Max: 0:01

Hello and welcome to Startup Chronicles podcast. I'm thrilled to be joined today by Jake Moshenko, a serial entrepreneur whose ventures have led to successful acquisitions. He is the mastermind and CEO of AuthZat, a tech company inspired by Google's Zenzibar white paper. Authzat makes the lives of software engineers easier by providing innovative authorization system solutions. We'll delve into Jake's impressive technical background, explore his experience starting his first company and see how these experiences shaped his approach to launching subsequent successful ventures. Additionally, we'll focus on the idea validation process and discuss other fascinating aspects of his journey. Stay tuned.

Jake: 0:41

We went from a two-person company to a multiple hundred thousand person company in the span of like five years, and that was pretty interesting. What I did is I looked back at managers that I've had in the past and loved and said what were the things that they did that I really liked? What were the things that they did that I didn't like so much? How can I learn from that?

Jake: 1:02

Prior to that, I had built like a pretty successful iPhone app. Right, I just built it. I thought people might like it. I threw it in the app store and got hundreds of thousands of downloads and so I was like, oh okay, it's now imagine if I have to allow access to a file for two million people, yeah Right. And I was able to give access to that file a million times per second. So before us they were writing a lot of code, to be frank, and we did this for Kway as well. Right, we said we need to do authorization. Let's just start writing code, let's store little bits of data in the database and then we'll interpret that data according to some roles and rules that we have set up in the application. If you have a one hour call, maybe spend 45 minutes of it, talking to the customer about their problem.

Max: 1:50

Welcome to Startup Chronicles Podcast. If you're building, or planning to build your own tech company, this is the place where you get inspired, educated and prepared, prepared for all those pitfalls that are on your way, which you will definitely overcome, because every guest who's on this podcast is a big time practitioner who's been there and done that. They come here to share the unique stories of their ups and downs, providing you with available tips and guidance, so maybe you will be the one to build the next unicorn company. I'm Max, the host of the podcast and a co-founder of a tech recruitment company. I'm not sitting on a bunch of startup secrets, but I'm also working on a few personal projects too, and that's the main reason why I brought this podcast to life to learn from the best, alongside with you. So enjoy the show and let's dive into our next Chronicle.

Max: 2:34

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 a very typical question to start this off, but your family name really sparked my curiosity, because I am Ukrainian myself, born and raised, and your family name sounds pretty Ukrainian to me, and I might be wrong, though, so I apologize if I am, but could you tell me, do you have any Ukrainian or maybe Eastern European roots?

Jake: 3:03

Yep, absolutely. My dad is 100% Ukrainian. But it's been kind of a long time since my family was in Ukraine. So my grandmother was born in Canada in 1911. So her parents were from Ukraine, and then my grandfather's parents were also from Ukraine.

Max: 3:24

So that's interesting. So have you ever been to Ukraine?

Jake: 3:28

I haven't. No, it doesn't seem like a great time to visit right now.

Max: 3:32

Definitely yeah, when things calm down.

Jake: 3:35

I do hope to be able to make a trip one day.

Max: 3:37

Yeah, that would be great. Okay, good, jake, so you have a very exemplary I would say, I would not even be afraid to say that exemplary and solid technical background. You studied in Michigan, the university correct me if I'm wrong then as a first job you worked at Boeing, then more classical companies like Amazon and then Google, and then you started your first company, which was called DevTable, and again, correct me if I'm wrong but if I'm not mistaken, it didn't really work out very well, or maybe as planned. Could you please tell me a little bit more about that period of your life?

Jake: 4:14

Yeah, so you pretty much nailed it. I did go to a university in Michigan. Then I went out to Boeing. I worked in the flight simulator's group at Boeing, which is like a dream come true, right Like I'm fresh out of college computer engineering degree and here I am flying around virtual simulated multi-hundred million dollar jumbo jets in like the full six, three degrees of freedom, motion simulator and everything. So that was by far an amazingly fun job and learned a lot there, but ultimately realized it wasn't going to take me where I wanted to go.

