The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 20 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
Lemkin: AI spending is actively cannibalizing legacy SaaS budgets
“If cursor did almost half a million, half a billion dollars in revenue in the same time, It sucked up an enormous amount of that dollar that would have gone to Okta and Salesforce, right? Five hundred million. That's a lot in that period of time, right? So AI …”
Lemkin: Public SaaS companies are re-accelerating growth through AI
“I'm glad to see that just literally this week, we were seeing Mongo even Okta, which had been struggling, Box last, the other day, Zoom, which is, you know, which is not exactly a rocket ship anywhere, but seeing growth re-accelerate because of AI, it's like, …”
Maples: Floodgate monetized Lyft and Okta holdings prior to 2020 peak
“As much as we loved Lyft and Okta, you know, in those years leading up into twenty-twenty, we're like, okay, we need to monetize these things, right, because there's a lot of excitement about tech stocks right now, and these prices are really high, and it does…”
McKinnon: Okta's biggest early mistake was relying on contingency recruiters
“One of the, I think, the mistakes we made early in Okta is we didn't hire recruiters, full-time recruiters that worked for the company. This is obviously very early, but we waited too long to hire full-time recruiters. We tried to use contingency recruiting fi…”
Okta suffered severe employee attrition early on due to improper sales strategy
“Okta went through a very difficult time early on and they had like, you know, very deep attrition. And so Todd asked me to go talk to the company about why like why people should stay in the company. Like it was that bad.”
Okta was Andreessen Horowitz's first fund investment check in 2009
“We were the first check that they wrote out of their first fund. In the summer of 2009 was into our seed round, and then obviously they led our series A in 2010.”
Kerrest: Startups should dominate small markets with adjacent expansion opportunities
“What he's looking for, and I agree with, is you want to become a monopolist in a small market with a lot of adjacencies.”
McKinnon: Okta was Andreessen Horowitz's first VC fund investment
“Like we were their first investment actually as a fund.”
McKinnon: Radical transparency in recruiting self-selects better long-term talent
“You should go the other way than your instinct. You should be super transparent about that and embrace what you are. Like, don't try to be the coolest thing on the block. Embrace what you're doing. It's more effective because it's just, it comes off as more ge…”
Todd McKinnon names Ben Horowitz as his top board member
“Yeah, it's a lot of good ones, but I think Ben Horowitz is the first. He's been there from the very early days, so we have a special, special connection, and also, he's also, we're compatible, like, in the way we think about things. Pretty logical thinkers. Ou…”
McKinnon: Startup CEOs should present clear board recommendations, not ask what to do
“The right way to do it is come in there strong and be, you know, open to input, of course, and be transparent and share information, but end it with a very strong statement about this is what we should do.”
Okta had just $3M ARR when Sequoia invested in its Series C
“So when we did invest in Okta, it was the series C and Ben Horowitz and Anil Bushri were already on the board. So we were a little bit late to the party, but even at the series C, they had three million of ARR versus consensus for this year says 500 plus.”
Kerrest: Okta restrained sales spending with a mandatory payback governor
“In our case, it was always about how fast can we grow, but we want to have a certain amount of payback on the investment that we made in sales marketing. So we kind of had a governor on how long it was going to take to get paid back for a dollar invested and g…”
Okta pivoted from small businesses to mid-market and enterprise in 2011
“We went from focusing on small, medium businesses to focusing more on mid-market companies and a little bit upscale because those companies, A, had more pain, B, they had more budget, and C, they were looking for solutions like the ones we had”
Investors Began Demanding Capital Efficiency From SaaS Companies in 2018
“And it's super important because now investors and the market are asking for capital efficiency with SAS businesses. 18 months ago, that didn't really matter. But if you look at things like Okta, you know, you look at companies like Nutanix, et cetera, these I…”
McKinnon: Okta failed to anticipate customer identity demand 10 years ago
“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.”
McKinnon: PeopleSoft was the biggest influence on Okta's culture
“It's probably the biggest influence on what we've tried to do at Okta in terms of the culture.”
McKinnon: Providing rich context maximizes board member advice quality
“You're going to get better input 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 q…”