Erin Baudo Felter is the Vice President of Global Impact at Okta and is responsible for leveraging Okta’s people, products and corporate resources – to create long-term value for people and the planet. Okta is the leading independent partner for Identity management. The company’s vision is to free everyone to safely use any technology, proving that pursuit is possible with seamless and secure access, authentication, and authorization. Erin also leads Okta for Good, the company’s corporate social impact initiative. Her leadership includes Okta’s climate strategy; nonprofit business; strategic philanthropy; employee and community engagement; and emerging human rights efforts.

John Shegerian: Do you have a suggestion for a Rockstar Impact Podcast guest? Go to impactpodcast.com and just click ‘Be a Guest’ to recommend someone today. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com. This episode of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Closed Loop Partners. Closed Loop Partners is a leading circular economy investor in the United States with an extensive network of Fortune 500 corporate investors, family offices, institutional investors, industry experts, and Impact partners. Closed Loop’s platform spans the arc of capital from venture capital to private equity, bridging gaps and fostering synergies to scale the circular economy. To find Closed Loop Partners, please go to www.closedlooppartners.com.

John: Welcome to another edition of the Impact Podcast. I’m John Shegerian, and I’m so honored to have with us today, Erin Baudo Felter. She’s the VP of Social Impact and Sustainability at Okta. Welcome Erin to the show.

Erin Baudo Felter: Hey, thanks, John. Thanks for having me.

John: Hey, before we get talking about what you and your colleagues are doing in sustainability and social impact at Okta, and for our listeners and viewers who will, of course, be in the show notes, you can find them at www.okta.com. Talk a little bit about the Erin Baudo Felter background story. Where did you grow up, and how did you get on this very impactful and exciting journey that you’re on?

Erin: Yeah, thanks for asking. I have lived all over. I was born in New York, grew up in Texas, and then have spent my adult years in California. I’ve seen a lot of [inaudible].

John: That’s a pretty good trifecta, by the way. Those are three pretty great places to live in your life.

Erin: Those are good. Yes, 100%. This has only sort of made sense later as I look back on my career, but when I think about my origin story, my mom was a hippie in the 60s, and she marched for civil rights and has that kind of countercultural orientation. And my dad was a very successful businessman. And so growing up and now seeing that I’ve found this career in corporate social impact for the last 20 years, it sort of makes sense in hindsight that I found[?] a way to combine those two things into this incredible job. When I was in school, when I was coming up, I had no idea this was a career at all. I didn’t know that this type of…

John: Where did you go to school?

Erin: I went to college at UT Austin, University of Texas at Austin, and studied archaeology and anthropology.

John: [inaudible].

Erin: There you go. And then later, once I started working and discovered in my first company, I was very lucky that they had a very small corporate social responsibility program in that first company I was in, and I got exposed to this. I always say it was like a lightning bolt hit me. It was just really one of those moments in life where I said, “I don’t know what this thing is, but I want to do that.”

John: I love it. You knew.

Erin: Yeah, I knew. It was just something kind of sparkly about it to me. I eventually went back and got an MBA once I realized that, wow, I really wanted to understand business, first of all, better and be able to speak the language of business and then apply that to solving broader challenges in the world and trying to make a positive difference.

John: I love it. And you got your MBA over at UCLA Anderson, huh?

Erin: I did. Yes, I did.

John: Great. I love it, you got two great schools represented, that’s for sure. Talk a little bit about when did you join Okta?

Erin: I joined Okta at a very cool time. I joined Okta, unbeknownst to me, weeks before they IPO’d. So, I joined in 2017.

John: Wow.

Erin: Okta was founded in 2009. So still a very young company. When I joined, there were only about 800 employees. I joined as the first person to come in to do social impact as my whole job. The company had just taken the 1% pledge, which is essentially giving pledge for companies.

John: Did they already have a sustainability program or was that their first toe in social impact leading into sustainability?

Erin: So, social impact came first and sustainability came later.

John: Got it. So, you were walking into what I like to call with so many of your fraternity colleagues in the sustainability impact field, you were walking into that proverbial white page. You had a clean slate.

Erin: Absolutely. Clean slate.

John: So talk a little bit about that. That could be both unbelievably exciting, but unbelievably scary at the same time. How did you figure out where do you start? Obviously, you and I know, sustainability is a journey. There’s no finish line. Impact is a journey. There’s no finish line. And you can read it very broadly or very narrowly. How did you go about looking at how broadly or narrowly to approach this very important social impact topic?

