just keep livin

Empowering High School Students

An Interview with Shannon Mabrey Rotenberg, Executive Director, and Erica Helwick Doyle, Managing Director, just keep livin Foundation

EDITORS’ NOTE Shannon Rotenberg started her career with nonprofit organizations and the entertainment industry while at Creative Artists Agency, a talent and sports agency based in Los Angeles. She was a program director in their philanthropic division for six years before helping to launch the just keep livin (JKL) Foundation. Rotenberg serves on the boards of Angels for Baby2Baby and Dak Prescott’s Faith Fight Finish Foundation, whose mission is to invest in a better future by empowering individuals, families and communities to find strength through adversity. She works with the Harold Robinson Foundation which is committed to providing impoverished children with camp retreats which are designed to strengthen confidence, independence, build character and develop leadership skills. Rotenberg was also the foundingchair of “Kidstock,” an event that benefitted One Voice’s Scholarship Program in Los Angeles. She serves on a committee of LA women for Giffords, the organization led by congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords that seeks to save lives from gun violence and make communities safer. Rotenberg is a member of the LA Women’s Collective, a political action committee that empowers women in Los Angeles to influence political and legislative progress. In addition, she consults with several other nonprofits, and has recently been working with Represent Justice to change the narrative around incarceration, specifically concentrating on the Julius Jones case in Oklahoma. Rotenberg is a graduate of the University of Oklahoma.

As the Managing Director for the just keep livin Foundation, Erica Doyle is tasked with managing fundraising events, business development, donor relations, marketing, and corporate partnerships for the organization. Prior to joining JKL, she worked in Celebrity Relations for City of Hope, a cancer hospital and research center based in Los Angeles. In addition to nonprofit work, Doyle has an extensive background in the entertainment industry, beginning her career as an assistant to a film agent at Creative Artists Agency. After CAA, she spent time working in film development at Universal Pictures prior to joining the West Coast Bureau of InStyle Magazine, where she helped manage talent bookings while also contributing to the magazine as a writer and reporter. Doyle is a graduate of Northwestern University.

FOUNDATION BRIEF The just keep livin Foundation (jklivinfoundation.org) was founded by Camila and Matthew McConaughey with the mission to empower high school students by providing them with the tools to lead active lives and make healthy choices for a better future. The Foundation is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit organization that implements after-school fitness programs in 40 inner city high schools/sites. Through its programs, the Foundation encourages students to make positive life choices that improve their physical and mental health through exercise, teamwork, gratitude, nutrition, and community service.

Shannon Mabrey Rotenberg Erica Helwick Doyle

Will you discuss Matthew and Camila’s passion and commitment for the work of the just keep livin Foundation and how deeply engaged they are in its efforts?

Rotenberg: Matthew and Camila are genuinely passionate about just keep livin, and when they commit to something, they give their all.. The very first time I met with Matthew to talk about launching the Foundation, I remember he already had pages and pages of ideas written down in a notebook. He and Camila did their research and were directly involved in everything right from the start, from the creation of the curriculum to our monthly inspirational quotes and how we end every session with a gratitude circle. From day one, their desire was to “do the work” and all these years later, they’re still doing the work; always willing to pick up the phone and call whomever necessary to help the Foundation or our kids in the program. They aren’t the type to seek recognition for all the amazing work they do behind the scenes, but, for example, they

“As parents, teachers, mentors and leaders, I believe that building better people is the path to true progress. With an aim to prevent before we need to cure, that starts with our youth. With the just keep livin Foundation, we wanted to create an all-inclusive, incentivebased curriculum to help students find the right path and give them the tools to live healthier lives – mind, body and soul.” Matthew McConaughey

went out of their way during the pandemic to make sure that we were able to augment our program and offer even more support to our JKL kids. Matthew was paid to do a number of corporate speaking engagements over Zoom during COVID, and he chose to donate his speaking fees directly to the Foundation to ensure that we did not let our kids down in their time of need. When Mother’s Day rolled around, Camila made sure to offer up words of inspiration and even send gifts to several of our JKL moms. Their hearts and devotion never cease to amaze me.

Did you always know that you had a passion for this type of work and what makes the work so special for you?

