Derek Knudsen - CTO at Alteryx

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:00) Today, we are talking to Derek, the CTO at Alteryx, and we discuss the future of making machine learning more accessible, optimizing engineering teams to be successful, and a unique take on the skills necessary to navigate your way to the top of an organization. All of this right now. How are you doing, man?

(Derek at 00:00:34) Good, good. I like the beard.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:37) Thanks. It's new.

(Derek at 00:00:38) Yeah, right? Looking like a Colorado guy like me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Right. And then my wife and I were just looking at vacation places, and I saw your location. I was like, oh, you should go back out to Colorado.

(Derek at 00:00:49) Do you get out here much?

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:50) Yeah, yeah. I went out there, I think, like three times last year, bounced around between Fort Collins, Boulder, and then Denver, and then the mountains over here.

(Derek at 00:01:01) Was it all for fun? Was it for work? Was it a combination?

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:05) Everything.

(Derek at 00:01:05) Nice.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:06) Yeah, we've got customers out there. We've got, she's looking at vet schools out there in Fort Collins, because that's she's becoming a doctor of veterinarian medicine.

(Derek at 00:01:17) Yep. Yeah, my daughter's into that, so she's talked about Colorado State. It's a really good school for it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:37) Yeah. Man, I'm excited, though, because we had a really good conversation, like, what, three or four months ago when I think Mike, no, it's been a while, introduced us. Yeah.

(Derek at 00:01:45) Yeah, yeah. I'm excited to chat with you. I know we talked about a variety of topics when we talked, whatever that was, a couple months ago. So, yeah, whatever you want to take it. Exciting just to chat with you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:01:56) Yeah. Mike said you were the man. Like, he texted me one day. He said you gotta talk to this guy. He's the best guy.

(Derek at 00:02:01) Well, we'll see about that. But Mike's been a great partner. I know Telium is somebody we're trying to develop a deep partnership with. So they've been great. They've been a great partner for us. So it's cool that we can kind of share networks and connect with one another.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:14) So what do you guys do?

(Derek at 00:02:16) What does Alteryx do? You know, at the heart of it, we're all about giving people access to the information their data holds. So, you know, the one data stat that we throw out there from PwC is they say $10 to $15 trillion of value is locked up in data. So our software is essentially giving everyone access to that information and the insights it holds. So we kind of brand ourselves as being an end-to-end, self-service data science and analytics platform. Really targeted to two personas for us. Part of it's the data science persona, and those are the folks that are the R and Python developers. How do we give them quicker time to insights through a code-friendly mechanism? And then there's the 47 million analysts that are spending their time in Excel and VLOOKUPs and those tools. How do we help them get access to insights more quickly in a way that's more code-free for them? Obviously, they're typically not programmers. So our goal is to give them a really obvious way to access those insights. That's what we do. Our software does that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:22) You guys are growing really fast. I looked you up on LinkedIn. 1,420 in 2018, 700 people. Today, 1,400 people.

(Derek at 00:03:30) Yeah, doubled by the time, since I've joined. I mean, I joined, what, August '18, doubled headcount. The one proxy I've used just for that momentum is when I joined, I think our stock was around $30 a share. If you look at a week ago, we were at $155 or some ridiculous number. So I just think it shows you not just our momentum in the marketplace, but just this general space. There's just a ton of momentum in the analytics space. And, fortunately for us, we're way out in front of that momentum, so we feel really good about where we're at.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:04) I like your tagline.

(Derek at 00:04:06) Yeah?

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:07) Yeah. For the company, I got in your profile or in the show notes, Jake put a link to the Gartner quadrant thing that you won. And the headline was, you know, Alteryx recognized as a leader with the highest ability to execute. And then I saw your logo, and then it said your tagline, the thrill of solving. And I was like, that sounds pretty badass.

(Derek at 00:04:28) It is. I mean, that is something we are really passionate about, especially for the citizen data science persona. I think for us, it's giving those people the ability to solve their own problems. So if I'm an analyst sitting in a line of business and I am trying to pull an insight out of a piece of data, I don't want to have to submit a ticket to IT, have them pull the data, you know, generate what they think is the right insight and give it back to me. It's really about giving the analyst the tools to go do that themselves. And so if you look at our case studies, it all revolves around empowering the individual. So that thrill of solving is something we're super passionate about, and I think our customers are. If you go to our Inspire conferences, Analyticon for 2020, you'll see people, tears in their eyes, about how life-changing our software's been for them. Things that used to take them weeks or months now take them hours or minutes, and they get all that time back to go do much more interesting work or have a life. And I think that makes it really cool that you're actually touching people's quality of life with the software that we have.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:28) Yeah. That's what got me interested in engineering, you know, in the business side of my career. So after just being a kid hacking stuff together, having fun, it was really, I gained traction when I was solving problems for people, and I was excited to do that. But I'm curious. Okay, so you joined. The company's doubled in size in the past two years. What have you been learning from that growth? Like, what insights do you have from that?

(Derek at 00:05:53) Well, I think Alteryx is really interesting, and if you've done your research, I'm sure you have. You know, company started in the nineties. Our existing designer software came out 2006, 2007. It's still the existing product we have today. Our server product came out in 2016, 2017. So you're talking about two products that are, you know, long in the tooth to some extent. Tons of value in those tools. Customers get tons of value. But now with this $10 to $15 trillion market opportunity, you can imagine the players that are starting to come into our space. And so you have this really escalated innovator's dilemma situation where things have been going really well with our existing software space, but now you're getting inundated with competitors. And so how do you take this high-growth company that's been kind of operating at a high level and now inject some startup mentality into it where, you know, you're innovating quickly. You're doing things that are more disruptive, doing things that are more transformational. And I think trying to combine servicing the existing customer base with innovating, the core innovator's dilemma, is something that I kind of walked into where I think the former leadership was really great about developing the product and making it better and better. We had not paid as much attention to that disruptive innovation piece of it, modernizing our platforms, being more cloud-first, and then all the people-process components that come with that. We hadn't paid as much attention probably to those things as we needed to. So that was really the discovery for me walking in is you gotta be sensitive to the culture that's been here for a very long time. But you also gotta inject some energy, some startup energy, into the culture too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:35) That was one of the things I really noticed about you guys when I was checking out your LinkedIn profiles and your pages. Your brand feels very startup-y. It's like you've got some really modern designers and brand feel, which is great that you don't lose that flexibility as you get bigger. I loved that that stayed ingrained.

