Code, Culture and Community

The people whose code, passion, and outreach nurtured a broad community

Aug 05, 2025

Truly entrepreneurial companies create outsized, multi-decade impact on their communities. Though donations and community events get covered most, the real impact happens through the companies’ employees. These companies inherently empower employees to change their communities through broad, often quiet engagement.

My series began with Engineering Animation under Marty Vanderploeg, Jeff Trom, and Matt Rizai’s leadership, grew at Webfilings and, later, Workiva, and continues to compound dividends across Iowa’s technology landscape. Though many individuals are deserving of the credit for this outsized impact within and beyond the founding team, I am focusing on one individual for his multi-faceted impact just outside of it.

Like parallel journeys of Cammie Greif of Parsons Technology, Gopal Miglani of Microware Systems, Mike Colwell of Norand Systems, and Hank Norem of Ramco, Dave Tucker began his professional Iowa journey as an employee of Engineering Animation after an entrepreneurial journey out west. Let’s dig into this remarkable leadership.

Dave’s Role in the Entrepreneurial Ecosystem

Dave Tucker, today, is Partner at Next Level Ventures, one of Iowa’s handful of venture capital firms with the largest amount of capital deployed (per publicly available records). Launched in 2013 by Craig Ibsen, the firm has invested in numerous Iowa companies through its three venture funds and nationally in credit union-focused companies via its CURQL fund. Dave’s colleagues include Craig Ibsen and Liz Keehner, two prominent members of Iowa’s VC community.

He is also a long-standing member of Technology Association of Iowa, an organization he first joined as Workiva’s technology leader, absorbing roles and responsibilities well-beyond those expected of a volunteer board member. His fingerprints appear embedded in concrete in TAI’s successful programs for students, young professionals, education, and startup connections.

Early Journey

Iowa experiences a brain drain as students across our colleges and universities graduate and seek adventures elsewhere. Upon graduating from Iowa State University, Dave joined Hewlett Packard to begin a seven-year journey as a software engineer. He worked in the heart of Silicon Valley, loosely located where Apple’s Headquarters sit today. The technology industry was at an inflection being caused by the personal computer and he, too, was surrounded by eager innovators in the valley.

If seven engineers leaving a Silicon Valley company for something else rings a bell, you’re a tech history buff. See, just forty years prior, a group of eight (called the traitorous eight) had left Shockley Semiconductor to launch Fairchild Semiconductor1. That event is regarded as the birth of the microprocessor generation and the computers that depend upon it2.

He and six colleagues took over a company in 1993 where they recognized their opportunity. Overseas trade was on an upswing and container upon container was arriving in the US., ready to transport on rail throughout the country. Each container had a bill of lading (BOL) listing the shipper, receiver, container contents, and more. These paper statements were useful individually, but the team recognized that each contained valuable data.

They called the new company T.R.A.D.E. for Trade Reporting and Data Exchange.

T.R.A.D.E.

They began collecting these BOLs, digitized them, normalized them into a database and burned it to CDROMs for distribution. They added a Windows program to layer a search tool on the data to make it eminently more usable. Levi Strauss, a customer, found value as it could quickly search to see if a container containing “Levis” was sourced from a non-Levis factory, thus identifying counterfeit products.

Despite a growing business with over 10MM in annual run-rate revenue, sabotage by an insider threat via a rogue employee quickly destroyed the value in the company which dissolved in 2002. Some of its assets were acquired by PIERS, now an S&P Global company.

Dave and his wife had two young children by this time and as he worked first at HP and then in TRADE, his wife transitioned from being a kindergarten teacher to an employee at Tandem computer. Life and Iowa, as they often do, called the young family back to Iowa through the grandchildren and grandparents. The next serendipitous meeting was around the corner.

Jeff Trom

Jeff, as readers will recall from parts I and II, was one of EAI’s and Webfilings/Workiva’s cofounders and the deeply technical mind. Though, today’s young startups would quickly assign him the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) title, late 1990s weren’t quite into early title inflation. Dave began working for Jeff at EAI just after the company went public.

