SailPoint CEO Mark McClain Talks IPO

Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, radio News.

Sale Point is back on the market. The security company went public for the second time last week. The first time it went public back in twenty seventeen, before Toma Bravo took sale Point private in twenty twenty two. Tomo Bravo, of course, has been very much looking for this IPO market to open back up, and sale Point is a critical part of that. For more on the decision to go public again, we're joined by Mark McLain, sale Points CEO.

I think the primary was to pay down debt sally, but I think we see ourselves kind of as a long term growth business, so in some ways it was putting some fuel in the tank, as it were, and kind of getting ourselves ready for what we believe is a multi year growth opportunity. So yeah, it was kind of get the debt down to a manageable level and then get ready for future growth.

I do want to talk about the timing a little bit, of course.

This is your return to.

The public markets. You listed on the New York Sock Exchange in twenty seventeen, then you went private when Toma Bravo acquired you in twenty twenty two. Now you're back again, which is a pretty quick turnaround.

Just talk us through that, yeah, I think, to be honest, Katie. And by the way, just a piece of data.

You probably know we were owned by Toma Ravo before the first IPO, which so it's a little bit of a back and forth thing.

Not a terribly common story, I guess, but I think we were.

Kind of, you know, when we did the go private in twenty two, thinking of a little longer timeframe to come back.

And I think two things are true.

One is we've been forced to have a very good, you know, amount of growth over the last few years and kind of shifted to a more profitable profile, so that kind of desirable scale growth profit profile that market's like. And then of course the markets have warmed up a bit obviously in the last three to four months.

So I think it was.

That combination of being ready, having kind of a hopefully attractive profile for the public markets, and then kind of ready to pull that trigger when the market started to warm up and we felt like the time was right to do that.

You can tell your story mark with your growth, and you know Wall Street likes to see the numbers. But in terms of just the elevator pitch, I always find it so difficult to understand what these software solutions providers do. And in your notes it says you equip modern enterprise to seamlessly manage and secure access to applications.

Like, what is that? What does that mean? How do you tell.

Your butcher what your company does?

I usually say my grandmother, but you know she's deceased, and probably the butcher is a better metaphor. I think at the end of the day, you know, there's what everybody does all day, every day, and they get this is they log into systems.

Right.

We all have a whole bunch of accounts and passwords, so everybody gets that concept.

What sale Points focused.

On is ensuring that in an enterprise amid to large scale enterprise where there might be tens or even hundreds of thousands of human identities.

And now increasingly what we call non human.

Identities you know think you know, software programs and now AI agents is all the rage. All those identities have access to systems and data, right, that's generally some kind of an account and a password. Well, keeping all of that accurate and what's called in the security realm least privilege. In other words, any identity should have exactly what they need or it needs to do with the.

Job and no more.

Well, keeping that accurate and adhering to security policy is really hard, and that's what big enterprises have struggled with because all those systems are from different vendors. Right, They've got Workday and Salesforce and Service Now and Microsoft Apps and Oracle and all kinds of stuff from twenty or thirty or fifty years of it. And getting all that to stay in sync and to be secure and accurate

I'm glad you bring up AI. I've been asking chat GPT to log in into some of my applications and do some stuff for me, right, rather than just answer stupid questions and so far it can't. Are you going to enable that kind of technology? How soon do you see that kind of thing being able to work?

Well, there are some places you know your chat GBT Matt is doing this to you, as I guess it should. But I think at the end of the day, there is a sense that people want to automate and streamline things while maintaining security. And that's the tension, right, There's a there's a tension that's existed forever in the realm of technology, which is convenience and things go fast and easy is what business users want, and control and security is what kind of the protection mindset people want.

Right, So there's always a tension.

There, and AI is just in some ways the latest, maybe most dramatic iteration of Wow.

Super cool tech.

We can do a lot with this, we can accelerate our business, go do amazing things.

And the security folks are going.

Oh, tap the brakes, like, not sure exactly if we understand what access to what data is happening here and all these controls we put in place to protect our business and its information might be getting run over in that realm. So there's a tension there, and we're pretty early obviously in this dynamic, right, So we're one of the companies that's kind of in the thick of that with all these providers of business application technology and.

