A bell is an unusually tidy ending for years of untidy work. On June 7, 2024, Matt Hawkins rang Nasdaq’s opening bell in Times Square as Waystar entered the public market. The ceremony supplied everything a company milestone ought to have: a recognizable setting, a precise moment, and a sound that required no explanation. The work that brought him there was harder to photograph.
Hawkins had been leading Waystar since 2017. Before that, he had run other software businesses, overseen integrations, and moved his family across the country for a job he believed required his physical presence. His route to the exchange ran through library technology, management consulting, and the everyday difficulty of getting people and systems to work together.
After the IPO, he wrote about investors, colleagues, clients, partners and loved ones. One detail stood out: he wanted all team members included in the celebration. The photograph belongs to the familiar genre of corporate confetti. His account of the occasion gave the crowd a purpose. A company can have one chief executive and still require a very long guest list.
The library chapter
For an earlier view of Hawkins, go to Provo, Utah, in December 2010. SirsiDynix, a library technology company, appointed him chief executive after he had served as chief operating officer since 2007. He succeeded Gary Rautenstrauch, who remained executive chairman. This was a promotion from the operating machinery of the business.
The appointment announcement pointed to customer support as part of his record, including bringing worldwide support to the company’s Provo technology center. It is an instructive place to begin. Library software has to serve people trying to get something done. The relationship continues well after the purchasing decision. A support operation can make a product feel dependable, or make its users dread needing help.
That early chapter gives his later career a useful continuity. Software ownership, product development and customer relationships appear together, long before the public-market ceremony. The settings would change. The managerial problem remained recognizable: people have bought a system, and they expect it to work.
A job worth moving for
Hawkins earned an undergraduate degree with University Honors at Brigham Young University and an MBA at Harvard Business School. His career included McKinsey & Company and leadership roles at Henry Schein Practice Solutions, Vitera and Greenway. The sequence reads like a conventional executive biography until the decisions between the titles come into view.
At Vitera, he helped lead the 2013 combination with SuccessEHS and Greenway Medical Technologies. When he considered Sunquest next, he was interested in the owner’s willingness to keep investing in the business. Roper had acquired Sunquest in 2012. Hawkins wanted the opportunity to build over time.
He became Sunquest’s president in May 2014, moving to Tucson with his wife and four children. He had grown up largely in Utah, but Tucson was new territory. He believed effective leadership called for engagement at headquarters, rather than a weekly visit followed by a flight home. So the job became a family relocation.
His questions about the city were practical: schools, family activities, the business community. Those are consequential questions when a career decision requires other people to change their lives too. An executive appointment looks wonderfully portable in a biography. Moving a household is a more substantial undertaking.
“We think work and fun should never be mutually exclusive.”
Matt Hawkins, discussing Sunquest in 2016
Two companies, then a common name
In 2017, the next assignment came from the combination of Navicure and ZirMed. Hawkins became chief executive and a director that October. The businesses merged in November; in February 2018, the combined organization announced its new name, Waystar. There was an established business on either side of the transaction, with customers already depending on each.
That starting point matters. Hawkins’s Waystar story begins with the obligations of existing companies. Combining organizations means deciding what customers should experience together, what employees need to learn, and which pieces of the business should become one. A new name is the short part of that exercise.
By July 2019, EQT and CPP Investments had agreed to acquire a majority stake in a transaction valuing Waystar at $2.7 billion. Bain Capital would retain a minority holding. The announced plan included investment in innovation and acquisitions. Connance, Ovation, Paro and Digitize.ai had already joined the growing business.
Across those changes, Hawkins stayed in the chief executive’s seat. Investors supplied capital and a changing ownership structure; management had to turn the expanding collection into an operating company. This is the less cinematic side of growth. Every acquisition arrives with work attached, and the signing photograph rarely shows the full to-do list.
The arithmetic behind the confetti
Waystar priced its initial offering at $21.50 a share, selling 45 million shares. That made the gross offering $967.5 million, before underwriting discounts and expenses. The stated use of the net proceeds was repayment of outstanding debt. Even on a day built for celebration, the practical objective was on the balance sheet.
The distinction is useful when looking at Hawkins’s milestone. An IPO changes a company’s financing and its audience. It also gives the chief executive a continuing public appointment with the numbers. The bell lasts a moment. Quarterly reporting has a considerably longer engagement.
There was no perfectly straight line on the first trading day: the shares opened at $21 and closed at $20.70, below the offering price. Those prices record the debut, rather than a judgment on the whole career. They do add a useful wrinkle to the ceremony. Public ownership comes with a market that is entitled to have its own mood.
45 million shares × $21.50 per share
Gross proceeds, before discounts and expenses.
A people business, with software attached
When Waystar announced its Utah expansion in 2020, Hawkins made the connection between recruiting and the product explicit: “Fundamentally, any software business is a people business.” The statement accompanied plans to draw on the state’s technology talent. It also connected the company’s expansion to his own long association with Utah.
The idea has consequences for how an executive talks about success. At the listing, Hawkins distributed credit across the people who had helped build the company. In 2026, when Utah Business recognized him as a CEO of the Year, he again acknowledged the team and his family, whom he called Team Hawkins.
There is a small personal detail that fits this vocabulary. Back in 2015, he described enjoying running, watching his children play soccer and baseball, and watching his daughters dance. These were the activities he chose to mention alongside the executive résumé. Away from software, there were other schedules to keep and other people to applaud.
In July 2025, the sports connection acquired a business dimension. Hawkins joined the ownership group of RSL Football Holdings, alongside Nick Greer, Jeremy and Kristin Andrus, and members of the Berman family. The group includes Real Salt Lake, Utah Royals FC, Real Monarchs and the RSL Academy. His investment put him in a different kind of team enterprise, with results displayed on a much more literal scoreboard.
After the opening bell
By the second quarter of 2026, Waystar reported $319.7 million in quarterly revenue, up 18% from a year earlier, and $40.9 million in net income. The figures put a more recent date on a career often summarized by its IPO. Hawkins was still running the business, with the recurring responsibilities that follow a listing.
The leadership group was changing too. Alpana Wegner became chief financial officer effective August 1, succeeding Steve Oreskovich after his eight years in the role. Oreskovich would remain an adviser during the transition. Hawkins credited him with helping guide the IPO and establish the company’s financial foundation. It was another moment when a large corporate event was described through a working relationship.
Hawkins’s stated ambition for 2026 centers on more automation and a unified software platform. The ambition is a direction of travel, with execution still to be measured. For an operator whose career has involved combining businesses, the practical test is familiar: can the growing organization make its parts work together?
In October 2026, Hawkins was also listed among the business leaders participating in the launch of the Utah Valley Regional Alliance. The announcement placed him alongside executives from technology, finance, property and other organizations concerned with the region’s long-term future. It adds another setting to his public working life: the community around the company. His Utah connections now run through education, Waystar’s presence in Lehi, professional soccer and regional business activity. Those connections give the career a geography as well as a chronology.
The Times Square celebration remains a good picture of his career, provided the frame is wide enough. There is Hawkins at the center, and there are colleagues all around him. Years earlier, he had moved to Tucson because he thought leadership required being present. At Nasdaq, he wanted the team present too. Between those decisions lies the work before the bell.