Jake Aaron Villarreal: Welcome to our podcast, From the Ground Up, where we interview startup founders exploring their journeys, their success, challenges and lessons learned. We hope you'll be inspired in discovering what it takes to build a thriving startup. I'm your host, Jake Aaron Villarreal, and here with us today we have Jake Moshenko, co-founder and CEO of Authzed. Jake, welcome to the show.
Jake Moshenko: Thanks, glad to be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Great. So a little bit about Jake, he's got a storied career here. Uh, he's been an innovator in the cloud-native ecosystem for over 15 years. After engineering roles at Amazon and Google, Jake founded Quay, the first private Docker registry, which was acquired by CoreOS. Jake then became an engineering leader at CoreOS, which was acquired by Red Hat and then IBM. He is now the co-founder and CEO of Authzed, the company commercializing SpiceDB, the industry-leading cloud-native permissions database. Got a lot going on there, Jake. I like your background and a lot of big company experience too. Before we dive in about your startup, where, where are you joining us from today?
Jake Moshenko: I'm here in New York City. I'm down in the Lower East Side, uh probably my favorite neighborhood in the whole city.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh, that's great. Are you originally from New York?
Jake Moshenko: Nope, I'm originally from Detroit. Um, I grew up in the suburbs of Detroit and then I went to University of Michigan for undergrad. And then after that I headed out to Seattle where kind of a lot of the cloud stuff and a lot of the Big Tech stuff was happening.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well I lived in New York City too, it's a great town, it's my favorite city in the world and a lot of fun going on there. Uh, you got to be pretty excited about your sports teams too if you're into sports, I mean you got the Detroit Lions and you also got Michigan who's going to be in the national championship. Not sure if you're into football, but if you are, everything's going your right way this year.
Jake Moshenko: Yeah, we were up till uh 1:00 in the morning uh keeping track of the Washington game to see who uh, who we're going to face in the national championship. So...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh yeah, very cool. Well, um, we'll talk about your startup. But you know, before we do that, you spent time at Amazon and Google. Uh, can you share some of the insights you gained from that experience in that career and, you know, what was the influence um in terms of, you know, cloud-native technology and authorization?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah, sure. Um, so I'll start with Amazon because that's where I went first. Um, actually my first job out of college was at Boeing. I worked in the flight simulator group which uh was basically a dream come true, right? I got to fly around these big jumbo jets uh in a full motion simulator and got paid for it. Uh but after that I was like "Well, I mean, I, I got a degree in computer engineering, so I belong in tech." Uh so then I went over to Amazon um for a little while. And Amazon was really, I guess, where I got my start in distributed systems and web services. Um if you know anything about Amazon, they were pioneers in service-oriented architecture. And so they decided you know "As a company, we're going to create these really tight, really clean interfaces between all of the teams and all of the different software that we're building. And that would allow each team to sort of go off and innovate and implement um at their own pace and on their own." Um and everything at Amazon was built around... well, not everything, that's unfair... but a lot of things at Amazon were built around reliable queues and syndication of data from one place to another place. Which I only bring up because [it] was a pretty sharp contrast with when I moved to Google.
Um, Google uh here in New York City has a slightly different philosophy. Google does everything based around um sort of like request-response or RPC-style semantics, where you're directly asking another, another service for some data and then you're getting that data and then you're doing some work with it and then you're passing it on to someone else. Um and so I spent a little while at Google as well, about 18 months I think if I remember correctly. And that's where I met Joey, who's our current CTO and my two-time now co-founder.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Um, for those that don't know about that space, uh can you share a little bit more about cloud and authorization and, and why it's so important to understand the complexity of it. But also really what is it that you deliver that say, wasn't around before you built your company, or maybe there was a solution or many solutions. But what is it that you do to help other founders save time as they're building out their enterprise application or their, their SaaS platform?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah, that's a great question. Um, so we're primarily focused on application authorization. So as you mentioned, that's helping other founders and other engineering teams and other companies to add authorization to their applications. Um this is in contrast with uh some of the first-party um IAM platforms that you may have seen, identity and access management, where you're trying to figure out "you know, as a company, what can my individual employees do?" We're trying to help applications figure out "what can our end users do?" And so this is a, a really complicated problem when you start to get into some of these authorization models that are outside of the box um of the traditional. And the traditional here being like uh RBAC, like role-based access control.
