The same will be the case for the current recession. And during our time of 2008/2009/2010, you had a whole generation of companies (founded). “If you look at the dotcom bust of the 2000/2001 timeframe, there were some great companies to come out there. But in those times when there is a lot of dislocation, those are actually great opportunities,” Mr Kerrest said. And he talks about being one of the earliest portfolio companies of Andreesen Horowitz, and how Okta chairman Ben Horowitz celebrated 10 years on the company’s board last February. He talks a lot about the beginnings of Okta and the turmoil of the GFC recession. In this episode of the Commercial Disco podcast, I spoke to Frederic Kerrest about a bunch of cool stuff ranging from the prospects for mail-in voting in the US presidential elections, why Australia’s system of compulsory voting is awesome, and why the identity management industry sucked before Okta launched. Frederic Kerrest: Periods of economic downturn and dislocations are ripe for innovation In the 11 years since establishing Okta with co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon the company has grown – in rough numbers – to 2,700 employees, 9,000 customers, US$800 million in revenue and a Nasdaq-listed market cap north of US$25.5 billion. The point of telling it here relates to the opportunities for transformational companies to get a start during periods of economic downturn and turmoil.īecause here we are sitting in the middle of a pandemic, a recession, and economic turmoil of as-yet unknown depth or duration.įrederic Kerrest is the co-founder, executive vice-chairman and chief operating officer at Okta. So these two things became important planks in the Okta origin story. When identity cloud provider Okta was founded in San Francisco in 2009, the United States was still struggling its way out of recession after the global financial crisis and the idea that identity management would be moved into the cloud was still considered controversial.
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