EP 122: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon on Scaling to $13B, High-Stakes Decisions, and Market Dynamics

What does it take to scale a company from an idea to a $13B industry leader? In my latest episode, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon dives into the essential lessons he’s learned on high-stakes decision-making, managing up to the board, and competing against tech giants like Microsoft. Todd also reflects on his journey to founding Okta, his bold choice to team up with a co-founder he hardly knew, and the motivations that have fueled him for over seven years as a public company CEO. Some key takeaways… [0:00] Intro [0:33] Todd McKinnon's Early Career and Founding Okta [1:38] Challenges and Psychological Shifts in Leadership [2:49] Decision Making and Company Culture [6:10] Milestones and Early Successes [18:03] The Importance of Market Timing [30:34] Hiring and Building a Strong Team [39:22] Setting Expectations with Board Members [40:50] The Shift in Board Dynamics [41:41] Maintaining Context and Strategic Input [43:15] Navigating Public Company Governance [45:21] Trusting Instincts and Founder Mode [47:11] Breaking Out of the Echo Chamber [51:00] The Importance of Prioritization [53:05] The Loneliness of Innovation [1:05:33] The Role of a CEO in Decision Making [1:18:17] The Journey to IPO and Beyond Executive Producer: Rashad Assir Producer: Leah Clapper Mixing and editing: Justin Hrabovsky Check out Unsupervised Learning, Redpoint's AI Podcast: https://www.youtube.com/@UCUl-s_Vp-Kkk_XVyDylNwLA 🎥 Subscribe on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCugS0jD5IAdoqzjaNYzns7w?sub_confirmation=1 Follow on Socials 📸 Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/theloganbartlettshow 📱 X - https://twitter.com/loganbartshow 🎬 Clips on TikTok - https://www.tiktok.com/@theloganbartlettshow About the Show Logan Bartlett is a Software Investor at Redpoint Ventures - a Silicon Valley-based VC with $6B AUM and investments in Snowflake, DraftKings, Twilio, and Netflix. In each episode of The Logan Bartlett Show, we sit down with the people behind today’s most important startups and extract the tactics, lessons, and frameworks they’ve learned the hard way. Conversations span hiring to GTM, product, growth, fundraising and everything in between - collectively forming the ultimate playbook to make you a better CEO, investor or board member. Tap follow and enable notifications to stay ahead of the game.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:03Logan Bartlett?

  Welcome to the Logan Bartlett Show. On this episode, what you're going to hear is a conversation I had with co-founder and CEO of Okta, Todd McKinnon. Todd and I talk about his journey to founding Okta, picking a co-founder that he didn't know particularly well in the early days, as well as the motivations that have kept him on the journey to nearly eight years in the public market, and what keeps him motivated today as he looks out into the future of what Okta can be. You'll hear that discussion here now.

• 0:34Speaker 01

  Thanks for doing this. Happy to do it.

• 0:35Logan Bartlett?

  An interesting thing I heard you say, which was, I think there's lessons in any founder journey, is sometimes you need to believe even if you don't believe. Is that a Todd McKinnon original?

• 0:48Speaker 01

  It was a heartfelt original, really a realization, because before I started Okta, my, the other jobs I had, I worked at a company called PeopleSoft where I was an engineer, then a manager, and then I worked at Salesforce where I ran engineering. And it was much smaller back then. But in those jobs, if I worked hard and I was relatively good with people and focused, I was going to have some kind of success. These were established companies and pretty good customer bases, et cetera. But with Okta, it was, the hardest part about it for me was that there was so much to chance, meaning I could work as hard as possible, I could do everything clinically perfect, and it just might not work. And going through

• 1:32Speaker 01

  the journey, I think one of the really important things I learned how to do pretty quickly is compartmentalize that, so I could just aggressively focus on executing day to day, making forward progress. Even logically, in my engineering logical brain, I knew that the odds were against me. And it was something I never had to deal with before. It was almost, it was definitely like a psychological...

• 2:00Speaker 01

  Switch I had to make in myself to be able to keep executing so aggressively, knowing that, you know, the odds are against you.

• 2:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  There's a reason why so many startups fail and there's a reason why market winners get big and hold their market share and, you know, so.

• 2:17Logan Bartlett?

  There's, there's, there's an interesting thing in that, which is like a heavy is the head that wears the crown or something where you think when you're at a business and you have a defined scope of responsibility, there's some comfort in just the singular focus on like doing what's in front of you. And then when, if you didn't like something at Okta, you would have to like change it. You don't just get to complain about it. When you're the CEO or founder, it's like, no, no, you actually have to go fix the things.

• 2:47Speaker 01

  You can complain, but no one cares.

• 2:49Logan Bartlett?

  No one cares. That's right. That's right. Your board members are not sympathetic ears. Maybe they are. I don't know.

• 2:53Speaker 01

  Yeah. So when I was working at Salesforce, I was very decisive. I was quick to make decisions and pretty, not ruthless, but decisive and went forward and whether it was a personnel decision or whether it was a product decision or something like that. I've noticed, it was interesting. When I started Okta after a couple of years, I noticed that my decision making had slowed down. And I think it was, simple reason is that there was no, at Salesforce and at PeopleSoft, I had a boss. And ultimately, there was a check. And if I made the wrong decision, they could help me or there was some kind of oversight and I felt like there was a safety net, maybe. But at Okta, there was no safety net. I realized that if I made

• 3:37Speaker 01

  a bad decision, it was going to be a bad decision. And me, I had obviously co-founder and people working there and a board, but it's, it's kind of like decision making without a safety net. So I slowed down and I took more time and I was, you know, making sure that I didn't make some, make a decision to, in a too hasty manner and forget to, I really wanted to kind of like really think about all the angles and all the implications. And I think in especially small, small companies, that can feel uncomfortable sometimes, but it, it felt right for me to slow down a little bit.

• 4:05Logan Bartlett?

  Did you have like a framework by which the, the one-way door versus the two-way doors or like how you sort of thought about the speed of execution and decisioning while still being thoughtful?

• 4:19Speaker 01

  Super structured of a framework. I would say, though, that as I think back on that time, the this maybe more being more measured in my decision making was married with a very strong culture of day to day execution. Like my co-founder and I, from the very first days and weeks, we started working together, we had a list of what we had to get done that day. So I think maybe the slowdown in decision making would be a big negative if you also didn't have that kind of that relentless day to day to do this, get something done, what do we do this week, what do we do next week? Because then maybe it could really slow you down. So we kind of had to check and balance with that inertia and that execution focus.

• 5:01Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, in the early days of a startup, the line between unemployment and being a founder can be a thin one. If you don't create that that urgency to get stuff done in a meaningful way.

• 5:14Speaker 01

  I'm trying to think where that came from. Like, maybe it's just a personality trait trait that I had and my co-founder had or has still. But I just, I think it's just a maybe part of it was filling in that void of a bigger organization around you. So if you take away the bigger organization and you take away the administrative assistant and you take away all the outwardly outward appearances of a company that's working in has customers and a bunch of employees, the only thing you have left is like, what did you get done today? And if you didn't get a bunch of stuff done today, guess what? Nothing happened.

• 5:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 5:50Speaker 01

  So I think it was just from that urgency, trying to fill in that void.

• 5:53Logan Bartlett?

  That's interesting. Did you, it sounds like day to day, you obviously had to do lists. Was there in the early days, a a point in the future that you would work towards? Like, was it monthly iteration cycles, weekly, quarterly, yearly? How did you sort of think about keeping your head off in the distance and moving forward?

• 6:11Speaker 01

  Milestones, we wanted to have a paying live customer relatively early. And that took us, we were pretty fast on that, actually. We got a seed round in June of 2009. And then we got, we wanted to, by the end of that year, actually. So really, I think it was May of 2009. So by six or seven months later, we wanted to have a live paying customer. So I remember that as a milestone, we met and we actually, we got a $400 order right on Christmas Eve. I remember I was very proud of that. Exactly. Corporation was our first customer at Okta. And that was a milestone. And then we also had milestones for, I remember we had a milestone for 50 customers. So there were some milestones like that.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  But then on the product, the product development, I focused on product management. You know, engineering, to the degree there was engineering management required with only a small number of engineers. But we had, you know, we did like weekly sprints and agile processes at a, you know, pretty scheduled timeframe. But I think the big milestones were like raise money, get a customer live, hire some salespeople, those kind of milestones.

• 7:19Logan Bartlett?

  I, I want to, I want to be the first kind of long form interview that you've ever done without talking about the PowerPoint.

• 7:24Speaker 01

  The PowerPoint.

• 7:27Speaker 01

  True story, true story.

• 7:28Logan Bartlett?

  It's for people that haven't heard the story. Todd delivered a PowerPoint to his wife to convince her to go, that you should start Okta. I'm curious, what, what was the core insight or thing that was like gnawing at you in the early days? That sort of felt like, hey, I've got to go leave a great job at Salesforce and go with this.

