Embark on a journey with Jake Moshenko, the CEO of AuthZed, as he shares the riveting tale of his ascent from a curious graduate to a pioneering tech entrepreneur. Our latest conversation peels back the curtain on the truths of startup culture, revealing the resilience and adaptability required to navigate the ever-shifting tides of tech innovation. From his early days at Boeing to the lessons learned in the trenches of Amazon and Google, Jake's story resonates with anyone who's faced the daunting climb up the entrepreneurial ladder.
As we wade deeper into the intricacies of leadership and product development, Jake imparts the servant leadership philosophies that have sculpted his approach to managing teams. The episode casts light on the unique challenges of persuading developers to embrace new tools, underscoring the craft of building and customizing IDEs. We then transition to dissecting the complexities of digital file cabinet authorization control, where Jake elucidates the vital role of precise access management in our digital world, and how AutZed stands at the forefront of this technological frontier.
Wrapping up our discussion, we dissect the unpredictable ebbs and flows of innovation and the indispensable practice of customer development. Jake underscores the discipline needed to derive unbiased feedback, offering hard-earned wisdom on the preparation and resilience vital for budding tech entrepreneurs. He extends an invitation to our listeners to experience the open-source revolution firsthand. Whether you're a seasoned developer or a startup enthusiast, this episode promises a wealth of knowledge to fuel your passion for tech entrepreneurship.
Visit AuthZed for a free consultation on authorization system solutions: https://authzed.com/podcasts
Hire Top-Notch Remote Software Engineers:
http://echoglobal.tech/
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Max (00:01):
Hello and welcome to Startup Chronicles podcast.
I'm thrilled to be joined todayby Jake Moshenko, a serial
entrepreneur whose ventures haveled to successful acquisitions.
He is the mastermind and CEO ofAuthZat, a tech company
inspired by Google's Zenzibarwhite paper.
Authzat makes the lives ofsoftware engineers easier by
providing innovativeauthorization system solutions.
We'll delve into Jake'simpressive technical background,
(00:24):
explore his experience startinghis first company and see how
these experiences shaped hisapproach to launching subsequent
successful ventures.
Additionally, we'll focus onthe idea validation process and
discuss other fascinatingaspects of his journey.
Stay tuned.
Jake (00:41):
We went from a two-person company to a multiple hundred
thousand person company in thespan of like five years, and
that was pretty interesting.
What I did is I looked back atmanagers that I've had in the
past and loved and said whatwere the things that they did
that I really liked?
What were the things that theydid that I didn't like so much?
How can I learn from that?
(01:02):
Prior to that, I had built likea pretty successful iPhone app.
Right, I just built it.
I thought people might like it.
I threw it in the app store andgot hundreds of thousands of
downloads and so I was like, ohokay, it's now imagine if I have
to allow access to a file fortwo million people, yeah Right.
And I was able to give accessto that file a million times per
(01:23):
second.
So before us they were writinga lot of code, to be frank, and
we did this for Kway as well.
Right, we said we need to doauthorization.
Let's just start writing code,let's store little bits of data
in the database and then we'llinterpret that data according to
some roles and rules that wehave set up in the application.
If you have a one hour call,maybe spend 45 minutes of it,
(01:45):
talking to the customer abouttheir problem.
Max (01:50):
Welcome to Startup Chronicles Podcast.
If you're building, or planningto build your own tech company,
this is the place where you getinspired, educated and prepared
, prepared for all thosepitfalls that are on your way,
which you will definitelyovercome, because every guest
who's on this podcast is a bigtime practitioner who's been
there and done that.
They come here to share theunique stories of their ups and
downs, providing you withavailable tips and guidance, so
(02:11):
maybe you will be the one tobuild the next unicorn company.
I'm Max, the host of thepodcast and a co-founder of a
tech recruitment company.
I'm not sitting on a bunch ofstartup secrets, but I'm also
working on a few personalprojects too, and that's the
main reason why I brought thispodcast to life to learn from
the best, alongside with you.
So enjoy the show and let'sdive into our next Chronicle.
(02:34):
Hi, jake, thanks for coming.
How are you Good?
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's a great pleasure.
So, jake, maybe this is not avery typical question to start
this off, but your family namereally sparked my curiosity,
because I am Ukrainian myself,born and raised, and your family
name sounds pretty Ukrainian tome, and I might be wrong,
(02:56):
though, so I apologize if I am,but could you tell me, do you
have any Ukrainian or maybeEastern European roots?
Jake (03:03):
Yep, absolutely.
My dad is 100% Ukrainian.
But it's been kind of a longtime since my family was in
Ukraine.
So my grandmother was born inCanada in 1911.
So her parents were fromUkraine, and then my
grandfather's parents were alsofrom Ukraine.
Max (03:24):
So that's interesting.
So have you ever been toUkraine?
Jake (03:28):
I haven't.
No, it doesn't seem like agreat time to visit right now.
Max (03:32):
Definitely yeah, when things calm down.
Jake (03:35):
I do hope to be able to make a trip one day.
Max (03:37):
Yeah, that would be great.
Okay, good, jake, so you have avery exemplary I would say, I
would not even be afraid to saythat exemplary and solid
technical background.
You studied in Michigan, theuniversity correct me if I'm
wrong then as a first job youworked at Boeing, then more
classical companies like Amazonand then Google, and then you
(04:00):
started your first company,which was called DevTable, and
again, correct me if I'm wrongbut if I'm not mistaken, it
didn't really work out very well, or maybe as planned.
Could you please tell me alittle bit more about that
period of your life?
Jake (04:14):
Yeah, so you pretty much nailed it.
I did go to a university inMichigan.
Then I went out to Boeing.
I worked in the flightsimulator's group at Boeing,
which is like a dream come true,right Like I'm fresh out of
college computer engineeringdegree and here I am flying
around virtual simulatedmulti-hundred million dollar
jumbo jets in like the full six,three degrees of freedom,
(04:36):
motion simulator and everything.
So that was by far an amazinglyfun job and learned a lot there
, but ultimately realized itwasn't going to take me where I
wanted to go.
So that's when I switched overinto the more sort of like
classical tech companies, thefirst one being Amazon.
Amazon is where I cut my teethon distributed systems and web
(04:59):
services and sort of web servicearchitecture, things like that.
And then after a little whilewe decided my now wife and I
decided that we wanted to moveto New York and at the time
Amazon didn't really have anyengineering in New York.
So that's when I made theswitch to Google and just
continued learning about superlarge scale hyperscaler style
(05:20):
architectures.
At Google I was working ondeveloper facing infrastructure,
so the API's infrastructuregroup and, yeah, that's where I
met Joey, who is my second timeco-founder now and our current
CTO, and we left to do DevTable.
And yeah, you're right,devtable was an online IDE Think
(05:40):
our compatriots at the timewere Cloud9 and CodeNV and we
never really got anywhere.
We never found any traction.
We had a few people kick thetires and use it here and there,
but ultimately the IDE wasn'twhere we ended up finding
success.
Where we ended up findingsuccess was in the Docker
ecosystem.
So we were using Dockercontainers.
(06:01):
This is back in 2012, 2013,.
So very early days for Dockerand containerization.
We were using Docker containersto run infrastructure for our
IDE and we had all of this code,all of this proprietary code
were like how do we store thiscode in the cloud and then serve
it up to our machines when weneed to?
And at the time there was noprivate Docker registry and
(06:24):
because it was proprietary code,we couldn't use the public
internet facing unauthenticated,unauthorized registries.
So we said, all right, let's gobuild it.
If we need it, someone elseneeds it, let's go build it.
And this is a common themeyou'll find with me scratching
my own itch, so to speak.
And we built a product calledQuay.
So Quay was the first privateDocker registry, and then that
(06:45):
one was kind of successful rightfrom the start.
We had traction, we had payingcustomers, revenue, users, all
of that, and eventually we endedup exiting Quay over to QuoroS,
and that was the start of oursort of like continued journey
and then correct me if I'm wrong.
Max (07:03):
Sorry for interrupting, but then QuoroS was acquired by Red
Hat, correct?
Jake (07:09):
And then Red.
Max (07:09):
Hat by ABM.
Jake (07:11):
That's right.
Max (07:13):
I did my homework.
We went from a two-personcompany to a multiple hundred
thousand person company in thespan of like five years and that
was pretty interesting, it waspretty interesting, I can bet,
and I'm sure there was lots ofups and downs and you learned a
lot, and I'm sure that maybe Iknow it's I cannot tell for you,
(07:36):
but I can only assume that allof that experience that you
gained during those five yearsreally reflected on how you run
currently auths at your currentcompany, that you found it, if
I'm not mistaken, back in 2019,right 2020 is when we found it,
I said Yep, okay, of course,absolutely.
Jake (07:58):
I mean all of us.
Everything that we do in lifeshapes the way that we approach
things and the way that we seethings.
And so through that journeythrough QuoroS to Red Hat, to
IBM I you know, we were atwo-person company, I had never
had like a formal leadershiprole before that, and then
through that journey I was sortof dragged, kicking and
screaming into management.
(08:19):
That's really where I likeformed the thesis of what kind
of manager and what kind ofleader I wanted to be.
I was given responsibility forsome pretty big initiatives and
so that kind of opened my eyesto sort of the wider role of
fitting an engineering orgwithin a larger organization.
So yeah, absolutely Right,everything that we do sort of
shapes the way we approach theworld.
Max (08:40):
So what would you say was the toughest or the hardest
thing for you to learn in termsof management, running the
company?
Because you used to be just asoftware developer in different
companies.
Right, you were more writingcode.
You didn't know.
I'm not sure whether youlearned something about
management at your university,but I assume you did not learn
(09:02):
much about that.
Right, you were learning moretechnical knowledge and
technical side of things.
So what really helped in?
How did you approach that?
Because you were like atrailblazer for yourself in
terms of learning how to run thecompanies.
Jake (09:18):
Yeah, that's a good question, I think.
When someone first findsthemselves in a leadership
position and they say this is anopportunity, right, what do I
want to do with it?
And so what I did is I lookedback at managers that I've had
in the past and loved and saidwhat were the things that they
did that I really liked?
What were the things that theydid that I didn't like so much?
(09:38):
How can I learn from that?
I read a bunch of books, right.
