This episode of Beyond the Deal features a conversation with Thoma Bravo Founder and Managing Partner Orlando Bravo, Thoma Bravo Partner Chip Virnig, and Ping Identity Founder & CEO Andre Durand.
AIR DATE:
June 12, 2025
LENGTH:
10:26
DISCLAIMER:
This podcast is for informational purposes only and does not constitute an advertisement. Views expressed are those of the individuals and not necessarily the views of Thoma Bravo or its affiliates. Thoma Bravo funds generally hold interest in the companies discussed. This podcast should not be construed as an offer to solicit the purchase of any interest of any Thoma Bravo fund.
Transcript
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Well, hello, everyone. I'm Orlando Bravo, founder and managing partner at Thoma Bravo. I'm here with my partner, Chip Virnig, and we are joined by Andre Durand, the CEO and founder of Ping Identity. Andre, Ping wasn't the first company you founded.
Tell me about where the idea came up for founding Ping, and I heard about this sailing trip that you had, and how did this happen?
ANDRE DURAND:
Yeah, so the idea, it was indirect, frankly. I had made an observation that every time we network a device, the utility of the device switched to all being associated with the network. And what I mean by that was that we first connected my PC to a Novell network — which, it was all great — a week later, the network went down and we went and played frisbee because we couldn't do anything.
A week earlier, we could do everything on our PC, but then all the value went to the Novell network. And some months later, we connected the Novell network to the internet, and I remember a week after that, the internet went down, and we all said, “Well, we can't do anything, let's go play frisbee.” And it was an observation that devices were networking, and that all the value was in the networking. And from there, I essentially surmised that, well, if that's the case, no device has any utility off the network, it should be that if someone steals my device, I can just shut it off, because it's on the network. It was verbatim, Find My on Apple, where you can see the device, but the leap from there was, well none of that works if I don't have an identity on the network, if the device doesn't have an identity in the network. Like everything has to have an identity for me to be associated with it to shut it off. And it was that leap of logic that said, well I guess we have an identity problem on the internet.
We need to know who people are, and my observation was we had email servers and FTP servers, and DNS servers, there had to be an identity server. And that was the original idea. The sailboat, yeah, I was off the ABC islands off of Venezuela, it was the first time I had a little bit of free time to think because I was solidly an entrepreneur for the prior two companies. And so this was the idea, the observation and the idea that essentially emerged in that moment of spare time.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Just amazing. And now here you are, a billion-dollar company, thousands of employees, thousands of customers. What's your culture like? You know, you started this from the beginning. You must be really like, tell me about how all this journey that you've had, how has it influenced the culture of your company, and what do you look for?
ANDRE DURAND:
Well, I came from very humble beginnings, right? It was an idea with no money and no understanding of the market. I mean, really, it was nothing. And both my prior companies were kind of similar. You never forget that humility, I guess, and how hard it is. I have come to resonate with one simple cultural north star. I refer to it as 10-10. And so if you think about measuring two things, either in an individual or in a company as a collective. One dimension is performance, in many respects non-negotiable. The other dimension is your attitude, and say one is the what and the other is the how.
In a 10-10 culture, the how matters as much as the what. And you will find situations where in pursuit of performance the how is sacrificed. In essence what you're saying is, the culture is sacrificed in pursuit of the number. And there are moments in time where you're vulnerable, where that has to be a true statement. I just don't want it to be the durable statement, nor necessarily what we strive for. We strive to be a 10-10 company, the how matters. And it's manifest in my — really one of my kind of visions for the company — my goal. I characterize it as, I want to be the most admired identity company. Now, admired takes on a lot of forms. For some people, it could be, oh, you're the biggest, or oh, you're the most profitable, or oh you're fastest growing. And I'm not suggesting that those aren't important attributes of admiration, but there's something deeper to me beyond that, which is how we move through life in pursuit of the goal or the outcome or the performance, it does matter, and I never wanted to build a culture where one party, one constituent, won at the expense of another.
It's like, we gotta find the win-win. And so the 10-10 culture is a very high bar. Like to achieve big performance and big numbers and not sacrifice the how, requires very mature and very capable individuals at all levels. So it's a pursuit. It's like, you know, you can touch the rim. You can't always, like, levitate and stay at that state, but it's always the goal.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
That's so humble of you. That humility, you said that that's what you aspire to. I think you're all of those. You're the fastest growing, the most profitable, the biggest, so you've got that and you still wanna get better, and that how, it's not what you do, it's how you do it. It's one of the reasons why you've been ranked the best company to work for, for so many years by given publications, so, it's really, really inspiring to hear that.