So in role-based access control, you usually have uh "I am an admin of this platform," right. Like this is what, this is the kind of granularity that my bank account gives me: I can designate someone as an admin or a bookkeeper or uh a read-only user. And so that, that level of coarseness really doesn't extend itself well to modern web applications, which are really wor-, uh concerning themselves with high fidelity and fine-grained access management. So in a modern web app, if you think of like Google Docs for example, I can share an individual document with any other person on the planet and I can give them a variety of different access levels to that document. And I can go and share that same document with hundreds or thousands of other people or groups, and those groups might have other groups that are contained within them uh etc etc, sort of ad nauseum. So the, the problem really kind of explodes in complexity when you start to bring in some of these really uh interesting authorization flows that involve specific applications and the way they want to interface with their end users.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: So today, if you didn't have your product, what are companies doing today to solve that problem?
Jake Moshenko: They are writing a lot of code by hand. Um so this is what we did. So when we built Quay uh way back in the day... this is you know put your rewind back to 2013... uh we built Quay and we said "Well, GitHub has a pretty nice authorization model, we'll just kind of do what they did." And GitHub had support for basically readers, writers, and admins on a repository by repository level. And so we said "Great, that's awesome." Uh we built it, we wrote some code to do it, we stored some relationships in a database so that we would know which user had which kind of access uh level, and then we shipped that product. And the very first feature request that we got from, you know, when that product hit the open market was "I need support for organizations," right? "I don't want to manage repositories and access to repositories on a one-by-one case-by-case basis. I want to set it up with teams and I want to be able to manage repositories across multiple business units and multiple organizations."
And so these businesses wanted to sort of categorize and organize and federate their access based on who the individual was and what their context was within the organization, as well as what the repository they were protecting. And these are Docker images, so you can think of it as very similar to like a GitHub repository. And they wanted to contextualize the access and make it sort of fit sort of their org chart and everything that they wanted. And so we, we said "Well all right, I guess back to the drawing board." And we... that was the first time we rewrote our authorization uh and we probably had to rewrite it three or four more times uh during the journey of that company.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. Um, it sounds like a product that it'd be great to have. Doesn't sound like it'd be great to have to build it if you have your own platform or application that's already doing something you're trying to solve but then have to build this into it as well. Is the... if you were to use your product, is there, is it a pretty easy integration? Is the setup pretty simple? Like what's a company getting into if they wanted to try your product or, or use it?
Jake Moshenko: I guess I won't attack the "simple" uh head-on, but we'll talk a little bit about the customer journey and how they end up adopting our software. So what they usually do is our customers will usually um have this idea that "There must be a better way to do authorization than what they're doing," and then they'll go and they'll, they'll search for a solution. And they'll find relationship-based access control or Google Zanzibar, those are kind of uh... or fine-grained access management. All three of those terms kind of mean the same thing in early 2024. And they'll find this concept and they'll map it back to their problem and they'll say, "I think that that would work for me."
And from there, where we see our customers usually head over is head over to our playground, where they can build out their model and they can set up some test data and they can formally verify their model and make sure that it's going to work with all of the edge cases that they've been struggling with uh so far. Once they've convinced themselves that that model works, that's when we sort of start our engagement or our relationship. And then we'll often deploy a permission system for them, and then they can start reading to it, uh reading from it, writing to it, and then synchronizing their data over to our permissions database, so they're actually able to see the product work and see it solving a problem.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: And then you come in and do more to ensure what they're creating is kind of how it should be implemented and supporting their process as they integrate into your system?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah, um I mean we offer a variety of services. Um we host the software for them. So SpiceDB is our primary open-source thing and you can think of it as the complexity level of adopting a database, right. So that's why we put DB in there, um even though it's like a permissions calculation engine. So you write to it, you read from it, and you integrate it directly with your code. So it's not a super easy, right, this is not something that you're going to bolt on. Um on the other hand, once you have it in place, it's very powerful and the, the call sites are stable. And everything that you have to do from that point on is done through our API. And you can basically rip out one permissions model and plug a new one in without changing anything um in seconds.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. I want to go back to that a little bit. And for those listeners out there that aren't technical, I just want to dive a little bit more there around on SpiceDB. Um can you elaborate a little bit more on it and how it's helping change cloud-native permissions databases in, in the landscape of technology today? I mean, is there anything out there today that does this, or is this kind of a new invention?
