It’s Appian CEO Matt Calkins, his games ordered from oldest to newest: Magnet, a game that cleverly harnesses electromagnetism in a race to the middle of the board. Sekigahara: The Unification of Japan, a conquest style game, which seems like the analog equivalent to Shogun: Total War for those familiar with digital games. Tin Goose, an airmail themed game set in the 1940’s. Matt has been able to keep up his hobby throughout Appians steady rise to prominence and recent IPO.
Appian is a leading provider of low-code software. Basically, it’s a platform for building software applications. You can think of it as an advanced code editing software with many tools, but taken one step further. It enables much larger chunks of code to be integrated easily and deployed rapidly in the cloud. According to Matt in a recent Motley Fool interview, “Appian applications don’t look like lines of code, they instead look like flow charts with lines connecting each piece. It’s extremely scalable.” Appian makes use of existing code and indexes them to be used over and over again for a specific purpose. When combined together, it creates a mosaic of optimized code designed specifically for the enterprise task at hand. Security may benefit from this model as well. Problems are easier to narrow down and dependencies easily shut down. It also makes updating easier.
We can see an interesting analogue in what Uber did, taking existing cars on the road and giving them the tools to spend their time and drive their vehicles more productively. The bottom line is that both companies are merely augmenting existing resources to accomplish a task better. Just when you thought programming is the one job that couldn’t be mass produced and automated…it can be, at least to some degree. It seems more and more human brain power is being moved to high level philosophic, abstract, and design problems. Appian is listed on the Nasdaq, one interesting thing to note about the stock is that it is mostly held among insiders. (the founders hold over 60% of the stock) A good sign that management is focused on long term growth instead of short term financial metrics. Matt has also mentioned his management emphasizes ‘short feedback loops’, where the company can quickly reiterate to achieve great performance. Similar to how beating that tough level in Donkey Kong takes multiple attempts, getting incrementally better each try.
It seems Appian is well-positioned for success, especially for the new api economy where increasing integration is key. It will be exciting to see how Appian develops with Matt at the helm. Though with Matt’s passion for gaming and tenure in software, it might be odd not to see him elsewhere—on the board or management team of a great video game developer…
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