• 7:49Speaker 01

  I think there were a few different key things. One was, it was a, I'm very, just personality wise, I'm very challenge driven. Like I like things that are challenging and makes me feel like I'm accomplishing something. And it makes me feel like I'm, you know, living up to potential and so forth. So I think starting a company was just a personal goal I had. I wanted to do it, which is not always the best path to success to start a company. So it was partly that, but it was, I would say a significant part of it too was. At being at Salesforce, I saw what it was like to operate in the mode of cloud computing.

• 8:31Speaker 01

  From Salesforce, we would have, we were, by the time I left to start Okta, we were coming up on a billion dollars of revenue. And we would have these management offsites where we would go two days and there wasn't, there was no section on competition, which is pretty strange. Usually you have a competitive team that comes in and talks about what's the competition doing. What the realization I had was that there was no competition because it was so disruptive. You know, Siebel really couldn't compete and all the other software companies, Oracle. It was such a disruptive technology model and business model. And just thinking through it as like, if you're going to go start a company, that type of disruptive technology wave is the best time to do it.

• 9:15Speaker 01

  And you also saw at the time that it wasn't just the application layer in 2007, 2008. It was also the kind of the core birthright IT application, like email. Google was doing Google Apps for Domains and you saw that was really going to be a cloud service. People were going to run their own exchange servers. You could tell that was going to go to the cloud. And then the big thing too was the success that Amazon started to have in the early days with Amazon Web Services. So then you have three layers. You have business applications, you have birthright IT collaboration applications, and you have IT infrastructure. So in that context, inside of Salesforce at that time, it didn't take a genius to figure out that this was going to be a big wave and there were going to be disruptive opportunities.

• 9:57Speaker 01

  So personal ambition, knowing that if there was ever a fertile ground to do it, it was going to be in the next few years for me. And so that was really the genesis. And then it was, and it was a lot of work and iteration to actually find out or actually figure out a product that would be valuable to companies or customers or we could make money selling in the short term, but also something that could build a big company over time. So that's kind of how we centered on the idea.

• 10:26Logan Bartlett?

  You referenced Salesforce, but before that, you alluded to PeopleSoft, which is probably, most people probably don't know that business that are listening at this point. They're probably aware of Workday, Dave and Neil's next act. And there was a nexus of talent at PeopleSoft as well as like a unique culture. Peter Gassner was there as well, CEO of Viva.

• 10:48Logan Bartlett?

  I'm curious, like, from the growing up, and it was maybe the definitive client server application business, or at least on a very short list of them. And then you went to the definitive, at least, first generation cloud, cloud company. The PeopleSoft experience, was there anything that you particularly took away from that journey that you wanted to instill within Okta's culture in a meaningful way?

• 11:12Speaker 01

  Hugely impactful. It was my first job out of college. I was there for eight years. And as listeners know, that your first job is super impactful. So it's all kinds of examples for you. And you meet mentors, and it's very, it leaves a big impression. For me, it was a few things. The thing, probably the biggest impression was Dave Duffield, the founder of PeopleSoft, who's, it was actually his second HR software company. So Workday is actually the third. There was Integral Software, which is mainframes, and then PeopleSoft, which is client server, and then Workday, which was cloud. So

• 11:46Logan Bartlett?

  You just kept running it past.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  It's like, pretty smart, right? Amazing run of success.

• 11:51Logan Bartlett?

  Now he's doing something, now he has another company at like, maybe four years old.

• 11:54Speaker 01

  It's not, it's not HR.

• 11:55Logan Bartlett?

  Not HR, yeah. Maybe it'll be an AI HR.

• 11:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. AI agent, HR software, probably coming out soon. The, so, he and the team there, management team there at the time, did a really good job of making it feel like the employee's company. And I just remember that feeling like, this is my company. You know, as hard as I work, and as smart as I am, and as good of a teammate as I am, how much I dedicate myself. It's, I'm gonna advance and grow and be rewarded. It's, it felt like, you know, the team was super strong, and everyone was aligned on that. That feeling, I thought was, for me, was incredibly motivating and really powerful. And something that, at Okta, I've really tried hard to create that. And there's a lot

• 12:42Speaker 01

  of things you do to try to create that, but it's almost, the most important thing you do is, I think, how the leadership team and how the founder acts. And if, you know, if, kind of giving credit to other people, and making sure that there's

• 12:59Speaker 01

  People are kind of maybe trusted with more than maybe they should be expected to handle any given time. Asking people to step up, pushing people, whatever you can do to try to make it feel like it's theirs. I'd never wanted to feel like it was my company and I'm the founder and I'm the CEO. It's my company and you can work here at my honor. It's like, no, I want it to feel like your company. And that is empowering. It's like, it's not altruistic. It's like, I think it's the best way to win.

• 13:29Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 13:30Speaker 01

  If you have a team of people that are really working their ass off for their thing and trying to further their own ambitions through the company, I think that's very powerful.

• 13:39Logan Bartlett?

  And so in picking, I guess you and your co-founder Freddie, you guys worked together at Salesforce but didn't, weren't super close? Is that, is that a fair characterization?

• 13:50Speaker 01

  We worked together on a few things. He was, did partnerships and sales and business development. I was on the engineering side. So a couple of little acquisitions we did, we worked together on that. And just, it was a pretty small company at the time. In 2003, Freddie started before I started, 2002. I was, I think, employee 400 or something at Salesforce. And it was a pretty small company. So just socially, we got to know each other. But yeah, when I, after I left to start, to start Okta, he left a year before and come back to get his MBA. And then the key thing for, you know, the advice I talk to people that are thinking about starting a company is you probably don't want to start a company with your family or your best friends because it's going to be pretty hard.

• 14:33Speaker 01

  But you also don't want to start a company with someone you, you have to be able to get a really good reference on them. And we knew each other a little bit, but we also knew a lot of the same people that knew us both really well. So it was really the best of both worlds. It was super strong references that vouched for us and. Comfortable with each other and it worked out really well.

• 14:53Logan Bartlett?

  How did you, besides referencing each other, did you guys identify a problem that you both uniquely had passion for? Did you guys do trust falls to build, like go on a ropes course or something? Like, how did you guys build that initial trust and start working together?

• 15:06Speaker 01

  We were both passionate about this move to the cloud and helping companies adopt it. And then after that, it was just a process to talk to, we had an original idea, which was kind of like systems management for a cloud world, kind of like similar to like New Relic or AppDynamics, but more from a company that had a bunch of SaaS applications. Didn't, we talked to a bunch of people, tried to get feedback on it. The feedback was kind of mixed and lukewarm. And it was through those conversations, we really got excited about the identity management idea, which is what Okta became. But it was just working together through that process. And then, you know, we went out to dinner, we went out

• 15:49Speaker 01

  to dinner with my wife at the time and his fiancee at the time, who later he got married to. And, you know, that was really important to us, that there was some level of comfort with the spouses. But yeah, just, we were lucky. It just clicked, it clicked right from the start. The, I think it helped that, it helped that we were, for some reason, we're both super competitive, but not with each other. I think a lot of founders get in trouble because they have that drive and that competition, but it gets turned against each other in cases, especially when times get hard. And for whatever reason, we never really, it was never like a competition between the two of us. It was always, that drive was focused on that day-to-day execution and making the company successful.

• 16:34Logan Bartlett?

  In building the nucleus of what the initial company kind of was, I heard a reflection from you at one point, that maybe some of the first 10 hires didn't work out, or weren't maybe as deliberate as you were with, with your initial co-founder. Was there any reflections on how that came to be? And, you know, as you think about the initial hiring, like what the, what you would have done differently?

• 16:57Speaker 01

  I was in a really big hurry. I wanted to really get progress fast and I wanted to... I didn't want to go a year without having a bunch of success and progress and at least, you know, although it wasn't going to be, a year is not that much time. I want to have some points on the board. And so I think that led to some of the early decisions we made around people were pretty, um, a little hasty. They were, the people were good and they helped us, but I feel like, looking back on it after a few years, I feel like if we would have been maybe a little bit more careful and slower on hiring, we probably would have gotten more done in the first three years than we ended up doing. Um, because we made progress pretty fast in the first year, but then we had to rework some stuff

• 17:39Speaker 01

  and it's probably better to maybe take a little bit more time. It's easy to say now, though.

• 17:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Speaker 01

  You're so, I mean, you're, at the time, you're like, are we going to survive? Is this even going to work? We need someone here to start writing code and building stuff. We know we have to do this. But a few years out, that was my reflection on it.

• 17:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's some survivorship bias probably.

• 17:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 17:58Logan Bartlett?

  You know, survival is requisite for having those problems.

• 18:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 18:02Logan Bartlett?

  Who knows? I've heard a reflection from you, uh, that I, I think I agree with about just, um, markets and tailwinds and sort of the market insight being maybe the most important thing. Can you, can you share your reflections on that and how you think about it?

