The Story of Strata Identity: Pioneering the Future of Identity Management

In 1995, while most Berkeley students were still trying to figure out what they wanted to do after graduation, Eric Olden was already building his first company. But unlike many .com era startups chasing trendy ideas, Eric and his high school best friend were focused on solving a fundamental problem.

“We realized that it would be security,” Eric recalls in a recent Category Visionaries episode. “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.”

From Campus to Category Creation

That initial insight led to Securant, a company that would grow to 300 employees and come tantalizingly close to an IPO before the .com crash intervened. While many startups of that era disappeared into what Eric calls “the great category graveyard,” the experience taught him invaluable lessons about building sustainable businesses.

“What we’re finding at that time was how to sift out the bad ideas and find the ones that were substantial,” Eric explains. This focus on substance over hype would become a defining principle throughout his career.

The Evolution of Identity Management

After Securant, Eric continued innovating in the identity space. He co-authored SAML, a critical standard for secure credential sharing between applications, and founded Simplified in 2006 to address identity management challenges in the emerging SaaS landscape.

Each venture was timed to coincide with major technological shifts: “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.”

Building Strata: The Third Act

With Strata Identity, Eric spent almost a year interviewing potential customers before writing any code. This extensive customer development revealed a critical need for identity orchestration in multi-cloud environments.

The company’s approach to building this new category has been methodical and customer-focused. “Wait, don’t start writing software,” Eric advises. “Get your hypothesis as vetted and validated as you can and document it.”

Vision for the Future

Looking ahead to 2024 and beyond, Strata is focused on deepening its moat in the identity orchestration space. “We’ve really oriented our go to market message around a very concrete, tangible set of value propositions, solving very tactical things,” Eric explains.

The strategy reflects a mature understanding of category creation: “The product expands, but our message contracts. And so I like to think about it as market the vision and sell the product.”

This balance between vision and execution is particularly crucial as companies navigate increasingly complex multi-cloud environments. As Eric notes, the alternative to Strata’s orchestration platform is manual effort that “costs tens of millions of dollars.”

For Eric, who has experienced both the highs and lows of category creation, this third act with Strata represents the culmination of decades of experience in the identity management space. The company’s focus on substantial problems, rather than market trends, positions it well for sustainable growth in an increasingly complex digital landscape.

As organizations continue to grapple with identity management across multiple clouds and platforms, Strata’s orchestration platform offers a glimpse of the future – one where managing identity becomes as seamless as managing compute resources. It’s a vision that’s been decades in the making, built on the foundation of lessons learned from the earliest days of internet security.