Read the PowerPoint a CEO used to convince his wife he should leave his job at Salesforce to launch a new company during the Great Recession

• Todd McKinnon quit his lucrative Silicon Valley job at Salesforce to start his own business during the Great Recession.
• His tech startup Okta, is now a $14 billion company.
• But before he could start Okta, which was formerly called Saasure, McKinnon pitched his wife to convince her that his mid-career change wasn't crazy.
• He gave Business Insider the PowerPoint he presented to her, which includes his initial business plan, investors he'd talked to, four possible outcomes, and projected milestones.
• Click here for more BI Prime content.

Okta CEO Todd McKinnon has pitched numerous investors and clients, but the pitch he's still talking about more than 10 years later was the one he gave his wife to convince her he wasn't crazy for wanting to start a tech company during the Great Recession.

Before he quit his Silicon Valley job at Salesforce to start his own business, he created a PowerPoint to present his business plan to his wife, Roxanne Stachon.

At that time, Stachon was the COO at an environmental-engineering consulting firm and was taking six months of maternity leave after their daughter was born. She had some major concerns about McKinnon's proposed mid-career change.

Neither of them wanted him to become an "entrepreneur-slash-bum," as McKinnon called it, like the ones they'd seen during the dot-com bubble when they first started dating. At that time - the late 90s - stock evaluations increased on internet-based companies. But aggressive startup funding and the subsequent market crash led to many entrepreneurs who were "trying ideas and having a lot of coffee" without much success, McKinnon said.

Stachon was skeptical about the financial risk of starting a new company. "She was worried about being tied into being the breadwinner," McKinnon said. So he laid out how they would afford healthcare and have enough in savings to live without his salary for a year, thanks to their lucrative jobs and careful budgeting.

"We lived in San Francisco so it wasn't the cheapest thing in the world, but we weren't living like rockstars. We weren't like Jay-Z and Beyonce," he said.

According to McKinnon, Stachon is a more conservative risk-taker and she worried about the general uncertainty of starting a business. "It's pretty hard for entrepreneurs, but it's also hard for the spouses," he said.

To assuage the uncertainty, his pitch outlined milestones to track his success. "We didn't want this to be one of those things that went on forever. We wanted to know that we were making progress or that we weren't and have a decision point," he said.

Stachon agreed to the venture and Okta - a service that gives people secure access to online accounts and tools - is now a $14 billion-dollar company. McKinnon said the company now has 7,400 customers and is making more than $150 million in revenue per quarter.

"It's a long shot and you have to get lucky. I'm very proud of it and so is she," he said.

McKinnon shared his 2009 PowerPoint pitch deck with Business Insider. (Okta was formerly called Saasure, as it's referred to in the presentation. Some sensitive information has been omitted.)

See his full pitch deck below, titled "Why I'm Not Crazy."