Rotenberg: Looking back, I believe I started down the path to finding my calling at a very young age. When I was growing up, I went to school in a very low-income area. I witnessed the daily struggles that many families endure, and saw firsthand that there are some kids who maybe don’t make the sports team or play in the band and really struggled to find a place to fit in during a critical time of development. I knew even then that I wanted to work with kids, helping to provide them a sense of support. I actually got my credentials to teach before I was blessed to find a job that merged all the worlds for me. It’s always been my passion to help kids who don’t have resources, and it’s endlessly rewarding to see what a difference this program makes in so many young lives.

Doyle: Giving back, in one form or another, has always been a big priority in my life. I’ve been volunteering in some capacity since I was a kid, and it’s always fed my soul in a way that nothing else has. It took me some time to figure out how to make a career out of it, though. I started off in the entertainment industry, nurturing my passion for helping others through Saturday mornings spent as a Child Life volunteer at UCLA Mattel Children’s Hospital. When I was eventually able to find work that combined my professional background with my philanthropic ambitions, I felt like I’d hit the jackpot. I’m such a believer in our work at the just keep livin Foundation, having personally witnessed our program transform these kids and enrich their lives. Whether it’s seeing our students’ faces light up after they’ve completed the high ropes course at our sleepaway camp, or watching them comfort one another after opening up at one of our “Gratitude Circles,” each day in this job gives me something to be grateful for. It’s an honor to help realize Matthew and Camila’s vision and to play a role in helping shape these incredible young people’s futures.

Will you highlight the history of the just keep livin Foundation and how you define its mission?

Matthew and Camila McConaughey established the just keep livin Foundation in 2006, with the goal of empowering high school students by providing them with the tools to lead active

“Besides simply providing youth from underserved communities a safe place to go after school, our program also teaches them life skills, including the value of not only setting goals, but of achieving them. Our students learn resilience, social responsibility, courage, and self-reliance, as well as the joy and dignity that serving others can give, not only to the served, but to them as servants. At the just keep livin Foundation, we also believe in the reciprocity of gratitude: the more thankful we are, the more we create in life to be thankful for. So, in the meantime and all times, just keep livin.” Matthew McConaughey

lives and make healthy choices for a better future. Matthew had reached a point in his career where he was being asked to support lots of different charities and causes, and, while they were all worthy endeavors, he and Camila felt like they could have a greater impact if they decided to go deep, rather than wide, in terms of giving back. Using their access and resources, they wanted to create an incentive-based program to help kids at underserved schools, starting at that pivotal time of 9th grade when students are old enough to be coming into independence and making choices for themselves, but also young enough to adjust their path if they’re headed down the wrong one. The just keep living program utilizes a whole-student approach that empowers youth to live better and healthier lives beginning with exercise and nutrition and carried forward with gratitude and community service. At a critical age, the program gives them life skills critical to building a happy and healthy future that are not often offered as part of the traditional high school curriculum. Studies have shown, for example, that Social Emotional Learning (SEL), which helps students learn how to regulate their emotions and become more socially aware and responsible, is an even greater predictor of lifelong success than academic grades. The JKL program is powerful medicine that holds the capacity to change the course of a life.

Will you provide an overview of the just keep livin Foundation’s work and initiatives?

The just keep livin Foundation implements after school fitness programs in 40 inner-city high schools throughout 14 cities nationwide. In our programs, we encourage students to make positive life choices that improve their physical and mental health through exercise, teamwork, gratitude, nutrition, and community service. We offer an all-inclusive approach through a curriculum that we created with Scholastic, and we hire teachers from the schools we are in to run the programs on the ground. Our goal is really to prevent before we have to cure by helping students to establish good habits that will serve them well throughout their lives. Every time we have a guest speaker, for example, we have our students write thank you notes. It’s often the first time they’ve ever done it, and it’s a practice that could potentially help them land a job later in life. The program gives participating students a safe place to enhance their lives with fitness coaches and health experts. Participants get in shape and gain confidence while also improving their grades, attendance and behavior. Friendships are built and fears are overcome. At our j.k. livin after school programs, kids learn self-reliance and get a healthy start today, so they can make a better tomorrow.

How did the just keep livin Foundation adapt the way it works to address the challenges caused by the global pandemic?

