MASTERPIECE: The Emotional Journey to Creating Anything Great...Anything

By Dean Stoecker

Dean Stoecker is the co-founder and executive chairman of Alteryx, a multi-billion dollar data analytics company. But his path to that success was not linear or logical or without its deep swamps of despair. Dean had many entrepreneurial false starts before he finally found his path.
In this candid, engaging book, he describes the emotional journey that inevitably accompanies any success in life. We all want to create something great—a great marriage, a great friendship, a great career, a great family, and if you’re as fortunate as Dean, a great business.
But building any masterpiece is as difficult as it is rewarding. People give up. They lose confidence. They can’t get through the tough parts. But, as Dean’s own story shows, most failures are not failures of vision or talent, but of belief and will. In fact, they’re not even failures at all. If you can learn to navigate the often overwhelming obstacles and dark moments, your efforts will be rewarded.
Based on Stoecker’s years of hard-earned wisdom, Masterpiece is much more than a window onto the founding of a tech giant. It offers universal and timeless lessons for any journey you might be on.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2022
• ISBN: 9781662923159

Book preview

CHAPTER ONE

This is the Best Idea Ever

This is it, I said to myself. This time it’s really gonna work.

It was my latest entrepreneurial venture, my latest brainstorm—the chimneyless fireplace. This one couldn’t possibly be a loser.

It was 1985 and I was beginning to build a family. My wife and I had a young son and I was employed full-time at a data analytics company. Still, the ambition to have my own business—an innovative one—had never left me. On Friday nights and weekends I tinkered with ideas for my own company, much as my father had tinkered, experimented, and dreamed all his life.

One day I came across a firm that was selling chimneyless fireplaces. I was immediately captivated by the concept. Building houses for dad, I had experience installing fireplaces. It was not only a complicated job physically, but one that required meeting a lot of fire and building regulations.

The chimneyless fireplace offered a way around these obstacles. By simplifying the process for a product a lot of people found attractive, it had huge market potential.

It was a firebox that looked just like a fireplace, but it didn’t require a flue because it burned fumeless grain alcohol. They came in brick and oak models, and were portable. Just a beautiful product, in both design and function.

I paid for the buildup of the business in California by selling them on the weekends, but I also did tons of statistical research, given my background in data and analytics. At the time, the largest apartment developer in the world was in southern California. My research compared the insurance costs of installing a real fireplace vs. the chimneyless version. If you were building a 1,000-unit apartment complex, the product not only saved an extra two man-days of construction per unit, but also saved you an extra $13 a month per unit for insurance, which meant millions of dollars saved for a reasonably-sized building. The chimneyless fireplace could mitigate massive costs for