YouSaid · the spoken record

Todd McKinnon

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66
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2026-03-30
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2026-03-30
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  1. “Not mutually exclusive. I think the attributes we talked about, whether it's reliability, trust, integration, capabilities, does the vendor you're going to trust have enough money to support you? That's a foundational thing in both of these markets, whether it's people identity for customers and partners and employees or it's this new identity type of agents and facilitating that. So they're not mutually exclusive. But I think that when I What's happening in the world right now is every organization is it's it's interesting I think I'd say they're universally aware of the potential of the agenda enterprise which is essentially they want to make things more automated and they want to you know enhance their digital or enhance their workforce with digital employees or they want to add new digital employees so they're all clearly aware of this but”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  2. “We have the opportunity to win this battle to be the identity layer for AI agents. And if we win that, that could easily be the biggest category in cyber. I mean, cyber is about $280-ish billion dollars a year. Identity management is about, depending on whose number you believe, it's roughly 10% of that. This new agent layer could be the biggest category in cyber by far. So yeah, winning that is...”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  3. “We have to change. It sounds very specific you think the change here is there's going to be a universe of agents doing work inside of companies and they need to be permissioned and controlled and OCTA should focus on that and you're not so worried about hey a bunch of people are going to vibe code their own tools or a bunch of cheaper competitors are going to come up and disrupt us because they vibe coded competitor octa. Like it seems like you're bracketing that and saying that's not a big problem for Okta right now.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  4. “Have a healthy appreciation for the change and the impact. You can fall victim to believing what you see online or what you hear, because everyone's trying to sell something. Everyone's trying to make their company sound cool and they're like they're embracing the change. So when you hear companies, especially big company CEOs, say, oh, you know, AI is writing 90% of our code right now. I mean, they're trying to sell something, whether it's their own substance as a leader or their own organization's ability to innovate. So you got to take that with a grain of salt and say, hey, the art of the possible, but as we change, what do we embracing? What's working for us? What's not? But it kind of all comes back to giving the teams freedom to change. And change is hard. It sounds trite, but you really as a leader, you have to force it sometimes. Tops down mandates, right? I like to be bottoms up and empower people, but sometimes to get change happen, you have to push it.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  5. “And I think the main theme in the second bucket is it sounds basic, but I think basics are important, which is it's very clear that especially in software development and innovation, the technical shift is very significant. So the number one thing that an organization has to do is turn the dial in terms of how much change it will absorb. So a normal operating mode, let's say you want 20% change, 80% stays the same, you need to turn that dial up now. You need to change more, whether that's your team structure, whether that's processes, whether that's the technology you're using, you have to turn up the change quotient. So what I tell the team is it's got to be at least 60-40, if not more. And then with that, it's like you give them the freedom to experiment with new technology, you know, learn from what's happening out there. By the way, I think one of the most important things is while...”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  6. “Compartmentalize it in two different areas. The first area is just probably the more important area is Job as a CEO is most important job is figure out strategy, which means which markets you're going to be in and how you're going to win in those markets. And for us, there's a big new emerging market, which is AI agents need to log into stuff. And AI agents need to be You need to have a system to keep track of them and define their role and define their permissions and what they can connect to and what they can do. So that's a big new market. So getting the company oriented on that massive new market. And that's one bucket which markets. The second bucket is how we execute to go capture that market.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  7. “Making sure it works 100% of the time takes years and years and years. And there's also a reputational thing. It's like, what are you going to trust? Are you going to trust the proven solution that's been out there for years? Are you going to trust something that your team just cooked up? So infrastructure software in general and then cyber software, I think is also very well insulated from people vibe coding it themselves just because you're talking about things that are purchased on There's a lot of a brand that goes into it like what cyber company do you trust? What cyber company do you trust to be secure itself? To what cyber company do you trust to be updating all the latest threats? And then people that are buying cyber tools, they're going to have to look at their bosses and their boards of directors and say, what did you pick? Oh, we got a breach. Well, what did you pick? Well, I wanted to save a little bit of money to vibe code it. So the category of security and infrastructure software, I think, is a little bit different from some of that.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  8. “Of functionality of our products. And then one thing that's maybe misunderstood about what we do or maybe the buyers understand it, but in general might be misunderstood, you can build the features and functions, but the last thing you have to do is you have to connect it to everything. Thousands and thousands of different applications and services and pieces of infrastructure. It has to be connected to the last mile. So that is, you know, and that all is changes. So you have to keep that integrated and you have to make sure it's always up to date with the latest changes of all the ecosystem. And so the integration part and then this other part is that it really, it has to work. It's mission critical. So even if you're building something that looks like Okta, getting the features to work is like 10% of the battle.