Jake Moshenko: So relationship-based access control has been around for a little while, but we haven't really seen it take off until Google wrote the Zanzibar paper in 2019, which we're modeled after. And the Zanzibar paper is two parts. So the pap-, the first part of the paper gives you an API and it tells you how you should interact with these kinds of services. And then the second part of the paper is how you scale it, right. Because Google has trillions of these kinds of relationships that they're managing on behalf of their billions of users. And that's actually the tougher nut to crack, is how to scale it.
So you know, back in our Quay days, we sat at the whiteboard for at least a week trying to sketch out how to build a service like this and build it in a scalable way. Um, and we unfortunately were time-bound on that project, so we didn't solve it and we ended up continuing to build and iterate on our existing permission system. But then in 2019, when I read the Zanzibar paper, I like all of our customers mapped that back to the problems that I'd seen in the past and I went "All right, we got to go do this, right. We have to bring this to the world." And that's where SpiceDB came from. So SpiceDB is like our love letter to Google's Zanzibar paper. So it's a, a pretty faithful implementation of the paper, both the API and the scalable parts.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Wow. You know, it's interesting...
Jake Moshenko: ...the other half of that question?
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, yeah, no worries. I mean, I want to, I want to kind of um stop there and, and talk a little bit about, you know, just in general, founders that start companies and the ideas that they have to implement or create something, many times it's really, it's not their idea. Sometimes it can be from other ideas that you then take and run with it. You talked about the Zanzibar paper. Um that's something that when we had a brief chat um prior to this podcast, you were sharing a little bit about the idea, where it came from and then taking that and building a company around it. If you think about like Steve Jobs and Wozniak, you know, going into a library and learning how to create a telecommunication um technology that you know was allowing them to make calls, you know, maybe legally or illegally at the time when they were little kids, um it was going into a library and researching um you know through books technology. Um, is this the first time you've taken an idea that you went out and read papers on? Because we're hearing a lot like, even with AI right now, a lot of AI companies that are being created are from papers that they're researching out of MIT and Stanford. Might not even be their own ideas, but they're able to implement those with technology, maybe execute differently or faster. So what was this... the first time you, you, you, you kind of took an idea from a paper that then you built a company around? Or is this kind of how you've built companies in your career so far, just curious?
Jake Moshenko: Uh no for sure, this is definitely the first time. Um, Quay and really our philosophy boils down to scratching our own itch no matter what we're trying to do, right? So we wouldn't have taken this solution from a paper if we didn't need it so bad, if we didn't know that there was such a pressing market need. Um and I do, I, I keep up with everything that's going on over at arXiv with all of the AI work and it's really incredible to see the pace of innovation um in that community. So I, I, while this is the first time we've done it, um it's actually a pretty well-trod path. So you've seen other companies come about from Amazon's Dynamo paper, or you've seen like CockroachDB come out of the Spanner paper. Not just CockroachDB, there's also TiDB and a number of other distributed SQL databases. Um so it's actually like a fairly common pattern to take a piece of research and then go turn it into a business. Um but this is like... like I say, this is our first time uh executing that playbook. And we've actually already had to deviate from the paper pretty significantly. I always like to joke that uh one of the things that Google gets to do is they get to tell their engineers "you have to use it," but we have to lure our customers in and give them better user experiences and, you know, build all kinds of tooling and, and on-ramps and, and help our customers use it and help them get to that first "aha" moment where they fully adopt and fully buy into the platform.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. You went through Y Combinator. And when you had your thesis going in there, um you shared that you were kind of focused on like the startup um type smaller organizations. Uh and that maybe your customer base would come from Y Combinator colleagues or maybe companies that were you know earlier stage. But really it's become enterprise companies that have been your clientele base. For companies out there that are striving to get into the enterprise, what worked for you?