I participated in sort of atechnical leadership, technical
management, small sort of grouplearning environment here in New
York City, and sort of liketaking all of those things and
fusing them together intofiguring out what my style, what
kind of leader I wanted to be,and the thing that really
(10:00):
resonated the most with me wasthe idea of a servant leader, so
basically being there to helpother people do their best work
and to sort of like set themfree and make sure that they
feel fulfilled and that they'redoing their best work, because a
company, right Like a company,is designed to be able to
accomplish more than what onesingle person can accomplish.
(10:21):
So it's like when you see someof these leaders that have like
a cult of personality or arevery like aggressive type A top
down.
I think they're probably notgetting the best out of their
people that they could be.
Max (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, and so could I say that you had
you always had the end user inmind when trying to make some
strategic decisions.
Jake (10:47):
Yeah, and like, that's exactly what we do when we do
product development as well.
Right, it's about havingempathy.
It's about making sure that thepeople that are eventually
going to end up touching yourwork product whether that's a
startup, whether that's software, whether that's an API, learn
about that at Google or whetherit's the decisions that you make
right, like, that's still awork product and that's still
(11:09):
something that people are goingto interact with and interface
with, and so making sure thatyou have empathy for how that's
going to impact them day to daywhen you're making those
decisions, I think is supercritical.
Max (11:20):
For sure.
So, jake, we will.
I really want to talk a littlebit more about us, that and
exactly what you do, yourproduct and everything.
But before we do that, I wouldreally still have would like to
touch dev table.
And why do you think it didn'treally work out?
Didn't you do your homework?
Or maybe you didn't reallyvalidate the initial idea,
because that's the first companyright, it's maybe 90% of the
(11:45):
time.
It usually doesn't work.
But what was your case?
Why didn't work in your case?
Jake (11:52):
Yeah.
So I guess I'll start with likehow I thought the world worked
before that.
Prior to that, I had built likea pretty successful iPhone app.
Right, I just built it.
I thought people might like it.
I threw it in the app store andgot hundreds of thousands of
downloads and so I was like, oh,okay.
And then also like in myprevious roles, like the manager
(12:14):
was always like this is what wehave to do.
So I just had this sense oflike, if you build it, they will
come.
And so when we got into the IDspace, I was like, okay, people
are looking more and more,they're doing more and more
things in their web browser andChromebooks are kind of a hot
thing right now.
A lot of schools anduniversities are using
Chromebooks, so there's probablya need here and if we build it,
(12:36):
they will come.
And Joey already had actually ahuge.
He had a like, he had a hugelead in this space.
He had already developed mostof the web ID.
So I was like, yeah, it seemslike the right product, right
time.
We can just go andcommercialize this thing, but
we're probably a little bitahead of where people wanted to
(12:58):
be.
And then I didn't realize that,how you know, from my own
personal perspective, we fall inlove with the tools that we use
and we get really attached tothem, and so to get a developer
to switch tools is actually kindof a monumental lift, and I
think I underestimated how bigof a challenge that would be.
(13:19):
And we would get all theserequests to where people would
use sort of you know put.
Think, imagine 100 technologiesthat exist in some grid and
every single person is going topoint to seven of those and
those are going to become theirstack.
But when you average thatacross the entire ecosystem,
across all of the technologies,everybody has a different seven
(13:41):
that they've picked.
And so we would get requeststhat are like All right, you do
three of the seven things that Ineed it to do, if you build the
other four, I'll use it.
And it was just kind of likethat loop over and over and over
again, where we were constantlybuilding, shipping, iterating,
building, shipping, iterating,but we never quite got the seven
things for a large populationof users to make a sustainable
(14:02):
business.
Max (14:03):
So it looked like more like like you had to build a custom
ID for almost everyone there,because everyone uses different
text tags, they have differentrequirements for their online ID
, and how it has changed nowbecause online ID is still a
thing right, people do use itand how other companies approach
that the successful companiesthat are on the market right now
(14:23):
.
Jake (14:25):
Yeah, I don't know if there's been a runaway success
in this area still right, likeVS Code, for example, is all.
it's built all on webtechnologies, but it's still
mostly a desktop app and peopleand people flocked to VS Code at
a rate like they switched fromAdam or sublime text or whatever
(14:47):
at a rate.
That is just incredible.
And it's because, still being adesktop app, you can also use
it and it's not offload the fourout of seven things that it
doesn't do well to the terminal,into the desktop, into your
local environment.
And so I would say, ifanybody's really going to crack
this nut, it would be building amodular IDE similar to how VS
(15:09):
Code and Eclipse have like veryrich plug-in ecosystem and their
modular and you can sort ofcompose that seven things that
you need experience out ofmodules.
So it would be a very modularIDE, but then I still don't know
how to solve the like terminaldesktop local file sync
experience, because you justhave to build so much and it's
(15:31):
people are very passionate aboutthese tools.
Max (15:34):
All right.
So, jake, now let's talk alittle bit more about your
current company, ozad.
It's very technical product andbecause it is quite a technical
product, not all of ourlisteners are software engineers
, so let me help you here.
I will tell the simplifiedversion of Ozad, so I would
explain it as a as to an eightyear old and you will do your
(15:57):
part, explain it in a moretechnical way, which I'm sure
you are extremely good at.
How about that?
Jake (16:03):
Well, we'll see how good I am at it.
You're right, it is a technicalproduct.
So let's start with your ELIeight.
Max (16:10):
All right, good.
So imagine you have a digitalfiling cabinet with lots of
drawers and files and in abusiness or organization not
everyone should be able to openevery drawer or read every file.
So some information is privateor sensitive and Ozad provides a
special lock system for thosedigital filing cabinets, which
(16:32):
in this case are computerapplications or software systems
.
And, for as far as I understand, ozad helps decide who can open
which drawers and look at whichfiles.
So it's like giving out specialkeys to people based on their
role in the organization.
For example, a manager mighthave more keys or a key that
(16:52):
opens more drawers than anintern.
And Ozad customers are usuallythe people who make these
digital filing cabinets, likesoftware engineers and companies
that build applications, andthese developers use Ozad locks,
their permissions and accesscontrol systems to make sure
that they're on the right peoplecan access information, certain
(17:13):
information in the applicationthey built.
Did I do a good job or not?
Jake (17:20):
That's actually a fairly accurate metaphor, I'd say.
But one thing that we reallyfocus on at OTSED, to use your
metaphor, is more aboutfederating out that access as
opposed to securing it.
It's very easy to makesomething secure by default.
You just only let the personwho created it have access.
So think about in your metaphoron the drawer system imagine if
(17:46):
there were post-its on everydrawer and on every file and on
every piece of paper within thedrawer, maybe even down to
paragraphs on pieces of paper inthe files in the drawer, and on
those post-its you could writewho's allowed to have access to
those things and why this persongets access to the whole drawer
because they're like let'spretend, a drawer is one tenant
(18:08):
of our customer, right, Like onecompany, one customer of our
customer.
This person gets access toeverything in the drawer because
they're the owner of theaccount, they're the ones who
signed up.
But, then for each individualfolder and each individual piece
of paper.
That person is going to decidehow to federate that out and
eventually they can alsodelegate permissions on who else
can make those decisions.
(18:28):
So it's much more aboutbuilding the infrastructure to
power the sharing than it isabout the locks themselves, I'd
say.
Max (18:38):
So that makes it easier to scale right and if you, for
example, have to changesomething, to change a piece of
code, it takes much less work todo, am I right?
Jake (18:48):
Yeah, I guess that we can extend the metaphor as well If
we're using post-its.
Now imagine if I have to allowaccess to a file for 2 million
people yeah Right.
Or if I need to be able to giveaccess to that file a million
times per second.
Max (19:03):
Sounds scary.
Jake (19:03):
We can't be opening and closing a drawer a million times
per second and going throughthe names on the post-it one by
one.
So scale is a big part of it.
A big part of it is also beingglobally available.
So if I need to be fieldingcalls from people all over the
world who are saying does thisperson have access to these
(19:24):
contents in that drawer, in thatfile, being able to answer that
quickly, succinctly, correctly,at scale is a big problem.
Max (19:32):
So it's a hosted service right and, as far as I'm aware,
having permissions as a service.
It's kind of a brand new thing.
Jake (19:44):
Yeah, we sell it in a variety of different ways.
So there is a multi-tenanthosted service.
We also have a private hostedservice that we run on behalf of
our customers, but it's justfor them, it's single tenant, as
we call it.
So we go, let's say that you'rein Frankfurt, your company does
business out of Frankfurt andyou're subject to GDPR and you
(20:07):
can't have your data stored overin the US because that'd be a
violation.
And you want really fast,really quick answers to these
questions.
We'll go and we'll put a copyof our software right in
Frankfurt for you so that, forcompliance, you're in the clear,
for performance, you're in theclear, and that's our private
sass.
And then, for the strictest ofour customers, we also have an
(20:28):
open source solution that wesupport that they can run in
their own data centers.
Max (20:33):
Okay, so now let's imagine there's no OSDAT.
What are the alternatives rightnow for that?
Because of course, there aresome frameworks right, there are
many other technologies.
How did people or thosesoftware engineers who are not
aware of your solution, how dothey solve this problem and how
would that would be easier forthem with OSDAT?
Jake (20:56):
Yeah, so before us they were writing a lot of code, to
be frank, and we did this forQuay as well.
Right, we said we need to doauthorization.
Let's just start writing code,let's store little bits of data
in the database and then we'llinterpret that data according to
some roles and rules that wehave set up in the application,
and ultimately, that code becamea bottleneck for us.
(21:18):
Nobody wanted to change it.
We would get customer requeststhat were outside of the scope
of what we had written, and sowe would get stuck.
There were some features thatwe actually didn't ship because
the permissions weren't richenough, weren't fine-grained
enough to ship it, and so, yeah,I think what people are mostly
doing or I would say 99% of thecustomers that we have are
(21:38):
coming from homegrownhandwritten systems, and some of
the downfalls of doing it thatway are that your data actually
can get locked up within asingle application.
I like to give this example.
So we're modeled off of asystem that existed at Google
before, called SansaBar.
You can't buy it from Google.
There's no open sourcereference implementation or
anything.
(21:58):
But at Google, if you try tosend an email via Gmail and it
contains a link to a documentand the person that you're
trying to send the email todoesn't have access to that
document, google Gmail will warnyou and they'll say hey, max
doesn't have access to thisdocument.
Would you like to fix that?