When COVID-19 hit and schools started to close, we immediately jumped into action by raising funds to provide the communities we serve with over 35,000 meals and 700 computers in order to help meet some of our students’ most immediate needs. We then began holding online JKL programming – mostly through Zoom and Instagram Live – to help our students stay active and healthy, and to maintain a sense of community while they were isolated in their homes. We hosted yoga sessions, calisthenics workouts and virtual 5K runs, and came together online to learn how to cook healthy food at home on a low budget. We provided resources such as access to free online workouts, meditation playlists, and breathing videos. For our community service piece, we had students write thank you cards to first responders, send well wishes to nursing home residents, and even go door-to-door (safely) delivering Thanksgiving turkeys to their neighbors in need.

Probably our favorite program addition to come out of the pandemic, though, is our “Mental Health Mondays” series. We implemented this program – in which we host mental health professionals as virtual guest speakers – at the start of the 2020-2021 school year, and it has been so impactful that we’ve continued it even though all of our programs are back to meeting in-person. The idea behind “Mental Health Mondays” came about as a way for us to continue to provide a safe space to nurture our students’ emotional and overall well-being during a time when they were isolated from school, friends, and their normal routines. During these sessions, which are open to all JKL programs throughout the country, our featured experts provide our students with practical tools for managing stress and anxiety, and help for those battling depression. We’ve seen an amazing response from our community since we started providing this service, and “Mental Health Mondays” have become a key pillar in our curriculum.

How critical are metrics to measure the impact of the just keep livin Foundation’s work?

Some of our greatest accomplishments are in the data we’ve collected from our programs that proves the effectiveness of our work. We also consistently receive great testimonials from our students about how JKL really has changed their lives, and how grateful they are for the “firsts” they experience through our program – from camping to volunteering, from completing a marathon to writing their first thank you note, and many more. While those are important indicators of success, Matthew is a numbers guy, and he also likes to see the numbers and the science behind the work. We like to say that we have numbers to back up the “feel good” feedback and we believe that it’s so important to have both. In terms of hard data, we conduct student surveys at the beginning and end of each school year, we do pre- and post-Fitnessgram testing, we require weekly and monthly reports from our instructors, and we work with the schools we’re in to track things like GPA, attendance, behavioral issues, and graduation rates. Additionally, in 2019, we made an investment in the Social Emotional Learning (SEL) aspect of our curriculum, partnering with Scholastic to create supplemental curriculum to make sure we are addressing that need. We work with a data collection platform called Hello Insight to engage our students in surveys that specifically address SEL skills so that we can better hone our programming to honor these needs. We’re proud to say our program is working: • Fitness: 95 percent of JKL students get more exercise since joining the program • Nutrition: 94 percent of JKL students make healthier choices since joining the program • Graduation: 99 percent of 12th grade JKL students graduated in 2021 • Attendance: 93 percent improved or maintained their attendance • Behavior: 99 percent improved their behavior • Academics: 91 percent improved or maintained their grades

What are your priorities for the just keep livin Foundation as you look to the future?

We want to continue to grow and expand our programming, adding three to five programs each year while making sure to remain very hands-on in terms of the implementation of our curriculum and the relationships we have with our program instructors. We have been fortunate to have many wonderful like-minded partners come on as sponsors, but we are always looking for new sponsors to fund individual programs. We are growing the mental health component of our program through our “Mental Health Mondays,” and we will continue to tweak our curriculum as our students’ needs evolve. We would also love to expand our JKL Alumni program and possibly bring more of our graduates back to help mentor kids currently in our program. As always, we want to continue to provide the students we serve with critical life skills and encourage them to take what they learn into their own homes and share it with their families and their communities.•

Matthew McConaughey with JKL students at a Texas Rangers event in Dallas in March 2019

Powering Identity for the Internet

An Interview with Frederic Kerrest, Executive Vice Chairman, Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder, Okta

EDITORS’ NOTE In his current role, Frederic Kerrest is responsible for Okta’s day-to-day operations, working with employees, partners, and customers to deliver on the company’s vision of enabling any organization to use any technology. As a key member of management, he helps set corporate priorities to drive success for the company and its customers. He oversees corporate strategy, corporate development, strategic partnerships, and Okta’s social impact arm, Okta for Good. Prior to Okta, Kerrest worked in sales and business development at Salesforce.com, and in venture capital at Hummer Winblad Venture Partners. He is the author of Zero to IPO, a guide to building startups based on his own experiences and those of some of the world’s most successful and recognizable entrepreneurs. The book was an outgrowth of his award-winning podcast of the same name, which features Silicon Valley founders, investors, and entrepreneurs sharing insights from their experiences building businesses. He serves on the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship Executive Advisory Board and advises early-stage software companies. He is also the Chairman and Co-Founder of System1 Biosciences, a neurotherapeutics company. Kerrest earned a BS in computer science from Stanford University, and an MBA in entrepreneurship and innovation from the MIT Sloan School of Management, where he was the 2008 MIT Patrick J. McGovern, Jr. Entrepreneurship Award recipient. COMPANY BRIEF Okta (okta.com) is a leading independent identity provider. The Okta Identity Cloud enables organizations to securely connect the right people to the right technologies at the right time. With more than 7,000 pre-built integrations to applications and infrastructure providers, Okta provides simple and secure access to people and organizations everywhere, giving them the confidence to reach their full potential. More than 15,000 organizations, including JetBlue, Nordstrom, Siemens, Slack, Takeda, Teach for America, and Twilio, trust Okta to help protect the identities of their workforces and customers.

