The Exchanges

Q Pretty much, yeah. The whole camp table, talk to them all, and it means that I've actually done no work on the schedule because they've done it all for me. But I do want to start with a little bit on you and set some context. It's been an incredible journey with Okta, but take me back. What was the founding moment with Okta?

A Okta started in 2009. And at the time I was running engineering at Salesforce. It was a great job. I was managing the team. I'd been there six years. I'd seen that company grow. And from when I started, it was really a kind of a basic online contact management app. And it grown over the six years into a fully programmable platform. At the same time, the cloud computing industry has really sprung up around apps like Salesforce, but also things like Infrastructure. We had Amazon web services coming out, S three, EC two. You had collaboration apps like Gmail and Google apps for domains. It was called at the time and Salesforce was great, but it was clear to everyone that was working there. And a lot of people in the industry that everything was going to have a cloud alternative, everything in the it stack. And what I kept thinking about, like what opportunities there would be to build companies in that transition. Cause that's a big transition. And whenever there's a platform shift in terms of how applications are built and how services are delivered, whether it's PCs or mobile or, or in this case, the cloud, there's a big opportunity to build new companies, or at least you have the best opportunity to build new companies. And I, I just couldn't be the person that didn't take a shot given that transition was happening. And so Okta was really a kind of a macro bet on a transition t…

AI assessment note: “Okta was really a kind of a macro bet on a transition”

Q So how do you think about reversible versus irreversible decisions?

A The decisions are less reversible than others, but I think there are very few irreversible decisions. I think if you think about really irreversible decisions, you could get into paralysis. So I tend to think about it as timeframes. Like, if we make this decision, how long will it take to get momentum and have effect? And how long will it take to unwind and change directions? So I don't think of it as binary, like reversible or irreversible. I think about it as the ones that are long lead time and long, it'll be like getting an aircraft carrier going and turning the aircraft carrier. It'll be really hard. Or I think about ones that are more iterative and you could just change really fast. As that goes, I think that the ones that are more longer lead time to change or longer lead time to take effect Especially over the last five or six years, I found myself really focusing on how I can prep myself and gather the information and get the context to make it a high hit rate on those decisions in terms of accuracy, and how I can make sure I have a good process for going through the mechanics of making those decisions.

AI assessment note: “I don't think of it as binary, like reversible or irreversible.”

Q the board. I think it's super tough. Like first time founders happen. How the fuck are you meant to know how to manage a board? It's not, like, inherently obvious. So how do you think about, like, your biggest lessons in what successful board management is? A lot of your board members said, like, Todd's the man for this one. How do you think about what successful board management is?

A Well, I think it's evolved. A board of a, of a venture-backed series A, series B company is very different than a board of a growth stage scaling company is very different than a public company board. I think first big lesson I learned is that When you're small, when you're series A, series B, venture capitalist on the board, the board is just kind of forming as a team. The instinct I had was these were my bosses, right? They were, you know, and in traditionally, in my experience, your boss had the answers. Not always, but a lot of times your boss had the answers or knew what they were doing more than you did because they had more experience. I get into this job where I'm running Okta, and my instinct was to kind of Throw out my opinion and lay out the options, and then kind of ask the board what to do. And this, this Harry was not good. This was like, well, it seemed like it made sense in my mind, right? It's like, they're my boss. These guys are all rich and they have, you know, they do these multimillion dollar investments. I probably should just tell them all the stuff I'm thinking about and then kind of throw it out there on what we should do because they don't want people telling them what to do. Right. But in reality, think about what that looked like from their perspective. They're looking for someone to drive and lead this company and a new thing that's going to be har…

AI assessment note: “I learned quickly only after a few meetings that that was totally wrong.”

Q How do you build that trust? You mentioned the ownership element from PeopleSoft. How do you make people feel like owners and feel like your trust in them is unwavering? How do you do that, literally?