You’ll recall from Part I the types of animation EAI accomplished for incident recreation. They also started collecting data from Programmable Logic Controller (PLC) devices on the factory floor and could visualize a vehicle moving across the Ford factory. Their experience had by now brought them into a John Deere Combine just as gaming was leveraging their visualization capabilities with Barbie!

The Valley culture of experimentation, hard work, innovation, and instrumentation was alive for the recently departed Silicon Valley engineer. A second setback, however exposed itself through the events previously documented, leading to EAI’s stock price fall, the SEC report, and ultimate acquisition by Unigraphix.

Dave continued to work for Unigraphix which was subsequently acquired by EDS before being spun out from EDS through a private equity transaction, and ultimately acquired by Siemens. Time in a stable gig can pass quickly when you’re creating technology, deploying software, and simultaneously building a life.

Dan Murray

Dan also had his roots at Engineering Animation, starting as a student intern from Iowa State University, but growing into a company leader as Chief Software Architect of the VisProducts line of software. After Engineering Animation Dan moved on to become the CEO of Phasient, an E-Learning company whose marquee customers included Principal, Meredith and John Deere. Phasient delivered a cloud-based learning platform long before the phrases “cloud-based” or “learning platform” had entered our vernacular.

Dan also formed a consulting company, Murray5.net which built a prototype application leveraging Adobe Flex for a user interface and the newly emerging cloud platform Google AppEngine on the back end. This application was an early prototype for the high-resolution, high-performance cloud applications so prevalent today.

This new application consisted of a cloud word processor and spreadsheet with a unique advantage over the Microsoft Office application suite. Any time a number from a spreadsheet or words from a document were used in other documents a change in one place would replicate throughout the other documents and spreadsheets so that there was never a danger of one document or spreadsheet being out of sync with another. What may seem a small feature was actually a revolutionary concept that would eventually form the basis for a public company.

Dan and his team of twelve, including David Haila, Mike Wesner, Brent Arndorfer, Matt Reynolds, Jason Bradley, Steven Ourada built a foundation that has led to hundreds of software patents and proven once again that truly innovative software on a global scale can start in Iowa, not just in Silicon Valley. This team of twelve formed a part of Webfilings’ early core.

Transitions are a way of life in companies and when supported by company leadership and culture, people move laterally, vertically, or beyond the company to achieve their highest potential. As Dave presented the voice, culture, and ethos of the company into the community, Dan continued his path toward innovation with his new company, Vertex Software. Other remarkable people, such as David Haila, remained at the company, growing personally and professionally. David now serves in the role of the company Chief Technology Officer.

Boomerangs

EAI’s original founders came back around in 2008 with the idea for Webfilings when Jerry Behar and Joe Howell started questioning the sneakernet used to create regulatory filings for the SEC. The story is detailed in Part II, but they knew their prior technical peers, Dave and a college, Brad Harper, were tapped on the shoulder to leave Siemens join the fledgling Webfilings.

Though Dave and Brett had been tagged to be the engineering leaders, the entire group hustled as a startup team doing everything each was capable of or willing to be doing. Brett wrote the “front-end” user-interface as Dave wrote code for the “back end” of the software, portions hidden away from the users’ interface but critical for maintaining consistent logic with the underlying database. This software rose in importance as the SEC mandated all electronic filing via the XBML standard.

This was a time when the engineers were building as they went as the founders bet it all. As Dave and team worked at a customer’s desk in Des Moines, adjusting code for filing the customer’s financial data in real-time, the founders were pushing all their chips in, mortgaging their home and futures on the promise that the software will work, success an upload and SEC acceptance away. Dave even snuck in the comment, “Copyright Webfilings, 2009”, into the HTML code in the filing as they raced against the clock, just to prove where it originated.

The company didn’t just recruit and work from Ames. It leveraged the universities and engineering resources where they were, establishing a hybrid work environment long before a global pandemic necessitated it. They established offices close to Jeff Trom in Bozeman, MT, in Denver, Saskatoon and Saint Marie, Canada, Los Altos, Columbus and beyond.

