David Faugno, President & Chief Operating Officer at 1Password

well today I’m thrilled to welcome David Fogo president and COO of one password David’s career is nothing short of

remarkable but with a foundation in accounting from Ruckers and NBA from duke he served in incredible and pivotal

roles like the CFO CFO at Barracuda networks the an EVP at qualtrix and

currently he’s steering the ship at one passord while he’s also a venture partner at Excel um he’s also a board

member and investor for companies like Sentinel 1 browser stack and meltwater uh welcome

David thank you Scott uh thanks for having me great to be here it’s great to great to have you um well so since you

run a uh password company uh do you have a favorite password uh so the password we the

unbreakable password we use as an example is often in in discussion is Fluffy cat1 123 so uh yeah that’s uh

that’s the one we use very often as an example of a very robust or maybe not so robust password that some okay I think I

need to share that one with my wife she loves to make the worst passwords um yeah I suggest not using that one

actually she should probably get a password manager and have a very strong password yeah yeah so so our family uses

one one password actually and uh I think the hardest part I find with using a one

password is adherence and helping ensure that she actually uses it but anyway that’s that’s just our our family

problem I don’t know if uh you know we can talk more about that but um sure one question I wanted to just jump in into

was was actually something really cool that I found on your LinkedIn which was where you shared an experience when you

brought your daughter to meet President Obama at at a qualx conference um I’ve got four kids two daughters um what was

it like to to bring your daughter to work on that day and how did it feel like for you to be like were you a cool

dad that day was she excited yeah no that was it was really cool I was uh I was a CFO at qual trick

at the time uh we had just started I think it might have been our second or third big user conference and they got

very big like every year was bigger and bigger than the best than the next or the last sorry uh put a lot of emphasis

into it so you know kudos to Ryan Smith the founder CEO at quals for getting you know speakers like President Obama to uh

to come and participate um look I’m super proud of all my kids uh you know they uh they all find their own path and

and what’s important to them and passionate to them but fortunate in my scenario that my kids have you know do

have their passions and they go they go after it uh my daughter anesca who was the subject of of that uh post and that

day she’s always been you know motivated by making the world a better place uh

and and understanding con of the way that uh you know the political environment can support that kind of

stuff and so she’s been a big fan of President Obama since you know she was a little person uh and so that opportunity

to go join us at the conference uh see President Obama speak meet with her we meet with him uh was a really really

important to her and you know it kind of showed her a little bit about what the corporate side of the world could be uh

and she’s she’s now in law school she’s thirdy year of law school she’s at NYU in New York um you know she’s now

understands that uh all the different parts of the way the world works are interconnected and so whether it’s

politics or business or the intersection of that you can still have a passion for

improving the world uh and do it from it sort of any any sort of perch that makes sense um and including the corporate

world uh so um you know it was it was a great experience for her on a lot of levels it was a great experience for me

just to be part of that Journey uh for her and we you know we sometimes even talk about it and you know brings a

smile to her face which brings a smile to mind so this good up awesome um so so

you um you know like from from your background you’ve uh worked in finance and and basically at an executive level

a few times um I I’ve been a CEO now for four years and you know I’ve been around some great

Executives like Facebook and other companies and it just seems like um obviously there are great parts and then

there are some tough parts right and it seems like particularly you know helping run a company maybe at your level could

be could PR pretty tough so I guess like you know why why do you continue to do it what’s driving you what excites you

about it you know like what what’s what’s the main thing yeah I sometimes I joke you know I’m good at some things

I’m not so good at other things I’m not very good at retiring I tried it a couple times and we all that well so um

again I’m I’m back back gring hey so I I mean I I asked a similar question of a

uh of a person that is a very accomplished executive uh that later in

his life went back uh jumped into an operating role again and um this was maybe five six seven years ago uh he was

a board member of company that I was I was working at and I asked him sort of like you know why why are you doing it

like why are you jumping back in you obviously it wasn’t for the money or anything else and he said something that stuck with me and it relates a little

bit to the first question that you asked he said uh I want my kids to see me

grinding and it like really like resonated with me like hell yeah like

that’s really really important and I think about how my father lived his life and sort of like the ethics of working

