Why I'm joining the Forter team

(The following views and opinions are my own.)

I am ecstatic to announce that I have joined the Forter team as VP, Global Solutions Consulting! Forter’s e-commerce optimization platform, powered by the largest network of online retailers, knows which customers to trust, in real-time, every time.?

After spending ~9 years at Okta, and being part of Okta’s growth from $1M+ in revenue to $1.2B+, and seeing our Pre-Sales Customer Solutions team grow from a small but mighty few to 300+ globally, I have taken some time to reflect over the past several weeks on the incredible and once in a lifetime accomplishments that our Okta team had achieved. The success that we experienced at Okta, would not have been achieved without great team members with huge hearts and belief, customers and partners who believed in our team, solutions and vision, an amazing leadership team, an innovative and reliable technology with a ubiquitous need and a massive total addressable market. Thank you to all of you amazing Oktanauts; it was a pleasure working with you!

When I made the decision to leave Okta and give myself and our family a much needed break from the demands of software as a service sales, I started to communicate with a few trusted friends, some of which were in the VC community. I let them know that I’d be taking some time off for myself and family but I wanted to start to explore some opportunities that may be a great next part of the journey for myself and our family from a vocational standpoint. I had enough experience and time to reflect to know that I would be looking for some key attributes in the next team that I would join. The following is a reflection on these critical attributes and why Forter is where I’m now excited to call my work ‘home.’

Know thyself - Finding an opportunity that plays to my strengths

Anyone that’s taken a Philosophy 101 course or who has watched Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure has come across Socrates. One of the most quotable quips connected to Socrates is ‘know thyself.’ I was at the point in my vocational and life journey where I had found that an ideal role for me would be one where I had the opportunity to think, act and plan globally and strategically in a Pre-Sales leadership role with a preIPO company. I’ve had the opportunity to work for 5 startups including Opsware, Okta and others along the way, as well as some much larger organizations like Sun Microsystems (early 2000’s) and HP (on the software side, in the late 2000’s.) I learned a lot about culture, leadership and organizational scale at companies like HP and Sun Microsystems, but I also learned from my work in startup companies that the sweet spot for me in my current stage of life (married with 4 school age kids) would be something of a Goldilocks opportunity; for me that Goldilocks zone would be a company that was not too early stage (Series A-D), and not post-IPO. I love the tenacity and creativity it takes to build a company pre-IPO, as well as the first few years post-IPO, and I wanted something that was more of a later stage (Series E or F) where there were trailblazers who had built a solid foundation that could be built upon and scaled over the next several years. I also have learned that startup cultures which thrive and not only survive are transparent, inclusive & open-minded, and so these attributes were critical in my search as well.

Follow the Money - To be clear, I use this quote with irony

The term “Follow the Money” was popularized by the 1976 film, All the President’s Men, starring Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman, and I’ve always used it a bit tongue in cheek in the way that I think about analyzing great tech startup opportunities. In the film, this phrase is used in a negative context, but I use it in a positive light. If you really want to nerd out on more of the context around this phrase, there’s a great write up on Groovy History.

When I spoke with my friends and looked at the large swath of pre-IPO companies, this looking at Series E & F companies created a good sieve for me, but that wasn’t enough. I followed the money as well. I looked at WHO the investors were in these later stage companies because over time I’ve developed a decent understanding of the VC’s who tend to WIN the most in terms of their bets on market fit, culture, leadership and technology trends. This is where I look for companies where you see multiple rounds of funding from e.g. A16Z, Bessemer Ventures, Index Ventures, Lightspeed, Sequoia Capital, Salesforce Ventures, or Tiger Global. They’ve all placed nice bets on companies that have seen or are about to see massive success in the public markets.?

Vision - We become what we imagine

In addition to following the money, as noted above, it’s not just about where smart VC’s are placing their bets, but for me I have always wanted to be part of a company that has world class technology, incredible global market tailwinds, and a vision to turn the status quo on its head. Having spent the past ~9 years focused on identity and access management, or identity security, I knew that I wanted to find something that overlapped with my past experience, but not in a large way. At each stage of my vocational journey I’ve enjoyed attaining mastery in new areas of technology and business (IT infrastructure, High Performance Compute, Datacenter Automation, Software as a Service, Software Integrations, Identity Security, and now e-Commerce Optimization at Forter.) At Okta, we spoke about the critical nature of how identity was evolving and becoming prominent, as infrastructure, services, apps and customer experience all moved to the cloud over the past decade. Our focus was very much about securing the employee and consumer identity for our customers from an authentication perspective; with Forter, I have the opportunity to passionately empower our merchants/customers to provide a seamless customer experience at the transactional level (among the other parts of the customer workflow), where our merchant customers secure the purchase transactions for their consumers, enhance the overall customer experience and do this with best in class machine learning models that enable legitimate customers to easily transact for their goods and services, while securing our customers from nefarious actors who try to fraudulently leverage legitimate customer identities. Forter is already driving this value today for global customers in APAC, EMEA and the Americas. Forter’s platform is the future of e-Commerce Optimization.? We imagine a world where not only the customer’s e-commerce experience is frictionless and secure, leading to an enhanced customer experience, and quality of life but also a world where we’re driving increased top line revenue for our e-commerce merchants which in turn, benefits their companies, their employees, their partners, and thus a future world that raises the quality of life for all members of the supply chain in developed and developing economies across the globe.?

