The following interview is a conversation we had with Eric Olden, CEO/Founder of Strata Identity, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $42M Raised to Build the Identity Orchestration Category

Eric Olden
What we’re doing at timescale is we’re redefining the database category. 

Brett
Monte Carlo’s pioneering category called data observability. 

Eric Olden
The subcategory interview intelligence is new. We are the leader. There’s a lot of category creators that are no longer with us. They’re in the great category graveyard.

Brett
Somewhere in each episode, we’ll learn the backstory behind the B2B founders category creation efforts. We’ll learn what worked, what didn’t, and tactical insights for how you can build a winning category strategy. I’m your host, Brett, CEO of Front Lines Media. Now let’s jump in today’s episode. Hey, founders, and thanks for listening to another episode of Category Visionaries. Today we’re speaking with Eric Olden, CEO and Founder of Strata Identity, an identity orchestration platform that’s raised over 42 million in funding. Eric, thanks so much for chatting with me today. 

Eric Olden
Thanks for having me, Brett. Looking forward to it. 

Brett
Not a problem. Super excited as well. So I see you started a company all the way back in 1995 when you were a student at Berkeley. So I think that’s a perfect place.

Eric Olden
For us to start. 

Brett
Take us back to 1995 Berkeley. What was going on in your world? 

Eric Olden
Yeah, that was a lot of things happening that year in 95 was right after Netscape had gone public and everyone was trying to figure out this worldwide web thing. And my best friend and I from high school, were trying to figure out what is the most important missing ingredient in this new Internet, in this web world. And we realized that it would be security. And we felt that at that time, in the mid nineties, there was this period where it didn’t last long, but everyone said, oh, the Internet’s just for academic. You’re not going to use it for commercial purposes. And I thought, well, that’s not going to last. And the reason that people will hesitate to do things of substance on the Internet would be that they couldn’t secure it. And so we locked into a situation where we started. 

Eric Olden
Given that I was a child of Silicon Valley grew up there, knew a lot of people, and importantly, just understood that starting and founding companies is something that is a thing, it’s something you can do. And we just jumped right into it. And one thing led to the next, and two kids turned into their running a good idea. Next thing you know, were running a company with about 300 employees and were to go public. And then the.com crash happened and learned a whole lot about how the world works in the other side of growth and traction. And we wound up not doing an IPO, but instead we had that company acquired, and that was a good kind of start in entrepreneurship and software and security, and then doing it ever since. 

Brett
Were many of the founders listening in and myself included? You know, weren’t really active founders, active entrepreneurs during that big.com bubble and then the burst that followed, what was it like? Can you try to like, take us back and tell us what Silicon Valley was like back then? What it was like to be in tech in the early nineties? Like any stories you can tell or anything, just to paint a picture for those of us who weren’t active at that time, I think would be super fascinating for the listeners. 

Eric Olden
Yeah, it was a wild time. There was just so much enthusiasm for anything that was web related. And the trick wasn’t getting people excited, it was finding something of substance. And we saw a lot of really just terrible ideas get a huge amount of capital and attention. And there was this company, Web van, that I think embodied that, where people thought, and pets.com, for similar reasons, where it was like, hey, everyones got pets, everyone needs groceries. Why dont we build companies that will make it easy to buy pet food online, as if the logistics of that don’t matter, and shipping a heavy bag and making any kind of margin would ever work. So what were finding at that time was how to sift out the bad ideas and find the ones that were substantial. And those were the people that we focused selling to. 

Eric Olden
And as a result, my company, securant, we focused just on the Fortune 500 enterprise and turned out to be a really good decision because they pay their bills. And a lot of companies, the dotcom startups, that flamed out very quickly in the 2000 2001 timeframe, if you didn’t have a real business model, then theres no help for you and you became a pets.com dot. So I think the big lesson then was, hey, lets focus on substance as opposed to sizzle and hype. And I think that has served me over the last 2030 years, because now we go into the modern technology landscape and the new hotness is AI. 

