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Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: All your existing K-12 services clients came with you to this product?

James Litton: Yes, because we were extremely focused on the customer. That continues to be a central part of the Identity Automation ethos. It’s not just paying lip service to it, but actually living up to that. I think the real testimony to how effective we were is that we had about 80 customers, and 79 of them came over.

Sramana Mitra: You had done all these projects to set up all their identity management. It was done on others people’s products like Novell and Sun. What was in your product that came on to? What was special about your product?

James Litton: There’s a couple of reasons why they came. First and foremost, I would say that relationship management is a huge piece of it. When it came to the technical justification for making a jump from product A to Identity Automation was because we made a good technical case for why that made sense. That was primarily focused on ease of use. The customer didn’t have the capability to self-manage most of these other very large solutions once they were in place. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: What happened to the Jabber project?

Andre Durand: Jabber continued on even in my absence. I left in 2002 to start Ping.

Sramana Mitra: When you left to sail around with your friend and wife, you quit Jabber?

Andre Durand: No, I just took a sabbatical. I just said, “I’ve been at this for 10 years. My childhood friend is now sitting on the boat that we dreamed about when we were 14. I’m going to go spend some time with him.” I was just literally taking a few months off. I planned to come back in January.

Sramana Mitra: While on the boat, what struck you? What was the genesis of the the Ping idea?

Andre Durand: I don’t know if you’ve ever spent any time on a sailboat. It’s a very glamorous visual. >>>

Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Was K-12 also consulting services and implementing identity management solutions kind of projects?

James Litton: Yes. Keep in mind that as we were doing this, we were doing projects for all types of organizations. It’s just that the majority of them was K-12.

Sramana Mitra: The business, however, were these projects? You were basically consulting services for these projects?

James Litton: Exactly. I think this is really instrumental to the story. Consulting companies are a dime a dozen. Most consulting companies have this basic philosophy of doing whatever it takes to get into the account. Once you get into the account, you then change order the customer to death. We took the approach that we’re not going to operate that way. >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: How long did this continue?

Andre Durand: We actually did about $600,000 worth of business that first year.

Sramana Mitra: That’s pretty significant. These were all from newsletter ads?

Andre Durand: This all began with a black and white, half page advertisement that went into a little newsletter of 20 pages that shipped once a quarter to about 5,000 bulletin board operators.

Sramana Mitra: Wow! That means that you tapped into a real need in the market. Who were these people who wanted to buy your software? What did you learn about the customer base?
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Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: The fact that you decided to go in this direction, does this have anything to do with your background in facilities management?

James Litton: No. The decision to go down this path was multi-faceted. I had known Troy since the Coca Cola days. We had stayed connected. Troy had really grown up around identity management. In fact, the project that I had him working on for me, whenever I was at Coke, was an identity management project. It was helping to move us from one computing platform, which was a NetWare platform, over to a Microsoft platform.

Troy stuck with that in his career. He was bored with what he was doing at Veritas, which is why he decided to leave and start Identity Automation helping Novell in their implementation. We saw this opportunity in the market. We thought, “We could actually turn that into a real revenue generating business.” >>>

Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 1)

If you haven’t already, please study our Bootstrapping Course and Investor Introductions page. 

The identity space is heating up, especially because of the explosion in cloud services in the market. Ping Identity is at a $100 million annual run rate already. Read the story of Andre’s entrepreneurial journey.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised, and in what kind of background?

Andre Durand: I was born in Seattle. My father was a newly minted PhD in Math teaching at the university. A year after that, we moved down to Southern California where my father got a job at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I grew up in Santa Barbara.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do for college?
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Bootstrapping Using Services From Houston: Identity Automation CEO James Litton (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You quit this job in 1990 and did something else?

James Litton: I then went to work for Continental Airlines where I moved into a Systems Analyst role. This gave me experience with a very large enterprise organisation. I was in their credit management group and helped them manage their IT infrastructure. I did that until 1991. I then went and worked for Bisys Loans and Services, which is another company in the mortgage industry.

There, I took on a full IT leadership role. I became the IT Manager and the Principal Systems Engineer. I was wearing multiple hats. I ran most of the infrastructure. These early years were incidentally quite critical because, from my perspective, having a hands-on role and really understanding the technology is important. At Bisys, it involved starting these IT organisations from scratch. I was at Bisys until 1993. >>>

Bootstrapping an IoT Company from North Carolina: Bob Witter, CEO of Device Solutions (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: This is very risky business though – trying to act venture capitalist in startups and building their products against sweat equity. That’s, business-wise, quite a risky move.

Bob Witter: It’s a lot of fun. We have never had any investment dollars, so the risk is our own. We’ve taken a different approach than, perhaps, a lot of big businesses take today. When our Board of Directors sits around the table, our interest is in keeping people employed before profit. Certainly, we need to, at least, break even to make that happen, and we’ve been fortunate enough to do that over the years. In 2009, we had a little trouble. We asked our employees to go to a four-day work week and take a 20% cut in pay. Myself and my founder went without salary for six months in 2009.

Sramana Mitra: That’s during the recession.
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