Erin: Yeah. I mean, you nailed it. It is very overwhelming, wonderful but also overwhelming to walk into a situation where it’s like, it could be anything. The good news about Okta and one of the reasons why I joined the company is that even though it was a blank slate in terms of a social impact program, the culture of the company was all about this from the very beginning. The company’s founders, Todd McKinnon, who is still the CEO, Frederick Harris, they founded this company with the idea that they wanted to attract people to solve really big problems for the world. Okta is an identity security company. So we’re solving very, very complex technology and security challenges for organizations all over the world. And so, they wanted to attract people that wanted to solve really big, hard problems, but also that had a sense of the world outside of themselves. And so giving back, making this a part of Okta’s values was sort of a seed that was planted at the very beginning. And then as the company grew, what’s, I think, so beautiful about how they led the company is at each stage where we got bigger, had more resources, had more influence, had more of an ability to take those steps, social impact and giving back was a part of that. And that’s what happened when I joined at the IPO is that the company took the 1% pledge and actually made a commitment in our S1 filing document that you can Google and go see and find that there was a commitment to launch Okta for Good, which is the name of our social impact program. So, that’s kind of what I walked into. And so it made it easier, I guess, a little bit less scary to center on what was important.

John: That’s great. I want to go into Okta for Good in a second. So, for our audience and listeners, I want them to level set and understand who Okta is though. Let’s go back to that. Where is physically the offices for Okta, the founders, where are they at?

Erin: Okta was founded in San Francisco.

John: Got it.

Erin: So we’re a Bay Area-based tech company. Of course, now we’re all over the world and over a dozen countries and serving organizations in hundreds of countries.

John: Right. Over 6,000 employees and over 2 billion in sales, so this is quite a sizable security company.

Erin: Absolutely. Yeah, absolutely.

John: Okay. So now you come in and Okta for Good, talk a little bit about when you launched that and what you wanted from the launch, and then how’s it gone since you launched it?

Erin: Yeah. So the 1% pledge is a really nice framework for companies who are just starting out in impact work. It provides, I would say, a template for how to get started, and that’s how we utilized it. Now we coach and help other companies in that ecosystem to utilize it too. But it’s essentially a pledge of three things. It’s financial pledge. In our case, it was pre-IPO equity that was set aside to be able to use for Okta for Good. It’s a pledge of employee time. So, employee volunteerism, getting your team to be able to give back, and we made a pledge around giving employees four days off every year to volunteer. We do lots more than that. And then it’s a pledge of product. For a company like Okta that’s a SaaS company, a software company that is working with organizations who are licensing our identity security products, we were able to commit to making some of that free and available for nonprofit organizations. And that has since grown into a very, very large and significant part of our business, both for the impact, we can drive by making nonprofits more secure who get it for free because they’re small and also for very large nonprofits who are paying customers and who have some complex challenges just as any other of our customers would. So, that’s kind of how we started the program. The sustainability, as you mentioned, got added on a few years in and now it’s evolved, I would say, out of that initial pledge 1% framework. I think of it as training wheels for companies where it’s like, if you don’t know what to do yet, you just get started. And now, we’ve really been able to evolve out of that and come up with a much stronger point of view of the impact we want to have in the world as Okta uniquely, and the ways in which that we do that.

John: How big is your team? Because social impact, as you and I know, can be a full-time plus, plus, plus job sustainability on its own can, and having them both underneath you, that’s a lot. So how big is your team now? And how do you go about developing culture at Okta from basically ground zero, it’s what you’ve done, in terms of being impact and sustainability-minded and buying into that kind of cultural shift that’s really important.

Erin: My team is still relatively small. It’s about a dozen people.

John: Still small. Wow. That’s great.

Erin: And we’re pretty evenly split across sustainability and ESG, across social impact and philanthropy and employee engagement, and then across this third area of what we call Tech for Good, which is how we serve nonprofit organizations with our products and services. So, that’s the split. Again, it was just me seven or eight years ago, a team of one. And so one of the things that I think has been most interesting is to be able to build a team step-by-step. It all seems like it makes sense now at 12 people, it sounds like, but when you see how we built it and the decisions you have to make, what do you resource first and what do you resource second? That was all very interesting time[?].