(Derek at 00:07:57) Yeah. It's still very much who we are. We think our core products will stay very applicable for the long term. It's about reimagining the technical platforms they sit upon to make it more accessible. Data's getting more distributed. It's getting bigger. So how do we play in that marketplace? I think it's something that we're very thoughtful around. It didn't exist as much as it does, you know, ten years ago. Very different situation than it is today with all the hyperscale providers and all the systems of record like the Salesforces of the world. How, as a data aggregator, assimilator, prep, and blend tool like we are, our DNA is, how do you survive or exist in that kind of a distributed data environment? We think the core experience will continue to be unbelievable, and our customers will continue to get tons of value out of that. But they're going to be inundated with even more data than they were before. So we just have to maintain that relevancy in terms of just giving people access to their information.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:52) Yeah. So here's a good question for you. So my parents own a weight loss clinic that does pretty well. It keeps doubling in size every year. I haven't been up there in, like, three years, but I went up there this past week to get some blood tests and some vitamins through IV because I'd never done that before, just to see their, you know, why is their business growing so big? It was huge. Like, it started out as a small office space and now it's like a giant commercial complex with just a large number of doctors and people. It blew my mind. But as I was sitting there getting the IV, which is a pretty cool experience, I was talking to my sister who actually works there, and she was doing some marketing, and she was asking me, you know, how we approach marketing at our leadership company and things like that and just getting some insights. And I said, oh, you know, you definitely want to run, she was asking, like, how does she pick a product to market within the organization because there's so many. And I was like, we should probably just go look in the sales system and see, you know, which products have the most margin and what type of customers and start to get an idea for your ideal customer profile and then, you know, have an offer to present to that profile and sort of figure out what works and how you can amplify it and look through your data. And she just looked at me like with a blank stare.

(Derek at 00:10:05) She said, how would you do that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:05) So I instantly thought, I was like, at what point will the, like, sales systems, I guess that's what they use, like the doctor's office tools type deal, like, at what point will they start extracting insights from their data? Like, because if they could serve that up to the people that run these small and medium, you know, $20 million businesses, that there's a lot of in America, and if they could run these data insights on them, they could give them really useful information, but it's not, we're not there yet. Like, how long do you think it'll take the market to get there?

(Derek at 00:10:42) I think it's getting closer. I think, you know, we are very focused on not just auto-modeling. You know, how do I take a set of data and generate insights off of it? But how do I take somebody like your sister through that journey so they can understand how to generate their own insights? Again, we're very focused on that citizen data science persona, taking somebody who maybe doesn't know much about how to take data and process it and really put the power of the tool in their hands to generate their own insights. So I think at a fundamental level, our tool does a lot of that. I think what you're seeing companies, not just like Alteryx, but others do, is provide a vertical slant on top of those scenarios. So if it's, you know, financial services and you're doing churn analysis, or we're trying to figure out where to put your stores to geographically expand, we're trying to make that experience much more accessible for a core set of use cases. We kind of dipped our toe into the healthcare space, into the financial services space to provide some of that experience to those consumers. But it doesn't stop there, obviously. There's a ton of applicable use cases. Will it always solve every use case someone like your sister has? Probably not. But it'll solve a good portion of them. And if we can get them comfortable with the tooling around that, then they can go generate their own insights. And I think that is really the magic, is giving them a guided experience that allows them to learn, and then they can take those learnings and apply them to solving their own business problems in unique ways, and maybe creating some business value, some differentiation of how they do that. I think there's tons of power in that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) Yeah. And I think also, based off of me, you know, just learning more in this conversation, it almost seems like you would make tools that the vendor of the software that they use would then consume, and then it would be up to them to do that. Right? Like, that's probably the more direct path, like, how you would get your technology helping my sister type?

(Derek at 00:12:36) For sure. I mean, we're obviously interested in OEM stuff. Our CEO, Dean Stoecker, is very interested in basically creating a venture enablement capability that allows companies to take our software and use it as how they build their companies. So you could take, maybe this space has enough critical mass into it that a company would say, I'm going to use Alteryx to drive speed to market on solutioning, and I'm going to provide my IP on top of that and white label that solution. But I know Alteryx gives me speed to market. I don't have to go build all the technical plumbing around standing up a solution. I can use Alteryx for that, and I can really connect with the user in solving the business problem and not focus as much on the technical underpinnings that a lot of companies get stuck in as they're trying to get their companies off the ground.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:22) That's interesting. So tell me how crazy I am right now. So I could take all their data and I could actually somehow use your tools and then build something on top of it that looks at product by margin and then develops automatic insights on customer profiles and things like that?

(Derek at 00:13:40) That's core to our product.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:42) Yeah.

(Derek at 00:13:42) We get you our product, I bet you a guy like you could probably do that in less than a day. Right? You could get something extremely interesting and valuable to your sister in less than a day easily. There's tons of those use cases out there. It's remarkable how quick the time to value is with our software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:57) And I could expand even further by looking at all the different OEM-type datasets and then end up, make it into a product, totally, right? And then sell, like, anyone that has those softwares can instantly just click an integration button, and it would tell them their most, and it would look at their ideal customer, it would develop their ideal customer profile based off of age. Because, see, the thing about healthcare is you have all that data.

(Derek at 00:14:19) Yep.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:19) Like, in healthcare, you know the sex, age, everything of the customer, and that is something you don't have in B2B, right? So because they are the customer.

(Derek at 00:14:30) Yeah, absolutely. And then what you see a lot of our customers do is take that data and enrich it. Right? So I'll take Experian data, and I'll get more of an enriched view of the customer. And I could be even more precise in my segmentation or my clustering, and I could be much more targeted in how I market or position my products to a specific segment of my consumer base. So all that stuff is core use case in our software. It's amazing how specific your example is to what people do every day with our software.

(Joel Beasley at 00:15:00) So I want to talk with you a little bit about your OQ. The first time I had heard that, I love this article. It's on your LinkedIn profile, but it's talking about, can you explain the IQ, EQ, OQ concept that you've written about?

(Derek at 00:15:17) Yeah. This is a thing that came to me over the course of my career as a bit of a personal discovery. And I think as the article describes, I think early on, I definitely followed the process of thinking IQ meant everything. You know, if I was smarter than everybody else, I would be more successful than everyone else. And through the school of hard knocks, I think a lot of us learn that there's different types of intelligence that you have to have an appreciation for and that you have to develop.

(Derek at 00:15:43) And I think in that article, what I attempted to do is to make folks aware of, you know, IQ doesn't solve it all and neither does EQ. And at certain times in your career as you're aspiring to take on larger and larger responsibilities between IQ, which is obviously intelligence quotient, EQ of the emotional side of it, and then what I call organizational quotient, which is understanding how to navigate an organization to achieve outcomes. All three of those are required in different levels, in different stages of your career, in different situations. But I think a lot of folks will ignore the OQ side of it. I think EQ's gotten much more press these days over the last ten, fifteen years.

