasn't acted as yet to replace this team. $8B dollars of market cap has been wiped out since the day MA took this job while he has personally cashed in more than $15M. I'm not sure how he sleeps at night knowing that. The board is absolutely derelict in its duty. It's one thing for Dean to make a colossal mistake in picking his successor. It's another for him and the rest of them to sit on their heels and let things worsen every day. Please WAKE UP AND ACT BOARD. This leadership team is fundamentally not capable of turning this ship around.

Somehow Alteryx adopted spending a bunch of money as a key strategy to growth, in of it's self.

This is so true.

Very expensive Bay Area leaders with ambiguous roles, massive headcount growth, questionable acquisitions, McLaren sponsorships, fancy new headquarters, private jets, expensive commercials, etc.

Also very true. All of these hires in 2022 particularly in the areas of marketing, sales enablement, field marketing, events, branding, customer enablement, customer success, content marketing, campaign marketing, sales ops, marketing ops, and on and on were largely just so …. Unnecessary. And every time a new VP was hired to lead one of these functions (typically from Palo Alto, SFDC, Adobe, VMware, etc) it turned into a huge empire building exercise, with each leader having 5-10 direct reports, their direct reports having numerous direct reports, and so on. Huge orgs built out literally in the course of a year with dozens and hundreds of people.

Does Alteryx really need a huge team of graphic designers and design professionals? A whole team dedicated to defining (not creating) marketing content for other teams? It just goes on and on.

Somehow all these investments were made with the expectation that it would translate into accelerated growth, but no one seemed to actually sit down and map out how that would actually happen.

That was the problem. There was no adult minding the store. Just a lot of bandwagon jumpers getting hired with seeming carts blanche to build their empires. Nobody was looking at the e gent of the expenditures and saying “NO!!”

Makes you wonder how much of this spend was just vanity projects so that certain execs could feel like they are one of the big boys.

How much of it? Literally ALL of it. They honestly thought that by spending like a big vendor, they would become a big vendor. How wrong they were.

Unfortunately most of them haven’t learned the lesson. They think they can wait this out and good times will return in January 2024. .

Here's my take on the critical errors made by Alteryx leadership:

1. Too much focus on hiring "stage appropriate" personnel from a select few bay area enterprise companies (Palo Alto, Vmware, Adobe). These are very successful companies that had a proven platform aggregator track record, however their products, markets and processes are very different from Alteryx. And the way this was sold to the employees was very alienating to a lot of the people that helped create Alteryx, who were basically told that they were not qualified to have to jobs they held. As a result, Alteryx brought on bunch of super expensive bay area leaders who to some extent forced the strategies they knew from their previous experience which just did not work for Alteryx given the product and market differences. The irony here is that the "scrappy" people that presided over the early and very successful creation of enterprise value were replaced by new "stage-appropriate" and expensive people who quickly wiped out all that value and brining AYX down to essentially the same valuation it had when it went public in 2017 with 1/10th the amount of ARR. Meanwhile the cost structure has ballooned, and now they are forced to react to try to save face with the street by going through multiple rounds of layoffs... hopefully they are laying off the right people...

2. Lack of transparency and flip/flopping with investors about which measure to use for top line success; revenue or ARR. When revenue was accelerating due to artificial factors like AS606 and longer contract durations, investors were told to use revenue as the measure of success. Then next year when the artificial tailwinds disappeared, then suddenly they switched to ARR and revenue was no longer relevant. And during this back and forth investors and analysts were given very opaque guidance on how much growth was driven by true performance vs. accounting changes, contract lengths, etc. And when they miss guidance, they try to deflect with excuses and poor attempts at shiny distractions (AiDIN) which just drives further degradation of investor confidence in management, and a certain point, they just move on to other opportunities, despite what should be a massive upside to the stock (market cap at 2x ARR!!!!).

3. Push to enterprise selling was too aggressive and poorly timed. In a quest to accelerate growth, there was push to move away from landing with a handful of licenses in a new customer and then nurturing that to expand as adoption ramps up, the new leadership team opted to push for larger "transformational" type enterprise sales. Unfortunately Alteryx is just not a product that resonates with executives and centralized decision makers. It resonates with line of business analysts, who actually work with the data and have the subject matter expertise to use the software and build workflows. Plus, now with the macro headwinds, their software is viewed as a nice to have rather than a must have, which makes enterprise top down selling even more challenging.

4. Somehow Alteryx adopted spending a bunch of money as a key strategy to growth, in of it's self. Very expensive Bay Area leaders with ambiguous roles, massive headcount growth, questionable acquisitions, McLaren sponsorships, fancy new headquarters, private jets, expensive commercials, etc. Somehow all these investments were made with the expectation that it would translate into accelerated growth, but no one seemed to actually sit down and map out how that would actually happen. Makes you wonder how much of this spend was just vanity projects so that certain execs could feel like they are one of the big boys. And suddenly the market shifted, and investors are no loner favoring growth at all costs, but looking for balance with profitability and AYX is now struggling to catch up and cut costs.