Jake Moshenko: Oh man. Uh that's a great question. I wouldn't say that we have a traditional enterprise sales model by any stretch of the imagination, right? Uh and when I say traditional I mean, I guess I'm leaning on tropes here, but where you call someone up and you take them to dinner and you go make a handshake over a game of golf. Um, I don't know if that really gets done anymore, but what happened for us is we open-sourced SpiceDB. So SpiceDB has a very liberal license, it's Apache 2. We open-sourced it, and then if individuals within large organizations who are feeling the acute problem that we solve, those individuals took a look at our software and they started putting their hands on it. And they started playing with it, and they adopted it at a small scale or in a proof of concept. And then when they were confident, when they were sure it was going to work, that's when they decided to take the plunge and give us a call and say "Hey, we believe in this technology, we think it's really great, we think it's going to help us, we're looking for a partner to make sure that we're using it right and that it's, it's working up to its potential and that we're you know, we've got all of our 'i's dotted and our 't's crossed."
So yeah, uh you started talking about YC Combinator, and I'll just touch on that a little bit too. Uh we did have a thesis going into Y Combinator that we were just going to sell to all of our batchmates. And uh it turned out that authorization was not their biggest problem, probably not even top five on their biggest problems. Usually for them their biggest problem was "How do we survive until next month?" or "How do we get our first user?" or "How..." you know, these very fundamental uh problems. And so we kind of took a pause and then refocused on, on larger organizations. And ultimately that's who uh also came to us as inbound leads.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I like that. You never quite know where your, where your niche is going to end up fitting best, at least in the early days. Um, what, what's been some of the insights you can share with, with the listeners today about your journey um with, with your current company? Because you've had really the dream of what other founders want to have, which is you start a company, it gets acquired. And then you know, maybe it changes your life, maybe you retire early, maybe it just fuels your desire to go out and build something bigger, you know, faster, stronger, whatever. Um, but you know, what are some of the insights you can share about when you launched your company, how much funding did you raise, what's been sort of the ebb and flow of the company to date so far. Some of maybe the things that have worked out really well and maybe some of the pivots and challenges you've had to figure out as you, you- as you kind of gone through your journey.
Jake Moshenko: Yeah. Um that's a great question. I'll actually start by talking about Quay as well.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah.
Jake Moshenko: So when we built Quay, this was on the back of GitHub's success bootstrapping GitHub to a giant business. And we're like, "We want to do that. We're not going to take any money. We're not going to hire anybody. We're just going to work our fingers to the bone until we have this massive company, and then we're going to sell it." And we built everything closed source at first, right? So we had a closed source, no funding, founder-only business uh as our first business. And we ended up selling that when we were still two people to CoreOS. Um just because it was a very strategic decision on both CoreOS's part and our part: they needed a container registry, we needed a bigger company to provide us with all of the other stuff besides a great product. Um and so that was our first journey. And then obviously CoreOS went on to do its whole thing and get acquired by Red Hat, and obviously that was life-changing.
But the, the second time around we seem to have done basically everything polar opposite. So now we're an open source startup, right? We've taken funding, we've taken 3.9 million funding uh to date, and that's across Y Combinator and our seed round. And we hired a bunch of people and we did uh... not a bunch, we actually are pretty judicious with our cash uh, but we hired people. And we went out and we built something bigger from the start. We had a bigger vision and we wanted to attract like, attract a bigger customer and a bigger market, like just bigger everything. And so far that's been basically uh how it's played out.
Um the only real pivots I'll say that we've done to date are about what our ideal customer looks like. So like I said, we thought it was going to be small startups. We were going to get in, we were going to build a, a bottoms-up business and were going to attract all these small startups and then we were just going to grow with them for a decade. And we have some of those. But by and large, most of our customers are, are big companies. So that was kind of, it was more of a go-to-market pivot rather than a product pivot. Um but otherwise we're just kind of executing the original plan uh to a T.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Oh that's great.
