ned_at_codomain

Yeah, would have been more useful to spend relatively more time on numerical approximations.

Unsure why the URL didn't take

was supposed to be this: https://www.dissentmagazine.org/online_articles/highway-robb...

While I'd agree that $1M is a lot, it's not altogether that crazy. (Full candor: we are ourselves a managed auth company, so I naturally have a vested interest in people wanting to pay for auth)

We could start by drawing an analogy to another vendor: Stripe. Our company pays much more than 1% of gross sales to Stripe for handling our payments. I wince a little every time I see our revenue leaking out to them, but I also don't have a great alternative. It's basically fine, and it's just the cost of doing business.

Relatedly, if you're a $100M business, what alternatives do you have to Clerk (or equivalent vendors)? One option would be to run auth in-house. If you do that, you pretty quickly hit $1M in headcount costs alone by staffing ~3 engineers + ~1 product manager to build and maintain an auth service. (Bear in mind that the fully-loaded cost of a hire vastly exceeds base salary). I don't think many CFOs are going to lose sleep over the cost/benefit here.

And in practice, that's exactly where a lot of companies land. Lots of companies pay Auth0 seven figures annually. It's expensive, but it's still a pretty good deal for some companies.

Used to be at BCG. I think it's worth bearing in mind that relatively little consulting revenue -- even at the top strategy shops -- comes from pure strategy work anymore.

You can push much, much more volume and absolute impact through by running big merger integrations, digital transformation, and other large scale change projects at big companies.

It is basically a better business to become something like a premium Accenture, a "get stuff done" kind of consultancy. You can staff an army of junior people for a very very long time on those kinds of projects.

It's just not that easy to keep people staffed on 5-6 person teams solely on 8-12 week pure strategy engagements.

These kinds of projects are also the first discretionary spending yo get cut when times get tough.

If you're going to be focused on the pure strategy work, you'll probably want to stay really really small. We've seen some of this in investment banking with firms like Allen & Co or Qatalyst. Challenge is that consulting doesn't come with scalable monetization via success fees.

It's just not great business to be a boutique consultancy, I think.

Yeah, that's a good point :)

Do you have any inside info on how some of these big LPs are modeling opportunity cost against their growth equity commitments? My understanding gleaned from friends has been that they're generally just cutting exposure to growth-stage software and planning to park the capital in pretty vanilla/liquid public equities and fixed income anyway.

Seems like no one really wants to be interested in increasing their exposure to PE or growth equity anymore.

FWIW, the IRR clock doesn't start until they call capital from the LPs.

Yeah, SAML will probably fade away (slowly). And sometimes, you might be able to convince the customer just to use OIDC.

But human behavior change is hard and expensive. For the most part, it's just easier to give the customer what they're asking for / what they expect, even when you know they're wrong.

When you're trying to push an enterprise deal over the finish line, this is often just not a good enough reason to introduce friction with your buying committee.

And if you have to support SAML for one stubborn customer eventually, you might as well support SAML for all customers that really want it.

Oh, good callout!

The document is open source: https://github.com/ssoready/docs/pull/55

I have done four things in the past when working at / with big companies:

1. [Usually the best option] You escalate to your manager. If they're unsuccessful, they can escalate to sufficiently high layers of management that bureaucracy doesn't apply. You can't always do this, because it requires getting other people to care. It's also kind of expensive -- you only get so many social capital points to spend.

2. [Second-best option] You don't take the first 'no' as the final answer. Most people go away after getting rebuffed once, but if you keep pestering people, they might give in. Again, have to be careful with how you spend social capital.

3. [Not always applicable] If your ask involves an external vendor, this is exactly the scenario where enterprise sales representatives become really valuable. Good ones know how to climb the management ladder and build cases for change.

4. [Generally not advisable] You can sometimes just 'break the rules' and accept some risk of consequences. Some rules are real and inviolable. Others can be nonsense bureaucracy. Need to be sure which you're dealing with and whether your reputation would carry you through if you got in trouble.

Guys, this is so cool! I am strongly in favor of anything that cuts out rent-seeking middlemen.

Every time someone mentions real estate to me, I immediately think back with intense resentment to the thousands upon thousands of dollars I paid brokers just to unlock crappy studio apartments for me in Boston. I was just out of school and barely had any money, but I was still paying a huge premium over the cost of rent for ~nothing. So annoying.

Speaking as a YC-backed startup founder myself, you should have more confidence in your ideas! But not for the reasons you might think.

It's not that your ideas are good or bad. Most of us have mostly bad ideas. Some of us sometimes have good ideas. But there's really no way to tell if your idea is good or bad until you try. No amount of intellectualizing will give you a trustworthy answer.

We started our business with what seemed (to me and my smart friends) like a great idea. It made tons of sense. I had this whole 48-phase plan for how we'd conquer the world. And then ... it turned out that people didn't really want the thing. The idea was actually bad.

By contrast, the business we're working on now has started to work pretty well. I have to admit, the business didn't make much sense to me at first. I could conjure a million reasons we'd struggle to compete. And then ... when we went to market, the thing started to work. Still early days, but there are lots of positive indications.

My biggest lesson in the last year-and-a-half has been that I just don't know that much :)

This is really cool, guys!

One use case that occurs to me is to build personal SaaS apps. It's the sort of thing a lot of people use spreadsheets or Notion for.

I just made a simple little app with Marblism to help me keep track of whether I took my medication on a given day.

I couldn't tell you why, but I prefer this to little mobile apps and it's less upkeep than the spreadsheets I've tried to make in the past.

Yeah, I think it's the compatibility with 'business language' for collaboration.

Most white-collar workers know how to use Excel to a really basic level of proficiency. Not many people know how to parse Python code.

It's also just a lot easier to work quickly in Excel. I dual boot Linux and Windows on my laptop so that I can have Windows keyboard shortcuts in Excel. If I need to do some lightweight financial modeling or analysis, it's dramatically faster (10x or more) for me to build a spreadsheet than write some Python/R code from scratch.