A I think transparency and communication are a big part of it, because one thing about the owner is they know what's going on. Sometimes it's hard for the boss to know what's going on, and we can talk about that, but usually if you own something, You have knowledge about how it's going. What are the implications? What are the choices? What are the trade-offs? So the more information you can share, I think the more it feels to people like their owners. So that's one important part. Another important part is, is thinking about what you trust people with and what decisions you trust them to make. And is it an environment where all the decisions are pre-decided and it's just kind of up to the person to pick the right path of a preset menu, or is it really more creative and there's more flexibility for people to Make these decisions and have autonomy. And now I think it's, this is always a tension and, and especially in Okta, like we have not totally nailed this, right? There's lots of areas where there's a lot of process and some areas, frankly, where there has to be process. You can't just have people creating and being freestyling how they're going to do security reviews on code and production, right? So, but it is a, think about like, how can you share more information? How can you push down decision-making and remove process constraints at In any way possible. And those two thing…

AI assessment note: “share more information? How can you push down decision-making”

Q You know, when you think about getting the most value from them, because there are pearls of wisdom, there are lessons, there are ideas, what would you say in terms of extracting the most value from your board?

A I talked about, you know, different stages, it, there's different, the board is different at different stages. This is actually one that's consistent across all the stages I've seen. You're going to get better input from From the board, the more you equip them and arm them with context. If you don't share much context, and you kind of leave them guessing or speculating about the context of what's going on in the business and the industry, the quality of their input is going to go down. But if you spend the time and you focus on keeping them up to speed, and there's going to be a lot of different ways to do this. It can be, you know, conversations you have with them frequently and regularly. It can be, you know, monthly updates. It can be, You know, you can ask the board to talk to people on the management team regularly, but the more you can get them context, the better input you're going to get, and the more relevant, and then the more they're going to understand you, and it's going to make everything run better. Even now, as a, you know, as a 3000 person public company, the board is, it's bigger, the board is, you know, it has a really big part of its job is now governance, versus in the early days, it was like trying to make the thing survive. But if we work really hard on making sure that the board is, knows what's going on, has context, we have A lot of material that goes …

AI assessment note: “You're going to get better input from From the board, the more you equip them”

Q What's the hardest element of your role today with Octotod?

A It's staying, building that context, building the context to make good decisions. It's the CEO filter, I call it. Everyone that talks to you is putting on their CEO filter, like, what does the CEO want to hear? What does he not want to hear? What kind of mood is he in? It's natural, right? Anytime you talk to someone that has a prominent position, you're going to want to be careful a little bit, and I find that that sometimes is It impedes my ability to figure out what's going on and get that context to make good decisions. So I do a lot of things like, you know, I have relationships with people that I've known a long time that I trust will give it to me straight. I try to take conversations in unique ways that are harder to kind of have a canned response for. Oh, well, I'll be nice. I don't want to be mean to anyone. I try to be open too, like, and not, and just make it clear to people that you can share the truth with me, and I'm not going to fly off the handle and do something irrational because you said something I don't like.

AI assessment note: “It's staying, building that context, building the context to make good decisions.”

Q How do you know when's the right time then? Cause they, with hindsight, it's easy, but when budgets is much smaller and, you know, growth isn't as obvious, how do you know when's the right time?

A I think as soon as you're going to hire, you should invest in the people to hire. And I remember thinking the same thing. It was, it was, you know, money is tight. What if we kind of don't succeed? Then we, we don't need all these people. But the reality is that the company was being built to grow and being capitalized to grow and being funded to grow. It was pretty short-sighted to think that we shouldn't invest completely in all the things we needed to do to grow at the most effective, to make all those functions effective, and people in recruiting being one of those. So that's another way to say it, maybe more succinctly, is that if we didn't need the recruiters because we couldn't hire, we were screwed anyways.

AI assessment note: “as soon as you're going to hire, you should invest in the people to hire.”