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's maybe pretty clear to people that the market matters a lot. I would say also the timing of the market. So you have to get a, you have to thread a couple of needles, right? One is you have to pick the right problem to solve and it has to be something that is a relatively immature solution by definition will come from a startup because a startup hasn't been working on it for 10 years. So that will be good enough to get people to invest in the solution or use the product or, so it has to be useful in the short term. But we all, well, most of us want to build something big and impactful over the long term. So then the second needle you have to thread is it actually has to have, be something that can grow into something big and impactful.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  And for me, I, I had a, my experience actually at, at PeopleSoft where I built a product of PeopleSoft that was kind of similar to Okta. It was hooking up the HR system to an LDAP directory and that product, customers really liked it. And I got a sense that they could really make it part of their IT infrastructure and it would be an important thing that. They would invest in for many, many years. So it was kind of the, for Okta, it was like, people were talking to customers and they said, yeah, you know, this, we're moving apps to the cloud. And it worked great when we had Exchange on premise and all my Windows PCs could connect to it with no login.

• 19:46Speaker 01

  It was really good, but now we're doing Box and we're doing Google Apps and it doesn't work very well. Can you just solve that problem today? So that was the short-term pain people would pay for and people would want to solve. And it was a, with the shifting technology landscape, it was an important thing to fix. But then also, if you, to build that, which seems pretty simple, you have to build all this infrastructure, directory services and replication technology. And I knew that that, those were the underpinnings of something that big companies would want to buy. And it could be part of their technology landscape for a long time.

• 20:21Logan Bartlett?

  There's this irony in this, in the reflection you said about the two things,

• 20:27Logan Bartlett?

  or the two different like market dynamics that need to exist, that, that you, you almost need by definition, to have a very small market initially.

• 20:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 20:35Logan Bartlett?

  If it were a big market, someone probably would have already solved it. But you want like a very fast-growing small market because that's the only way to make big outcomes. And so the worst.

• 20:44Speaker 01

  We were in the Florida Keys last spring break. I'll never forget. I was with my kids and there was this pelican that was trying to eat this massive fish. And it was like, there's no way it's going to get that fish in its beak.

• 20:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Yeah. And that's what sometimes people.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  Stop trying. You're not going to be able to eat it.

• 20:58Logan Bartlett?

  Come in and pitch huge ideas, right? But there's no disruptive means of pursuing those in some way. There's no chasm that's opening up and you get to cross it uniquely. And I think that big markets are almost, it's like a fool's gold in pursuing.

• 21:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:17Logan Bartlett?

  I imagine your TAM initially was, I don't know, a couple million bucks or something, right? But definitionally, but it was on the path of being hundreds and then billions and then tens of billions.

• 21:28Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, we, we've, we heard that the market Okta was going after wasn't big enough. We heard that, you know, I think we still heard it like six months ago.

• 21:40Logan Bartlett?

  Sure.

• 21:41Speaker 01

  Yeah. So it's, it reminds me of another important thing from the early days, which, which is.

• 21:48Speaker 01

  You you are, if you don't feel like it's too early, you're too late. But also being being perfect timing feels way too early. So that's why you have to suspend belief and just go.

• 22:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And that's what's really hard for people. It's like they want to mitigate risk and they want to like do a bunch of research to figure out if this is the right idea. But the reality is you're not going to know because if you know, if it's too early, you're not going to know. And if it's too late, if it's too comfortable and you've mitigated all the risk and you see, oh, people will really buy it. There's all six other companies doing it, then it's too late.

• 22:24Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. By definition, you it's very improbable that you started on the exact day, the exact right day. And so your your job in some ways is to start too early and survive until the market

• 22:37Speaker 01

  Bingo.

• 22:37Logan Bartlett?

  gets to where

• 22:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, and for us, it was, we we built the first product and we had a had a had a customer, you know, paying customer. And the next, this like the second year, like the second full year, or no, the third full year, we were doing this. The third full year was really hard because we were, we'd been doing it for like two and a half years, raised money. And it's like, all right, where's the where are the sales, you know, you should be rolling. It's been two and a half years, you have this team of 15, 20 people now, where is all the success? But the reality was it was still too early. It was still too early, there weren't enough cloud ops and companies maybe had a few, but you know, this whole identity thing they're going to put in and spend a bunch of money for like three cloud ops, maybe not enough.

• 23:23Speaker 01

  And we just basically had to hang on for for us relatively short amount. It seemed like a long time, but it was relatively short amount of time, it was like three quarters. And then I remember, I'll never forget, the third quarter of 2011. So what is that exactly 13 years ago in 2011? It was like all of a sudden. It just worked in the quarter and there was a bunch of sales. I'm not talking like millions of dollars. I'm talking like the target was 200 grand and we did 280 grand. But that just felt like the dam broke open and the water was flowing.

• 23:57Logan Bartlett?

  Was it?

• 23:57Speaker 01

  Cause there was enough, you know, enough, like the market caught up to us.

• 24:01Logan Bartlett?

  So there, there wasn't, I assume, like a seminal thing that, that happened, but instead it was like chopping the tree and you don't know which chop knocked it over. You sort of got the market, the density of what you guys had built.

• 24:12Speaker 01

  Yeah. And it was, you know, it was in stages, right? Because like I said, it was 200, 200, 280 grand. But then after that, it just seemed it was, there was enough opportunity there every quarter, every year. And it felt much different than that. I call it that, you know, that, that time, that, you know, relatively short amount of time, but three quarters in the desert there where we'd been doing it long enough to have some expectations, but not so long that it was, the market was really ready. It felt like a long time. But for those companies out there that are in that valley, hang on, keep going, survive.

• 24:47Logan Bartlett?

  And so, so what would you, if you were asking yourself, if you're in that and there's, there's a balance between the, the delusion of, of just, it's almost there, it's almost there, it's going to happen. And the reality of maybe, maybe not, is, is there something that you would ask yourself? If you are in what feels, you're not sure if it's, we're waiting for a moment in time versus maybe you're just banging your head against the wall?

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Oh, that's the $64,000 question. Cause for us, and I think for a lot of companies, it's the only thing that, the only reason you know is because it happens. The early indicators aren't super clear. So in other words, the reason I knew that, that quarter in 2011, Q3 was going to be good was because it was good. It wasn't like, I mean, two months before that, it was pretty rocky. We had to, we're trying to close our series B and we totally whiffed the previous quarter. And thank God that David Widen from Coastal Ventures agreed to still lead the B. Cause the round got done and, but there was not like tons of signal that that next quarter was going to be the tipping point.

• 26:00Speaker 01

  So I think it's hard. I mean, You gotta, you have to, ultimately, it comes down to, maybe not even, depending on the business, maybe not even financial metrics, but it comes down to like, true customer value. And sussing out what is true customer usage and true customer value versus all the things that might seem like that but aren't really true. For us, it was relatively easy because people were paying for it and using it and there was adoption, but I can imagine other businesses. The only thing that's really going to tell you is true customer value.

• 26:32Logan Bartlett?

  Is there an element of fulfillment in the process that you enjoy the most about building a company? Because I think sometimes that we lionize or we hold in too high a regard fundraising or an IPO or valuations or hiring or whatever the numbers are. And it's almost like you need to find the beauty in the process in some ways because there's always a new number to hit or something.

• 27:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, for me personally, I love the challenge. I love the, oh, that can't be done. Oh, it's a single sign-on company. You can never build a big company on a single sign-on. Oh, Microsoft is going to crush you. I remember when Microsoft launched their competitive product in 2014, it was going, you know, it was going to crush us and going to put us out of business. And it's like, what is that, 10 years running? 10 years in a row, still not crushed.

• 27:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  So the challenge and the overcoming challenge and getting, continuing to grow and have success and innovate, probably the thing that I wouldn't have expected as much 10 years ago was, it's been super satisfying to see people at Okta grow and take on more responsibility and even as painful as it is, leave and go to other companies where they're successful. I always tell everyone I get pissed off when they leave, but the reality is, I'm super proud of them.

• 28:03Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 28:04Speaker 01

  And I love seeing that success. I mean, junior people that start off entry level and go on to run sales at other companies or go on to be COOs at other companies, startup CEOs, it's incredibly satisfying.

• 28:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. One of the things I think that I always try to say, but it sounds very self-serving when I, when I say.

• 28:26Logan Bartlett?

  Dilution or valuations or whatever are markers along the journey and aren't means to an end in some ways. And I've heard you talk about reflections on how at one point, some of those things felt more important than they do today. Can you share? Maybe I'll clip this and send it to people when we're negotiating over, you know, 10% here or there.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah. Well, I wish I owned 100% of Oxford.

• 28:50Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. Yeah, I can imagine. Yeah.

• 28:52Speaker 01

  Talk about, what was it? Survivor's bias?

• 28:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. Yeah, exactly. But you've had some good board members along the way.

