Matt Calkins is the co-founder, CEO, chairman, and president of Appian Corporation, and a world champion board gamer.

Early life and career

Calkins grew up in

Mill Valley, California Mill Valley is a city in Marin County, California, United States, located about north of San Francisco via the Golden Gate Bridge and from Napa Valley. The population was 14,231 at the 2020 United States census, 2020 census. Mill Valley is lo ...

. He graduated from

Dartmouth College Dartmouth College ( ) is a Private university, private Ivy League research university in Hanover, New Hampshire, United States. Established in 1769 by Eleazar Wheelock, Dartmouth is one of the nine colonial colleges chartered before the America ...

in 1994 with a degree in

economics Economics () is a behavioral science that studies the Production (economics), production, distribution (economics), distribution, and Consumption (economics), consumption of goods and services. Economics focuses on the behaviour and interac ...

. He then joined MicroStrategy, a business software vendor where he was the director of the Enterprise Product Group. When he was 26, he left MicroStrategy and co-founded

Appian Appian of Alexandria (; ; ; ) was a Greek historian with Roman citizenship who prospered during the reigns of the Roman Emperors Trajan, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius. He was born c. 95 in Alexandria. After holding the senior offices in the pr ...

. In 1999, Calkins co-founded Appian and began building software tools such as an

intranet portal An intranet portal is the gateway that unifies access to enterprise information and applications on an intranet. It is a tool that helps a company manage its data, applications, and information more easily through personalized views. Some portal so ...

for the U.S. Army. In 2008, the company raised $8 million, and in 2014, raised $36 million in a secondary offering led by venture capital firm

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

. Appian later went public in May 2017. As of 2019, Calkins owns just under half of the company which is valued at $2.1 billion. Calkins believes there are different dimensions of AI.

Appian

Calkins left MicroStrategy in 1999 in order to launch Appian Corporation. He was 26 years old. Appian creates low-code software that helps businesses build apps more quickly. It is used by government agencies including the United States Food and Drug Administration, and private companies such as

T-Mobile T-Mobile is the brand of telecommunications by Deutsche Telekom Deutsche Telekom AG (, ; often just Telekom, DTAG or DT; stylised as ·T·) is a partially state-owned German telecommunications company headquartered in Bonn and the largest telec ...

Bayer Bayer AG (English: , commonly pronounced ; ) is a German multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company and is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies and biomedical companies in the world. Headquartered in Leverkusen, Bayer' ...

, and Exelon Corp. The company went public in 2017 and Calkins owns just under half of it.

Board gamer

Calkins is well known for designing board games and playing competitively. He has collected 1,000 games, and has won a number of events at the World Boardgaming Championships. His philosophy is that business and gaming have a lot of similarities: business skills can make someone a better game player, and playing games helps to make him a better CEO. Calkins created the board games Sekigahara, Tin Goose, Charioteer, and Magnet. * Sekigahara: players recreate the 1600

Battle of Sekigahara The Battle of Sekigahara (Shinjitai: ; Kyūjitai: , Hepburn romanization: ''Sekigahara no Tatakai'') was an important battle in Japan which occurred on October 21, 1600 (Keichō 5, 15th day of the 9th month) in what is now Gifu Prefecture, ...

in Japan * Tin Goose: players build one of the first commercial airlines * Charioteer: a strategic racing game set in ancient Rome * Magnet: an “abstract game where players try to get their king to the middle of the board” (runner-up for Games Magazine's Abstract Game of the Year, 2010) Calkins has contributed to ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''NYT'') is an American daily newspaper based in New York City. ''The New York Times'' covers domestic, national, and international news, and publishes opinion pieces, investigative reports, and reviews. As one of ...

'' about the value of board games in business.

Other involvement

In 2017, Calkins was named to the Northern Virginia Technology Council (NVTC) board of directors. He also serves on the leadership council of the Virginia Public Access Project and the board of the Sorensen Institute. He was previously on the board for the NVTC TechPAC. Calkins was named to the 2022 Virginia 500: Federal Contractors - Technology.

Political views

Calkins is a supporter of

Elon Musk Elon Reeve Musk ( ; born June 28, 1971) is a businessman. He is known for his leadership of Tesla, SpaceX, X (formerly Twitter), and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE). Musk has been considered the wealthiest person in th ...

's involvement with the Department of Government Efficiency, but has criticized its implementation, saying: "it wasn’t nearly as much as we needed, and we probably didn’t need the chain saw. We needed the chisel."

War against Ukraine

Calkins helped the Renew Democracy Initiative to create fight4ukraine.com, a website that tracks the world's response to Russia's February 2022 invasion of Ukraine. This initiative included banning the sale of software to Russia.

References

Chief executives in the technology industry {{DEFAULTSORT:Calkins, Matt Year of birth missing (living people) Living people Dartmouth College alumni American technology chief executives