hard for what you earn and um being committed and and sticking through things and so I I kind of feel the same

way at a certain level that like I want to be the right example for my kids that um um you know I embrace the grind and

then at the end of the day I love the grind like I actually really enjoy uh being in the mix uh I enjoy the work

content I use the analogy sometimes as like it’s the you know from a football analogy it’s the difference between you

know if you’re an advisor or in a board seat or you’re an operator it’s the difference between being in the booth

with the headset on or being on the field making a block that Springs the player for the touchdown run and there’s

just you can’t compare the the experience or the Fulfillment that you get when you’re actually part of making

it happen uh versus versus sort of a little bit of the rumble seat so um I I enjoy being part of the team I enjoy the

the the grind of getting it done I enjoy the work content uh if you put yourself in the right place but most important um

is really around people so like if you working with people that you respect that uh see the world the same way that

are um uh that you have a good relationship with then you know the hardest amount of work that you can do

still can still be really fun could still be really rewarding and similarly you could be in a great situation with

people that aren’t the right people and it’s a it’s it’s not a good experience so uh for me if I can continue to grind

be a good role model for my kids be a good example for others enjoy the quality and the uh the nature of the

work and then most significantly enjoy the people that I’m doing it with then you know life is good so that’s that’s

where I wound up finding myself I I love that answer my anytime so so like I’m I’m like you’re you’re thinking about

like your kids and the generations ahead of you like them seeing you and um I I was a pitcher growing up I played

baseball all through high school and my dad would come to my baseball games and he’d be in left field in his full

pinstriped suit with like his ear earpiece in on calls like watching and I could see he’s like he’s here he cares

about me but he’s still grinding and I think about that all the time I’m like what are my kids going to think about me

are they going to be like he’s the guy working at home remotely or you know what is it and so I I think that’s a

really important thing to consider um so how about like uh you know you’re

looking back I mean you you still have a lot ahead of you right but like looking backwards now um from CFO

EVP Finance guy you know even back to your NBA like you’ve probably learned a

lot and and had these perspectives that have changed is are there things where you’re like man I was completely wrong

at the be beginning of my career versus now where you’re like okay I think I finally figured it

out well I mean I think I certainly learned lessons along the way mentors

played a big role in that and helping me benefit from the experiences that they’ve had one of

the early career realizations that I had was because I did start out in a sort of

Finance track I went to ruers and got an undergrad degree in accounting almost all of my classmates were going into

public accounting uh firms to sort of the CPA route and I I didn’t want to do

that coming out of college because I had a desire to be a little bit more of a

broad business person versus a financial you know specialist uh but leveraging

that lens I had I had a gut that sort of there was a breadth to what I could could learn and bring to the to the

table that was rooted in the financial discipline and my education and my experience that I was going to get in

that that discipline but but had an impact that was broader and so so I didn’t go into public accounting I went to work for AT&T which was at the time

the largest company in the world and I was in a financial development program which had you rotated you through a

bunch of different functional areas within Finance uh and had exposure to to mentors and Executives and I actually um

I wound up having somebody that I really respected and trusted gave me some advice early on because they sort of saw

my desire to be Broad and and it was advice that i’ I’ve taken to heart and I pay it forward a lot when people come to

me and ask for for advice it’s a it’s a story that I tell and um basically the

the to sum up the advisor make it sort of you know tldr on it is um you know if you have an idea what you want to be

sort of uh you know you need to get enough of your experiences in life in the in the in the column that would lead

to that so in case of want to be a CFO someday uh you know there’s accounting and Treasury and planning and a bunch of

stops along the way you have to get exposure to in order to be able to do the job but you should sort of think about your career at 70% of the material

in that in that channel and 30% in adjacent areas where you can get different perspective uh make you better

and um this was controversial advice at the time this ecosystem of people who were supposed to be advisers and mentors

to the class of rotational folks it was you know you run through the program you do the three rotations you get this job

you get that job you know 10 years you get to be a district manager what else could you want uh and the other the

other advice was like hey you got to plot your own course like if you think about this balanced perspective thing

there’s no prescription to it you figur it out and so I went and quit this program I went out and took a sales job

