Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio, news. SailPoint is back on the market. The security company went public for the second time last week. The first time it went public back in 2017, before Thoma Bravo took SailPoint private in 2022. Thoma Bravo, of course, has been very much looking for this IPO market to open back up, and SailPoint is a critical part of that. For more on the decision to go public again, we're joined by Mark McClain, SailPoint's CEO. When you spoke to our colleagues over here at Bloomberg News, you talked a lot about the use of proceeds, the grand ambition here about going public. At the end of the day, what do you think the first priorities are for you? Is it paying down that debt or looking for expansion opportunities?
I think the primary was to pay down debt, but I think we see ourselves kind of as a long-term growth business. So in some ways, it was putting some fuel in the tank and kind of getting ourselves ready for what we believe is a multi-year growth opportunity. So yeah, it was kind of get the debt down to a manageable level and then get ready for future growth.
I do want to talk about the timing a little bit. Of course, this is your return to the public markets. You listed on the New York Stock Exchange in 2017, then you went private when Thoma Bravo acquired you in 2022. Now you're back again, which is a pretty quick turnaround. Just talk us through that.
Yeah, I think, to be honest, Katie, and by the way, just a piece of data you probably know, we were owned by Thoma Bravo before the first IPO, so it's a little bit of a back-and-forth thing, not a terribly common story, I guess. But I think we were kind of, you know, when we did the go-private in '22, thinking of a little longer time frame to come back. And I think two things are true. One is we've been fortunate to have a very good, you know, amount of growth over the last few years and kind of shifted to a more profitable profile, so that kind of desirable scale, growth, profit profile that markets like. And then, of course, the markets have warmed up a bit, obviously, in the last three to four months. And so I think it was that combination of being ready, having kind of an hopefully attractive profile for the public markets, and then kind of ready to pull that trigger when the market started to warm up, and we felt like the time was right to do that.
You can tell your story, Mark, with your growth, and, you know, Wall Street likes to see the numbers. But in terms of just the elevator pitch, I always find it so difficult to understand what these software solutions providers do. And in your notes it says you equip modern enterprise to seamlessly manage and secure access to applications. Like, what is that? What does that mean? How do you tell your butcher what your company does?
I usually say my grandmother, but, you know, she's deceased, and probably the butcher is a better metaphor. I think at the end of the day, you know, there's what everybody does all day, every day, and they get this, is they log into systems, right? We all have a whole bunch of accounts and passwords, so everybody gets that concept. What SailPoint's focused on is ensuring that in an enterprise, a mid- to large-scale enterprise where there might be tens or even hundreds of thousands of human identities, and now increasingly what we call non-human identities, you know, think, you know, software programs, and now AI agents is all the rage, all those identities have access to systems and data, right? That's generally some kind of an account and a password. Well, keeping all of that accurate and what's called in the security realm least privilege, in other words, any identity should have exactly what they need or it needs to do the job and no more. Well, keeping that accurate and adhering to security policy is really hard, and that's what big enterprises have struggled with because all those systems are from different vendors, right? They've got Workday and Salesforce and ServiceNow and Microsoft apps and Oracle and all kinds of stuff from 20 or 30 or 50 years of it, and getting all that to stay in sync and to be secure and accurate is a very hard problem. That's what SailPoint's focused on, is the right access to the right data for every identity in their enterprise.