IPO and Maturity

The company of renegade entrepreneurs knew it had grown up with its 2014 IPO. Though single individuals could aim to understand the inner workings of all the software, scale now required process and regimen. Despite the engineering culture rife with intellectual argument and friendly competition, they drove hard. Even as their own quarterly earnings call ended, they found themselves rushing back to work, ready to add/improve/grow.

The founders and their team had cut their teeth on entrepreneurship and company building at EAI. The Workiva team (rebranded by now) brought in rigor accompanied with fun. They actively pursued fun at work, even as the rigor behind their work grew with each passing quarter.

Marty Kagan is well-regarded as a consultant and author of a series of books focused on a product development methodology and was engaged across the company to further hone the product and mature it toward customer-expectation rather than a set of software specifications. Workiva seemed to adopt the mindset highlighted best by this quote

“You can't take your old organization based on feature teams, roadmaps, and passive managers, then overlay a technique from a radically different culture and expect that will work or change anything.”
― Marty Cagan, Empowered: Ordinary People, Extraordinary Products

Supporting Startups

This particular epilogue has told Dave’s story parallel to Workiva’s own journey. As a startup whose J-curve was unique for the region and many of its employees left to start their own ventures, joined other startup ventures, and remain engaged with the community. A few organizations and people who continue to impact them:

Technology Association of Iowa

Dave has remained a fixture in the association’s operations, board, and leadership for a large portion of the last decade. Though he represented a large, growing company that would often be commingled with large technology companies statewide, his voice and stewardship of the startup world remains constant.

Just as Workiva’s growth would’ve nearly guaranteed additional awards for the team, the technology leaders, the company and its product, Workiva pivoted to becoming a sponsor of the very award it would’ve likely been awarded several more times. The altruistic move was remarkable and appreciated across the technology community.

Iowa Agritech Accelerator

Megan Vollstedt took the courageous jump from Workiva in 2017 to be the inaugural managing director for the Iowa Agritech Accelerator. A venture that began to accelerate investments in and work of agtech focused startups, IATA was launched with the support of seven industry leaders of varying sizes. Megan worked with the board to launch the inaugural and subsequent classes and developed the mentor-driven accelerator.

Global Insurance Accelerator

Megan Brandt left Workiva in 2015 to join the Global Insurance Accelerator as its inaugural program manager where she created the mentor program and collaborated with its managing director to grow the GIA’s impact and footprint in Insurtech. She subsequently became the managing director of Maple Studios and is now directly engaged from Iowa Economic Development Authority.

Gain Compliance

Burch LaPrade built the Solutions Management team tasked with identifying new and significant revenue opportunities at Workiva before leaving to launch Gain Compliance, a startup originally focused on insurance reporting and automation.

Vertex Software

We’ve learned a brief story about Vertex Software and Dan Murray’s connection, contribution, leadership and transitions to Engineering Animation, Iowa State University, Webfilings → Workiva, Phasient, and murray5.net earlier. I plan to delve into his story at a later date and look forward to the conversation. (Disclosure: just as I remain invested in Workiva via its stock, I am also invested in Vertex as a LP via a venture fund. However, neither investment played a role in telling the Webfilings story earlier or Vertex’s mentions in this final edition)

Next Level Ventures

Dave Tucker joined Next Level Ventures as a partner where his work engages him deeply through NLV’s portfolio of startups across diverse companies and industries. The firm’s three Iowa-focused funds and the national CURQL fund investing in credit-union focused companies leverage Dave’s expertise as a mentor, investor, teacher, technology leader, and of course a board member of several portfolio companies.

Final Thoughts

I was asked a question before publishing this series, “Which company would I call the most successful technology startup in Iowa”. I believe my instant answer was Workiva - for its global impact, distributed workforce, strong suite of products, a group of co-founders who created not one but TWO companies. If that wasn’t enough, they grew them enough to list them on public markets, creating wealth for many early employees and supporters. In my research, it also remains the technology company with the largest market value to date.

And that’s worthy of celebration!

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