Tech Brew Ride Home - (TWTR SPC) Samsung Event And The 1Password Team

Episode Date: August 14, 2021

Wrapping up the Samsung event with @samrutherford of Gizmodo, taking stock of the state of foldable phones, and the 1Password engineering and founding team joins for the entire second half! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

On April 4th, 2023, around 2 in the morning, a man was found stabbed multiple times on a sidewalk in downtown San Francisco. Hey, who did this to you? What happened next turned the story into a political firestorm. Reports have identified the victim as Bob Lee, the founder of Cash App. From Bloomberg Podcasts, this is Foundering, the Killing of Bob Lee, beginning April 16. Hello, everybody. My name is Chris and Suna. Today is Wednesday, August 11th, and this is the TechMeme Ride Home Experience. The whole concept for the show was essentially I've been a long-time listener to the TechMeme Ride Home podcast, which Brian hosts. And, you know, I'd find myself just kind of like walking around, especially during the pandemic, wanting to talk to someone about these stories. And it occurred to me, why don't I just talk to Brian himself? And so social audio happened to come along at the very right moment, and here we are. So, essentially we take some time to go deeper into the biggest, most interesting tech stories that are going on in the world. We try to bring on folks who know some things about these things.

And on the one hand, put things into some historical context. We also talk about product context. We talk about the business models of this stuff. And we just try to learn kind of what's happening. Like what is going on in this world at the bleeding edge of tech. So that's the preamble. This topic today, specifically around the galaxy and full. in the Samsung event. I am actually going to plead my ignorance. I don't follow that space too closely,

but this is something that Brian does, and Sam specifically does. No kidding, because it's unpacked. The event was unpacked, Chris. And I just wanted to make sure that you guys saw, in a very embarrassing public way, how little I follow that space. So, you know, it's like if I called it like, I don't know, like the, no, I'm not going to come up with something else. Anyways, anyways, you got the point. I'm going to let Brian and Sam take over. Yeah, let me, let me take the bottom. and Sam, even though I'm making fun of Chris, today's event was all about flipping and folding.

So let's just start out with your general impressions of the event today. We got a flip three. We got to fold three. Let's start with that, and then we can get into the other things around the margins. Yeah, for sure. And it's kind of interesting that you say that, like, you know, you don't have a lot of experience with foldables. And I think that was kind of the whole message of Samsung's entire event.

This is the third Galaxy Fold, but I mean, you'd be totally forgiven if you kind of wrote the first one off. That one had a bunch of issues. The second one made a lot of big, interesting steps. But now we have a third generation Galaxy Fold and then a new Galaxy Z-Fit3. And I think that, you know, Samsung is really trying to push. They're like, oh, hey, foldables are ready for the mainstream. Yes, they're still, you know, wildly expensive, especially the Fold 3. But, you know, they're like, oh, these things are usable.

They have water resistance. They have the durability improved. And that's kind of, you know, really kind of make sure that people's like, oh, foldables aren't scary. They're usable. And there might be even some reasons, some very good reasons why you might want one. Yeah, that's an interesting way to think about it. Like the, I had, I actually, even though I do cover this all the time, I had forgotten that there was a difference between a fold and a flip.

you know, and I believe you have the fold, right? So first of all, just explain, explain how Samsung has these two different devices and how they're slightly different, but then maybe what's new about these new ones. Yeah, for sure. So the, the Gatsy Z Flip 3 is kind of their more mainstream phone. It's kind of like your old school flip flown, but modernized with modern flexible screen technology. And so that one, I think, you know, that one in between being priced at $1,000, you know, that one is like, oh, okay, it's kind of like, you know, an interesting alternative to a traditional, you know, glass slab smartphone. And the pricing makes it so that it's like, oh, now you actually got to

think about that choice if you're the kind of person who buys, you know, premium phones. And then on the other hand, you have the Galaxy Z Fold 3, and that is their big screen. It's their power user phone. And, you know, it's big, it's heavy. But if you really love big screen phones, you can't really find anything better. And then for this model, they add a style of support. So not only is a big screen phone, also kind of a Galaxy Note replacement. So it's kind of bridging that really those kind of two audiences into something that is like really, you know, do everything device unlike anything we've really seen before. All right. I want to come back to your personal experience with the fold. But in general, both of these are sort of iterative devices. Like there's not,

