It’s with some nervousness but more excitement that I am starting a Substack! I’m not sure yet what direction this will take, but I want to primarily use this as a forum to share my thoughts and perspectives on company building, founders, and investing.
I anticipate a good amount of my writing will be informed by my experience at Okta. I was fortunate to spend 8 years there (a lifetime in today’s world). I joined the company when we were ~200 employees in 2013, when we were a single product company with 3 floors of office space at 301 Brannan Street in SoMa in SF. By the time I parted ways in October 2021 we were a $40B market cap, multi-product business with 4,000+ employees, doing $1.4B in runrate revenue growing 60+% per year, with offices and teams around the world. And to top it off, my team had just executed Okta’s capstone M&A transaction (so far!), our $6.5B all-stock acquisition of Auth0.
Being a part of that early team at Okta was a truly transformative experience personally and professionally, with countless learnings about what it means to build a world-class enterprise software company that I hope to share here. As with anything, my writing will reflect my own experience, and I definitely don’t speak on behalf of the company!
Please reach out anytime to share your own thoughts, advice, topics to cover (or people to discuss them with), and feedback. Thank you!
would love to hear stories! you had a unique front row seat at a generational SaaS company.