Jake Moshenko: Oh from, and I guess you asked for what are my insights...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Uh yeah.
Jake Moshenko: I guess the insights that I have are... and this is going to seem very platitudinal, but it's: there are certain parts of your business where you need to be flexible and you need to be willing to pivot, and there are certain parts of your business where you need to have conviction. Because if you only just did exactly what the market told you to do at every, at every moment, you wouldn't build anything new and you wouldn't build anything innovative. So you should kind of write down what those things are, the things that you have conviction on and that you're inflexible, and then kind of leave the rest of it... let those be sort of free points and let them float around as the market tells you what it desires and what's going to be successful.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, that's good to hear. I love the insight. There's a lot of founders out there that might be on the sidelines looking to build a company or just they've already built companies, but hear-, hearing that uh might hopefully influence them in a positive way. If you think about the company now that you've created and you're still building, what's been the, I guess, when you talk about go to market... You know, a lot of companies that we work with don't have a sales team, they're trying to get into new markets. It's really the founders hitting the pavement, making the calls, sending out the cold emails, hitting LinkedIn. Um some are product-led where they're actually not doing any outreach, they're just looking for the leads to come in and then they engage and support them, you know, a freemium model potentially. What's, what's working for you?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah, so by far um most of our leads come from our open source. So people find Authzed, you know, we have DB right there in the name. Nobody wants to buy or adopt a closed source database in 2024. So people are hearing about our open source, they're convincing themselves that they want it, and then they're reaching out. And we do have a sales team. We do have an enterprise sales team. And what they're largely doing is, once the customer has indicated interest, they're helping the customer to project manage their own process to get this across the line. And that was a huge learning for me, right. Like I, like I said, I have these tropes in mind about what an enterprise sales team is supposed to work like. But just the fact of how difficult it is for a customer to sell a new technology into their org and to get that deal across the finish line, I had no idea uh how difficult or how complex uh that actually is for a product like ours, which is so deeply ingrained with the software and with the platform.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it's true. I mean you have to first make sure the product works. And then you have to make sure that it costs you know within a budget that makes sense for the company. Uh it gets approved for multiple figure heads in the company. Like in enterprise sales, like selling to Congress sometimes. You have multiple people, multiple budgets, some are pro, some are con. You got to influence the right influencers and it can be challenging. So it's great to hear you have a sales team. Uh you know from our perspective, the, the, the companies that seem to do the best uh have multiple strategies in combination, it's not just one. They have a sales team. They have potentially product-led strategies. They have marketing, they're investing in doing the right things to, to do to get the, the clients. But they're also, you know, their website is also one of their best sales people too. So making sure that their website's going to attract people they can engage and maybe go through a demo or whatever, whatever they have there. Um, how big is the market for, for your company today? I mean what do you, what do you, when you look in the market, how big can this be built into as a company?
Jake Moshenko: I mean every SaaS, right? How many SaaS companies are there? Tens of thousands. Um you know, at right now we're attacking the top end of the market because they, they're uh, they're feeling the need most acutely. But as time goes on, we will build out things that'll make it easier to adopt and it'll make it the, the sort of obvious choice for the smaller companies as well. It is very flexible, so why would you want to adopt something that's going to fall down a few months down the road, or maybe a few years down the road? And if we can make it easy, then you can just get started on the solution that'll be with you all the way until your Google scale. So I mean the opportunity is huge. I, I wouldn't be here if I didn't think the opportunity was huge though, so maybe I want to run that by a fact checker.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. No, that's great. Well, it sounds really exciting. Um I uh most of the companies that we work with are SaaS based organizations, so I'm sure they'll love to hear what you've created. Some are earlier stage than others. Um, but happy to connect you with them uh in your journey and, and hopefully open some opportunities that make sense for, for you and for them. Um in terms of 2000... what are you excited about as you kind of look into the market with your current, with your current product and, and the company on the road map?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah. Um, the thing that I'm most excited about, I unfortunately can't talk about um right this second. Uh we're building something really amazing I think is going to just kind of like blow the doors off uh uh the performance in this space. So uh stay tuned there. Um but yeah, from a company perspective: grow, grow, grow, right? Grow the product, grow the team, grow the revenue, uh grow the addressable market. Um that's why we do startups, right? Like if it were, if it were uh obvious and straightforward and linear, again, I guess I wouldn't be here.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, no, makes, makes sense. Well God, you got me interested in understanding what's coming. Sounds like it's uh you're excited about it, which I'm sure your current customer base probably will be, and potential future prospects. Um what's, what's one thing that you can share in, in your journey so far that you feel maybe was a lesson you learned that you would have done differently now that you're through it, that you know the audience can learn from. Maybe there's nothing, it sounds like you got a great story, but maybe there's something in there that others can learn from as well.
