Altair CEO Jim Scapa on the Most Loved Workplace Leaders Show

Nice to see you as well. You just got quieter than you were before, so now I have to make you louder.

Oh, okay. So well, this is... no, we have to keep emotional regulation, which is exactly what we were just talking about. And Jim and I were talking a little about being founders and keeping our emotional regulation and how we can enable that most loved workplace really, and how being at a most lovable place and leading in a most loved workplace is one of the same, really. Right, we're in it and we're leading it. And as a founder, Jim, I'd love to hear more about your story as a founder of Altair. How did it start? How did you get to that level of success where you found it and you had that idea and it germinated and became really truth?

It sounds very exciting, but it's more prosaic than that. But let me give you my story a little bit. So I grew up in New York City. I went to Columbia. I came out to Michigan as an engineer in the auto industry and pretty quickly saw I'm not a really big company guy. Very entrepreneurial. And I got an MBA at Michigan, mostly at night. And then I thought I'd go back east to work in a venture capital firm. I had these notions. I was very young. And saw the opportunity. I was involved with a new area of computer simulation. And so an opportunity to start a company. Started a business with fifteen hundred dollars of startup capital, so nothing like what you see these days, especially on the West Coast. And primarily as a consulting business in the beginning. Very quickly was developing some of our own software. I've always been kind of on the software side. And had some failure. Failure really important. And then I had a very big success with one product called HyperMesh, and I began to take that internationally and continue to reinvest through the success of that product as I went international as well, and continued to bring some new products out. So that's really the story of Altair. Little by little, I think I've just brought a lot of great people on the team. It's a culture that I think... we just closed on a very small acquisition this morning, a tiny company in India, 17 people, almost no revenue. But I had brought my C-team on the call this morning, very early this morning, just to meet the new people that are coming in. And listening to my own team members, how long they've been with the company, and how people don't really leave that often. It's just been a very, very nice ride for many years.

So I've had kind of the same four key points to our culture for many, many years. The first one is, as you know, we're thinking about the future. I say we envision the future, and then we make our decisions in the context of that longer future, step by step. So I think we're always looking out there, and I think that's exciting and fun for people. The second one, I think, is that everyone talks about being honest and having an honest culture, and we are very honest with each other and with customers as well. But one of the things that I really push hard is this idea of broad communications. What that means to me: I've worked in some big companies very early, and politics kind of creeps into a company when you have someone who decides, 'I've got some information I want to share with Jim, but Amy doesn't need to know that, so I'll leave her out.' And I really fight that. So I have these broad email groups. We try and really communicate broadly, internationally as well, about what we're doing wrong, about what we're doing right. We cheerlead a little bit broadly as well. We talk about the challenges that we have and the market, all of that in a very broad way. And I think it makes people feel included in what's happening, so I think that's a very powerful idea as well. We're always looking for new technology and new business models, and we're experimenting a lot. And then the last thing I think in Altair that's pretty powerful is this idea of diversity. Everyone talks about diversity today, but I've had the same points to the culture for over 30 years. It's to really embrace diversity. I was on several calls just in the last day or two, and even I'm amazed. I'm looking at the leadership of my team, and there's a guy from Germany, a guy from Italy, a guy from France, a guy from India, a guy from China, a guy from Japan. And this is just the solver team leaders on the tech team. So we're so broad and international, we're so diverse, and it's throughout, top down really. And I think that is super powerful. We weren't as good on the gender side, and I've been... I have all daughters, by the way. Two are engineers, one's a lab animal. So I really have pushed this gender aspect of diversity as well in the last 10 years, and I think it's really taking root. So diversity is big. And then finally, we just take risks. I like to experiment. I'm always reorganizing. I'm always trying, and there's a lot of resistance internally very often, and sometimes it's quite a failure, but very often these things we learn from them and just quickly pivot and move on. So that's in a nutshell, I think, my key reasons why this business works and why people tend to stay. Not everybody stays, and by the way, we kick people out too. We are not afraid if someone isn't fitting or isn't measuring up. It's a very, very high caliber group of people, but we're really nice about it even though we're kicking somebody out. You want to treat people with respect, and it wasn't a fit for them, but we're not afraid to do that either. We recognize that we have to do that if people aren't fitting right. So it's all that. Probably more than you wanted to hear.

Yeah, I just think it's part of the whole diversity element. You really want the perspectives. To some extent, I see it as the power of the US. My parents were immigrants from Greece in the early 50s. I see the power of the US historically as this idea of diversity. Actually, I think some people are fighting against it now, but that is the historical difference. If you go to Japan, it's fairly mono-cultural, of course that's changing too, but that diversity of thinking is very important. And having women in that mix is just so important, I think, and not just tokenized. There are so many amazing women. If you go to the very top technical universities, Columbia where I came out and I'm very active with, most of the really top technical universities are 50% women at this point. And as you go down, it's less so, actually, believe it or not. And as you go down, you see women entering as freshmen and dropping out after a year or two because what's important is that they see the professors. The people to aspire to need to be women as well, which is why you need the top down, bottom up. So yes, I'm a huge believer in gender diversity.