5. No clear product roadmap and half committed strategy to transition to SaaS. Seems like the SaaS strategy was more of an effort to appease investors and talk about a SaaS offering, rather than actually transition customers to a SaaS platform, because such a transition would result in revenue growth hit during the transition years. Plus the lack of innovation is making them less and less competitive every year. In the meantime, every time there is an earnings call or investor day somehow the TAM keeps growing, which I don't know how you go from a $50B TAM to a $200B+ TAM with essentially no new product offerings (the market for analytics did not growth that much). This again, makes you wonder how transparent the AYX team is with investors, or even worse, with themselves.

Anyways the product is still awesome nonetheless. The customers love it, and it's never too late to turn it around. However, I don't see how that happens without some major major changes. I'm still rooting for you Atleryx! You can do it! You're better than this!

They are just switching seats on the Titanic by having all these layoffs.

It's a reactionbased measure to avoid the uncomfortable truth. The companies management stinks.

Self-fellating is right. The engineering culture and leadership is laughably bad.

The astounding lack of fundamentals is something you'd expect at a lower tier company. Maybe Lockheed Martin, where software engineers are treated as a cost center.

At Alteryx, they will be promoted to senior and beyond. A number of the staff/principal/distinguished engineers have no hope of even landing a senior engineering role at any of the major players. Not a chance.

I think pretty much all of them are raking in about 300K+ a year in CO; which is a very competitive salary for not knowing much of anything except herding weak engineers around.

Frankly the Trifacta acquisition was the death knell of an already dying company. The product vision has been non-existent since 2018 and the market is finally realizing this with the stock price collapse. The fact that they blew >400M on a laughably sh---y competitor with a worse product than what was glued together in-house over 6 months is pathetic. Truly I have never met a more self-fellating group of people that AYX Product leadership.

Do you think we would have been better off building our own cloud platform rather than acquiring Trifacta and trying to leverage their tech? Was that acquisition a good one?

The mention of Davidson brought back dark memories. He did nothing but start the downward spiral of culture and innovation.

Dean had his flaws but at least he had courage, vision, understood the space and why alteryx was loved by users. He’s got a better shot at turning this around than the current sad lot. That said, I’m sure he’s too busy enjoying his billions to really care

This ship is too far gone to save, at this point. Only a total reboot is going to have a chance.

Have you checked the recent Glassdoor ratings? Marked downward trend since the April layoff, and now the ratings have utterly fallen off of a cliff. I don't think even the CPO is going to bother to respond to each review, they are so bad.

How many times in your career have you literally seen the wheels fall off a company right in front of your eyes? Well, you are witnessing it now.

As a longtime Alteryx investor, I last week sold my considerable stake in the company, because I have lost faith in the company leadership and their current “strategy.”

That strategy is not working, clearly. Wall Street is punishing the company as a result. Alteryx was not so long ago quite a high-flying company with very unique product and value proposition. Now it has been turned into another “wannabe” enterprise software company by a bunch of execs who come from enterprise companies. That’s all they know, so that is where they are trying to take the company.

It’s plainly obvious that none of the executive team really KNOWS the products, the analytics market, or why customers use Alteryx software. They just want to turn the company into the next Salesforce, Adobe or SAP.

Compound this with the lack of racial awareness and corporate nepotism that has infected hiring decisions over the past couple of years, and you have a company now with a completely entrenched leadership cadre that is TOTALLY wrong for where the company needs to go.

Dean, frankly, is not coming back in an active managerial role. The only power that Dean really has now, is to initiate the hiring of a new CEO and then the executive team. Dean definitely has the power to fire the CEO and do a careful search for a CEO who has actual experience running a software company, and hopefully an analytics software company. Dean erred in hiring the current CEO, unfortunately, because this was a first-time CEO with no direct corporate leadership experience, and it has clearly shown.

Compound that with the racial insensitivity, which has arisen now in AT LEAST THREE instances, and you have the makings of a corporate disaster.

Correct statements from the previous poster on the state of product leadership, particularly the cloud product leadership (ex-Trifacta). Unfortunately over the past 18 months the infusion of Trifecta product and engineering has not had the desired results, and this is disappointing.

Don’t get me started on the overall corporate market leader. As said, the massive spending on marketing (which began under the previous CMO) has progressed so that the company is spending money like a drunken sailor on useless sponsorships (like McLaren) and big branding campaigns (“Analytics for All”) that honestly, most customers don’t care about. Sure it looks and feels good, but it’s much too flashy for the “roll up your sleeves and get sh!t done” typical business users of Alteryx software. They don’t care about McLaren partnerships. Marketing leadership has completely mis-read who Alteryx sells to. They drank the Kool-Aid from the CxO big-company leadership, probably because marketing leaders themselves come from similar companies (also MAJOR corporate nepotism involved).

