Well… that happened.
The “that” in this case is, as of mid-October, I have been in identity and access management for 25 years. With the recent passing of an industry legend and good friend, I have been a bit more reflective than usual and decided to do some of that reflection in public.
I started in the industry as a sales engineer. I was too dumb to realize that when my Sales VP from my current job at the time got recruited and brought me along to Access360 headquarters, I was being recruited too. (I never claimed to be the most perceptive person…) As IBM acquired us, I transitioned into product management… I think my boss was sick of me complaining about the product and thusly challenged me to fix it. From there I got exposed to the much larger world of both a ginormous company but also the larger industry.
Being young and impatient, I left IBM for a security company that combined identity and network security at the packet level… learned a ton about network security and security in general as well as what to watch out for in leadership teams. After a stop at a financial GRC company doing toxic combination and segregation of duty analysis, I joined Burton Group.
It’s at BG that the world really opened up. The opportunity to be surrounded by some of the absolutely smartest people I have ever met combined with the opportunity to help people at scale. It was Halycon Days. Gartner acquiring Burton opened other kinds of doors and some “interesting” lessons came with that too.
Wanting to get back to building things instead of talking about building things I joined the Salesforce ohana. Up until this point, I had never stuck around anywhere longer than 5 years… but in what felt like a blink, it was 9 years.
All of these experiences set me to do my own thing at Weave Identity and now SGNL.
I don’t talk about these experiences as a “career.” I was never and still am not a person who had a career in mind. In fact, I think a career is just the look back narrative one creates to tie professional experiences together. My career desires can be summed up in my own version of Jeff Spicoli, “All I need is to ship some cool shit with awesome people.”
I have been incredibly fortunate. This industry has given the opportunity to see the world. I have met some amazing people and formed lifetime friendships. I have been challenged intellectually and creatively. And I still think I am the youngest, least intelligent person in the room.
The reason I found identity interesting all those years ago is because its challenges touch everyone of us. In some form or fashion, every person interacts with issues of identity access every single day. Yes, there is a very broad range of issues from the mundane (remembering passwords) to the existential (legal personhood) and everything in between. These problems, all of them, absolutely fascinate me still to this day.
None of us know how much time we get here, so I don’t want to make predictions about the next 25 years. But I can feel confident about is my love for the industry, the community we have formed, the work, and for whatever comes next.