Q I'm too intrigued not to jump on that, and in terms of the transparency there, and the problems that you have, like, I'm a big believer in kind of vulnerability kind of built within leadership. How do you think about vulnerability within leadership, and is there ever too vulnerable, and what's that kind of scale for you?

A I definitely think you can be vulnerable to a point where it's almost, you're a downer, you know. I have this problem, and I have this angst, and I'm, I have this hang-up, and this is messed up, and you come across as a complainer, or as a, or it's just not productive. And I think that the, a good way to think about that is the objective is to build trust and loyalty and camaraderie, whether that's with a recruit or whether that's someone on your team or someone that's working for you or your person that you're working for. And you probably should be open and vulnerable and try to build that trust to the level that you can build trust and can build a relationship and can build a feeling of team and camaraderie and probably not much more.

AI assessment note: “I definitely think you can be vulnerable to a point where it's almost, you're a downer”

Q the board. I think it's super tough. Like first time founders happen. How the fuck are you meant to know how to manage a board? It's not, like, inherently obvious. So how do you think about, like, your biggest lessons in what successful board management is? A lot of your board members said, like, Todd's the man for this one. How do you think about what successful board management is?

A Well, I think it's evolved. A board of a, of a venture-backed series A, series B company is very different than a board of a growth stage scaling company is very different than a public company board. I think first big lesson I learned is that When you're small, when you're series A, series B, venture capitalist on the board, the board is just kind of forming as a team. The instinct I had was these were my bosses, right? They were, you know, and in traditionally, in my experience, your boss had the answers. Not always, but a lot of times your boss had the answers or knew what they were doing more than you did because they had more experience. I get into this job where I'm running Okta, and my instinct was to kind of Throw out my opinion and lay out the options, and then kind of ask the board what to do. And this, this Harry was not good. This was like, well, it seemed like it made sense in my mind, right? It's like, they're my boss. These guys are all rich and they have, you know, they do these multimillion dollar investments. I probably should just tell them all the stuff I'm thinking about and then kind of throw it out there on what we should do because they don't want people telling them what to do. Right. But in reality, think about what that looked like from their perspective. They're looking for someone to drive and lead this company and a new thing that's going to be har…

AI assessment note: “I think first big lesson I learned is that When you're small”

Q take on this, is like, you know, when you're public, you've got to think about quarter by quarter numbers, and you know, hitting the streets of expectations, but you also have to retain that big picture of just what Okta could be in five to 10 years time. How do you think about hitting the numbers for next quarter, and also maintaining that vision? How do you hit the balance?

A Well, before we went public, I was worried about this. Like, you hear the stories about You know, investor, Wall Street has short-term, short-term viewpoint. It's quarter to quarter. You're on the treadmill. You can't invest, et cetera, et cetera. And what I found is that investors, public market investors are, I know this is a big shock, but they're people. And people are, have a lot of similarities across the spectrum from the earliest venture investor all the way to a public market investor. And one of those things is that they don't like surprises and uncertainty, right? So to have good investor relations, I think you have to start from a Foundation of predictability. People ask me all the time, like, you know, should I go public? Should I not go public? Or people debate this all the time. And I think that it's a lot harder if you don't have a foundation of predictability in the business, right? If your business is bouncing all over the place and, you know, might have a bunch of upside, but there's going to be a lot of variability. It's hard to do this effective investor relations because it's hard to set expectations. And one of the greatest things about SaaS and cloud computing is that we have this recurring revenue That gives a very stable business and it makes it much more possible to, to set realistic expectations with investors. So once you set that foundation and you…

AI assessment note: “Then you've earned the right to kind of tell your big story and tell your long-term vision.”

Q have to ask, and the final, final one, I promise before Quickfire, and it's like, you know, Like, one of the sexiest public companies over the last couple of years. Why do you think that is the case when, or to maybe in prior years, wasn't like the sexiest company? Why do you think it's transitioned to be like the darling, other than just pure amazing performance, which is obvious?