Eric Olden
And what I see there is a lot of what we saw in the nineties where people are now just saying whatever the business problem may be, and they’re going to throw some AI onto it, as if that somehow makes it a good thing, and it doesn’t. So I think where we’ve been really focusing is the intersection of things like a breakthrough technology, like artificial intelligence and generative AI and machine learning, and saying, hey, where are those things applied? In a way that actually is doing something, a substance and not just a buzzword. So that was an interesting lesson that learned in those early days. And it was fun, though. We were in our twenties, just graduated college, lived in San Francisco. We were some of the first software startups in the city proper. Right? 

Eric Olden
Silicon Valley is more on the peninsula, if you’re familiar with the area down south, so to say. But were having a great time in San Francisco, and there was just so much energy and so much excitement, it was hard not to get caught up in it. And then when the music stopped with the.com crash, that was really interesting to see how quickly it unwound. And one of the funniest things that I’ll never forget was going out to bars and stuff around in my twenties. I was more of a thing. But after the.com wipeout, some friends of mine and I were at a restaurant in San Francisco, and the waitress was asking us for our drink orders, and everyone just ordered water. So she goes, oh, do you want barking water? It’s a fancy place. Everyone’s like, no, no, tap water is fine. 

Eric Olden
She yells back to the bar, she goes, how did she say it? Can we get around for.com blowouts? I said, really? That’s quite a thing. And she’s laughing, she goes, nobody wants to spend money anymore. Everyone just lost everything in the.com crash. And so I’ll remember that. A.com blowout or.com washout. One of those two is pretty funny. 

Brett
I live in San Francisco, so I’ll have to try to go and order one of those one day. Yeah, I think every Founder who’s in tech dreams of the day that they get to ring the bell and go public. And it sounds like with that first company, which is really impressive considering how young you were, that you got very close to making that happen. What was it like the day you found out it wasn’t going to happen? 

Eric Olden
I remember that moment. I was working on the roadshow presentation and that were going to go do the offering to. And we had our investment bankers, they were helping with the narrative, and I was working on the slides. And I remember I was just in the minute on these pitch deck, and then this banker comes by and he says, hey, Erica, we’re having a board meeting right now. It was like two in the afternoon on a Thursday or something. I was like, what do you mean, a board meeting? And I walked into our conference room and the banker said, hey, we’re calling off this IPO. There’s no way in 2001 we’re going to be able to take this company out. There’s no market for it. And I just remember thinking, that’s not supposed to happen. 

Eric Olden
We’re supposed to go through this whole process and we’ve been getting ready for it and all that. I just remember having such a hard time accepting that. And afterwards, I was trying to explain to years later to my son, because I started another company in a similar category, and he was basically like, why are you doing this again, dad? This seems like, didn’t you learn your lesson? And I explained to him at the time, remember the movie Kung fu Panda, where he runs up those steps all the way, all the way, all the way, eventually gets to the top at the temple door. And that’s what I felt. We had done the work. We’d gotten all the way to the door, and right as were supposed to go through it, the door got shut and we got knocked down those steps. 

Eric Olden
And the kind of determinist, the person, the grit in me said, get up and you go back up those steps. And if you fall down, then you get back up and you go back up again. And here I am. Hard learner or slow learner, maybe, but I’m doing it for my 3rd, 4th time. So I think that was the emotional reaction that I had, was disbelief, but couldn’t accept it. And then I just wouldn’t accept it, as in, maybe I can do it with this company, but I’ll do it with the next one. If I can’t do it that one, I’ll do it with the next one. 

Eric Olden
So it just kept me going because I just really felt like there at some point I’m going to get to the top of the stairs and I’m going to get through that door into the public markets. And that’s where we’re at today. We’re not at the door yet with this company Strata, but we’ve chosen a market that we can and we’re making it happen. So a lot of motivation when you.

Brett
Have a setback, where does that motivation come from? Where does that drive come from? And what makes you just keep going back and getting up and just continuing to climb up those stairs? 