at AT&T uh it was you know they didn’t care what program I came from if I didn’t make quota two uh two quarters in

a row was fired it was not only not in the program I wasn’t in the company uh and you know I did it because I wanted

to understand like the customer perspective so that when I was in a meeting like it wasn’t just spreadsheets it actually made sense it’s in context

uh and you know that led to so much you know open doors for me because when I rent back you know after a couple years

of figuring it out and being successful in sales I got back into the finance track and different kinds of jobs there

and just my perspective on what really happens when a customer gets a bill that’s messed up or the the the meter

you know pricing model didn’t work for a certain Market segment like I I had real world context for this what what was

being discussed in meetings and shown on spreadsheets and it really uh you know sort of accelerated what I was able to

do in the finance world and then I continued to find Opportunities to be abro and find other experiences and so

um you know that’s one of the things that I’ve sort of Built My Career on that basis and really trying to be as

Broad and and see the business from as many different angles while not doing it at the sake of having the requisite

experiences to be sort of what what I wanted to be and uh you know so that was was an

instrumental uh mentorship opportunity that I had uh when I was younger and

again when I get folks that reach out to me for help it’s one of the things I talk about depending on the situation but the one

of the most critical parts of that or the mentorship and will say it here since we’re we’re saying it on uh on video uh I was asked at the end of that

is like hey the only thing I ask for you in return know thank you so much for your advice and your experience is that

when somebody asks you for help you do the same and so when I whether it’s one of my daughter’s friends or someone

that’s working with me or you know there’s some some PE person that you know I have some relationship with that asks me for advice I always end it with

what I’m asking of you is that you pay it forward when your time comes people are asking you that so anybody who takes

any of that seriously or internalizes it via this video that’s that’s the request of you as well so that is beautiful okay

I I actually really like that because I think most it’s a sort of assumed but you often hear particularly in certain

industries that people are willing to share and give advice and then in other Industries they’re kind of surprised

when that advice is actually like shared and disseminated so that’s actually pretty cool good way to like just push it Forward I love it um okay so you

you’ve taken all these different roles that have sort of gotten you to a point where like you can see sales you can see

Finance you can see operations product Etc and so you’re now you know running the company as president um and in some

ways uh you probably joined this company and you had some ideas of like what you

would probably do right away or you had some ideas of like what you think you might do right away um so I was kind of

curious like when you join one password for example like how did you think about the first 90 days and just to kind of

give you some context for this question I talked to Nick meta last week he’s the CEO of gain site and he said that the

three things he really likes to do is show up and do something for the team do

something for the board and do something for customers and I thought like that was really profound but I assume

everybody kind of plays this differently so just curious like how how do you think about it yeah you know I think um

when uh when any when I try to start something new and even if it’s it’s

inside of something I’m already sort of doing um to me the most important thing is first and foremost is learning all

right and uh I think there’s a lot of times people will come in and say look

I’ve got my playbook boom you know slap it down and let the dust settle wherever it goes uh I don’t personally think

that’s the right way to start I think the first thing to do is really understand is there a method to any of

what appears to be madness here why are the why are the way that things done done so some cases it’s done because it

was done for a different time or it was not fought through in some cases there’s a little secret magic in there that’s

actually allowed the company to hit a vein someplace and very much prevalent

in founder Le companies which my career has largely been based on joining founder-led you know businesses that

figured out something pretty unique and helping that business to scale and so if you come in and you try to wipe out

everything that actually got them to where they where they’ gotten to you’re you know because your playbook says that

everything has to be done a certain way then I think you know that’s not the right formula for those kinds of environments um and so you know

understanding sort of why the decisions that uh have been made have been made and where they’re working and where they’re not uh that’s sort of the first

thing to learn the second you know thing to learn is like learn who the people are um you know what’s driving them uh

where is there good matches where is their mismatches where are people not being fully you know leveraged for what

their potential is things like that uh then the next thing to understand is like what does the business want to be when it grows up so really I put a lot

of emphasis on the long range like what are we trying to accomplish here uh you put in any number of years on it five

years from now 10 years from now I don’t know there’s a there’s an exercise to think about what are we trying to accomplish uh ultimately and then what’s

