While competitors slept
How a quiet revolution in regulatory reporting created a 3.8B company
This story isn’t investment advice. I have held a position in the company since its IPO and may still own positions on or after this story’s release.
The 3.8B value in the title is the company’s market cap on 7/28/2025.
The first part1 of this multi-part series focused on the birth, growth, IPO, and acquisition of Engineering Animation, Inc (EAI), the first company launched by a group of serial entrepreneurs. This second part chronicles their creation of Webfilings in 2008.
One reader called out my incomplete detailed handling of events in EAI’s later years. Keeping with my original thesis to eschew tabloid journalism, I have distilled the circumstances below and provide a link for detail and choose not to mudsling.
According to the SEC, the earnings misstatement referenced in Part I was due to the company booking prospective revenue early from a customer at the hands of an executive responsible for the company’s sales. The company’s quarterly financials recorded the sale but failed to disclose associated conditions. The SEC found2 the company in violation of its three separate sections and two associated rules. It further found the executive responsible for violating two sections and two associated rules. Details are discussed in this Securities & Exchange commission report, issued in October 2000, almost thirteen months after the disclosures and restatements, and a month after EAI’s acquisition by UGS.
A New Beginning
EAI’s founders had, for all intents and purposes, achieved an “exit” via the UGS acquisition and retirement would’ve been normal and expected. Such retirements generally encompass some mix of board service, teaching, angel investments, advisory services and consulting. Each founder did some of these activities, but some went on to launch other businesses to recreate the heady magic of a startup.
Dan Murray was one of the first to heed his entrepreneurial gene. He had joined EAI as a graduate student in 1990 and spent the next decade designing and building, elevating to the Chief Software Architect position at the time of EAI’s acquisition. After EAI, he realized that he wasn’t quite done and launched Phasient, a cloud-based learning service for corporate customers, including Principal, GuideOne, and Pioneer Hi-Bred, once again at the ISU Research Park3.
Though the phrases “cloud-based” and “learning solution” roll of the tongue today, in 2002 the idea of a ‘cloud based’ service was as foreign as a “learning system” yet would soon become valuable.
A Creative Collision between Painful Lessons and Market Timing
In 2008, the technology industry had grown past infancy, and several tech companies had successfully leveraged public markets for growth capital. Beyond Microware’s story in these pages, Apple, Microsoft, Intel, Cisco, Amazon and hundreds more had gone public in the previous two decades. EAI itself had leveraged public markets for capital in the late 1990s.
However, 2008 was a unique time in the public markets. The Enron failure a few years prior, new legislation (Sarbanes Oxley), and the financial crisis had readied the industry for innovation.
Collaborative Ideation
The Webfilings origin story emanates is a classic collision of need and opportunity. A big problem was growing within the routine financial reporting required of public companies. The reporting overhead was increasing with new regulations, and errors could be fatal to the reporting company and its shareholders’ equity.
EAI’s original founders, still young in their 40s and 50s, found this big problem worth solving. They researched ideas, talked with public companies, and collected the unique challenges and methods deployed to report required data. Ready to do something anew, they launched Webfilings in Palo Alto, CA in August 2008 with additional cofounders from their EAI days. The ideation and launch story are described briefly in a Google case study and talk about the group recognizing the need for a better way to collect and report these data. Though formidable competitors served a majority of public companies, none appeared to be innovating beyond the existing word processor and spreadsheet-based solutions.
Matt Rizai was appointed to the CEO role, a role he retained through 2018. Dan Murray and Jerry Behar, worked through 2013 before leaving to pursue other interests. Joe Howell worked through 2020, leading strategic initiatives and working with standards bodies. Jeff Trom adopted a Managing Director role at launch and continued his technology journey through research and development, adding a patent4 specific to Webfilings’ technology. He led as the Chief Technology Officer and retired in 2023. Marty Vanderploeg served the company the longest, beginning as a Managing Director like his cofounders, shifting into a President & COO role in 2014, President & CEO in 2018, and CEO from Feb 2022 until retirement in 2023. He continues to serve as the company’s non-Executive chair of the board.