Eric Olden
I think it has some combination of your childhood and then the moment. And when I say my childhood in my example, I’m one of three boys and we had a lot of guy cousins and so forth. So a lot of rough housing, and you didn’t get what you deserved. You got what you could fight for and defend and all of that. And it’s very lord of the flies, all in a nice neighborhood in Silicon Valley, right? It wasn’t like the mean streets of Saratoga, but the reality was the competitiveness within the family. My mom, she was very good at making sure that we didn’t take things too far, but she let us sort things out on her own. So if you wanted something, you go out there and make it happen. 

Eric Olden
And if you’re waiting for someone to hand it to you, it’s never going to show up. And so I feel like that was a big part of my personality, is I have a high value or high index on tenacity. And the second thing that I think is a big motivator for me is when people would tell me I can’t do something or they say, oh yeah, that’s a great idea, but Microsoft is going to do someday. And who are you to think you can go build something that a real company, a real established entrepreneur or somebody? The whole imposter syndrome stuff that comes up. And I always thought, well, you know what? The person who says it can’t be done should get out of the way of the person trying to do it.

Eric Olden
So once I found success with choosing my own path and ignoring people who were skeptics and just stayed focused on it, then that reward cycle kicks in because you have some quick wins, some small wins that grow and medium become large. And then all of a sudden, I can’t tell you how many times I tell my team today, if it was easy, anybody would do it and we wouldn’t have an opportunity. So if it’s going really easy, probably isn’t going to work. I know that may sound counterintuitive, but it’s got to be hard or you’re just going to have too much competition or zero competition because no one else wants to do it. So I think those have been things that have really driven me.

Eric Olden
And then the moment the opportunities that I’ve been fortunate to be in the midst of are times of big shift, right? In the nineties, it was the shift to the web. In 2006, when I started my second company, simplified, it was the big shift to software as a service. And now with my current company here, since 2019, it’s all been about the move to multi cloud. And so how you find yourself situated in each of those key moments is that intersection of opportunity and hard work. So I think all of that pulled together, Brett, is what gets me motivated. I had a huge amount of coffee. I’m probably one of the more over caffeinated people in this industry, but it’s all good.

Brett
I love it. I want to switch gears now and talk a little bit about category creation. So were chatting there in the pre interview, and this fact that you’ve created categories before, that’s not very common. There’s not a lot of founders, there’s not a lot of entrepreneurs, and there’s really just, frankly, not a lot of companies that have truly created new categories. So let’s talk category creation. And can you tell us about the first category that you created? 

Eric Olden
Yeah, the first category that I would have created was in the security world. We carved out niche to solve the problem of the users and how users access applications and data. And today we call this identity management. But back in the mid, late nineties, it was web access management, or web single sign on, or web security. And the terminology was still kind of floating around there. What happened in that situation was there was a huge gap in the market of how you’re going to handle security at scale, and we not knowing any better. I was 24 at the time. We just started building software that would solve this very fundamental problem. And there’s a technology development process went through, but I think it’s more of the market. 

Eric Olden
And the category creation part that was really instructive to me was that when you find yourself trying to solve a problem that’s never been solved before, chances are there’s a big enough gap that you could build a category. And inside of a category, you have companies. Inside of companies, you have platforms. Inside of platforms, you have products inside of products, you have features in that, almost like a russian doll, where everything’s nested from smaller, encompassed by the larger one. And I say that because a lot of times, people will confuse category creation with a product creation, and I think they’re both important to do. But when you’re talking about a category, you have to assume you’re solving a really big set of problems, and not so much like a feature set as it is a problem and market fit.

Eric Olden
So a lot of times people talk about product, market fit. Well, before you can have a product in the market, you got to have the market in the first place. And the way I look at that is what is the problem that you’re solving that if you aggregate all the people solving that problem, does that create a market? And if you can basically find a huge problem, like in the case of the first company, securent, how do people log into websites when you have potentially millions of customers that had not been solved before, that was a huge problem of, okay, we’ve got to have something that companies can use to manage millions and millions of users. And then on the other side, we need to do this at enough scale that we can keep up with the growth in what our customers were doing. 