the fold gets the S-Pen support. I think the screens got improved. There's water resistance or whatever. But essentially, both of these phones are kind of like their previous gens, right? Yeah. The designs are very similar to the previous generations. And like you said, It is iterative, but it's iterative in the way that everything, it's like adding that extra layer of polish, because these devices were so new that there were just a lot of things that Samsung just simply wasn't going to know until people were able to use them in the wild. And now two generations in, they're able to make a couple important upgrades in terms of just everyday usability. And I think that's partly what the previous models were missing.

the flip, which is the one that is the razor sort of clamshell, it flip, because it reminds you of a flip phone of old. One interesting thing is that this is the first time that at least Samsung has got one of these photo phones under $1,000. Are they the only ones? Are they the first to get a foldable phone under $1,000? Yeah. And right now, it's just, you know, various kind of depending on where you live, but especially in North America, the flip is by far the cheapest foldable device. And it is the first one to get like really get under that, sneak in under that $1,000 price money. And if you look over in China, there's the Huawei mate X series and Xiaomi has a couple things that they're working on.

I haven't released yet. But especially over in the West, Samsung is, you know, they have a three-generation lead on pretty much everybody else. Obviously, we can't know this because they were just announced today in terms of the durability. You mentioned the durability and how they're learning several generations in, but I'm going to reference your piece about living with one of these in a second. But the idea of having a crease and having, you know, air bubbles. appear in between the screens and things like that. Do we know anything about what they've done for this generation to make the durability and those sorts of things go away? Yeah, for sure.

I mean, obviously they added the IPX8 water resistance. So you can, you know, it's you can drop and adopt of five feet of water for 30 minutes. And that is right there is a big improvement in terms of, you know, just usability because, you know, most premium phones today come with water resistance. And so that was, you know, a really important. kind of tick in the box that Samsung had to do. But in terms of durability, there's a new armor aluminum. It's Samsung's custom alloy that's supposed be stronger on the hinge.

The screen protector itself, they switched from a TPU material to a PTE material. And they've made the adhesive for that factory installed screen protector significantly stickier. So they're talking about 80% more, 80% better durability. Obviously, that's going to be remaining to be tested and making sure that, you know, that stream protector does not come away because that's, you know, what caused the bubbles on my personal fold too. Do we know anything about the market penetration of foldables in terms of, and I'm not saying even worldwide, let's just say North America. And it used to be I would know sort of anecdotally about these sort of things because I'd be on the train every day.

I'd see various phones in the world and things like that. But do we know if this lineup has been successful for Samsung specifically, or is this still experimental for them? I think Samsung has been really cautious about releasing sales figures, especially when it comes to the foldables. So there's not a ton of information available. But kind of like you were saying, I haven't seen anyone use one of these in the wild that wasn't like a YouTuber or

in the tech media space. And so I think that kind of goes to show you that to certain extent, they haven't really penetrated it. And that's kind of what this, you know, they're really trying to make a statement about with this unpacked event. Yeah. So actually, do you want to ask the audience? Like who here?

Raise your hand. Raise your hand. Give us some kind of a moat. Give us a sense if you have a foldable or flip phone right now. And I'm seeing crickets. Nothing. Yeah. Yeah.

I mean, that's supposed to be expected, yeah. Yeah. So, okay, but Sam, the, even the reason that I reached out to you is because you did earlier this week write a piece about living with a foldable phone. Yep. Which you said was a game changer with one terrible downside. So let me just specify that, and this is so confusing, I actually even writing up today's show, I had our hard time distinguishing between the flip and the fold. you have the fold two and the fold is the one. I have the fold too.

The fold is the one where if it's closed up, it looks like a candy bar. It's very tall. And then... Yeah, it's kind of like a long baton almost, like a TV remote with a screen on it. Or a candy bar. Right.