The Perfect Problem Worth Solving
The two main incumbent technologies included an archaic way to collect and report data via documents and spreadsheets, and an even more archaic way to manually rationalize these data into heavily prescribed formats. These documents were collected on computers and file servers, leading to conflicting document versions and time-consuming methods of handling changes to last minute numbers and facts.
This team decided to forgo both incumbencies and rely upon the experience gained from cloud-based learning systems. Unlike competitors who collected data in spreadsheets and files, they created an alternate mechanism to tag individual data elements and establish linkages between related data. They adopted XBRL, a formal mechanism for electronic data exchange with the SEC and were the first system to enable a customer with filing XBRL with the SEC. Deploying a methodology where a data wasn’t duplicated but used instead from a single source, they lowered the chance of errors AND made it easier to update across multiple documents when necessary.
I saw company pride in this innovation on screens throughout the company during a tour of the company in 2016. Screens showed the intelligence enabled by these tagged data elements and our guide spoke of their impact on customer timelines.
Customer Impact
There is a product development principle adopted by successful startups that speaks to the efficacy of a company and its product: Product-market fit. Andy Rachleff coined and defined the term as answering the question - What do you uniquely offer that people desperately want?
The earliest Webfilings product was ready to be tested after nearly two years in R&D. The team must have sought testers from multiple companies but the first willing prospect I found documented was Winnebago industries. Winnebago’s team, like most others responsible for filing SEC reports, relied heavily upon word processors and spreadsheets to consolidate financial information in an error-prone, manual process. They’d tried various automation methods internally but were still seeking a solution when the Webfilings team presented their product, Wdesk. The product was designed to capture necessary data, supported the XBRL tagging required by the SEC, enabled electronic filing, and was already cloud-based which transformed the archaic process into a collaborative, multi-author environment.
Winnebago Industries became the first customer to prepare their 2Q 2010 10-Q and file it electronically with the SEC. A case study5 associated with this successful beta test alludes to early savings - 30 hours of preparation time and associated soft costs.
This success was soon repeated with other Iowa companies, FBL Financial and Meredith6, on the way for the company’s product to begin finding broader adoption.
Stakeholder Trust
Massachusetts Institute of Technology offers a program labeled REAP (Regional Entrepreneurship Acceleration Program). The program offers mechanisms to study means of improving a region’s entrepreneurial acumen and impact through a multi-stakeholder model. It identifies Entrepreneurs, Universities, Government, Risk Capital and Corporates as five stakeholders whose intricate interaction is an imperative for growth. An Iowa team participated in studying this model at MIT recently, and the Webfilings/Workiva story offers a perfect case study, and I discuss each of these five stakeholders (each bolded for reference) below:
The Webfilings Entrepreneurs dream could only be realized through their primary and only customers - corporates required to file with the SEC. Those Corporate Customers’ willingness to test was required to validate a product/market fit. Such a test is the hardest for most entrepreneurs as companies are wary of disruptive technologies, even when they accompany a promise of saving time, money, and effort.
The University was no stranger to the founders due to their prior faculty and student relationships with ISU and their location within the ISU Research Park. The university also played a critical source of talent for their company.
The State of Iowa Government has offered various financial programs and incentives to promising companies since the early 1980s. The Grow Iowa Values Fund was one such program that invested in Webfilings through a $500,000 award intended for companies to expand their product via marketing, sales, customer support, and reach. Its successor funds from the Iowa Economic Development Authority remain a mainstay for entrepreneurial growth in the region as it is some of the earliest money raised by startups and is instrumental for their existence. Though Webfilings had been born in Palo Alto, CA and had engineering resources in Ames, IA, the 500K investment from the state was coupled with the company’s pledge to create new jobs in Iowa. Over time, this investment by the State of Iowa into Webfilings grew beyond $3M through the Iowa Values Fund, Demo Fund, and High-Quality Jobs Program7.
