Why I Joined SGNL:
When I was a 9, I was the goalie on my small town soccer team. During an important match, the opposing team had the opportunity to take a late lead with a goal kick. Their star player, who was unusually strong for a 9 year old, was set to kick. My team called time out and we huddled up. I was scared, and it was obvious, but my team rallied around me. The coach and every player provided their honest encouragement and support. Play resumed, the kick vaulted towards me and I dove. The whistle blew loud and my team started cheering. I had blocked the kick! The force of the kick was so strong it left a geometric imprint of the soccer ball on my chest, which hurt, but I didn’t care. My team won.
That experience left another imprint on me. It taught me that being part of a great team—one where everyone is talented, driven, supportive, and working toward the same goal—is rare and special. It’s also the best way to succeed. And as I’ve grown in my career, I’ve realized that being with good people on a winning team, solving real customer problems in an exciting market is the best opportunity you can hope for.
That’s why I joined SGNL.
The People
The first thing that drew me to SGNL was the people. This team is packed with A players—masters of their craft who are also humble, helpful, and collaborative. They’re the kind of people who make you better just by being around them.
Throughout my career I’ve been fortunate enough to work on multiple market-leading product teams, and I know firsthand that this is the key to success. A great team isn’t just about individual talent; it’s about trust, collaboration, healthy conflict, and a shared commitment to succeed.
Patrick Lencioni said it best in The Five Dysfunctions of a Team:
“When team members trust one another, they are not afraid to engage in passionate dialogue around issues and decisions that are key to the organization’s success.”
That’s exactly the kind of team SGNL has built. And I couldn’t be more excited to be part of it.
The Problem
The second reason I joined SGNL is the identity problem we’re solving. I love Identity. It’s the space where I’ve spent most of my career, and right now, it’s undergoing some exciting, seismic shifts. Organizations’ identity needs have drastically changed and so has the available technology. Workloads have moved to cloud services (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS), AI presents new data security concerns and also increases the abilities of threat actors. Security teams are striving to achieve Zero Trust principles, but are struggling to do so and stuck with their existing, legacy identity solutions.
Organizations’ ultimate goal is to securely grant access to systems and data only when there is a provable, active business need from an individual (or system), and to take away that access when anything changes. For my identity people out there… organizations want to achieve Zero Standing Privileges (ZSP), where access is only granted through Context-Aware Access decisions and once granted, they want Continuous Evaluation of the user’s needs and security posture (via CAEP & SSF) to be able to quickly react to any changes.
SGNL is leading this charge. We’re building products to achieve these goals, informed time-and-time again by real customer use cases and stories.
The Competition
Lastly, I’ll admit it: I missed the hunt. I greatly enjoyed my time at Salesforce, where I had a stellar team that was responsible for delivering and innovating the platform authentication services for our customers, but I wasn’t competing in the market, and I miss it.
Now, at SGNL, I have the opportunity to help deliver innovative products that provide enterprise customers a better way to address their evolving identity needs, disrupting and displacing existing solutions that are not working. For me, helping customers solve big problems and landing a big team win along the way is as good as it gets.
My Advice
If you’re thinking about your next career move, take your time and find your Dream Team. Surround yourself with honest, talented people who push you to be better, who make work fun, and who share your drive to succeed.