Jake: 4:46

So that's when I switched over into the more sort of like classical tech companies, the first one being Amazon. Amazon is where I cut my teeth on distributed systems and web services and sort of web service architecture, things like that. And then after a little while we decided my now wife and I decided that we wanted to move to New York and at the time Amazon didn't really have any engineering in New York. So that's when I made the switch to Google and just continued learning about super large scale hyperscaler style architectures. At Google I was working on developer facing infrastructure, so the API's infrastructure group and, yeah, that's where I met Joey, who is my second time co-founder now and our current CTO, and we left to do DevTable. And yeah, you're right, devtable was an online IDE Think our compatriots at the time were Cloud9 and CodeNV and we never really got anywhere. We never found any traction. We had a few people kick the tires and use it here and there, but ultimately the IDE wasn't where we ended up finding success.

Jake: 5:56

Where we ended up finding success was in the Docker ecosystem. So we were using Docker containers. This is back in 2012, 2013,. So very early days for Docker and containerization.

Jake: 6:07

We were using Docker containers to run infrastructure for our IDE and we had all of this code, all of this proprietary code were like how do we store this code in the cloud and then serve it up to our machines when we need to? And at the time there was no private Docker registry and because it was proprietary code, we couldn't use the public internet facing unauthenticated, unauthorized registries. So we said, all right, let's go build it. If we need it, someone else needs it, let's go build it. And this is a common theme you'll find with me scratching my own itch, so to speak. And we built a product called Quay. So Quay was the first private Docker registry, and then that one was kind of successful right from the start. We had traction, we had paying customers, revenue, users, all of that, and eventually we ended up exiting Quay over to QuoroS, and that was the start of our sort of like continued journey and then correct me if I'm wrong.

Max: 7:03

Sorry for interrupting, but then QuoroS was acquired by Red Hat, correct?

Jake: 7:09

And then Red.

Max: 7:09

Hat by ABM.

Jake: 7:11

That's right.

Max: 7:13

I did my homework.

Max: 7:15

We went from a two-person company to a multiple hundred thousand person company in the span of like five years and that was pretty interesting, it was pretty interesting, I can bet, and I'm sure there was lots of ups and downs and you learned a lot, and I'm sure that maybe I know it's I cannot tell for you, but I can only assume that all of that experience that you gained during those five years really reflected on how you run currently auths at your current company, 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: 7:58

I mean all of us. Everything that we do in life shapes the way that we approach things and the way that we see things. And so through that journey through QuoroS to Red Hat, to IBM I you know, we were a two-person company, I had never had like a formal leadership role before that, and then through that journey I was sort of dragged, kicking and screaming into management. That's really where I like formed the thesis of what kind of manager and what kind of leader I wanted to be. I was given responsibility for some pretty big initiatives and so that kind of opened my eyes to sort of the wider role of fitting an engineering org within a larger organization. So yeah, absolutely Right, everything that we do sort of shapes the way we approach the world.

Max: 8:40

So what would you say was the toughest or the hardest thing for you to learn in terms of management, running the company? Because you used to be just a software developer in different companies. Right, you were more writing code. You didn't know. I'm not sure whether you learned something about management at your university, but I assume you did not learn much about that. Right, you were learning more technical knowledge and technical side of things. So what really helped in? How did you approach that? Because you were like a trailblazer for yourself in terms of learning how to run the companies.

Jake: 9:18

Yeah, that's a good question, I think. When someone first finds themselves in a leadership position and they say this is an opportunity, right, what do I want to do with it? And so what I did is I looked back at managers that I've had in the past and loved and said what were the things that they did that I really liked? What were the things that they did that I didn't like so much? How can I learn from that? I read a bunch of books, right.