Yeah, yeah, right. And then, but what this one has that the flip doesn't. The flip, again, looks like an old school razor and has a little tiny screen that will give you like notifications and stuff. But the fold in theory you can use without opening because it has a front screen on the top that functions like a full smartphone slab of glass. Is that right? Yeah.

So on the outside of the device, there's a what Samsung calls a cover screen. And it's basically an exterior screen so that, I mean, the way it's kind of intended to use that, If you want to check, you know, notifications, respond to a text, you know, look up something in Google Maps or whatever, the exterior cover screen is able to, like, get you what you need to do quickly and then you can go about your business. It's kind of like, you know, kind of make things really easy and simple. And so, you know, because opening up the phone is actually kind of a process. Like, it's a two-handed operation. And so, you know, you don't always want to, like, sit there and, like, unfold something, especially if you're walking around the street. That's 100% my question is that as dumb as this may seem, if I say this out loud, it's like,

how often would I really want to unfold my phone to use it? But in reality, if you think about it, you can see how it'd be like, God damn it, do I have to open? I just want to see what that text is. I just want to respond. So question number one, you've been living with a Z-fold to. How often do you find yourself opening it? and how often are you just leaving it closed and using it like anybody else uses a slab of glass? Yeah, so kind of the way I think about it is if you're walking on the street or you're in a hurry or whatever,

you just use that outside screen and you use it basically like any other phone. Where the, you know, that big interior screen comes into play is if you're, you know, commuting on the subway, if you're, you know, watching a movie in bed, or even just like, you know, sitting on the couch, having that actually, screen real estate makes browsing everything just so much better or playing games or everything. So it's really just like kind of two modes. There's the quick on the go mode and that's the outside cover screen and there's the, oh, I want to enjoy something. I want to like kind of sink my teeth into some content, whatever it is. And that's when that big screen really comes into play.

Okay, but that I'm going to ask it a kind of slightly different way, but the same question, which is like my phone's sitting on my desk in front of me right now and so I wouldn't be opening it up to do something. Like, if you, in your average day, um, are you opening it 30% of the time, 50% of the time? I'm gonna say 50% of the time.

Interesting. Because it's that, it's, yeah, it's really, it's really that balance in terms of, and obviously, you know, it depends on what you're doing that day. But, you know, there are different times where like, or even like, I'll check something. I'll be scrolling through Twitter and I see like a funny, video and I'm like, oh, I want to see that. And then I'll open up the phone. And so it's like,

it's kind of dynamic in that way where it changes the way operates based on what you want to do. You know, I will say just to jump in here because that is a use case that I think is relevant, or at least a behavior where half the time I'll see emails or I'll see things that are just kind of like somewhat larger tasks where I do want the bigger screen. And I'm kind of like, you know, even though I've got like an iPhone Pro 11 Max or whatever, probably get that one wrong too. There's still moments where I want to have more screen real estate. So I can imagine actually having that in the device itself and being able to expand in situ kind of allows you to drive through and you know, I'm so distractible that by

the time I get to my big screen, I'm like, what was I even doing? I'm like, oh, look, Twitter. So I can imagine that that actually might actually increase your productivity to some extent. I guess is that your experience of it? And by the way, I also just want to remind everyone that I am pinning tweets that are, you know, sharing related content or reviews or things like that too as we're going. So just keep that in mind. Yeah, it's, I mean, I'm not going to say I'm more productive on this thing because this, like the fold to me is like the ultimate time wasteer because it makes every distraction way more interesting. Huh.

