Todd McKinnon
Co-Founder and CEO, Okta. On 3 shows, 3 appearances. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
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.
3shows
3appearances
39statements
2resolved
1supported
1contradicted
50%fully supported
24said about them ↓ Everything Todd McKinnon said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
Okta halted feature development for eight months to engineer zero-downtime upgrades
“I remember we spent seven or eight months just engineering the fact that we didn't have to take it down for maintenance. And before I came from Salesforce and we had to take the service down for four hours every three months for maintenance to upgrade it. And …”
Early-stage startups over-invest in refactoring before securing market traction
“I think a lot of early companies do too much refactoring and too much perfecting of the architecture. Being successful in the marketplace and getting momentum with customers can make up for a lot of sense. And give you a lot of time and effort and flexibility …”
Winning developer adoption requires core architectural integrity, not just APIs
“It's much deeper than just having APIs or just having a good website. It's cause you think about developers is they're smart. Once they get past the website and the API, they realize the core of the architecture, how it's built.”
Amazon's broad but shallow services ultimately drive customers to specialized alternatives
“Amazon tends to, they're doing a lot of things, but nothing super deep. They're successful a lot with the services that are broad and don't have to be super deep. But the ones they have that are more, not as deep, they tend to get customers excited about them,…”
Founders should not fear discussing negative news because buyers already know
“If it's a relevant question and if it's a relevant issue, the people that it matters to are gonna know about it. Like for us, the people that look at the magic quadrant have already looked at it. They're not gonna go look at it and see our position went down a…”
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…”
McKinnon: Leadership vulnerability becomes unproductive past the point of building trust
“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 pr…”
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.”
Startups must land one major bet; perfection across all is unnecessary
“If you don't get one A plus, if you don't get one big bet, you're probably gonna struggle. So that could be comforting because you'll have to get one right. Or it could be stressful because you're not sure. And then beyond that, I think you can, you do have, y…”
Enduring early skepticism allows startups to eventually set the industry agenda
“The learning for me was that if you stick with your vision and you power through that, it's It feels really bad in the moment, but it's good because once it flips and once you prove that it is big enough, you by de facto own the category, right? You're the per…”
Retreating to established software categories destroys the advantages of category creation
“The ironic thing is that when you're going through the tough parts of that process, the natural reaction is to try to, if that's a word, undifferentiate yourself by shifting into something else that someone else owns. Oh, we're really like, yeah, exactly. We'r…”
Incumbents like Salesforce prioritize their own products over helping startup partners
“It turns out that like a lot of companies, Salesforce is more into selling their own product than your product. So it did end up being a, it did not end up being that helpful to have that relationship, but like a lot of things, you gotta do it on your own and …”
McKinnon conducted 500 executive interviews over five years and vetoed only one
“I've probably done, I don't know how many of them I've probably done in the last five years, I've probably done 500 of them. I did veto one person.”
Todd McKinnon: Platform shifts offer the best opportunities to build new companies
“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 in this case, the cloud, there's a big opportunity to build new companies, or at least you have the best opportunity to b…”
McKinnon: Very few business decisions are truly irreversible
“I think there are very few irreversible decisions. I think if you think about really irreversible decisions, you could get into paralysis.”
McKinnon: Effective leadership decisions require arguing with yourself
“To make effect good decisions, you have to be able to argue with yourself. You have to be able to, in your head, hold opposing viewpoints.”
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…”
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.”
McKinnon: Establish quarterly predictability before pitching long-term vision
“Once you set that foundation and you kind of can set the, you can, here's the expectations. There's predictability. Yes, we might, there might be a little bit of variance from it, but it's not going to be dramatic. Then you've earned the right to kind of tell …”
McKinnon: Okta was Andreessen Horowitz's first VC fund investment
“Like we were their first investment actually as a fund.”
Todd McKinnon: The 'CEO filter' impedes effective executive decision-making
“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 po…”
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: 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…”
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 …”
The other half of the tape: Todd McKinnon's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 24 times in 8 episodes across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
Who brings them up most Mike Maples 8Frederic Kerrest 6Pat Grady 4Martin Casado 2Ben Horowitz 2Ryan Carlson 1Jason Lemkin 1
Every mention by year
tap a year for its mentions
20VC 21
the a16z Podcast 2
the Official SaaStr Podcast 1
2025 10 mentions in 2 episodes 5 per episode
2024 3 mentions in 3 episodes 1 per episode
- Pat Grady: Sequoia Partner on Investing Lessons from Doug Leone, Roelof Botha and Alfred Lin | E1174 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- The 7 Biggest Mistakes CMOs Make (And How to Avoid Them) with the CMOs of Databricks, Zoom, and Okta
- Jason Lemkin: Predictions for 2024 - What Does a Trump Administration do for Startups? | E1099 · 20VC with Harry Stebbings
- every mention in 2024, scene by scene →
2019 11 mentions in 3 episodes 4 per episode
- 20VC: Okta Founder Frederic Kerrest on Why You Want To Be A Monopolist In A Small Market, The Biggest Challenges in Scaling Okta To IPO and Being a16z's First Ever Fund Check
- 20VC: Sequoia's Pat Grady on What Sequoia Is Focused On Today, How Sequoia Think About Investment Decision-Making Processes & Why It Is Important To Trade A Few Points of Efficiency for Culture When It Comes To Attribution
- 20VC: a16z's Ben Horowitz on How To Create An Environment of Trust with Founders, How and Why Creating Shocking Rules Is So Impactful To Culture & What The Samurai, Shaka Senghor and Toussaint Teach Us About Company Culture Building
- every mention in 2019, scene by scene →
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Todd's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| SAASTRLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Okta | 1 | 16 | — | full record on the Official SaaStr Podcast → |
| 20VCLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Okta | 1 | 14 | 0% 0/1 | full record on 20VC → |
| a16zLEDGER | Co-Founder and CEO, Okta | 1 | 9 | 100% 1/1 | full record on the a16z Podcast → |