Jake: 9:42

I participated in sort of a technical leadership, technical management, small sort of group learning environment here in New York City, and sort of like taking all of those things and fusing them together into figuring out what my style, what kind of leader I wanted to be, and the thing that really resonated the most with me was the idea of a servant leader, so basically being there to help other people do their best work and to sort of like set them free and make sure that they feel fulfilled and that they're doing their best work, because a company, right Like a company, is designed to be able to accomplish more than what one single person can accomplish. So it's like when you see some of these leaders that have like a cult of personality or are very like aggressive type A top down. I think they're probably not getting 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 in mind 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 having empathy. It's about making sure that the people that are eventually going to end up touching your work product whether that's a startup, whether that's software, whether that's an API, learn about that at Google or whether it's the decisions that you make right, like, that's still a work product and that's still something that people are going to interact with and interface with, and so making sure that you have empathy for how that's going to impact them day to day when you're making those decisions, I think is super critical.

Max: 11:20

For sure. So, jake, we will. I really want to talk a little bit more about us, that and exactly what you do, your product and everything. But before we do that, I would really still have would like to touch dev table. And why do you think it didn't really work out? Didn't you do your homework? Or maybe you didn't really validate the initial idea, because that's the first company right, it's maybe 90% of the 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 like how I thought the world worked before that. Prior to that, I had built like a pretty successful iPhone app. Right, I just built it. I thought people might like it. I threw it in the app store and got hundreds of thousands of downloads and so I was like, oh, okay. And then also like in my previous roles, like the manager was always like this is what we have to do. So I just had this sense of like, if you build it, they will come.

Jake: 12:20

And so when we got into the ID space, I was like, okay, people are looking more and more, they're doing more and more things in their web browser and Chromebooks are kind of a hot thing right now. A lot of schools and universities are using Chromebooks, so there's probably a need here and if we build it, they will come. And Joey already had actually a huge. He had a like, he had a huge lead in this space. He had already developed most of the web ID. So I was like, yeah, it seems like the right product, right time. We can just go and commercialize this thing, but we're probably a little bit ahead of where people wanted to be.

Jake: 12:59

And then I didn't realize that, how you know, from my own personal perspective, we fall in love with the tools that we use and we get really attached to them, and so to get a developer to switch tools is actually kind of a monumental lift, and I think I underestimated how big of a challenge that would be.

Jake: 13:19

And we would get all these requests to where people would use sort of you know put. Think, imagine 100 technologies that exist in some grid and every single person is going to point to seven of those and those are going to become their stack. But when you average that across the entire ecosystem, across all of the technologies, everybody has a different seven that they've picked. And so we would get requests that are like All right, you do three of the seven things that I need it to do, if you build the other four, I'll use it. And it was just kind of like that loop over and over and over again, where we were constantly building, shipping, iterating, building, shipping, iterating, but we never quite got the seven things for a large population of users to make a sustainable 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 different requirements for their online ID, and how it has changed now because online ID is still a thing right, people do use it and how other companies approach that the successful companies that are on the market right now.

Jake: 14:25

Yeah, I don't know if there's been a runaway success in this area still right, like VS Code, for example, is all.

Jake: 14:34

it's built all on web technologies, but it's still mostly a desktop app and people and people flocked to VS Code at a rate like they switched from Adam or sublime text or whatever at a rate. That is just incredible. And it's because, still being a desktop app, you can also use it and it's not offload the four out of seven things that it doesn't do well to the terminal, into the desktop, into your local environment. And so I would say, if anybody's really going to crack this nut, it would be building a modular IDE similar to how VS Code and Eclipse have like very rich plug-in ecosystem and their modular and you can sort of compose that seven things that you need experience out of modules.

Jake: 15:19

So it would be a very modular IDE, but then I still don't know how to solve the like terminal desktop local file sync experience, because you just have to build so much and it's people are very passionate about these tools.

Max: 15:34

All right. So, jake, now let's talk a little bit more about your current company, ozad. It's very technical product and because it is quite a technical product, not all of our listeners are software engineers, so let me help you here. I will tell the simplified version of Ozad, so I would explain it as a as to an eight year old and you will do your part, explain it in a more technical 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 technical product. So let's start with your ELI eight.

