All right, welcome to a new episode of the Opening Bid Unfiltered podcast. I'm Yahoo Finance executive editor Brian Sazi and like I always say, this podcast will make you a smarter investor period and the podcast has hit the road again. This time to San Francisco Dreamforce. I think this is my sixth or fifth, maybe seventh Dreamforce, whatever it is, it all has just merged together and it's just a lot of cool thoughts on technology and you never know who you're going to find here at Dreamforce. And this year we got Okta co-founder and CEO Todd McKinnon. Todd, good to see you here at Dreamforce. Not your first clearly.
You were at the first Dream Force, right?
I was at the first Dream Force.
It was much smaller. I remember it like it was yesterday. The spirit, the energy was the same. It was just 400 people instead of 50,000.
We were actually trying to get people to use enterprise apps on the web. That was the big pitch. You can do it all in a browser. You can do enterprise technology just like Amazon. That was the pitch.
What did you do? What did you do at Sal?
I ran engineering. I was hired to be the first non-founder before I joined Salesforce. One of the co-founders, Parker Harris. He's still at Salesforce today. He was running engineering and I was the first non-founder running engineering. In 2003, there were 15 engineers at Salesforce in those early days.
And I'm not trying to date you. I'm not at all like what would the head of engineering do? What were you trying to build?
It was going to start to scale. The company was really working, the revenue was 100 million and growing quickly, and we really needed to take the engineering from 15 to 500, which is what we did over the next five or six years. So it was really about scale, hire people. It was really working, customers were getting value from it, the cloud was starting to take over. It was about scale, scale, scale, grow.
How did you know? Exciting times in those days. How did you know that you wanted to have founded Okta? What was that light bulb moment?
It was a continuation of that progress. Our industry saw this wave of the internet and the next wave after the internet was cloud computing in the enterprise. And I saw this opportunity to build what really would become an essential service if companies and organizations and people were going to adopt cloud computing. And that was identity. This identity layer was critical to secure it, to make it easy to use, and to help take all the legacy stuff on premise, all the databases, all the servers and move it into the cloud. It was a huge shift that took the industry 10, 15 years, and now we're on to the next shift.
Yeah, it feels like I was just here last year. We were over there, crowds were same size. But Salesforce had just launched Agent Force and I had never seen anything like that before. Now a year in, it's really spread through organizations. What type of what is this technology doing to a company like Okta and how are you changing?
Well, I think everyone is incredibly excited not just for the progress we've all had with agents in the enterprise and seeing the automation and seeing the business metrics especially in something Salesforce is very strong at which is customer support and automating support workflows. And you heard the announcements today about voice, about what Agent Force can do with voice now. It's game changing in the call center. But I think the more exciting thing is all the other places it can apply to and really automating your entire company process from your products to your go to market funnel, your top funnel, how you prosecute sales leads, how you equip your sales team to better go after new customers, how you onboard the customers, how you support the customers end to end. I think that's, as much progress we've made, we're more excited about all of the areas that this technology can revolutionize companies and help us grow and help us decrease costs and help us win against our competitors. That's why everyone's walking around here so excited.
Yeah. I can't believe how fast things are moving. And I'm not in the tech industry like you are. Are you surprised by how fast the pace of innovation is going?
It is both exciting and unnerving at times. I think we got to remember that this is the biggest platform shift since the internet since the mid 90s and late 90s and 2000s. This is the biggest shift. It's bigger than mobile. It's bigger than social. It's massive. But it's not like it's happening on it's building on those foundations. So when you see apps like ChatGPT get to 800 million users, it's because everyone has a mobile phone. When you see companies innovate and build out amazing technologies, it's because we have clouds from Amazon and Google. When you see enterprises deploy Agent Force at scale, it's because they've spent 10 years putting in Salesforce.com and unifying their data silos and on and on. So in a sense every revolution should go faster because it's building on the infrastructure and the facilities and the capabilities we learned in the last revolution. So we all need to keep upping our game and remember that it is a revolution but it's not the same revolution. It's a new revolution and it kind of inspires us all to work harder and go faster.
What unnerves you about this particular moment? Is it AI guardrails? Is it the valuation some of these private companies are getting? Or is it just all of it?