Eric Olden
So we really looked at how do we solve that problem and secure it, became embodiment of that solution. So everything we did was a way to solve that large problem of management at scale. Not very sexy, but thats in the end people would choose to solve that set of problems with software from my company or what became our competitors. So I think getting that problem first and realizing that the problem is the key to a big enough market, and you need a big enough market in order to create a category. So that was what we did in the first one. Since then, I’ve done it some other times. I was one of the co authors of a standard called SAML, which is kind of interchange trust protocol to allow people to use different web applications and do that in a secure way.

Eric Olden
Like how driver’s license in the real world. If you’re license in California, you could use that license in Colorado if you were renting a car and you’re driving around. So we built the system that would allow you to securely trust credentials that were issued by another entity and that created a category called federation. And that I think was really again created by trying to solve that problem of how do you make things work between unaffiliated entities? And that turned out to be a really big problem. The third market, the category was single sign on and identity for SaaS software as a service applications. And we did that with simplified in 2006.

Eric Olden
And the way that we approached that was to go and talk to as many companies as we could for customer development and ask them what are the security and identity problems you face now that you’re using applications like Salesforce and Webex was big at the time. And once you get enough of those interviews where you’re asking people about the problem, you start to shape up into a pattern. We say, hey, you know what, a lot of people struggle with how they’re going to identify the right users and get those only the right users into the right applications. Now you started to have this pattern shape up around. A lot of people have that problem. So that starts to feel like this is a new category and then the next kind of refinement is on the problem itself.

Eric Olden
And how do you, when you’re talking to people who are in the business, you’re not trying to get them to buy something because you don’t have anything at this point, right? It’s more of a conceptual conversation. But then once you ask them about the problem, the next and most important thing is to identify the priority. And if the problem that you’re talking about isn’t the top one, two or three priority for the people you’re talking about, then you may build a product, but it’s not important enough for people to do much with it. And so that’s like really a step. I think a lot of times people skip because they just want to build a product so quickly. And what I found is, wait, don’t start writing software. Get your hypothesis as vetted and validated as you can and document it. 

Eric Olden
And then through those notes of customer development, that’s when you can start to find what you’re going to build, the solution to the problem. And that doesn’t happen overnight. In the case of my current company Strata, we spent almost whole year just interviewing companies and say hey, what were your biggest problems? And its important to keep the company in the burn rate really small because you don’t want to short circuit anything there because its usually after a lot of discussion and analysis and conversations that you land on the thing that your first generation is going to be. And its counter to the idea of just hey, lets go build a product and the minimum viable product and use that as a way to fail quickly. I found it’s easier to work in pixels instead of code.

Eric Olden
And even before pixels with a visual design have a conversation and write things in pencil and just start to really build a breadth of knowledge. So ultimately fast forward to now you’ve got your problem defined. You know, it’s a top one, two or three priority. Then you start to build the feature requirements on what the solution should look like. Those again with your early adopters. And then once you have that pretty validated, then write the software. And the funny thing is that once you know all of those things, it’s so much faster to build the product because you’re not drawing a lot of things out. You have a lot more fidelity in your initial version of the product. That’s how I’ve seen it work, how I’ve been able to get things started. 

Eric Olden
And the last thing I’ll say about category creation is actually getting product market fit is before you scale and try and take your product to market at scale, really make sure that you get the first twelve customers right. And we call this, in practice, the dirty dozen. And it’s an easy number to remember. Twelve is a good sample size. And the reason it’s dirty is that you’re dealing with customers that are really unclear about what they want because they’ve never seen this before. And so when the new category, you’ve got to have a lot of deep engagement with those early customers, and you’re going to do some things that don’t scale, but are going to get your first early adopter successful. And then you’re trying to figure out of those twelve, who do we want to build the product for?

Eric Olden
And the answer is not all twelve. It’s usually probably somewhere between six and eight of those twelve that you say, look, they have the same problem and they’re all happy with the same solution. So let’s really focus on that subset and be able to walk away from customers who want you to do something that will spread your resources too thin. So said a lot there. I’ll pause there. What do you think, Brett? 

