The following interview is a conversation we had with Lasse Andresen, CEO and Founder of IndyKite, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $10 Million Raised to Empower Teams to Move Beyond Legacy Identity and Access Management

Lasse Andresen
Really a pleasure. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So I want to begin with talking with you about something very big that happened in the last few years, and that is the acquisition of your company, Forge Rock, which sold for, I believe it was reported, $2.3 billion. So tell us about the day that happened. How did that feel for you? What was going on inside of your brain and what did you do to celebrate? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, I think I had one glass of red wine and then I fell asleep. So that was the big celebration. Anyway, it was great. But also it’s kind of like, I love starting companies, and that’s why I started Indicator now. And it kind of like felt that when you close a good book that you’ve been reading not that I read a lot of books, but it was like a fantastic journey, an amazing ride. I learned so much. I probably done all the mistakes possible doing, but also, of course, doing something right. And then coming into that fantastic closure, it kind of like, yeah, I wasn’t relaxed. I really felt really nice and then kind of like, closed the book and ready for a new one. 

Brett
And what about on the day of the IPO because you went public and then you were acquired and taken private, is that correct? 

Lasse Andresen
That is correct, yes. 

Brett
What was the IPO like for you? Was that similar glass of wine and fell asleep or what was going on inside your head? And I’m asking these questions because these are the days that Founders dream of, right? They dream of their company going public. They dream of getting acquired for a billion or $2 billion. So that’s why I’m curious about these types of things. Tell us, what was it like on the IPO day? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, absolutely. And there was a little thing called COVID that was going on for a while, which was, of course, also during our IPO and Nasdaq. So, honestly, I was actually in Norway at the time of the IPO and was not allowed back in the didn’t ring the bell. Yeah, I couldn’t ring the bell. I was alone in a hotel room in Oslo in a T shirt and was broadcasted live, but I haven’t touched the bell yet. But apart from that, a fantastic evening. But it was kind of weird. It’s kind of like having this fantastic moment and not allowed to come back to the US. 

Brett
That’s crazy. Well, I guess you’re just going to have to do it again with IndyKite, right? You’re going to have to take it public and you’re going to have to ring the bell just to get the experience. 

Lasse Andresen
Of course. And that’s why I’m kind of like I told everybody, I’m going to do two more startups before I die and do a hack trick. So I’m going to do it faster, bigger, and even more fun. 

Brett
Now a couple of questions that we like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick. So over the course of your career, I’m sure you’ve dealt with a lot of amazing people. Is there a specific Founder or CEO that you really have come to admire? And if so, who is it and what do you admire about them? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, I have to mention Scott McNeely, the Founder and CEO of Sun Microsystems, and of course very known kind of like internet company out here in Bay Area. And also, I would say kind of changed computing. So his kind of style when it comes to culture and also one of the things which is near to my heart is innovation. I think sun was the company that, first of all, was using kind of like a lot of money into r d. They did a lot of bets, some of them plain stupid, but some of them also brilliant and actually innovation making bets, not making a me too company or trying to be a copycat. Then you’re always going to be too late, and you’re not going to be a winner. So that ballsy move. And believing in open source, believing innovation and actually go where the puck is going to be and not where it is at the moment. 

Brett
And I see you were CTO at Sun Microsystems from, was it 2003 to 2010, which is a very interesting time, I think, to be part of the company. I’m sure you learned a lot from that experience. But if you had to choose just one thing, one big takeaway that really has informed how you approach company building and managing today, what would that one thing be? I think it would be the big. 

Lasse Andresen
Developer conferences that we used to put on and seeing all that energy, all that innovation, all people coming together and building something which is larger than what you can do by yourself. We did something called Community One and then started here in San Francisco with Community West. And then we came to New York with Community East. And at that time I was in Europe. So I called the guy and I said, you know, there’s something more east than New York. And say what? Really? Yeah, it’s called Europe for Christ’s sake. So we also put on an amazing developer event there. And developers is actually the people that are innovating and actually make this fantastic application and services. These are the guys you need to create technology for, so they continue doing what they’re best at, making great new stuff. 

Brett
Fascinating. I love that. And I know you mentioned there that you don’t read a lot of books, but has there ever been a book that really resonated with you that you would say has had a big impact on you or you’re just not a reader at all and prefer to consume information in different ways? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, I’m sorry to say that I don’t read a lot when it comes to books. I’m kind of a born curious, so I read a lot of different kind of like small articles and stuff like that, having time to sit down for like an hour or five reading a book. Yeah, I probably did that in Easter in 1978. But yeah, I don’t read a lot of books. Sorry. 

