Okta President spoke about growing up his company and scaling up his business

Last week, Okta co-founder and president Todd McKinnon proudly did what he had been striving for for several years: he introduced a new, better official website for 1000 users present at the presentation and millions of people around the world .



According to Business Insider, Todd did not even know that a new project to redesign the official website would lead him to perform many different actions, with which he did not want to deal with. However, the process itself radically changed his thoughts about his own company.



For McKinnon, this was the moment of his growing 6-year-old enterprise, which collected $ 230 million and was estimated at $ 1.2 billion in September, at that time numbering about 600 employees.

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The project itself started in February, Todd says: “The guys from the marketing team came to me and said that we need to work on the brand. I did not understand why we needed it at all. ” As a result, marketers insisted on change and began to act. They hired an advertising agency to improve the official site, but McKinnon still did not understand the meaning of the whole action.



A little later, a representative from the agency came to the Okta office to get more information about the company. “We started the conversation, but I was very skeptical and was not willing to cooperate,” says Todd. “Why should I tell this guy about everything?” Well, we need a new site, so why can't it just be made? Do we really have to spend time developing a brand? Why not make a new logo and, say, color the official portal in new colors? ”



An advertising agency showed McKinnon some feedback from other clients regarding completed projects, and Tien Tzuo, a former colleague of Todd, turned out to be one such client. They worked together at Salesforce at the dawn of its formation. Now Zuo is a co-founder and president of Zuora, another rapidly rising startup that has raised about $ 243 million, and is now valued at $ 1 billion. An unusually calm, self-assured Tien, with a measured, well-placed voice of the radio announcer, turned out to be just the person who was able to extinguish the irritation of his friend and convince him of the need for change.



Tsuo told that attracting independent professionals who can take a fresh look at the project and share their impressions of the company turned out to be a surprisingly successful experience for its startup.



According to Todd, he did not hear about the new project for several months, and then he was shown what stage the work was, which impressed the president: “It wasn’t just a website. It was a different view of the company, what we say about it and how we look at its products. Of course, we have a new logo and a new style. ”

This is what made McKinnon understand that it’s all about scaling: “Now we are at such a stage of development that it’s very difficult to grasp the essence of the company. We need to scale our projects. ” Now, when he wants to talk about his startup, he describes Okta as “a basic shell for the secure communication of people with technologies,” although earlier the description was limited to the words “a service that provides single sign-on for cloud applications.”



The main problem for Todd as president was his habit of thinking about his company in the context of his first and most successful product for managing employee passwords in cloud applications, on which he worked together with co-founder Frederic Kerrest. Okta now offers a number of other services. Growth of the company means the need for a broader way of thinking, but also a larger presentation. McKinnon, with his engineering mindset, needed some help to figure it out, even though he was confident of the meaninglessness of change.