Max: 16:10

All right, good. So imagine you have a digital filing cabinet with lots of drawers and files and in a business or organization not everyone should be able to open every drawer or read every file. So some information is private or sensitive and Ozad provides a special lock system for those digital filing cabinets, which in this case are computer applications or software systems. And, for as far as I understand, ozad helps decide who can open which drawers and look at which files. So it's like giving out special keys to people based on their role in the organization. For example, a manager might have more keys or a key that opens more drawers than an intern. And Ozad customers are usually the people who make these digital filing cabinets, like software engineers and companies that build applications, and these developers use Ozad locks, their permissions and access control systems to make sure that they're on the right people can access information, certain information in the application they 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 really focus on at OTSED, to use your metaphor, is more about federating out that access as opposed to securing it. It's very easy to make something secure by default. You just only let the person who created it have access. So think about in your metaphor on the drawer system imagine if there were post-its on every drawer and on every file and on every piece of paper within the drawer, maybe even down to paragraphs on pieces of paper in the files in the drawer, and on those post-its you could write who's allowed to have access to those things and why this person gets access to the whole drawer because they're like let's pretend, a drawer is one tenant of our customer, right, Like one company, one customer of our customer. This person gets access to everything in the drawer because they're the owner of the account, they're the ones who signed up.

Jake: 18:18

But, then for each individual folder and each individual piece of paper. That person is going to decide how to federate that out and eventually they can also delegate permissions on who else can make those decisions. So it's much more about building the infrastructure to power the sharing than it is about the locks themselves, I'd say.

Max: 18:38

So that makes it easier to scale right and if you, for example, have to change something, to change a piece of code, it takes much less work to do, 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 allow access to a file for 2 million people yeah Right. Or if I need to be able to give access 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 through the names on the post-it one by one. So scale is a big part of it. A big part of it is also being globally available. So if I need to be fielding calls from people all over the world who are saying does this person have access to these contents in that drawer, in that file, 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-tenant hosted service.

Jake: 19:50

We also have a private hosted service that we run on behalf of our customers, but it's just for them, it's single tenant, as we call it. So we go, let's say that you're in Frankfurt, your company does business out of Frankfurt and you're subject to GDPR and you can't have your data stored over in 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 copy of our software right in Frankfurt for you so that, for compliance, you're in the clear, for performance, you're in the clear, and that's our private sass. And then, for the strictest of our customers, we also have an open source solution that we support 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 right now for that? Because of course, there are some frameworks right, there are many other technologies. How did people or those software engineers who are not aware of your solution, how do they solve this problem and how would that would be easier for them with OSDAT?

Jake: 20:56

Yeah, so before us they were writing a lot of code, to be frank, and we did this for Quay as well. Right, we said we need to do authorization. Let's just start writing code, let's store little bits of data in the database and then we'll interpret that data according to some roles and rules that we have set up in the application, and ultimately, that code became a bottleneck for us. Nobody wanted to change it. We would get customer requests that were outside of the scope of what we had written, and so we would get stuck. There were some features that we actually didn't ship because the permissions weren't rich enough, weren't fine-grained enough to ship it, and so, yeah, I think what people are mostly doing or I would say 99% of the customers that we have are coming from homegrown handwritten systems, and some of the downfalls of doing it that way are that your data actually can get locked up within a single application.

Jake: 21:48

I like to give this example. So we're modeled off of a system that existed at Google before, called SansaBar. You can't buy it from Google. There's no open source reference implementation or anything. But at Google, if you try to send an email via Gmail and it contains a link to a document and the person that you're trying to send the email to doesn't have access to that document, google Gmail will warn you and they'll say hey, max doesn't have access to this document. Would you like to fix that? Right here, right now, and right there from within Gmail, you can grant access to Max, and the way they're able to accomplish that is that they have this permission service and then everything is going through the same interface and they can all talk about permissions sort of uniformly. So Gmail doesn't need to know the deep down, nitty gritty, specific details about how Google Docs makes that decision. It just calls an API and says can Max do this? 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 us that. 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 say sorry, but can I say that you failed on DevTable and then had the success on the next few companies. Right, didn't you have like flashbacks? Maybe you know that when you start another company it will not work and maybe that's too good 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 of like a Phoenix moment, right, like rebirth as Quay, and then it ultimately went on to become quite successful. So I wouldn't say that any companies like straight up failed, although we had to pivot away from our original idea.

Jake: 23:47

We were ready to do that again if that happened. So, like we're not entrepreneurs because we think it's going to be a straight line to a billion dollars right. Like the reason that there's value in starting startups is because it's unknown whether it's going to be successful at the outset right, if everyone knew this was for sure going to work and for sure going to be financially successful, we'd have a million competitors and everybody would be just following the same exact script and doing the same exact thing. So the thing that I love about entrepreneurship is the ability to explore and to iterate and to try things and to fail. Right Like, all successes are built on the backs of like little, tiny micro failures. So nobody, nobody had an idea of how their business was going to go, and then went and executed it 100%, without fail, exactly as they initially predicted, 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 you did you have much more confidence when starting us that, compared to those times when you started your previous companies?

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 a spectrum of how audacious you want to be and at the less audacious end of the spectrum you could imagine opening a chain of grocery stores or a chain of laundromats or something right, like there's a well demonstrated human need for these kinds of businesses and it really is just like a mathematical money in returns out kind of business play. And obviously, yes, you have to run it well and you have to provide a great customer experience and everything. And then like one step up from that in, like the digital world would be offering a play that you can adopt in a minute, right, something that you can kick the tires on, pull out a credit card and be using one minute later. Kway was in sort of that, like 10 minute to one hour sort of category. It was something that you could adopt very easily. You could bolt it on or integrate it with your business infrastructure.

Jake: 26:03

But Zed is more of a platform play. It's think of it more along the lines of adopting a database. Nobody adopts a database after one minute thought. Nobody pulls out their credit card and is buying a database after kicking the tires for 10 minutes. So it's a more audacious play and when you do that, there's more value. Right, you can deliver more value to your customers because you're taking on a bigger portion of their needs and of their infrastructure and really helping them accelerate their own growth and their own product development. But it's a harder sale, it takes longer and, yeah, so I would say that I had less confidence, because these kinds of platform plays are trickier to build companies around.

Max: 26:44

We've been quite successful. It was harder to sell and also it was harder to build because it's a very technical chunk of work, right? So how hard was that technically 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 bit into the weeds technically, but it is a. You know, you can think of it. I wouldn't say it's quite as hard as creating like a new relational database would be, but it's somewhere between there and like a business intelligence app.

Jake: 27:19

So there are quite a quite a few performance and technical hurdles that we had to clear before anyone could even consider it. We had to. We actually wrote a version in Python to prove out the model.

Jake: 27:33

And then we had to replace that with the current version, which is written in go, which is a lot faster and a lot leaner on memory. So you know, we were constantly iterating and we're constantly integrating what we've learned from going to the market and listening to what they say into our technical plans and making sure that we're moving forward in the right direction.

Max: 27:54

Okay, so, and also, do you, how often do you do things like customers interview and customers development? How do you approach customers development in general and how was it especially? I really would like to hear how was that at the beginning, when you were, you know, just starting validating, talking to people? Where did you find those people? 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 our network, 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 way to do product development, because those people don't want to tell you something that you don't want to hear. So you usually don't get very good feedback that way.

Jake: 28:51

But after a while we open sourced SpiceDB and we said here's the system. Right, it's a database, you understand it, it's a database for permissions. And after that the script flipped entirely. 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 and do this, or I can't adopt it until it hits these performance numbers. And that's where the flywheel sort of starts, where if you can get real users who have real skin in the game, then you start to get feedback that's actually useful and actionable, versus like when you're asking your friends, they're like oh well, yeah, it's great, but wouldn't it be nice if you know those kinds of requirements and requests are never quite as good as when people have skin in the game.