the path from where we are to where we’re trying to go and is that clear is everybody on the same page do we understand that collectively there

different opinions that have to be reconciled uh you know do we do we can we start to

identify the Choice points and the decision points on uh what we could be and what the right path to get there is

and how do we how do we create a system optionality and so once you start sort of like learning and understanding and

then you I think you’re in a position to then clarify communicate align you know

prioritize set metrics set benchmarks uh to execute to the Tactical plan that

marries up to that Vision with the benefit of understanding what makes you special and the benefit of understanding what the team’s strengths and weaknesses

are and so to me that’s what the first part of any of these gigs is is really trying to get all my hands around all

that and then leverage it to build some value amazing uh okay uh I I particularly like the uh the idea of not

screwing up what the founder has done or at least like observing it before you do um that seems pretty insightful uh for

for you guys um specifically at one password um from what I understand it’s a it’s a pretty substantial big remote

company and maybe parts of it aren’t part parts of it are maybe you can clarify for me but um what’s that been

like going and working for an entirely remote company trying to figure out how to communicate has it been a challenge

are you excited about it are there times where it’s tough like love to hear a little bit more about that yeah um you

know I guess pre- pandemic uh you know I went when I worked for qual tricks in in Provo Utah where you went to school I

was uh commuting from California so it wasn’t a remote company you know I had a little home office for the one day every

two weeks that I wasn’t staying at the proo mar yet but um but there was uh you know there was not really a remote a

remote company and you many companies were like that uh in the pandemic era a lot of companies went fully remote and

then some rotated back and some rotated partly back uh and some didn’t uh but

common to all of those pandemic era companies they weren’t built to be remote and so they a lot of them hit a

lot of the potential pitfalls of that environment so a company like one password was built originally as a

remote company they always operated that way there are number of companies that have that same profile uh and so they

the company was only able to scale successfully because they built a system to be able to attract and retain and

manage their people asset in a way that was true to that form of of uh work uh

and it requires a tremendous amount of overhead around communication specifically uh and really consistency

of messaging so you have to very much make the messaging clear about what the priorities are you have to very consistently communicate it you have to

hit people in the way that they are most likely to receive it right so you can go and say oh we did we said that in the

All Hands well you know not everybody like out all hands and paid attention to everything and by the way you got to say it in every all hands and you got to say

three different ways you got to make sure all the other forms of communication and you have to really think about making sure and stress

testing that each of the layers of management are staying aligned and connected on the same same page because what you what you can get is people not

like going in different direction thinking that what we’re trying to accomplish is this well another team thinks it’s this it’s much easier to

reconcile those differences and spot them when you’re sitting in the same room in meetings uh or in you’re in the hallway conversations that in person uh

uh provides you benefit some of those disconnects are harder to to pick up especially when you have thousands of people and they’re all in different

spots so really an emphasis on communication consistency uh approach

you know the the methods the channels of communication uh and then you also have to get out and meet people like you you

can’t have a remote remote company just assume that hey three years from now me and Scott will shake hands we talk on

Zoom you know three times a week but you never heard so like whether it’s whether it’s uh staff you know meetings for a

particular organization or you know events or or other opportunities for people to move around a bit and meet we

we emphasize that you know quite a bit and so you know all the savings that you get in real estate sometimes gets

compensated for the fact that you want people to actually meet each other in person a little bit and you have these you know handful sites that are in

different groups or larger groups or what have you so a lot of overhead you get a lot of benefit out of it but you have to manage to the downside otherwise

you can have a lot of you know inefficiency and lack of productivity and most significantly lack of alignment

so yeah definitely makes sense I think I’ve heard from many Executives this idea of like uh you know sharing the

same message over and over and over and over and basically doing it until either they are no longer in leadership or the

company ceases to exist seems seems kind of like a big Focus um so I I I mentioned it early on but