A It's a good question. I think it's a combination of a couple things. One thing is that we're very, very fortunate that the macro trends have gone our way. And what I, I don't mean like economy, I mean like the industry trends. So we started with identity, and it was really identity around helping the transition to cloud computing. So building this identity platform would help the transition to cloud computing, and that was how we started. Over the last decade, you've seen not only workforce and employee technology go to the cloud, but you've also seen at the same time every company have to build a better website and mobile app as the whole economy transitions to the internet. And guess what? Identity is at the center of that too. And that's something I didn't anticipate. I didn't anticipate, you know, 10 years ago saying it's not only going to be workforce technology, but it's also going to be every customer interaction is going to be online and that's going to need identity. So that's the second fortunate macro trend. And then the third one is just security is more relevant and pressing than ever. And if you look at, if you're going to try to do things without the VPN and this flexible remote work environment, guess what's at the center of that? That's identity. So we were fortunate in that these long-term secular trends have gone our way, which is a big part of it. And then t…

AI assessment note: “I think it's a combination of a couple things. One thing is that we're very, very fortunate”

Q So how do you think about reversible versus irreversible decisions?

A The decisions are less reversible than others, but I think there are very few irreversible decisions. I think if you think about really irreversible decisions, you could get into paralysis. So I tend to think about it as timeframes. Like, if we make this decision, how long will it take to get momentum and have effect? And how long will it take to unwind and change directions? So I don't think of it as binary, like reversible or irreversible. I think about it as the ones that are long lead time and long, it'll be like getting an aircraft carrier going and turning the aircraft carrier. It'll be really hard. Or I think about ones that are more iterative and you could just change really fast. As that goes, I think that the ones that are more longer lead time to change or longer lead time to take effect Especially over the last five or six years, I found myself really focusing on how I can prep myself and gather the information and get the context to make it a high hit rate on those decisions in terms of accuracy, and how I can make sure I have a good process for going through the mechanics of making those decisions.

AI assessment note: “I don't think of it as binary, like reversible or irreversible. I think about it as timeframes.”

Q What do you think allowed you to do it? Is it the partnership with Frederick where when one, you know, suddenly feels the disbelief, the other is in suspension of it? Or is it this, what is it that allows you to do that, do you think?

A I think that there's, and Freddie is very important. My co-founder, Freddie, he's very important, obviously. I think all founding teams and team members are important in successful companies. But more than that, I think it also is just, you know, my relationship with my wife and my family life gave me a solid, like a solid foundation, right? So kind of a safety net. And like, I know, even if this all doesn't work out, I'll still have all that. You know, we were able to save up some money. So I had some, a little bit of a nest egg if Okta didn't work out, which helped. But then after that, it's, you just have to have a desire to want to prove something and want to prove people wrong and prove that you can do it. You got to be stubborn that you're going to keep going and you have to do it. Even like sometimes when you don't believe.

AI assessment note: “my relationship with my wife and my family life gave me a solid foundation”

Q How do you build that trust? You mentioned the ownership element from PeopleSoft. How do you make people feel like owners and feel like your trust in them is unwavering? How do you do that, literally?

A I think transparency and communication are a big part of it, because one thing about the owner is they know what's going on. Sometimes it's hard for the boss to know what's going on, and we can talk about that, but usually if you own something, You have knowledge about how it's going. What are the implications? What are the choices? What are the trade-offs? So the more information you can share, I think the more it feels to people like their owners. So that's one important part. Another important part is, is thinking about what you trust people with and what decisions you trust them to make. And is it an environment where all the decisions are pre-decided and it's just kind of up to the person to pick the right path of a preset menu, or is it really more creative and there's more flexibility for people to Make these decisions and have autonomy. And now I think it's, this is always a tension and, and especially in Okta, like we have not totally nailed this, right? There's lots of areas where there's a lot of process and some areas, frankly, where there has to be process. You can't just have people creating and being freestyling how they're going to do security reviews on code and production, right? So, but it is a, think about like, how can you share more information? How can you push down decision-making and remove process constraints at In any way possible. And those two thing…

AI assessment note: “how can you share more information? How can you push down decision-making”

Q Tell me, what three traits would you most want your children to adopt?

