Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Unlocking Success: Fundraising Secrets for Taking Your Organization to the Next Level! Okta's COO

7 Dec 2023 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:54

A short talk/presentation by Okta's COO about fundraising strategies and experiences. Covers Okta's capital raising history (total $2.7B), lessons on storytelling vs. slide decks, and practical tips for pitching and hiring professional leadership to scale an organization.

Questions this video answers

$2.7 billion

Seven rounds from Sequoia, Andreessen, Greylock, and Khosla

$230 million

$2.3 billion of public market debt over the last five years

Chapters

We had all these things where I got to be comfortable saying, you know what it means. Now I've been able to hire someone who is a professional, who is going to be able to take our organization to the next level. And you got to love that. You got to embrace that. All right, Fundraising. Over the course of Okta's history, we have raised $2.7 billion. I raised seven rounds of private venture capital from Sequoia, Andreessen, Greylock, and Khosla to the tune of $230 million. We raised $2.3 billion of debt in the public markets over the last five years. Okay. Number one thing that matters in fundraising, I don't care if it was our seed round, which was a million dollars. I know people are like, what? My pre seed is 10 things. And they're all like, yeah, yeah, we like you, but not that much. We're like, what's going on? I have an idea. Let's just throw away the deck and tell a story. But we had to go through a lot of pain for that. If you are going to write a deck, start with the subject line. And you know, sales statistics update is a bad title.