Right here, right now, andright there from within Gmail,
(22:19):
you can grant access to Max, andthe way they're able to
accomplish that is that theyhave this permission service and
then everything is goingthrough the same interface and
they can all talk aboutpermissions sort of uniformly.
So Gmail doesn't need to knowthe deep down, nitty gritty,
specific details about howGoogle Docs makes that decision.
It just calls an API and sayscan Max do this?
(22:41):
No, all right, let's fix that.
Max (22:44):
So Google released SansaBar paper back in 2019 and that's
where you got the idea for usthat.
Is that correct?
Jake (22:52):
That's right, yep.
Max (22:53):
Okay, and how much confidence did you have back
then?
Because, yeah, you let's saysorry, but can I say that you
failed on DevTable and then hadthe success on the next few
companies.
Right, didn't you have likeflashbacks?
Maybe you know that when youstart another company it will
(23:17):
not work and maybe that's toogood to work because nobody at
that time, nobody did that right.
That's a brand new idea.
Jake (23:28):
Yeah, so I will say that Quay came out of DevTable like
the company, so that was sort oflike a Phoenix moment, right,
like rebirth as Quay, and thenit ultimately went on to become
quite successful.
So I wouldn't say that anycompanies like straight up
failed, although we had to pivotaway from our original idea.
We were ready to do that againif that happened.
(23:49):
So, like we're notentrepreneurs because we think
it's going to be a straight lineto a billion dollars right.
Like the reason that there'svalue in starting startups is
because it's unknown whetherit's going to be successful at
the outset right, if everyoneknew this was for sure going to
work and for sure going to befinancially successful, we'd
(24:09):
have a million competitors andeverybody would be just
following the same exact scriptand doing the same exact thing.
So the thing that I love aboutentrepreneurship is the ability
to explore and to iterate and totry things and to fail.
Right Like, all successes arebuilt on the backs of like
little, tiny micro failures.
So nobody, nobody had an ideaof how their business was going
(24:33):
to go, and then went andexecuted it 100%, without fail,
exactly as they initiallypredicted, and that's why we do
it.
Max (24:41):
Absolutely.
I can't agree more with you.
So what I was trying to ask youdid you have much more
confidence when starting us that, compared to those times when
you started your previouscompanies?
Jake (24:55):
Maybe, Actually, if anything, I'd say I had less
confidence.
Max (24:59):
Oh, why?
Jake (25:01):
It's a bigger.
It's a bigger play.
So there's sort of like aspectrum of how audacious you
want to be and at the lessaudacious end of the spectrum
you could imagine opening achain of grocery stores or a
chain of laundromats orsomething right, like there's a
well demonstrated human need forthese kinds of businesses and
(25:25):
it really is just like amathematical money in returns
out kind of business play.
And obviously, yes, you have torun it well and you have to
provide a great customerexperience and everything.
And then like one step up fromthat in, like the digital world
would be offering a play thatyou can adopt in a minute, right
, something that you can kickthe tires on, pull out a credit
(25:48):
card and be using one minutelater.
Kway was in sort of that, like10 minute to one hour sort of
category.
It was something that you couldadopt very easily.
You could bolt it on orintegrate it with your business
infrastructure.
But Zed is more of a platformplay.
It's think of it more along thelines of adopting a database.
(26:08):
Nobody adopts a database afterone minute thought.
Nobody pulls out their creditcard and is buying a database
after kicking the tires for 10minutes.
So it's a more audacious playand when you do that, there's
more value.
Right, you can deliver morevalue to your customers because
you're taking on a biggerportion of their needs and of
their infrastructure and reallyhelping them accelerate their
(26:30):
own growth and their own productdevelopment.
But it's a harder sale, ittakes longer and, yeah, so I
would say that I had lessconfidence, because these kinds
of platform plays are trickierto build companies around.
Max (26:44):
We've been quite successful .
It was harder to sell and alsoit was harder to build because
it's a very technical chunk ofwork, right?
So how hard was thattechnically to implement?
Jake (26:57):
Yeah, I mean it is a big distributed system so it forms a
big, consistent hash of.
Sorry, I'm getting a little bitinto the weeds technically, but
it is a.
You know, you can think of it.
I wouldn't say it's quite ashard as creating like a new
relational database would be,but it's somewhere between there
and like a businessintelligence app.
(27:19):
So there are quite a quite a fewperformance and technical
hurdles that we had to clearbefore anyone could even
consider it.
We had to.
We actually wrote a version inPython to prove out the model.
And then we had to replace thatwith the current version, which
is written in go, which is a lotfaster and a lot leaner on
memory.
So you know, we were constantlyiterating and we're constantly
(27:44):
integrating what we've learnedfrom going to the market and
listening to what they say intoour technical plans and making
sure that we're moving forwardin the right direction.
Max (27:54):
Okay, so, and also, do you, how often do you do things like
customers interview andcustomers development?
How do you approach customersdevelopment in general and how
was it especially?
I really would like to hear howwas that at the beginning, when
you were, you know, juststarting validating, talking to
people?
Where did you find those people?
(28:15):
Was it, you know, some forums,or maybe offline conferences and
stuff?
Jake (28:23):
Yeah, at the very beginning we found people by
basically reaching out to ournetwork, people that we know
that are running projects,running companies embedded at
big organizations.
Would you use this thing?
Yes, no, why not?
That is a fantastically bad wayto do product development,
because those people don't wantto tell you something that you
(28:44):
don't want to hear.
So you usually don't get verygood feedback that way.
But after a while we opensourced SpiceDB and we said
here's the system.
Right, it's a database, youunderstand it, it's a database
for permissions.
And after that the scriptflipped entirely.
(29:05):
Right.
They started coming to us.
They're like SpiceDB Zanzibar,I'm all in, but I need XYZ.
I would like you to go off anddo this, or I can't adopt it
until it hits these performancenumbers.
And that's where the flywheelsort of starts, where if you can
get real users who have realskin in the game, then you start
(29:26):
to get feedback that's actuallyuseful and actionable, versus
like when you're asking yourfriends, they're like oh well,
yeah, it's great, but wouldn'tit be nice if you know those
kinds of requirements andrequests are never quite as good
as when people have skin in thegame.
There's actually a great bookabout this called the mom test
that I highly recommend as well,which is the thesis of the book
(29:47):
, is basically that your momwill never be entirely honest
with you if you ask her what youshould be doing.
Max (29:55):
For sure.
So if I got an idea, Ishouldn't go to my grandma and
ask her whether it's a good ideafor a business or not and then
skip to the bank for the loanagainst my apartment.
Right, that would be everyonedisclaimer.
This is not a financial advice.
Never do that.
Just listen to what Jake saysand never do biased customer
(30:17):
interviews.
Is that right?
Jake (30:20):
I wouldn't say never right , you've got to talk to somebody
at first.
But you should understand whatkind of bias is they're bringing
to the table and how usefulthat feedback can be.
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Jake (31:13):
And also not to discredit it, but if your grandma is like
a software architect at aFortune 500 company, she may
have very valuable insight,right?
So, like you know, your mileagemay vary, your grandma may vary
.
Max (31:24):
It would be really difficult to come by with such a
grandma.
But, yeah, so let's talk alittle bit more about interviews
, customer interviews, becauseit's sometimes difficult to.
What would you say would be themain advice?
To avoid asking biasedquestions.
(31:46):
And you already said do it'sbetter not to talk to people
that you know, to your family,to your colleagues?
You can talk to them at thebeginning, right just to get the
things off the ground, but whenyou really want to scale up and
get more data from potentialusers, which you will analyze
later, what do you think are thebest approach to ask the right
(32:11):
questions?
Jake (32:17):
Yeah, this is very well, pretty well trod material at
this point, but I'll just echowhat sort of the advice you'll
get from a lot of this businessdevelopment is, which is, ask
questions about the problem, diginto the problem.
Like, if you have a one-hourcall in your pre-product and
(32:37):
your pre-product market fit.
If you have a one-hour call,maybe spend 45 minutes of it
talking to the customer abouttheir problem.
Don't pitch your solution,because as soon as you pitch
your solution, they're going tocontextualize everything that
they talk to you about in termsof your solution and whether or
not they can make your solutionwork or not.
And that really it's a greatway to find sort of like a local
(33:01):
maxima where you've taken thatsolution as far as it can go,
but you've really missed theforest for the trees.
You don't know the otherproblems that they have that
might be more valuable or thatmight guide your company to go
in a slightly differentdirection.
So, yeah, it's just like talkto people about their problems.
Another thing is that peoplelove to talk about their
(33:22):
problems.
So, if you're just very honestwith people and you're like, hey
, I'm exploring something in thepermission space or the X space
, whatever it is that you justpitched your grandma on.
Would you be willing to talk tome about problems that you're
having in that space?
And it is very easy to get onemeeting with almost anybody,
(33:46):
right, like, just hit them upand find a warm intro, right,
like, hey, you know, max knowsboth of us.
It'd be great if we could chatabout this.
I'm thinking about exploringsomething in this space and
people are just generally veryhelpful.
So, yeah, it's easy to getmeetings and talk about the
(34:06):
problem before you pitch thesolution.
Max (34:09):
Is that possible when you gathered all of that information
from all of those interviews?
But when you look at that andthen when you analyze it, you
are being.
You see what you want to see,you see the answers that you
want to see and you don't.
So is that good to get somebodyinvolved, who may be like a
third party or something, justto look at that information with
(34:31):
a cold mind?
Jake (34:37):
Yeah, that's actually an excellent question, right Like?
People lie to themselves allthe time, just like you know,
it's another biased opinion.
Your own opinion is a biasedopinion, the same way as talking
to your friends or your grandma.
That's a good point.
Another thing that I like toadvise people is there are
things that you need to haveconviction on in your business
(35:00):
and there are things that youshould be flexible on and be
willing to pivot in onedirection or another and like,
maybe for one person, the thingthat they have conviction on is
like their go to market model.
I'm going to sell this way andI don't really care what I sell
Another person might have aconviction on.
I believe that this technologyis the right way to solve the
(35:21):
like a class of problems andlike if it were completely
obvious just from talking topeople, then you would end up on
sort of like the laundry matend of the spectrum.
There's really famous quote,henry Ford, where he says if
people asked me or if I builtexactly what people wanted, I
would have given them fasterhorses.
