Road to 1k

It’s been Churn City the last month..lol. To be fair we do have an automated system that removes users who aren’t actively engaged with the newsletter, but it still sucks seeing the numbers. BUT, ever the optimist, I love seeing that we are getting new subscribers week after week. Total count is 452.

Okta’s 10-Q Report

Most of you probably don’t know that for a while I ran a financial services business as my side hustle. Credit Repair, Life Insurance, and Portfolio building ( I have a series 6, and 65 license). All of that to say, I REALLY REALLY enjoy looking at financial reports. ( Yes, I’m just all kinds of nerd)

What I find interesting in this report from Okta is the following numbers

• Operating Loss: $(16) million, improved from $(111) million in the prior year, reflecting better operational efficiency and cost control.

• Net Income: $16 million, a significant improvement from a net loss of $(81) million in the previous year, attributed to increased revenue and cost management.

Say what you want about Okta..but that’s a pretty impressive turnaround. Pair that up with 14% increase in total revenue and at least business wise Okta is poised for a good run. Ok, ok, but this isn’t a financial newsletter so why bring it up. Well that’s context for this next highlight:

• Customer Segmentation: The number of customers with an annual contract value above $100,000 increased to 4,705 from 4,365, indicating a growing recognition of Okta's platform value among larger enterprises.

Okta is continuing it’s push into the big enterprise, and with the race in identity for everyone to have a platform a strong customer base gives them a solid pipeline to sell into. Their governance product, while not great, is sufficient. Combine that with the Spera acqusiition ( ISPM), and their PAM product, plus Auth0 on the CIAM side and Okta is poised to be the giant they always wanted to be.

That’s a lotta cash

Does anyone out there want to start a Cloud Security business with me, so we can raise 100 Million in our Series A? Anyone?

Sheesh. Kudos to the Upwind crew on that raise. The marketing material reads that it’s a Cloud Security platform, with an Identity Security feature. That last part is key, especially for our identity startup friends. One thing that I will say the got right(purely from an outside looking in perspective) is where identity plays in the security stack. Check out their Identity Security page below. Notice how the drill down from the identity to the application to the privilege. That ( in my humble opinion) is the holy grail around identity.

Now how it works, deploys, etc. I don’t know..but this could signal the type of movement we see in this Identity Platform centric era.

100 Million in Series A…what did I do wrong in my life?

My favorite company that no one knows about..

But I think that’s going to change. For decades Radiant Logic has been the swiss army knife for every identity practitioner. It was my secret weapon when I was doing deployments. The ability to shape identity data in any format you needed easily sped up deployments by 60%. The last couple of years Radiant has been on a mission to do more than just that. What good is data if you can’t do anything with it?

Well looks like Radiant Logic had that same thought. Looking forward to seeing this in detail at Gartner next week.

Meet Franklin

A couple of months ago I had a really crazy idea pop in my head.

“What if I can create a virtual IAM consultant? I could train it to do Identity Assessments, answer basic questions, and create action plans and strategies for IAM implementations”.

I had been playing around with OpenAI’s latest build and their voice enabled chat bot, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that I could create this. So I shook off the coding cobwebs and decided to get building.

Now I wasn’t always the best coder, but I enjoyed it and was very good at system architecture. But the part I HATED about coding was just all the extra setup you had to do just to get stuff working. Well in 2024 being a developer is REALLY easy.

Enter in Cursor and Vercel.

Oh, and I also DESPISED Frontend development. So big shoutout to V0 as well.

Using these tools ( Cursor for my AI enabled coding, Vercel for my deployment and storage, and V0 to help layout front end components) I got to coding. But like any old school developer and former product leader, my first step was defining my use cases.

Here’s a look at my “virtual whiteboard”. Hopefully you can read that, but basically it’s a Miro board of use cases, and things I wanted Franklin to be able to do.

So I’ve got my plan, and I started coding. Using Cursor was absolute heaven. The ability to take my use cases type those out and then have working code was absolute bliss. It turned the whole process into more of editing instead of coding.

So very quickly I was going through prototypes, adding new features, rethinking features, etc. I truly enjoyed coding again. But I digress..

The Point.

I made some pretty good progress getting it working. The foundation elements of being able to build an assessment, generate a report are there. Along with a chat functionality to ask it questions about identity. I’m going to continue to build out more functions, and specifically I’m going to redo the authentication and add in some admin functions. Thanks to the folks over @ Descope, I’m partnering with them to add in that functionality. So over the next 30 days I’ll be posting updates to my journey with Franklin and Descope. The first blog series will post later this week with the details of the Auth redesign and flow. From there I’ll be updating that blog as I make updates, and then at the end of the month I’ll do a wrap-up detailing my overall experience.

So you’l have multiple ways to follow along! Big thanks to the crew over at Descope for helping out with this. If you want to check out Franklin, you can do so here: