Episode 25: Marty Vanderploeg, Co-Founder & Former CEO of Workiva

Welcome back to the FinanZe Podcast, episode 25.

Today’s guest is Marty Vanderploeg, Co-Founder and former CEO of Workiva — the cloud platform that fundamentally transformed how organizations manage, connect, and report critical data. Today, Workiva serves over more than 80% of the Fortune 1000.

Marty’s journey into software and entrepreneurship is anything but conventional. He began his career as a professor at Iowa State University before making the leap into building companies, founding Engineering Animation Inc., a pioneer in visualization software whose technology played a role in some of the most complex and high-profile events in modern history.

He later co-founded Workiva, scaling it into a category-defining SaaS platform at the intersection of financial reporting, compliance, and enterprise data management.

In today’s conversation, we’ll dive into Marty’s transition from academia to entrepreneurship, the story of EAI, the founding and scaling of Workiva, establishing a positive company culture, the lessons from building multiple companies, and what it takes to create, the future of software companies in today’s AI first world, and advice to young people on building enduring companies

Let’s get into it.