Todd McKinnon

Todd McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest after spending five years as VP of Engineering at Salesforce, where he saw firsthand how enterprises were rapidly moving to the cloud but lacked a unified identity layer. He recognized that as companies adopted dozens of SaaS applications, the ability to securely manage who can access what would become a critical infrastructure layer — effectively, identity would become the new security perimeter. Under McKinnon's leadership, Okta pioneered the cloud-native identity and access management (IAM) category, offering single sign-on, multi-factor authentication, and lifecycle management as a service. The company went public in 2017, and its revenue has grown from under $200 million to over $2 billion annually. Okta's customer base includes more than 18,000 organizations, ranging from small startups to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies. The $6.5 billion acquisition of Auth0 in 2021 was McKinnon's boldest strategic move, bringing developer-focused identity capabilities into Okta's portfolio. McKinnon has navigated significant challenges, including a 2022 security breach by the Lapsus$ group that targeted an Okta support contractor, temporarily shaking customer confidence. His response — enhanced security protocols and greater transparency — was closely watched by the market. His decisions on integrating Auth0, competing with Microsoft Entra ID (formerly Azure AD), expanding into governance and privileged access management, and managing the path to profitability are the key factors driving Okta's stock trajectory.