Metamorphosis - a job left to be done

Last year, after a long career leading security efforts at some of the biggest technology companies in the world, I decided to take a break. I needed time to decompress and reflect after an intense run of amazing jobs that started more than 25 years ago. During this break I connected with my family at a critical juncture in life as my wife and I began our preparations to become empty nesters. I spent time traveling, reading, and reflecting on my life up to this point. But most importantly, I spent time re-connecting with the mentors, former colleagues and sponsors who have played pivotal roles in my success over the years. You all know who you are and I am deeply grateful for everything you have done for me.

During my time off, it became apparent that I have more service left to offer the world. Instead of retiring, I realized that I was preparing for my next stage. The question became, what is the best way for me to serve? 

There are some things about myself that I have learned to embrace. First, I’m a builder. I’ve been building things since I was a kid taking apart my family’s vacuum cleaner to figure out how it worked. Second, I am passionate about building teams and empowering them to do the best work of their careers. The greatest compliment I’ve ever received was a former team member telling me that a project we worked on together was the best job of their career. Third, I am at my best when driving projects with significant business impact. My career has allowed me to take on challenges and create large scale solutions that I couldn’t have ever imagined while playing with that old vacuum cleaner. 

Taking these personality traits into consideration, I felt there were two ways I could re-engage: Head back into a big company either as a product or security executive;  Or, take on the more challenging path of building a company to solve a critical problem that will make organizations more trustworthy while making the world a more secure place for everyone. Ultimately I decided to take the latter path and Oleria (a genus of transparent winged butterflies) was born! Then, the real work began to get it off the ground.  

The Inspiration

The first order of business when I began to think about starting the company was to clearly define the problem I was setting out to solve and what I wanted the world to look like when we were successful. For me this was the easy part. 

I've long been vexed by the challenge of providing robust security while empowering employees to do their jobs with ease. So often access to applications and data is both insecure and places unnecessary obstacles in the way of employees. This problem is only growing with the transition to SaaS. It is clear that the real solution requires an adaptive and autonomous approach to access. The days of static and manual access processes must end and be replaced by an adaptive and autonomous future that liberates business outcomes.

While I knew this was one of the most challenging and costly problems my teams and I had faced in my former jobs, I wanted to make sure that other trusted advisors saw this the same way. So, I spent months talking to dozens of former CISO colleagues, security industry luminaries and potential investors to vet and refine these ideas. I became quite energized when it became clear that others saw the same opportunity that I did – so much so that several of them decided to join us as investors!

Bringing it to life

The next order of business was to decide who I wanted to partner with to build this vision. Selecting a partner for any business is an important endeavor. In a start-up it is even more critical because you are going to be working in close quarters with them for a long time. You need to have a level of chemistry that goes beyond what most co-workers have. Critically, you need shared vision and values. You also need to be able to be completely honest with each other and push each other every day to be and do better. 

For me this partner was Jagadeesh Kunda. Jagadeesh and I had the pleasure of working together at both Microsoft and Salesforce. He is an expert in Identity and Access Management, a top notch product leader, a strong manager and mentor, and most of all I really enjoy working with him on big challenging projects. We worked together to solve application compatibility for Windows 10 at Microsoft which was critical to achieving the goal of upgrading hundreds of millions of PCs from previous versions of Windows. Together with our team, we completely rebuilt the Identity and Access Management infrastructure at Salesforce including creating an all new cloud scale service for managing access to all of Salesforce’s production infrastructure. I can’t think of anyone better to take this journey with than Jagadeesh and I’m thrilled that he was as excited about the challenge as I was.

In addition to a founding team, a startup also needs capital to turn a vision into reality. The fundraising process was an incredible journey unto itself. We met so many amazing people along the way who freely shared their wisdom with us as new founders. I’m thrilled that we are now able to announce our incredible group investors. And I look forward to staying in touch with all of those who we met that aren’t part of this initial group.

I’ve been thrilled to collaborate with the growing group of investors, advisors and partners who have joined forces with us. I have known and worked with some of these people for a long time.  Others I have had the pleasure of meeting during this new journey. They have been critical to helping Jagadeesh and me build out this vision and get us ready for this announcement. I am indebted to all for their confidence, feedback, ideas and hard work that has made today possible. 

Defining who we want to be

Once we had defined the core problem to solve and established the initial team to solve it with, the real work began to define the company we wanted to build. For us this started with an aspirational vision and foundational values. 

Our vision - and what defines our brand - is to solve these challenges in entirely new business outcome centric ways. We are creating solutions that provide enterprise-ready security that enables organizations and their teams to accelerate while maintaining customer trust. Oleria will provide security that sets your business free, free to collaborate and innovate. And we will do this with a friendly, consumer-like user experience that makes a CISO's team more effective and efficient at their core duties.  Through this, we will enable brands to retain their most important asset - their customers’ trust.  

Ultimately, our vision is to build “A world where every organization is trusted to protect the data of all people.” And we don’t plan to stop until we’re there!

After establishing a shared aspiration for the world we wanted to create, it was also critical to identify what is most important – our foundational values. These will guide everything that we do from our culture to our products to all of our interactions with stakeholders and much much more. I’ve really come to appreciate the way that well defined and shared values attract highly capable and motivated teams, as well as help partners and customers understand why they should choose to work with an organization. 

Our Oleria values are Trust, People, Customer Success, Innovation and Equality. They inspire us to do our best work everyday, guide us on who to hire, help us drive prioritization and decision making, and remind us to never forget what is truly important.

Today we’re sharing Oleria with you all for the first time. Over the coming weeks and months we will continue to grow our team (We’re Hiring!) and get the initial product into the hands of our pilot customers. As we progress we will continue to share more with you about the challenges we see in the access space, our thoughts on solving them and more details about the product we are building. I’m excited to share our journey with all of you.

After reading all of this, I’m sure you’re eager to learn more about our product. For that I suggest checking out Jagadeesh’s blog post.

Welcome to the Kaleidoscope (group of butterflies)!

Jim Alkove

Oleria Co-Founder and CEO