A I want my kids to be kind to other people and, like, not treat other people badly. So the golden rule, like, you know, treat other people like you'd want to be treated. That's one. The second one is I want them to understand the way that focus and working on something can lead to results over time. It's more than just hard work. It's like hard work, but also understanding that consistent hard work in a single direction is what adds up to success. The third thing is I want them to find what makes them happy and follow it. You know, not what makes someone else happy. No one makes me happy. I want them to find their own calling and follow it because there's a lot of problems and people have a lot of unhappiness because they're trying to follow something that's for someone else, not for themselves.

AI assessment note: “I want my kids to be kind... That's one. The second one is”

Q I love that kind of ownership mentality. If we go from like PeopleSoft to Salesforce, obviously you saw Salesforce in the most insane levels of hyper growth. When you think about the takeaways from Salesforce, what were the cool ones for you there?

A Salesforce was another amazing company. It's seems like an obvious thing today with the success they've had, but back at the time, it was cloud was new. The idea that you would want to have everything as a service, all your apps, all your infrastructure, that was a new idea. So the coolest thing about Salesforce was that we were clearly the leader, right? At PeopleSoft, it was like, There was a company, you know, SAP, which was the preeminent ERP company, and PeopleSoft was basically trying to be number two to SAP. But Salesforce was trying to be number one in this new world, which was really fun and really invigorating. It was like, we're creating this new world. This, no one thinks we can make this new world where computing is done from the internet, and you don't own software, and you don't manage the software, and It's this whole new paradigm, and that was, being that leader, that was really fun to work on and really energizing.

AI assessment note: “the coolest thing about Salesforce was that we were clearly the leader”

Q I love that kind of ownership mentality. If we go from like PeopleSoft to Salesforce, obviously you saw Salesforce in the most insane levels of hyper growth. When you think about the takeaways from Salesforce, what were the cool ones for you there?

A Salesforce was another amazing company. It's seems like an obvious thing today with the success they've had, but back at the time, it was cloud was new. The idea that you would want to have everything as a service, all your apps, all your infrastructure, that was a new idea. So the coolest thing about Salesforce was that we were clearly the leader, right? At PeopleSoft, it was like, There was a company, you know, SAP, which was the preeminent ERP company, and PeopleSoft was basically trying to be number two to SAP. But Salesforce was trying to be number one in this new world, which was really fun and really invigorating. It was like, we're creating this new world. This, no one thinks we can make this new world where computing is done from the internet, and you don't own software, and you don't manage the software, and It's this whole new paradigm, and that was, being that leader, that was really fun to work on and really energizing.

AI assessment note: “So the coolest thing about Salesforce was that we were clearly the leader”

Q Pretty much, yeah. The whole camp table, talk to them all, and it means that I've actually done no work on the schedule because they've done it all for me. But I do want to start with a little bit on you and set some context. It's been an incredible journey with Okta, but take me back. What was the founding moment with Okta?

A Okta started in 2009. And at the time I was running engineering at Salesforce. It was a great job. I was managing the team. I'd been there six years. I'd seen that company grow. And from when I started, it was really a kind of a basic online contact management app. And it grown over the six years into a fully programmable platform. At the same time, the cloud computing industry has really sprung up around apps like Salesforce, but also things like Infrastructure. We had Amazon web services coming out, S three, EC two. You had collaboration apps like Gmail and Google apps for domains. It was called at the time and Salesforce was great, but it was clear to everyone that was working there. And a lot of people in the industry that everything was going to have a cloud alternative, everything in the it stack. And what I kept thinking about, like what opportunities there would be to build companies in that transition. Cause that's a big transition. And whenever there's a platform shift in terms of how applications are built and how services are delivered, whether it's PCs or mobile or, or in this case, the cloud, there's a big opportunity to build new companies, or at least you have the best opportunity to build new companies. And I, I just couldn't be the person that didn't take a shot given that transition was happening. And so Okta was really a kind of a macro bet on a transition t…