Brett
Love it. A lot to unpack there. This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now, if you’re a Founder, you may be thinking, I don’t have time to host a podcast. I’ve got a company to build. Well, that’s exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io slash podcast. Now back today’s episode. One thing that came to mind as you were talking there is about priorities. What do you do to make sure that it is a priority? Because what I’ve seen a lot with category creation efforts is the customers don’t always realize that they have a problem.

Brett
They don’t realize that it’s a priority to solve it. So are you prioritizing based on their actual priorities, or are you coming up with the priorities they should have? That make sense?

Eric Olden
Yeah, well, absolutely. The question does make sense, and I think you need to have a framework that you apply consistently between customers to make sure that you’re getting that priority in a consistent way. And the gold standard is whether they’ll pay for something or not. And the gold standard being that they’ll spend money with you, the next one after that is they’ll spend time with you. So I think some way that if you’re talking to people who aren’t your friend network, right, go to arms length people. And if you’re talking about something that really is a problem, you’re going to know it because they’ll take your call, they’ll do the meeting, they’ll hear your pitch. If you’re talking about something that’s not a priority for them, you’ll probably hear them say something if they’re polite. Oh, this is interesting. 

Eric Olden
We don’t want to pick this up until Q five of next year. And of course that never comes. But when you’re talking to them, the question is, okay, of all the things that you’re doing without me telling you what I want you to say, what are the top three things that you’re concerned with right now? And not all of the things, but the top three things. And you’re usually going to see a pattern by hearing that open ended question. So that’s how I’ve had a lot of success, is just being open minded, seeing what the problem is. And then once you have something, then testing that to see. Hey, I know you’ve given me some time. Would you give me more time and pilot this? And if you were able to be successful on a pilot, would you purchase that?

Eric Olden
And if you’re going to purchase it, is this a $1000 problem or a million dollar problem? And we’ll give you a good deal no matter what your answer is. But we’re just trying to understand where this fits in your budget and in the organizational priorities. So it’s a lot of conversations. So that’s why it’s another side of that dirty adjective is you got to roll your sleeves up. This isn’t something you can outsource to a marketing agency or the gardeners of the world. You’ve got to get in there and really understand your customer, understand your market, understand what you’re doing. And this is the Founder’s full time job. This isn’t something you hire somebody in to come and do this. This is where CEO, the CTO, the founders, were the ones who did all of those early conversations. 

Eric Olden
And that I think made this company what we are is that we have that common grounding in those early days to define what the problem were going to solve was, and that’s brought us to where we are today.

Brett
What about the naming of categories? So just to pick one there, identity management, let’s talk about that. Did you come up with that term or was that a term that was already being used in the market and you took it over, said we’re going to define this, we’re going to associate it with the problem, and then we’re going to build this category. Like how did the naming part work?

Eric Olden
Yeah, interesting. I’ll give you two examples. In the one that you raised, identity management, I had very little, I’d argue I had nothing to do with using those words because they weren’t a thing when we started. And were focused on the literal solving of access management to web based applications. So way we talked about it was very tactical, it was very much web access management. And that was a very literal definition of what were doing. It was only after we had sold that company, I would say in the early two thousands, where people said these kind of concerns are different than the networking concerns or the vulnerability security concerns of web security. And so the market started to call it identity management. So thats how that came about. It was what they called it after were doing it. 

Eric Olden
Fast forward to where we are today in this new category called identity orchestration, where coming into it, I was the person who coined that phrase. And the intention was very deliberate because in two words, identity orchestration, that is the literal definition of what we’re doing. We looked at the identity space in general, how users access applications and data and say, hey, that’s a world that we’re very familiar with. But the new category in that world is orchestration. And I didn’t invent orchestration, but there were companies and technologies like Kubernetes that broad orchestration as a concept. And things like Terraform Hashicorp have been orchestrating infrastructure for a long time. You had the Kubernetes world that was orchestrating compute. And I looked at that and said, well, what if were to orchestrate through automation and abstraction?

