First-Time Entrepreneur at 37: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: As you have built the company, how has the evolution been? Did you start with large enterprises and come down, or did you start with the mid-market and move up? Todd McKinnon: Initially we had a lot of success with companies that had between 1,000 and 5,000 employees. In the last year and

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Thursday, June 6 – 177th 1M/1M Mentoring Roundtable For Entrepreneurs

Entrepreneurs are invited to the 177th FREE online 1M/1M roundtable mentoring session on Thursday, June 6, 2013, at 8 a.m. PDT/11 a.m. EDT/8:30 p.m. India IST. If you are a serious entrepreneur, register to “pitch” and sell your business idea to Sramana Mitra. You’ll gain straightforward feedback, advice on next steps, and she’ll answer any

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First-Time Entrepreneur at 37: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Would you provide some information about your company’s product? What did you ultimately end up building? Todd McKinnon: The product is an identity management system for applications on-premise or in the cloud. It is delivered in the cloud. It is a system of record for which users are allowed to log in to

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First-Time Entrepreneur at 37: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Once you had identified identity access as the real problem your target customers faced, what did you do next? Todd McKinnon: I built a paper prototype of the product that was based on identity management and access. I continued to have meetings based on those mock-ups and then moved to webpage demonstrations. Once

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Catching Up On Readings: A Lasting Trend?

Following on our current Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing interview, this week’s reading from TechNewsWorld discusses Google-owned Motorola’s plans to assemble the Motorola X in the United States. How much impact are such moves having on the U.S. economy? For this week’s blog posts, click on the paragraph link.

Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 7)

Sramana Mitra: The U.S. has lost millions of manufacturing jobs. How many of those do you think are coming back? Jason Blessing: That is hard to say, since there is no great data on it. But what you can point to are some of the most well-known manufacturing companies in the world like General Electric

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First-Time Entrepreneur at 37: Okta CEO Todd McKinnon (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What I am hearing you say is that you were able to have detailed conversations with a lot of potential clients based on a mock-up. I think this is an important point to make. Todd McKinnon: If you talk only about high level concepts then it is difficult to communicate with any level

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Thought Leaders in Cloud Computing: Interview with Jason Blessing, CEO of Plex Systems (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: What about smaller companies interested in providing value-added solutions on top of your systems? Is that something you are doing? Jason Blessing: It is. We have a concept called community-enabled development, which is a platform that allows partners as well as customers that are big enough to have IT shops to build extensions

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