What was the vision for creating Okta and how do you define its mission?

Okta’s vision today is to provide identity and access software so everyone can safely use any technology. When I transitioned from the on-premises software world to Salesforce in 2002, I wasn’t sure what was going to happen in the industry. As more companies adopted online CRM and started trusting the cloud enough to move sales information and data over, I became an evangelist. AWS started taking off in 2007 as I started at MIT Sloan, and when I went to work in venture capital in 2008, it was very clear there was going to be a need for software services in the future.

I started talking about business ideas with my cofounder, Todd McKinnon, the second semester of my second year in business school and we decided to go into business a month before I graduated. I wasn’t sure about the original idea Todd had, which was about systems monitoring, was right and we ended up pivoting over to identity and access management. We could have never guessed how much and how quickly things were going to change in terms of transformation from on-premise software in proprietary data centers over to cloud technologies.

Will you provide an overview of Okta’s business and what have been the keys to Okta’s strength and leadership in the industry?

We bring simple and secure access to people and organizations everywhere. It is a customizable, secure, and drop-in solution to add authentication and authorization services to our clients’ applications. Customers get scalable authentication built right into their application without the development overhead, security risks, and maintenance that come from building it themselves.

The key to our success is an unrelenting focus on customer experience; our number one value is “Love our Customers” and we think it’s essential for achieving and maintaining leadership. The most important aspect of my job is meeting with our customers to discuss their opportunities and successes so that we can implement their feedback. Just recently, for example, Okta was the only vendor given a Customers’ Choice distinction across every category evaluated in the Gartner Peer Insights Voice of the Customer for Access Management report which is based on customer reviews.

How did Okta adapt its business to address the challenges caused by the pandemic and how proud are you to see the resilience of your team during this unprecedented time?

Organizations worldwide have turned to technology to stay afloat during the challenges caused by the pandemic. Companies rushed to support remote working, enabling new online experiences to stay connected to employees and to transact with customers. Cutting-edge tech solutions, once considered only by “early Frederic Kerrest adopters,” became survival tools for firms of every size and industry and Okta was there to support customers with this shift. Internally at Okta, the biggest changes have been in the way we show up for our employees and how we think about building our culture as a rapidly growing organization. Okta was piloting and transitioning to our flexible work framework, what we call Dynamic Work, prior to the pandemic. With Dynamic Work, employees have the choice to work from where and when they are most productive and successful. Employees are not required to spend a specific number of days in the office or with colleagues. Work schedules are flexible and based on employees’ work preferences, who they need to collaborate with, and how they balance those commitments with their personal life. With Dynamic Work, employees have the tools and resources they need to get their work done and are provided with comparable benefits and experiences, regardless of where they are logging in from. I’m incredibly proud of our team’s foresight because when the pandemic hit, we were able to quickly accelerate this transition and move our operations fully remote without missing a beat, enabling us to be there for our customers every step of the way. We know that we’ve only scratched the surface of what it means to work dynamically and have so much opportunity to expand our footprint, reach incredible talent outside of the markets we have offices in and create a more diverse workforce – all things that make us a stronger company.

How critical is it for Okta to build a diverse and inclusive workforce to bring diverse perspectives and experiences to the table when making business decisions?

Diversity, Inclusion and Belonging is incredibly critical at Okta – it’s just good business. We target three main areas: workforce,

“We bring simple and secure access to people and organizations everywhere. It is a customizable, secure, and drop-in solution to add authentication and authorization services to our clients’ applications.”

workplace and marketplace. Our workforce bucket is focused on recruiting under-represented and diverse talent to create balanced teams at Okta. Our commitment to nurturing an inclusive workplace ensures that we are driving change within our organization. These efforts allow us to bring richer skills and experiences in designing and selling our products to a wider/ larger marketplace.

