Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: With that General Catalyst money, you said 2006 was when you had the server?

Andre Durand: 2005 was when it came out. We used the General Catalyst money, in essence, to build the first commercial product. The first one probably took us about 18 months.

Sramana Mitra: When did American Express hit?

Andre Durand: They actually licensed our toolkit—the open source precursor to the commercial server. We had some customers that were licensing our toolkit capabilities. We weren’t licensing the software at that time. We were really just licensing our professional services to implement the software.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the next major milestone from here on?

Andre Durand: In 2006, the cloud and SaaS hit. Lo and behold, our business really began to take off in earnest. I remember sitting down with a friend who had been involved in identity, not knowing what the killer app in identity is. There’s a lot of capabilities, as you know, in identity. There’s provisioning. There’s directory servers. He had developed some web access management software. They had sold the company to RSA. It later became the RSA Access Manager.

I said, “Of all the things that you did in the four or five years that you were involved in this, was there an 80/20 rule – 20% of the functionality was 80% of the utility?” His immediate response was, “Yes, single sign-on.” Here’s the way it went at Jabber. When I first met Jeremy Miller, who was the founder of Jabber, he painted this vision of realtime messaging that was fully inter-operable with every other instant messaging system.

If you recall, you had ICQ and AIM. They didn’t talk. Jeremy’s vision was that we can make a platform that can make all of these IM systems talk together. I looked at the underlying technology and we said, “This is a real-time messaging bus that can move XML bidirectionally between any two endpoints on the Internet through a collection of distributed servers like email.”

Then I remember one day, one of the telcos called us and said, “We hear you have a chat system. We have $1 million to spend on chat.” I remember turning to Jeremy and a few others at Jabber and said, “Hey guys, we’re in the chat business.” One second, we were selling real-time routers for the Internet. Then the money showed up and said they wanted to buy a chat server. The point being was that instant messaging was a killer app.

Two years later when I was at Ping, I asked this gentleman this question and he said single sign-on. That was the aha moment. We essentially sold single sign-on from 2006 all the way through to today and it’s still going. For every password, that still exists, there’s a single sign-on software to sell to eliminate it.

Sramana Mitra: I have a few questions at this point. This stuff is pretty complex technology and this is not your background. Who was managing the engineering and architecture? How did you pull that off in Denver, Colorado?

Andre Durand: I co-founded the bulletin board company with Brian Field-Elliot. He was a brilliant technologies who always knew how to see through the complexities and create elegance in simplicity. With him helping in the very early days, we were able to make some headway. A lot of phenomenal technologists who were involved in the Liberty Alliance took a passion and liking to Ping and helped us along the way. This is about 11 years ago.

Somewhere along that curve, I met Patrick Harding at Fidelity Investments who is today our CTO. Patrick was a brilliant technologist who grew up inside of the complexity of large enterprises like Fidelity and really had a passion for identity. With Patrick and all of these other mentors from Liberty Alliance, along with my co-founder, we became astute on the ways of enterprise complexity early in our lives.

Sramana Mitra: How did you gather the technical talent in Denver? Did you have to move people?

Andre Durand: We definitely have great talent in Denver. The truth is we have been amassing talent around the globe and certainly here in the US for the better part of our whole history. Because we were pioneering the standards and really painting a vision of the future, we attracted some of the best and the brightest from all of the other enterprises.

Sramana Mitra: What does that mean, that you were amassing talent from all over the place? Does that mean that you’re moving people to Denver or are you running a virtual company?

Andre Durand: We did both. We quickly learned, in this space, that talent rules. If it came down to taking someone who was not as good but happened to be local versus someone who was truly world-class, we chose to take them wherever they were. That’s the reason why we have people in our CTO office who live in Canada, Chile, and Holland.

Sramana Mitra: You started doing that as early as 2004?

Andre Durand: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: That’s pretty good because that was not a time when virtual companies were readily assembled or accepted.

Andre Durand: I think I had an open mind to it. The reason I did was because Jabber was open source. I got quickly exposed to people who were passionate about a particular topic and frankly, we grew up in times where online communication was the norm and distance does not hold you back from doing great things.

Sramana Mitra: Open source is the beginning of the virtual collaboration movement. That’s absolutely true.

Andre Durand: That philosophy was quickly carried into Ping.

Sramana Mitra: Enterprise software sales was not your background either. How did you build the team to execute on that part?

Andre Durand: Once we honed in on enterprises and, of course, once enterprises started taking a real inclination to what we were doing, we started to hire from those enterprises. Also as we began to hire, we looked for enterprise experience in people’s background. From the very early period, the baseline requirement to join Ping was enterprise software experience.

Sramana Mitra: But you had to get an executive who could build this enterprise software salesforce. Did you find that person in Denver?

Andre Durand: No, we found that person in Boston. Patrick, our CTO, was in Boston. We ended up finding our first real Head of Enterprise Sales in Boston. We found our first Head of Customer Service in Boston.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have an office in Boston?

Andre Durand: Yes.

Sramana Mitra: How did customer ramp happen between 2006 and 2015?

Andre Durand: The ramp has been fairly smooth. I wouldn’t say that there were any big jumps but it has always been very consistent. We would add 200 to 300 customers a year.

Sramana Mitra: This is all direct or were you also doing channel?

Andre Durand: This is all direct. For the most part, with the exception of the past couple of years,  the channel now has began to focus both on identity and the transformation that we’re seeing in identity. Just under 20% of our business now is  generated by the channel. For the most part, we grew the business direct and are switching rapidly now.

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