(Derek at 00:16:22) So I think there's much more of an appreciation for the need to have emotional intelligence than there ever has been before. But I think the more senior you get in an organization, the more you appreciate the nuance of organizational structure and agency issues, et cetera. And how you navigate those really can make or break your success, especially at the most senior levels. And so I think at least having sensitivity to it is super, super important.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:50) No. And I love the nuances, and I really suggest people go read it. And it's well written, by the way.

(Derek at 00:16:56) Thank you.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:56) About how it walks you through each step. But it was so, whenever I find something that's so truthy, I want to amplify it. Right? Because the way you called out, if it was only about, because there are people that, their only skill is the organizational intelligence, and you don't get far with that. If you just know how to play a social game, you don't, you're not actually bringing any real value to the organization, and therefore, you will just maybe move around quickly and then rise up and then fizzle out.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:26) But if you have those core abilities, and you can, you have a craft that you've mastered. And then on top of that craft, you've also mastered your emotional intelligence and being able to understand the team and those dynamics. Then once you've gotten that, it's the dynamics of teams and that's the higher level organization one. And if you can, if you sort of, it's like looking at the sun when there's an eclipse. You don't look directly at it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:53) You're aware of it. It's kind of there. It's a light string that you kind of tug on, but just having those awarenesses and skills is really like this mix and I haven't been able to articulate it. And then I read that article and I'm like, dang, that is it. That is what I feel and I experience and I see, but Derek just went and wrote it out in an articulate, beautiful way.

(Derek at 00:18:14) I'm glad it resonated. I think we've all known people that were the extremes of each one of those three. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:19) Yeah.

(Derek at 00:18:19) And I don't think I could point to a single person that has had longevity of success when they really focus on one of those three. They may have moments of success, but in terms of the ability to maintain momentum and maintain success, you can't just do one of them. And I would challenge you at the highest level of achievement, you can't just do two. You really gotta be strong at all three of those things and know how to apply the different intelligences at different moments. If you're purely empathetic and you're all about EQ, sometimes your effectivity could be damaged. If you're all about IQ, then you can leave bodies behind in terms of how you execute. That was more of how I was wired. Right? And then I think I started discovering the nuance of relationships, especially at the senior level and organizational structures and influence and all of those things. And not in a manipulative, house of cards way, but in a way that I think was much more authentic to, okay, I know what's important to that person. Let me enable their success, versus always being about my own agenda. And I think if you take that servant leadership mindset to it, it doesn't feel like it's manipulative. It feels like it's serving. And that has definitely been my mental shift is trying to take that OQ side of it and make it more of a servant leadership style than a manipulative playing the organizational political game style. And I think you gotta be careful that you don't fall into that trap.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:39) Yeah. No. I like your leadership style. Things I've been working on, you know, how sometimes you're always growing and learning. You seem to be that type of person. And then sometimes these catch phrases will stick with you if somebody's content, and you don't really know why exactly. But I've been working on getting out of my own way type. That's one. That's the stage I'm on. I've found, and I think a lot of it too is physiology.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:05) So I've been, you know, I'm 32 now, and I've been trying to reconcile the changes in my mental thinking, how my brain operates. And one of the things that I learned or a concept I like is that your prefrontal cortex starts finalizing its maturity in your early thirties. And I'm like, that would help explain the clarity and the different ways of my new thinking. And so I get, I like being weird. Right? I like looking at, you know, what's on the cutting edge of science and what's the future like and what are the leading theories, because when you get to the top, it's just the experts arguing. So we think we have biology figured out. It's like, absolutely not. We don't even know what consciousness is or why we die.

(Derek at 00:20:55) Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:56) Yeah. Yeah. So I like those deep thoughts and I like taking my mind over there and then inevitably, I come out with some sort of abstractions that help me think about this other type of work I'm doing.

(Derek at 00:21:06) For sure. For sure. And I think my background with being a consultant for a long time, I'm not a quintessential typical CTO. I have a pretty broad background. I got an MBA. I ran corporate strategy. I was a CTO. I was a CIO. I've done a lot of different things. I think the one thing that I've grown more and more to appreciate is self awareness.

(Derek at 00:21:26) And I think that article that I wrote kind of speaks to you can read the article and have an appreciation for those things, but if you're not self aware of how you're behaving in the moment, then it doesn't matter what you read. You cannot change behavior unless you generate some self awareness. So if you came into my office, you'd see I have sticky notes everywhere that are those mental reminders for me, where I look at my wall when I sit at my table in front of me and I'm talking to somebody and I have things that remind me of being an active listener and always be modeling the right behaviors. The one that's fully stuck with me lately is this concept of curiosity over judgment. I think a lot of us are quick to judge. And so one of my coaches really has reinforced this concept of, you know, I'm a D in the DISC profile. Right? You're very action oriented. I think a lot of us are. And I think the thing that she's coached me on is, you know, instead of jumping to judgment and trying to fix things, ask questions and be curious. I will tell you the amount of times I've saved myself from sticking my foot in my mouth because I've seen that reminder on my desk in the sticky note, I couldn't count. And so it's really cool when you take these concepts that are resonating with you and you make them become alive for you and they become part of who you are. Picking those little learnings and making them become how you operate every day is super, super powerful. So self awareness to me is a huge deal.

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:52) I'm blown away by, I love that you do that because I realized, I guess, in my early twenties, how powerful words are, around you, through sticky notes or a poster or something. We are so programmable, and it's so important for us to curate our environment. I mean, Fabiana, one of our leadership coaches, she's got, she switches out her sticky notes all the time, and I always like to walk by her desk and look at them because they make me feel good. You know?

(Derek at 00:23:17) Oh, yeah. For sure. I think those very trainable machines we are, and I think it's cool to see yourself do something and take a little tiny little tactical tool and put it in your tool belt and see that it actually adds value. It can become a bit of an addiction on adding all these little things, these little tweaks into who you are and to see that the combination of those things make you a much more effective leader.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:41) I love curiosity over judgment. Some deep thoughts lately, I've been having, I've differentiated self awareness and consciousness. Oh. So yeah, I found they're often used interchangeably. People will say, oh, I'm self aware. And I'm like, oh, I think that's just a way for them to say that they're conscious. Of course, they're aware of themselves. My two year old has, you know, is conscious and it has awareness of their self. But what I found though, is if you look at the people who are doing really well with the self awareness, so I've differentiated the term in saying, I consider self aware people that are aware of how they work, but then will also take action to adjust their lives based on that. Because you'll see people all the time that will have awareness of certain attributes, but they won't actually adjust their environment or life or decisions to give themselves more success. So they'll have awareness of what could make them more successful, but they won't take actions. Now I've limited my definition of self awareness to people who are not only aware of what will improve them, but they're actually implementing that.