Risk Capital, the final stakeholder success was also validated by Webfilings. Marty, Matt, and Jeff invested their own money in addition to their sweat equity into the company. Though early investor info for their early years isn’t public, personal funds, two private equity and two convertible debt rounds resulted in $24M in early investments reported through October 20108.
Growth Phase
A growth period ensued from this initial 2010 launch through 2012. Workiva’s Wdata and Wdesk products found adoption amongst public companies hungry for efficient filings. Competitors such as Bowne & Co, Merrill Corporation, EDGAR, and Rivet quickly lost ground to Webfilings’ new and efficient technology. One of the above-named competitors lost as many as 3500 of its clients to Webfilings over time.
The company also grew rapidly in headcount throughout this period, from 75 in 2010 to nearly 350. It sought to hire the best and nearly half of its workforce worked from outside Iowa in 2012. Though it wasn’t on the radar for Technology Association of Iowa’s vaunted Prometheus Award in 2010, Webfilings was nominated for one category in 2011 and in two separate categories in 2012. The company won all three nominations, securing the awards for Large Software Company of the Year in 2011 and 2012, and Large Technology Company of the Year in 2012. It won three in 2013!
By 2014, nearly six years since its launch, and four years since commercial availability of the product, Webfilings had acquired 2100 customers, including nearly 60 percent of Fortune 500 companies. The company was no longer a startup, and its software was clearly a winner in the category it rightfully can be credited with creating.
From Webfilings to Workiva
The founding name of a company reflects who the founders perceive it to become and to remove any natural friction from a customer’s perception of the company. The conjugation of web and filings reflected that early potential, using the web to collect and present data for filing with the SEC.
By 2014, the “web” moniker was aging and Wdesk had morphed beyond its quarterly utility. In understanding data pipelines for financial information, tagging critical elements, layering search, intelligent linking between related datum, surrounding it all with an audit trail, visualizing macro relationships, Webfilings and its products had become an integral part of a public company’s financial systems portfolio.
The company adopted the name Workiva on July 1, 20149.
Journey to Public Markets
In a near-mirror scenario to Engineering Animation’s in Oct 2014 six years after its formation, Workiva announced an Initial Public Offering. An opening price of $14/common share price was announced on Dec 11, 2014 and 7.2M shares were offered on the NYSE as WK the next day.
The following chart from Yahoo! Finance shows its remarkable life since the IPO:
Postscript
Workiva’s story isn’t over, and the company continues to grow its customers and markets. It has expanded to Canada and the EU as well as additional cities in the US and has undertaken other filings in addition to those required by the SEC.
Over the years, several changes within the founding team have led to impacts on the entrepreneurial ecosystems in Ames, Des Moines and beyond. New companies and retirements have accompanied life changes. Yet, the impact of the people and companies continues to grow in Iowa and beyond.
As this post has grown well beyond a normal length, I’ll return to completing the story next about a few Workiva voices that continue to impact the Iowa entrepreneurial ecosystem. I do want to acknowledge Marty graciously sharing his time and providing me with story arcs that led me to (re)read Silicon Prairie News, Press Releases, Wikipedia, Case Studies, and send various LLMs down their deep research paths. Sites, documents, and links that provided key data are cited for further reference.
Part III coming soon. Thank you for reading this far.
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The Engineers who Animated a Movement - by Tej Dhawan
US-8504827-B1, Document server and client device document viewer and editor, 2013.
WebFilings relieves the 'pain' of SEC filings - Business Record
Two years since WebFilings launch, CEO says it's pulling the market - Silicon Prairie News
WebFilings changes name to Workiva, hones focus on Wdesk platform - Silicon Prairie News
So informative! Thank you Tej.
Thank you for sharing this story. I knew some but this is so much more thorough. Fascinating to see the success coming from our back yard!