Pros
My colleagues teach, challenge, and motivate me. People at Okta are smart. I learn new things from new people every day. I'm constantly impressed by my colleagues' creativity and ability to solve new and complex problems. Sales Engineers teach me how our technology works on the backend. Sales Reps and Managers teach me how to organize my schedule, navigate accounts, and identify addressable pains in the companies I work with. Our Product Marketers teach me how to position Okta against competitors. Our BizOps and Accounting teams teach me why it's important to structure contracts correctly and uphold our legal terms. Every single other team helps me better understand something - from business tactics, position in the market, and product roadmap, to sales best practices and communication strategies. Perhaps more importantly, my colleagues are happy and willing to help one another. What we're doing together is not easy. We're solving problems that 1) didn't exist ten years ago, and 2) evolve every day as new cloud technologies and security threats emerge. All hands and minds are on deck when it comes to creating Okta’s success. Being surrounded by intelligent, driven, and supportive people is what pushes me to want to learn, improve, and make an impact within this company. I am learning how to build and scale a start up company. Okta has grown nearly 2.5x in the two years I've been with the company. Many of the internal processes that were in place when I started have changed. While those old processes might still work at our size today, they certainly wouldn't scale at the size we expect to reach ten years from now. I've been watching our leadership team prioritize, reorganize, and optimize every part of the business. From market segmentation, messaging and branding, to platform architecture and security. I've been paying attention to where and why growing pains have manifested. And I've been taking note of how we've addressed these pains to build a more mature company. But I’m not just following blindly. I see that we make mistakes along the way. When those mistakes are related to my team, and when I can affect change, I have a hand in proposing new ideas and correcting those mistakes. What I'm learning by being a part of this is going to make me an invaluable asset to the companies I will work for (and possibly start) and make successful throughout my career. I feel confident in and inspired by our leaders. Perhaps the main reason why it’s so beneficial to my career to watch how this company is being built is that we have a lot of people here who have successfully done this before. Our CEO, COO, and CCO (Chief Customer Officer) were all with Salesforce from the early 2000’s where they played major roles in building the first cloud company to successfully take on Siebel Systems who was the on-premise CRM leader, differentiate from Microsoft's new-at-the-time Dynamics CRM, and dominate a market that didn’t exist before. Our CEO was the first VP of Engineering in 2003 and was responsible for growing that team from 15 people to 250. Today, Salesforce has nearly 20,000 employees, supports over 150,000 customers, and generates over $5 billion a year. My manager, the manager of the next team I'm working on getting promoted to, and their manager all came from SuccessFactors where they helped build the first cloud-based human capital management software company that paved the way for companies like Workday, and forced on-premise, perennial incumbents such as ADP and Oracle to innovate and develop cloud HCM offerings to compete in the market that SuccessFactors invented. I truly believe that we have the best product in our market. When I go head-to-head against any of our competitors, and the customer's use case is a good fit, I feel confident that I'm offering the best technology. The reasons why I've lost competitive deals in the past have been because of un-matchable price cuts, pre-existing business relationships, or technical requirements that we simply can't meet or are too far away on our roadmap. My responsibilities as a salesperson are to articulate the value of our technology in order to avoid price wars with our low-cost competitors, to build rapport with my customers to overcome the weight of a pre-existing business relationship, and to identify early on when a use case isn't a good fit for our product. These deals that I've lost have helped me improve in these areas and become a better salesperson. But from a technology standpoint, when a buyer is looking for the best identity management product and company, and when they run a comprehensive evaluation, Okta always wins. What fuels my conviction on this is that we have a lot of people - Product Managers, Cloud Architects, Implementation Consultants - who have been working in enterprise identity management for decades. They were in this industry when only enormous enterprises could afford hundreds of thousands of dollars of on-premise identity management software. Many of the same integration challenges that existed with early on-premise IDM have transposed as parallel challenges with cloud IDM. Our team has designed our products with that knowledge in mind. Beyond retrospective development, as we move forward and plan the roadmap for our products, our team does a great job of partnering with our customers and analyzing the market to understand how IDM demands are evolving and how Okta must to adapt to address emerging challenges. When I talk to evaluators and existing customers about our roadmap, I often get positive, enthusiastic feedback that reassures me that our product team is deducing the market accurately. As an honest salesperson, there is no better feeling than knowing that when I propose a solution to my customers, it's going to work well, it's going to work better than our competitors, and they're going to realize the benefits and gain the value that I've identified with them during the evaluation. I have both freedom and structure in my sales cycles. Our sales team is rigorously trained on how to help customers understand their IDM-related challenges, define their objectives for an IDM initiative, and assist a customer's evaluation process. While there is this framework to help guide the process for working with customers, our management team also allows me to be creative and put my own spin on how I interact with customers and work my deals. This freedom has been valuable for my growth as a salesperson because it has allowed me to experiment with new strategies, identify my strengths and weaknesses, and leverage my personality to bring in business. Okta is the only company I've sold for, so I my firsthand experience in a variety of sales organizations is limited. But two years ago, when I was applying for sales jobs, I read numerous reviews on Glassdoor about sales teams that enforce a cookie cutter sales process, thus stifling creativity and narrowing the opportunity to learn. I'm paid well. There's a reason why TechCrunch lists Okta as one of the 20 highest paying start up tech companies. For reference, as a starting point, it's not uncommon to start as a Sales Development Representative as a first job out of college and make $80-90k within a year -- six figures if you blow your number out of the water. You have to be smart, hard-working, and produce results, but it's absolutely attainable. I have a clear path to promotion. The sales progression is clearly defined. I know who I'll be working for next. All of the leaders of that next team are in the office every day, they're accessible, they're transparent about their hiring standards and their growth plans, and they're willing to provide guidance to help me prepare for their team. That being said, in our sales org, we don't promote based only on tenure or results. For me, it has also taken internal networking, developing personal sponsors, learning where and when growth is planned, and endorsing myself to the right people. I think the internal politics have been a point of contention for some, but I also think it's unavoidable at any company. In my personal experience, I've found the opportunity to progress within our sales team to be fair and obtainable.
Cons
No 401(k) match or gym programs (which is ironic because our CEO Is super fit). However, it has been made clear multiple times to the whole company why management has strategically chosen to not fund these employee programs - and the reasons make sense in terms of company investments and limited cash. Long hours tend to produce results, and that's rewarded. You have to put it on yourself to find balance, stay healthy, and say no when necessary. Otherwise, you'll get pushed and pushed and run into the ground.
