Michelle Wyatt sold the software. Then she bought the riverboat.

A riverboat is an unusual thing to put on a software founder’s shopping list. It comes with considerably more weather than a server room, and its customers expect dinner. Michelle Wyatt bought one anyway. In September 2023, the co-founder and former CEO of CadmiumCD acquired St. Johns Rivership Company in Sanford, Florida. The Barbara Lee, with its paddlewheel and excursions on the St. Johns River, became the setting for her next working life.

The change makes an excellent photograph. It also makes more business sense than it first appears. Wyatt had spent two decades helping other people organize gatherings. Now she would own the place where people gathered. The scenery improved; the calendar remained essential. Anyone inclined to call this retirement should first try arranging a dinner cruise.

An engineer notices the luggage

Wyatt’s route to the waterfront began with chemical engineering at the University of Delaware. She joined DuPont’s Somos business, which worked in materials for rapid prototyping. The operation was subsequently acquired by DSM. As a sales engineer, she attended events where she could observe how conference education was assembled and delivered. Her eventual customers were already in view, long before she had a software company to introduce.

While studying for an MBA at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, she and her husband, Peter Wyatt, launched CadmiumCD in 2000. Some of its earliest clients came from events she had attended as an exhibitor at Somos. By her 2022 account, those relationships had lasted through the company’s evolution. Knowing the room, in this case, preceded selling software to it.

The opening problem was wonderfully tangible: conference binders. Meeting attendees took home substantial collections of proceedings, and the Wyatts offered a digital alternative on CDs. The company’s name carried a small joke from the periodic table, connecting the discs with Cd, the symbol for cadmium. An engineering education had found a second use in the naming department.

That first service grew into tools for conference organizers and attendees. The underlying question was practical: how could information move through an event with less work for the people responsible for it? An event might last a few days. Its information had a much longer itinerary, from the first submission to the materials attendees used afterward.

The small things that make an event work

In the early software years, Wyatt described monthly user meetings and improvements prompted by customers. One requested color coding for categories; the feature was added. She also emphasized the value of connecting the stages of a conference. A change of speaker, room or time becomes quite an undertaking when several systems must be told separately.

Her concern was how much inconvenience customers would accept from technology that failed to behave as they needed. There is an engineer’s impatience in that question, although the person waiting outside the wrong meeting room might express it with equal conviction. Useful software has to survive contact with an actual event.

“We try hard to listen and hear what they are saying.”

Michelle Wyatt, on customers, 2014

The industry relationships became concrete. In 2014, IAEE signed a three-year partnership to use CadmiumCD tools for Expo! Expo!, linking submission collection, presenter management and delivery of content to attendees. It placed the company’s products inside the working machinery of an organization serving exhibition professionals.

A separate collaboration with GES connected conference content management with what happened at the venue. Speaker presentations, session details, digital signs and attendee information could be updated through a connected system. Those are the sorts of features that sound modest until a schedule changes. Then the difference between one update and a chain of phone calls becomes rather more interesting.

Wyatt also joined the conversation beyond her own product. On an EventIcons panel, she appeared alongside Dahlia El Gazzar, Tess Vismale and Keith Johnston to discuss technology choices for event professionals. The topic was whether teams should move beyond Excel. Even the grandest conference eventually encounters a spreadsheet and the question of who edited it last.

A company people wanted to work for

There was a human system to build alongside the software. By 2019, CadmiumCD’s workplace practices included flexible schedules and compensation time for long event hours. The company paid for industry certifications, conference attendance and association membership. It also supported further education under stated conditions.

Employees could contribute to projects outside a rigid hierarchy. Staff volunteering was encouraged with additional vacation for qualifying service. Wyatt involved people with a stake in a new hire’s success in the hiring process. These were specific choices about how a growing company should work, extending beyond the reassuring adjectives usually applied to office culture.

The business was growing, too. Its December 2019 account put the workforce above 75 and its customer community at more than 3,500 meeting professionals worldwide. It had made the Inc. 5000 for a fourth time, ranking 3,441 that year. Its Forest Hill operation had expanded to occupy the building where it had leased space for a decade.

That scale makes the bedroom beginning worth remembering. A small publishing service had become an employer, a collection of products and a set of continuing relationships. Wyatt’s stated priorities included making a company she wanted to work for and solving clients’ practical problems. The workplace and the product were both part of the undertaking.

The exit, and the next boarding call

STG’s majority investment was announced in February 2020. Wyatt and Peter remained with the business. The deal brought outside capital to a company that had grown for roughly twenty years, with plans to expand its products and opportunities among association and corporate customers.

The next corporate chapter arrived in 2021, when CadmiumCD, EthosCE, Warpwire and CommPartners combined under the Cadmium name. New leadership took charge of the combined business. Wyatt became president of CadmiumCD/Warpwire, a distinction worth keeping in the chronology of a career whose best-known title remains CadmiumCD co-founder and CEO.

She later said she left the company at the end of June 2022. By the end of that year, she and her family had moved from Maryland to Florida. She began looking for a business to buy, bringing the experience of building one from the beginning and a clear preference for an operation already underway.

St. Johns Rivership offered an experienced staff and room to apply her technology skills. After the purchase, she introduced online ticketing, updated the point-of-sale system and installed satellite internet aboard the boat. The historic appearance could remain part of the pleasure while the transactions caught up with the century in which the guests were paying.

A little theatre, a little tea

The boat provided something software rarely does: an audience that could enjoy the result over lunch. Wyatt’s approach to hospitality has included finding different reasons for people to come aboard, with entertainment becoming an increasingly visible part of the business.

In 2024, theatre returned with the Barbara Lee Wedding, an interactive comedy built around a wedding and its mishaps. Wyatt welcomed the return after a twelve-year gap and spoke about employees who remembered the earlier production. Institutional memory had found an entertaining use. A guest could board for a meal and become involved in somebody else’s extremely questionable wedding arrangements.

In 2025, the company announced character cruises with Orlando Character Events. The planned program included princess experiences, villains, musical themes and holiday outings. These collaborations gave performers a setting and gave the rivership another way to address families looking for an occasion.

By January 2026, the offerings also included themed high teas, participatory mysteries, music nights and wine-focused sailings. Wyatt emphasized the local community, whose members could return for a different experience rather than treat the boat as a single tourist excursion. A vessel may follow a familiar stretch of river while its entertainment calendar supplies the variation.

Still watching the details

There was another venue to manage as well. The Sanford Galleon opened in December 2024, adding an event space on land. The two businesses gave Wyatt different booking requirements: individual cruise tickets on one side, private events and venue contracts on the other.

Her account of running them returns to the familiar territory of calendars, paperwork and payments. She described using Eventective for venue bookings and private rivership events, with separate payment accounts for the properties. She valued being able to check availability on her phone when an inquiry arrived outside office hours. The customer sees a possible celebration; the operator must know whether the date is free.

Asked about the rivership in 2026, she said, “I absolutely adore the business.” She liked its responsiveness: each cruise offered a chance to try an idea and see how people reacted. The affection and the operating interest appear comfortably together. This is a business she enjoys changing.

Across the two chapters, Wyatt keeps returning to the details that allow people to gather. First came the conference material, then the connected software, then tickets and contracts for experiences she could host herself. The riverboat gives the story its unexpected turn. Her attention to what happens before the guests arrive gives it continuity. There is a paddlewheel now. There is still work to do.