Jake: 29:41

There's actually a great book about this called the mom test that I highly recommend as well, which is the thesis of the book, is basically that your mom will never be entirely honest with you if you ask her what you should be doing.

Max: 29:55

For sure. So if I got an idea, I shouldn't go to my grandma and ask her whether it's a good idea for a business or not and then skip to the bank for the loan against my apartment. Right, that would be everyone disclaimer. This is not a financial advice. Never do that. Just listen to what Jake says and never do biased customer 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 what kind of bias is they're bringing to the table and how useful that feedback can be.

Max: 30:30

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Jake: 31:13

And also not to discredit it, but if your grandma is like a software architect at a Fortune 500 company, she may have very valuable insight, right? So, like you know, your mileage may 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 a little bit more about interviews, customer interviews, because it's sometimes difficult to. What would you say would be the main advice? To avoid asking biased questions. And you already said do it's better not to talk to people that you know, to your family, to your colleagues? You can talk to them at the beginning, right just to get the things off the ground, but when you really want to scale up and get more data from potential users, which you will analyze later, what do you think are the best approach to ask the right questions?

Jake: 32:17

Yeah, this is very well, pretty well trod material at this point, but I'll just echo what sort of the advice you'll get from a lot of this business development is, which is, ask questions about the problem, dig into the problem. Like, if you have a one-hour call in your pre-product and your pre-product market fit. If you have a one-hour call, maybe spend 45 minutes of it talking to the customer about their problem. Don't pitch your solution, because as soon as you pitch your solution, they're going to contextualize everything that they talk to you about in terms of your solution and whether or not they can make your solution work or not. And that really it's a great way to find sort of like a local maxima where you've taken that solution as far as it can go, but you've really missed the forest for the trees. You don't know the other problems that they have that might be more valuable or that might guide your company to go in a slightly different direction. So, yeah, it's just like talk to people about their problems.

Jake: 33:20

Another thing is that people love to talk about their problems. So, if you're just very honest with people and you're like, hey, I'm exploring something in the permission space or the X space, whatever it is that you just pitched your grandma on. Would you be willing to talk to me about problems that you're having in that space? And it is very easy to get one meeting with almost anybody, right, like, just hit them up and find a warm intro, right, like, hey, you know, max knows both of us. It'd be great if we could chat about this. I'm thinking about exploring something in this space and people are just generally very helpful. So, yeah, it's easy to get meetings and talk about the problem before you pitch the solution.

Max: 34:09

Is that possible when you gathered all of that information from all of those interviews? But when you look at that and then 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 somebody involved, who may be like a third party or something, just to look at that information with a cold mind?

Jake: 34:37

Yeah, that's actually an excellent question, right Like? People lie to themselves all the time, just like you know, it's another biased opinion. Your own opinion is a biased opinion, the same way as talking to your friends or your grandma. That's a good point. Another thing that I like to advise people is there are things that you need to have conviction on in your business and there are things that you should be flexible on and be willing to pivot in one direction or another and like, maybe for one person, the thing that they have conviction on is like their go to market model. I'm going to sell this way and I don't really care what I sell Another person might have a conviction on.

Jake: 35:18

I believe that this technology is the right way to solve the like a class of problems and like if it were completely obvious just from talking to people, then you would end up on sort of like the laundry mat end of the spectrum. There's really famous quote, henry Ford, where he says if people asked me or if I built exactly what people wanted, I would have given them faster horses. I just butchered that quote horribly, but it's the same idea, right Like? You talk to people about their problems 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 input would lead you to believe that your solution is in the horse space somewhere, but like looking one level deeper. The real problem that they were trying to solve was transportation, and so Henry Ford presumably had some conviction that a better way to solve transportation was through machines instead of animals, and so he mapped those problems onto his candidate solution and then, kind of, the rest was history.

