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Appian was the first company I worked for out of college. It's good to see that they have done well, but it has been a long road for them. After starting as a

Appian was the first company I worked for out of college. It's good to see that they have done well, but it has been a long road for them. After starting as a technical consulting firm and growing quickly for the first few years (they survived the dotcom crash by making inroads into the government and military markets), they decided to make a transition from consulting to software. This ultimately seems to have been a good move, but it took them almost 10 years to figure out and fully execute (the transition started around 2002-2003, and they didn't really hit their stride until about 2011). I have to give Matt Calkins a lot of credit for pulling it off.

elmar 9y ago
Long road on the flip side Matthew Calkins managed to get to the IPO with 54.7% of the company stock. http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=11493592#D363139DS1_HTM_TOC363139_15 http://www.nasdaq.com/markets/ipos/filing.ashx?filingid=1149...
Edmond 9y ago
I used to work for Pega, the leader in the BPM software space, Pega is over 30 years old and they only recently figured out how to really hit their strides. I believe they hired someone from SalesForce to help them position the company for growth, in the past 6 years the company's valuation has gone from ~$500M to $4.5B. Looks like the industry has figured out how to make itself valuable even if the products are sub-par. Incidentally, like Matt Calkins, Alan Trefler the Founder and CEO also owns more than half the company.