#110, CEO @ Ping Identity, Andre Durand: “Happiness Equals Reality, Minus Expectations”

0:00Three months into it, I called Phil Becker, who was my first investor. And I said, Phil, we have a problem. He said, what's that? I said, I'm pretty sure we just started a business in an industry that doesn't exist. I said, don't worry. I just reserved digitalidworld.com. You put up 5 ,000, I'll put up 5 ,000. We'll start the industry conference. We'll start a conversation about something that doesn't exist so we can build a company inside of it. And we did just that.

0:29Back in 2001, entrepreneur Andre Durand had a pivotal moment that would change the course of his career. From that observation, he founded Ping Identity, a company that not only pioneered a new industry, identity and access management, but also became a leader in it. Fast forward to today, Ping Identity processes millions of logins every hour, securing the digital landscape for businesses and individuals around the globe. In this episode, Andre dives deep into his journey from raising capital in the early days through to building a company in a nascent industry, and also navigating the rise of AI, the art of pivoting, and much, much more.

1:15Anyone who listens to this show knows I'm fascinated by entrepreneurs, and Andre is a true pioneer and visionary. It was a joy to speak to him, speaking from his offices in Denver, Colorado. This conversation is one you won't want to miss. I hope you enjoy it. It's Andre Durand.

1:42Thank you so much for coming on the Tech Leaders Podcast. I've been really, really excited about this one. Loads of things I'd like to talk to you about. But we always start with a bang, Andre, on the Tech Leaders Podcast. So the ever-present opening question, what does good leadership mean to you, Andre? You know, that's such a great question. I'm fond of the saying you're not a leader without followers. And that doesn't speak to title or any sort of entitlement. It does speak to whether or not you, I think, inspire people to come together around a mission or around a vision. I think it's important if collectively you share the same set of values so you know what the rules of engagement look like while you're together pursuing that vision and mission.

2:29So it really is about the inspiration and creating the opportunity for people to come together to achieve that mission or vision. Yeah. And do so in a way in which they fulfill their own career aspirations while helping the company fulfill it. Yeah, absolutely. It's a collaboration and mutual collective achievement, isn't it? Yeah, I think that's brilliant. I always give maritime examples. You're in a small boat together, you want everyone rowing in the same direction, don't you? Now, that's just really, really good sum up, Andre. So could you give us a little bit of an introduction of yourself, your background in the early days, and why you ultimately set up Ping Identity?

3:10Yeah, happy to. So I'm a three-time software entrepreneur, although January 4th was my 23rd year celebration here at Ping. So I guess you lose serial entrepreneur at some point in time. But I started a software company with a friend back in 1993. This was kind of pre-internet. We developed the first online photograph database back when viewing photographs, believe it or not, over 2 ,400 baud modems. And doing so after searching a database was a kind of cumbersome task. And so it was very kind of cottage industry at the time. Then, of course, the internet hit and everything changed. Bulletin boards kind of gave way to web servers and browsers.

3:53That was my first introduction to a disruptive transformation where everything was blue sky until one day it wasn't. Very, very quickly. And so I ended up selling that company, moving to Denver, and in a short amount of time, ended up coming across a small open source project called Jabber, which was focused on interoperable instant messaging back in the day where we had multiple proprietary instant messengers. like the AOL Instant Messenger and things like ICQ, for those of you who have been around for a while. So I decided to kind of pick up and help accelerate the vision, if you will, of that open source project.

4:36And so created a company called Jabber. And we, in essence, accelerated the open source development, built a commercial instant messaging platform that was ultimately acquired by Cisco and embedded in WebEx and a number of other Cisco capabilities. So I did that for a few years. About that time, Microsoft had introduced Passport, this notion that you would have a Microsoft account that would, in essence, allow you to traverse the internet leveraging that Microsoft account. And I gave a lot of thought to that concept at the time and the implications to Jabber. It kind of stuck in my head. In 2001, I took a small sabbatical after several years of entrepreneurialism.

5:20And I was on a sailboat off of Venezuela, the ABC islands. A lot of time to think, a lot of time to blog. And it occurred to me that we didn't know who people were on the internet. It was almost by design anonymous by default. And it occurred to me that things that you cared about, the integrity of those interactions on the internet couldn't be done anonymously. So somehow identity was missing on the internet. And therefore there was no accountability, I suppose. No accountability. You can't secure what you can't identify. I mean, there is a certain utility to anonymity, but for society to function properly and for there to be trust in every digital moment, you've got to know who you're interacting with on the other line.