John: Let’s talk a little bit about building a team because it’s a much different scenario. I’m 62 years old, so obviously, when I went to high school [inaudible], and then when I went to NYU and continued my education, there was no such thing as getting a PhD in environmental sciences and all that other kind of stuff. What kind of folks are applying for that kind of job and what kind of coaching and mentoring can you give young people that are looking to work at great places like Okta, with great people like you that allow them not only to make a nice living, but also to make a difference?

Erin: Yeah. The number one trait that I hire for is empathy.

John: Really? Wow.

Erin: And maybe that sounds a little small.

John: No. Sounds great.

Erin: But it’s really strategic because if you think about what a team like mine has to do, we have to understand the business well enough to be able to understand what we’re good at and where we have pull and where we have resource and where we have impact from the ways in which our business runs. We also then have to go outside of the company into the community and into the world and understand what the challenges are and what the problems are and be able to fuse those two things together into the ways in which Okta can uniquely help maybe and uniquely make an impact. And to do that, there’s a lot of brain activity in that, right? There’s strategy, there’s all these things, but for me, empathy is the most important thing because if you don’t empathize with the community, first of all, you’re not going to be a good partner. You’re not going to authentically show up and listen, which is the most important thing we can do is listen first, to understand what the need is. And then similarly, you got to have empathy for the business. If you don’t, and I’ve seen this many times with impact teams, you end up just at cross purposes and you aren’t effective and you can’t get things done because you’re trying to say, “Go left,” and they’re going right. And you don’t have empathy and the understanding of how to influence in the right way. And so that’s the number one thing I look for. Practically speaking, about half my team has worked in the nonprofit sector at some point in their career. I had not, so in some ways, I’ve hired for some of my own deficiencies because I believe that to serve, that’s a big audience for us in many pieces of our work and in order to serve them best, we should understand them and what they need.

John: I love that. Really great.

Erin: Yeah. And then on the more academic side, I got an MBA. I felt like I needed that to be able to, again, have the understanding of how business worked and the ways in which I could pull levers to make an impact. Some of the folks on my team have MBAs and advanced degrees in certain types of environmental areas and things like that. But again, I go back to that empathy being the most important piece in my mind.

John: And I go back to, by getting your MBA, you were just polishing your gene. Your gene pool is hippie do-gooder mom and businessman dad, and so you’ve got a great gene pool that mixed and you were polishing both as you got formerly educated and now getting practically educated in the real world. I think the quality of empathy, I think, is unbelievably underestimated. And I think you’re so spot on. Since you are the VP of social impact and sustainability, I want to break it down. You’ve been there seven years now. Talk about two of your favorite stories from each sector. What’s one of your favorite contributions and wins that you got in the social impact sector that you’re so proud of? And then talk about one on the sustainability and environmental side that you’re likewise really proud of as well.

Erin: Oh my gosh. I mean, that is a tough one.

John: So, Sophie’s choice of a leadership.

Erin: Exactly. Oh my God, I know. I apologize to all of our partners that I will not name.

John: It’s okay.

Erin: Well, let’s just go with recent [inaudible] because that’s safer and maybe [inaudible]. But last week, I was in Washington, DC, for this incredible convening of humanitarian organizations and their technology leadership, put on by an organization called NetHope. NetHope works with, let’s say the 60-plus largest NGOs in the world who are doing organizations like the Red Cross, UNICEF, Oxfam, and Save the Children. And they convene them with the leaders of the tech sector in order to solve big global challenges for these organizations, humanitarian development challenges. We’ve been a part of that ecosystem as a participant for almost 10 years. We show up every year to this convening. We have many customers in this cohort of large NGOs who use Okta’s technology. So, we’ve gotten to know the really, really, really incredible challenges that come with delivering aid in hard-to-reach places around the world and in difficult conditions. We have done some philanthropic grant-making as well in this community. Last week, we announced a new commitment of two and a half million dollars over the next five years to NetHope, specifically focused on helping these large NGOs with cybersecurity. It’s not very well-known that actually nonprofits are some of the most targeted organizations by threat actors of any. And people would always say, “Why in the world would someone attack a nonprofit? Like what’s wrong with people?” And it’s not obvious on the surface, but if you think about it, threat actors understand. First of all, they have a lot of times very sensitive data on vulnerable populations where threat actors might be able to extract a lot of value by having that data and by being able to sell it or whatever.

John: That’s right.

Erin: So that’s one. The other piece is they move a lot of money around. These organizations raise hundreds of millions of dollars [inaudible]. It is also assumed that their security and technology posture is just not where it is for maybe other kinds of organizations with more resources. And so, it’s a huge problem. It puts already vulnerable communities at vastly greater risk than they are today because of increasing threats. And we don’t think that’s okay. So, we made this commitment and we’re really, really hopeful that it will spur more investment and more awareness about this problem so that we can all work together.

