He wanted to teach college English. Instead he took four companies public.
Johan Dowdy has taken four companies public.
Workday. Twitter. Lyft. Asana. Four IPOs, four times building an IT organization from inside a company racing toward the public markets. “I think I kind of got addicted to the process,” he says, “and decided to keep repeating it.”
He didn’t set out to chase that pattern. He came in wanting to teach college English.
Johan majored in English and German literature at Colby College, a small liberal arts school in central Maine, planning to take a year off before grad school and a career as a professor. The year off turned into tech support work, because in the early 1990s “there was not yet such clearly defined IT and technology roles,” just a computer person, maybe, in an office still full of typewriters and filing cabinets. In parallel, he also became interested in network security. Things changed dramatically when he was hired by a small, still relatively unknown startup named Workday. At that time, he had to explain the pitch to strangers at conferences: “You remember PeopleSoft, right?”
At Workday, Johan built a team focused on identity and access management, even before IAM was a category most companies had a name for. “I was really looking at it more as a critical security practice at that point,” he says. Just usernames, accounts, passwords. Along the way, the vision of what this layer is evolved: not a security control, but the structure on which everything in IT is built. “It’s really the foundational layer for what we can do to affect change and process around the organization.” Every automation, every onboarding flow, every access decision needs one thing first: a reliable answer to who someone is, what their role is, who they report to.
That’s the lesson four IPOs taught him, in order: put IT governance in early, even when a company doesn’t feel big enough yet for it to matter. “Much better to have them there early when you’re growing and building the foundation than like, oh no, we’re going public in two months, we don’t have all this figured out, let’s quickly get it.” He said the same thing to himself every time he joined somewhere new. At Asana, he started building it at five or six hundred employees, years before the direct listing.
None of the four stretches was easy. What got him through wasn’t a plan for every scenario, there isn’t one at that pace. It was tolerance for not having all the information.
“You go to war with the army you have, not the army you want.”
Johan Dowdy, Asana
High-growth IT means making calls without full visibility, and treating a wrong call as information instead of a verdict. “I don’t see failure as an end point. I see it as an often necessary first step.”
The other lesson took longer to learn. Early in his career, he ran a team of fourteen direct reports because he didn’t trust anyone else to own a piece of it. “I felt like this is all on me. It’s 100% my responsibility.” Eventually someone told him to learn to delegate instead of carrying every decision himself, advice that took him a while to actually believe. Once he did, leading got easier, not harder.
“People don’t scale that well.”
Johan Dowdy, Asana
His advice for other senior IT leaders is blunt: most people think they delegate more than they actually do. “Strong recommendation for people to really think about their leadership style and how they’re leaning into delegation as a way to be more successful.”
He never went back for the teaching degree. But watching someone move from his service desk into an engineering role somewhere else still counts as a win in his book, closer, maybe, to the version of himself that wanted to spend a career developing people. It just came built into a much bigger organization than a classroom.
This has been a DoGood Member Spotlight.