Max: 36:16

That's a really great analogy. So, before we move to, also want to talk a little bit more about how do you market right now, oz that. But before we move to that, the last question about customer development how do you actually motivate people to come to the interview and you know to, to, to give you that 30 minutes or 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 of inbound, which are, I believe this could be a solution for my company, so motivation is no longer such a huge problem. But I think before that it is about like finding warm intros and finding somebody that both of you know in it. It's hard, right, Like how do you bootstrap a network? You just have to start doing it.

Jake: 37:07

You need to find out who who is doing interesting things that you can make an honest connection with and then from there you can start growing your network and adding more people that you know and getting more intros and things like that. So yeah, like I, we've never really incentivized like directly incentivized people to take meetings. Like I've heard of people who use strategies where they're like I'll give you a $5 Starbucks gift card, right Like coffee's on me, if you take a meeting. We've never really tried that, but if you did have to bootstrap a network from zero, maybe that would 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 those 10 bucks or they really, you know, are interested in the topic. Okay so, jake, now because Authzat is. You know, I've tried to find Authzat on different social networks and then I visited your Instagram, which is kind of like not existing right. There is only one follower, one follower, one guy. So one follower and the profile doesn't follow anyone. And I was not surprised at all, because Authzat is a very technical company. It is not such a company that would have a sexy Instagram profile with lifestyle pictures and all that kind of things, right? So that's. That leads me to my next question how do you approach marketing right now, at this point? I know you have already, you know, a great community, that's, that's for sure. I've checked your Twitter. I see people posting about this. People are happy with the product, but still, how do you put your product in front of those potential users who are still not aware of the solutions that you provide?

Jake: 38:48

Yeah, I would say that's an open issue for us right Like getting it in front of more people, getting more mind share, more market penetration. Our association with Zanzibar and with having an open source solution in the Zanzibar space is how we get a lot of awareness right. People go and Google for open source Zanzibar and then they find us. I mean, we happen to be the most mature player in that space, so then we have a pretty high likelihood of converting them. But yeah, I would say yeah, getting in front of more people would definitely be great for the business. You did give me a great idea, which is we should do an Instagram with a bunch of lifestyle photos of just like somehow related back to authorization just like throw a padlock on random things all over the world and just, you know, take the selfie.

Jake: 39:36

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, I will 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 only one follower. It looks better. With one follower only it's very, very unique. Yeah, great. So, and I'm also wondering about the market awareness how much are your potential users aware of the problem and the solution that you provide them? Because I'm, you know, I'm not very aware of, I'm not a developer myself, so I'm not really sure how much really software engineers know about your solution or similar solutions that exist.

Jake: 40:25

Yeah, I would say that if you're a software entrepreneur, virtually all of them have experienced the problem. And then in larger organizations it would be like people on the platform team. There's often dedicated teams within larger organizations that handle these kinds of cross cutting concerns for the whole organization. So 100% of those people have also experienced the problem. One of the interesting challenges is that, because this is kind of a new category, a lot of them don't even know to go and look for a solution and there's like no budget line item that they can be like. All right, I'm going to move from vendor A to vendor B.

Jake: 41:00

We don't have a box in the architecture diagram is how I like to describe it and so there is a big education component to making people aware of what exactly it is that we do and that there actually is a solution in this space. Now, like for a long time, there's a lot of spaces you can think of that for a long time just didn't have a solution and we're kind of annoying. And then, all of a sudden, one day there was a solution, right, like think the advent of the dishwasher machine. Before that it was just like okay, you spend an hour doing dishes after dinner every day, and that's just what people do. And then all of a sudden, one day there was a machine, but nobody, like nobody, was replacing a broken machine when they were first invented. So I'm sure there was a big education thing. Like you, don't have to wash dishes anymore.

