Todd McKinnon - Creating and Defining a New Market Category - [Founder’s Field Guide, EP.7]

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (0:00)
This episode of Founders Field Guide is brought to you by Microsoft for Startups. Microsoft for Startups is a global program dedicated to helping enterprise-ready B2B startups successfully scale their companies.
The program has been around for a couple of years, but I recently became intrigued when former Invest Like the Best guest, Jeff Ma, took over. Microsoft for Startups provides companies access to technology, including Azure Cloud and GitHub, coupled with a streamlined path to selling alongside Microsoft and their global partner ecosystem. Microsoft for Startups has a very compelling approach to working with startups and driving their long-term business value. If you're a founder running a B2B company targeting the enterprise, you should definitely check them out at startups.microsoft.com. To hear more about the program, stay tuned at the end of the episode to hear from me, Jeff Ma, and Greylock partner, Sam Motamiti.
Hello and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy and this is Founder's Field Guide. Founder's Field Guide is a series of conversations with founders, CEOs, and operators building great businesses. I believe we are all builders in our own way and this series is dedicated to stories and lessons from builders of all types. You can find more episodes at investorfieldguide.com.

**SPEAKER_2** (1:13)
Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management.
This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of O'Shaughnessy Asset Management may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast.

**Patrick O'Shaughnessy** (1:38)
My guest today is Todd McKinnon, co-founder and CEO of Okta, the leading provider of identity management for enterprises. Todd started Okta in 2009 after realizing that enterprises would need a robust solution for identity management in a world where everything was quickly moving to the cloud. And today counts over 7,000 enterprises as customers. Our conversation focuses on how Todd decided to leave Salesforce to start Okta, the painful early years of growing the business, how companies can create and define a new market, the different roles he's had to play as the company grew and went public, and the frameworks he's put in place to continue to innovate and test new things as a public business. I hope you enjoy our conversation.
So Todd, I always try to come up with a clever way to start these conversations, and for you, I thought a neat entry point would be to ask what the best slide in the PowerPoint deck that you presented to your wife about starting Okta was.

**Todd McKinnon** (2:33)
There's a lot of competition there for that title.
I wrote this slide deck in 2008 For context for folks listening, it was a reaction to when I came home from my job at Salesforce one day. I was running engineering at Salesforce, and at the time, that was really the preeminent syllabus today, but at the time, it was really the preeminent cloud company. Also, we just had a baby, so we had a six-month-old daughter. My wife was at home with the baby. I was busy at work, and I came home one day. I'd been thinking a lot about it in the transition to the cloud, and I've thought a lot about this, and I'm gonna quit my job. She'd been at home with the baby all day, and she'd been watching the news about the financial crisis. It's like that never-ending stream of news about Lehman Brothers is collapsing, and will the financial system uphold, and it's the worst financial crisis and the worst economy since the Great Depression. And I came home and said, I wanna quit my job. She looked at me, I remember it like it was yesterday. She said, what are you crazy? But she used some more colorful language than that. It's funny now because it kinda worked out okay, but it was really scary for her and for me at the time. We wanted to talk it through and make sure we were making the right decision. So I did anything a logical engineer would do is, well, maybe not anyone, but I wrote a PowerPoint. I did a presentation for her.
The title of it was my proposal to quit my job and start a new company subtitled Why I'm Not Crazy.
So it was probably like 13 slides long or something like that.
And part of it is, if you look back on it now, you can link to it in the show notes, it's online. Part of it sounds pretty forward looking. It's cloud computing is gonna change the world and all the big companies in the next 10 years will be built on top of cloud computing. And about the recession, Microsoft and Oracle were started in a recession. So it's actually an okay time to start a company. So I sound pretty forward looking, but then I'm not that forward looking because if you look at the next 12 slides, they were all basically CYA for when it didn't work out. I can get a new job.