(Derek at 00:24:52) Yeah. I love it. Yeah. I wish you could tell I'm drinking that Kool-Aid big time. Big believer in that piece of it. You know, creating that learning environment here where you demonstrate, you know, the desire to get better to continually improve. One of our engineering core values is growth mindset. We really try and drive self awareness and an appetite to get better and grow. It's super important to who we are as an organization. And so the more we can model that as leaders, I think the more it becomes a real thing within the organization. So it starts with me. If I don't model that expectation, then I can't expect my leaders to do the same thing. And so I take that responsibility pretty seriously.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:29) So when the company is growing as fast as it is, what's, you kind of just alluded to a little bit, but what are the one or two things that you really know? Like, if you get these right, the culture will scale and will do well as we add another 1,400 people.

(Derek at 00:25:43) Man, it's a great question. We have lots of different moving parts at our pace of growth. I mean, we talked about, you know, our products have been amazing. They're still amazing, but there's a desire and need to modernize those products. So it's easy to get excited about the technical transformation we get to go under. I think a lot of folks in my seat would naturally gravitate towards that. To your point, where I really focused on is more of the people and process side of things, the cultural dynamic. As an example, we've been working through living more of the lean principles internally in terms of the software development lean principles. So tracking things like cycle times and throughput and work in progress and queue sizes and et cetera. And what we found was all the training in the world doesn't get people to appreciate the value of those concepts. And so, yes, you could do the enablement. You do the training around those things. But unless we can get people to understand that by having reduced WIP, by focusing on reducing cycle times, you can actually see value in the outcomes. In terms of time to value for our customers, the concepts don't land. And so a lot of my time is spent walking people through that process of learning on some of these core concepts where I think a lot of folks would get lean towards the technology side of things. If I don't enable the organization at a fundamental level during this transition, it's not gonna matter. We can't scale. When I joined, I think engineering was, I want to say, a 150. And I think this year will be close to 400. So at that level of, and that's fourteen, fifteen months. At that level of growth, if you don't have that foundational piece in place, we're in trouble. So we focused a lot on that. The other thing that we've started focusing a lot right now on is organizational design. So how do we organize and structure ourselves to be successful? Not sure if you've read Team Topologies. Have you read that book?

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:36) No.

(Derek at 00:27:36) Fascinating book. It's basically how do you design teams and engineering teams to be most successful. You know, folks in our industry have heard a lot about Conway's Law, you know, that your software reflects how you're organized. So they kind of lean into that principle in this book, and they talk about how you can optimize your organizational structure to achieve the outcomes you want to achieve. And it talks about this concept of, I think they call it the inverse Conway maneuver, some fancy name like that. But the intent is, you know, you design your platform architecture, in our case, where you take all these different products and you do a lot of platform enablement around that. And then you look at that structure, and then you design your teams within that structure to deliver that outcome. And so they've got different types of teams. They've got these things called stream aligned teams. They've got enabling teams, subsystem teams, platform teams. And it basically, you create an organizational design based on your technical strategy, which is a really different way of thinking about things. So we started slowly working through that process as we finalize our technical strategy. Okay. Now that we know where we want to go, how do we organize ourselves the right way to deliver those outcomes? Uh, where I think a lot of times folks will fall into, well, you've got, you know, you've got Spotify teams. You've got guilds. You've got chapters. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:59) Yeah.

(Derek at 00:29:00) And they don't think about kind of this concept. And so it's been a really interesting thought experiment to go through this team topologies idea. And I think they started in the DevOps space, and they've kind of morphed into overall engineering teams and maybe IT teams in general. But we've started really focusing on the organizational dynamic too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:19) Yeah. And then, I mean, you definitely pick up on that and experience too because you start out and you build some teams, or you start a small team and you're building around a product, you're trying to solve a problem, and then you get bigger and now you have resources that start needing to be shared and so it's constantly this moving object. So it's not always just one and done. It's always going to be based around the problem you're trying to solve. So when I do talks in public, I get that question a lot. They'll say how, or yeah. Or after the talk, people come up to me. Hey. You know, we're growing at the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:29:50) How do I design my team? I've read the Spotify guilds or the this, that, or whatever branded Medium post that has a million views. How do I do it? And I'm like, well, I can't. You don't want to. You start with your problem. What are you trying to do?

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:05) And it's going to be reflected based on the type of service you're providing. If you have client work, that's very, very different than if you're just like a Netflix and you don't have client work.

(Derek at 00:30:16) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:17) Right? And so you structure it around the problem. And it seems pretty simple, but it takes a lot of frustration to get there.

(Derek at 00:30:26) It does. And I think it's been more acute for us because we're not a SaaS company. We ship product. Right? We're one of probably the few companies left that do that.

(Derek at 00:30:35) And yes, we're going to be much more cloud first, and it'll feel like we're cloud native. But we have to satisfy a bunch of different constituent groups. So we have to be really thoughtful in how we architect and design our software. We can't hide behind the SaaS curtain and have people putting their fingers in the technical dam behind the service. What we deliver to our customers is exposed. Right? They have to stand behind it and support it and operate it. So we have to make sure that we're super thoughtful in our architecture, which means we've got to plan a long ways out. So if we plan a long ways out, we have to architect ourselves to be successful in delivering those outcomes. And we have to be much more thoughtful of it because of our distribution base and how we deploy our software.

(Derek at 00:31:14) So it's a super fun challenge. My team's really excited about engaging in this. It's massively thought-provoking. In my history, I've never approached it this way. And so for me, we've all done the Spotify, and let's take QEs that were in a separate department and embed them and DevOps and embed them and product management. That stuff's great, but this is kind of an elevated view of organizational design. So I'm pretty excited to go down that path. Hopefully, in the next, I don't know, six months or something, we've got a pretty good story to tell.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:45) So I want to dive a little bit deeper to something you were talking about a minute ago when we were talking about metrics and cycle times and throughputs and WIPs and stuff like that. You were lightly touching on their metrics, but you have to get someone, you have to walk them through that path of understanding that they're valuable or feeling the gravity of them. At least that's where I thought you were going with it. I'm curious, say I'm a new executive there. How do you lead me to that conclusion to understand that these are the metrics that matter?