CHIP VIRNIG:
So, Orlando hit it on culture being really important to how you lead your business. You know, given there's a lot of listeners here that are CEOs or founders, what advice as a founder – multiple times now in your career – would you give another CEO or an aspiring founder?
ANDRE DURAND:
You know, I would say you need to get the balance between patience and impatience correct. I've found a lot of founders are too patient on things that need to be tackled yesterday, like maybe we can do it in the next month when in fact it should have been done yesterday, and too impatient on where they expect to be on their longer term goals.
A lot of times, success is nonlinear. I'm not gonna say it's a J curve, but it does kind of accrue in a nonlinear fashion over time, and if you're too impatient on your long-term goals, then you don't have the grit to make it through some of those early obstacles where life — almost by design — filters out the uncommitted. You're going miss it. And so, you have to be very impatient on your near-term goals, and that needs to be juxtaposed against being more patient on your long-term goals.
And I would also suggest that along the way, you can be rigid on your desire for an outcome, like this is the outcome that I'm shooting for, but you need to be flexible on how you get there, because the how you get there many times takes turns that you didn't expect. And so holding on to a goal or an outcome, being more patient over time as to how long it will take to achieve that because a lot of times the achievement's nonlinear — being very impatient on things you need to do today, and then being flexible on how you get there — that's the place that I've seen a number of founders get the balance wrong.
CHIP VIRNIG:
That’s well said. I know work is everything, but out of the office, off the field so to speak, you enjoy carting, racing simulation. What is it? Is it more just the strategy and the kind of clear your head or desire to win and get better lap times?
ANDRE DURAND:
Super interesting. Yeah, so always loved cars. That's like — it's in your genes. It was in my genes. Discovered shifter kart racing, you know, four or five years ago, and it hit a chord and it's been growing. It's actually not the competition with others. I discovered that it is completely all encompassing of 100% of your attention and because the business is so focused, you need those moments where your brain disconnects and focuses on something else. And this one's not a casual pursuit of perfection measured in tenths of a second, and the repeatability of perfection over a period of time is exceptionally hard to achieve.
So, it's a combination of the distraction through focus, it's a combination of the adrenaline, which people like me tend to seek. And trying to find the line where skills can overcome risk with total focus in the pursuit of perfection measured in milliseconds. There's something in there, which is just a little bit addicting, if you will. And again, it's not commentary on me beating other people. It's just commentary on continual improvement. Knowing where the bar sits, because you always know what the fastest lap time is around the track.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
You spent a lot of time with your family, and I remember when we were either negotiating something important on the deal — there was a really important moment — and you told us, “I am going to be on a train —
CHIP VIRNIG:
Very important train trip.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
—for five hours.” I was like, “A train for five hours? That sounds so exotic —” in the middle of a, of a deal — but what were you doing by the way? It was a special family trip?
ANDRE DURAND:
It was a special family trip. So, my mother and father are getting up there in age and it occurred to me that time is precious and limited, and a train trip across Canada was kind of on the list and it was something that physically my parents — my mother especially — could do. And not lost on me that you're kind of in a captive area for a number of days where some real quality time that was rightfully deserved. You know, certainly for her as one of many thank yous for how she raised me and everything that she sacrificed. So no, we were on a train between Vancouver and Toronto. It was right in the middle of the deal. Reception was optional. There were many times where I didn't have it, but I have found that if you don't take time either for family or for your personal health, you will burn out. Like we're running a sprint marathon.
And I found you actually can take the time and consciously or subconsciously you do make it up. Like you push a little harder before the trip, you push it a little bit harder after the trip and the trip occurred. The only delta was did you do it or did you not do it in hindsight? And the years, days, and months slip by and we're not getting them back, and we can't go recreate choices that we've made. So, yeah, I have observed that to stay in the game, I've got to pay attention to all those facets of balance in order to kind of achieve — not just peak performance for a short period of time — but peak performance, in this case over 23 years, right, and going. That sprint marathon, there's gotta be breaks in there, and that was an important one.
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Well Andre, thank you so much for being here. Thanks for being just a phenomenal partner to us, and I am pretty sure all the listeners now know why you have built such an amazing company.
ANDRE DURAND:
Thank you both, it's been a great partnership and when people ask me I will go, “Well look they're tough coaches, but that's what you want.”
ORLANDO BRAVO:
Behind the Deal is brought to you by Thoma Bravo in partnership with Audacy's Pineapple Street Studios. Join us next week for more stories behind the deal. Thanks for listening.
DISCLAIMER:
The executives were not compensated in connection with their participation, although they generally received compensation in connection with their roles and in certain cases are also owners of Thoma Bravo portfolio company securities and or investors in Thoma Bravo funds, such compensation and investments subject participants to potential conflicts of interest.