• 28:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I wish I never sold a share. I knew everything was going to work out. I found continued success or I found a continue over and over again, maybe giving a little bit on funding rounds, even on the IPO. I mean, when we went public, I remember on the road show, we had enough demand for to price, you know, like probably price the deal at $19 a share. And we had a big meeting and it's like, we could probably get $19 a share. Let's do that. And I made the decision. I said, we're going to do, we're going to

• 29:38Speaker 01

  do $17 a share. Just because I feel like we're, all these investors are going to be partners for a long time. And I feel like if we give a little now, it's going to help build that long-term relationship. We're not in this for whatever the $2 a share, I think would have been, you know, millions and millions of dollars, but it wouldn't have been better to start the relationship off on the right foot with these long-term shareholders. And other funding rounds, it was the same way. It's like, let other partners into the deal, a little bit more dilution. You know, it's probably good to have more money and we get great people at the table. So it's kind of like long-term thinking or

• 30:21Speaker 01

  trying to make sure that you're, you know, these are long-term relationships and you want these people to help you and you want them to feel like you were a good partner from the start. It's worked pretty well.

• 30:32Logan Bartlett?

  You've hired thousands of people at this point, even I guess multiple thousands, if you go back to PeopleSoft and Salesforce as well. I'm curious about interview questions and

• 30:48Logan Bartlett?

  I've heard you say things about teasing out motivations when trying to get people or figure out like why they want to join a particular company. Can you speak to that and how you think assessing out motivations can lead to potential success or problems within an organization?

• 31:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, my, I think when I interview people, I really try to focus, focus on why they made decisions in their career, why they went places, you know, and obviously like it kind of gives you an insight or an idea of what they're looking for now and is that what you need, is that going to make them successful now at Okta? But I also try to figure out, you know, history is the best.

• 31:33Speaker 01

  So you can try to assess someone, you can try to say, oh, I'm going to judge, I'm going to test this person, I'm going to ask them questions, I'm going to see how quick they are on their feet. But it's probably, it's very unlikely that you're going to be able to assess them better than their previous companies and managers could. So I try to figure out what tasks and what projects they got put on. And did they get more responsibility, was it in a key area for the company? So I'm really trying to get for that, you know, so you went to this company, you were there four years, what did you go in as? How did you, what, what, you know, did you, how did the orgs change? Did you get more responsibility? Did your, what projects did you put on? Was that project important for that company at that time? Or were you kind of a sideshow? So let the, let the people that have managed that person and let the companies that have hired that person and promoted that person and assigned work to them, let them tell you how good they are.

• 32:18Speaker 01

  And if you see, I mean, you really have to, you can, you know, you're really trying to get a great person and if you see them, they've been working at great companies, but maybe it wasn't that long and maybe they didn't get put on the most important things, you really have to ask a question like, you're going to basically overrule their managers and the leadership of those companies. It's probably not, the odds are probably not in your favor to come out ahead there.

• 32:44Logan Bartlett?

  Well, and that leads to the reference checking and I guess, I mean, it's amazing how. How many people don't do it when making hires? And I'm sure there's a bunch of people that have worked at Okta that you've interacted with and they've gone on to other organizations and subsequent people didn't check with you.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Shockingly, yeah. How often people don't call me?

• 33:06Logan Bartlett?

  It's pretty wild that people don't do that. I'm curious what you've learned about when you're talking to someone for a reference and trying to tease out the key characteristics that... Are there questions that you tend to ask or things you tend to do?

• 33:21Speaker 01

  Well, I think do it.

• 33:23Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  That's the first... It's something easy. It's easy to get really excited about a person and not be rigorous about doing it.

• 33:33Logan Bartlett?

  On sheet, off sheet, sort of triangulate in on?

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Multiple. Yeah, I mean, you gotta make a decision maybe about the importance of the role and how long it's gonna take or what kind of references you can get to. But the more important the role, you gotta really... And especially if you're... Let's say you're going through the resume and talking about their experience and there's one thing in their experience where they were at this company and they got put on an important project that was very applicable to what they might do at your company. That's the reference you need to check.

• 34:06Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 01

  So it's almost like the first conversations and the background checking is like a map that tells you where to focus with the references. And then the references are like, okay, so and so was at this company. Tell me about this project. Like, was it really as important as I thought? And did it go as well as it seems? And was this person involved like I think they were? And you get that from a reference. It's like, you're doing pretty good at that point.

• 34:28Logan Bartlett?

  Have you found ways of framing the questions such that I think people's bias is always to say positive things?

• 34:35Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:35Logan Bartlett?

  There's not a ton of incentive for people to...

• 34:37Speaker 01

  I called a... I checked a reference once and I, you know, I said, I said, "Okay, we're talking to this person. You worked with this person here. Was this person good? Oh, yeah, they were good, you know? Really enjoyed working with them. Yes, they did this." And I said, "All right, thank you very much." Hung up the phone. And then five minutes later, my phone rang and it was a woman I worked with at Salesforce and hadn't talked to her in years. And she said, "Todd." I said, "Hey, how's it going?" She goes, "I just gotta tell you that I have an office next to the person you just talked to that you were checking the reference on." Or the person that was giving you the reference. And this person came into my office and said...

• 35:21Speaker 01

  I feel so bad, I just totally lied to Todd about this reference.

• 35:27Speaker 01

  You know, I just felt bad, you know, it's like, I didn't wanna, I didn't wanna say a bad thing about this person. So yeah, you gotta like, there's a reason, like, there's a bias to be positive and no one likes to blow people up and. I, I think you, what I've, one, one thing I've done is like, what are they?

• 35:47Speaker 01

  What is one thing they're just best in the world at? Now, very few people are the best in the world at anything, but that should get to a strength. That should get to a, you know, oh, the team loves them, or oh, you know, they're really good at crisis management. And so try to, try to get the person to say something they're amazing about. Cause it's pretty unlikely that, or if they're gonna really be negative on the reference. If that's gonna come out, they're probably gonna do that pretty directly. Right? If they're not, and if, if they're just gonna not be direct about that, then the next best thing you can probably do is see that there's a lack of a super positive strength.

• 36:27Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  And if there's a lack, because it's easy for someone that's gonna be negative on a ref, or doesn't wanna be negative on a reference, because they don't wanna blow someone up, but they wanna do the reference. It would be, it would be for, they would figure out a way to say, you know, yeah, they were kinda just okay about a lot of stuff. You know, they're good, I liked working with them. They're probably not gonna be like, they were the best in the world at crisis management.

• 36:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 01

  Under fire, the best I've ever seen. They're not gonna say that.

• 36:51Logan Bartlett?

  And pinning people down, you, the, the best is a great way of framing it.

• 36:56Logan Bartlett?

  The other ones I've heard is like, you know, were they top 5% or 10% people that you've ever worked with in this capacity?

• 37:03Speaker 01

  Some range, yeah.

• 37:04Logan Bartlett?

  So, giving people some barometer and, and then they react, oh, you know, they weren't, let me think, like, I've worked with 40 people, they weren't top 5%, but you know what, they were probably top 50. And then you know, okay, then at least you're calibrated in some way where you've moved beyond the platitudes or the, the general descriptors, and now you're forcing them to rank, which for whatever reason, doesn't feel as bad as saying something negative to someone.

• 37:30Speaker 01

  For sure. I think that's right on. When I, when people call me for references, one thing I do is if the people that I think are awesome, I tell the person calling me right away, hire this person, they're awesome. That's the first thing I say in reference call. I don't screw around. Like, I don't say like, "Okay, tell me, ask your questions." I'd be like, "You gotta hire this person. If you don't hire this person, you're crazy."

• 37:53Logan Bartlett?

  Because at the end of the day, that's what they're solving for.

• 37:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, if you call me for a reference and I don't say that.

• 37:56Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, there's an implicit thing in-

• 37:59Speaker 01

  So you know, I've set the bar with everyone now.

• 38:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly. The negative one is also interesting where forcing people to frame, "Hey, if this doesn't work out, what, in three years, I call you and say, 'Thank you for the reference, but, you know, it was really appreciated, but it didn't work out with XYZ person.'" There's something to that that forces a tangibleness in someone's mind of like, "Okay, what, what reason would it be?" And then you're getting to their weaknesses in some way, and that feels, whatever reason, softer in some ways of getting people to say that, the implicit things.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  And I also, I don't think it's, the other thing on this one is, I don't think like a one non-raving reference is a veto. So many people I've hired that I've talked to four or five people, and maybe there are a couple ones that were not raving, but I got to one raving. Give me one.

• 38:47Logan Bartlett?

  Also, I'm sure you've found this, not everyone's gonna be amazing at all things, and so you need to calibrate what that person's strengths are with the particular role at which you're hiring them into. I, one of the, I forget, maybe this is a Peter Thielism or someone like that, but like, they've always said Brian Chesky couldn't be the CEO of Tesla, and Elon Musk couldn't be the CEO of Airbnb, which I think is an interesting sort of-

• 39:09Speaker 01

  They originally said of Twitter, but then they had to change it?

