I know this is a bit of a hypothetical but In the grand scheme of things, is Alteryx better or worse off as a result of hiring SV (and his ilk) in early 2021?
What could the company have looked like had we hired ANYONE else in that role?
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Better question: Why didn’t AYX begin its cloud journey in 2008 like every other tech company?
The engineering was resistant to move to cloud back in 2008, they only wanted to work on on-prem so it ended up with building Analytics Hub
The second consulting firms, etc move from on Prem to cloud AYX would have been (and still is) at an extreme risk.
It took a village to fu-k up AYX. Not just one manager. Incompetence, bad hiring, and bad management for decades is leading to this. Just because there were short term gains doesn’t mean the execs at the time were making the right decisions.
Trifecta acquisition was a shortcut that at least got a published cloud product, albeit cr-ppy.
You realize in 2008 AYX was busy growing from a few million to almost $1B in revenue (2022) with no cloud product. How many tech companies make it to the $1B mark? almost none. But "the company wasn't successful" because they didn't start their cloud journey soon enough, didn't invest enough in innovation, didn't hire the right people in product etc.. sorry that's not the real story.
Chasing a cloud story the execs took the journey to overpay for a cloud ETL tool co. that had almost no revenue compared to AYX. Why do this? Were customers leaving AYX to go spend that $$ on cloud ETL tools instead? Nope. But because of that and other missteps customers are leaving now thanks to 30%+ hikes with no additional value, growing lists of product issues and poor support.
We did begin the cloud journey in 2008 - or before. But management kept changing strategies and throwing it all out to start over. Every 1-2 years!
SV, while incompetent, is pretty inconsequential here.
Better question: Why didn’t AYX begin its cloud journey in 2008 like every other tech company?