Matthew Rizai’s second act began with paperwork

Matthew Rizai had already run a technology company, taken it through growth and seen it acquired. When he returned to building one, the attraction was a task with very little glamour: helping public companies prepare their financial reports. The work had deadlines, rules and a remarkable capacity for making capable people chase the same number through different documents. A filing could be perfectly respectable and still consume an unreasonable amount of everyone’s evening.

The company became Workiva. Its earlier name, WebFilings, was refreshingly literal. You could say it aloud without needing to explain a philosophy of the future. Rizai and his fellow founders established the business in 2008; the software launched in March 2010. He served as chief executive from 2009. The premise put an experienced software team in front of a recurring corporate chore, with cloud computing giving them a different way to tackle it.

Experience mattered in an unusually concrete way. Several of the people building WebFilings had worked together at Engineering Animation. They knew one another’s abilities before the new company needed a hiring process to discover them. In 2012, Rizai described that familiarity as a competitive advantage. “We have a very deep bench,” he said. For a young company, it was an interesting possession: a past.

An engineer learns to run the room

Rizai’s route to that room crossed several kinds of work. He earned bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees in mechanical engineering at Michigan State University, then an MBA at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. His career included development engineering at Ford, research at General Motors and work at ARCH Development Corporation. He also co-founded Computer Aided Design Software. The combination gave him practice with technical problems and the organizations expected to pay for their solutions.

In 1990 he joined Engineering Animation in Ames, becoming its chairman and chief executive. The business developed visualization and collaboration software. Its customers needed ways to make complicated technical information usable across an organization. Years later, corporate reporting would present another version of that difficulty: people separated by departments or geography, trying to work from information that ought to agree.

By 1999, Engineering Animation’s annual revenue was in the range of $100 million and it employed more than 900 people. Recognition followed, including BusinessWeek’s selection of Rizai among seven notable entrepreneurs for 1997. There were harder decisions, too. In July 1999, the company announced it was cutting its interactive games division. Rizai pointed to competition, consolidation and lost contracts. Growth had required deciding which businesses to stop pursuing.

Unigraphics Solutions acquired Engineering Animation in 2000. That chapter left Rizai with something more useful than a tidy account of success: operating experience that included changing direction. Building a company had meant choosing markets, organizing people and making decisions when circumstances became less accommodating. Those lessons would travel with the team to its next venture.

A market that still had to file

A recession ordinarily supplies plenty of reasons to postpone a startup. Rizai found a practical opening in it. During the downturn, he explained, recruiting became easier than it was in a buoyant market. Meanwhile, public companies still had to file their SEC reports. Their reporting obligation continued even when the economic mood deteriorated. WebFilings had chosen work that remained on the calendar.

He approached the cloud with a similarly practical argument. A young business could use computing capacity without buying and managing all the machinery itself. In 2010, he compared that shift to the availability of electricity: the interesting activity happened after the infrastructure became dependable enough to take for granted. For his own startup, avoiding the expense of servers and a dedicated infrastructure operation helped make the venture possible.

Corporate reporting supplied a timely test. The SEC’s adoption of XBRL, a structured format for business reporting, helped open the market to a new approach. Rizai later described that regulatory change as a central impetus for acceptance. Workiva’s Mike Starr brought experience from serving as deputy chief accountant at the SEC, where he had been responsible for its XBRL initiative. Product development and knowledge of reporting rules met in the same business.

The appeal of Wdesk lay in connecting the work. Documents, spreadsheets and presentations could share linked information, with permissions and an audit trail. The intended result was less manual repetition and greater confidence in what appeared in a report. An accountant’s ideal software demonstration may be the moment a number changes everywhere it should, and nowhere it should not. There is a certain elegance in removing an opportunity for confusion.

The office with tropical trees

Ames offered the new business a pool of people who had stayed after Engineering Animation. Rizai said some had started companies of their own. Bringing experienced colleagues back together could speed development, even though the industry they were serving had changed. His explanation was specific to a team and a place. The city was part of the company’s working memory.

