The Road to Palm Springs
Dave Alberga
CEO
Matt Landa
President
The Active Network, Inc.
Like many small businesses, Active Network, a leading provider of organization-based cloud computing solutions, started off with modest goals and the drive to fix a most basic problem. Its founders simply wanted an easier way to sign up for races, which traditionally was a time-consuming and frequently frustrating process.
It wasn’t an easy path to success. Dave Alberga and Matt Landa, CEO and President, respectively, have, like many executives, overcome significant challenges. At one point in late 2001, as the dot-com markets crashed and companies were shuttering left and right, they and other Active Network executives put up their own funds to cover three payroll cycles while waiting for lending to close. And, after being told to “keep their powder dry,” they were forced to undergo serious cost cutting and restructuring, which led to reducing staff and eliminating projects that were not generating revenue.
Just over one decade later they have grown from three to 2,500 employees offering registration and event-management software to organizations in four main categories: sports, communities, outdoors and business events. Its customer base has swelled to 47,000 organizations, and more than 70 million registrations were supported by Active Network’s technology last year alone. Today they support some of the nation’s best-known races, including the Chicago Marathon and San Francisco’s Bay to Breakers; camping reservations for all major national parks; and social and political activities such as an effort to motivate lobbying groups to rally for government funding of health and wellness initiatives on Capitol Hill.
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