There is still time to turn things around, but it is going to take a major house-cleaning with current leadership and a full-on reboot of corporate strategy and product vision. I am not sure they are ready to leave on their own. Dean could initiate this…but will he?

So, investors like me will continue to sell, sell, sell. I do not see the stock appreciably hitting even $50 a share for at least the next couple of years, or until there is a major strategy and leadership change. Hopefully you current stock-holders are patient. Here’s hoping that the corporate leadership is different, and the company in a much better place, a year from now.

We can only hope.

Save the culture? I really don't think anyone can. The damage is done!!

I've witnessed the way my friends were treated during the consultation process. No respect for the individual, no emotional support, no financial support, no healthcare support. NOTHING AT ALL. Package being 1 month, plus 1 month notice period. No commission given during the notice period- so unethical. HR being absolute mo--ns, both the HR lead and his little puppet.

Sorry but I am actually deeply ashamed to work for Alteryx and I am in conversations with competitors.

This is an awful situation to watch unfold as a shareholder.
Questions needs to raised against the CEO (lack of racial intelligence, hired his buddy as CRO - racial comments), CPO (no real product innovation, just hype, words and fluff, Most senior leaders, couldn't lead lemmings over a cliff.

Get Dean back? Sure, but we live in different times and this calls for an astute person that owns the number and holds people accountable.....Anyone remember Scott Jones (past CRO/President) - he should have been the CEO all along after Dean.

Time to clear the top, start fresh with a clean plan to move forward, save the culture and save the platform.

An Alteryx loyal shareholder till the end

The primary issues here are

1. The entire leadership team, but particularly Product and engineering has zero background and pedigree in analytics as has been mentioned in another post. Whether it’s Suresh or any of his leaders, not a single one of them could build a real workflow in Designer. They are clueless about where Alteryx fits in the world and couldn’t describe why it’s different than other competitive products. I’ve had them on my customer calls and have seen how shallow their understanding is. Ned, Ashley etc weren’t geniuses but they at least understood what made the product different and loved by users and they kept trying to improve it. The current product leadership and the entire PM team is absolutely clueless. We haven’t had a meaningful feature added to designer since this group started and it’s getting harder talking to my customers about the same stuff from 5 years ago while the competition innovates constantly. The head of designer cloud is building another trifacta with the same terrible product experience which sunk his company (that we used to dismiss as a cr-ppy product) vs. understanding what makes Designer great. I couldn’t even think about recommending designer cloud to my customers its so laughable

2. The CEO, CRO and sales leadership do not understand how to sell analytics. They celebrate 12 month 10 legged sales cycles for 300k deals on all-hands. This is not SAP or PA-Networks. Alteryx isnt a ERP or VPN. You can’t sell a 500k alteryx deal top down to IT like you sell a vpn without having a loyal use base no matter how much vision you paint or executive calls you schedule. Fast cycles and land and expand was the method that worked for Alteryx. In the last 3 years, this leadership group may have managed to increase revenue but the stock has gone from 180 to below 30. This is because there was gross mismanagement of the budget where they spent on sales and marketing like drunken sailors mostly on unnecessary nonsense like splashy branding and terrible hires who all wanted to build their own empires. This big company SAP mentality wrecked the company. The expensive big company reps they hired from their networks failed because well, they had zero understanding of analytics and weren’t selling an ERP to IT. When you combine this with zero product direction, any wonder why things are the way they are

If you want to talk nepotism, Dean was the worst offender. This is the same person who was meeting people in airports thinking they’d be great executive leaders at Alteryx (Davidson). Dean’s not coming to save anything. We need a new and proven CEO to come in, make tough decisions and set a very clear strategy for the next few years.

What could Dean do to turn Alteryx around? What should Alteryx be emphasizing instead of the cloud product?

This is an insightful, informative & productive thread. Thanks to those who started and have contributed so far.

You are correct that really only Dean can step in and force change. It will be interesting to see if he will.

The ONLY hope when it comes to BoD intervention seems to be Dean because is not just another board member or Chariman. He is the largest and controlling shareholder who built the company. At least as an outsider it feels like that but what do we know w/o being in the room. Excuses like “last 2 weeks of the qtr were weak” are bogus - everyone knows that the bulk of the biz closes then so obviously the non-performance will be most visible then. But the issue sits largely with a bungled product strategy which is a root cause for weak sales. Cloud was emphasized disproportionately in a year when it hardly exists. Latching on to new buzzwords is laughable and not listening to sales plus a myriad host of issues (a completely clueless sales Ops team down from SVP to the last person) needs a new slate of leaders for which the company has no runways left.

If your board has not reacted in three years, I wouldn't expect them to do much now. A lot of boards know how to leverage business opportunities in good times but are clueless in difficult times. The board room is often an echo chamber and it's the rare person who stops the meeting and drills down to the details on where and why the loss is happening. That's messy, confrontational and you can often be the lone inquisitor. Consequently, it's easier to grumble and buy the tap dance put on by the directors or C-suite team.