I'm not sure I know exactly what you should never do, and I'm quite certain that I'm super far from that. I make so many mistakes, it's crazy. But I think you want to, certainly when you do make a mistake, you want to be very quick to admit it, to talk about it in an open way, and to just move on from that and to learn from that. So I don't know about what you should never do. I think you need to be listening a lot to people, and listening actively. A lot of people listen, but their own ideas are rumbling around so fast that they're not really actively listening. And I think it's super important. People want to be heard. You really have to very actively listen. And you're obviously terrific at that. That's what makes you good at what you do.

Yep.

I know that I want to pick a specific one out. I've made so many. I've made more mistakes than you can imagine, because I really am an experimentalist. I've reorganized 100 different ways. And one of the things that I've found is that something that doesn't work today, very often we all tend to say, 'Well, I've had that experience. I did that. That didn't work. That'll never work.' Actually, very often something that's not working today, you need to take it back out again and look at it again, and decide because in this sort of change set of circumstances further down the road, that idea actually may have legs now. So I think that's super important. I mean, most of the mistakes that I've made are around people. Quite honestly, I've opened offices in 26 or 27 countries, and I personally used to travel, visit each market, each country, spend a good deal of time there, meet a lot of people, customers and resellers and others. And then I would identify who I wanted to lead that market for me, and I would recruit them and bring them in and raise that whole thing. And I've made some mistakes on some of those, and had to correct those. I've had people who stole and cheated us. We grew up as a private company, and maybe there were some fewer controls, and I've had to remove those people. But in general, I personally think I'm a pretty good judge of people, but not always. And people change as well. But in general, I believe I have to trust the people who work for me a lot, and I do, and I trust them with a lot. And I think if you trust people, they give back way more than that. When they violate that trust, I'm pretty firm about it. I'm not good with people who violate that trust, but I don't want to spend my life policing people in any way at all. I'd rather trust them, give them the tools, the power to get out there and innovate and be creative. And usually they just return that in such great ways. So I don't know if that's the answer to your question. It's not, but sorry.

Right. Isn't that really what we're talking about here? Of course, yeah. It's not easy. The easy place to be... It's great to hear and see your success.

Well, that is very, very true. I've had to change. Started basically with a couple of people, and we've grown to a pretty large business, publicly traded. And I personally have had to morph from being a leader in my 20s of a very small team, up to 50 people, then to 100, into 500 people. And at every stage along the way, the business needs to change, and I need to change as a leader. And then I had a lot of people telling me, 'Don't take the business public, Jim. You'll hate it.' But I enjoyed that challenge, and I enjoy that challenge because I love change. And I actually enjoy the aspect that I have to do things differently, and trying to keep as much the same but still respecting the new rules of being a public company. So yeah, absolutely. I'm a really fortunate person, though. I have amazing family. I have five daughters and five granddaughters. We're very close family. And the business is so successful, and the culture in the business is very, very warm even at our size. I think it would surprise a lot of people. Of course, thank you for the award. Somewhere, somebody noticed. But I feel very fortunate.

Yeah, within Altair, when we IPO, we had about 800 people who had equity in the business. A lot of founders will hold on to all the equity, but I really distributed a lot, and we continue to do that. And it was super gratifying to me. I mean, there are many, many millionaires and multi-millionaires who have come out of this. And for me, it's such a pleasure that these people who supported me during those years have really been rewarded. And I've had so many tell me it's transformed their lives. It's a really, really nice feeling. And I am a very fortunate public company because I have controlling interest still, which is not usual in a public company, but it gives me the ability to balance correctly the long view, making decisions in the context of envisioning the future and not just the short term, but also balancing it against what the shareholders, these new shareholders, need. And I think I've been doing that fairly well.

Yep. Well, I'm not as famous as some other tech founder leaders, for sure. I've been an experimentalist, and I had a lot of patents around business models. And one of them covered consumer digital content. And it's a model that I used to sell very successfully, but I built a platform that was music, books, podcasts, all of that. We called it Wave. An amazing piece of technology with a lot of machine learning to create playlists and all that. And we had about 15,000 monthly active users, and we shut it down. But had I been the guy using Twitter and social media very actively, if I was, let's say, Elon Musk, that thing would have been killer. So maybe I'm doing some things wrong. Maybe I need to be much more out there and invisible. But for me, this is my personality, and it's worked successfully for me.

Louis, thank you very much. Appreciate the interest in speaking with me, and really appreciate the award. Thank you so much.