• 39:12Logan Bartlett?

  That's probably right. And it turns out-

• 39:15Speaker 01

  I take that back.

• 39:16Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:16Speaker 01

  Edit that out of the podcast.

• 39:18Logan Bartlett?

  It turns out he actually couldn't be the CEO of Twitter.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  But- Nice one, Logan.

• 39:22Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I said that in a thought. One of the things I've also thought in building a journey, or in the journey and working with board members, is just expectation setting with them and what to use them for. And obviously, as much as I hold all of these in the highest regard as, you know, doing really God's work out there, we're not always gonna be, have the full context of the business and not living the day to day. And so you get really a breadth of perspective, but not the depth in there. How did you go about figuring out what was the right context to provide with the investors or the independent board members?

• 40:06Logan Bartlett?

  And taking that feedback, not as gospel, but as an input into decisioning.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Well, one of in early times at Okta, one of the mistakes I made is I was too passive with the board. I would go into the board and say, here are a couple of things that are going on. What do you guys think? Which felt okay, because it was early and we did have a lot of questions to answer. And maybe we didn't have a lot of answers, but that was wrong. That was not effective, because as the CEO of a company, the board members know that there's a lot to figure out. They want someone that's going to figure it out or try, not someone that's going to have a brainstorming session with them about what we should be doing. So I think that tone change of here's what we're doing. Here's the decision.

• 40:56Speaker 01

  Here's the thought process that went into it. Here are some things that could go wrong, could go right. And here's some ideas about the future and how we could pivot. That's very different than saying, we have these challenges. What does everyone think? So that was a big, big shift for me that helped with the board in early on. That's very early on, though. It's changed over time.

• 41:11Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, and that I guess implicitly sort of forces action or forces them to raise their hand if they disagree without impeding you and trying to make progress.

• 41:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And it's, and it just, you know, gives them confidence that someone's got the wheel, which in the early days, that's as things are not totally figured out, that's valuable.

• 41:31Logan Bartlett?

  Have you gotten more as the business has scaled? How do you maintain what altitude to talk to the board members about?

• 41:42Speaker 01

  Which is, I think, one of the things that happens.

• 41:46Speaker 01

  Over the years is you have to get pretty effective at giving them context. So and different companies do this different ways. There's data packs, you know, like the whole spreadsheets get sent out and the whole pre-read for meetings, there's the letter, there's the board memo. And all those are good, but I've found that you have to work pretty hard to keep that context current and and it takes the board members have to absorb it and grok it and work to make sure they're up to speed. But if you provide that context, you're going to get much more valuable insight on the challenges and more strategic input versus spending all the conversations just educating them. And I've found the most successful or the most helpful conversations and the most valuable

• 42:30Speaker 01

  input has come from when we've done a good job of getting them context on an issue. So they're not trying to come up to speed and have a strategic input on the issue all in the same time.

• 42:39Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm, that's interesting. And I guess as the relationship, as you've grown into a public business, how has the how has the dynamic in working with investors maybe changed if you started to build a cast of people that you go to for different things or has it sort of stayed consistent personalities?

• 43:02Speaker 01

  I think that it's been, we've been public 28 quarters now. It's pretty, pretty cool. 2017. It's evolved, of course. I think one thing that changes, obviously, well, maybe not obvious, but when you go public, there's, there's a really, the governance part of it becomes more of the board's function. Audit committee, nominating nominations and governance committee, et cetera. In the early days, it's very different. Most of it, most of it's about like making the company work and grow and be successful.

• 43:38Speaker 01

  I've found that because, I think partly because of that, the, the network of other like stage CEOs is very valuable. Just bouncing ideas off people that are similar size and stage as you, probably at some form, in some form encountering the same challenges. And, and that's the, beyond just the board and just personal mentors I have or personal relationships I have, other CEOs of companies, same size and stage. I've also worked, have, I'm in some CEO groups and some organizations with CEOs of much bigger companies, like Fortune 500 companies. And they have a different set of challenges. So you can learn stuff

• 44:22Speaker 01

  from them and it's valuable and smart people are smart people. But there's something about, you know, talking to CEOs of companies that are about the same employee size, about the same revenue, same growth challenges, same business model. It's really valuable.

• 44:36Logan Bartlett?

  From an operating standpoint, as you, as you may reflect on the, the founding journey or from being, you know, the two of you in the early days to where you are today, is there anything that stands out of, you wish you could have told yourself way back when? Like when it was just the two of you?

• 44:52Speaker 01

  Don't sell your stock pre-IPO.

• 44:55Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah. It will go up. Anything, operating wise, any, anything with regard to managing people?

• 45:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know. It's, there's, there are a couple of things that pop out. One is that even, so I think there, I had, I made the mistake, or I had notions for some reason that once we were a real company, that can be defined as different sizes as we grew, right? First it was a real company, we had a customer. And then it was like when we got to a certain revenue. And then it was when we went public. And the advice I'd give myself is you have good instincts and you should trust your instincts, even if you may be at a size and scale now where before you thought you might have to stop trusting your instincts. So I think that's one of the things I would tell myself. You know, you know, you kind of, you're, one of the challenging things and something I'm very

• 45:46Speaker 01

  proud of is my ability to be effective at different sizes and scales and stages. And I think To do that, I think you have to understand that it's different and changing and there's different challenges and different requirements. But I think I maybe underestimated my instincts being valuable at different stages and that's one piece of advice I give myself. I think when I think, I think I hear this, when I hear founder mode, this is my interpretation of it. I hear other people, that's what I hear when people say, "I'm going founder mode," or I feel like they're saying the same thing I'm saying now, which is trust your instincts.

• 46:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  Even if you might be a company that's much bigger than you were five, 10 years ago, your instincts are probably pretty good still.

• 46:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah. Founder mode's good branding.

• 46:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:33Logan Bartlett?

  Trust your instincts. Isn't that quite as buzzy as?

• 46:35Speaker 01

  It's also good when your job is to attract founders.

• 46:39Logan Bartlett?

  Yes. It's great branding. Yeah, I totally agree with that. In terms of, I guess, making sure, to your point on trusting instincts, is there anything you've done tactically to maintain information, be it skip levels or on the ground, what's actually going on, so you're not getting managed up to, which I'm sure is inevitable from a scale standpoint where you are today?

• 47:06Speaker 01

  It's a very powerful phenomenon, yeah. You get people present what they think you want to hear. And I think there's a few things that help break out of that echo chamber or that, whatever that, you know, that prism. One is just trusted relationships of people that have been around a long time and you can rely on to give you the truth about what's going on in a certain area. You can build those over time. I found also that, and this is not just for myself, but also for my leadership team, you have to have a competency of, or an ability and a drive to know the details.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  I think if you have a leader or a leadership team that doesn't have a drive to know the details, they're more susceptible to this. Because when things are being presented to you in a certain way, or your information is getting filtered, so it comes at you in a certain way, if you don't know the details, or at least at some level, or don't dig in in some areas, you don't have a reality check against that. But if you talk to enough customers, if you know how the details of a product works, if you... Know more things about a process or about a challenge or about how employees are feeling. It's more likely that you're going to be able to have a good contrast with what you're being presented and be able to call BS on it in the right time.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  So I think that is, that's very valuable. The other thing I like to do, which is you, you gotta, the ceremonies of the presentations and the status reviews and the, the meetings, you gotta, you gotta shake them up. Like, you know, you know, okay, there's a seventeen page deck we're going to go over. So just, you know, something's in there, ask about that first. And get the, get the conversation shaken up a little bit from what they thought they were going to have. And it gets people, sometimes it can be unnerving for the team that prepped and, but I think it's, people that are passionate about what they're presenting are comfortable with what they've done

• 49:15Speaker 01

  and they understand it well, they're going to be more capable of, of being free form and going off the script. And they're going to be okay with it and you're going to probably get a better sense of the people that are really comfortable with it and deeply understand it and get a better insight into what's being presented than if you just follow the script and got the pitch as it was designed to do. Now, I think my team probably annoys them.

• 49:40Logan Bartlett?

  I'm sure.

• 49:41Speaker 01

  Because they did all this prep and, you know, and a lot of times, you know, I try to do this and they're like, if you just would have let me do the first three slides, I would have told you all these questions.

• 49:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  And then I'll gradually go say, okay, give me the first three slides. That's what I'm trying to do. I want, I want, I want truth. And sometimes a well-crafted presentation is good, but I think more often than not, an open discussion, candid discussion about the issue or the, what you're trying to decide is better than a pretty canned presentation about it.

• 50:12Logan Bartlett?

  Because you can't, you can't fake depth on understanding or something. You can't, like, you, you can, you can rehearse a presentation, but the, what's below the waterline or the iceberg, you know, picture or whatever it is, you can't fake that.