Brett
Makes sense. I love it. All right, well, let’s switch gears now and let’s dive a little bit deeper into what you’re building today. I was looking through the website, I read some of the articles about you, and it sounds just incredibly exciting. So take us back to the early days of Indykite and talk to us about the origin story. 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, love to. It’s kind of like there’s so much going on when it comes to innovation and new technology and be able to start from scratch again and have an old technology baggage. It’s amazing if you have all these new color pens and black sheets. One of the things that is very different versus kind of like back in the old days is that everything is online. There’s more cars, IoT devices, APIs bots online than there’s human beings. And you know what? They all have relationships and they need to connect. You need to kind of know who they are, meaning authenticate, and that they also need to be authorized. What are kind of like people love to do or a car love to do, or is your phone actually allowed to speak to your car speakers, which is basically pairing, but it’s actually an identity management use case and kind of like a relationship. 

Lasse Andresen
So being totally agnostic around identity types, that’s a big thing. And just look on everything which is connected. How do you take advantage of that and build new fantastic services while, of course, also being secure, that opens an insane amount of business opportunities. So that’s where it started. The other thing is that if you have all that information, kind of like you can use it for so much more than just security and access and authorization. You can use the same information for hyper personalization because you know who is who and what they are, where they are, what car they are in, or what hotel room. And you can really personalize the services based on identity data, you can use it for recommendation. Amazon or Netflix, kind of like movie recommendation. It’s all about identity. They have all the identity of all the movies, they know who you are and they’ve seen what you’re doing in the past. 

Lasse Andresen
So that’s why they can recommend stuff. And for me, that’s Nidax team Management use case. So this is what indicator is all about, making decisions in real time based on context. And that could be a decision, it could be a recommendation, it could be an authorization, it’s just what you query our technology, what kind of question you are asking our knowledge graph and could. 

Brett
You talk to us about the types of companies that are using this and really what that product suite looks like? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, I think we have most traction kind of like in finance, in retail, in automotive industry and our focus is where we can help other companies to actually create more value, meaning growing their top line revenue by serving the customer much better. And a very good sample there in retail is of course loyalty programs. If you know who they are, your members, you can connect a lot of different services and not kind of only send them kind of like a marketing ad, but you can do in real life decisions. So you come up to a parking garage, we recognize your car by the license plate, so we know who you are. We see you are kind of like a gold member of the loyalty program. We have your mobile phone number so we basically just text you and say hey Brad, you see you are a good customer in our store. 

Lasse Andresen
By the way, you can charge your vehicle, electric vehicle for free in parking spot number 29. And by the way, Salmon is on half price today. So this is just combining identity data and make based on the context. You can make decisions like this and it’s really powerful and all these companies would like to have better serve their customers. Customer retention is of course very important and make money and it needs to be secure. You need to kind of respect all GDPR and those kind of regulations. But the main thing the driver is the experience. How can you serve your customer better by kind of giving them more based on information that they have shared with you to get something back? So this is also very close then to come down to the whole area of privacy, of course. 

Brett
And I know Identity and Access Management or IAM is an established category and Gartner recognizes it and writes a lot about it. So when it comes to your market category, what’s your thinking here? And what’s the long term plan? Is it to really just take a challenger position to this legacy category and say hey, we’re building the next generation and it’s better than anything that’s ever existed and you’re going to redefine this existing category or eventually is this a category creation play where you’re going to create a totally new category? 

Lasse Andresen
We’re totally reinventing the identity space. It’s kind of like turning identity data into value instead of kind of like being a corporate liability. If you only look on this type of technology for kind of like who have access to application one and two and three, it’s a very narrow kind of view of the world. And there’s probably 230 companies going out there and talking about I have a much better MFA, kind of like technology than already others. And when it comes to removing the password, for Christ’s sake, that is not hard. If you want to do it, there’s so many vendors that can do it. But why don’t you take all this information and all this identity information and put it together, build a knowledge layer on top of it and create new value and experiences. And so, yeah, we’re totally redefining what you can do with identity. 

Lasse Andresen
And I think the most important thing that I have done now is that half of my team is identity security and geeks. The other ones is like data scientists. People that come from company like Snowflake, for instance. So people that look on this and say this is data and it’s connected data and based on the relationship, the information we can get access to in real time, we can do a lot of interesting things with this. And not only that, a stupid but simple access control decision. 

Brett
This show is brought to you by Front Lines Media, a 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 podcast. Now back today’s episode. And when you are redefining an established space, it obviously takes a lot of time and it takes a lot of work and you have to go out and evangelize and educate people on this idea and really try to get them body into change and doing something different. So what types of tactics are you deploying to do that? And what are you just doing as an organization to really evangelize and preach this message to the world and to your customers, get them to believe in what you believe in. 

