Inspired Execution

A leadership podcast With Chet Kapoor

Sagnik Nandy

CTO and President of Technology, Okta

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Season 4 · Episode 8

Solving Intergalactic Problems and Planning for Sustainable Growth with Okta’s CTO

Today, we are joined by Sagnik Nandy, CTO and President of Technology at Okta, the world’s #1 identity platform. After spending fifteen years at Google, Sagnik transitioned to Okta and turned his focus to identity management and keeping us all safe in the digital world. He joins the show to talk about what it takes to build scalable products, how to stay grounded in high-stress situations, and much more!

Published October 18th, 2022 | 16:58 Runtime

Episode Transcript

Timestamps:

0:42 - Welcome to today’s episode with guest Sagnik Nandy

1:09 - How would Sagnik sum up his career in one word?

2:29 - Sagnik’s 15 years at Google: Solving hard problems with smart people and awesome technology

6:25 - Transitioning to Okta: Challenging himself to think differently

8:01 - What are the key mistakes people make when building scalable products?

10:10 - Sagnik explains how he stays grounded: Finding a balance of speed and sustainable growth

13:37 - The best advice Sagnik has ever received

14:56 - Rapid-fire questions

Welcome back to the Inspired Execution Podcast! In this episode, we are joined by Sagnik Nandy, CTO and President of Technology at Okta, the world’s #1 identity platform. After spending fifteen years at Google, Sagnik transitioned to Okta and turned his focus to identity management and keeping us all safe in the digital world. He joins the show to talk about what it takes to build scalable products, how to stay grounded in high-stress situations, and much more!

As the episode gets underway, Sagnik first sums up his career thus far in one word: gratitude. He has had the opportunity to solve really interesting problems and make an impact on millions of people while working with awesome colleagues and technologies. Diving into more detail on his career, Sagnik shares his experience working at Google for 15 years. Google was far smaller than it is now when Sagnik joined, and over the years, he saw the company transition from “the largest small company” to “the smallest large company.” Even after many years, going to work still felt like going to school, complete with a culture of ideating and questioning the status quo. As an engineer at heart, Sagnik loved his time with Google for four particular reasons: there were great problems to address where you could build solutions bottom-up, the problems has tremendous impact, the people he worked with were an amazing group and willing to hear other points of view, and the company supported individuals to grow in many ways.

After 15 years at Google, Sagnik decided to make a change. He wanted to prove to himself that he could succeed elsewhere. Given that Google does things its own way and tech had evolved very differently outside the company, Sagnik also wanted to get to know this other world and its ecosystem. Okta as a company was a good mix of what he was looking for in his next company, and he jumped in!

Sagnik has been building scalable products for his entire career. The key mistakes people often make in building such products are that they don’t proactively think about sustainable growth and they don’t build their systems for deprecation. Double-clicking on sustainable growth, Sagnik shares about staying grounded and balancing aims to pursue this growth and manage high-stress situations. He stays grounded by pursuing the best of both worlds, bringing together speed and thoughtfulness, and embracing the value of mistakes and diverse viewpoints. As the episode wraps up, he passes on the best advice he’s ever received and answers rapid-fire questions.