E133: Reinventing Authorization with Google's Zanzibar Paper
May 13, 2024
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Jake Moshenko, Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, discusses the Zanzibar approach to auth, building for big companies, Hacker News launch boosting growth, and early monetization strategies.
AuthZed leverages Google's Zanzibar principles for scalable authorization solutions.
Early monetization strategy includes licensing options for security and compliance needs.
Incremental adoption and user feedback drive AuthZed's platform refinement and partnership building.
Deep dives
AuthsEd Founding Story and Problem Solving
AuthsEd's CEO, Jake, shares the founding story of the company, rooted in their experience with a previous company, Quay, where they faced challenges with authorization management. Quay's growing feature requests led Jake to seek a more scalable solution, which eventually led him to Google's Zanzibar paper in 2019, offering a breakthrough to their decade-long struggle.
Focus on Scalable and Flexible Authorization Solution
AuthsEd's approach to authorization emphasizes scalability and flexibility, addressing the limitations faced with traditional authorization methods. By adopting Google's Zanzibar principles, AuthsEd aims to provide a service that can evolve with a company's growth, offering a more streamlined and efficient authorization process.
Early Monetization and Business Model
AuthsEd's decision to monetize early on underscores their commitment to validating the commercial viability of their open source authorization platform. They intentionally introduced licensing and self-hosted options alongside cloud services to accommodate users with specific security and compliance requirements, showcasing a strategic approach to business model design.
Importance of Incremental Adoption and Feedback
AuthsEd's strategy focuses on enabling incremental adoption by users, leveraging feedback mechanisms to refine their platform and enhance user experience. By guiding customers through a gradual adoption process and prioritizing user feedback, AuthsEd aims to build meaningful partnerships and continuously improve their authorization solution.
Emphasis on Problem-Solving over Open Source Advocacy
Jake advises founders to prioritize solving a problem effectively rather than starting with the goal of creating an open source company. Highlighting the importance of choosing the right tools, such as open source, based on the specific problem and context, he encourages founders to align their approach with solving core challenges first, leveraging open source as a means to address those needs.
Jake Moshenko is Co-Founder & CEO of AuthZed, the scalable authorization platform based on Google's Zanzibar white paper. Their open source permissions database spiceDB has 5K stars on GitHub and enables fine-grained access control for customer applications.
AuthZed has raised $4M from investors including Work-Bench and Amplify.
In this episode, we dig into the Zanzibar approach to auth, branding themselves as a database, building for big companies from the get-go, their Hacker News launch and how getting on the front page kickstarted their project's growth, monetizing early & more!
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