What You Do Is Who You Are: An expert guide to building your company’s culture

by Ben Horowitz

A potential large deal with Sony would make or break the quarter. The good news was that the deal was on track. The bad news was that Okta’s sales rep had promised Sony that a feature called on-premise user provisioning—which would allow Sony to put users into the system from within its own buildings—would be delivered in a few months. In fact, Okta didn’t plan to build it for a few years. Sony didn’t require contractual assurance that the feature was just around the corner, but it did want McKinnon’s word. Was the smart thing to do to tell Sony the truth, or was it to save the company? Was that feature so important to Sony that it had to be warned that it would be delivered a little late—even at the risk of layoffs at Okta, or worse? “I knew that I could get the deal if I stretched the truth,” McKinnon recalled. “But I knew that everyone from the sales rep to the engineers would know that I had done that. They would assume that little lies were okay. I’d like to say it was an easy decision, but it was a hard decision. I ended up not taking the deal, because I knew it would be fatal in the long run. And maybe more than that because I did not want to lie.” He chose to risk the company rather than risking the culture. In this case, it worked out. Khosla Ventures made a gutsy bet and funded Okta’s next round despite all those missed quarters. As of this writing, Okta is worth nearly $15 billion and has become the most important cloud-identity product in the world. Okta has st...