• 50:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, especially if it's a, especially if it's like a hard call. The depth is important because.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  You wanna, if you're gonna try to, as a leader, if you're gonna try to

• 50:42Speaker 01

  come down on the right side of a hard call, you probably have to get to the things on the margin that are swaying the call either way. And I think you can explore those best with people that can talk in depth about the thinking about the issue.

• 51:00Logan Bartlett?

  How do you think about the slope of the line of people within the organization and the balance between hiring for experience and people that have been there, done that versus maybe people that have been on the journey with you for a while and it's unclear if they can continue to scale and the trade off between them.

• 51:21Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you that being a founder has made me much more loyal to people. Sounds like I wasn't loyal. I was loyal, but my mean is like, you know, wanting to keep people, keep, keep someone in a role they've been in for a long time. They've done such a good job for the company. Wanting to promote from within, wanting to reward people for a long period of work, even though they might not be the right person for the next couple of years. I'm much more apt to do that than I would have been before. Just, you know, you go through the war with people and you kind of feel like you owe them and you know what they did to get you here and you feel even sometimes honestly, like it's probably not the best decision, but I feel like I err on the side much more of, of being loyal. The, the

• 52:07Speaker 01

  but that being said, one thing that really resonates with me is, is people that can think about opportunities and problems and challenges and the right solution based on empirically or from first principles, what we need now or what we'll need over the next couple of years. I don't want to hear as much about, yeah, it's fine if you want to bring your past experience and Things from previous roles and previous companies and previous industries to inform your analysis of this, but don't give me the the rote repetition of what worked before. And don't, you know, not everything is a just, you know, if all you have is a hammer, not everything's a nail.

• 52:44Logan Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  Let's bring some thought and some insight into why it might be different. So with me, it's like I'm much more likely to agree and be swayed by your case or your arguments if you can make a logical, well-prested argument on why we should go a certain direction versus like, you know, I've seen this work before, or this is how this other company does it.

• 53:06Logan Bartlett?

  You've described innovation as inherently lonely in some ways, and the people are going to question if the ideas work, how big is the TAM, the path and all that. Has there been, obviously, success is probably validating of the the journey, but as you look out now and you're a public business and probably have had more success than you originally thought you.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  Oh, well, if you look at that PowerPoint, the upside scenario, I did like three scenarios. One scenario is we would fail and I would go get another job. And there's like a medium scenario and the upside scenario was that Okta would be worth a hundred million dollars.

• 53:40Logan Bartlett?

  You've exceeded. Did you give any time horizon for that?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you know, like a few years.

• 53:45Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  Because if I was still doing this after a few years, that would mean that it's probably going well enough to.

• 53:51Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, cash out.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  Be okay that I quit my job.

• 53:54Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 53:55Speaker 01

  Cash out, just be okay. Yeah, be okay that I quit my job. So, yeah, that was the upside.

• 53:59Logan Bartlett?

  What, so but in the in the pursuit of the the next thing along the way and dealing with the inherent loneliness of of innovation in some way and just having people shoot spitballs on your idea, is there anything that you've that you take solace in beyond success or is someone else that's along this journey right now that's being doubted? Anything that was particularly helpful for you?

• 54:26Speaker 01

  I mean.

• 54:28Speaker 01

  It's possible.

• 54:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:31Speaker 01

  You can succeed. That's, that's what's comforting. That was, that's what, I mean, just tell me there's a chance.

• 54:37Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  That's what's got to keep you going. And if, the only time you should quit is if you're pretty sure there is no chance. That's kind of the ultimate decision you have to make there.

• 54:47Logan Bartlett?

  I don't know how you think about where Okta is in the life cycle of going from extremely doubted and people skeptical around it and then maybe disruptor innovator in some way to leader and established sort of public business that's, that's doing well. In that journey along the way, how have you, how has the culture maybe shifted? How do you sort of think about making sure that you maintain the elements of innovation that, that got you there, recognizing you need to operate in a potentially different way?

• 55:26Speaker 01

  Yeah, the first, the, especially when you get bigger and go public. I think the most important thing for a leader and for the culture is to keep it forward looking. And yeah, it's great. We can have these nostalgia sessions, nostalgia sessions on what it was like before and how great it was like in the early days. That's fine. You can do that a little bit, but focus on the future. What is the big milestone? What are we trying to do? And we did a good job of this at the IPO time. Like a year or two before the IPO, we really moved past the IPO as the milestone. And we said, we want to get to a billion in revenue. We want to get to, you know, more customers.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  And we said, we tried to get off that going public because that's naturally a big milestone for every tech company that's venture funded. We moved past that. And I think it's been a continuous, continuous journey on, on doing that. It's like, what's the next thing? The lifeblood of, of a technology company is, is, is doing the next thing and leading the market and growing. And if you lose that, everything else, whether it's, you know, like our culture is very much like, like I, you know, think is from my experience at PeopleSoft and building up Okta, it's all about. How can we make a company that feels like it's our employees' company and they want to work super hard? But the only reason they want to work hard is because they want to build the next thing. They want to have the next impact.

• 56:51Speaker 01

  They want to go further. It's not about like celebrating the past. So I think that's a really important thing. Not easy to do because there's times when there's just a bunch of pretty, you know, like blocking and tackling has to be done. And a lot of every company is blocking and tackling at some level. But there has to be enough of the focus on the future and what's next to make sure that all the blocking and tackling is worth it.

• 57:18Logan Bartlett?

  You are technical. You were a technical founder in the early days. Was there something that was particularly difficult or didn't come naturally to you in the transition to CEO?

• 57:31Speaker 01

  I just my, I'll call it my voice, like my, my public voice, whether that was working with customers or working with the employees as the company grew and had hundreds and then thousands of employees, or whether it's my public facing persona or communication. I had to, I had to, I had to find a voice that was, that worked for me. And it took me a while to find that. And eventually what the voice is, is it's kind of, it reinforces some of these things I've talked about. It's about, you know, giving credit to the employees and being super humble and super

• 58:14Speaker 01

  appreciative of them and very transparent and very open and very, you know, people don't perceive me as full of a bunch of BS, you know? They, they perceive me as getting the right, getting the straight story and someone they could rally behind. And I think it took me a while to find that, especially in the early days of Okta. It was like, oh, all these people are relying on me and I have to kind of. Keep all the challenges inside and I don't want to share these challenges because then everyone will get everyone will get freaked out. It took me a while to figure out that's the exact opposite. You gotta, you gotta share them because what do you want? You want empowered people that are gonna try to solve the challenges and to solve the challenges,

• 58:57Speaker 01

  they have to know what they are. So it was, I was behaving the exact opposite of the way I should be behaving. So I, I found that voice over the years and, and you know, people will comment to me that even now they'll say, you know, I really like how you presented that all hands and we feel like we're very, it's very, I never heard this kind of presentation at a big company. It's very transparent and open and I feel like I'm part of the team and it's not in a bad way, but it's, that's like, that's what I'm going for in like a presentation and like a, it's a calculated thing I'm doing.

• 59:34Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:35Speaker 01

  Although it comes across as very uncalculated, which is, it's kind of weird, but it's like the intent of my communication style.

• 59:42Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  It's like if you're, if you get good at it enough, it looks unintentional. That's worked really well for me.

• 59:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's, it's an interesting thing where a public persona almost needs to be an authentic version of yourself, but it's not going to be the total authentic version of yourself or something. It's like you're, you're.

• 1:00:02Speaker 01

  The medium is not, is not suitable to that. You can't be yourself because it's a public medium.

• 1:00:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, that's right. And, and so I, it's, it's a, it's a weird dichotomy or like an interesting thing to try to figure out of what, what is the representation of, of yourself that's, that's authentic. You don't want to be disingenuous in any way, right? It has to come naturally to you, but it's, it's a version of you, which is a weird.

• 1:00:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, like when I see, when I see John Chambers speak or I see Bill McDermott speak.

• 1:00:35Logan Bartlett?

  Chambers was Cisco.

• 1:00:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:37Logan Bartlett?

  McDermott now, ServiceNow.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, amazing, two amazing leaders. But I feel like a, like an amateur hour CEO. When I hear those, because they're just like amazing and polished and professional. But for me, if I did that, it wouldn't work.

• 1:00:52Logan Bartlett?

  It would be disingenuous in some way.

• 1:00:54Speaker 01

  Like the worst, I think the worst presentations I've ever given at keynotes or meetings is when I've tried to do that.

• 1:01:00Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  And the best ones I've ever given is when I didn't. I got in my own style, which is very different.

• 1:01:05Logan Bartlett?

  It's a weird analogy, but kind of the way I feel about like competing with some of the luminaries in the venture industry. It's like, I can't, I can't go back in time and invent the browser, right? Or I can't go back and like invest in, you know, Google in 98 or whatever, like whoever it is today. I'll never be Peter Fenton, right? And so it's sort of like, you have to be the most authentic version of what it is that can resonate with you. And I, it's true, I know you're a sports fan, but like if you watch the different generations of coaches that sort of cycle through, the new successful coach often doesn't look anything like the prior generation.