(Derek at 00:32:21) Well, you know, two different audiences. I think the audience that's been harder for us is the teams and the team leads. Right? We don't want the metrics to come across as being punitive. Right? We want the metrics to come across as being more enabling. So if I give you a dashboard that has these lagging and leading indicators, and we get you to do some experiments within that and see the effect. So if I get you to minimize WIP on a, you know, team size is four. Let's say we do WIP limits of two times team size, so you could have no more than eight things in progress at one time. Then let's take a look at the lagging indicators after a period of time and see is it having effect on your cycle time. At the end of the day, our job as software engineers is to get ideas and features into the hands of our customers as fast as possible with the highest quality. And so I think everybody can connect with that mission. Okay. Well, here's a tool that we think will help you do that. So just do an experiment. The only way you're going to buy into it is by doing an experiment for an iteration, two iterations, and seeing the impact. And then once you see the impact, okay, I get it. I get why we should be doing this. And then you'll see people start tweaking the levers more and more.

(Derek at 00:33:29) We had Don Reinertsen, who's really the man behind the lean metric movement. He wrote Principles of Flow. We had him come in and do a bit of an assessment and a consultation for us. It was extremely eye-opening to my leaders to hear somebody who is basically the luminary in the industry in this area talk about what he sees within our company, and talk about where he's seen all sorts of different companies adopt lean principles and seem to be successful. It had a great impact at the team level in terms of folks buying into it. The key to enabling it is to make sure there's no process friction there. Meaning, if your builds take forever, you're having merge conflicts, that stuff's all artificial friction. We have some of that still. Maybe we've got kind of legacy build processes, so we've had to work through those things in concert. But at a principal level, it really makes a ton of sense. So I think we've made some progress there.

(Derek at 00:34:21) The other audience is really the executive team. So I sell and I communicate to my CEO, who's my boss, and our president on a weekly basis around our metrics. How are we doing? Are we becoming a more effective software engineering company? Can we deliver insights to our customers and innovation to our customers much more quickly? They love to see that. They love to see that engineering is all in on innovation and all in on velocity of innovation and not just technology for technology's sake. So I think that's gone a long way with my leadership to get them to appreciate that we're trying to pull and push the levers to produce as many optimal outcomes for our customers as we can.

(Derek at 00:35:05) So two different audiences, two different messages. I think both audiences buy into it, or heck, our board buys into it. They get it as well. So it's pretty cool when the board's talking about those metrics with me. Pretty powerful conversation.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:18) I love how everything's advanced to where it's no longer like, shut up, nerds.

(Derek at 00:35:24) Well, if you talk about the tech, that's what you're going to get. Right? If you talk about, I'm trying to get concept A to the product as fast as possible, I think everybody can get that. If you just talk about the different levers and metrics that give visibility to that, I think that's accessible. If you start talking about, hey, I want to do Kubernetes versus Docker Swarm, you're going to lose 90% of your audience. And so we're trying to find those business-impacting metrics that our business stakeholders will understand. And I think these are some metrics that they definitely get.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:55) Yeah. It's like talking about using a hammer or a wrench, and they're just like, when's the house going to be done?

(Derek at 00:35:59) Yeah. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:00) We're buying a house. We want to move in.

(Derek at 00:36:03) That's a great analogy for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:05) I really like how you broke that down too. So I guess I could sum it up by saying you allow them to feel it by experimenting it and seeing it themselves. That's how it becomes real to them.

(Derek at 00:36:19) For sure. You know, it's never easy. I think there's pockets of, you know, as you typically find, you've got your adopters, the folks that are your first adopters, your initial adopter group, your early adopter group, then you've got your laggards. And I think how you bring the laggards along is by having those early adopters show success. Right? They're like, oh, okay. Well, I get it now. So super important metrics. As a company, one of our key metrics for us is net revenue retention. So, you know, if you get into an account and get into a customer, how quickly are you growing your revenue base there? That's a key metric for us. Customer NPS is a key metric for us. Employee NPS is a key metric for us. We try and tie, especially the net promoter score stuff and the net retention score stuff, as hard as it is, we try and tie it into these engineering metrics. To say, hey, if we can impact these metrics, look what it does to our customer NPS, and look what that customer NPS does to our net revenue retention. If you can create that correlation for our business stakeholders, then they're like, go for it, man. Whatever you can do to optimize that, do it because it's going to have a big impact on our key business metrics. Those being customer NPS and net revenue retention.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:33) No. I love it. I've found that in this world of ridiculous amounts of data points, it's really about, and all the things you can do, because we're way behind you guys. We're like a startup. Right? We've got like eight people. And so there's so many books and so many things. This has just really been about reducing and finding what's the two or three things that we can control and work towards every day that actually make a meaningful contribution to our revenue. Right? Or our product or customer happiness. We still do the NPS scores too. But yeah. It's for me, it's been a theme lately just reducing the amount of things you look at, finding the least amount of metrics to track that create the most difference.

(Derek at 00:38:16) And that's super hard. That's super hard. Right? And I will tell you I'm the first person to emphasize too many things. Right? I mean, that D comes out a little bit too much, I'm sure. And I've been told, hey, you've got to slow down, man. There's, you're introducing too much change. And so you have to pick the two or three things that are going to make the biggest impact. And I think at times I've selected maybe the wrong thing, and I've had to realize that and pivot to something that was more meaningful. It is not easy to pick the right metrics. You just have to be quick to adjust when you figure out you picked the wrong one. Right? Ask for forgiveness. Hey. I think I got us focused on the wrong thing. I think we should be instead focused over here. Having that level of self-awareness in the conversation with your constituents is super important. But I know I've made tons of mistakes in terms of focusing on the wrong stuff too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:04) You've been training your AI, your internal AI.

(Derek at 00:39:07) Yeah. There you go. There you go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:09) Not mistakes. You've been collecting data points.

(Derek at 00:39:12) Yeah. You've been collecting a lot of data points. That's for sure. I'm collecting a ton. I'll tell you that much, Joel.

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:18) What are your thoughts on the future of machine learning? What's it going to look like?

(Derek at 00:39:25) I think part of it's just making it more accessible. I think right now, if you look at, you know, there's what, 2 million trained statisticians out there. So if you kind of call that your data science persona, there's 2 million of those. And as you probably have read in the press, we're not growing that at an exponential rate. So how do you take what they do and make it more accessible to the masses? All Alteryx does is a business solution, not as a technical solution or a data science-oriented solution. So, you know, unlike some of the folks that sit within our industry who maybe approach it from an IT consumer's perspective or a data science consumer's perspective, we approach it from a, what we call, a citizen data science perspective. How do I give the Joels and the Joel's sister and others really meaningful access to their data? And so I think what our charter really is to take that mission or that journey of data discovery, especially when it comes to assisted modeling or machine learning or predictive analytics in general, help people learn how to think about solving those problems, so they can gain enough insights on their data to act on it.

