Executive Summary
Background
Todd McKinnon earned a Bachelor of Science in management and information systems from Brigham Young University and a Master of Science in computer science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He began his career at PeopleSoft, spending nearly eight years there across various engineering and leadership roles before moving to Salesforce.com in 2003, where he served as overall head of engineering, growing the team from 15 people to more than 250 and the underlying service from roughly two million daily transactions to more than 150 million, giving him direct experience scaling a cloud platform years before founding his own company.
Role and company
McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest and has served as chief executive officer and chairperson of the board since founding. Okta became one of the first cloud-based identity management platforms, letting companies secure employee and customer access to applications and data across both cloud and on-premises systems, and grew into what the company describes as the leading independent identity provider used by enterprises worldwide, serving thousands of customers including many of the largest organizations across finance, healthcare, and government.
Career and company-building context
At Salesforce, McKinnon's engineering team developed and launched Force.com, the industry's first platform-as-a-service product, and AppExchange, the first online marketplace for cloud computing applications, giving him direct experience building developer-facing cloud infrastructure before founding Okta. Under his leadership, Okta has recently extended its identity-first security model into what it calls an Identity Security Fabric, treating AI agents and other non-human identities — API keys, service accounts, and autonomous agents — as first-class identities alongside human users, reflecting McKinnon's continued positioning of identity as the foundational layer of enterprise security rather than a feature bolted on to individual applications. He has repeatedly argued in public appearances that most breaches trace back to compromised or mismanaged identities rather than to failures of network perimeter defenses, a framing that has shaped Okta's product roadmap for more than a decade.
Public milestones
Okta has introduced Identity Security Posture Management features including Agent Discovery, which surfaces "shadow" AI agents and unmanaged non-human identities operating inside a company's systems, alongside a centralized kill switch that lets administrators instantly revoke an AI agent's access and sessions across integrated applications if it behaves unexpectedly. McKinnon is a regular contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, and Fortune on identity and cloud security topics, and continues to serve on Okta's board alongside co-founder Frederic Kerrest, who serves as president and chief operating officer.
Why their work matters
McKinnon's extension of Okta's core identity model to cover AI agents addresses a rapidly growing enterprise security gap: as organizations deploy AI agents that can outnumber human users by fifty to one or more inside some environments, according to Okta's own published research, treating those agents as unmanaged infrastructure rather than governed identities creates a large and largely invisible attack surface. Okta's approach of applying already-proven identity principles — least-privilege access, continuous monitoring, and revocable credentials — to this new category is a useful reference point for how a mature security discipline is adapting to agentic AI rather than being replaced by it. Because Okta remains one of the few large identity vendors not owned by a broader platform company, McKinnon's continued independence also matters to enterprises wary of consolidating too much of their security stack with a single vendor.
Sources
This profile is sourced from Okta's own official leadership biography for McKinnon and its published blog posts describing its Identity Security Fabric and AI agent identity work, supplemented by McKinnon's own Fast Company contributor biography, which describes his prior roles at Salesforce and PeopleSoft in his own words. Product and feature details are drawn directly from Okta's own published materials rather than third-party analysis.
Background
Todd McKinnon earned a Bachelor of Science in management and information systems from Brigham Young University and a Master of Science in computer science from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo. He began his career at PeopleSoft, spending nearly eight years there across various engineering and leadership roles before moving to Salesforce.com in 2003, where he served as overall head of engineering, growing the team from 15 people to more than 250 and the underlying service from roughly two million daily transactions to more than 150 million, giving him direct experience scaling a cloud platform years before founding his own company.
Role and company
McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest and has served as chief executive officer and chairperson of the board since founding. Okta became one of the first cloud-based identity management platforms, letting companies secure employee and customer access to applications and data across both cloud and on-premises systems, and grew into what the company describes as the leading independent identity provider used by enterprises worldwide, serving thousands of customers including many of the largest organizations across finance, healthcare, and government.
Career and company-building context
At Salesforce, McKinnon’s engineering team developed and launched Force.com, the industry’s first platform-as-a-service product, and AppExchange, the first online marketplace for cloud computing applications, giving him direct experience building developer-facing cloud infrastructure before founding Okta. Under his leadership, Okta has recently extended its identity-first security model into what it calls an Identity Security Fabric, treating AI agents and other non-human identities — API keys, service accounts, and autonomous agents — as first-class identities alongside human users, reflecting McKinnon’s continued positioning of identity as the foundational layer of enterprise security rather than a feature bolted on to individual applications. He has repeatedly argued in public appearances that most breaches trace back to compromised or mismanaged identities rather than to failures of network perimeter defenses, a framing that has shaped Okta’s product roadmap for more than a decade.
Public milestones
Okta has introduced Identity Security Posture Management features including Agent Discovery, which surfaces “shadow” AI agents and unmanaged non-human identities operating inside a company’s systems, alongside a centralized kill switch that lets administrators instantly revoke an AI agent’s access and sessions across integrated applications if it behaves unexpectedly. McKinnon is a regular contributor to Forbes, Fast Company, and Fortune on identity and cloud security topics, and continues to serve on Okta’s board alongside co-founder Frederic Kerrest, who serves as president and chief operating officer.
Why their work matters
McKinnon’s extension of Okta’s core identity model to cover AI agents addresses a rapidly growing enterprise security gap: as organizations deploy AI agents that can outnumber human users by fifty to one or more inside some environments, according to Okta’s own published research, treating those agents as unmanaged infrastructure rather than governed identities creates a large and largely invisible attack surface. Okta’s approach of applying already-proven identity principles — least-privilege access, continuous monitoring, and revocable credentials — to this new category is a useful reference point for how a mature security discipline is adapting to agentic AI rather than being replaced by it. Because Okta remains one of the few large identity vendors not owned by a broader platform company, McKinnon’s continued independence also matters to enterprises wary of consolidating too much of their security stack with a single vendor.
Sources
This profile is sourced from Okta’s own official leadership biography for McKinnon and its published blog posts describing its Identity Security Fabric and AI agent identity work, supplemented by McKinnon’s own Fast Company contributor biography, which describes his prior roles at Salesforce and PeopleSoft in his own words. Product and feature details are drawn directly from Okta’s own published materials rather than third-party analysis.