But, you know, I have, you know, I have used it at trade shows and stuff like that. And, you know, being able to multitask and just having like side by side apps where I can, you know, check a calendar and then check an email to make sure, like, hey, am I going to the right place or whatever. That is supremely useful, absolutely. That's one of the things that they were saying was even improved today is like, you know, tiling around various things so you can have multiple things running at the same time. But go ahead, Chris. Well, you got a faster screen refresh rate and things like that. I guess the question is, you know, with this event and with all the press around it, do you think Samsung achieved what they set out to do? In other words, to convince people that, you know,

a fold or a folding device or a flip phone is both sufficiently different, and more appropriate for the given use cases relative to a flat slab of glass and metal. Yeah, for sure. I think in terms of the fold, that price is still going to put out of reach of pretty much everybody. You have to be a bleeding edge enthusiast to like say, I'm going to willingly spend $1,800 on phone, whatever. When it comes to the flip, I think that is much more interesting because it's like, I mean, if you look around the space, that might be the most stylish phone on the market. on the market now. They did a really good job with the cases, with the colors. It looks great. They even have the case with like the elastic band on the back. So it's like it kind of brings in a little bit of utility and like, you know, it's better looking than a pop socket. And so

I think the style play is a really interesting angle from Samsung. And then combined with that with making it basically the same price as, you know, an iPhone 12 pro or whatever, then it's like, oh man, I can have something that looks really cool and it does everything I wanted to do normally. And I think that's a really interesting kind of conundrum. Final question ish with the caveat that we don't know how much this has been improved, but you mentioned in your living with a foldable phone that you have been living with a crease and things like that. How much does that bug you in day-to-day driving? The crease bugs me about 0%.

If you look at it straight on, you don't see the crease. It's only if you look at it from like, you know, side angles, you actually notice the crease. And to me, like, I honestly don't even see the crease anymore. Now, as it comes to like the bubbling, you know, I've had the phone for about nine, ten months. And, you know, because the screen protectors kind of peeled away, air bubbles just get trapped in there. And it's a daily battle where I'm constantly like smoothing out the screen, pushing out the bubbles. And it's really annoying. And I said this back when I reviewed this.

And it's like I was worried that this was going to happen. And it did. And so I think, you know, that was one of the things that Samsung works to improve. And it's like little details that like you don't really think much about in the beginning. And it becomes like, oh, this is just really annoying on a daily basis. And I think that's what they, you know, really kind to address in part with the news. devices. That sounds horrible, by the way. Like a laminated device that like gets bubbles. Right. And so I have to be kind of kind of specific when I talk about this because

technically you can remove the screen protector and that would solve all of my problems in 10 seconds. Now, if you go back to the galaxy fold one, when people did that, they just ruined the screen because it was completely different construction. And so for this one, like, you know, Samsung was really careful to warn people, hey, you can take it off. But if you do it, we strongly, strongly recommend you take it to a service center. And, you know, so I tried to play by Samsung's rules. I tried to, you know, abide by all their guidelines and stuff. And it just doesn't work because, you know, after six months or so, you know, I wanted to take it apart, but take the screen protector off. But, you know, it was the middle of pandemic.

like it doesn't make sense to go out to a Samsung service center which there aren't a ton of or maybe a Best Buy and then just to get a screen protector replaced that's something that people have kind of gotten accustomed to doing at home and so that it was definitely frustrating but you know I have talked to other people other fold users who took the screen protector off and they said that they haven't had any issues but you know if you know that's not Samsung would really prefer you not to Well, I guess we can look forward to, what would it be, 2023 when the iPhone gets a foldable or something. Yeah, yeah. I mean, in some ways, Apple's smart because they're kind of sitting back and watching Samsung kind of navigate the early stages of foldable devices. And this is like what Apple has been really good at throughout the years, is they let people to kind of test the waters,

and then they swoop in a couple generations in. like, oh, here's our device. And it doesn't have any issues because we didn't make, we didn't try this before people thought it was ready or before they felt that the device was in a proper, proper state for the masses. Got it. All right, Sam, we really appreciate you coming on,

really appreciate your experience, you know, at least educating me on this whole space. I did a little bit of digging. I got to say this like today and I learned a lot more about it. And I was actually impressed by the look at these things, by the functionality that could be there. I think you're right. The price point, it just makes it a little bit, you know, you're not going to really experiment. But you got to be either, you know, got crypto, you know, billions or, you know, just, I guess, looking for that extra productivity boost or something.