I’m a paying one password customer I I’ve loved the product for a bunch of different reasons uh you know it sort of

takes advantage of things like autofill all my passwords anything I basically need anytime that’s secure notes Etc and

it’s just it’s a great product um recently so I as a result of building Zite which is is a product that like is

on a bunch of different types of computers Mac Windows Etc I am constantly dog fooding all of the latest

like Apple products so I have seoa I’ve had it for like you know two three months which is their new operating

system update and one day I noticed that they had a new product called uh passwords and it just showed up on my

phone it showed up on my computer it kind of reminded me like at the iPod where like YouTube was downloaded onto my iPod all of a sudden and anyway I I

I’m curious like how you think about you know Google Apple Microsoft releasing

some of these features that are competitive with you guys where we’re building and and I’m building companies

that they’re build and releases feat releasing features for um how do you think about differentiating doing better

beating them Etc yeah so a few things there um uh first of all uh there are

billions of people on this planet that should be using a password manager that are not uh we are in very very early

days of like the appropriate hygiene and the problem that uh password manager

solves both from security and a productivity uh perspective uh is

getting more significant every day so more and more our lives are uh uh

interacting digitally with the world and it’s not just passwords it’s your wife’s you know TSA number when you’re booking

a flight it’s your kid social security number it’s uh the image of the healthcare card that needs to get sent

to the you know your kid when they’re at the doctor and they don’t have it there’s all these things where the security and convenience of having sort

of the digital identity stored in one place across a lot of different places and be able to securely recall it and

save adjustments to that digital identity is super important gets more and more important every day which is

why not only for the personal use case but the business use case we’re super excited about our future um we on our

consumer business we have millions of people that are use our product on the consumer side like yourself we have many

many many people probably Millions who use the word love like you used you said I love one password I go up to you know

go to the airport or go to a conference I have the one password badge on my shirt I get people that pull me aside and give me 10-minute diet tribs about

how one password changed their lives or their grand mother’s life whatever there are not any other products that actually

elicit that kind of certainly not in the security realm certainly not in B2B security where the end user will go out

of their way to tell somebody who they think works for the company how much they love the product you you in security it’s not crowd strike it’s not

OCTA it’s not po nobody loves those products so much that they’re pulling people aside in the airport to tell them

how much they love them so that that’s a really big important part of what we do and so what what we what we represent to

the users who get it who have got there is a very differentiate experience from

what you can get in your browser Plugin or native at the application Level however um we as a company of our means

and resource don’t have the ability to move the market for for millions and billions of people the platforms do and

so when Apple comes out and says passwords are important you should take it seriously or Google comes out and says the same thing it stimulates the

market at large to start thinking about the proper hygiene not to use fluffy cat 123 in every single one of the password

fields that you come across uh and ultimately if people want to start there at the platform level if they’re a

closed system on Apple or whether they just sort of want to not use fluffy cat and have a couple different things they

can remember and Google browser plugin that’s a great start on the journey but people ultimately many people realize

that Google’s in the business of selling ads Apple’s in the business of selling content and devices we’re in the

business of being Switzerland for what you use and being your trusted partner for keeping your dat privacy secure and

your ability to be extraordinarily productive as you interact digitally very different thesis for what we try to

do as a company and what platforms do with the password feature that they include in the platform and so many

people migrate from those platforms to us sometimes they bypass those platforms they go right to us when they realize

fluffy cat isn’t the the right way to go uh but what we do find is every time one of the big platform providers makes any

kind of noise they stimulate the market demand and the of traffic that comes to our website goes up not goes down when

when these things happen so we always have viewed it as a positive when when those folks are going to stimulate when the platforms stimulate awareness of the

problem that we all have uh and our our challenge is to make sure that every day

people like you continue to say I really love this product if we do that if we continue to focus on the end user and

making sure you love using the product and it helps your life be become materially better which we believe it

does then we’re going to be fine I I think that was a a great perfect way to

say it like the the love the product like so far in the very small amount of time that I’ve tried passwords don’t

love it and so I think I’m it’s going to be hard to keep going back um so you you

made a really interesting point around all of the different uh data points and notes and different pieces of

information you can pull in like when I when I go to my daughter’s dentist appointment it’s like hey do you have your Healthcare card and I’m like I do

but it where is it and it’s like I go to my email and then my United Healthcare and blah and it just it’s like

complicated and and when I actually have things in one password my life seems simpler um it seems like maybe with with

