Teleport Your Company to IPO

One of the most exciting things about working at Teleport is getting to see how our infrastructure access solutions enable customers to grow their business. Since software has eaten the world, solutions like Teleport that enable developers to become more productive are essential to fast- growing companies. You simply can’t create a hyper growth business today without a strong software development muscle. The need for speed when it comes to software development is particularly strong for companies who are going to IPO in the next couple of years. They are growing fast, have customers that demand security and compliance best practices, and will need to comply with the public reporting and accountability requirements that come from being listed on a stock exchange. All of this explains why six of the biggest Tech IPOs of 2020 and 2021 choose Teleport as a key part of their stack.

In my view, the reason that Teleport is so popular with pre-IPO companies boils down to three interrelated reasons: productivity, growth, and security & compliance.

Let’s look at each in turn.

Productivity

The big don’t eat the small anymore. The fast eat the slow. Every industry is under threat from more nimble competitors, so the companies that can deliver software solutions to market fastest are those who are more likely to win against even entrenched competitors. Developer productivity is key to accelerating software development.

To keep developers “in the zone”, it is important to not disrupt their preferred way of working. One example of this is what Paul Graham of YCombinator famously calls the “the maker’s schedule”. Task-switching caused by meetings is detrimental to developer productivity because it disrupts a developer’s flow. Another example of task-switching negatively impacting productivity is forcing developers to switch between different tools so they can accomplish their job.

Traditional PAM (Privileged Access Management) solutions are notorious for forcing developers to switch between tools so they can access various privileged accounts like servers or databases. These legacy solutions also force developers to create tickets to approve changes in permissions instead of using more nimble solutions such as ChatOps wherein access requests are routed and tracked automatically in solutions like Slack, PagerDuty, and Jira. At Teleport, we believe that improving security should not come at the expense of productivity, and aim to provide infrastructure access solutions that don’t get in developers’ way. Publicly traded company, Elastic, is a great example of a company that uses Teleport to enable productivity while simultaneously improving security.

Growth

Financial markets expect growth quarter after quarter, and when you IPO you lose some of the flexibility that can come from running a private company. When you're private, investors might not like a slow quarter, but one missed quarter won’t dramatically affect your valuation. Public markets are another thing entirely. In order to grow, post-IPO companies need to bring on new verticals and sell more to existing customers. But taking on larger and larger customers ups the expectations on your company. You are no longer a startup. Customers expect you to have mature processes around access controls, and you must be able to demonstrate these controls, often by an independent 3rd party audit like SOC 2, or you might lose out on new sources of business that can limit growth. Take AirSlate, a fast-growing Teleport customer who understands what it takes to convince large organizations to buy their SaaS solution.

Security & compliance

SOC 2 is not a compliance standard per se. Rather, it is a demonstration that you are protecting customer data based on multiple trust principles. Security-conscious buyers will ask for SOC 2 certification because it is an independent measure of service provider quality, but it is not required. Other compliance standards like HIPAA, PCI-DSS, or FedRAMP do, however, dictate certain practices in order to do business in certain industries like health care, payment processes, or anything to do with selling to the U.S. federal governments. Take FedRAMP (Federal Risk and Authorization Management Program), which was originally proposed as a standardized approach for the federal government to adopt secure cloud services offered by the cloud providers and now is used to evaluate SaaS providers, as well.

For growth-minded organizations, it is impossible to ignore that the Federal Government has a $92 billion IT budget in 2021 alone, so expanding to serve this lucrative market is smart business. But selling to the federal government also comes with significant responsibility to demonstrate care is taken to protect government data. That is why Teleport helped publicly- traded company Sumo Logic prepare for and pass their FedRAMP audit.

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Conclusion

Going IPO is a big accomplishment for any company and at Teleport, we are proud to have worked with so many companies who are managing through the productivity, growth, and security/compliance challenges that come from scaling a business. Can we help you on your journey to IPO? Contact us today.