But really helpful putting this all in context for us. So thanks for coming on today. Great. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Awesome. Feel free to stick around. I wanted to, I guess, you know, bring this up as it's not even. Actually, it is. It's a bit of a segue. You know, today, Twitter launched a new font. And, of course, it sort of broke the Internet and the places where people talk about and Kavich about things that they see and that they weren't consulted on. And it's so, you know, it's crazy, right? Like, I will admit that I do this. And I probably shouldn't admit this because now everyone who I work with is going to know that I'm the culprit.

But oftentimes I will go into like Google Docs and I will select all and I will change the font. Usually do something like work stands, you know, totally appropriate. very tasteful, of course, which is my taste. And then I'll go into the styles and I'll change normal to the normal text to have the new fonts and then everything cascades. And I'm sure everyone just like gets really, really upset with me. But they don't know, at least until now, that I'm the one who does that. And so I feel like Twitter kind of just did that to like most of the internet.

And, you know, I like the chirp typeface. It's a little bit like Franklin Gothic. It's, you know, it's its own thing. There are areas where, at least on the website, the font hasn't. totally rolled out, but it does, it looks and it feels different. It's, it's sharp and it's bright, especially on retina displays. And I'm curious if I will, I don't know, if I'm going to notice that feel, you know, just as I have with San Francisco, which is the typeface that Apple uses, when I'm spending time in Twitter properties. It doesn't seem to have rolled out on

the desktop app yet, though. And what's the same thing I was going to say about it? It's probably boring to people who don't follow this stuff. But I can't see it on tweet deck and also So it's like, you know, tweet tech. Oh, rip tweet tech. I mean, you've got to be using the beta. Like, tweet tech's going away. Well, right. But listen, I use what I use.

But also, I'm also, you know how there's people that like can't hear, um, music, can't hear tunes or something like that. Oh, I see. They're like, they're like font blind. I'm kind of, I'm a little bit design blind. I wouldn't even say font blind. I'd be like, you could change a whole bunch of stuff to me. And you were like, they changed it.

What am I? What does this have to do me? Exactly. Yeah, yeah. Like, I don't see it. I'm like, look at the linkatures. You're like, I don't get it. Anyways, it was a big deal to me, and I saw it. And I saw, I see you Twitter.

And like, they, I don't know, they've been doing a lot of stuff. And I remember, I'll bring this, this one last anecdote out. This is a very, well, this is interesting to me, but I don't know if anybody else cares. But when I was at Google, and I was working Google Plus, we also tried to design our own font. And I believe that font was called Open Sans. Now, ironically, open sands, you know, and I was a big open source advocate for a long time, was not actually that open. In fact, there was some dispute with the typeface company that designed it that they wanted to be paid for like every single install or something.

And, you know, think about a web font and think about Google scale. And every time the font gets downloaded, that company gets paid. I mean, that's a really, really great business. But Google was like, uh-uh. So that's actually how Roboto came along is that they ended up doing it internally. They could come into their own font so they would have their own look and feel. And that's one of the things that sort of got the whole web font thing going. But I found that to be very interesting.

That was going to be part of the Google Plus, like, design, brand, voice, and all this stuff. So I just, I guess I understand the both business cost of putting out a font, of designing your font, the cost that goes into it, and just the weight in not using a system font. But we're, you know, moving forward with the web, it's coming, you know, the design is getting improved. etc., etc. Anyways, so hats off to that team. Hopefully they're going to go off and spend some time with some lead type or something tonight, you know, have a good time. Okay, the reason why that's sort of a segue is because this is not something, Brian, you brought up.

I don't even know if it made it to TechBeam today, but I did see it trending on Twitter, which is that one password announced, and I think this actually happened a couple days ago, but it just hit my transom today, that they are opening up their early access program for OnePassword 8. Now, OnePassword is I'm sure many people are familiar with it, but it is the number one password, you know, as a word altogether. That's the brand name. And it is essentially a password manager. Now, I went back into my email archives and I found that my very first email with Dave Tare, the CEO of OnePassword, back when he was running a company called Agile Web Solutions. So he was like early days of Agile was from 2006. And in 2006, I

sent him an email, and I was like, hey, I think you should add support for open ID into OnePassword. So I've been a user of this product for a very long time. I have to say, I was not successful in convincing them to adopt Open ID. And of course, Open ID has not really taken the Webby Storm as we had once hoped. But regardless, OnePassword did not only succeed, but stick around. They announced a $100 million investment from Excel partners back in July to really blow this thing up. And so, Which I didn't cover, but I really almost, I would have if it hadn't been a busy day. Because I live with OnePassword and everything I do all the time. Yeah, well, so why don't, you know, I want to bring up some folks today from the OnePassword team.

