Building an IPO-Ready Identity Software Company from Colorado: Andre Durand, CEO of Ping Identity (Part 5)

Sramana Mitra: Who were the customers you were going after? Were these enterprise customers?

Andre Durand: We didn’t know at that time. The truth was it was big enterprises that had this problem.

Sramana Mitra: Since your background was selling to bulletin board kind of people, you didn’t really have any enterprise software sales experience. You were just feeling your way around.

Andre Durand: You don’t give credit to people in our position how much you wing it. There was a lot of conviction obviously that what we were doing was going to be important. As it turns out, we were lucky. Literally, my first customer was American Express. We quickly realized that it was large enterprises that were really struggling with proprietary identity.

They had been sold every stack vendor’s identity management product. They had a domain called their CA domain. They also had a Microsoft domain and an IBM domain. All the applications that are sold by CA, IBM, or SAP, you can integrate and have a single sign on inside of those stacks but there was not a single sign on between the products. The cloud had not yet hit. This was Internet federation that drove this.

Even though the Liberty Alliance, based on Passport, was saying, “Let’s build an identity standard for the whole Internet.” The truth is enterprises had an internal problem before they had a cloud problem. Starting in 2006 or 2007, Salesforce hit, and the whole cloud revolution and SaaS began finding its way into the story. The truth is our business really began when the cloud hit around 2006 or 2007.

Sramana Mitra: What did you do from 2002 to 2006? When did American Express come about?

Andre Durand: I should probably go back and look at what my financials were at that time. We didn’t have a server until 2005. I don’t think we sold much of anything – probably a little bit of professional services in 2002 to 2004. We were busy building an industry to educate people to tell them they had a problem.

Sramana Mitra: This was all happening on that half a million dollar investment.

Andre Durand: Do you remember Esther Dyson’s PC Forum conference?

Sramana Mitra: Yes.

Andre Durand:  I got an invite to that. It was my first exposure to real entrepreneurs and big thinkers. I sat quietly in the corner amongst all these giants, just happy to be there. I remember on the last day, 10 minutes before I was supposed to get a ride to the hotel, I was standing around killing time waiting for my taxi to arrive. I ran into a gentleman named Jeremy Allaire.

This is Allaire of Allaire Software. Jeremy is a true visionary and we just hit it off. We got talking about identity. We saw the future of it. Jeremy, as it turns out, was an entrepreneur-in-residence at General Catalyst. Because we were all early at that time, it was Jeremy’s vision that convinced General Catalyst to invest an A Round in 2003.

Sramana Mitra: Without any product and just on the strength of the vision of how the identity space is going to emerge, you raised money from General Catalyst?

Andre Durand: Yes. We got Fidelity Investments to quickly follow suit. General Catalyst and Fidelity co-led the A Round.

Sramana Mitra: How much was that?

Andre Durand: $3 million.

Sramana Mitra: What was the team?

Andre Durand: I might have been a full-time employee. I might have been 10 people. I had some fairly impressive contractors, for the lack of a better term, around me. It was my vision that identity was going to follow a similar path to Visa or MasterCard. I thought, “If we need a universal ID that can be recognized and accepted anywhere, there’s going to be a brand behind that so that if you come up to a website, you know that if you use this identity, you can login and be accepted.

The problem sounds exactly analogous to the problem that Visa, as a brand, provides consumers an ability to get credit at any merchant. I had contracted with the lady who ran all authorization and authentication services for Visa. I met the person who ran their data centers. I met the attorney for the Plus ATM network. I met the founder. I sold them a vision that identity, at some future point in time, was going to be similar to Visa and Plus. They were loosely involved at that time to give my little motley crew some credibility.

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