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  9. “I mean, if you look at what these tools can do, it's amazing. The cloud code and cowork and codecs, I grew up as a software engineer, and that whole world is being revolutionized. So I've built a company as a product developer and as an engineer. And so if you don't question and look at how you've built your own company and thinking and realize that that world is changing, you're just naive. Now we can talk about the reasons why I think Okta is very well positioned and has attributes of the market and attributes of the product that make it very resilient and hard to replace, but just got to look at the technology and look at what's possible. And if you're not circumspect about what got you here and what your modes are and what the upstart would be doing if they were trying to compete with you, I think you're just naive. So I think it's a healthy paranoia. When you look at the business, I think there's the features and functionalities.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  10. “Had a decent amount of success, three billion in revenue growing over 10% last year, established brand 20,000 customers. We've had some decent success. I think the opportunity going forward with all this change and all this disruption is massive. It's huge. Technology is getting way bigger. There's all kinds of new categories, I think, are emerging. So for me personally, it's an incredible opportunity and challenge to lead the company through this and to go from what is like a midsize, successful SaaS company to be what I think could be one of the most important companies in the world. So that's a huge challenge. It's a huge opportunity. It's also daunting because in some way it'd be great if things didn't change that much and kind of our locked in position was, you know, more stable and we could plug along. But there's a huge prize. The prize is massive and that's incumbent upon us to face this challenge and to go get it.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  11. “Let's start with me personality wise and how I operate. I'm very much challenge driven. And I think a lot of people are in our business. And just like, what's the next challenge? And what I see right now in the world is huge challenge and a huge opportunity. It's like a huge mountain to climb. And that is the fundamental level is that I believe strongly that the pie for technology is expanding greatly. Like the pie that what we can do for people and companies with AI and the common things people talk about agents. I mean, this is a massive change, massive disruption. It's bigger than cloud computing. You could talk about is it as big as the internet. It's big. So now capturing that and leading a company that thrive, I mean, a company, Akta's...”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  12. “You did. Here we go. We're going to just jump right into it. A few weeks ago, Octa had earnings. You're on the call. They asked you about the SAS apocalypse, which I want to talk about in detail. But this was your response to SAS apocalypse. This is why I was starting with feelings. You said, quote, we are paranoid, and we're making sure that we're using all the latest technologies, LLMs, et cetera, to make sure that we have something that's resilient and secure but has the best features and best capabilities. This is you talking about Agentic software development is real. The idea that our customers would build their own tools instead of paying us for these tools is real. We're paranoid about it. We've got to compete with that. That's a big thing to say. Talk about where you are in SaaS apocalypse because I want to start there and then I want to zoom out to basically the nature of software in general, but that feels like a big thing for you to say. Like you need to be paranoid about this threat.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  13. “I'm excited to talk to you. I feel like a real theme of Dakota lately is just me being emotional about the nature of software in 2026, and I can't think of anyone better to do it with than you. Because when I think of emotional software development, I think of big enterprise software CEOs.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  14. “Know how Todd was thinking about that inside of Okta. Like so many of our guests recently, it's clear that Todd's a decoder fan, so this one got deep about the very nature of building software itself and what it means to run a software company in 2026. That's right. Octa episode got emotional. Hang on, it might surprise you. Okay, Okta CEO Todd McKinnon. Here we go. Todd McKinnon, the co founder and CEO of Okta. Welcome to Dakot”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  15. “Practice inside Okta. What he's changing and what new opportunities he's going off to head off the apocalypse. The biggest opportunity that Todd's thinking about is some deep decoder bait. The idea that it's not just people whose access and security credentials need management, but also AI agents inside a corporation. This concept has really gotten traction recently with the rise of OpenClub, which comes with a ton of security challenges. Can any company keep their users, platforms, and data safe if people are just going to go buy a Mac Mini, hand it all their credentials, and let OpenCloud do its thing? Is simply installing a kill switch at the agent or login level, as Todd suggests, going to be enough. You'll hear Todd say that agent identity is something between a person and a system, which is in fact some of the richest Dakota bait possible. So we spent some time digging into that. It also seems like we're on the cusp of some of the goofiest orc chart ideas in history as folks start to manage hybrid teams of people and agents.”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT

  16. “And welcome to Dakoder. I'm Neil Patel, editor in chief of the Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. Today I'm talking with Todd McKinnon, the co-founder and CEO of Okta, a platform that lets companies manage security and identity across all the apps and services their employees might use. Think of it like login management. Actually, that's a great way to think about it because the way most people encounter Okta is that it's the thing that makes you log in again right before joining a meeting several times a week, which makes you late, and then you have to apologize. Can you tell we use Okta? Anyhow, all that is a big business. Okta has a $14 billion market cap, but big software as a service companies like Okta are suddenly under a lot of pressure in the age of AI. Now, after all, why would you pay their fees when maybe you could just vibe code your own tools to do similar things? This is the so-called SAS apocalypse, and Todd himself recently said he was paranoid about it on Okta's most recent earnings call. So we dug into it and how he's putting that paranoia into”

    2026-03-30 · Decoder with Nilay Patel · Okta's CEO is betting big on AI agent identity · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT