I find investors and founders are often obsessed with category creation. Given that Okta played in what many considered a fairly established market, how did the desire (or not) to create a new category factor into your messaging at Okta?

There is a classic fit in / stand out paradox that all companies have. On the one hand, most companies are improving on an existing way of solving a problem, there’s budget for that category, and therefore opportunity to pursue. It’s really, really expensive to create a completely new category as a new company, with a few exceptions. Salesforce create the category for SaaS software, for example. But they had to spend a lot of time and $$ on the whole ‘no software’ mantra. On the other hand, you want to obviously stand out from the crowd with differentiators and unique capabilities clearly articulated. So there’s a balance needed to fit in to a problem that people have but set the table in such a way where your solution is the best choice.

A couple of examples, Okta and Citrix.

At Okta, we pushed early on with analysts and influencers to create a sub-category of Identity and Access Management (“IAM”) called Identity-as-a-Service (“IDaaS”). Took a few years, but we got Gartner to do an MQ just on cloud-based identity. The requirements for IDaaS were similar in function but very different in execution from classic IAM. IDaaS solutions had to excel at connecting to cloud apps like Box and Office365, have a seamless mobile/desktop UI, have a meta-directory that could sync profile data back and forth from other identity sources, etc. These were requirements pushed by Okta and other cloud-first players like OneLogin and Microsoft to the analyst/early influencer community. Over time, market maturity led Gartner to merge the two together into one “Access Management” MQ and now cloud-first players sit next to (and run circles around!) traditional on-premises players like Oracle, Tivoli, and CA.

So, early days, it was important to ‘fit in’ to the identity market, but ‘stand out’ with a strong POV on how the world is changing and that change necessitates new capabilities that legacy providers don’t have.

On Citrix, we were late to the mobile device management market (“MDM”), so the approach there was to deposition vanilla MDM by adding Application Management (app wrapping/security) and Data Management (secure Dropbox) on top of MDM and working with a 3rd tier analyst to coin the term “EMM” or Enterprise Mobility Management. Then, we went around telling early customers that they needed to ‘go beyond’ MDM to a EMM solution… Citrix… for ‘complete’ app, data, AND device management (everyone loves ‘complete’ - just be sure you’re the one defining what it is!)

Something Citrix did really well on competitive positioning, btw, was ranking key features on a 3-point scale:

* Table-stakes: required capabilities that everyone and where there’s no clear uniqueness.
* Competitive differentiators: everyone has the capability, but your company does it better
* Purple cows: your company provides this capability and no one else has it

So in practice, here’s how that netted out for our entry into the mobility market:

* Mobile Device Management: table stakes. Everyone has it, no one had a big advantage
* Mobile App Management: differentiated. We put a security ‘wrapper’ around applications that protected them from security breaches. Not unique to us but the easy wrapping capabilities were novel.
* Mobile Data Management: purple cow. No mobility vendor offered a secure Dropbox-like capability. We generated 70% of our mobility sales based on this unique capability.

This is a practical way of designing in the fit-in/stand-out paradox into message development.