Jake Moshenko: Oh man. Uh I guess it would be, so, so in our first business, the thing that we built, the first, very first thing that we built was a web IDE. Um, and Quay came out of that, like I say, scratching our own itch. So Quay wasn't the thing that we set out to build. But it turns out that we had chosen this like, "we're going to bootstrap this business and we're going to stay small and lean uh as far as humanly possible." And with a hosted online web IDE, like that just wasn't, that wasn't realistic. It wasn't a realistic business model for that particular business. Because people were asking for, you know, what I like to call the like M-by-N integration problem. So they wanted the web IDE to work with every language that was in their stack. And they wanted it to work across you know all the different places that they wanted to deploy, and all the different tools, the web browsers, and everything that they wanted to use.
So we were just, from day one we were constantly building things. And it felt like we wouldn't really have market success until we filled in sort of the entire matrix of that M-by-N, and then everybody would finally be happy. And maybe there's somebody out there who can build that business, but they're definitely not going to bootstrap it, and it's definitely not going to be a two-person business. So I guess what I learned from that is: make sure that it's realistic. Make sure that your business plan and your go-to-market plan and the product you're trying to build are all actually realistic. Uh there's some coherence between those things and, and that it's realistic to go out and build that with the tools that you're going to arm yourselves with and what you're trying to accomplish.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Well said. Well, that's um real insight for, for others out there. And I guess at this point um, you know what I want to do is kind of just move to what we call Three Questions. It's just three questions about you and, and three simple answers. So I'll get into it here and we'll start to wrap up. Um where, where do you go to think big or to brainstorm?
Jake Moshenko: Where do I go to brainstorm? Um I wouldn't say it's somewhere that I go, uh but I have all of my best insights in the shower. And this is probably not, this is probably not unique by any stretch of the imagination. But it's become such a trope at our company that like early in our early days, my daily standup notes were like, "Here's what I did yesterday, here's what I hope to accomplish today, and here's what I thought about in the shower today." And like largely the shower thoughts were, were some of the most uh pivotal thoughts in terms of guiding where we went uh early days. And I think that still holds today, right? I, I don't know, it's just something about the environment. And you've got nothing else going on and you're just like "All right, time to think." It's just a very thinking-conducive...
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, it... I... it happens to me, it happens to a lot of the, the, the, the guests we talk to as well. There's some, there's got to be some sort of physical element of water hitting your body that makes you start to kind of get into a deeper thinking pattern or something. But I always thought, "Well if, if your best ideas or maybe some of the most common ideas that help you innovate come out of the shower, maybe you should take like three to five showers a day, because then you'll have that much more like insights and ideas." Um, but you know for me it's...
Jake Moshenko: I thought about it. I don't think my skin could handle it. I think I'd be uh just like a dry mess after shower number two or three.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, I hear you. Um, what advice have you gotten from another founder that you thought was priceless that you can share with the founders listening?
Jake Moshenko: Yeah. Um, this is actually a pretty easy one. Um, and I'm sure this other founder thinks it's totally inconsequential. But we, you know, early on in our last company, I was talking about all the cool stuff that we were going to build and all the cool like happy users we were going to have from all of that. And like it was just build, build, build. "I'm going to build, build, build." And he's like, "Jake, is that the thing that is going to set your company free? Is that what's going to unlock you? Is that the most important thing that you can be doing in your role right now for the company?"