AI assessment note: “Okta was really a kind of a macro bet on a transition”

Q What do you think allowed you to do it? Is it the partnership with Frederick where when one, you know, suddenly feels the disbelief, the other is in suspension of it? Or is it this, what is it that allows you to do that, do you think?

A I think that there's, and Freddie is very important. My co-founder, Freddie, he's very important, obviously. I think all founding teams and team members are important in successful companies. But more than that, I think it also is just, you know, my relationship with my wife and my family life gave me a solid, like a solid foundation, right? So kind of a safety net. And like, I know, even if this all doesn't work out, I'll still have all that. You know, we were able to save up some money. So I had some, a little bit of a nest egg if Okta didn't work out, which helped. But then after that, it's, you just have to have a desire to want to prove something and want to prove people wrong and prove that you can do it. You got to be stubborn that you're going to keep going and you have to do it. Even like sometimes when you don't believe.

AI assessment note: “my relationship with my wife and my family life gave me a solid, like a solid foundation”

Q How do you know when's the right time then? Cause they, with hindsight, it's easy, but when budgets is much smaller and, you know, growth isn't as obvious, how do you know when's the right time?

A I think as soon as you're going to hire, you should invest in the people to hire. And I remember thinking the same thing. It was, it was, you know, money is tight. What if we kind of don't succeed? Then we, we don't need all these people. But the reality is that the company was being built to grow and being capitalized to grow and being funded to grow. It was pretty short-sighted to think that we shouldn't invest completely in all the things we needed to do to grow at the most effective, to make all those functions effective, and people in recruiting being one of those. So that's another way to say it, maybe more succinctly, is that if we didn't need the recruiters because we couldn't hire, we were screwed anyways.

AI assessment note: “as soon as you're going to hire, you should invest in the people to hire.”

Q What's been the biggest takeaways from working with Mark and Ben? They are these hailed figures of our industry. Have there been some big takeaways from working with them?

A I think it's, I mean, Ben has been on the board, and he's, you know, been immensely helpful to me on multiple levels, just as a CEO and as a, as a friend. They're systematic, like, right? And a lot of this is, they're systematic in how they approached their industry, and how they built their firm, and how they had this positioning of, we're going to help the entrepreneur, we're going to invest in things in the firm to help entrepreneurs and execute on that. And really investing in front of problems and investing in areas that can have ROI. So I learned a lot just watching them build their firm and the analogy or the analogies to building a company in terms of where to invest and so forth. And I think that it was a long time where they were growing faster than we were. I remember I'd get mad. I was like, oh my God, they have like 40 people and we only have 15 people. Like, we're the company. We're supposed to be getting bigger. And up until they had, I think, you know, they had about a hundred people and then we passed them at that point. But for a long time, they were investing so much in helping entrepreneurs and Building out the infrastructure for a firm, they were bigger than us, so that was, learned a lot from that.

AI assessment note: “learned a lot just watching them build their firm and the analogy or the analogies”

Q Bit of a kind of personal one, but you know, when you realize that it was such a scary decision, often when I come to that realization of, Plenty the momentous element of the decision and being scared. I moved to paralysis, and then I moved to safety, like flight to safety. How do you think about actually progressing in the right way, and not just retreat to safety?