Eric Olden
Identity management and that unique combination of orchestration for identity is what created that new category of identity orchestration today. And so it depends on when is it before you start that you come up with a name or does someone else name it after the fact? So I think the terminology can happen in different ways, but we had really looked at it in a very deliberate sense to say, hey, we’re going to do for identity what orchestration did for compute or to say it real. Simply with Strata, we’re building vmware of identity management. And so once you start to use examples that people understand, they can then apply those concepts to a new category. And that’s what we did with orchestration. 

Brett
Can we unpack the marketing playbook and the thought leadership playbook that you’re running right now for orchestration? 

Eric Olden
Yeah. The long play that I would recommend to every Founder is to get your content search engine optimized. And when you are in this category creation situation, recognize that people aren’t out there searching for a solution. They don’t go to Google. And as an example, when we started 2019, no one was going into Google and searching for identity orchestration. What they were doing is they were searching for their problem. And that goes back to that whole problem market. Fitzhe and so were really mindful of those ways that our current customers, but back then, our future customers, how did they start? What were they looking for? And so we would find things that people were searching for. How to manage two identity providers. We use Okta and we use Microsoft. How do we make them work together? 

Eric Olden
And so that became an example of what people were searching for. They didn’t know that the way to do that is through orchestration. So what we did is I wrote a huge amount of content blogs that were explanations of how to use both Okta and Azure active directory together. Because when you post that blog on your website and enough people who are searching Google for that same question, they’re going to find your content. And over a long, many years of time, you start to build authority in that space. So that now when you do a search for identity orchestration, you’re going to find my company, Strata, at the top of the list. And we don’t pay Google for that. We’re not paying it in a search engine marketing standpoint. Our budget, there are next to nothing.

Eric Olden
But what people do find are all of those articles and the investment we made in long tail content, that’s really paying dividends. So now one of the most popular pieces of content is something I wrote back in 2020. And we get a lot of hits and people coming to our website and then we show them, hey, this is how you do cloud to on prem and it’s called identity orchestration. So over time, it switches from people looking for the problem and asking questions to then searching for the thing like identity orchestration. And there’s no shortcuts here. It’s really one of those things that the more content that you can create and it doesn’t have to be expensive, long form content, or just maybe five or six paragraphs. And I did all of this way before chat GPP could generate content for you. 

Eric Olden
So I think that becomes even more important, because if you’re not doing it, assume your competitors are, and you’ve got an arms race going on around who can get the best content to be the answer to the questions that people are asking. So it’s a little bit indirect from a lot of the marketing things. If you’re familiar with media and targeting, where you’re going out after something that people are looking for today, you always have to build a shadow before you have the thing that creates the shadow. It’s a little bit indirect. 

Brett
One of my favorite thought leadership tactics is branded research, original research, as some folks call it. And I see that you guys did that with the state of multicloud 2023. Can you talk to us about that project and the benefits that’s had on your category creation efforts so far?

Eric Olden
Yeah, that data, multi cloud, somc around our company, it was a piece of content that we created off of a survey that were doing to get all the customer development questions answered. So the way it started was customer development, right. We were trying to build inventory of the concerns that people have with multi cloud. And initially it was a web form, and we talked to as many people as we could. On the first year, I think it was 2020, it was our first year, and a lot of work then, aggregating and analyzing, correlating the responses. But the most important thing is that it created a piece of content that our audience could compare what they were doing with what other people were doing. And that peer comparison thing is really valuable on its own. And it’s not just an identity orchestration kind of thing. 

Eric Olden
This is something that I think you can use in virtually every category and every market. We took those surveys, and it was very manual early on, but later we found a research company that would facilitate first. It was just automating. We outsourced the survey. We had all the questions and we said, hey, look, instead of having 300 people respond to it, what about getting 500? What about getting 600? And there are organizations that can go have people do surveys. You pay them money, but you pay them money to get the people to participate in the survey, and then they help out with the aggregation and all of that. But what was really cool about the state of multicloud is we do it every year, and that allows us to show the evolution of this problem over time, or a longitudinal analysis. 

