Pros
- core on-prem product offering is stable, robust, and loved by customers - platform fills an analytics automation niche not well-addressed yet by competitors - many employees are humble-smart problem solvers who excel at what they do; some of the most intelligent people I’ve met work here - most customers are genuinely in love with the platform after they use it for a few months - in the right hands and for the right use cases, the Alteryx platform makes sweeping impacts on careers and organizations - numerous examples of a single license impacting millions or tens of millions of dollars in customer revenue or efficiency gains abound
Cons
- Alteryx's Achilles heel is the rarified nature of the buyer personae and the high license cost: for every 100 competitor dashboard platform users, there are probably 1-5 Alteryx-sellable users, and for every 100 heavy Excel jockeys, probably only 5-10 of them have use cases powerful enough to justify Alteryx's $5,000-9,000 per seat license cost - the platform caters to a more rarified organizational persona than management and employees would like to believe: a highly skilled information worker who focuses on analytic process automation and who has the correct and substantive use cases to justify Alteryx - finding individuals who fit the buyer personae mold and who are willing to shell-out $5k+ on a license is an uphill battle to achieve at scale for many accounts; hence the company has grown at a glacial pace compared to much-younger peers in the analytics space - pockets of cronyism, cronyism, cronyism - multiple rounds of layoffs through 2023 cut at least 15% of the workforce, demoralizing remaining employees while increasing their workloads - while not a single senior executive took a pay cut or was let go - 2-3% typical raises given in 2023 against a backdrop of 9-10% inflation - for some sales teams, 2023 quotas were doubled over 2022 quotas, effectively slashing commissions in half or worse - 2023 market and economic conditions made it exceedingly difficult for most sales teams to make anywhere near their total commissions and achieve OTE - migration of on-prem platform to cloud is years behind industry peers, and cloud platform as it stands is not well-adopted compared to on-prem offering - many in leadership arrived from Cisco cronyism with an ossified old-school IT mentality (instead of analytics sales success story backgrounds) that didn’t elevate company performance in the eyes of Wall Street nor enhance the working culture; the 5-6 year lows of the stock attest to the overall situation - the CEO delivered the least-inspiring, most poorly rehearsed keynote at Inspire I have seen in 25 years in technology sales; he appears checked out, a vibe I noticed with increasing frequency throughout 2023, including a stunningly out-of-touch moment on an all-hands post-layoff call where he told a senior Black female employee in front of an audience of thousands: “thank you and your hair for coming [to the call today],” a grossly unbecoming faux pas that was yet another reason he is unworthy of his $56M 2022 compensation package - for minority employees, the company culture has a somewhat tweedy, WASPish Orange County feel to it; past controversies have involved a leader/founder attending a MAGA rally and another short-lived leader making a racist Tweet, in addition to the CEO's recent company-wide video call comment about a Black female leader's hair... overall, the DEI culture here is worse and feels less genuinely safe and inclusive for minorities than at most other tech companies - talk is empty while actions speak truths