CEO Kabir Barday on OneTrust's Path to Being Publicly Traded
OneTrust CEO on Why He Took Another $150M of Pre-IPO Funding From Al Gore's Company
Most late-stage startups aren't ready to become publicly traded since investors shifted from a pure growth mentality to one that balances growth and profitability, OneTrust CEO Kabir Barday said.
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Barday said the Atlanta-based trust intelligence firm has already balanced growth and profitability and now plans to strengthen its financial controls and processes and recruit a majority independent board to prepare for an eventual initial public offering. Having a public market investor such as Al Gore's Generation Investment Management write OneTrust a $150 million check speaks to the company's IPO readiness (see: OneTrust Raises $150M From Al Gore's Firm Following Layoffs).
"There's no IPO window that's open or closed for great companies like us that can achieve it," Barday said. "We're a company that's prepared to go public but also prepared to be private and profitable for a long time and also a company that has a strategic enough and important enough problem we're solving that we're attractive to strategic companies."
In this video interview with Information Security Media Group, Barday also discussed:
- What Generation Investment Management brings to the table as lead investor;
- Why OneTrust decided to cut its valuation by $800 million rather than issue debt;
- How OneTrust can advance responsible usage and governance of generative AI.
Barday founded OneTrust in 2016 and has grown it into the most widely used privacy, security and third-party risk technology platform to comply with the CCPA, GDPR, ISO27001 and hundreds of the world's privacy and security laws. Prior to that, he spent two years at VMware, where he founded the application configuration for enterprise industry group and oversaw the app management, app development, telecom analytics and VPN gateway technology teams. Barday joined VMware through its February 2014 $1.54 billion acquisition of AirWatch, where he spent more than four years establishing implementation consulting and enterprise support teams and methodologies.
