Todd McKinnon, CEO and co-founder of Okta

Todd McKinnon is the CEO and co-founder of Okta, the trusted platform to secure every identity in an organization, including your workforce and customers. If you happen to work for or patron one of Okta’s thousands of customers, including T Mobile, Major League Baseball, Albertsons, then you’ve definitely come across Okta since they power the single sign on solution and much more. In this episode, Byron gets into the nitty gritty of Okta’s journey and Todd’s role in bringing this company to its staggering heights.   

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Key takeaways from this episode include:

• Important lessons for investors on providing feedback to entrepreneurs: “When investors talk to entrepreneurs remember that the conversations are very, very vivid for the entrepreneur. It’s usually a big part of their future, it’s something they’ve worked hard on and so they’re going to remember it forever,” said Todd. “So make sure that you take that opportunity to spread some goodwill for yourself in those conversations. Oftentimes with other investors, I’d been through so many frustrating conversations when I felt like I was just getting the runaround and I wasn’t hearing the real story. However, I distinctly remember the conversation [Byron and I] had where you were so straightforward and honest with me, and I really appreciated that.”
• The inherent benefits and struggles of creating a category: “When your company is inventing something new and defining a category, or seeing a new way to go to market, it’s going to be a little bit lonely. But the advantages of it—whether that’s if you invest enough money, if you innovate in other ways and persevere and grind through it— all of the sudden flips and you go from being a struggling category creator to now owning the category.”
• How Okta built $21 billion in market cap value since their IPO in 2017: “Over the last three years, it’s become more and more clear to the world that SaaS and cloud are the future and that’s very important to our success,” said Todd. “So everyone is pretty universally in agreement that things delivered as cloud services are the future and there’s going to be really big, substantial platforms that are going to create a lot of future cash flow. The second thing is something I didn’t fully appreciate as much before we were public. Once investors get that macro, high level conviction of the cloud, then the next thing is they have to see you as one of those major players. One of the main things to achieve that position is for your company to consistently deliver what you say you’re going to deliver. And I think that’s what we’ve been able to do at Okta,” he continued. “This was starting even before we were public. Two years before we went public, we started meeting with public market investors and telling our story and getting to know them. And even when we went public, you could see those same investors taking out their notebooks from those meetings over the previous two years and looking at what we told them and the numbers and the milestones and the roadmap and what we delivered. We started building an incredible amount of trust and confidence in the investors and then continue to do that as a public company. Delivering value for 13 quarters in a row builds up a lot of credibility so investors begin to see you as a player in that part of the economy.