The following interview is a conversation we had with John Milburn, CEO of Clear Skye, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: More Than $20M Raised to Build the Future of Identity and Access Governance.
John Milburn
Hey, Brett, it’s great to be here.
Brett
Yeah. So before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
John Milburn
Yeah, I’ve had the pleasure of working in enterprise software for the past 25 years and specifically in identity management for the past 18. I’ve enjoyed starting on the technical side and then moving my up to the business side of things where I am today.
Brett
Very cool. And two questions we’d like to ask just to better understand what makes you tick as a Founder and as a CEO. So is there a specific startup CEO or tech CEO that you are following the most right now, and if so, why?
John Milburn
Yeah, I always have one answer and it’s the most uncool one you could think of, and that’s Bill Gates. He certainly changed the world, but he’s not one that people usually point to as admirable. I have two reasons for that. One, while he was active with Microsoft and they were changing the world, he was just as vocal about their failures and what they learned from it as he was their successes. And I thought that was really admirable. Second, I mean, look, he’s using his wealth and his retirement to better the planet. I think that’s pretty cool, too.
Brett
One time I went down the rabbit hole. I don’t know how I got selected to this, but I ended up watching the deposition tapes of Bill Gates when they were coming after him for I think it was for Monopoly or having a Monopoly. And it was interesting to see Bill Gates back then compared to the man that we see today. He was pretty vicious, pretty ruthless. He wasn’t the nice, happy, nerdy grandpa that he is today.
John Milburn
No, that’s true. But theme of a lot of my answers is probably going to be related. And it’s not just talent. It’s grind and hard work to get you places. Yeah, look, he was tough then, but it wasn’t just that. He was smart and he was resting on his laurels like he was pushing.
Brett
Totally. And if you look at his legacy, I think he’s not going to be remembered for those random deposition tapes that somehow found their way to YouTube it’s going to be for all the amazing work that he does.
John Milburn
Yeah, that’s right.
Brett
Nice. And what about books? Is there a single book that you can think of that’s had the greatest impact on you as an executive and as a leader? And this can be a business book or it can just be a personal book that’s really influenced how you think.
John Milburn
So I think every business problem is all about getting people to rally around a solution, and it’s all about figuring out how to motivate people. I am more tuned to fiction for that than I am nonfiction. Although I read plenty of business books, my favorite book that I keep going back to is a book called Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. And it has a lot to do with the dangers of relying on talent and precociousness only and the trap that you can have if you ignore the hard work and rigor side of things. And I just think I’ve seen so many things play out that prove it’s a cautionary tale.
Brett
Nice. It’s refreshing to hear something other than the hard thing about hard things. And from good to great, I would say that’s what 80% of guests come on here and say when I ask this question. So appreciate you recommending a book that I’ve not heard of.
John Milburn
Awesome. It’s 1000 pages. Highly recommend. It for this weekend reading.
Brett
I knew there was a catch. Nice.
John Milburn
Perfect.
Brett
So let’s switch gears here and let’s talk about Clear Skye.
John Milburn
So do you want to walk us.
Brett
Through the origin story and then just dive into a bit more about what you guys are doing?
John Milburn
So, yeah, I’d love to. And look, I mentioned I’ve been in Identity for a long time. When I left the last company in 2018, I swore that I would never work in Identity again. Every customer is five years into a two year project. No one’s happy. It wasn’t a great place to work. I met the founders of Clear Skye in 2019. It was two guys and a dog at that point. And they had built something that I had personally heard hundreds, if not thousands of customers asked for. Although they built it just trying to solve a problem that they experienced in their own day to day lives. Working in it at a law firm had no idea there was a market and a buyer and all those good things out there. But to me, that’s the most exciting thing. These guys didn’t take 20 years of doing it the wrong way.
John Milburn
As they were solving a problem, they were trying to solve a problem and then realized, oh, there’s a market for this and that’s where we are.
Brett
And who is the market that you’re serving? What does that look like?
John Milburn
Yeah, that’s a great question. So what our solution does is needed by almost every organization of over 500 employees. We allow you to prove all of your employees who has access to the myriad of applications and data that’s around your organization both on premise and on the cloud? Who gave you that? And then when was the last time an adult agreed that you needed access to that data based on your current job and duties in the organization? It’s twofold benefit, one compliance, depending on what space you’re in. HIPAA socks, GDPR, lots of these three letter acronyms require you to know this, but additionally, it’s just basic security hygiene. Having visibility of knowing who has keys to what data helps you really you can’t manage what you can’t measure.
