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What the heck just happened to shares of identity management King Okta tonight? Okta is moving lower in after hours trading, despite reporting what looked to me like a pretty strong first quarter. The only possible negative was that the company only maintained, rather than raised, its full year sales guidance, even as it raised the rest of its full year outlook. It seems to me like a silly reason for such a big sell off, given that the CEO is just being prudent. But don't take it from me. Earlier today we had a chance to speak to Okta co-founder, chairman and CEO Todd McKinnon to get a better look at the quarter and the latest trends in his industry. Please take a look. All right, so Todd, I've got to tell you, when I say better in the quarter, what I actually meant is that I want people to start before they decide. Wait a second. Revenue guidance this quarter was a true blowout. This quarter had so many new customers. This quarter also reflected to me the problem. People were worried about the federal government. None of that happened. Talk about the huge clients you had, the big growth you had.
Yeah, we're very excited about the performance in Q1. Four of our top ten deals in the quarter were with public sector, which is very strong for us, a strong part of our business, and two of the top three. So overall, the performance by Okta is very consistent with Q4, where we had great momentum with large customers. Our million dollar plus cohort of customers in Q1 grew 20%, the fastest growing cohort. And again, if you zoom out, this is because identity is even more important than ever. We talk about security. Identity is security. To be secure, you have to have a solid identity foundation. And now in this world of AI, these agents are going to be everywhere, and they're going to need access to everything. And you have to have Okta to give that access to this eccentric future we're embarking upon.
I know that both Jensen Huang at Nvidia and Marc Benioff at Salesforce are deeply focused right now on this whole problem with the genetics. I would think that an agenda could easily, let's say, frame you or actually become you. And you are probably one of the few companies, if the only company that can stop that.
Yeah, well, everyone's very excited about the potential, but with all the great potential of technology comes risks and uncertainty. And where we are in the industry right now, Jim, is that we're moving from a world of prototype to production. Everyone is excited about the prototypes of what these agents can do for us, and they're popping up everywhere. They're writing software, they're doing customer support in the prototype world, and now we're moving them to production. And when you move into production, what that means is you have to give them access to real systems, real data, real customer data, your customer data. And the only way to do that securely is with Okta, and with a great identity management foundation that can manage the right access not only to your people and your customers, but also your agents.
Is that one of the reasons why you added 70 customers with over $100,000 in annual contract value, which is an incredibly fast rate there?
See, yeah, these customers, large and small and everything in between. They're seeing this issue of going from prototypes to production. And when you go to production, you have to have a real solution in place. It's not just enough to make it look good in the demo or make it look good in the user conference. It actually has to work. And part of it working is solid security and solid access management, which is what we've been talking about, Jim, for years and years and years. And now first, it was cloud transformation that made the imperative for identity stronger than ever. Then we started talking about security and how to manage this new perimeter. You couldn't use a firewall. You had to have identity and you had to have strong authentication. Now we're in this AI world where the potential is tremendous. But now that we move from prototypes to production, the risks are high as well.
Now let's talk about some of the things that seem to be disconcerting to people, but maybe shouldn't be if they're explained. You talk about in the forward guidance. One of the reasons why you're being prudent is because your go to market specialization that was rolled out. Now people say, well, wait a second, did it not go? Was it not rolled out? Well, is Todd himself unhappy with it? Can you explain why someone should not be as concerned about this?
We have these two amazing platforms with the Okta platform and the Xero platform, both of which have become much more powerful in the last few years. So specialized sellers are more able to convey the value and perform better over many, many quarters. And specialization is off to a strong start. Auth0 had a really strong quarter and the pipeline built throughout the quarter, and we're very optimistic about the rest of the year. The world is a more uncertain place, Jim, than it was just a month ago or two months ago. And I think in the forward guidance in the next quarter and the next couple quarters, we're being conservative. But that doesn't make us less excited about the long term future for our business. Identity is security, especially in an AI world, and we're more excited than ever.