I just butchered that quotehorribly, but it's the same idea
(35:43):
, right Like?
You talk to people about theirproblems and they're like well,
my horse's knees are getting old, or my horse eats too much hay,
or whatever.
So compiling just that inputwould lead you to believe that
your solution is in the horsespace somewhere, but like
looking one level deeper.
The real problem that they weretrying to solve was
transportation, and so HenryFord presumably had some
(36:03):
conviction that a better way tosolve transportation was through
machines instead of animals,and so he mapped those problems
onto his candidate solution andthen, kind of, the rest was
history.
Max (36:16):
That's a really great analogy.
So, before we move to, alsowant to talk a little bit more
about how do you market rightnow, oz that.
But before we move to that, thelast question about customer
development how do you actuallymotivate people to come to the
interview and you know to, to,to give you that 30 minutes or
(36:39):
60 minutes of their time?
Jake (36:42):
Yeah, we're very blessed that right now we get a lot of
phone calls, we get a lot ofinbound, which are, I believe
this could be a solution for mycompany, so motivation is no
longer such a huge problem.
But I think before that it isabout like finding warm intros
and finding somebody that bothof you know in it.
(37:03):
It's hard, right, Like how doyou bootstrap a network?
You just have to start doing it.
You need to find out who who isdoing interesting things that
you can make an honestconnection with and then from
there you can start growing yournetwork and adding more people
that you know and getting moreintros and things like that.
So yeah, like I, we've neverreally incentivized like
(37:24):
directly incentivized people totake meetings.
Like I've heard of people whouse strategies where they're
like I'll give you a $5Starbucks gift card, right Like
coffee's on me, if you take ameeting.
We've never really tried that,but if you did have to bootstrap
a network from zero, maybe thatwould be viable.
I can't really comment.
Max (37:40):
Yeah, it could be risky as well, because you never know
whether people just want those10 bucks or they really, you
know, are interested in thetopic.
Okay so, jake, now becauseAuthzat is.
You know, I've tried to findAuthzat on different social
networks and then I visited yourInstagram, which is kind of
(38:03):
like not existing right.
There is only one follower, onefollower, one guy.
So one follower and the profiledoesn't follow anyone.
And I was not surprised at all,because Authzat is a very
technical company.
It is not such a company thatwould have a sexy Instagram
profile with lifestyle picturesand all that kind of things,
(38:23):
right?
So that's.
That leads me to my nextquestion how do you approach
marketing right now, at thispoint?
I know you have already, youknow, a great community, that's,
that's for sure.
I've checked your Twitter.
I see people posting about this.
People are happy with theproduct, but still, how do you
put your product in front ofthose potential users who are
(38:45):
still not aware of the solutionsthat you provide?
Jake (38:48):
Yeah, I would say that's an open issue for us right Like
getting it in front of morepeople, getting more mind share,
more market penetration.
Our association with Zanzibarand with having an open source
solution in the Zanzibar spaceis how we get a lot of awareness
right.
People go and Google for opensource Zanzibar and then they
find us.
I mean, we happen to be themost mature player in that space
(39:12):
, so then we have a pretty highlikelihood of converting them.
But yeah, I would say yeah,getting in front of more people
would definitely be great forthe business.
You did give me a great idea,which is we should do an
Instagram with a bunch oflifestyle photos of just like
somehow related back toauthorization just like throw a
padlock on random things allover the world and just, you
(39:34):
know, take the selfie.
So maybe, maybe for April Fools,that'll be a fun one.
Max (39:40):
That's a great idea, but so one day, when I see your
Instagram profile is growing, Iwill take a little bit of credit
for that.
Okay, as?
Jake (39:48):
long as you promise to follow.
Max (39:49):
I will.
I promise I will, because onlyone follower.
It looks better.
With one follower only it'svery, very unique.
Yeah, great.
So, and I'm also wonderingabout the market awareness how
much are your potential usersaware of the problem and the
solution that you provide them?
Because I'm, you know, I'm notvery aware of, I'm not a
(40:16):
developer myself, so I'm notreally sure how much really
software engineers know aboutyour solution or similar
solutions that exist.
Jake (40:25):
Yeah, I would say that if you're a software entrepreneur,
virtually all of them haveexperienced the problem.
And then in largerorganizations it would be like
people on the platform team.
There's often dedicated teamswithin larger organizations that
handle these kinds of crosscutting concerns for the whole
organization.
So 100% of those people havealso experienced the problem.
(40:46):
One of the interestingchallenges is that, because this
is kind of a new category, alot of them don't even know to
go and look for a solution andthere's like no budget line item
that they can be like.
All right, I'm going to movefrom vendor A to vendor B.
We don't have a box in thearchitecture diagram is how I
like to describe it and so thereis a big education component to
(41:07):
making people aware of whatexactly it is that we do and
that there actually is asolution in this space.
Now, like for a long time,there's a lot of spaces you can
think of that for a long timejust didn't have a solution and
we're kind of annoying.
And then, all of a sudden, oneday there was a solution, right,
like think the advent of thedishwasher machine.
Before that it was just likeokay, you spend an hour doing
(41:29):
dishes after dinner every day,and that's just what people do.
And then all of a sudden, oneday there was a machine, but
nobody, like nobody, wasreplacing a broken machine when
they were first invented.
So I'm sure there was a bigeducation thing.
Like you, don't have to washdishes anymore.
Max (41:43):
Yeah, washing machine is a great analogy and maybe do you
partner with some educationalmaybe online courses or
educational companies where youwould show this solution to
people just starting to learnsoftware engineering, so they
know this from the verybeginning of their journey.
Jake (42:05):
Yeah, we would love to do things like that because
education is such a key piece.
We're just kind of buried, tobe honest, keeping up with
customer demand and growing thecompany and everything, so we'll
get to it at some point, forsure.
Max (42:20):
Great.
So now, jake, you are a CEO ofus.
That what are the mostimportant metrics and KPIs that
you pay attention to?
Jake (42:32):
Of course, revenue right.
Of course, open sourcecommunity.
How many people are adopting it?
Are they being successful?
Are they sticking around?
Are people on our Discord?
Are they active?
Are they participating?
Are people opening issuesagainst our GitHub?
So basically making sure thatthe open source continues to
(42:55):
grow and then growing thebusiness to sort of help those
open source users become moresuccessful in a commercial
setting.
Max (43:04):
So what role?
What is your role as a CEO?
But what is your practical roleat the company?
Do you do more like a productmanagement, or do you still get
your hands dirty and you writecode?
What is your day-to-day looklike?
Jake (43:19):
Yeah, that's interesting, it's ever-evolving.
So for the first year at least,I was writing code every day,
day in, day out, and then alsomaking sure that we were
building in the right direction,that we were from a product
perspective, that we werebuilding something people want.
As the company matures, my rolematures as well.
Remember we talked about theconcept of like a servant leader
.
So if you think of a company,people have different roles
(43:44):
within a company and if there isany role that doesn't have
somebody who does it, it's myproblem.
So everything that flows upeventually becomes my problem if
it's not already delegated andnot covered by somebody else.
Some examples here are makingsure that people get paid Not a
(44:07):
very sexy part of the job, butcritical if you want to keep a
staff and keep them happy andhave roofs over their heads.
So it's like those kinds ofthings that just aren't covered
by anybody else end up becomingsort of my responsibility de
facto, and then over time, whatI do, my methodology, is to get
(44:27):
good at those things, todiscover what it means to be
good at that role and then, nowthat I know what good looks like
, go out and find somebody whocan help and who can augment our
company and do that thing.
And then on to the next thing,because there's always new
challenges coming.
Max (44:42):
Yeah, that's a very smart approach, because it would be
really difficult to findsomebody, let's say, for a
certain role, and then tell themokay, you do your thing, but I
really don't know how to do that.
But I expect this from you.
This results from you, right?
But when you really want to bea good leader, you really want
to show them how it's done and,of course, sometimes we learn
(45:04):
from those people who be higheras well.
So there should be that synergy, Great Jake.
And also the next thing that Iwant to ask you.
It's more of a philosophicalquestion, but if somebody told
you back in 2019 where you willbe in 2024 in terms of growth
(45:27):
and progress of us, that we aretalking about the company
Likewise, would that correlatewith your initial expectations
Again, growth and your currentprogress as a company?
Jake (45:42):
I've never been asked that before.
That's kind of a unique one.
What did align with my?
Well?
So back in 2019, I had somenotion that I would start
another company, but hadn'tsolidified on the idea yet.
We didn't really solidify on theidea until 2020.
So somebody told me you'regoing to start another startup,
(46:04):
You're going to do it in themidst of a global pandemic and
then in early 2024, you're goingto be at these numbers.
I think I would be blown away.
I think I would say congrats.
I would pat myself on the back.
When you're living it day today, it doesn't feel like that
right, you always want to gofaster.
You always want to grow faster,do more, get more customers.
(46:26):
But yeah, I think I would bequite proud of what I would go
on to accomplish.
Max (46:33):
That is really good.
Yeah, once you look back, Iagree with you.
Sometimes it's very difficultto notice our own progress in
anything it can be business orlearning or improving anything
but when we look back where wewere before, it's really
noticeable, and I can correlatewith that as well.
Wow, that's great.
Okay, do you have any finaladvice for those who are just
(46:57):
starting their tech companies ormaybe just thinking about
starting the tech company?
Jake (47:02):
Yeah, I really think it's just reiterating all of the
things that we've talked about.
Make sure you have conviction,make sure you're doing something
worth doing, make sure all yourducks are in the row, because
success is not going to beovernight.
There's another famous anecdotewhich is like seven years later
they were an overnight success.
Nobody ever sees the difficultyof the journey, just making
(47:26):
sure that you're really preparedfor the ups and the downs, both
in the business and also inyour own mentality and your own
relationship with the businessand with your co-founders.
It's a lot of just preparingand making sure that you've got
the right mentality and thenjust making a go of it.
(47:46):
We all only get one journeythrough this life.
Max (47:51):
If entrepreneurship is part of your journey, do your best
to pack your kit with the righttools and materials that you
need and then just have a gofrom it, jack, before we finish
this, for those who really wantto try the solutions that you
provide and really want to gettheir hands dirty to try a
product, what would be the bestway to do that?
Jake (48:13):
We have a page set up specifically for podcast
listeners.