A So in the specific, it's funny, looking back on the decision to start Okta, and when I told my wife about this decision, and saw that her, the shock and horror in her eyes, you know, the first things we did to work through it is we decided to She told me and I agreed that if we were going to do this, I had to make a presentation to her that we're kind of laying out the pros and cons. I did what any logical engineer would do. I, you know, I made this PowerPoint and, and I kind of argued my case. And, uh, it's pretty interesting to look back on it today. Kind of a, an accurate history can be retold, right? Post facto. And if you look at this today, it's kind of an act more of an accurate reflection of, of what was going on then. So You can link to it in the show notes. You can find it online, but the, you know, now it's like, uh, you know, Todd created this company and it's very successful and the cloud transition happened. But if you look at this PowerPoint where I was presenting my case to Roxanne, there was a lot of CYA in there. There was a lot of like, what would happen when it, when it didn't work out, you know? So, you know, oh, when it doesn't work out, it's, um, I can get another job. You know, if, if I can't get another job, my job at Salesforce probably wouldn't have been safe in that scenario. So if anyone ever says that I knew this would work, totally, they can look …

AI assessment note: “I had to make a presentation to her that we're kind of laying out the pros”

Q In terms of goal setting, the big challenge that I have is, and I would love your thoughts on it, is like, when you think about setting really lofty, ambitious goals for the team, That's crucial, but you also don't want to set goals that are too ambitious where they become demoralized, disincentivized if they don't hit them. How do you balance between the two and find the right medium?

A It's a hard problem. I mean, you know, there's debate all the time, even internally at Okta about, you know, KPIs or quarterly KPIs. What's the right result? Is the right result all red or is the right result all green? And we go back and forth on it. You know, in engineering, it's like hitting your monthly sprint commitments. Should, is it better to Try to do 10 things and do eight, or try to do five things and do four, or I guess that would be the same, but try to do six things and do, you know, five, you know, obviously it's, we want eight, we don't want five, but you know, higher percentage of commitment is five out of six versus eight out of 10. So it's definitely, it goes back and forth. What I've found is that, and this is not just for the CEO, I think any person in a leadership position, the first thing you have to do is you have to paint the high level long-term vision. You have to do that. If you think that you need more tactical, achievable goals, that may or may not be true in some situation, or you may or may not be like hindering the productivity by setting not lofty enough goals, but you got to set the long-term vision first. You have to tell people where you're going. You know, you have to get them excited about the fact that like at Okta, it's like, we're not building identity. We're trying to help anyone use any technology. We're trying to set the identity sta…

AI assessment note: “the first thing you have to do is you have to paint the high level”

Q Of course, of course. And then final one, paint the picture for me. What do the next five years hold for you and for Okta? What does that look like?

A Oh, it's, I'm pumped up. It's, I think this is a lot because, you know, I founded Okta, and I was there from the very, you know, when it was nothing. And I know how hard it is, and how fortunate and lucky you have to be to make it to where we are now. And it's such a platform to accomplish what we could accomplish next with the brand and the team and the customer base. And so we're building this universal identity platform that's being used for workforce and customers. And, you know, we have a lot of cool stuff we're doing about standardizing internet and standardizing security, and that's going to lead to more impact. And ultimately it's going to lead to better technology adoption in the world. And better, safer use of technology in the world, which is what we're all about, which is what fires us up.

AI assessment note: “we're building this universal identity platform that's being used for workforce and customers”

Q Yeah. What does a daily work routine look like? That's from Frederick.

A It's balanced, you know, it's balanced between a lot of meetings, a lot of discussion, a lot of back and forth, and it's really balanced across Different functional areas. Some leaders have over rotate toward product or sales, or I tend to be pretty balanced. One of the things I found is that I need time to ponder. My personality is that I need to like two things over my brain. Some people just get energy off talking and off going back and forth with on issues or interacting with people. I need time to ponder. So if I have too many back to back to backs, I just start to lose steam and just start to lose energy in them. So Try to build in time to ponder as well.

AI assessment note: “It's balanced between a lot of meetings, a lot of discussion”

Q Bit of a kind of personal one, but you know, when you realize that it was such a scary decision, often when I come to that realization of, Plenty the momentous element of the decision and being scared. I moved to paralysis, and then I moved to safety, like flight to safety. How do you think about actually progressing in the right way, and not just retreat to safety?

