Sailpoint CEO Mark McClain Talks IPO - podcast episode cover

Sailpoint CEO Mark McClain Talks IPO

Feb 13, 20256 min
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Episode description

SailPoint is guiding prospective investors that its initial public offering has received orders for more than 20 times the shares available, according to people familiar with the matter. The IPO for the Thoma Bravo-backed security software company is poised to price at the top or above its revised price range, the people said, asking not to be identified as the information isn’t public. He spoke about this and more with hosts Alix Steel and Norah Mulinda.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Transcript

Speaker 1

Bloomberg Audio Studios, podcasts, radio news.

Speaker 2

We're lucky that we have the CEO of sale Point Technologies with us, Mark mclin. He joins us. Now, how does this IPO mesh with your long term vision for the company?

Speaker 1

Well, I think in general, we've tried to stay focused as a business on building great business with our customers and winning in the market. In some ways, what happens in the financial ownership of the business matters a lot, but it doesn't actually affect our day to day lives, if you will, and finding and securing customers and making them successful, that's certainly always our focus. We do think though, that the IPO gets us back out in the public

eye a little more. The importance of what we do and what's called identity security is raising an awareness and importance to the large companies all around the world that we typically serve, and this will help with our visibility. It'll give us future fuel to grow the business. We've had a great run as a private company with Telebravo. Some folks know this. We were public before and before we were owned by Toma Bravo. It's a little bit of an interesting story of a PE backed IPO same

Pe backed IPO again. But all the while, our focus continues to be on doing great things for our customers and helping them secure their enterprises with identity.

Speaker 3

Well, cyber threats have continued to increase. How does sale Points stay ahead in identity security?

Speaker 1

Yeah, what's happened in the world of cybersecurity. There's a lot of shifting things in the landscape. A simple metaphor that sometimes helps folks is that the bad actors are the attackers. Not so long ago, their metaphor was to break the glass and grab the jewels and run. Quite often now, and we've seen this in breach reports, they'll try to sneak in the back of the jewelry store, poses an employee and eventually try to quote clean out

the jewelry store. And that's because they've been able to impersonate, so to speak, an employee, and that's a compromised identity. What we do is help businesses, typically mid to large enterprises around the world, focus on understanding all the identities they have, both human and nonhuman, all the data they care about protecting, and making sure that at any point in time, all of those connections are secure. It's a pretty complex problem. At scale.

Speaker 2

Who are your competitors right now and how can you help differentiate?

Speaker 1

Yeah, the truth is we've got more I like to call them PowerPoint competitors than real competitors. I mean, there's folks that are talking about this space quite a bit, but if you look at what happens day to day when we're out in the market, there's very few companies that are capable of delivering the success at scale that

we have. We're fortunate to be in almost half of the Fortune five hundred, about a quarter of the Fortune two thousand, and they're generally throwing out older legacy products like from Oracle and IBM. There really hasn't been a strong challenger to us in this key space, and that's part of what I think has gotten investors excited about our potential for long term, durable growth.

Speaker 3

So another thing that's been in conversation, I'm curious, how are you all planning to address your debt load?

Speaker 1

Well, you know, one of the key use of proceeds will be to pay down a lot of the debt. We actually had a little more debt about six months ago. Our backers Home of Bravo chose to take some of that debt out with equity before the IPO, and we'll use the bulk of the proceeds from the IPO to pay down significantly, putting ourselves in what they call it debt zero, meaning we'll have as as much more cash as we have debt, which from a financial profile standpoint makes investors really happy.

Speaker 2

Why do you guys decide to do the IPO? Now? We were just talking about IPOs in general, and I was talking about an LNG export that went public at seemingly a great time and it didn't go so well. So I wonder why strategically you guys chose right now.

Speaker 1

Well, we've been watching markets as everyone has, and I think we were really pleased with the progress of the business. We went private about two and a half years ago. As part of our S one filing, we talked about the fact that as of our third quarter last year, we'd grown the business at thirty percent. We've been able to deliver non gap margins of about fourteen percent, and had a strong sense that durable growth would continue, and

that was at scale. We're over an eight hundred million dollar revenue business now and investors don't see a lot of profiles of growth at scale with profit, and I think our sense was that the markets were kind of hungry, so to speak, for new issuances, particularly I think in technology security has been considered a really good market for a long time. I think we looked like a company that would fit many of their requests, so to speak, for a durable growth company in the security space.

Speaker 3

How are regulatory shifts driving demand for identity security solutions as enterprises continue shifting to the cloud. How is sale point evolving its offerings?

Speaker 1

Well, it's interesting you mentioned that regulatory is indeed part of the landscape we're addressing. Sometimes, you know, audits or the threat of failed audits or not being able to comply with regulations is a driver. But increasingly our space is less about that. Not it hasn't moved away from that, but it's less about that than truly securing their data. Again, what's happened is this concern that data can be compromised

through this lens of identity. If a bad actor can somehow you know, get in, break in, steal an identity, or in some way get access to data through those identities, they can do a lot of damage. So that that focus on truly protecting the data is really more of an issue today than just regulatory compliance.

Speaker 2

You go, what's it like attracting talent right now in the market.

Speaker 1

Well, I'd say attracting talent is never easy in a very competitive technology market. I think we're very fortunate at sale Point. One of the things that we pay a lot of attention to is our culture and our values and how that shows up. And as you probably familiar, a glass Door runs around and surveys the world and tries to understand how companies are doing. We're super pleased

they released those results recently. We were number seventeen in the world, and if you want to cut it by an interesting factor, we were the highest ranked tech company with under five thousand employees on Glassdoor. I think that speaks a lot about the kind of culture and the values that we live out in our company. It attracts and retains very good talent, and we're very fortunate.

Speaker 2

Hey, Mark, we appreciate your time today. We look forward to catching up with you again once you've had some time to be public. Mark mclains, CEO of sale Point Technologies,

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