6:07And obviously underneath pretty much every scam and fraud is an identity problem at its core, where people's actions are disconnected from the ramifications of those actions. Yeah. So that was the initial idea behind Pink. You're obviously a very entrepreneurial guy, quite clearly, you've demonstrated that three occasions. Where does that come from in your character, Andre? Why, how are you an entrepreneur? Why are you an entrepreneur? You know, is it family trait or is it just something that's been in you since a young age? Where does it come from? I do think, you know, if you've had kids, you realize pretty quickly, they come out pre-programmed.

6:43That doesn't mean that environmental conditions don't over a lifetime impact their personality and how they show up. But boy, I would say I had a lot of innate characters. So I love to build. I love to explore. I love risk. There's an adrenaline to jumping and then surviving the jump. And entrepreneurialism, you know, I've come to appreciate the formula for entrepreneurialism really is what I refer to as maximum survivable risk. Rinse and repeat over and over and over again. And if I look back at my career, you know, when you know nothing, have nothing, you have no reputation, you have no resources.

7:23Really what you have is an unproven idea and some will. But what I've realized is that will can bend reality. And when you're not afraid of taking risk and you do or are able to survive your jumps repeatedly, those end up being kind of core attributes of entrepreneurialism. And, you know, I can thank my parents, not in what they taught me, but, you know, I think the encoded behaviors that probably I exhibited at three, four and five. So do you think that's nature, not nurture then? Do you think that just was in your DNA? Or do you think it's something that was subconsciously built into you in your early years?

8:08It was definitely my DNA. So you had this backstory of setting up and exiting on three startups. Was it two or three before Ping? It was two before Ping, yeah? It was two. What did you learn from that experience then that sort of set you in good stead for the Ping journey? What did you learn from the first two ventures? Well, the first one in particular, right, because it was such a story of really survival and grit and, you know, accountability to friends and family who had invested, who I didn't want to let down. I would say kind of two things stand out. One is that many times your original idea might be close to what you end up doing, but not exactly what you think you're going to do.

8:55And so there's a certain amount of agility in your own mind and flexibility that you need to have in order to kind of fit your idea in reality. Turns out your idea might not be the problem the world's trying to solve at that moment. It might be five years from today, but not at the moment. And I found a lot of entrepreneurs are fairly rigid about their vision. It's like one way or no way, so to speak. Yeah. And if they're right, it's awesome. But when they're wrong, it keeps them from seeing what they would view as compromises to their vision that are not compromises at all. They're just break the problem down and tackle a smaller part of it to get started.

9:39So I would say that pivoting, of which the survival and really the first days of my first company were all about the last minute pivot that came out of desperation. Had I not done that pivot, had I not been desperate, I probably wouldn't have done it. I think the second point that kind of stands out is, you know, the goal of an entrepreneur is to come with a vision and really the goal of any leadership and to aggregate the resources required to achieve the vision. Now, there are two things when you say resources, it's people and money. And many times it's money and then you get the people. That's the resource.

10:19So you have a vision, you want to match it with resources. And invariably where many don't clear the bar, so to speak, because they have a big vision or maybe the vision's too big and they can't raise enough resources to achieve the vision. And that was me early. I had a big vision. I did raise money, but I never raised enough money to really achieve my aspirations. And it meant we were in a constant state of essentially needing money. I called it tin cupping, constantly tin cupping to make payroll. But I ended up in what I call an unhealthy relationship in so much as my job to get enough resources to do the job right.

10:57I never cleared the bar. Consequently, I was always honest with my employees. I would say, hey, we need to raise money for me to make payroll next week. I don't have it, but stick with me. I'll figure it out, right? Don't quit. And they didn't. They did stick with me and I did raise the money. But the challenge in that relationship was because we were in a blood pact, so to speak. Don't quit. I haven't raised the resources. when people didn't work out or they weren't doing the job. I almost felt obligated to keep them when I shouldn't have. I know exactly what you mean. I failed in my mission to raise enough resources to have a professional relationship with employees.

11:35Yeah. And that was unhealthy. Now, it all turned out fine in the end. That sort of balance between professional, because you're in the trench, you know, it's your baby and you're in the trenches with these people. You're inevitably going to grow quite close with them. And it's difficult to retain that professional relationship when these people are so present in your lives and you're so reliant on them. No, you pretty much nailed it. So it ended up being a less than forthright, fully what I call professional relationship to your point. And like I said, as a result of my lack of failure to get enough resources to instigate a professional relationship, I couldn't hold people accountable when that relationship was subpar.

12:19Anyway, that wasn't ideal. So, you know, look, I learned that and along the way, you know, my mindset in the beginning was, well, I'll raise some money and I'll pay everyone but myself. And I came to realize that if I can't afford to pay myself, I can't afford to pay anyone else because that also doesn't respect the longevity of the role of a founding CEO. So anyway, there were a lot of lessons that had to be kind of learned, if you will, early. But again, you're coming from nothing to something. Well, that's really interesting. How do you actually deal with that situation now then? Are you better at keeping your parameters professional now?