It's at athzcom slash podcastsand that's a place where you can
reach out and talk to someonedirectly on our team about the
problems that you'reexperiencing.
We're authorization andpermissions experts at this
point and we think we can helpguide you, even if athzcom
doesn't end up being theultimate solution for you.
(48:34):
We just love to talk about thisproblem and love to hear from
users and customers out in theecosystem.
Max (48:41):
Great, that sounds amazing.
All right, jake, thank youagain and you have a great day.
Jake (48:46):
Yeah, you too.
Thanks for having me.
Max (48:49):
Thanks for listening everyone and if you like this
podcast, make sure to follow onwhatever platform you're using
to get your podcasts.
Also, if you could leave areview, that would be highly
highly appreciated.
Thanks, and I'll see you in thenext episodes.
Take care.
Hello and welcome to Startup Chronicles podcast.
I'm thrilled to be joined todayby Jake Moshenko, a serial
entrepreneur whose ventures haveled to successful acquisitions.
He is the mastermind and CEO ofAuthZat, a tech company
inspired by Google's Zenzibarwhite paper.
Authzat makes the lives ofsoftware engineers easier by
providing innovativeauthorization system solutions.
We'll delve into Jake'simpressive technical background,
(00:24):
explore his experience startinghis first company and see how
these experiences shaped hisapproach to launching subsequent
successful ventures.
Additionally, we'll focus onthe idea validation process and
discuss other fascinatingaspects of his journey.
Stay tuned.
Jake (00:41):
We went from a two-person company to a multiple hundred
thousand person company in thespan of like five years, and
that was pretty interesting.
What I did is I looked back atmanagers that I've had in the
past and loved and said whatwere the things that they did
that I really liked?
What were the things that theydid that I didn't like so much?
How can I learn from that?
(01:02):
Prior to that, I had built likea pretty successful iPhone app.
Right, I just built it.
I thought people might like it.
I threw it in the app store andgot hundreds of thousands of
downloads and so I was like, ohokay, it's now imagine if I have
to allow access to a file fortwo million people, yeah Right.
And I was able to give accessto that file a million times per
(01:23):
second.
So before us they were writinga lot of code, to be frank, and
we did this for Kway as well.
Right, we said we need to doauthorization.
Let's just start writing code,let's store little bits of data
in the database and then we'llinterpret that data according to
some roles and rules that wehave set up in the application.
If you have a one hour call,maybe spend 45 minutes of it,
(01:45):
talking to the customer abouttheir problem.
Max (01:50):
Welcome to Startup Chronicles Podcast.
If you're building, or planningto build your own tech company,
this is the place where you getinspired, educated and prepared
, prepared for all thosepitfalls that are on your way,
which you will definitelyovercome, because every guest
who's on this podcast is a bigtime practitioner who's been
there and done that.
They come here to share theunique stories of their ups and
downs, providing you withavailable tips and guidance, so
(02:11):
maybe you will be the one tobuild the next unicorn company.
I'm Max, the host of thepodcast and a co-founder of a
tech recruitment company.
I'm not sitting on a bunch ofstartup secrets, but I'm also
working on a few personalprojects too, and that's the
main reason why I brought thispodcast to life to learn from
the best, alongside with you.
So enjoy the show and let'sdive into our next Chronicle.
(02:34):
Hi, jake, thanks for coming.
How are you Good?
Thanks for having me.
Yeah, it's a great pleasure.
So, jake, maybe this is not avery typical question to start
this off, but your family namereally sparked my curiosity,
because I am Ukrainian myself,born and raised, and your family
name sounds pretty Ukrainian tome, and I might be wrong,
(02:56):
though, so I apologize if I am,but could you tell me, do you
have any Ukrainian or maybeEastern European roots?
Jake (03:03):
Yep, absolutely.
My dad is 100% Ukrainian.
But it's been kind of a longtime since my family was in
Ukraine.
So my grandmother was born inCanada in 1911.
So her parents were fromUkraine, and then my
grandfather's parents were alsofrom Ukraine.
Max (03:24):
So that's interesting.
So have you ever been toUkraine?
Jake (03:28):
I haven't.
No, it doesn't seem like agreat time to visit right now.
Max (03:32):
Definitely yeah, when things calm down.
Jake (03:35):
I do hope to be able to make a trip one day.
Max (03:37):
Yeah, that would be great.
Okay, good, jake, so you have avery exemplary I would say, I
would not even be afraid to saythat exemplary and solid
technical background.
You studied in Michigan, theuniversity correct me if I'm
wrong then as a first job youworked at Boeing, then more
classical companies like Amazonand then Google, and then you
(04:00):
started your first company,which was called DevTable, and
again, correct me if I'm wrongbut if I'm not mistaken, it
didn't really work out very well, or maybe as planned.
Could you please tell me alittle bit more about that
period of your life?
Jake (04:14):
Yeah, so you pretty much nailed it.
I did go to a university inMichigan.
Then I went out to Boeing.
I worked in the flightsimulator's group at Boeing,
which is like a dream come true,right Like I'm fresh out of
college computer engineeringdegree and here I am flying
around virtual simulatedmulti-hundred million dollar
jumbo jets in like the full six,three degrees of freedom,
(04:36):
motion simulator and everything.
So that was by far an amazinglyfun job and learned a lot there
, but ultimately realized itwasn't going to take me where I
wanted to go.
So that's when I switched overinto the more sort of like
classical tech companies, thefirst one being Amazon.
Amazon is where I cut my teethon distributed systems and web
(04:59):
services and sort of web servicearchitecture, things like that.
And then after a little whilewe decided my now wife and I
decided that we wanted to moveto New York and at the time
Amazon didn't really have anyengineering in New York.
So that's when I made theswitch to Google and just
continued learning about superlarge scale hyperscaler style
(05:20):
architectures.
At Google I was working ondeveloper facing infrastructure,
so the API's infrastructuregroup and, yeah, that's where I
met Joey, who is my second timeco-founder now and our current
CTO, and we left to do DevTable.
And yeah, you're right,devtable was an online IDE Think
(05:40):
our compatriots at the timewere Cloud9 and CodeNV and we
never really got anywhere.
We never found any traction.
We had a few people kick thetires and use it here and there,
but ultimately the IDE wasn'twhere we ended up finding
success.
Where we ended up findingsuccess was in the Docker
ecosystem.
So we were using Dockercontainers.
(06:01):
This is back in 2012, 2013,.
So very early days for Dockerand containerization.
We were using Docker containersto run infrastructure for our
IDE and we had all of this code,all of this proprietary code
were like how do we store thiscode in the cloud and then serve
it up to our machines when weneed to?
And at the time there was noprivate Docker registry and
(06:24):
because it was proprietary code,we couldn't use the public
internet facing unauthenticated,unauthorized registries.
So we said, all right, let's gobuild it.
If we need it, someone elseneeds it, let's go build it.
And this is a common themeyou'll find with me scratching
my own itch, so to speak.
And we built a product calledQuay.
So Quay was the first privateDocker registry, and then that
(06:45):
one was kind of successful rightfrom the start.
We had traction, we had payingcustomers, revenue, users, all
of that, and eventually we endedup exiting Quay over to QuoroS,
and that was the start of oursort of like continued journey
and then correct me if I'm wrong.
Max (07:03):
Sorry for interrupting, but then QuoroS was acquired by Red
Hat, correct?
Jake (07:09):
And then Red.
Max (07:09):
Hat by ABM.
Jake (07:11):
That's right.
Max (07:13):
I did my homework.
We went from a two-personcompany to a multiple hundred
thousand person company in thespan of like five years and that
was pretty interesting, it waspretty interesting, I can bet,
and I'm sure there was lots ofups and downs and you learned a
lot, and I'm sure that maybe Iknow it's I cannot tell for you,
(07:36):
but I can only assume that allof that experience that you
gained during those five yearsreally reflected on how you run
currently auths at your currentcompany, that you found it, if
I'm not mistaken, back in 2019,right 2020 is when we found it,
I said Yep, okay, of course,absolutely.
Jake (07:58):
I mean all of us.
Everything that we do in lifeshapes the way that we approach
things and the way that we seethings.
And so through that journeythrough QuoroS to Red Hat, to
IBM I you know, we were atwo-person company, I had never
had like a formal leadershiprole before that, and then
through that journey I was sortof dragged, kicking and
screaming into management.
(08:19):
That's really where I likeformed the thesis of what kind
of manager and what kind ofleader I wanted to be.
I was given responsibility forsome pretty big initiatives and
so that kind of opened my eyesto sort of the wider role of
fitting an engineering orgwithin a larger organization.
So yeah, absolutely Right,everything that we do sort of
shapes the way we approach theworld.
Max (08:40):
So what would you say was the toughest or the hardest
thing for you to learn in termsof management, running the
company?
Because you used to be just asoftware developer in different
companies.
Right, you were more writingcode.
You didn't know.
I'm not sure whether youlearned something about
management at your university,but I assume you did not learn
(09:02):
much about that.
Right, you were learning moretechnical knowledge and
technical side of things.
So what really helped in?
How did you approach that?
Because you were like atrailblazer for yourself in
terms of learning how to run thecompanies.
Jake (09:18):
Yeah, that's a good question, I think.
When someone first findsthemselves in a leadership
position and they say this is anopportunity, right, what do I
want to do with it?
And so what I did is I lookedback at managers that I've had
in the past and loved and saidwhat were the things that they
did that I really liked?
What were the things that theydid that I didn't like so much?
(09:38):
How can I learn from that?
I read a bunch of books, right.
I participated in sort of atechnical leadership, technical
management, small sort of grouplearning environment here in New
York City, and sort of liketaking all of those things and
fusing them together intofiguring out what my style, what
kind of leader I wanted to be,and the thing that really
(10:00):
resonated the most with me wasthe idea of a servant leader, so
basically being there to helpother people do their best work
and to sort of like set themfree and make sure that they
feel fulfilled and that they'redoing their best work, because a
company, right Like a company,is designed to be able to
accomplish more than what onesingle person can accomplish.
(10:21):
So it's like when you see someof these leaders that have like
a cult of personality or arevery like aggressive type A top
down.
I think they're probably notgetting the best out of their
people that they could be.
Max (10:34):
Yeah, yeah, that's right, and so could I say that you had
you always had the end user inmind when trying to make some
strategic decisions.
Jake (10:47):
Yeah, and like, that's exactly what we do when we do
product development as well.