John: That’s interesting. Let’s just take a break and also circle back on that one issue in that your mission of your company is protection and it’s [inaudible] protection…

Erin: Correct.

John: …people protection, data protection of Okta. And for our listeners and viewers, again, it’s going to be in the show notes, but you could find Erin and her colleagues at Okta.com. okta.com. Okay, if sustainability really equals resilience, that can be a great argument made that cybersecurity is really one of the key pillars of any good sustainability program.

Erin: 100%. And a corporate responsibility on its own.

John: Exactly. So, it’s sort of full circle that you’re coming in terms of helping these nonprofits to help keep them sustainable and resilient. Offering them the best that’s out there with regards to cybersecurity hygiene sounds like so logical and such a great, great mission.

Erin: Yeah. Thank you. I mean, very well said. It’s really kind of wonderful to work at a company where the whole deal, everything we do is delivering a net positive to the world because as you said, we are protecting people. We are protecting the most important thing. We are protecting identities. And it’s interesting because, again, not a lot of people know this, but more than 80% of all cyber attacks come from some kind of compromised login or compromised identity. And you can think of all the silly examples in your life where you see the email and they ask you to click the link. And if you do, they get the password and you’re in trouble. This is happening all over the place. And so, Okta’s core business of identity security of making organizations safer, making the people that access those technologies safer is such a net positive. And then what my team does is we get to think about the ways to extend that beyond where maybe the business is today. So, we get to think a little bit further out in time, a little bit further out in different communities, and bring that to new places.

John: Talk about an environmental partnership or win that you’ve been really proud of and excited about. Again, this is just one of many, so we’re not trying to disqualify or minimize the others, but this is just [inaudible] for a story.

Erin: Yeah, totally. So, Okta is a technology company. We don’t manufacture anything. We don’t make anything. We don’t own a whole lot. We’re a pretty lightweight business.

John: Asset light.

Erin: A little asset light. But like many other technology companies, our big impact is energy use, and running our service and the people that come to work and the ways that they need to be powered [inaudible].

John: Great point.

Erin: In fact, our first environmental commitment that was public was around renewable electricity. We made a commitment several years ago to a hundred percent renewable electricity for our offices. We extended that then to cover our employees remote work when we moved to remote work. And then we also extended that to Okta service itself and how it runs, so that we can say to our customers that Okta service is running on a hundred percent renewable electricity for you.

John: Got it.

Erin: So that’s kind of like a nice headline, cool. Many companies do that.

John: Right. That’s good. It’s still good.

Erin: All right. Thank you. Underneath the thing that I’m really proud of is part of the strategy for meeting that commitment is to purchase what’s called renewable energy certificates, or [inaudible] as people know, and you can purchase them in a variety of ways. You’re essentially purchasing energy generated by solar or wind and applying that to your own operations. We have made an intentional choice to look for renewable energy projects that also have an additional social benefit so that by investing in them, we’re not just helping ourselves and helping the environment, but we’re also helping communities. One example of this is a program we found years ago. It’s called the California Bright Schools Program, and what they’ve done is they work with public schools to put solar on the roofs. We work with a school in Milpitas, California, not too far from our headquarters. And that solar is generating clean energy. The schools have a revenue stream because companies like Okta purchase that and apply it again to our own operations. And then guess what? The students who go to school there get to learn and see how solar energy works. So, it’s just been this beautiful partnership. We have several others that are similar to that.

John: Absolutely brilliant.

Erin: It’s really cool.

John: So, you’re not only offsetting your energy use, but the ripple even goes farther, you’re also making a social impact with the purchase of the energy offsets that you’re making.

Erin: Correct.

John: Brilliant. I love it.

Erin: We’re really excited about that. We think companies can be doing a lot more of this. It’s not that hard. You just have to know to ask for those types of projects and find them. And sure, some of them might be a little bit more expensive than the very cheapest of REC programs, but we think the benefit is absolutely there. And we’re really proud of that.

John: You know, Erin, you’ve been at Okta now for seven years, but you’re very young and you’ve got a huge career and blue sky in front of you at Okta and beyond. Talk a little bit about, what are you excited about? What are some of the greatest opportunities and priorities ahead for Okta for good in the next one or two years that we’re looking at right now, ’25 and ’26?