12:55How removed are you from the business on a day-to-day basis? It's kind of two dimensions to your question. Am I in the details or removed on one? And what's my balance between personal and professional relationships? Yes, yeah, exactly. I would say in the priority of personal and professional relationship, I'm deeply committed to people. And those people have names. However, I realize, and this took me a while to have this understanding, and it's important. My loyalty is to the cause. I'm not CEO because I was the founder. I was CEO on day one as the founder. I gave the title to myself, and I was employee number one and the only employee.

13:34But every day subsequent, I have to earn the title. So there's no entitlement to be CEO just because you're a founder. Earning the title means that my loyalty is to the cause. And the cause is the collective, not the individual. So there has to be a hierarchy and relationship in decision making. You have to hold people accountable to the job that they are hired to do for the better of the whole. That's the company. That's the loyalty to the cause. But that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't seek deep personal relationships. and transparent relationships about what's working and not working along the way.

14:10And I came to realize that everything has a beginning and a middle and an end. Companies, relationships, employer-employee, and that true friendship can transcend the employer-employee moment in time. And I didn't have a perspective young. It felt to me like everything was muddied together. It was a big swirling pot and I couldn't, there was no hierarchy. But over time, I came to appreciate there is, my loyalty has to be to the cause. Cause has to have people who are capable and accountable to a job at a moment in time. And that if you're so lucky that it's all working, don't take it for granted because things change.

14:51People's lives and motivations change and they might depart for their own reasons. And you have to respect that. Companies also change and the needs of the company will change along with it. And some people are along for multiple segments of that journey and some people aren't. And that's okay.

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15:56Okay, so I just want to get back on track. Late 2001, or maybe it was middle of 2001, you decided that you were going to set up Ping Identity. Can you talk us through that period in your life? What was the stimulus for setting up Ping Identity? And what did that first six months look like? Well, I'll tell you what the first day looks like. So I'm sitting on the sailboat, day sailing or sailing. I mean, it sounds glamorous, but really it's like when you move the boat, it's kind of terrifying. And then when you anchor the boat, which is the goal, in some ways, it's like sheer boredom, right? So you have a lot of time to think.

16:29So I'm sitting on the boat in the morning with my coffee. It was just a few of us on it, best friend from high school. And he comes up about nine o 'clock. I always get up early and I said, hey, I think I thought of my next business. He said, what's that? And I said, well, no one knows who you are on the internet. I think I need to figure out how to know your identity on the internet. And he thinks about that for a second. And he goes, well, how are you going to make money? I said, well, I'm not exactly sure, but we have web servers and email servers and FTP servers and DNS servers. I said, maybe there's an identity server.

17:01We'll build an identity server. Well, 23 years later, it's exactly what we do. But at the time, it was just such a naive observation about how we make money or how we would make money. So long story short, I said, I think I need to cut my sabbatical short, go back, write a little business plan, raise some money. And so I did just that. I came back, wrote a little business plan, ended up raising half moon, which was my goal. It was half a million or bust. I said, because that first lesson, right? In the old days, Andre would have raised 50K and said, let's get started. The newer Andre said, it's going to take me a year to figure out what we need to do.

17:33And I need a year's worth of capital for myself and some other folks. So we raised the half a million and I resigned from Jabber. and the CEO of the parent company said, hey, do you need office space? And I said, well, as it turns out, I do. He goes, well, we have lots of that. So I picked up my desktop computer and I moved it 50 feet across the kitchen to this blank office. And Jabber was doing well. I want to say Jabber was 80, 90 people at the time and here the founder is picking up his computer and starting something new. I remember the first day, so it's like a Monday or a Tuesday right after the holiday, January 4th.

18:07I've got my computer, I move it to a blank office. I turn it on. And of course I have no email. So it's like no messages because it's a new email address. And at about 11 in the morning, it really hit me. What did I do? Like, I don't know anything about identity, like nothing. So I was like, well, I got to make a logo. I knew how to do Photoshop. So I made a logo and it said, Ping ID. And just for a joke, I printed worldwide headquarters. And I went outside, taped it to the door. It was about two o 'clock and said, I don't know what else to do. So I just went home. So that was like the first day.

18:39make a logo, worldwide head curves. It was like a big joke. 23 years later, turns out that office is like six blocks from where I'm standing right now. In the first three months, three months into it, I called Phil Becker, who was my first investor. And I said, Phil, we have a problem. He said, what's that? I said, I'm pretty sure we just started a business in an industry that doesn't exist. He said, well, how do you figure? I said, well, go to your computer, go to Google, type in digital identity. I said, I can only find a single literally single reference in Google. And it's in another language.

19:12I'm not even sure it has to do with digital identity, but somehow it's in the title. It was like a PhD thesis. I said, don't worry. I just reserved digitalidworld.com. You put up 5 ,000, I'll put up 5 ,000. We'll start the industry conference. We'll start a conversation about something that doesn't exist so we can build a company inside of it. And we did just that. You created an industry, essentially. Was there nobody else doing this at that time? I mean, identity management wasn't a term. It was synonymous with Active Directory back in the day. Yeah, of course. And so, no, there was no conversation about identity as a bigger topic.

19:44So we created Digital ID World, which ultimately we sold to IDG. Later on, I liked the industry building part of that. So I started another conference called Adeniverse, which is kind of the official industry conference for the identity industry. It just goes to show that if something doesn't exist and you need to make it, you just do it, right? I needed to accelerate the conversation that wasn't focused on digital identity. And we created an industry conference to do exactly that, really to mature the market from which we wanted to build the company. Yeah, no, absolutely. So what type of organizations and what type of people would come to that conference?

20:23Who was your target customer is a better question. Well, it was very different in the early days to what it is now. In the early days, in the classic personalities of technology adoption, where you have the innovators and the early adopters before you get to the early majority. It's all the thinkers. It's all the people that like to build stuff that doesn't exist. So it really attracted the people who were thinking about, yeah, this is a problem. We do need to figure out how to authenticate people and how that authentication can be shared across all of these enterprise domains on the internet so you can know who you are in a broader context.

21:01not like an enterprise identity, but like an internet scale identity. So it was really all the early thinkers. And later it evolves and the industry matures and the terms kind of mature and you start attracting the doers, people who are responsible for the thing or the infrastructure. And they start having titles like, you know, director of identity and access management. And now you roll forward and it's the responsibility of the CISO, the chief information security officers responsible for integrity of identity. So it's evolved over time, but it was very much early adopters. In the early days, were you selling this as a white label capability to consumer-facing businesses, for instance?

21:44Or were you selling it as a product directly to the businesses retaining your branding on it and stuff like that? The first thing we sold was actually just a toolkit. It wasn't a product at all. It was an embedded toolkit to do what we now call single sign-on. There were some emerging standards. This is pre-SAML, which was the first kind of major standard for single sign-on. There was an industry consortia called the Liberty Alliance, kind of founded and run by Sun, but that had 200 organizations that wanted to create a standard for single sign-on on the internet. They developed a protocol. At the time, it was called IDFF 1.1.

22:22It was an industry consortia protocol, standard for single sign-on, we wrote the first open source toolkit. And my first customer was American Express, who basically bought some professional services to implement that toolkit inside of American Express to connect two applications. One application, you'd log into one app and you'd get single sign-on to the second app. It was very, very humble beginnings. About a year later, we turned that toolkit into our first product called Ping Federate, which has done well over a billion dollars now in the last 20 years and is relied upon by the world's largest organizations globally.

22:58These are telecoms, banks, airlines, governments to do exactly that. So we went from a very humble toolkit and a professional services business to turning that into, in essence, a single sign-on server that large enterprises would use. And companies used it in both ways. Most of it was white label, the way you would describe what you just did, which is on their customer-facing websites, our product would be behind the scenes, enabling single sign-on. And we did the exact same thing for employees. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Now that makes sense. So in terms of the early days of what you've just described up until now, could you talk us through the evolution of identity management right up until today?

23:37What did that evolutionary journey look like? And where are we at now in terms of the industry standard for identity and access management? It's a big space. I mean, it would be measured in tens of billions all in, right? All the different sectors, if you will, of what you just described. But identity and access management has always been slightly a tale of two market segments. Call it kind of the mass consumer market served by the likes of Microsoft and Google in some ways, your Google account, your Gmail account, or say your Microsoft account, or back in the day, your Yahoo account, things like that.

24:16So kind of like mass consumer your identity and your email address kind of tightly associated with your identity on the internet. And then there's been this large enterprise challenge. Large enterprises that have complex environments, thousands of applications. Those applications go from the mainframe all the way to the most recent SaaS app. They live in a hybrid world. And managing who has access to what, meaning the employees, what employees can access and how easy they can access it. and keeping the security of that employee so that only that employee can access that resource is a very complicated affair.

24:51So I call it an access management in large enterprise for both the customer use case as well as the workforce use case is a big, complex security integration challenge. And there are kind of two dimensions or buckets, I guess, of how enterprises kind of manage identity across all their different resources and all their different users. One is kind of focused on how users authenticate, you know, AKA in the old day, the username and password, but today with multi-factor authentication and biometrics like Face ID. And the other is how behind the scenes they manage identity, meaning when you get hired, they onboard you, the HR system and the IT system, they collaborate.