1Password originated as an internal autofill tool for web development testing
Jeff Shiner · 1Password’s growth story | How they went from bootstrapped to $6B company | Jeff Shiner (CEO) · Apr 24, 2025 · at 5:04
Jeff Shiner, CEO of 1Password, discusses how co-founders Dave Teare and Roustem Karimov initially created the software in 2005 to reduce testing costs at their web development consultancy.
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“And so they thought one of the ways that we can make it less expensive is to automate some of the testing. We'll just spend a few weeks, build this tool that will allow us to autofill so that when we do testing, we can use that tool to autofill addresses and credit cards and sign in and do that sort of stuff. And as they started to build it, they started to realize, well, this would be really useful like for themselves. And so they added the security part to it.”
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