"I don't need the money, I wouldn't be doing this if it wasn't really intellectually interesting for me."
Jim Scapa, founder and chief executive of software maker Altair Engineering[2], was explaining over a lunch of Italian food recently why, at age 62, he's working harder than he has ever worked in his life.
Scapa certainly wouldn't stick around merely to enjoy the slings and arrows of Wall Street investors. Although Altair's shares, traded under the ticker "ALTR," have doubled since the stock's debut on Nasdaq on November 1st, 2017, the stock has had some wrenching ups and downs. Investors have periodically worried that his ambitious M&A strategy to transform the company via artificial intelligence may be leading Altair astray.
Altair stock is up 32% this year, slightly less than the Nasdaq Composite Index.
"I had my training wheels on as a public CEO, and it went very well for the first six months or so," Scapa told ZDNet over lunch in Manhattan. Things did go very well right after the IPO, then came the grumbling.
The tension, in short, comes from the fact that most people are not sure what artificial intelligence is supposed to do for software broadly speaking. Scapa has a vision, and it requires some faith on the part of investors.
Scapa, a mechanical engineer by training, who also earned a masters of business administration from the University of Michigan, has spent 35 years building Altair into one of the preeminent companies in computer simulation. Its software