Right, it's about havingempathy.
It's about making sure that thepeople that are eventually
going to end up touching yourwork product whether that's a
startup, whether that's software, whether that's an API, learn
about that at Google or whetherit's the decisions that you make
right, like, that's still awork product and that's still
(11:09):
something that people are goingto interact with and interface
with, and so making sure thatyou have empathy for how that's
going to impact them day to daywhen you're making those
decisions, I think is supercritical.
Max (11:20):
For sure.
So, jake, we will.
I really want to talk a littlebit more about us, that and
exactly what you do, yourproduct and everything.
But before we do that, I wouldreally still have would like to
touch dev table.
And why do you think it didn'treally work out?
Didn't you do your homework?
Or maybe you didn't reallyvalidate the initial idea,
because that's the first companyright, it's maybe 90% of the
(11:45):
time.
It usually doesn't work.
But what was your case?
Why didn't work in your case?
Jake (11:52):
Yeah.
So I guess I'll start with likehow I thought the world worked
before that.
Prior to that, I had built likea pretty successful iPhone app.
Right, I just built it.
I thought people might like it.
I threw it in the app store andgot hundreds of thousands of
downloads and so I was like, oh,okay.
And then also like in myprevious roles, like the manager
(12:14):
was always like this is what wehave to do.
So I just had this sense oflike, if you build it, they will
come.
And so when we got into the IDspace, I was like, okay, people
are looking more and more,they're doing more and more
things in their web browser andChromebooks are kind of a hot
thing right now.
A lot of schools anduniversities are using
Chromebooks, so there's probablya need here and if we build it,
(12:36):
they will come.
And Joey already had actually ahuge.
He had a like, he had a hugelead in this space.
He had already developed mostof the web ID.
So I was like, yeah, it seemslike the right product, right
time.
We can just go andcommercialize this thing, but
we're probably a little bitahead of where people wanted to
(12:58):
be.
And then I didn't realize that,how you know, from my own
personal perspective, we fall inlove with the tools that we use
and we get really attached tothem, and so to get a developer
to switch tools is actually kindof a monumental lift, and I
think I underestimated how bigof a challenge that would be.
(13:19):
And we would get all theserequests to where people would
use sort of you know put.
Think, imagine 100 technologiesthat exist in some grid and
every single person is going topoint to seven of those and
those are going to become theirstack.
But when you average thatacross the entire ecosystem,
across all of the technologies,everybody has a different seven
(13:41):
that they've picked.
And so we would get requeststhat are like All right, you do
three of the seven things that Ineed it to do, if you build the
other four, I'll use it.
And it was just kind of likethat loop over and over and over
again, where we were constantlybuilding, shipping, iterating,
building, shipping, iterating,but we never quite got the seven
things for a large populationof users to make a sustainable
(14:02):
business.
Max (14:03):
So it looked like more like like you had to build a custom
ID for almost everyone there,because everyone uses different
text tags, they have differentrequirements for their online ID
, and how it has changed nowbecause online ID is still a
thing right, people do use itand how other companies approach
that the successful companiesthat are on the market right now
(14:23):
.
Jake (14:25):
Yeah, I don't know if there's been a runaway success
in this area still right, likeVS Code, for example, is all.
it's built all on webtechnologies, but it's still
mostly a desktop app and peopleand people flocked to VS Code at
a rate like they switched fromAdam or sublime text or whatever
(14:47):
at a rate.
That is just incredible.
And it's because, still being adesktop app, you can also use
it and it's not offload the fourout of seven things that it
doesn't do well to the terminal,into the desktop, into your
local environment.
And so I would say, ifanybody's really going to crack
this nut, it would be building amodular IDE similar to how VS
(15:09):
Code and Eclipse have like veryrich plug-in ecosystem and their
modular and you can sort ofcompose that seven things that
you need experience out ofmodules.
So it would be a very modularIDE, but then I still don't know
how to solve the like terminaldesktop local file sync
experience, because you justhave to build so much and it's
(15:31):
people are very passionate aboutthese tools.
Max (15:34):
All right.
So, jake, now let's talk alittle bit more about your
current company, ozad.
It's very technical product andbecause it is quite a technical
product, not all of ourlisteners are software engineers
, so let me help you here.
I will tell the simplifiedversion of Ozad, so I would
explain it as a as to an eightyear old and you will do your
(15:57):
part, explain it in a moretechnical way, which I'm sure
you are extremely good at.
How about that?
Jake (16:03):
Well, we'll see how good I am at it.
You're right, it is a technicalproduct.
So let's start with your ELIeight.
Max (16:10):
All right, good.
So imagine you have a digitalfiling cabinet with lots of
drawers and files and in abusiness or organization not
everyone should be able to openevery drawer or read every file.
So some information is privateor sensitive and Ozad provides a
special lock system for thosedigital filing cabinets, which
(16:32):
in this case are computerapplications or software systems
.
And, for as far as I understand, ozad helps decide who can open
which drawers and look at whichfiles.
So it's like giving out specialkeys to people based on their
role in the organization.
For example, a manager mighthave more keys or a key that
(16:52):
opens more drawers than anintern.
And Ozad customers are usuallythe people who make these
digital filing cabinets, likesoftware engineers and companies
that build applications, andthese developers use Ozad locks,
their permissions and accesscontrol systems to make sure
that they're on the right peoplecan access information, certain
(17:13):
information in the applicationthey built.
Did I do a good job or not?
Jake (17:20):
That's actually a fairly accurate metaphor, I'd say.
But one thing that we reallyfocus on at OTSED, to use your
metaphor, is more aboutfederating out that access as
opposed to securing it.
It's very easy to makesomething secure by default.
You just only let the personwho created it have access.
So think about in your metaphoron the drawer system imagine if
(17:46):
there were post-its on everydrawer and on every file and on
every piece of paper within thedrawer, maybe even down to
paragraphs on pieces of paper inthe files in the drawer, and on
those post-its you could writewho's allowed to have access to
those things and why this persongets access to the whole drawer
because they're like let'spretend, a drawer is one tenant
(18:08):
of our customer, right, Like onecompany, one customer of our
customer.
This person gets access toeverything in the drawer because
they're the owner of theaccount, they're the ones who
signed up.
But, then for each individualfolder and each individual piece
of paper.
That person is going to decidehow to federate that out and
eventually they can alsodelegate permissions on who else
can make those decisions.
(18:28):
So it's much more aboutbuilding the infrastructure to
power the sharing than it isabout the locks themselves, I'd
say.
Max (18:38):
So that makes it easier to scale right and if you, for
example, have to changesomething, to change a piece of
code, it takes much less work todo, am I right?
Jake (18:48):
Yeah, I guess that we can extend the metaphor as well If
we're using post-its.
Now imagine if I have to allowaccess to a file for 2 million
people yeah Right.
Or if I need to be able to giveaccess to that file a million
times per second.
Max (19:03):
Sounds scary.
Jake (19:03):
We can't be opening and closing a drawer a million times
per second and going throughthe names on the post-it one by
one.
So scale is a big part of it.
A big part of it is also beingglobally available.
So if I need to be fieldingcalls from people all over the
world who are saying does thisperson have access to these
(19:24):
contents in that drawer, in thatfile, being able to answer that
quickly, succinctly, correctly,at scale is a big problem.
Max (19:32):
So it's a hosted service right and, as far as I'm aware,
having permissions as a service.
It's kind of a brand new thing.
Jake (19:44):
Yeah, we sell it in a variety of different ways.
So there is a multi-tenanthosted service.
We also have a private hostedservice that we run on behalf of
our customers, but it's justfor them, it's single tenant, as
we call it.
So we go, let's say that you'rein Frankfurt, your company does
business out of Frankfurt andyou're subject to GDPR and you
(20:07):
can't have your data stored overin the US because that'd be a
violation.
And you want really fast,really quick answers to these
questions.
We'll go and we'll put a copyof our software right in
Frankfurt for you so that, forcompliance, you're in the clear,
for performance, you're in theclear, and that's our private
sass.
And then, for the strictest ofour customers, we also have an
(20:28):
open source solution that wesupport that they can run in
their own data centers.
Max (20:33):
Okay, so now let's imagine there's no OSDAT.
What are the alternatives rightnow for that?
Because of course, there aresome frameworks right, there are
many other technologies.
How did people or thosesoftware engineers who are not
aware of your solution, how dothey solve this problem and how
would that would be easier forthem with OSDAT?
Jake (20:56):
Yeah, so before us they were writing a lot of code, to
be frank, and we did this forQuay as well.
Right, we said we need to doauthorization.
Let's just start writing code,let's store little bits of data
in the database and then we'llinterpret that data according to
some roles and rules that wehave set up in the application,
and ultimately, that code becamea bottleneck for us.
(21:18):
Nobody wanted to change it.
We would get customer requeststhat were outside of the scope
of what we had written, and sowe would get stuck.
There were some features thatwe actually didn't ship because
the permissions weren't richenough, weren't fine-grained
enough to ship it, and so, yeah,I think what people are mostly
doing or I would say 99% of thecustomers that we have are
(21:38):
coming from homegrownhandwritten systems, and some of
the downfalls of doing it thatway are that your data actually
can get locked up within asingle application.
I like to give this example.
So we're modeled off of asystem that existed at Google
before, called SansaBar.
You can't buy it from Google.
There's no open sourcereference implementation or
anything.
(21:58):
But at Google, if you try tosend an email via Gmail and it
contains a link to a documentand the person that you're
trying to send the email todoesn't have access to that
document, google Gmail will warnyou and they'll say hey, max
doesn't have access to thisdocument.
Would you like to fix that?
Right here, right now, andright there from within Gmail,
(22:19):
you can grant access to Max, andthe way they're able to
accomplish that is that theyhave this permission service and
then everything is goingthrough the same interface and
they can all talk aboutpermissions sort of uniformly.
So Gmail doesn't need to knowthe deep down, nitty gritty,
specific details about howGoogle Docs makes that decision.
It just calls an API and sayscan Max do this?
(22:41):
No, all right, let's fix that.
Max (22:44):
So Google released SansaBar paper back in 2019 and that's
where you got the idea for usthat.
Is that correct?
Jake (22:52):
That's right, yep.
Max (22:53):
Okay, and how much confidence did you have back
then?
Because, yeah, you let's saysorry, but can I say that you
failed on DevTable and then hadthe success on the next few
companies.