Brett
Got it, that makes sense. And how do you generally think about market categories? Do you have a market category that you place yourselves in or do you view it as this is a new category that’s being created?
John Milburn
No, we have a defined market category. Gartner calls it identity and access governance. It’s about 20 years old and we are definitely evolving it. One of the ways we’re evolving it, and I apologize, I didn’t say this earlier, is we are delivering the capabilities that typically exist in one of these tools on the back of a platform that customers are already using and their employees are using every day. And that’s the ServiceNow platform. So we are changing the idea that you don’t have to have a standalone ipod to manage permissions. You can actually stream music from your phone or use something you already have to affect the same change with much less cost and much less effort.
Brett
Very cool. And what type of traction are you seeing so far? Are there any numbers that you can share?
John Milburn
Yeah, I mean we have grown about 500% their first two years each, so that’s going from small numbers, but we feel good about that. I would say we are just now getting sort of past the early adopter phase and crossing the chasm into the broader market. But so far I’ve been pleased to know that people do want this. Like people are exhausted, a CISO is exhausted of having 500 tools to solve 500 different security problems. And these platforms like ServiceNow that are sort of removing silos and doing things that formerly 40 products would have done, I think that’s the future. I think people are tired of stitching together hundreds and hundreds of security tools to try to protect their environment.
Brett
And I was just at Black Hat earlier this summer, that was my first year going and I was just mind blown with the number of companies there, how everyone seemed to have a very similar problem statement and message. And I just had to wonder how do you stand out in this world of cybersecurity tools? How do you find a way to get CSAs to pay attention when there’s just so much noise in the market?
John Milburn
Well, the industry as a whole has a problem and I’ve been part of it, so I’m not throwing stones. We have looked at all of these problems as technology problems. Every new security risk, entry point, attack vector, whatever it might be, it’s a technology problem. We go build a bunch of technology to solve it when the reality is to really solve any problem. It’s a people process and technology equation, and we as an industry in cybersecurity have ignored that. So the way we are delivering our solution focuses on all three of those, the people, because they’re already doing work, there the process because that’s where the workflow is and the technology. So that’s how we are trying to stand out in a crowded space.
Brett
And in terms of the go to market motion, do you have an element that’s product Led or is it all top down enterprise sales?
John Milburn
Today? It’s majority top down enterprise sale, although you will see products two, three, and so on coming out in the coming months that will have at least more of a flavor of product Led growth.
Brett
Nice. And is that where you see the market shifting overall in terms of cybersecurity tools? Is it moving to more of a PLG approach?
John Milburn
It depends on what space it’s in. So the space I’m in, people spend a significant amount of money to prove an audit right. And that’s usually not a departmental sale. That is one group that manages across an entire organization and their sub entities, et cetera. Usually somebody owns that. It’s sort of difficult to use the traditional product Led growth and a very broad security solution. But in areas that are focused on a particular attack vector, I absolutely think that is probably like if you’re not doing product Led growth, you’re going to be lost.
Brett
Got it. Makes sense. And when we look at the category of Identity and Access Governance, you said it was created 20 years ago, are you actively working with firms like Gartner and Forrester to try to redefine and shape how that category is going to be described in the future? What does that look like on your end?
John Milburn
We are, yes. So were pleased to win Gartner cool vendor last year with our approach in this space for identity. First Security was their title, and then in this year in the Market Guide for the Identity Governance Market, they basically created a whole new category for us, what they call platform based lite IGA.
Brett
Which we are quite proud of.
John Milburn
Actually. It’s us and one other very small vendor in Australia because there’s no one else doing this yet. But I absolutely believe that we will not be the last ones to join this space with this approach.
Brett
And I feel like they couldn’t be right. If they’re going to create a totally new category, you got to have multiple vendors in there.
John Milburn
Yes, that’s exactly right. So it’s great to be first. We just need to continue to execute so we could stay ahead.
Brett
Nice.
John Milburn
I love that.
Brett
I think that’s the dream of a lot of the founders that I speak with, everyone loves the idea of category creation, and I think it’s controversial of what’s that end state of category creation. Is it when Gartner goes out there and creates a report on it, or is it something that can happen outside of Gartner? So it sounds like you guys very early on were able to get Gartner to pick up your category.
John Milburn
Yeah, look, this is something that hundreds and hundreds of people have asked for in the past, and quite frankly, I would have told you it was impossible. But the founders of Clear Skye are geniuses. So, yes, I think it’s exciting. It’s fun to be a first mover, but it’s not a market with just one. So I look forward to spirited competition as new entrants coming.