(Derek at 00:40:40) It's funny because a lot of folks will look at, you know, what a data scientist does. A lot of what data scientists do is they don't, you know, create a predictive analytics model, a machine learning model, and deploy that model into production, like a churn analysis model or what have you. You know, a lot of it is just generating insight. Right? So you have some data, you think there's something there, you start structuring some machine learning. Oh, I see some insight. I'm going to go act on that insight. I'm not publishing the model. I'm learning. And I'm using machine learning to learn about the data. Maybe it's sentiment analysis. Right? Where you learn your customers have a specific issue with, you know, let's say you're a restaurant. They've got a specific issue with your food quality, your service, and your sentiment analysis is identifying that. Well, you're acting on that insight. You're not, okay, let me publish that model so I can throw new data at it to see what it predicts. You're acting on those insights. And I think for us, it's reducing the time to insight for everybody. So I think that's where the magic sauce is. The Googles and the H2O's and the DataRobots and Microsoft's, they're going to continue to do really, really great data science work. But if I don't know I have a data science problem, I don't know that I should go use their technology. And I think the secret sauce for us is, if I've got data and I don't know anything about data science, how do I understand that I'm in a situation where I can take advantage of that. And the ability to turn that switch on of insight, oh, this, I probably could learn something from this data. Maybe I could do a regression analysis or a cluster analysis. I'll get some insight. That's the secret sauce. Right? That's what opens up that data to everyone, especially the predictive analytics side of that data to everyone. And I think that really is the magic sauce for us and probably everybody else in the industry.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:26) When are you seeing companies start or what patterns are you seeing within your customer? When are people realizing, oh, I'm at a point in my business where I don't know exactly what I need to do data science on, but everyone's kind of doing data science. I feel like I need a data scientist to do some stuff. How much of that stuff is on the data scientist you hire to come up with, or how much of it is the company coming up with and then trying to find a data scientist? How is that playing out in the market right now?

(Derek at 00:42:58) My opinion is pretty inconsistent. I mean, I think when we talk about the $10 to $15 trillion of value that's locked up, I think you're hitting the nail on the head. And people have data, but they don't know how to get access to the data. So I think there's the obvious use cases, but people, you know, machine learning and predictive analytics is enough out there that folks will know that there's this thing called churn analysis. There's this thing called clustering. There's this thing, you know, there's those typical data science concepts that still sit out there to enough to be curious about how to solve those problems. So I think education-wise, we've come a long way, at least people having awareness of machine learning. Then the question becomes a tooling component of it. And I think most folks will generate insights off of the lookups in Excel or exports to Tableau. Right? Tableau was kind of that first and, you know, whether it's Tableau or Qlik or Power BI. That was really their first foray into trying to understand their data outside of looking at Excel. So I think that we've gotten some acceleration there, but that last mile around data science, I think, is a challenge. And I think that's where the $10 to $15 trillion of opportunity sits. For us, we're approaching it from the citizen data science persona direction, not really the data science persona direction.

(Derek at 00:44:16) But I think if you look at companies that are more data science oriented, like the H2Os and the DataRobots, you know, they're coming towards us. And we're trying to evolve the citizen data science to have more access to advanced data science concepts. And we're going the other direction. So I think both parties understand that the data needs to be more accessible in terms of insight generation to everybody, and how do we make that much easier for people.

(Joel Beasley at 00:44:44) I got it. Okay. I'm starting—I'm getting some clarity now. So you guys are empowering the citizen data scientist because that's a really smart part of the market to empower because they're gonna go build companies and widgets and things, and they're gonna be all built upon your stack.

(Derek at 00:44:59) And they got great domain knowledge. Right? They're the domain experts. A lot of times, your data scientists aren't the domain experts. They're the statisticians, and they don't have the domain expertise.

(Derek at 00:45:09) And so the golden goose is, how do I find a data scientist who's got a boatload of domain knowledge? Like, that's hard. That's a unicorn to some folks. And so how do you take the citizen data science and get them to look more like a unicorn in terms of being able to provide some of those insights? To us, that's auto modeling.

(Derek at 00:45:27) You'll hear auto modeling talked about a lot where, you know, you give it data and it just generates insights magically inside the box. How do you make that understandable, explainable, I think is a really important thing. There's talk about neural networks and how awesome they are, but they're not easy to understand. So if you're a, you know, an insurance company, you're underwriting based on a neural network, you have to be able to explain how it's making decisions. And you can't really with a neural network.

(Derek at 00:45:53) And so I think, yeah, data science can be really empowering from an auto modeling perspective. But if you can't explain to your boss how you got to the answer, they're probably not gonna trust your answer. And so you have to make the understandability, the explainability of the machine learning more obvious to the citizen data scientist who doesn't know how to speak about, you know, ROC curves and everything else. Like, they're speaking about, "Hey, the data produced this model, and I gotta explain why I wanna go this route on this business decision," and I don't know. How do you make that more accessible?

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:27) Oh, I like that. Because I did see some companies coming out with tools to help the neural networks that are learning explain—

(Derek at 00:46:36) Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:37) —backwards about why they're learning. This sounds like you guys are in that area a little bit.

(Derek at 00:46:41) Yeah. I mean, that's—it's really weird. It's machine learning for machine learning. Right? It's adopting neural networks to explain neural networks is what you're saying as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:46:50) Inception.

(Derek at 00:46:51) Yes. Well, I think what it tells you is the industry's understanding that just creating data science outcomes that you can't understand isn't super valuable, especially business outcomes. Yes, driving your car, like autonomous driving, sure. Like, I don't need to explain why the neural network told me to go left when I was running at the end of the road. But if I'm creating a business decision, like, you know, a churn analysis or I'm making a decision on an individual in terms of underwriting, I have to explain that decision. And so it's great to see the industry's understanding that to make it more available and accessible, you have to make it more understandable. And so we're approaching it from what we call assisted modeling right now, which is how do I guide people through the process and educate them on the steps of machine learning or predictive analytics so they can learn how to fish. And then after a while, they can turn off the guided experience and just have their own experience or turn on the auto modeling experience. But we wanna provide the education to the user so they can learn a little bit about data science in the process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:54) Oh, I love it. And you guys are publicly traded. Right?

(Derek at 00:47:58) Yeah, AYX.

(Joel Beasley at 00:47:59) Yeah. All right. Eternally curious. Right? So I read that you used to do some endurance sports, and I have learned—yeah, I've learned that your mind is not separate from your body and that your physical health and your fitness have a direct correlation and impact on your ability to think clearly, to manage stress, things of that nature. So I want you to talk a little bit about that.