Right, didn't you have likeflashbacks?
Maybe you know that when youstart another company it will
(23:17):
not work and maybe that's toogood to work because nobody at
that time, nobody did that right.
That's a brand new idea.
Jake (23:28):
Yeah, so I will say that Quay came out of DevTable like
the company, so that was sort oflike a Phoenix moment, right,
like rebirth as Quay, and thenit ultimately went on to become
quite successful.
So I wouldn't say that anycompanies like straight up
failed, although we had to pivotaway from our original idea.
We were ready to do that againif that happened.
(23:49):
So, like we're notentrepreneurs because we think
it's going to be a straight lineto a billion dollars right.
Like the reason that there'svalue in starting startups is
because it's unknown whetherit's going to be successful at
the outset right, if everyoneknew this was for sure going to
work and for sure going to befinancially successful, we'd
(24:09):
have a million competitors andeverybody would be just
following the same exact scriptand doing the same exact thing.
So the thing that I love aboutentrepreneurship is the ability
to explore and to iterate and totry things and to fail.
Right Like, all successes arebuilt on the backs of like
little, tiny micro failures.
So nobody, nobody had an ideaof how their business was going
(24:33):
to go, and then went andexecuted it 100%, without fail,
exactly as they initiallypredicted, and that's why we do
it.
Max (24:41):
Absolutely.
I can't agree more with you.
So what I was trying to ask youdid you have much more
confidence when starting us that, compared to those times when
you started your previouscompanies?
Jake (24:55):
Maybe, Actually, if anything, I'd say I had less
confidence.
Max (24:59):
Oh, why?
Jake (25:01):
It's a bigger.
It's a bigger play.
So there's sort of like aspectrum of how audacious you
want to be and at the lessaudacious end of the spectrum
you could imagine opening achain of grocery stores or a
chain of laundromats orsomething right, like there's a
well demonstrated human need forthese kinds of businesses and
(25:25):
it really is just like amathematical money in returns
out kind of business play.
And obviously, yes, you have torun it well and you have to
provide a great customerexperience and everything.
And then like one step up fromthat in, like the digital world
would be offering a play thatyou can adopt in a minute, right
, something that you can kickthe tires on, pull out a credit
(25:48):
card and be using one minutelater.
Kway was in sort of that, like10 minute to one hour sort of
category.
It was something that you couldadopt very easily.
You could bolt it on orintegrate it with your business
infrastructure.
But Zed is more of a platformplay.
It's think of it more along thelines of adopting a database.
(26:08):
Nobody adopts a database afterone minute thought.
Nobody pulls out their creditcard and is buying a database
after kicking the tires for 10minutes.
So it's a more audacious playand when you do that, there's
more value.
Right, you can deliver morevalue to your customers because
you're taking on a biggerportion of their needs and of
their infrastructure and reallyhelping them accelerate their
(26:30):
own growth and their own productdevelopment.
But it's a harder sale, ittakes longer and, yeah, so I
would say that I had lessconfidence, because these kinds
of platform plays are trickierto build companies around.
Max (26:44):
We've been quite successful .
It was harder to sell and alsoit was harder to build because
it's a very technical chunk ofwork, right?
So how hard was thattechnically to implement?
Jake (26:57):
Yeah, I mean it is a big distributed system so it forms a
big, consistent hash of.
Sorry, I'm getting a little bitinto the weeds technically, but
it is a.
You know, you can think of it.
I wouldn't say it's quite ashard as creating like a new
relational database would be,but it's somewhere between there
and like a businessintelligence app.
(27:19):
So there are quite a quite a fewperformance and technical
hurdles that we had to clearbefore anyone could even
consider it.
We had to.
We actually wrote a version inPython to prove out the model.
And then we had to replace thatwith the current version, which
is written in go, which is a lotfaster and a lot leaner on
memory.
So you know, we were constantlyiterating and we're constantly
(27:44):
integrating what we've learnedfrom going to the market and
listening to what they say intoour technical plans and making
sure that we're moving forwardin the right direction.
Max (27:54):
Okay, so, and also, do you, how often do you do things like
customers interview andcustomers development?
How do you approach customersdevelopment in general and how
was it especially?
I really would like to hear howwas that at the beginning, when
you were, you know, juststarting validating, talking to
people?
Where did you find those people?
(28:15):
Was it, you know, some forums,or maybe offline conferences and
stuff?
Jake (28:23):
Yeah, at the very beginning we found people by
basically reaching out to ournetwork, people that we know
that are running projects,running companies embedded at
big organizations.
Would you use this thing?
Yes, no, why not?
That is a fantastically bad wayto do product development,
because those people don't wantto tell you something that you
(28:44):
don't want to hear.
So you usually don't get verygood feedback that way.
But after a while we opensourced SpiceDB and we said
here's the system.
Right, it's a database, youunderstand it, it's a database
for permissions.
And after that the scriptflipped entirely.
(29:05):
Right.
They started coming to us.
They're like SpiceDB Zanzibar,I'm all in, but I need XYZ.
I would like you to go off anddo this, or I can't adopt it
until it hits these performancenumbers.
And that's where the flywheelsort of starts, where if you can
get real users who have realskin in the game, then you start
(29:26):
to get feedback that's actuallyuseful and actionable, versus
like when you're asking yourfriends, they're like oh well,
yeah, it's great, but wouldn'tit be nice if you know those
kinds of requirements andrequests are never quite as good
as when people have skin in thegame.
There's actually a great bookabout this called the mom test
that I highly recommend as well,which is the thesis of the book
(29:47):
, is basically that your momwill never be entirely honest
with you if you ask her what youshould be doing.
Max (29:55):
For sure.
So if I got an idea, Ishouldn't go to my grandma and
ask her whether it's a good ideafor a business or not and then
skip to the bank for the loanagainst my apartment.
Right, that would be everyonedisclaimer.
This is not a financial advice.
Never do that.
Just listen to what Jake saysand never do biased customer
(30:17):
interviews.
Is that right?
Jake (30:20):
I wouldn't say never right , you've got to talk to somebody
at first.
But you should understand whatkind of bias is they're bringing
to the table and how usefulthat feedback can be.
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Now let's get back to theconversation.
Jake (31:13):
And also not to discredit it, but if your grandma is like
a software architect at aFortune 500 company, she may
have very valuable insight,right?
So, like you know, your mileagemay vary, your grandma may vary
.
Max (31:24):
It would be really difficult to come by with such a
grandma.
But, yeah, so let's talk alittle bit more about interviews
, customer interviews, becauseit's sometimes difficult to.
What would you say would be themain advice?
To avoid asking biasedquestions.
(31:46):
And you already said do it'sbetter not to talk to people
that you know, to your family,to your colleagues?
You can talk to them at thebeginning, right just to get the
things off the ground, but whenyou really want to scale up and
get more data from potentialusers, which you will analyze
later, what do you think are thebest approach to ask the right
(32:11):
questions?
Jake (32:17):
Yeah, this is very well, pretty well trod material at
this point, but I'll just echowhat sort of the advice you'll
get from a lot of this businessdevelopment is, which is, ask
questions about the problem, diginto the problem.
Like, if you have a one-hourcall in your pre-product and
(32:37):
your pre-product market fit.
If you have a one-hour call,maybe spend 45 minutes of it
talking to the customer abouttheir problem.
Don't pitch your solution,because as soon as you pitch
your solution, they're going tocontextualize everything that
they talk to you about in termsof your solution and whether or
not they can make your solutionwork or not.
And that really it's a greatway to find sort of like a local
(33:01):
maxima where you've taken thatsolution as far as it can go,
but you've really missed theforest for the trees.
You don't know the otherproblems that they have that
might be more valuable or thatmight guide your company to go
in a slightly differentdirection.
So, yeah, it's just like talkto people about their problems.
Another thing is that peoplelove to talk about their
(33:22):
problems.
So, if you're just very honestwith people and you're like, hey
, I'm exploring something in thepermission space or the X space
, whatever it is that you justpitched your grandma on.
Would you be willing to talk tome about problems that you're
having in that space?
And it is very easy to get onemeeting with almost anybody,
(33:46):
right, like, just hit them upand find a warm intro, right,
like, hey, you know, max knowsboth of us.
It'd be great if we could chatabout this.
I'm thinking about exploringsomething in this space and
people are just generally veryhelpful.
So, yeah, it's easy to getmeetings and talk about the
(34:06):
problem before you pitch thesolution.
Max (34:09):
Is that possible when you gathered all of that information
from all of those interviews?
But when you look at that andthen when you analyze it, you
are being.
You see what you want to see,you see the answers that you
want to see and you don't.
So is that good to get somebodyinvolved, who may be like a
third party or something, justto look at that information with
(34:31):
a cold mind?
Jake (34:37):
Yeah, that's actually an excellent question, right Like?
People lie to themselves allthe time, just like you know,
it's another biased opinion.
Your own opinion is a biasedopinion, the same way as talking
to your friends or your grandma.
That's a good point.
Another thing that I like toadvise people is there are
things that you need to haveconviction on in your business
(35:00):
and there are things that youshould be flexible on and be
willing to pivot in onedirection or another and like,
maybe for one person, the thingthat they have conviction on is
like their go to market model.
I'm going to sell this way andI don't really care what I sell
Another person might have aconviction on.
I believe that this technologyis the right way to solve the
(35:21):
like a class of problems andlike if it were completely
obvious just from talking topeople, then you would end up on
sort of like the laundry matend of the spectrum.
There's really famous quote,henry Ford, where he says if
people asked me or if I builtexactly what people wanted, I
would have given them fasterhorses.
I just butchered that quotehorribly, but it's the same idea
(35:43):
, right Like?
You talk to people about theirproblems and they're like well,
my horse's knees are getting old, or my horse eats too much hay,
or whatever.
So compiling just that inputwould lead you to believe that
your solution is in the horsespace somewhere, but like
looking one level deeper.
The real problem that they weretrying to solve was
transportation, and so HenryFord presumably had some
(36:03):
conviction that a better way tosolve transportation was through
machines instead of animals,and so he mapped those problems
onto his candidate solution andthen, kind of, the rest was
history.
Max (36:16):
That's a really great analogy.
So, before we move to, alsowant to talk a little bit more
about how do you market rightnow, oz that.
