Frederic Kerrest
CEO & Founder at Kerrest & Co | Vice-Chairman & Co-Founder of Okta (NASDAQ:OKTA) | Author of "Zero to IPO"
San Francisco Bay Area
Overview
Work Experience
CEO & Founder
2024 - Current
Boutique investment and advisory firm focused on helping technology CEOs and Founders scale their businesses.
Vice-Chairman & Co-Founder
2023
The World’s Identity Company From our inception in 2009 to joining forces with Auth0 in 2021, Okta is the leading independent Identity partner for organizations around the globe. We're relentlessly focused on Customer and Workforce Identity so that our customers can enable secure access and seamless experiences for their customers, employees, and partners. With flexibility and customer choice at our core, our solutions make it easy for everyone — from budding developers to leaders of the world’s largest organizations — to build and use their tech stack, their way. All because Okta works anywhere, on any device, with any technology.
Executive Vice-Chairman, COO and Co-Founder
2019 - 2023
Board Member, COO & Co-Founder
2009 - 2019
Okta is a management platform that secures critical resources from cloud to ground for workforce and customers.
Raised $1,229,250,000.00 from Junipero Capital and Employee Stock Option Fund.
Managing Director & Founder
2016
Early stage technology investment firm. Investment in ~100 private enterprise software and biotechnology companies. I enjoy mentoring the next generation of hard-working, visionary entrepreneurs with operating advice alongside a personal capital investment. More information at www.515ventures.com.
Author
2020
Guidebook to building startups with insights from many successful entrepreneurs. I've met with some of the most successful entrepreneurs and investors from Silicon Valley and around the world, discussed every angle of entrepreneurship with them―what works, what doesn’t, and what to do when things get rough―and taken notes. The result is this unmatched blueprint for building and growing a business, drawn from my own experience as well as that of fellow visionaries and business leaders, who have collectively built over $1 trillion of wealth for themselves and their investors. They include Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz (Andreessen Horowitz), Eric Yuan (Zoom), Stewart Butterfield (Slack), Aneel Bhusri (Workday), Julia Hartz (Eventbrite), Aaron Levie (Box), Fred Luddy (ServiceNow), Melanie Perkins (Canva), Patty McCord (Netflix), Sebastian Thrun (Udacity), and dozens of other luminaries. These ideas and practices aren’t taught in business schools. They’ve been learned the hard way, through trial and error in the real world of business. I have battle-tested them himself, so I know their power. Organized by topic in roughly the order that leaders will encounter them as they scale their businesses, this book is the ultimate guide to taking a company all the way from founding to IPO―and beyond. Published by McGraw-Hill, April 19, 2022.
Visiting Committee for the MIT Sloan School of Management
2022
Partner & Founder
2019
Angel investment group of C-level executives mentoring the next generation of entrepreneurs.
The Operator Network is an angel investor syndicate of public company C- and SVP-level executives.
Chairman of the Board
2022
Enterprise software company that helps athletic coaches keep players healthy and win more games.
Co-Chairman, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Capital Campaign
2022
Executive Advisory Board Member
2017
delta v is MIT’s premier venture accelerator, that prepares entrepreneurs to hit escape velocity and launch into the real world.
Senior Advisor
2021
Advise Blackstone Growth (BXG), the firm’s growth equity investing platform.
Provides its services to pension and profit sharing plans; pooled investment vehicles; institutional investors.
Chairman & Co-Founder
2017 - 2023
In September 2023 the company's next-generation drug discovery platform was acquired by Genentech, a member of the Roche Group ($RHHBY). ... Herophilus is a neurotherapeutics development company that employs AI-driven phenotypic screening to discover and develop novel drugs for complex brain diseases (starting with Rett syndrome, Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s), disorders for which traditional discovery techniques have proved least successful. Herophilus industrializes the recent revolution in complex in vitro experimental science, leveraging robotic automation and machine learning, to characterize the etiology and expression of disease at molecular, cellular, and tissue levels. These "deep phenotypes" are exploited to identify novel therapeutic targets and drug treatments.