Brett
And are there any takeaways or do you have any insights from that journey to get them to create that category?
John Milburn
I’ve been doing this for a while. The team that’s with me has been doing this for a while. It can’t be underestimated how important it is to brief the analyst community, even as you’re starting off and you have no money to spend, and you’ve got two customers, there’s just unbelievable value in their feedback and the way they perceive the market. And we started that from day one. We got our seed funding round, and we start talking to the analysts, and we start talking to them every quarter. Here’s what we’re doing, here’s what our customers are saying, et cetera. That is the only way to be a viable enterprise software option in a market this size.
Brett
That’s interesting to hear and it makes logical sense. What I tend to see with a lot of the maybe younger founders is they kind of hate the idea of Gartner. They view it as pay to play. But from what I’ve learned from a lot of the founders I’ve had on is they say, yeah, that’s great. You can hate the process, hate the pay for play. But at the end of the day, gartner still has tremendous influence on the buying cycle, and there’s not really a way to scale an enterprise software tool without engaging with analysts.
John Milburn
Gartner, Forrest, how many times have you heard zero trust in your podcast? That was a term that Forrester invented, right? Like, can’t underestimate the influence that these thought leaders have on the space totally.
Brett
Makes a lot of sense. And what about kind of the emerging platforms that are coming to try to disrupt, so to speak, with Gartner? So, like, G Two is one that I hear a lot of people talking about, where it’s kind of peer to peer reviews as opposed to analyst doing the reviews. Do you guys put any attention into those types of platforms?
John Milburn
We do, and I like them. Our product. We’re on G two. Our product is deploy it from the ServiceNow store so they have their own store for their customers and there’s a sort of Amazon like review system there. We actually find that it’s more efficient drag with positive reviews there than it is through gartner like it’s slower process to churn through the big beast as opposed to direct sort of customer to customer reviews. The same reason why if you have a webcast and you just talk about your product or you have a webcast and a customer is talking about how they use your product, there’s going to be a million more people show up. You always want to get the customer’s voice out there.
Brett
Yeah, that makes a lot of sense. And as you’ve taken this product further into market, what would you say has been the greatest challenge that you faced so far and how did you overcome that challenge?
John Milburn
Well, we are doing something that’s very different in a market that’s old and that requires us to speak to one additional faction within a large organization to sell our product. So it has taken us a while to learn the best way of engaging the traditional budget owner for identity products and the group that owns the ServiceNow platform. We’ve had a lot of help in figuring that out from our partners, both firms like Accentuary and Y, but even more so our partner in ServiceNow who’s helped us sort of build those bridges between two on paper groups that are both in it but probably don’t interact very frequently.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. Last couple of questions for you as we wrap up here. What excites you most about the work you get to do every day?
John Milburn
Look, I really believe that if done right, we are changing the way people will think about security software. It’s not just a piece of technology. It doesn’t do any good to have a padlock that’s sort of to the side of the work and where people are doing their work. And this idea of leveraging large platforms like salesforce like ServiceNow, like Atlassian to do more and more traditional standalone security things, I think is going to be a very meaningful change over the next decade. People are just exhausted with hundreds and.
Brett
Hundreds of vendors, and we’re at the start of it.
John Milburn
So that’s what gets us up every day is we’re getting to do something neat. In ten years, people will look at my current competitors and look at them like they are walkmen as opposed to streaming music on their fan. I love it.
Brett
And if we zoom out into that future, let’s say five years from now, what does that future look like? What is that vision that you’re working towards?
John Milburn
Well, so the identity has a lot of different subspaces. Our single product today is in one of them, identity governance. But the value of delivering other identity capabilities on a platform like this is just as powerful or maybe even more so. In the next five years, you’ll see multiple sort of adjacent security and identity products that we will release on ServiceNow and probably at least one other platform. Some of the similar tools as well. Not everybody uses ServiceNow. Some people use Atlassian or Workday or there are lots of these large application platforms with a rich, independent software vendor marketplace that I believe will be fertile for companies like us.
Brett
Amazing. Well, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today before we wrap. If people want to follow along with your journey as you scale up here, where’s the best place for them to go?
John Milburn
Oh, LinkedIn. Yeah. Love to chat with anyone on LinkedIn.
Brett
Amazing. Well, thanks so much for taking the time to share your vision. I really enjoyed hearing your insights. It’s always refreshing to hear something that’s new and a book I haven’t heard of. So really appreciate that and look forward to seeing you execute on this vision.
John Milburn
Hey, this was great. I appreciate the time.
Brett
Brett. Yeah. Thanks so much. Keep in touch.
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