“The bet for us was that there's really two parts of it, kind of. One was that it would be a big enough problem in the future to build a large independent company because previous generation, a lot of the vendors were near sure they got picked up by bigger companies and never were independent and surviving the test of time. And then the second thing was that there would be so much cloud in the world and that there would be a cloud alternative for everything. It would actually make sense to have your security and your login and your identity be in the cloud, which back in 2009 was not obvious.”
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