As Chief People and Places Officer at Okta, Vijay Rao has guided the company through a period of explosive growth. Okta, a leader in enterprise identity and access management, tripled to 6,000 employees during Rao’s five-year tenure. Revenues at the publicly-traded company hit $1.8 billion in 2023.
We spoke with Rao recently about evaluating emerging technologies; building productive relationships between startups and large organizations; and avoiding common pitfalls that can derail implementation.
This conversation is part of InnoLead’s new “Early Adopters” series, highlighting business leaders who are driving digital and AI transformation at major companies. Through these interviews, we’ll share perspectives from functional leaders who are putting emerging technology into practice — and building strong partnerships with their colleagues throughout the business.
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Within the People and Places functions at Okta, where do you see the biggest technology gaps or opportunities for innovation?
In the People space, it’s knowledge management. How do we help employees onboard faster, and get the information they need to do their jobs? We’re still in our infancy stages with AI, so I’m excited to see what solutions come out. Knowledge management is a huge productivity play to unlock.
GenAI is going to free people up to be more strategic and focus on important work. At the same time, it’s going to eliminate transactional roles. That’s just the reality.
How can GenAI transform HR?
GenAI is going to free people up to be more strategic and focus on important work. At the same time, it’s going to eliminate transactional roles. That’s just the reality. While this transactional work is important, eliminating it allows people to step up and be more strategic.
What separates startups that successfully break into the enterprise market from those that don’t?
Ease of use is really important. Ease of implementation is crucial too.
Breaking into enterprise means getting through robust security and procurement reviews. At a security company like ours, this can take months. Startups need to focus on their security posture, getting their SOC 2 reports and certifications. You might win on ease of use, and the customer may really want you, but without a good security posture, you probably won’t get selected. Or you’ll have to fix a lot of issues before you can actually be implemented.
Which internal stakeholders are crucial to involve when evaluating and implementing startup technologies?
Within my team, I have a Digital Solutions group that takes the lead initially in evaluating solutions. Then, we work with Business Technology on next steps — getting the security review completed and figuring out implementation timeframes.
Our Business Technology team comes in when there’s significant integration work needed. Most solutions have to integrate with Workday at some point. All our apps need single sign-on, so integrating with Okta is another key focus area.
What inspired you to start advising startups?
For me, it’s really about giving back. I’ve worked at startups in the past, so I know what it takes to try to make things successful.
I also wanted to get more involved with startups because one of my aspirations is to be on a board, or multiple boards of companies. I felt like the only way to really get that experience is to be an advisor first.
So I advise two companies: XP Health, which is revolutionizing the vision industry, and All Voices, an employee relations platform. I’ve really enjoyed my experience with both companies and getting to know the founders. It’s really great to see your feedback get leveraged and positively impact the company.
Looking back at startup relationships that didn’t meet expectations, what are the common pitfalls you’ve observed?
A couple points. First: there’s a conflict of interest if startups want you to use their product in order to be an advisor. I’ve been offered advisory roles with this condition and had to decline. You can’t tie the advisory role to using the product at your company.
The other pitfall is when companies don’t leverage you enough as an advisor. You’re reaching out asking, “How can I help?” but they’re so busy with their day-to-day that they don’t take advantage of your potential value.
When you think back on your career, are there any technology implementations that delivered outsized returns or unexpected value?
One does come to mind, but it wasn’t an external solution. While I was at Facebook, we built an internal employee portal in nine months on the Facebook platform back in 2017. This was pretty impactful because it touched all 40,000 employees at the company.
The portal became our main knowledge management system for the company — everything from HR and payroll information to internal policies, pretty much any company-level information that people needed to navigate and onboard. Before this tool, finding basic information was really difficult for employees.
Can you share an innovative solution you’ve recently implemented?
Yes, we recently implemented a tech solution to proactively predict attrition based on different data points.
We piloted the tech for free after about a year of conversations. My team was interested, so despite a lengthy security review, we went for it. And, we’re still using it.
With startup relationships, it’s not just one conversation. There’s continual discussion over two, three years.
Paulina Karpis leads Early-Stage Platform for B Capital, a global multistage venture firm investing in B2B startups.