But before we move to that, thelast question about customer
development how do you actuallymotivate people to come to the
interview and you know to, to,to give you that 30 minutes or
(36:39):
60 minutes of their time?
Jake (36:42):
Yeah, we're very blessed that right now we get a lot of
phone calls, we get a lot ofinbound, which are, I believe
this could be a solution for mycompany, so motivation is no
longer such a huge problem.
But I think before that it isabout like finding warm intros
and finding somebody that bothof you know in it.
(37:03):
It's hard, right, Like how doyou bootstrap a network?
You just have to start doing it.
You need to find out who who isdoing interesting things that
you can make an honestconnection with and then from
there you can start growing yournetwork and adding more people
that you know and getting moreintros and things like that.
So yeah, like I, we've neverreally incentivized like
(37:24):
directly incentivized people totake meetings.
Like I've heard of people whouse strategies where they're
like I'll give you a $5Starbucks gift card, right Like
coffee's on me, if you take ameeting.
We've never really tried that,but if you did have to bootstrap
a network from zero, maybe thatwould be viable.
I can't really comment.
Max (37:40):
Yeah, it could be risky as well, because you never know
whether people just want those10 bucks or they really, you
know, are interested in thetopic.
Okay so, jake, now becauseAuthzat is.
You know, I've tried to findAuthzat on different social
networks and then I visited yourInstagram, which is kind of
(38:03):
like not existing right.
There is only one follower, onefollower, one guy.
So one follower and the profiledoesn't follow anyone.
And I was not surprised at all,because Authzat is a very
technical company.
It is not such a company thatwould have a sexy Instagram
profile with lifestyle picturesand all that kind of things,
(38:23):
right?
So that's.
That leads me to my nextquestion how do you approach
marketing right now, at thispoint?
I know you have already, youknow, a great community, that's,
that's for sure.
I've checked your Twitter.
I see people posting about this.
People are happy with theproduct, but still, how do you
put your product in front ofthose potential users who are
(38:45):
still not aware of the solutionsthat you provide?
Jake (38:48):
Yeah, I would say that's an open issue for us right Like
getting it in front of morepeople, getting more mind share,
more market penetration.
Our association with Zanzibarand with having an open source
solution in the Zanzibar spaceis how we get a lot of awareness
right.
People go and Google for opensource Zanzibar and then they
find us.
I mean, we happen to be themost mature player in that space
(39:12):
, so then we have a pretty highlikelihood of converting them.
But yeah, I would say yeah,getting in front of more people
would definitely be great forthe business.
You did give me a great idea,which is we should do an
Instagram with a bunch oflifestyle photos of just like
somehow related back toauthorization just like throw a
padlock on random things allover the world and just, you
(39:34):
know, take the selfie.
So maybe, maybe for April Fools,that'll be a fun one.
Max (39:40):
That's a great idea, but so one day, when I see your
Instagram profile is growing, Iwill take a little bit of credit
for that.
Okay, as?
Jake (39:48):
long as you promise to follow.
Max (39:49):
I will.
I promise I will, because onlyone follower.
It looks better.
With one follower only it'svery, very unique.
Yeah, great.
So, and I'm also wonderingabout the market awareness how
much are your potential usersaware of the problem and the
solution that you provide them?
Because I'm, you know, I'm notvery aware of, I'm not a
(40:16):
developer myself, so I'm notreally sure how much really
software engineers know aboutyour solution or similar
solutions that exist.
Jake (40:25):
Yeah, I would say that if you're a software entrepreneur,
virtually all of them haveexperienced the problem.
And then in largerorganizations it would be like
people on the platform team.
There's often dedicated teamswithin larger organizations that
handle these kinds of crosscutting concerns for the whole
organization.
So 100% of those people havealso experienced the problem.
(40:46):
One of the interestingchallenges is that, because this
is kind of a new category, alot of them don't even know to
go and look for a solution andthere's like no budget line item
that they can be like.
All right, I'm going to movefrom vendor A to vendor B.
We don't have a box in thearchitecture diagram is how I
like to describe it and so thereis a big education component to
(41:07):
making people aware of whatexactly it is that we do and
that there actually is asolution in this space.
Now, like for a long time,there's a lot of spaces you can
think of that for a long timejust didn't have a solution and
we're kind of annoying.
And then, all of a sudden, oneday there was a solution, right,
like think the advent of thedishwasher machine.
Before that it was just likeokay, you spend an hour doing
(41:29):
dishes after dinner every day,and that's just what people do.
And then all of a sudden, oneday there was a machine, but
nobody, like nobody, wasreplacing a broken machine when
they were first invented.
So I'm sure there was a bigeducation thing.
Like you, don't have to washdishes anymore.
Max (41:43):
Yeah, washing machine is a great analogy and maybe do you
partner with some educationalmaybe online courses or
educational companies where youwould show this solution to
people just starting to learnsoftware engineering, so they
know this from the verybeginning of their journey.
Jake (42:05):
Yeah, we would love to do things like that because
education is such a key piece.
We're just kind of buried, tobe honest, keeping up with
customer demand and growing thecompany and everything, so we'll
get to it at some point, forsure.
Max (42:20):
Great.
So now, jake, you are a CEO ofus.
That what are the mostimportant metrics and KPIs that
you pay attention to?
Jake (42:32):
Of course, revenue right.
Of course, open sourcecommunity.
How many people are adopting it?
Are they being successful?
Are they sticking around?
Are people on our Discord?
Are they active?
Are they participating?
Are people opening issuesagainst our GitHub?
So basically making sure thatthe open source continues to
(42:55):
grow and then growing thebusiness to sort of help those
open source users become moresuccessful in a commercial
setting.
Max (43:04):
So what role?
What is your role as a CEO?
But what is your practical roleat the company?
Do you do more like a productmanagement, or do you still get
your hands dirty and you writecode?
What is your day-to-day looklike?
Jake (43:19):
Yeah, that's interesting, it's ever-evolving.
So for the first year at least,I was writing code every day,
day in, day out, and then alsomaking sure that we were
building in the right direction,that we were from a product
perspective, that we werebuilding something people want.
As the company matures, my rolematures as well.
Remember we talked about theconcept of like a servant leader
.
So if you think of a company,people have different roles
(43:44):
within a company and if there isany role that doesn't have
somebody who does it, it's myproblem.
So everything that flows upeventually becomes my problem if
it's not already delegated andnot covered by somebody else.
Some examples here are makingsure that people get paid Not a
(44:07):
very sexy part of the job, butcritical if you want to keep a
staff and keep them happy andhave roofs over their heads.
So it's like those kinds ofthings that just aren't covered
by anybody else end up becomingsort of my responsibility de
facto, and then over time, whatI do, my methodology, is to get
(44:27):
good at those things, todiscover what it means to be
good at that role and then, nowthat I know what good looks like
, go out and find somebody whocan help and who can augment our
company and do that thing.
And then on to the next thing,because there's always new
challenges coming.
Max (44:42):
Yeah, that's a very smart approach, because it would be
really difficult to findsomebody, let's say, for a
certain role, and then tell themokay, you do your thing, but I
really don't know how to do that.
But I expect this from you.
This results from you, right?
But when you really want to bea good leader, you really want
to show them how it's done and,of course, sometimes we learn
(45:04):
from those people who be higheras well.
So there should be that synergy, Great Jake.
And also the next thing that Iwant to ask you.
It's more of a philosophicalquestion, but if somebody told
you back in 2019 where you willbe in 2024 in terms of growth
(45:27):
and progress of us, that we aretalking about the company
Likewise, would that correlatewith your initial expectations
Again, growth and your currentprogress as a company?
Jake (45:42):
I've never been asked that before.
That's kind of a unique one.
What did align with my?
Well?
So back in 2019, I had somenotion that I would start
another company, but hadn'tsolidified on the idea yet.
We didn't really solidify on theidea until 2020.
So somebody told me you'regoing to start another startup,
(46:04):
You're going to do it in themidst of a global pandemic and
then in early 2024, you're goingto be at these numbers.
I think I would be blown away.
I think I would say congrats.
I would pat myself on the back.
When you're living it day today, it doesn't feel like that
right, you always want to gofaster.
You always want to grow faster,do more, get more customers.
(46:26):
But yeah, I think I would bequite proud of what I would go
on to accomplish.
Max (46:33):
That is really good.
Yeah, once you look back, Iagree with you.
Sometimes it's very difficultto notice our own progress in
anything it can be business orlearning or improving anything
but when we look back where wewere before, it's really
noticeable, and I can correlatewith that as well.
Wow, that's great.
Okay, do you have any finaladvice for those who are just
(46:57):
starting their tech companies ormaybe just thinking about
starting the tech company?
Jake (47:02):
Yeah, I really think it's just reiterating all of the
things that we've talked about.
Make sure you have conviction,make sure you're doing something
worth doing, make sure all yourducks are in the row, because
success is not going to beovernight.
There's another famous anecdotewhich is like seven years later
they were an overnight success.
Nobody ever sees the difficultyof the journey, just making
(47:26):
sure that you're really preparedfor the ups and the downs, both
in the business and also inyour own mentality and your own
relationship with the businessand with your co-founders.
It's a lot of just preparingand making sure that you've got
the right mentality and thenjust making a go of it.
(47:46):
We all only get one journeythrough this life.
Max (47:51):
If entrepreneurship is part of your journey, do your best
to pack your kit with the righttools and materials that you
need and then just have a gofrom it, jack, before we finish
this, for those who really wantto try the solutions that you
provide and really want to gettheir hands dirty to try a
product, what would be the bestway to do that?
Jake (48:13):
We have a page set up specifically for podcast
listeners.
It's at athzcom slash podcastsand that's a place where you can
reach out and talk to someonedirectly on our team about the
problems that you'reexperiencing.
We're authorization andpermissions experts at this
point and we think we can helpguide you, even if athzcom
doesn't end up being theultimate solution for you.
(48:34):
We just love to talk about thisproblem and love to hear from
users and customers out in theecosystem.
Max (48:41):
Great, that sounds amazing.
All right, jake, thank youagain and you have a great day.
Jake (48:46):
Yeah, you too.
Thanks for having me.
Max (48:49):
Thanks for listening everyone and if you like this
podcast, make sure to follow onwhatever platform you're using
to get your podcasts.
Also, if you could leave areview, that would be highly
highly appreciated.
Thanks, and I'll see you in thenext episodes.
Take care.
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