Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: They were people who had made money off you before, so they had confidence in your ability.

Andre Durand: Exactly. On January 4, I moved my computer from the corner office in Jabber. I think we had 50 people working at the company. I announced that I was going to start something new. They were kind. They said, “Do you have an office?” I said, “I don’t have anything.” They said, “Why don’t you take the blank office across the kitchen.”

I took my desktop and my inkjet printer and moved it to this other office. I remember sitting down at the computer the first day and I had a brand new email address. I went from a hundred emails an hour to no messages. I had a business plan. I’m the only employee. There’s some money in the bank but I’m in an empty office in a space called identity. I remember thinking to myself, “Wow! What did I get myself into?” That morning, I said, “I need a logo.” I opened up Photoshop and made a logo. For kicks, I wrote, “Worldwide Headquarters” underneath it.

I printed it and taped it to the outside of the door at 2 o’clock in the afternoon. “That’s a good day’s work.”, I thought and went home. That was day one at Ping. Somewhere in that first month, I started to research Identity. I remember typing ‘Digital Identity’ and finding one research paper by some Ph.D. candidate in Switzerland. I don’t even think the paper was in English. I could just tell by the title of the paper it was talking about Digital Identity.

Identity management wasn’t a term. There was one reference that I could point to that was semi on the topic. I remember calling back my first investor. His name is Phil. I said, “Phil, I think we have a problem. I think we just started a company in an industry that doesn’t exist. Don’t worry. I reserved digitalidworld.com. If you put up $5,000, I’ll put up $5,000. You and I will start the industry conference so we can have a conversation about the industry that we want to create so we can build a software company inside of it.”

Sramana Mitra: Where was the conference going to be held?

Andre Durand: That October, we held a conference in Denver called Digital ID World. I think we had a hundred seventy people.

Sramana Mitra: How did you find them?

Andre Durand: Right about the same time or maybe just slightly earlier, Microsoft had announced Passport. It was not lost on everybody, because the Internet was exploding, that the concept that everyone would have to log in to Microsoft to gain access to the Internet. It was an interesting idea that you can log in once and go anywhere on the Internet, but a lot of people were afraid that given Microsoft’s dominance in Windows, they would advocate the neutrality of the Internet to one vendor.

A number of companies led by Sun created an alliance called the Liberty Alliance. It was in response to Microsoft and Microsoft’s Passport initiative. What they said was, “We love the idea that you could have an identity that could be used anywhere on the Internet but we just want to make open standards so that anyone who wants to do that can do it.”

There was a growing number of companies that had joined the Liberty Alliance with the vision of standardizing identity. Very early on, I recognized that that standard effort was very important for the development of the industry. Ping developed the first open source toolkit that implemented the protocols of the Liberty Alliance. I started to meet pioneers in the space and those were the people who came to that first conference.

Sramana Mitra: This happened in 2002, you said?

Andre Durand: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: You’re a very good storyteller.

Andre Durand: Thank you.

Sramana Mitra: What happens after this?

Andre Durand: In hindsight, I’m so fortunate to have survived 2002 to 2006. On the one hand, the industry was so new and we were pioneering the conversation. It’s not that I look back and say, “What did I do for those five years?” We were really starting from ground zero, trying to build Identity. I really am fortunate that we, as a company, have backers with the vision that I had that allowed us to incubate through that period of time and essentially, not run out of cash.

Sramana Mitra: What did you build?

Andre Durand: In the first two years, we wrote the libraries that implemented the Liberty Alliance specification. Starting around 2004, we said, “I wonder if we can turn these libraries into an identity server?” Or in essence, the first federation server. The standalone piece of software that talks the identity protocol but that can integrate with existing applications and that can convey the open protocol across the Internet.

For the first two years, we implemented the libraries. They were just open source libraries that someone would embed in their application. Then the following two years, we turned that idea into a standalone commercial server called Ping Federate. I think we released the first version of Ping Federate around 2005. It was actually Version 2 because we all realised that nobody wanted to buy Version 1, so we said, “Why don’t we just get Version 1 and call it Version 2?” Then everyone will think the whole space is more mature than it actually is. Ping Federate 2.0 came out in 2005.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity
1 2 3 4 5 6 7