A So in the specific, it's funny, looking back on the decision to start Okta, and when I told my wife about this decision, and saw that her, the shock and horror in her eyes, you know, the first things we did to work through it is we decided to She told me and I agreed that if we were going to do this, I had to make a presentation to her that we're kind of laying out the pros and cons. I did what any logical engineer would do. I, you know, I made this PowerPoint and, and I kind of argued my case. And, uh, it's pretty interesting to look back on it today. Kind of a, an accurate history can be retold, right? Post facto. And if you look at this today, it's kind of an act more of an accurate reflection of, of what was going on then. So You can link to it in the show notes. You can find it online, but the, you know, now it's like, uh, you know, Todd created this company and it's very successful and the cloud transition happened. But if you look at this PowerPoint where I was presenting my case to Roxanne, there was a lot of CYA in there. There was a lot of like, what would happen when it, when it didn't work out, you know? So, you know, oh, when it doesn't work out, it's, um, I can get another job. You know, if, if I can't get another job, my job at Salesforce probably wouldn't have been safe in that scenario. So if anyone ever says that I knew this would work, totally, they can look …

AI assessment note: “first things we did to work through it is we decided to... laying out the pros and cons”

Q In terms of goal setting, the big challenge that I have is, and I would love your thoughts on it, is like, when you think about setting really lofty, ambitious goals for the team, That's crucial, but you also don't want to set goals that are too ambitious where they become demoralized, disincentivized if they don't hit them. How do you balance between the two and find the right medium?

A It's a hard problem. I mean, you know, there's debate all the time, even internally at Okta about, you know, KPIs or quarterly KPIs. What's the right result? Is the right result all red or is the right result all green? And we go back and forth on it. You know, in engineering, it's like hitting your monthly sprint commitments. Should, is it better to Try to do 10 things and do eight, or try to do five things and do four, or I guess that would be the same, but try to do six things and do, you know, five, you know, obviously it's, we want eight, we don't want five, but you know, higher percentage of commitment is five out of six versus eight out of 10. So it's definitely, it goes back and forth. What I've found is that, and this is not just for the CEO, I think any person in a leadership position, the first thing you have to do is you have to paint the high level long-term vision. You have to do that. If you think that you need more tactical, achievable goals, that may or may not be true in some situation, or you may or may not be like hindering the productivity by setting not lofty enough goals, but you got to set the long-term vision first. You have to tell people where you're going. You know, you have to get them excited about the fact that like at Okta, it's like, we're not building identity. We're trying to help anyone use any technology. We're trying to set the identity sta…

AI assessment note: “you have to paint the high level long-term vision”

Q One thing that you've put on Twitter, actually quite a few times is people's ability to hire the best beneath them and the teams that they build being kind of an embodiment of like their quality. How do you think about that as a sign of truly great entrepreneurship? And I guess, how do you implement that Like hiring framework today?

A I think you have to focus on it. And I think that it might sound strange when I say focus on it, but in the early days of a company, it's a little bit more obvious, like, because if you're going to grow, you have to hire people. It's very clear. Like when you have one person, you can double the team by hiring one, right? And then two, three and four and so on. So early days, it's clear you have to focus on it, but it's not very long. Your company is not very big where it's easy to focus on other things. Whether you're the CEO or whether you're maybe just a, you know, the first line hiring manager, it's easy to focus on your day to day, what you're trying to build that day or what you're trying to, whatever your role in is the company, or especially as a CEO, once you get like 50 people or a hundred people, there's always so much stuff to do. It's easy not to focus on hiring and talent because hiring and talent's hard. So, you know, focus on it, talking to people, reaching out, you know, being involved in the recruiting loop. It's focus is really important.

AI assessment note: “I think you have to focus on it.”