Eric Olden
So the way it looks like in a report is what are your top three concerns of security for a multi cloud? And maybe in 2023 it was a, b and c. And how does that compare to last year? Oh, well, last year it was CBA. So somethings changed in the market where what was last year not as important is now the most important and vice versa. Right. And so that helps people see where the trend is headed. And that is another lens that you only get, I think, through a serial multi year report like say, to multi cloud for us. So that’s been one of our most evergreen pieces of content. We found just really great product roadmap prioritization in all of that data, and we have dozens of that downloaded from a lead gen standpoint now every week.

Eric Olden
So it is a really powerful piece of content, not just for lead gen, but for product design and product management and all the other kind of things. So that data, multi cloud, we also have gotten a lot of success working with making business cases legitimate. And the return on investment analysis is really strong with identity orchestration. Typically for every hundred applications that you secure with orchestration, you’re going to save anywhere from seven point five to fifteen million dollars. And that’s a big claim, but our customers do it every day. It’s one thing when we tell our story that our customers have this experience, but people tend to discount when a vendor is saying what the strong Roi is. What we found was really powerful is to put it in our customers words and to put it into the hands of the analysts. 

Eric Olden
Like in our case, we use Forrester to do an arm’s length study, and to do that, they come in and they interviewed all of our customers and they got all of their metrics and details from them directly. We had no involvement in the creation of the report, and we do license it for redistribution. But that was another piece of really important content that we outsourced because we didn’t want to have questions on credibility or self interest. So those are two really key pillar pieces of content for us. SATA, multi cloud and the total economic impact analysis that Forester did. They’re the ones that we spent the most resources on, and it paid off in a big way. 

Brett
Can you share like a ballpark of what something like that cost with a forester, or is that confidential? 

Eric Olden
Well, how about I say this? I won’t say what Forrester would charge, but it’s possible in the industry to get something like that produced for around $100,000. And I’m not saying that’s what Forrester would charge you, but I think if you’re looking at allocating budget, not a $10,000 asset, it’s going to be more closer to six figures. And it takes a long time to produce too these kind of things because they are primary research by the analysts to the customers. You know, it’s going to take. In our case, it took us almost a year for the partner to produce it and it wasn’t because they weren’t working hard on it. It’s just the level of detail that they go into is really impressive. So figure it’ll take you about a year and it’ll cost maybe around $100,000. 

Brett
Outside of this project with Forrester, what does the analyst relations program look like and how important has analyst relations been in all of the other categories that you’ve created so far?

Eric Olden
Yeah, analysts and the media relations, I think are one of the most under invested in things that I think founders should look at prioritizing. And I know it seems like, man, oh, the analyst, it’s green male. If you don’t pay, you can’t play. Get over it. Because guess what, that’s just the world that we’re in. And you could argue about it, cry about it, and I say, oh, we wish it were different. We wish it was all on the merits alone. That’s just not the way the world works. And it also isn’t as bad as people suspect. Right. Even when I was at Oracle, we had infinite budgets. It doesn’t matter how much money you spend with the analysts, they’re not going to write stuff just because you’re paying them. 

Eric Olden
I think that’s the other boundary that people need to be mindful of, is, yeah, you got to invest in it. And it’s not just because you spend money. They’re going to say what you want to. Somewhere in between there is the right balance and for some companies they’re going to do more or less. But with my experience, we go really deep within that. And the other advantage I have is that having created multiple companies inside of one ecosystem of security and identity management, most of these analysts, they’ve known me for the last 10, 15, 20 years, some longer than that. Theres kind of momentum that ive got individually with the analysts. And I know not everyone coming up today is going to have that same context. So maybe thats my unfair advantage. 