Lasse Andresen
Everything is about adoption and adoption comes to that actually. The developers in the world see value and what kind of technology you are creating. So for us, it’s all about open source. It’s of inclusion and actually making developers happy and more productive and in that way get adoption. Of course, in addition to that, you probably need to kind of like pay a couple of million to gartner to get up to the magic quadrant right corner. But what we’re doing is kind of teaming up with developers in the world, make everything open source, and create something bigger that we can do only alone with our engineering team. 

Brett
And what are you doing to stand out and capture the attention of developers? Because I feel like over the last couple of years, there’s just so much noise. There’s been so many companies funded for developer tooling, and I feel like they must just have so many companies trying to battle for their attention. So are there any specific strategies that you’re just seeing work or tactics that you’ve deployed to rise above all that noise and capture the developer’s attention? 

Lasse Andresen
I totally agree with you, and I think where you should start is actually have really good documentation and kind of like samples and makes it really easy to get started. I think if developer probably are deciding to go with your technology or not within kind of like 30 to 40 seconds. So make it accessible, make it really easy to get started. I think that is the key. People don’t want to kind of search for four days or four weeks to figure out what’s going on. The attention span is really short, and like you said, there’s so many interesting, good technology out there, so you need to kind of capture them really fast, really early. 

Brett
And I see you launched in March 2020, which I believe there were some interesting things happening in the world in March 2020 with the COVID Pandemic. So let’s talk about those early months of the company. And then what was that like in your journey to finding product market fit? And do you have it now? Do you feel like you have complete product market fit today? Yeah. What are your thoughts there? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, 2020 was pretty interesting. And of course, I was in San Francisco on the week that everything was shutting down. And the week after, I actually had four scheduled in person meetings with investors because I wanted to raise some money, some appreciate round. So on a Friday the 13th, when all the airports was closing down, I called my friends in Norway, said, I don’t have time. I can’t go home. I have a lot of meetings now. So I decided kind of to stay. And I’m always very optimistic that it can’t be that bad. If you can’t fly from US, I can drive to Canada, whatever. I’ll get home. And then so I decided to stay. And then on the Sunday the 15 March, the airline called me and say, mr. Anderson, we’re not kidding. There’s only one plane left. There’s two seats, and this is kind of the last plane going from the US to Europe for God knows how long. 

Lasse Andresen
So within 2 hours, I decided to jump on that plane. Kind of like when I came back one and a half year after, I had some really well aged cheese in my fridge basically left really fast. And of course, all the investors, everything kind of stopped. And my decision at that time in March 2020 is that there’s a timing for everything. You don’t try to sell kind of like a new mobile phone subscription at a funeral. You wait when there is actually people that are in the mode to actually look on your mobile phone. So I went totally off the grid, spent time with some of the key engineers looking on the product and start developing that and didn’t even try to get funding and waited until kind of like people were coming back in the right modes and then did a very quick seed round on two and a half million precede. 

Lasse Andresen
And then I did a seed round in 8 million in it was probably February 2021. 

Brett
Wow, that’s amazing. At what stage in that journey or around what time period did you start to feel like you had reached product market fit? 

Lasse Andresen
I still think we have some time to where we are at that point. We are now testing our technologies with a handful of pilot customers. Personally, being with sun, being with Fortwo, we always worked with Global 5000 companies like the BBC or Motorfone or Verizon or Audi or kind of like Geico. And this is the same customer type that I’m talking to now. And honestly, I find it much easier to working with big enterprises because they have very good internal kind of like technology skills. It’s kind of like trying to do software support for your grandma is the worst kind of scenario ever. If you talking to people in a big corporation like that, they really know their stuff. So it’s much easier to having great conversation, much easier to get into a pilot project and work together. That’s where we’re aiming. So no SMB, no mid market for us. 

Brett
And what type of traction are you seeing today? Are there any numbers or metrics that you can share that highlight some of that adoption? 

Lasse Andresen
We’re basically sold out. Wow. And that’s of course, we’re only like little over 60 people. And if you’re working with big Fortune 500 or global Fortune 5000 type companies, you really kind of get really busy with only five big customers like that. 

Brett
Wow. That’s amazing. Now, let’s talk a little bit about your motivation. So obviously you’ve had a lot of success in your career. So what motivates you to keep going and to keep grinding? Because I know building a startup is a grind. It’s hard, it’s a lot of work, it’s stressful, it’s painful. So what motivates you just to keep going and to keep building companies? Because I feel like many people in your position would say that’s it, I’m going to Norway, I’m going to chill in the mountains and I’m done, and I’m going to enjoy life. But you’re here and you’re building, so what motivates you day to day? 