(Derek at 00:48:29) Interesting. Yeah, I did endurance sports for—I lived in Southern California for, I don't know, five or so years, and I really got into Ironman and kind of the endurance sports side of it, mostly for the psychology of it. I thought it was, you know, trying to push your body through what you thought was the end of the rope. I think it was a really interesting mental experiment for me. And so when I was doing that, you know, in terms of my mental health, I felt really, really good about where I was at. I could really connect my physical health to my mental strength. But what happened to me is I got hurt in the process of doing that. I moved to Colorado. I ended up having to get surgery on my hip. I had a torn labrum in my left hip.

(Derek at 00:49:09) And so I went from—and I still had exercised through the pain. Like, it was part of who I was. But I was struggling. And I had to basically not exercise once they fixed my hip for three months. And if you ask my wife what I was like during those three months when I was disassociated physically from the mental side, it was pretty impactful to my own productivity. Part of that's who I am, but I think part of that too, when you wake up in the morning and you get a workout in and you start your day on that positive, like, it sets the tone for the day.

(Derek at 00:49:41) So for me, I'm not a nighttime exerciser at all. I am a "exercise in the morning, start your day off on a real positive note, and then carry that momentum into your day." You feel better. You feel healthier. You're more mentally acute during the day. So I think there's tons of correlation between exercise and just mental awareness, mental vigor. So I definitely connect those two things even still today.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:04) Oh, yeah. I mean, I'm a big "exercise in the morning" person. I tried a couple times to do it in the evening before I decided to make it, like, a priority. I was like, "Oh, well, if I just don't get to it in the morning, I'll do it in the evening." But what was happening was I was doing these, like, 6:00 or 7:00 workouts, and it gives me so much energy.

(Derek at 00:50:21) Oh.

(Joel Beasley at 00:50:22) And I can't go to sleep. Like, the workout gives you energy. The first time I ever heard this was—it was so counterintuitive. Like, "Oh, if you're feeling a little tired, you know, and you're healthy, you're not sick or anything, but if you're feeling a little tired, go for a quick run. Your body will start producing some more energy because it'll hit a demand." And I was like, "Whoa." You know? It's pretty interesting how our bodies work.

(Derek at 00:50:44) For sure. And if you look at, like, you know, Mark Wahlberg, I think, is crazy. I think he wakes up, like, at 2:00 in the morning or something. You know, The Rock, Kevin Hart. Like, those guys are all, like, wake up at 3:00 in the morning, get workouts in, and then have my day. Jocko. A lot of the high achievers, like, this is part of who they are. Like, you don't see a lot of those guys as evening. That might be their second workout.

(Derek at 00:51:10) But a lot of those folks, they start their day by, you know, getting the exercise in to get the day off on the right note versus "get out of bed, get on my phone, what emails did I get over the night, you know, pop up my computer, surf the web." Like, that's bad momentum to start your day with. I read somewhere that the first thirty minutes of your day defines the tone of your day. And so I try and make those first thirty minutes of my day extremely effective, and that builds a ton of momentum. So a lot of times I'll get up and I'll—I'm big into meditation because I'm big into self-awareness.

(Derek at 00:51:43) I do affirmation stuff. Like, I try and, like, get myself jazzed for the day. Then I work out, and I take that into my workout. And then once I leave the workout, hey, I am full speed, and I feel like I'm gonna have an amazing day. But if you can really get your day start off strong, man, the momentum you carry into the day is—it's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:01) Oh, I do all that stuff, but I also play with it. Right? Like, so I've gotten the affirmation tracks, you know, and listen to those. I've tried different types of things because I like to always keep it fresh. Right? Like, I like to try—like, I'll go a month or two and do one routine in the morning and I'll try another routine, but they're all positive routines. Where I'm at right now is I'm doing like a walking meditation. So like, walk-run. So I get up, you know, within five minutes, I'm on the sidewalk outside my house on my walk or run, and I try to keep no thoughts in my head throughout the mile that I do. And every time something comes in, you know, I just let it go, let it go, let it go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:52:45) And the concept I use is like—I look at my brain like a muscle. And when you're thinking, you're flexing your muscle. And so if you're always flexing your muscle, it's gonna be really weak and exhausted when you need it. So I try to use that beginning morning section to just, like, consciously teach myself to relax. Just because thoughts come in doesn't mean, like, I have to tense up and react and, like, think them. I can just, like, let it go. So I've been playing with that a lot lately, and that's been good. And to aid in that, what was killing me was I get up and I need my phone. Right? And then there's stuff on my phone, and you can't not see it. Right?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:22) You have to see the alarm and everything. And then you have to get your music going or whatever. And so recently, I think it's been two weeks now, I turned off all my notifications. Like, all—

(Derek at 00:53:33) All day or just in the morning? You turn them back on?

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:35) Oh, no. No. They're gone.

(Derek at 00:53:37) Oh, wow.

(Joel Beasley at 00:53:37) Like, I have text and calls, but I keep my phone in "do not disturb" a lot. But there's no notifications anymore. And it was a bold move, and I told my wife, I was like, "I'm gonna do this." And she's like, "Okay." And I posted that on LinkedIn, like, three or four other really successful people I know were like, "Yeah, I've been doing that for two years." I was like, "Oh," because you don't know what someone else's notification settings are like.

(Derek at 00:54:02) Yeah. That's—I've gotta—I've thought about trying that. I love that you just take an hour and you get up and you go on a walk and you just—you try and get into that mental state where you're just in the moment.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:14) That clarity.

(Derek at 00:54:14) Yeah. That's amazing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:16) I try—go ahead. Go ahead.

(Derek at 00:54:18) Go ahead. No, I wanna hear how you're doing it because I'm gonna adopt—

(Joel Beasley at 00:54:20) So I've been trying to—this new thing is, like, placing my consciousness that you could, like, you know, put it, like, in different parts of, like, forward or backward or side to side. And so as I'm trying to keep my mind clear, I'll—I let myself be as weird as possible. I was like, "Oh, what's it like if I put all my consciousness, like, in my stomach or, like, all my attention there or if it's, like, behind my eyes or directly behind my eyes?" And, like, I'll, like, scan around the map of my brain and play with different things because I believe that there's a huge lack of that. There's a lack of, like, self-exploration, and there's a lack of discussion about it because I hear myself talking about it right now, I'm like, "Sounds pretty weird."

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:00) But, right? But, you know, the rewards in life go to those who are bold and willing to explore new areas. Right?

