Venture Voice

I can still remember logging in to PeopleSoft at my first job to see what deductions had come out of my paycheck. Now, all these years later, I’m interviewing the man who wrote that very code. Todd McKinnon, my guest on this episode of Venture Voice, began his career at PeopleSoft before moving on to Salesforce and ultimately founding Okta. Todd’s company is now worth over $25 billion. This episode takes you on Todd’s entrepreneurial journey, from the Powerpoint deck he presented to his wife (subtitle: “Why I’m not crazy” for quitting my job at Salesforce) to the initial product idea (with a name that sounded “like a French perfume”) to successfully completing an IPO. Listen now on Apple Podcasts. “You had to be able to have enough confidence that you’d be able to build this iconic tech company around this initial idea. A lot of initial ideas — people will pay for them but they don’t have that long-term staying power. They become a feature.”Todd McKinnon is the founder and CEO of Okta, a $25 billion publicly