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Todd McKinnon

Co-Founder and CEO, Okta · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveengineer@toddmckinnon ↗LinkedIn ↗okta.com ↗

McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 to establish cloud identity and access management, leading the company through its 2017 IPO and the acquisition of Auth0. Prior to Okta, he served as Senior Vice President of Development at Salesforce and held engineering roles at PeopleSoft.

9statements → 5claims → 1claims resolved → 4/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential → 2said about them ↓

1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 4 not checkable as stated how the 5 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 assertions · 4 insights · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 5 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 4 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Todd argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
McKinnon: Apple Touch ID dramatically increased iPhone passcode adoption rates
“They've turned on passcodes and more people are, have their phones locked now than ever before because they made it easier. You didn't have to type in that code and now they have a fingerprint reader.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:01 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable

How they sound: speaking style how? →

266 words/min while actually speaking · 13.8 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Todd McKinnon: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews.

Measured by listening to the audio itself: 2,530 words across 1 episode of raw-level tape, transcribed verbatim with every um and uh kept, each one attributed only where the alignment onto our timed stream is unambiguous. These are measurements of speaking style. We do not rank them: across this corpus, fluency and argument quality are nearly uncorrelated (ρ≈0.2), and smooth talking does not signal clear thinking. How it's measured →

Everything Todd McKinnon said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
McKinnon: Winning in cybersecurity means moving forward, not achieving zero breaches
“I think that if you think about, winning is not zero breaches. I think winning is moving your organization forward.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:04 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McKinnon: Board cybersecurity focus spiked recently while CISO concern remained consistent
“One of the things that we've seen, it's the people that are chief security officers, or security professionals, or even CIOs, their level of vigilance and their level of concern about this over the last 18 months is pretty consistent. What's clearly changed is…”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 2:10 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Insight
McKinnon: Forcing inconvenient security protocols on end-users is a losing battle
“I think it's an uphill battle to try to get, especially in the modern era of IT, to try to get users to do something that is inconvenient or out of band. I think that, and what we see in our customer base and the prospect base that Companies in IT departments …”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:22 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Insight
McKinnon: Enterprise IoT security must anchor to individual human identities
“And ultimately, it's going to go back to a person. The person's going to want to consume the data or understand where that asset is, and that's why we think that having that logical map all the way back to the person is very valuable.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 14:49 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McKinnon: Major security breaches are usually caused by simple administrative errors
“If you look a lot of these cases, ah, these breaches, it was, Very basic things that were used or problems that were used to take advantage of these networks or these systems, and it was just simple stuff that wasn't cleaned up.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:46 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McKinnon: Unlike CISOs, corporate boards still assume they have not been breached
“What we see is that, that, like earlier, I was talking about the CEO board level and then CIO chief security officer, We see that the CIOs and the chief security officers, they understand that, that they've likely been breached and they're very into monitoring…”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 20:34 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Insight
McKinnon: Enterprise security requires tiered data classification to balance risk and speed
“I think companies need to have that kind of framework. Maybe not that formal, but they have to define what's super sensitive, lock that down in a way that's commensurate with the sensitivity of the information, and then think of it like concentric rings outsid…”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 22:13 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Assertion Not checkable as stated
McKinnon: Security, not ease of use, now drives Okta enterprise deals
“So maybe two years ago was more we were being brought in because it made it easier, and now more often we're being brought in because it makes it more secure often from higher people in the organization.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 3:50 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable
Assertion Supported
McKinnon: Apple Touch ID dramatically increased iPhone passcode adoption rates
“They've turned on passcodes and more people are, have their phones locked now than ever before because they made it easier. You didn't have to type in that code and now they have a fingerprint reader.”
Todd McKinnon Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 9:01 a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable

The other half of the tape: Todd McKinnon's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 2 times in 1 episode on the a16z Podcast. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Martin Casado 2

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0011212025episodesmentions
0112025episodes it came up in
0010.5212025episodesmentions per episode
2025 2 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
a16z Podcast | Making Security More Useable Jan 2, 2019 11m
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