LMS and AI models and.

All that good stuff, and then these security professionals in these enterprises that are trying.

To make sure they let their business succeed.

But do so in a way that protects its information. And that's just a hard problem, and we're kind of at the center of helping big enterprises solve that problem.

You know, Mark, on the show, we like to have our guests talk about their business but also about their market experience. And you've got a lot of credit here for being one of the first to market this year. Of course, this is an IPO market that a lot of investors have been waiting to open back up. The first week has been choppy. What would you say to people that are looking to go public right now?

Is it a good time?

Is the window really small?

Frankly, that's a good question. We wrestled with it both. I will give you a little perspective.

That you know, everybody's got their view of what's happened, even in our case for about a week now, right, I mean, we priced kind of between nineteen and twenty one.

On the cover of the S one.

We raised the filing range from twenty one to twenty three and priced at the high end of that rage and then upsized our offering. So we did a lot of things that kind of said we weren't set up for a big run up. We were focused on getting out at the right price in the market to kind of balance two things. Frankly, right, Toma Bravo, our primary owner, wants.

Good liquidity out of the deal.

And we want to set ourselves up for long term market success with a lot of the same long term investors at own sale point for five years in the market before, so there was some tension there. And again I like to say, if you're in my seat, you didn't do this for a one day pop or even a week pop. We're thinking months and years of business success. You know, I won't plan on necessarily this kind of multiple. We went public the first time at seventeen at a

So we think we understand something.

About how to grow once we're in the market, and we just don't focus on the day to day. My famous phrase I developed on our first public offering timing was to our own team internally. I said, look, every second you spend watching the stock price, you're doing nothing to help the stock price, right Like, watching stock movements day all day is what you all and a bunch of investors do. Our team's job is to go build great solutions and win in the market.

And I always say, if we do.

That well, the stock price will take care of itself.

I hear what you're saying.

If I were the CEO of a company, I would.

Just stare at my stock price all day.

So I really respect the discipline there. I do want to get your thoughts on the broader landscape, the broader competitive landscape, because you're the first cyber IPO in quite a while. I believe the last one was Rubric back in April. Do you think that your debut may encourage some of your peers to come out of the pipeline and test the public markets.

I think there's and be on security cater but I think all around the market people have been kind of watching and waiting.

Is it time to get back out there?

And, like I say, depending on how close you are to our story. In our minds, we thought we were going to come out at the midpoint of our original finding range of twenty we've been trading in the twenty four to twenty five range. In our minds, that's great, and we think we're going to over time be able to move up from there if we continue to deliver results. So I think people were watching us, watching kind of

I think the market, as you all know, has been hungry for some more IPOs.

So I think there's an interest and they're looking for the right profiles of companies. And then I think back to your question a little more, Katie. I think at the end of the day, cybersecurity is still a very good market, right, if there's nothing else that's true. Everybody's very well aware we are far from solving this. Matter of fact, we will never solve cybersecurity, right. It's just a cat and mouse. There's going to be new ways of tackling it.

You know.

A very common question we get is AI good for you or bad for you? And I say yes, right, like welcome to cyber Right, it's going to be a tool that helps us do what we do better, and it's going to help the bad actors do what they do better. So we're just going to continue to be helping companies protect themselves against a set of bad actors Nation States, criminals, et cetera, that are trying to disrupt them, steal data, you know, et cetera.

So I think.

We're very confident that this is a great market. And then within that back to Matt's question of explaining this to your friend the butcher, right, identity is a very interesting subsector of security because it's probably the newest sub sector. Meaning for decades we've been working on network security and device security or endpoint security.

We know names like Palo Alto, we know names like CrowdStrike and all that.

Identity security is a relatively newer concept, right. There's a handful of names there, and the market got a little enamored with this single sign on thing, which is kind of all the rage of a decade ago, and that's an important piece. It's far from the comprehensive need though, that customers have to secure their enterprise and all its data.

We're still maturing. We're still maturing in this market. All right.

That's a good place to leave it. Mark, great to get some time with you. Hope to speak to you again soon. That is Mark McLean of Sale Point