Lasse Andresen
I don’t know, maybe I’m a half mad or what it is, but it’s all by passion. I just love to kind of like getting new fantastic people together, building a team, building a unique culture, innovate, creating technology that nobody has built before and see how that is deployed at customer and actually create value for them. And that it’s kind of like starting a bat. You finding these five or four crazy rock stars getting it together, try to come up a new song and you go out on stage and when you play and your hit song you see the audience go crazy. It’s the kind of same feeling. So it’s all about passion and as you said, there’s no way to do a safe startup. So I said there’s a lot of self inflected pain in doing this, but it also makes you feel alive and you are changing people’s lives and you’re having a lot of fun together with them while you’re creating value. 

Brett
And what is it about identity that attracts you? What do you love about this identity space? Because it seems like your last company, this company, it’s all about identity. So what is it about it? 

Lasse Andresen
Honestly, I think it’s really boring. The thing I’m just kidding. No, but as I said before, everything is going online and knowing who is who and what is what. Almost everything or kind of like call it digital transformation. Believe it or not, there’s always an identity. Kind of like infrastructure part of any problem. If you want to have a new service online, how are you going to charge people? Then you need to know who they are. How are you going to make sure that they get the right service? Then you need authorization. So it is kind of like I get a lot of pushback from the investors because I called it plumbing but it’s necessary plumbing. It’s kind of like probably not the most sexy thing that you’re plumbing in your house, but if you don’t have that right and your shower is not working or your toilet is not working, it’s not a good place to be. 

Lasse Andresen
So identity is this glue that actually are the foundation for every online experience and service on the planet. So that’s fascinating. You can actually do something without indicators. There’s a lot of other good vendors out there but you can’t build a new service without thinking about security and identity. 

Brett
Super fascinating. Now another thing I want to ask you about is just your belief when it comes to company building. So how I like to phrase this question. Know, if you go on Twitter, you see a lot of Founders tweeting their thoughts. If you go on TechCrunch, you read articles about things. Are there any things that you see out there in the world that you just disagree with when it comes to company building? Is there any advice that just seems to be widely accepted and believed in that you just think is total bullshit and you don’t believe in it. 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, and this is probably since I’m coming from Norway, I don’t believe in that hire and fire kind of like attitude, because getting the right people into place and that is the most important thing. And hiring great people that actually can lead and execute is kind of like the key to creating a great culture and also a great company. Hiring the wrong people just before, just knowing that it’s easy to kind of get them out the door, I think is a very wrong attitude. So we spend a lot of time interviewing and making sure we hire people the right culture, fit the right attitude. Why do they want to do a startup and not work for Oracle? And what is the motivation? What is their persistence? So I’m thinking getting the right people in place and that also share the same goal is very important. 

Lasse Andresen
And I think you can be happy as a small company and you can be happy as a big company, but you need to align. And I’m going big with this. And I said kind of like aiming for the next hat trick. And people that sign on for that gig, they better kind of can get their seatbelts ready and ready for the speed. 

Brett
Now let’s talk about that hat trick and that vision for the future. So let’s zoom out three to five years from today. What’s this big picture vision that you’re working towards? 

Lasse Andresen
So what I really like is some of the sign principles around that 30. And it’s decentralization, it’s a big thing. And I think we are getting into a much better place following those design principles, privacy giving kind of like control back to the owner of the different data and they can share what they want to share with who forget some benefits back. So I see a much more interesting world where value creation is distributed to the belonging of the data and also more secure. I don’t believe in all these security training courses that you need to don’t click on this link or don’t do that. I actually think technology actually going to protect me much better. I’m seeing a digital twin that know what I like and can spot spam or other security breaches much faster and smarter than myself and also have digital twins that can help me and have a more fun life, basically. 

Lasse Andresen
So, yeah, digital twins, decentralization, control back to the users at that, I think where we’re going to be at five years from now and hopefully ringing the. 

Brett
Bell at the New York Stock Exchange, right? 

Lasse Andresen
Yeah, come on, I need to do that. It wasn’t the same feeling. Kind of like being online in a hotel room on the other side of the planet and everybody’s in New York and ringing the bells. 

Brett
Well, it’ll happen here, it sounds like. So this conversation has been so much fun I’ve learned a lot from you and it’s just been really enjoyable chatting with you. And like we talked about in the pre interview, I really appreciate how you handle these interviews. It’s clear you didn’t come with know pre written script of what you were going to say to each answer. It was a very real and authentic conversation, which are my favorite conversations and that’s the type of stuff that our audience likes to hear. So thank you so much for taking the time. We really appreciate it and I wish you the best of luck in executing on this vision and I look forward to seeing you ring that bell. 

Lasse Andresen
That’s good. Thank you so much. Thank you for having me. 

Brett
No problem. Let’s keep in touch. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Front Lines Media, silicon Valley’s leading podcast production studio. If you’re a B2B Founder looking for help launching and own your own podcast, visit frontlines.io podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening and we’ll catch you on the next episode.