Max: 41:43

Yeah, washing machine is a great analogy and maybe do you partner with some educational maybe online courses or educational companies where you would show this solution to people just starting to learn software engineering, so they know this from the very beginning 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, to be honest, keeping up with customer demand and growing the company and everything, so we'll get to it at some point, for sure.

Max: 42:20

Great. So now, jake, you are a CEO of us. That what are the most important metrics and KPIs that you pay attention to?

Jake: 42:32

Of course, revenue right. Of course, open source community. 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 issues against our GitHub? So basically making sure that the open source continues to grow and then growing the business to sort of help those open source users become more successful in a commercial setting.

Max: 43:04

So what role? What is your role as a CEO? But what is your practical role at the company? Do you do more like a product management, or do you still get your hands dirty and you write code? What is your day-to-day look like?

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 also making sure that we were building in the right direction, that we were from a product perspective, that we were building something people want. As the company matures, my role matures as well.

Jake: 43:36

Remember we talked about the concept of like a servant leader. So if you think of a company, people have different roles within a company and if there is any role that doesn't have somebody who does it, it's my problem. So everything that flows up eventually becomes my problem if it's not already delegated and not covered by somebody else. Some examples here are making sure that people get paid Not a very sexy part of the job, but critical if you want to keep a staff and keep them happy and have roofs over their heads. So it's like those kinds of things that just aren't covered by anybody else end up becoming sort of my responsibility de facto, and then over time, what I do, my methodology, is to get good at those things, to discover what it means to be good at that role and then, now that I know what good looks like, go out and find somebody who can 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 find somebody, let's say, for a certain role, and then tell them okay, 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 be a good leader, you really want to show them how it's done and, of course, sometimes we learn from those people who be higher as well. So there should be that synergy, Great Jake. And also the next thing that I want to ask you. It's more of a philosophical question, but if somebody told you back in 2019 where you will be in 2024 in terms of growth and progress of us, that we are talking about the company Likewise, would that correlate with your initial expectations Again, growth and your current progress 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 some notion that I would start another company, but hadn't solidified on the idea yet.

Jake: 45:57

We didn't really solidify on the idea until 2020. So somebody told me you're going to start another startup, You're going to do it in the midst of a global pandemic and then in early 2024, you're going to 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 to day, it doesn't feel like that right, you always want to go faster. You always want to grow faster, do more, get more customers. But yeah, I think I would be quite proud of what I would go on to accomplish.

Max: 46:33

That is really good. Yeah, once you look back, I agree with you. Sometimes it's very difficult to notice our own progress in anything it can be business or learning or improving anything but when we look back where we were before, it's really noticeable, and I can correlate with that as well. Wow, that's great. Okay, do you have any final advice for those who are just starting their tech companies or maybe 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 your ducks are in the row, because success is not going to be overnight. There's another famous anecdote which is like seven years later they were an overnight success. Nobody ever sees the difficulty of the journey, just making sure that you're really prepared for the ups and the downs, both in the business and also in your own mentality and your own relationship with the business and with your co-founders. It's a lot of just preparing and making sure that you've got the right mentality and then just making a go of it. We all only get one journey through this life.

Max: 47:51

If entrepreneurship is part of your journey, do your best to pack your kit with the right tools and materials that you need and then just have a go from it, jack, before we finish this, for those who really want to try the solutions that you provide and really want to get their hands dirty to try a product, what would be the best way to do that?

Jake: 48:13

We have a page set up specifically for podcast listeners. It's at athzcom slash podcasts and that's a place where you can reach out and talk to someone directly on our team about the problems that you're experiencing. We're authorization and permissions experts at this point and we think we can help guide you, even if athzcom doesn't end up being the ultimate solution for you. We just love to talk about this problem and love to hear from users and customers out in the ecosystem.

Max: 48:41

Great, that sounds amazing. All right, jake, thank you again 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 on whatever platform you're using to get your podcasts. Also, if you could leave a review, that would be highly highly appreciated. Thanks, and I'll see you in the next episodes. Take care.