Leadership and culture are key

By leveraging my focus of company vision, stage (Series E or F) along with analyzing where the top VC’s had placed their bets, and having conversations with my VC and other friends, I learned more about the leadership teams, technology, company cultures and addressable markets for about 20 different companies that made what you could call ‘my top 20.’ Leadership can mean a lot of things to people, but for me, leadership is very much tied to culture and these are two key attributes that I leaned into quite a lot to find the best fit for me. When I’m speaking with founders and executive leaders I’m looking not only for transparency, but a vision that will pull the team forward when things become inevitably difficult (building a successful company is no simple task), and in addition to these two attributes, I’m looking for proven experience in prior parts of the journey of the leadership team, as well as humility and flexibility. You can have a very focused and dedicated vision and also be a leader with humility who is also secure enough to know that they do not have everything figured out; there’s also the need for flexibility to evolve the company and the team as success continues, because as Marshall Goldsmith highlights, “What got you here, won’t get you there.”? As I spoke with the top 20 startup companies, I was able to whittle it down to a top 5 list of companies that I was really enthusiastic about, after evaluating the top 20 on the aforementioned criteria. I was completely blown away by the alignment I found with these leadership attributes in my conversations with Liron Damri, Michael Reitblat, Marcus Holm, Lauren Vigliante, Thomas Hansen, AJ Umandap, Kris Zanuldin and others from the Forter senior leadership team. Forter moved to the clear #1 opportunity after these conversations. Culture is inherently tied to the leadership of a company, and I am very excited about Forter’s focus on building an iconic e-commerce optimization company, and doing it with a real focus on the diversity and quality of life of our team members. One recent example of this is Forter Fridays, where employees are strongly encouraged to unplug at 1PM local time every Friday. We’ve found we’re just as productive working strong, 4.5 days as we are 5 days. I personally know from dozens of conversations with friends that the ‘unlimited PTO’ being all the rage in Silicon Valley the past several years has missed the mark in reality, leading many people who I have cared about to burn out and in some cases struggle with mental health issues. I’m proud to work at a company who has a high cultural value on caring for its team members and providing time and space for team members to connect with their loved ones.

The Future with Forter

The need for data, AI/ML, cybersecurity and e-commerce solutions have all been fast-forwarded by the pandemic. The needs for these technologies had already been growing at a rapid pace before our lives were unequivocally changed by the pandemic, and there is now an even greater need for these technologies to be used in the right context to meet the demands of our societies, economies and our joint global future. Forter, for me, provides a beautifully perfect intersection of the technologies mentioned above, giving me an opportunity to leverage much of my past experiences in identity cybersecurity, and blends with it, the challenges of the future of e-commerce with a best in class, network effects driven, AI/ML model that changes the way that merchants interact in a much more positive way with their consumers. The underlying network effects paradigm which Forter has built from day 1 within our products and solutions empowers the phenomenal experiences our merchant customers are passing onto their consumers, and adding $10’s-$100’s of millions in their top line revenue isn’t too shabby either.

The opportunity in global e-commerce is massive; in 2019 B2C e-commerce was $3.354T globally and by 2024 is conservatively estimated to become $6.388T globally and 21.8% of total retail sales. B2B global e-commerce is expected to grow from $12T+ to $20.9T by 2027.

With the diversity of talented team members we are adding daily, our product innovation, and our recent $300M Series F funding, led by Tiger Global at a $3B valuation, the future is very bright. We’ve doubled our revenue over the past 12 months and our global network of merchants now exceeds $250B in annual online transactions. The Forter trust ecosystem is “enabling retailers, e-commerce platforms, issuing banks and payment providers to fight fraud together, boost confidence and improve the shoppers’ experience across the entire purchasing journey” and this is only the beginning! I’m incredibly grateful to be part of this team and the future we will create together. If you’re interested in exploring this preIPO, high growth company and learning more about the incredible career opportunities at Forter, please DM me, check out https://www.forter.com/careers/ for our open positions and review https://www.forter.com to learn more about the company, our solutions and and our vision.