• 1:01:46Logan Bartlett?

  Because the generations are different. It's authentic to who the personality is in the moment in time. And you need to capture all of that. And McDermott probably couldn't be the, his style couldn't be what it is today if he wasn't already Bill McDermott. Or Doug Leone couldn't be a 26-year-old Doug Leone today. It's almost like he has to, you know.

• 1:02:08Speaker 01

  Doug might be the exception.

• 1:02:09Logan Bartlett?

  Maybe Doug could do it. Maybe Doug, I don't know. The hard-charging enterprise sales with the founder is a very different, you know, world than I think most of the VCs that I operate with. But maybe Doug could pull it off.

• 1:02:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, it is an interesting question, like how much of success is being who you are? It's not totally true. You always have to change and evolve, but there's a, there's a limit to how far you can change and evolve. If you have to change and evolve too far, you're probably in the wrong situation.

• 1:02:40Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:02:40Speaker 01

  You gotta find, people say like, find what you're good at or find what you're passionate about. But you got to get close enough to where you can evolve toward your, you can evolve a little bit, but still be true to yourself.

• 1:02:50Logan Bartlett?

  There's, there's a ton of college basketball coaches are now like stepping back and it's interesting of, I mean, B. H. Wright or Tony Bennett or Coach K. or Roy Williams or all these people have sort of decided that it's gotten to NIL and the transfer portal and all this stuff. It's no longer something that they can keep up with. And I guess maybe it's just reached the outer bounds of their ability to evolve in some ways. And so, um, yeah, then there's probably be a whole new generation that can keep up.

• 1:03:19Speaker 01

  Yes, the new generation will save us.

• 1:03:21Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, we sure hope so. What about, speaking of new generation, how do you, um, you, you saw and lived client server to SaaS and now, um, there's this artificial intelligence thing that, that people are talking about.

• 1:03:35Speaker 01

  Just, just when we thought innovation was dead, right?

• 1:03:38Logan Bartlett?

  It's going to save some big funds out there. Maybe not save, but it'll at least allow them to keep them for a little bit longer, uh, investing in, uh, you know.

• 1:03:46Speaker 01

  My meta, my meta, meta is the wrong word, but my big picture takeaway.

• 1:03:50Logan Bartlett?

  Meta starts to be a little too, uh.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. My big picture takeaway about this is, I was thinking the other day, one thing to always bet on is no matter how much compute we come up with, we will use it.

• 1:04:02Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:04:03Speaker 01

  We will use it.

• 1:04:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:05Speaker 01

  Never, never think we will have too much compute.

• 1:04:07Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:07Speaker 01

  I mean, if you think about an, uh, an H100 and all these, all these, all the hardware that's going on now and all these clusters that are being built, we will find a way to use it.

• 1:04:20Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:21Speaker 01

  Always bet on.

• 1:04:21Logan Bartlett?

  Always bet on compute?

• 1:04:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, I always bet on, um, yeah, I mean, there's going to be more compute, but bet on the insatiable, uh, drive to use it.

• 1:04:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:31Speaker 01

  We will figure out how to use it.

• 1:04:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, that's an interesting, interesting, uh, meta takeaway. I, um, I heard like at the end of the day.

• 1:04:40Speaker 01

  I mean, think about what these things are doing.

• 1:04:41Logan Bartlett?

  It's crazy.

• 1:04:42Speaker 01

  These, I mean.

• 1:04:43Logan Bartlett?

  Is there anything cool you guys are, are the?

• 1:04:45Speaker 01

  No, I mean, like just like these, the, you know, LLMs and it's like.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  It was like, okay, we're gonna take every word ever and we're gonna like wait the frequency of it occurring with every other word ever. And we're gonna like run that through a massive cluster for like 10, you know, 10 months.

• 1:05:02Logan Bartlett?

  And we're not like, and it's gonna spit some things back. We're not totally sure why it did it. We can't explain how it's coming back to you. But um, yeah, it's a there's, there's, there's countless things. I feel like

• 1:05:13Speaker 01

  It's like, um, yeah, remember, remember the, yeah, the with mobile, right? It was like, we'll just have a mobile phone that's a Mac. What are you gonna do with a mobile phone's a Mac? It's gonna be too heavy. Well, no, there's a lot of stuff. You can put an awesome UI on it. And you can have all these apps and same thing. It's like always bet on the hardware, always better on the hardware being used.

• 1:05:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's interesting. I um, I heard you mention that a CEO's role boils down to five or six critical decisions a year, plus, you know, tons of tiny ones from a calibration standpoint. Is there, um, is there anything you do from a decisioning framework or way you approach if, if you recognize maybe you're in those five to six decisions a year? Or is it, you actually don't know which are the five to six?

• 1:05:57Speaker 01

  Well, I think the first thing I try to do, and this, through the phases of Okta, this, I remember a distinct change when the job slowed down, meaning that I felt like there was enough team and infrastructure and process around me that a lot of the day to day stuff was being done. And it slowed down enough for me to think, wow, really, it's five or six decisions a year. And I think that's a milestone. Like you should think about building a company, you should think about trying, or recognize when you get there. So that when you get there, you're not, you're not running around doing a bunch of low value stuff and not doing what you need to do to make, to try to get a high hit rate on those five to six decisions. That's the first thing.

• 1:06:37Logan Bartlett?

  What, at what point do you feel like you hit that?

• 1:06:39Speaker 01

  This, for me, it was like, you know, like 10 years ago.

• 1:06:44Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:44Speaker 01

  2014. So the company Okta was

• 1:06:47Logan Bartlett?

  100 million or?

• 1:06:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, maybe a little less than, you know. Two, three hundred people.

• 1:06:53Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:53Speaker 01

  Four hundred people, something like that. Basically, I say before you have a hundred and fifty people, you until you have a hundred and fifty people, you don't really even have someone on every job. You probably don't have like a full time recruiter, you don't have all these key jobs, but hundred and fifty, you have someone on every job and then twice that, you probably have enough redundancy where you should be not frantically in the day to day and you can step back and try to make some of these decisions.

• 1:07:15Logan Bartlett?

  So recognizing you're at that point and then do you feel like you knew when these five to six get presented to you, do you feel like you know when they're the five to six? Or is it a list of twenty?

• 1:07:28Speaker 01

  I think you probably have several that you know and maybe a couple that are sleepers that you don't know. And

• 1:07:38Speaker 01

  the like how to try to make, how to try to have a high rate, high hit rate.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  You know, a lot of it sounds basic like try to gather as much information as you can and get much of different perspectives, but it's the confirmation bias is incredibly, incredibly powerful. You know, and you know, interpreting information that confirms your bias to make to what the decision should be. And so one thing that I've found that's worked pretty well is really work hard to figure out

• 1:08:10Speaker 01

  dig for stuff that would be against your kind of bias in the decision making. One of the things we did that worked pretty well, I've heard a lot of people do similar stuff, which is for big decisions, set up a like a two teams to present the opposite cases. So as the CEO, if I'm like, you know, we really want to buy this company. I think this company is great, you know, for all those reasons. Set up two teams and one team presents the this is crazy, we should never do this argument. We should do this, this is the most amazing thing and let it present and have like a structured thing where they spend an hour presenting the pro case and spend an hour presenting the negative case. So that's a, that's a tactic to try to, what is that trying to do? Well, it's really trying to

• 1:08:52Speaker 01

  get a balanced perspective because the CEO is probably leaning one way. So but, you know, put your best people on the other way. Tell them to argue against you. That's worked pretty well for us. And it doesn't have to be an acquisition. That was just an example.

• 1:09:04Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:04Speaker 01

  It could be product direction or prioritization. But yeah, there are a lot of times they tend to be people, people decisions, hiring someone, you know, changing an organization to focus on a priority and that means a leader gets, that's a, those things have, those are big decisions that have many years that that can compound positively or negatively.

• 1:09:28Logan Bartlett?

  There's, there's, one of the most important parts of any executive or leader or anyone within a company is the ability to get great people to work alongside them. Is there, is there a way that you think about assessing if someone has that competency in the early days or any way that you calibrate on if someone has the, the talent nexus?

• 1:09:55Speaker 01

  I think that, first of all, this ability for great people to work for someone is incredibly important. I think, I mean, you know, I talked about, I think, when I think about leadership qualities or assessing a leader, the first, the most important thing I see is their ability to set a vision and a strategy for what they're trying to do. Just, and that's partly like coming up with a compelling strategy or vision. It's partly their ability to communicate it. And it can be for any group. It can be for a product group. It can be for the people team. It can be for sales region. Can you articulate the vision and the strategy for what you're trying to do? If you can't do that, it's probably not a good sign that you're going to be able to lead that function, even if you could do everything else right.