I think the biggest thing for companies is balancing what got them to where they are versus what they have to change to be better and revolutionary. So like at Okta, we grew up revolutionizing identity in the cloud and helping companies adopt the cloud and helping companies adopt platforms like Salesforce and being that trusted source of identity inside of companies for people and customers and employees and external partners and then making sure that works across not just access management but all of the categories of identity from governance to privilege access management. And really we're selling something new. It's a new category of identity. It's called the identity security fabric. You can think about it as before Salesforce defined the category of CRM. There were separate categories of Salesforce automation, customer support, marketing, and then there was a new category that came along called CRM which encompassed all of it. So we're doing the same thing for identity. It used to be privilege access management, identity governance and there's companies that specialize in that. We have this new thing for the world. It's this identity security fabric and it takes all of the identities, all of the use cases and all of the resources in a company and makes sure they're all secure. So that's amazing. But at the same time, that fabric has to work with this new revolution, which is this agentic revolution. So from a company perspective, how much time do you spend on perfecting this concept of a fabric versus actually supporting agents in the fabric? Because every customer wants both. They want complete coverage. They want what you've been doing, but they also want something totally new, agents in the fabric, and they want governance, visibility, and control for their agents. So how do you do both? And I think where a lot of companies trip up is they don't get that balance right. They don't focus enough on the new or they divert too much focus from what they've been doing and leave the core of what they've been doing to maybe languish. And I think striking that balance is something we try to get right.
Well, Mark Benioff in his keynote he really laid out the next iteration of Agent Force and how he's going to deploy it inside of companies. Have you seen a pickup in your business? Not only Salesforce, a lot of its competitors also rolling out various agents. Have you seen that correlate to more business for Okta?
Yeah, so this is the biggest platform shift since the internet and I think with every platform shift customers want three things. They want innovation. They don't want to be left behind in their old core business, they don't want to be wedded to the old ways. So they want innovation. They also want security. They want to make sure, we're spending $200 billion a year as a cyber security industry and there's still breaches. So we need security. So innovation, security, and they want control. They want to be in charge of their own destiny. So you see that with this agentic revolution as well. People want innovation. They're getting a ton of innovation from Salesforce. They also want security. They want to make sure that if they use Salesforce's infrastructure or other infrastructures, it's all secure. And they also want control. And this is the key part because they want to have flexibility as the technology is moving so quickly and as everyone's coming out with new things all the time, they want to have freedom and flexibility and to be able to choose the best innovation because we all know fundamentally we're going to want security and control. But we're probably going to want to make different choices from different vendors as everyone innovates. We know that there's going to be many vendors that power the AI revolution. You see the announcements all the time.
Yeah. I think even like William Sonoma had a chatbot called Olive. I guess you go to the website and you can find a recipe or it just is wild.
Well, they have to, right? Because William Sonoma, Restoration Hardware is going to do it better, IKEA is going to do it better, all these companies are investing too. And when IKEA invests or Restoration Hardware invests or William Sonoma invests, they all want those three things. They want innovation, they want security and control. What we found is that by making sure this concept of the identity security fabric extends to this agentic revolution, we can solve these fundamental problems that every customer is going to have security and control while giving them the choice to choose the best platform for them to get that innovation.
You mentioned voice and it's good to see I guess agents finally talking. How important is it that these agents do talk and it actually works?
Yeah. Let me ask you a question. How much do you use voice on your phone? Use it all the time? I barely ever use it. I'm still texting. I'm not the person that will talk into my phone and text and send it. It just doesn't work right yet. Yeah. I think that's changing. I'm very excited about the innovations in voice. I think the reason you and I don't use voice on our phone a lot is because it's never worked very well in the past. Horrible. You know, you ask your phone for something and it says like I can search the web for that. Like thanks, I didn't need that. I didn't need your help for that. I could do that myself. But if you think about what these models are doing now with voice, it's amazing. This is back to the customer support thing and automating the support center. I mean now we have real voice that works and understands you and can take action. It's pretty amazing. I think that's going to come to all of our devices whether it's our phones, whether it's our call centers, whether it's our computers.
I still yell when I call when I need phone service. I'm still yelling. I recently called up my financial manager person and I guess I got an agent or someone. That's a lot of pressure managing the finances of the guy from Yahoo Finance. Just give me somebody to talk to, man. Like it all worked.
You just call say person person.
That's getting better, Brian. That will get better. Customer service, please.
We sometimes in this revolution we forget the basics like we forget that you can take a self-driving car. This voice is going to work.
I just wanted to be consoled a bit. I didn't want an agent doing it. But how I mean that is important, voice is the next iteration.