(Derek at 00:55:07) Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, I love how much you play and you test things. I think that's amazing. I mean, you're experimenting on yourself, which is super cool. That's—I think if you can do that and enjoy that experience, gosh, that's incredible.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:22) And I found people—you know, maybe you did this with your—so when I was, like, around 12, I got hit by a car and I was in a wheelchair for a year. I had to go through the process of learning how to walk again and, like, my muscles atrophied. And so I had to get them, like, fired back up in therapy, you know, for over a year. And it was because I had that experience, like, if you have a muscle atrophy and you have to get it to work again, get it to fire again through manual stimulation and mental stimulation, you have to actually recreate that mind-muscle connection. And I hope no one ever has to go through that process.

(Joel Beasley at 00:55:56) But if you do, you realize that your body has, like, features that you don't know unless you have those opportunities to use them. And I'm sure you experienced some of that with after your surgery. Right?

(Derek at 00:56:07) Well, not to your level. I mean, I—most folks don't think about, "Hey, I'm teaching my toe to move again." Right? Like, you've gone through, like, that mental—that neural path connected to that neural path from your brain to your toe. I mean, that's—yeah, I mean, post-surgery, I went through my moments of rehab and got through that. But I think what you're talking about, what you experienced is so—I don't know, it's so foundational. It's, like, root. Like, it's the most basic mental neural pathway between your brain and your foot or your toe, like, the smallest muscle movement in your body, and you have to work to make that happen. But you can. You can program that neural path. And so I think—sounds like for somebody like you, you've taken that and you've taken it to the extreme. Like, you're always trying to program different neural pathways in your head, and I think it's—maybe that was a blessing. I don't know. I hate to say that for something that's as tragic as that. But you took a, you know, a tragic situation, and you've really used it to your advantage. So that's the definition of growth mindset right there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:57:06) And it comes and goes. It's like the snow where you get the ski marks and then new snow falls. Like, the things that you're doing aren't permanent. Like, I can play with something and like it and then completely forget about it and, like, rediscover it later. But I'm curious to know about you. So are you back, like, in the gym working out and lifting again? Like, are you all healed up after your surgery?

(Derek at 00:57:24) Yeah. You know, I healed up. I think I, like a dummy, continued to run endurance races even when I had a torn labrum. I didn't know I had a torn labrum. I saw a ton of doctors, and they couldn't figure it out. So I just continued to exercise on it. So, unfortunately, for me, I kind of created some—and maybe this is where I need to reset mentally—I kind of created some really bad muscle memory in my leg where I still have a ton of leg pain from it. It's not with the injury. It's just more of I've kind of programmed my leg to—my motor skills to function in a specific way, and having to unprogram that is probably even more work.

(Derek at 00:57:59) So it's a long process to get back from that. That being said, I've—I'm off to the next thing. So I used to ride bikes. I still can ride bikes. Obviously, I did triathlon. So, you know, riding bikes is familiar to me. So I ride bikes. I've gotten into a little martial arts stuff because I like to accomplish things. I mean, the cool thing about endurance sports was it's about you and what you can get out of yourself. And so I like that process.

(Derek at 00:58:21) And so I tried doing more martial arts stuff to see if I can learn a different skill set. So the passion's still there. The endurance sports thing is kind of parked on the sideline until I can get maybe a little more physically better. But I'm finding different ways of exploring the physical side of my life. And I think it's a journey like anything else, and I'm getting a ton of joy out of learning a brand new skill set just like I did when I started in triathlon, when I couldn't run three miles.

(Derek at 00:58:48) Right, you gotta start the journey from zero, and the journey is the fun part.

(Joel Beasley at 00:58:53) It always is. And then it's reminding yourself, like, when you slide on that spectrum to desire and you're not there yet.

(Derek at 00:59:03) And you

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:03) have to, like, slide yourself back, like, I'm just—I'm always in this constant, like, directing myself, like, oh, I feel tension right now. Like, I'm desiring a lot of these things, and I don't have them. And it's like, what do I need to do? I've been here before. Oh, I have the skill. I'll just not desire them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:19) I'll get right back to happiness and be completely content with my life today because we're just on a rock flying through space and it's beautiful. I love it.

(Derek at 00:59:26) I love it. That's great.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:29) Oh, man. Dude, Derek, this is awesome. Hey, when I'm out—alright. What city are you in? Are you in Denver? Are you outside of Denver?

(Derek at 00:59:34) We're a little north. We're between Denver and Boulder. We're in Broomfield.

(Joel Beasley at 00:59:38) Okay.

(Derek at 00:59:39) Yeah. So our old ex-founder was from—good interesting story. He was from Boulder. You know, our company's based out of Irvine, California, so Southern California. And so he basically refused to move. And so they started really—the engineering footprint started in Boulder, and we moved it to Broomfield. But, yeah, our DNA, our technical DNA really is in Colorado, which is super cool. Most folks don't know that.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:04) Oh, nice. So I'll let you know when we're traveling out there next. Maybe we go for a hike or something or have lunch, do something. It'd be great to connect in person.

(Derek at 01:00:13) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:14) Dude, we did it. We had a podcast. Well, if you wanna go work for Derek, where do you go? What's the website?

(Derek at 01:00:19) Well, obviously, [email protected], [email protected]. Both of those will get you there. We're hiring a ton of people right now. As you know, we're growing at a monumental rate. So if you're in the market and you're an overachiever and you wanna go do amazing things for an amazing company, we're obviously a great spot to be. So, yeah, if you're into fast-paced growth, reach out to us. Get in contact.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:43) Yeah. And a leader who cares. Alteryx.com.

(Derek at 01:00:46) Absolutely.

(Joel Beasley at 01:00:47) And then when I'm out there next, I'll let you know. We could see if our schedules match up.

(Derek at 01:00:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. If there's anybody else in Denver you're interested in meeting, let me know. I'm trying to expand my personal brand. I'm fairly new to this market.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:01) Oh, you've got really good content, though. Like, A-plus stuff. No bullshit. Like, when I read your stuff, I was like, this guy—this mind needs amplification.

(Derek at 01:01:08) Yeah. Well, likewise, I think the way you're attacking your space. I was listening to your podcast with—was it Kevin? Is Kevin Smith the CTO at—

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:17) Kevin Scott. Yeah.

(Derek at 01:01:18) Kevin Scott. And you had a blurb at the beginning around how you kinda got there with Leaderbits, and it really impacted me. I think the way you've approached it is very akin to how I think about it. So I'd love to see your solution get much more market traction.

(Joel Beasley at 01:01:33) Awesome, man. Thank you so much. Have a wonderful day.

(Derek at 01:01:35) You too. Thanks, man.