• 1:10:38Speaker 01

  You can hire good people and like operationally check the metrics, et cetera. So that's, vision and strategy is really important. The, um, the, the second thing is kind of like getting the resourcing and getting the right people on the task. And this is where the ability to get good people to work for you comes in. And there's really, I mean, this, this is one where you can, showing a track record of this is a good indication that people will continue to be able to do it. One thing to think about is like, When leaders have gone from company to company, who's followed them? Like I said, you know, like I think it was really strongly, I feel really strongly that you can try to assess a candidate's ability, but let their past companies and their past

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  managers tell you, who followed them? So when you went to this new company, who'd you, who followed you there? When, when new people come to Okta and if no one follows them, I get a little worried.

• 1:11:35Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:36Speaker 01

  And as painful as it is, they leave and no one goes with them, it's probably not a good sign as well. So I think that's, that's something that's very important. And you can also just, you know, if people in these teams have just have awesome people that are working on these teams, it's a good sign. It's a good sign what, what they're doing at your own company. So I think that's really important. And also, you know, a leader's ability to understand at least some level, the details of what's going on in their organization is really important. And then the last one I'd say is, and this is one like, I don't know, I'm not great at this one, and I think a lot of people struggle with this, is prioritization.

• 1:12:17Speaker 01

  I mean, we have, we, I mean, myself included, it's like, I'm a, I'm a yes and, let's do it all. And that's a problem, right? You gotta like prioritize. You know, we have a hard time getting things done in general when we're trying to do too much stuff at once. And a leader that can actually, along with the vision, along with knowing the details, along with building great teams and getting the right resources on a problem, if they can actually then prioritize and make sure that the team is executing in the right order, it's gold.

• 1:12:48Logan Bartlett?

  As you, as you sit here and maybe look out a couple of years in the future, five years, whatever, whatever the right time horizon is, are there new challenges that you look forward to? Or things accomplishing over the course of the next couple of years? And just sort of milestones that keep you motivated and in pursuit of X, Y, Z thing beyond financial targets or anything?

• 1:13:15Speaker 01

  There's a, there's a ton of them. And I think this will resonate with a lot of people that maybe are earlier in the company journey, which is building a, a company that's at scale with, you know, thousands of people and thousands of customers and, or users and.

• 1:13:36Speaker 01

  You know, big employee base and good revenue and brand. It's it's so hard and it's such a struggle and it's so rare and a big accomplishment. But once you get that, the what you can do with that is feels like,

• 1:13:56Speaker 01

  to me at least, it feels like this it's the potential is even much higher. You know, a simple way to say it is, you know, getting to a billion dollars in revenue is really hard. But if you want to get to 20 billion in revenue, 50 billion in revenue, you have to get to one.

• 1:14:15Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:14:15Speaker 01

  So it means you're on the path. And that's like the impact you can have and the value you can deliver to investors and to customers at 20 billion and 50 billion dollars. That's incredible, but you've built the foundation. You've built the billion dollar, whatever the number is, billion dollar foundation. It's like, what a challenge it would be to get to 20 and 50 and whatever metric you want to use. But all the pain and all the uncertainty in the beginning, you really get motivated to take advantage of it and not let all that pain and struggle go to waste by under underliving or undershooting your potential.

• 1:14:51Logan Bartlett?

  When the in 50 years or 15 years or whatever it is, when Okta's at the, you know, you're you're no longer leading it, someone else is in the seat. Or you you reflect on what Okta has has done and and accomplished along the way. Is there is there something that you hope that the the business will have done? And you would have done as a leader that you sort of look back and say, hey, this is really what I hope we would have accomplished with the business?

• 1:15:23Speaker 01

  Well, this may be a little specific to our industry, but I deeply am motivated by and believe that it all needs to be simpler. It's it's it's too complicated. It's too complicated to stitch together all this technical identity, security, infrastructure. And not only is it too complicated, it's which means it's costly. It's leading to bad outcomes. I mean, why are there? There's many reasons there are so many security breaches despite billions and billions of dollars in cyber tools.

• 1:15:59Speaker 01

  One of the big reasons that it's too complicated to put it all together in a secure way. People are building these, companies are building these applications and these IT infrastructures and they're over many years and they're buying companies and inheriting legacy technology and it's super complicated. And if we can be part of this solution to simplify and standardize it and make it all snap together easily and make it all cheaper and easier and actually have better, fewer security breaches and more robust infrastructure, that would be amazing. And that's gonna take, and that's, that's an industry-wide goal. That's, one company is not gonna do that.

• 1:16:44Speaker 01

  It's like leading a movement to do that, which is, I think that's very cool. It's very motivating.

• 1:16:48Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's a noble mission.

• 1:16:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Logan Bartlett?

  This stuff, hiring, firing, promoting.

• 1:16:55Speaker 01

  Super important, yeah.

• 1:16:57Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah, motivations, I think is just a really, I think people appreciating that there's no, there's no point in the journey at which you, that you necessarily feel, you just recalibrate to new competitors or new milestones and all that stuff. Getting to that is an intrinsic motivation and that the inputs or the means are.

• 1:17:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, and early on you have this idea that you've arrived.

• 1:17:25Logan Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  You get established. And that is true to some degree, like you get to a point where you feel like it's less likely that it's all gonna fall apart.

• 1:17:32Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:33Speaker 01

  But, I don't know, I mean, you always have challenges.

• 1:17:36Logan Bartlett?

  And you recalibrate to a new, I remember like, if only I got to be a general partner at a venture firm, then I, you know, I could exhale. And then you recalibrate, you recalibrate the whole new set of people and you're like, oh wait, no, now, now I'm no longer competing with my associates at Battery, I'm now competing with, you know, Pat Grady or Doug Leoni or Ben Horowitz or whoever it is, right? And it's like, that's a whole new set of people to reorient and now you have all this same insecurities manifested in a different way of out like trying to establish, so I'm sure company, I mean, every company seems to have that same journey.

• 1:18:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:18:11Speaker 01

  It's what, I mean, that's why it's such a satisfying job.

• 1:18:15Logan Bartlett?

  Have you?

• 1:18:15Speaker 01

  It's all continuously challenging.

• 1:18:17Logan Bartlett?

  Have you found IPO? We didn't talk about that necessarily. Has that been a rewarding, like something that you've, are you in the pro IPO camp or?

• 1:18:28Speaker 01

  SaaS recurring revenue is a very good thing.

• 1:18:30Logan Bartlett?

  Yes, I'm a fan.

• 1:18:31Speaker 01

  I can't imagine trying, I can't imagine trying to manage investor expectations without predictable recurring revenue. That would be a challenge. That being said, I think it's very simple to me. It's like you paid your employees in stock. You gotta let them get paid.

• 1:18:51Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  It's, it's almost like a loyalty thing. You got, you gotta get them paid. And I think every other format of tender offers and secondary markets, you know what they all are? They're all a bad approximation of this thing we have called the public stock market that lets people get paid in a regulated way. That's, you know, there's some controls to prevent fraud, et cetera, et cetera. So just to take advantage of that.

• 1:19:14Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:15Speaker 01

  And so if you have the predictable business and you also, you do have to run the company in a way that's governance and, you know, but you probably want to do that anyways. We did that at Okta, like we kind of knew what we wanted to do. We ran it well and we didn't have these problems. We didn't have these concerns that we weren't going to be able to have compliance.

• 1:19:31Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:32Speaker 01

  Certification. So, and I think it also for our business too, I think it helped the, it does help the perception. People are buying security software and infrastructure software. It's a public company with audited financials and it's in the news a little bit, you know, doing some earnings every three months. It's a good thing, I think.

• 1:19:47Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Speaker 01

  And it hasn't felt, it hasn't felt, it's been, you know, seven years, eight years next, next spring. It hasn't felt, it hasn't felt super constraining. You know, people say like, oh, you know, you can't, you can't invest as much money as you'd like to. It hasn't felt that way for us.

• 1:20:07Logan Bartlett?

  It's all kind of expectation setting, right?

• 1:20:09Speaker 01

  It's, yeah, it's, and it's, and it's, by the way, not that different when you're setting expectations for your VC investors. When you have five million AR.

• 1:20:18Logan Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:18Speaker 01

  You want to like, you don't want to under promise, you want to under promise and over deliver. You want to set realistic expectations. You want to be consistent in your messaging. You want to balance both short-term reality with what the business is doing with long-term potential in a way that's clear and not confusing. And so a lot of it's similar, but.

• 1:20:40Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, I think those are my thoughts on that.

• 1:20:42Logan Bartlett?

  It's interesting. Okay. Well, thanks for doing this.

• 1:20:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. It was fun. I enjoyed it.

• 1:20:50Logan Bartlett?

  Thank you for joining this episode of the Logan Bartlett Show with co-founder and CEO of Okta, Todd McKinnon. If you enjoyed this discussion, we'd really appreciate it if you shared this episode with anyone else that you think might find it interesting, as well as subscribe on whatever podcast platform you're listening to us on. We look forward to seeing you back here next week on another episode of the Logan Bartlett Show. Have a great weekend, everyone.