some of the newer technologies that are kind of coming out now like chat PT and AI um I’m curious like if you’re seeing

are there ways to pull that stuff in more easily like could you build a tool that sucks in my inbox and just grabs

all the stuff I need um how are you guys thinking about all the cool technology that’s out and available yeah there’s there’s multiple AI initiatives at you

know in play for years now at the company and many of them are focused on

usability uh which is an important pillar of our investment area that um you know lots of interesting things not

to give the the answer away but that you’ll see in the product that that will be tremendously valuable for end users

it also comes into play very much in our business use case where we sell a much broader platform effectively in the

identity and access management space to business customers and AI plays a big role there in in both Discovery and

workflow and other areas so yeah I mean uh AI you know every company and every

board for the last several years has been developing their AI strategy how does AI as you do I’m sure at zes as

well understand the points of Leverage both from an internal use perspective manifesting the product the way that you

support customers the way that you sell there’s all kinds of ways that this the wave of AI could and should be helping

customers serve companies serve their customers uh know better so and we’re no exception to that and then our last

question for the day um I would love to know from you what does the future of one password look like and what are you

excited about so where one password started two decades ago was really serving the most

prolific internet users of the time happen to be pretty technical consumers individuals and uh you know so the

product was designed for that Community with a couple things in mind security and data privacy

uh and you know those are super important to that constituency but also usability becomes important and those three things are often at odds right so

the company worked really hard to create product that was not only the most secure and and sensitive to data privacy concerns but also the most usable and

that really allowed that sort of you know consumer to really uh you know embrace the platform or the product and

it spread pretty virally early on uh you what happened in kind of the mid- teens is uh a lot of those folks took the

product into their workplace to cover some holes that the identity and access

management uh uh solutions that they were they were deploying in the in the workplace were were exposing and so um

we started getting requests for administrative tools you know to take our consumer product and pull it into the business use case we actually

launched our um one password for business in you know I think 2016 um and so you know that also sort of hit a vein

and started to pick up because the world was changing even at that time but that change EX ated pretty dramatically given

the pandemic when everybody as we mentioned before went sort of remote hybrid working from everywhere so now

they’re working on you know multiple devices as they’re moving uh throughout the house or wherever they are they are

um uh they’re interchanging between their personal uh identity and their professional identity throughout the day

as they’re doing things uh and they’re bringing in applications from the outside from the edge that the company

hasn’t necessarily sort of asked them to use to get their job done you know over 50% of the applications the company uses

are not known to the IT department and 80% of companies have some form of BYOD

policy and so there’s this Outer Perimeter of devices applications identities that exist outside of the

core it provision infrastructure which was the old way of working and so what one password has the opportunity to do

or what we’re doing is we launched a a platform called extended access management which basically provides

visibility and protection for that outer ring of applic devices work work forms

and and provides application visibility and control uh policy uh taking applications from The Edge and moving

them life cycle managing them over time into privilege and governance and all the things if appropriate but also

provides kind of a universal signon uh approach for both the things that are provisioned centrally and and

provisioned and Federated behind like an SSO that you might have with the OCTA or anantra uh Google workspace even for

some customers uh but also then complements that with all of the outer of devices devices and applications that

exist and so that’s really the future what that’s the problem that we’re solving about you know the the access trust Gap you you trust that all of the

identities all of the devices all of the applications uh you have the ability to sort of get visibility to them and

provide control and uh and uh provisioning over time into a more uh

governed uh environment so uh we’re super excited about uh extended access management the reception has been

tremendous from both customers as well as the industry that we were speaking with and and partners we’ve announced a

a great partnership with crowdstrike uh this week we’re working closely with them uh and you know there’s a lot of

the ecosystem players that recognize that the footprint that we have at the individual level you know the human

being that puts us on all their devices that you know loves the product uh that you know gets tremendous amount of

productivity and time back in their day gives us a really unique uh vantage point and opportunity to provide a more

comprehensive security solution and so that’s the future of where the business is going uh you we’re super excited to

have the opportunity to do it um well I think I think that wraps up our time and our questions for today so thank you

very much David Fogo of one password yeah I know appreciate being here and uh

thanks for thanks for doing it