That choice eventually became visible in glass and concrete. Workiva’s headquarters expansion at Iowa State University Research Park connected two building phases completed in 2013 and 2014. Together they covered nearly 120,000 square feet. The second phase included a game room, another kitchen and a south-facing atrium containing five tropical trees, each about 30 feet tall. Iowa had acquired a little indoor Florida.

The atrium offered places to sit and talk; the offices used open workspaces and meeting areas. Energy-efficient shades, water conservation systems and native prairie planting appeared alongside the more conspicuous amenities. Rizai described the headquarters as a way to represent the company’s openness and collaborative culture. A building cannot manufacture good working relationships, but it can give them somewhere to happen.

In 2017, Workiva received a Gold Stevie Award for employer of the year in the large software company category. Rizai’s explanation emphasized listening to employees and responding to their needs. It matched his earlier interest in gathering people who wanted to work together. The office was the expensive, physical expression of an argument he had been making when the company was much smaller.

“We have a very deep bench.”Matthew Rizai, 2012

A filing business grows past filings

The name changed from WebFilings to Workiva in 2014. That December, its shares began trading on the New York Stock Exchange. On January 9, 2015, the company returned to ring the closing bell, announcing that its customers included more than 65 percent of the Fortune 500. It had more than 900 employees and offices in 15 cities. A business organized around a particular reporting problem now had its own public reporting obligations.

Expansion showed up in what customers bought. Non-SEC uses accounted for 25 percent of subscription bookings in 2014 and 39 percent in 2015. Those uses included risk processes, auditing, management reporting and Sarbanes-Oxley work. The numbers describe bookings, rather than shares of total revenue, but they still show the shift: the company’s sales were increasingly reaching beyond its original filing market.

Annual revenue reached $145.3 million in 2015. In 2017 it reached $207.9 million, and Workiva reported more than 3,000 customers. Rizai discussed continued investment in the platform and employees, alongside an expanding partner network. His interest in scaling had a measurable expression. The next problem was sustaining a larger organization while giving existing customers reasons to use more of its software.

The ambitions also reached public data. Workiva supported the Data Transparency 2016 conference, which focused on making government information more accessible through standardized digital formats. Rizai argued that such policies could increase the value of government data. It extended a familiar concern from corporate reports to public records: information becomes more useful when people can actually work with it.

Still a student of the company

There is a personal route behind the engineering credentials. Rizai grew up in Istanbul, came to Dearborn, Michigan, through an American Field Service exchange and attended Dearborn High School. He studied at Boğaziçi University before transferring to Michigan State. He later recalled initially wanting business school; his mother urged him toward engineering. The eventual MBA suggests that the earlier interest survived the change of course.

His first job was as a busboy in a German restaurant in Dearborn. Asked about his worst job, he gave no employer’s name. He described the misery of sitting at a desk watching the clock, waiting to leave. That answer puts a more recognizable motive beside the revenue figures. He wanted work that held his attention. Starting and developing companies offered him an ongoing supply of questions.

In his early WebFilings interviews, he was curious about how organizations began, survived and failed. “I’m always a student of that,” he said. He resisted the idea of a universal startup formula and emphasized the people surrounding a founder. His own career makes that emphasis easy to understand: Workiva brought earlier colleagues into a new market, carrying relationships forward while changing the product.

Rizai’s tenure as Workiva’s chairman and chief executive ended on June 11, 2018. The board and Rizai described the departure as a mutual decision. Martin Vanderploeg became CEO and David Mulcahy became non-executive chairman. The company retained its revenue guidance while announcing the transition. A founder’s story can continue through a company whose daily decisions now belong to other people.

His connection continued as a shareholder. A June 2026 filing identified him as a 10 percent stockholder and recorded a proposed sale of shares. It is a small administrative detail after a career spent making administrative details easier to manage. The more revealing continuity is the team: engineers who had already built one business returned to build another, choosing a problem that other people had to solve every quarter.