And I got a chance to actually turn that back around and ask the same founder uh that same question a little bit later on. Um, and I think that that uh resulted in some soul searching. But it was just that way of thinking, which is like, I'm in a very leveraged position and my time is finite, right? It's my most precious commodity. And so what am I doing? Is what I'm doing the most important thing that I could be doing for the company at any given time? And so that became sort of a rubric uh for how I think about where I spend my time.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah, great. What works for you in staying positive through the up and down roller coaster of building a startup?
Jake Moshenko: Oh, great question. Um what works for me for staying positive... I wouldn't, you know, there's nothing I'd rather be doing. So for me it's, it's kind of easy. So uh, you know, the downs are obviously what they are. But you don't, you don't set out to start a startup and leave the comfort of big corporate life for, like I said, a straight line, linear, everything is obvious, uh the outcome is, is foretold kind of situation. So the downs just kind of come with the territory. Um, one of the, one of the most important things I think is to have frequent honest chats with your co-founders... you know presuming that you have co-founders... about how the business is going, first and foremost. But you're having those chats all the time. But also how the way the business is going is making you feel. Um and that's something that I think people don't, they're not open enough about and they're not vulnerable enough with is trying to map back, right? My, my feelings are obviously impacted by the business. And we should talk about that. And we should write it down and we should maybe even develop plans for how to manage our emotional state uh going forward.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: Yeah. God, so many companies and so many founders we talk to, it's, it's, it's interesting um to me, and I come from a psychology background, of how often we hear that as a founder there's like... the mental health of a founder is so incredibly important to that company as a leader. And how so many people have learned that they need support, and having co-founders is one huge way of, of getting that support. Um uh you know you don't have to go to a therapist. Sometimes you can get it through the people you're building a company with. And you can also get it outside too, but it seems to be, I would say one of the trends that we have heard a lot in the last 12 months is the, the mental health of the leaders of the company um oftentimes determine the success of that company. So if you haven't sought it out, you know, I would just say maybe explore what others are doing because um it's helping a lot of people and I think that's great. Um as, as we wrap up here Jake, if someone wanted to find you or find um your company um Authzed, where would they go?
Jake Moshenko: Um the web. So we're at authzed.com. And we are willing, ready and able to talk with anybody about their thoughts around authorization. Whether they think they're more suited for a traditional model, or whether they're ready to take a, take the plunge to something relationship-based or Zanzibar-like, we're happy to just chat. So I, I highly encourage people to take advantage of that. We have a special landing page for our listeners. Like, I know most of you aren't at a computer right now and you're not typing in authzed.com, but we do have a special page at authzed.com/podcast where you can go and you can just schedule a quick consultation. And we'll talk to you about what you're doing and why it is the perfect thing for you or what you could potentially be doing better.
Jake Aaron Villarreal: That's great. Well, Jake, thanks so much for joining uh and having the courage to come on and tell your story and understand kind of the journey of where things are and where they're headed. It sounds exciting. It'll be great to have you come back on in the next 6, 12 months and hear the updates on that new innovation that you're talking about that you can't share with us today. And to the listeners for listening, appreciate you taking your time to spend it with us. It means the world to me. Uh my name is Jake Aaron Villarreal, the host of the show, and can't wait to connect with you all on the next episode. Until then, take care.
Before we wrap up, I want to give a big shout out to all the entrepreneurs that have joined to make this podcast possible. And for all the listeners for listening, it means the world to me that you chose to spend your time with us today. I'm your host Jake Aaron Villarreal, signing off for now, but can't wait to connect with you all soon on the next episode. Take care.
This show is sponsored by Match Relevant, a company that helps venture-backed startups find the best people in the market. And they do it in three simple steps. First, they sit down with founders to understand their story. Second, they tell their story into multiple candidate channels. And third, they schedule interviews within 48 hours. Find us at matchrelevant.com to learn more about how we do it.
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