The Exchanges

Q All right. Fair enough. I'm probably worse than anything I can think because that's what's required in today's world, but permit.io. So what are people paying you for? What's the company do?

A So it's very straightforward. We allow developers to bake permissions into their products in an easy fashion and the way, in a way that it's future proof. So they only have to build it once and they don't have to constantly rebuild it. I got to that as in my previous company, a lookout, I ended up rebuilding access control for our product five times in a three-year-old company. I was like, that's annoying. That's probably four times, if not five times too many. And, um, And we quickly realized that this is common for basically every product. You've seen these interfaces, these capabilities across the space a billion times, things like user management with the ability to assign roles, API key management, approval flows, ability to ask permissions from another user, audit logs, the ability to see who did what within the system, the ability for each of the tenants within the system to see that on their own, Uh, and invites and impersonation and emergency access. And you've seen all of these things a billion times. And every time you saw them, some poor schlep of a developer had to build them from scratch. And what we're saying is very straightforward. Just like you don't want to build your authentication, just like you don't want to build billing, just like you don't want to build a database. There's no reason that you'll have to build authorization or permissions. So we provide t…

AI assessment note: “We allow developers to bake permissions into their products in an easy fashion”

Q Okay. Fair enough. Um, give me more of the backstory here. What, what year did you go launch the company in?

A So we got started, uh, basically a year and a half ago. We bootstrapped for a year. Um, so my co-founder and I worked in garage mode, but not in a garage cause I don't have a garage. Um, And we initially started by working with design partners and just delivering the SaaS offering to them kind of more, a bit more handholding. Then as part of the service we built, we had, uh, um, a microservice, a component, uh, that sync the application with the, uh, the, sorry, the authorization layer with the application itself. We decided to export that as an open source project. And that's what's called Opal today, which you mentioned kind of in the opening brief. And while Opal is a very young project, it's not even a year old. It's already being used in production in amazing companies like Tesla, Zapier, Accenture, and others. And we have a very large community of developers in Slack.

AI assessment note: “we got started, uh, basically a year and a half ago. We bootstrapped for a year.”

Q Well, I don't want to die, so is there anything you can share with me that wouldn't get me killed, just to give us a sense of what you were working on?

A So actually, it's, it's been more than seven years since my service, so I can be slightly more open about it, but I obviously can't go into much detail, but I can tell you that I worked a lot in software engineering and cybersecurity, and I can tell you that I I had the good fortune of working on projects that were critical for the security of both the state in Israel and other allied nations. Um, I worked on a lot of cases that, um, I described in other talks as, um, working on high stacks and high stakes. Uh, for example, I had a situation where, uh, I was required to deploy software to production, but people told me you only have four attempts to get this right. And if you fail, people would die. So not exactly CICD. Um, and, uh, obviously a lot of stakes. And I also, in that specific incident, I ended up running into a bug. That, uh, kind of, uh, thwarted our endeavors initially, and we really tore our minds to find where it is, and it ended up being a vulnerability in Windows itself, in the operating system, and I think, um, seven years later or so, it was announced as a CVE, but before that, it was unknown, um, so we both had to, uh, dive deep into the stack, And also handle those high stakes and those kinds of situations. I think really taught me a lot about, um, taking software to the edge into the extreme cases and making the best out of it.

AI assessment note: “I can tell you that I worked a lot in software engineering and cybersecurity”

Q How do you guys come up with a cap, right? Raising six million on a note or safe.

A Um, you start by, uh, Wetting your finger and waving it in the air and getting a gauge from that. And the rest of it is negotiation, like everything else in the market. Um, so you try to get a sense of what you can get for this. And then in negotiation, you move a bit to the left, a bit to the right. And, but I honestly, I wasn't optimizing for the valuation. I was optimizing for the players I want to work with and the types of relationships I want to have with the, uh, ongoing longer journey of the company. Um, and I even, I think in some parts of it, I, uh, um, decided to opt for a lower valuation to work with people that I wanted.

AI assessment note: “the rest of it is negotiation, like everything else in the market.”