Erin: Yeah. I’m not that young, by the way, but thank you.

John: Hey, when you’re 62, you’re young, okay? You’re much closer to my daughter’s age. So you’re young.

Erin: All right. So what am I excited about? So, earlier this year, we announced a new, very large commitment. We announced a $50 million, five-year philanthropic commitment from Okta to the world. And the intention of these funds is to build a more secure world. That’s the headline. So, what are we doing with that? A big chunk of that is going to things like I just talked about, like with NetHope, where we’re helping nonprofits and other vulnerable organizations to be more protected against cyber threats. We’re investing in climate action and in particular, frontline communities who are impacted first and worst by climate change and solutions developed by those communities. And then we’re also investing in what we see as a digital equity issue, which is how do we get more ready, trained, diverse talent from all kinds of communities to get into the field of cybersecurity, to get into this field that pays well, you can make a living, that every company needs more cyber talent than we have today. And it’s a job with an inherent purpose of making the world a little bit safer and a little bit better, which is, I think, something that a lot of us clearly look for in our work and value in our work. We’re making some big moves to partner with organizations who are training the next generation of cyber talent. We just announced a really cool partnership with a nonprofit called CodePath a couple of weeks ago. CodePath works with underrepresented college students and industry leaders in the technology field to create like real-world curriculum that is very, very translatable into jobs. And the students graduate and go on to work in all the biggest tech companies you can think of. We are partnering with them to create a hands-on cybersecurity lab that was going to reach 3000 students in the next year. The idea is that to get a job in cyber, it’s a good job, but getting that first job is really hard because you need real-world experience. And how do students get real-world experience if they don’t have the job and how do you get the job if you don’t have the experience? And so this lab is one way. We’re trying to test a new model of how we might bring hands-on training informed by industry experts like Okta and others to students, to be able to give them that experience so that they can be more job-ready sooner.

John: Erin, does your sustainability and impact report, does that get published every year now?

Erin: It does, yes. It’ll get published late February, early March annually. So, the next one will be coming around that timeframe and a lot of this will be in there. Yeah.

John: And it lives in perpetuity on your website?

Erin: It does. Yeah.

John: Erin, you’re doing so many things and you get to have this fascinating straddling of two great, great trends that are so important to this planet right now, social impact and sustainability. Where do you find your inspiration outside of Okta? I always say to my guests, because I really truly believe it, I’ve been doing this show 17 years, so I have the unique and wonderful position of being able to meet, I think one of the greatest fraternities in the world, social impact officers, sustainability officers. Where are you looking for your inspiration and fresh ideas when you’re trying to get inspired and get some aspirational vision as well? What’s your go-to?

Erin: The reason this job is the best job in the world is that every day, I’m talking to somebody who’s helping do something that makes the world better. That’s the cohort I get to hang out in. And of course, there’s a whole other side of it that’s, like, it’s just a job like any other, and there’s hard things too. But the fact that even in just the last few days, I have spoken to several emerging social sector leaders who understand things like collaboration and understand things like systems change, and understand things like how to take risks and innovate in the right ways, in a way that we have not seen before. And so I’m really hopeful that this new generation of social sector leaders, whether they’re working in nonprofits, whether they’re working in climate tech startups, whether they’re working in companies like mine understand this interconnectedness, that is the way toward the answer for all of us in terms of how we solve some of these big problems. And so, I’m really, really hopeful for where we go from here with them.

John: Well, Erin, I just want to say thanks for what you’re doing. And for our listeners and viewers that will be in the show notes, to find Erin and her colleagues and all the important work they’re doing in social impact and sustainability with Okta for Good, please go to okta.com, www.okta.com. Erin, thanks not only for spending a half hour with us today but more importantly, thank you and all your colleagues at Okta for the work that you’re doing in making the world a better place.

Erin: Thanks, John.

John: This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by Engage. Engage is a digital booking platform revolutionizing the talent booking industry. With thousands of athletes, celebrities, entrepreneurs, and business leaders, Engage is the go-to spot for booking talent, for speeches, custom experiences, live streams, and much more. For more information on Engage or to book talent today, visit letsengage.com. This edition of the Impact Podcast is brought to you by ERI. ERI has a mission to protect people, the planet, and your privacy and is the largest fully integrated IT and electronics asset disposition provider and cybersecurity-focused hardware destruction company in the United States and maybe even the world. For more information on how ERI can help your business properly dispose of outdated electronic hardware devices, please visit eridirect.com.