Eric Olden
But I will say getting a really good ER and media relations person is one of the best investments you can do. And I know ive been working with this firm since the nineties Mark Gendron, printhead, buying them on the Internet. But he really has the relationships and he knows how to shape your message in a way that is going to be relevant to the audience and the influencers. So don’t skimp on the influencers. It may seem like you’re paying a lot for PR. It’s a different game nowadays. And I would just encourage people to give it another look. If it’s not in the top five things that you’re doing from a marketing standpoint, it really should be, I would say top three. 

Brett
In fact, before a Founder engages a pr firm, what would you say are like the top, like one, two or three questions that they should ask before they make their decision? 

Eric Olden
I think a big question that I would make sure to ask is how well does the media person know the market that you’re selling into? And I found that if you’re not working with someone as a specialist in your niche, then you’re really not going to get the same kind of return on things as you would if you’re dealing with someone who’s a specialist in an area like security. So in my case, we start with, it’s kind of unfair because I know that this individual and his firm, that’s why I’ve used him now at four or five companies. But if you don’t have your own equivalent, I would make sure that they understand the market that you’re going into. Number two, that they understand the new rules of media. It’s not about big magazine coverage. No one cares about product launches anymore.

Eric Olden
It’s all about the micro analyst, the influencer, the individuals who cover things on a more niche, boutique basis. You want to have a really deep network there. And I guess the last thing is conflicts, which you just want to be mindful that when you are working in a niche, the probability that you’re going to have competitive companies working together is the same thing with a law firm. Right. You don’t want to have a law firm that trying to represent companies that may be adversarial at some point. So I would just make sure that you don’t have any conflicts that are going to be problematic and that turns out to be less problematic than I think. A lot of times people assume that someone’s in an adjacent space that’s going to mean that they’re going to be competitive. I don’t see that personally.

Eric Olden
I’m more of a mind to take the upside that the analyst is going to know or the media person is going to know that space better than to divulge my secrets to help them launch a product because you can do that once, you’re never going to have a repeat customer. So. But I do like to ask to make sure that there’s not an obvious conflict. 

Brett
Final question for you. So we’re depressingly already at January 30. So 30 days into 2024, from a category creation perspective, what is the number one top priority for you in 2024? 

Eric Olden
The number one thing that were doing this year in 2024 is I guess we have an amazing amount of momentum right now and I dont want to take our eye off of whats working. So were really focusing and winnowing down the focus of what we’re bringing to market. The product expands, but our message contracts. And so I like to think about it as market the vision and sell the product. So we’re now made the transition to sell the product. And that means that we’ve really oriented our go to market message around a very concrete, tangible set of value propositions, solving very tactical things. Right. And that’s because we want to attach to a budget they have to solving that problem. 

Eric Olden
So 2024 has been about getting our message really small and tight so that nobody can compete with us in this one very narrow thing that we do. Happens to be that modernization niche is super lucrative because the alternative is to do things by hand and that costs tens of millions of dollars. So it’s an easy competitor to go after manual effort or do it yourself. So that’s really what we’ve been focusing on, go to market on the product. We’re really focused on deepening our moat around what identity orchestration is and doubling down on the things that we do that are the highest priority things within our customers. What they’re asking us for and what’s different now is our roadmap is so clearly driven by what our customers that we have, what they’re asking us for. 

Eric Olden
So it’s really clear, give them more of what they want. And it’s about making our platform more differentiated. Then inevitably with, when you do create a category, you’re going to have competition. And so we’re mindful now about competition in a way that we had to think about in the past. And it’s really about building features and technology into our product that makes our approach architecturally very different than everything else that’s out there. It’s a bit broader and deepening of the mount. 

Brett
Amazing. Eric, we’re way over on time, so I don’t want to keep you any longer. I’m not bullshitting you when I say this was truly one of my favorite conversations I’ve had out of like 480 interviews, I think. So thank you for being such an awesome guest. Thank you for sharing such valuable insights and really wish you and the team the best of luck in 2024 and beyond. 

Eric Olden
I really appreciate it. Brett, I had a great time. Thanks again and really enjoyed it myself. Thank you. 

Brett
No problem. Keep in touch. I’ll.