What do you see as Okta’s responsibility to the communities it serves and to being a force for good in society?

We all have a responsibility to give back. At Okta, we know our success is linked to our communities – businesses can’t thrive unless our communities are thriving as well. That’s why, since the early days of Okta, we’ve been intentional about building social impact into the DNA of the company. We took the 1% Pledge prior to going public and launched our social impact arm, Okta for Good. We empowered Okta’s employees to give back to their communities as we’ve expanded around the world. We made Okta’s technology accessible to nonprofits by donating our core products. And we deployed millions of dollars in grants over the last several years.

We also launched our ESG (environmental, social, governance) and sustainability program in 2020 to address growing expectations for corporate action. In a rapidly evolving world with complex and interconnected challenges – from COVID, to climate change, to rising inequality – we see expectations for action accelerating from all of our stakeholders.

Employees choose to work at companies based on an alignment with their values and purpose. Customers are asking us to help them meet their own ESG goals and investors want to understand our broader risks and opportunities beyond financials. To win in today’s world, companies have to take a broader view and participate in driving positive change. This is something Todd and I believe very strongly.

What interested you in writing the book, Zero to IPO, and what are the key messages you wanted to convey in the book?

Zero to IPO is the entrepreneurship playbook I wish I would have had when I was starting out. By gathering advice and specific, tactical suggestions from other founders, I hope to share some of the wisdom that we’ve all learned the hard way. Too often in business, this kind of knowledge is only shared among a select few. It’s the kind of thing that gets passed from person-to-person. Yet, for a founder, it often makes the difference between success and failure. Entrepreneurship should be accessible to all and I hope the advice in my book’s pages inspires and helps the next generation of founders.

The book, which has become an instant Wall Street Journal best seller, is full of great tactical advice from the world’s most successful entrepreneurs, but there are three main principles I’d like to leave readers with: 1. Keep the main thing the main thing. That means there are a lot of things that will come at you and that will try to distract you; email is a very good example. Email is what other people want you to do, it is not what you should be doing. You need to make sure that you are focused on the most important things. 2. Nothing happens until somebody sells something. It’s very easy as an entrepreneur to get distracted by product details or designing something perfect. Salesmanship is not something we’re usually comfortable doing, but if no one buys your product, nothing’s going to happen. 3. Time is your most precious resource so prioritize it ruthlessly and learn how to say no.

Did you always know that you had an entrepreneurial spirit and desire to start your own company?

I’d say so – I’ve always been interested in business and consider myself to be an entrepreneur since I was a kid. I started a can-recycling business when I was seven or eight years old and then in high school, a tennis racket restringing business. After graduating from college, I joined and helped build a technology system integrator software company in Argentina, Brazil, and Mexico.

I joined Salesforce when it was a company of just 100 people. I was there for five years and helped build five different businesses until the company had 3,500 people and it became too big. I then went back to business school with the specific intent of owning my financial education so I would be in a great position to start a new company when I graduated.

What do you see as the keys to effective leadership and how do you describe your management style?

Being a leader means constantly being thrown into the fire. You have to continually make decisions with only a fraction of the information you need. The fate of your company rests on how you choose to lead.

A great leader must give away power and responsibilities so the company can grow. They must deprioritize their own needs in favor of those of their employees. Most importantly, a good leader is one who is willing to learn how to listen – to colleagues, customers, investors, and mentors – so they can collect as much insight as possible to make those calls.

Personally, I use the Eisenhower Decision Matrix to help with my prioritization and decision-making and it has served me very well. I focus on what is important and urgent, delegate what is urgent but not important, schedule what is important but not urgent, and delete everything else.

As a manager, I believe my job is to hire great people, push as much information down in the organization as possible, give folks a lot of room to run and then help them with strategy or specific blockers to keep moving forward. I am not a micromanager because it’s not healthy or helpful – or fun frankly – and you’ll never scale if you can’t build an amazing team around you.

Okta has achieved much success since its founding. Do you take moments to reflect and celebrate the wins or are you always looking to what is next?

We’re proud of our team’s accomplishments, and we take the time to celebrate when it’s warranted. However, the next day, it’s back to work and figuring out what we could have done better and how we can improve.•