We actually have a bunch of folks here. I reached out to them because I was like, hey, you know, I'm sort of like dunking on this and lots of people are dunking on this because of a number of either ways of communicating or messaging or just, again, you know, it's just like changing the fonts. Like, there are some changes, and people are afraid and they're scared. And so, therefore, people have expressed that concern. Brian, but why don't you tell us a little bit about how you use one password, so people sort of understand, you know, what that experience is, what that product is. And we'll bring this up and talk about sort of these changes in what's happening next. I mean, we keep talking about Chris, we're going to do an episode one time where we talk about how we do we do our workflows and things like that.

It's going to be a ticketed space. That's what we're going to do. I mean, I still have tickets for that. I feel like over a decade now, I've been using OnePassword, and it's like, you know, it was early days of me trying to be secure in what I did on the internet. This is me not doing an ad for them. This is me, like literally, you know, every single login that I have has a different password. And then when they integrated it with the iPhone, that was insanely great.

And so, yeah, I mean, every time I go to any website, I log in with OnePassword when it's on the phone. I can, I just do the same thing and it opens with Face ID. They integrated, what would you call it, the two-factor authentication where it's the code. OTP, right, exactly. So, I mean, it's just, it just gets better and better and better. And, you know, I'm now paying for it on a yearly basis. But I'm happy to. It's one of those things that is so fundamental to everything that I do that it's fine.

It's fine. Is that your word? It's fine in the way that you pay for everything that makes your life function. You're satisfied and not angry. I'm okay, okay. If that sounded bad, no, I'm saying I love one password. I'm happy to pay. And then what I need you to do is explain to me what this new change is that people are up in arms about.

Well, like I said, we've got, we've got, we've got Michael here to sort of help us to, you know, go through this and understand this. we get folks from the team. I will give you my impression. I pinned my tweet, which is part of a, I guess, I'll explain how this happened. And how I, I don't know, I was on Twitter a lot today,

just ogling at the font, the new typeface. And I saw this guy, Cinder, who's a prolific Mac developer, basically say, oh, I think I should go, what did he say? He said, I'm really thinking about going and creating my own open source password manager.

I was like, oh, that's interesting. I use a lot of his apps. I'm like, that's cool, right? It seemed like a totally benignive. thing to say. And then a couple of tweets later, I saw someone else's tweet, this guy, Curtis, Herbert, or Herbert, at Parrots, where he, I guess, downloaded the 1Password 8 binary, took a look inside, and realized that this was no longer a native Mac app, but was actually an electron app. And for folks who have used electron apps, they typically

are pretty resource intensive, they tend to be slow, they tend to like, you know, it's like basically running a browser as an application. And if your browser is already slow, now you've got dozens of browsers that are all running as separate instances because of the way that platform system works. And so instantly, for me, I was like, oh, this is terrible. And the reason why this is happening, and again, this is all extrapolation. And that's why we're having this conversation was because, you know,

they raise all this money and now they've got to be cross-platform. They're no longer true to their Mac roots. And, you know, they're banning us. And it's another example of how the world is going to hell, et cetera, and so forth. And so that was sort of like, I guess, my initial response. And then I was like, well, let me take a step back. There's reasons and yada yada. And so anyways, I would love to be, you know, told how I've got it wrong and what's really going on here. So I will step back and let the folks One Password tell us more. Hey, Chris. This is Rustin.

Hey, man. One of the founders of One Password. And I remember the first time we met in San Francisco. Yeah. And then I think at some point, you mentioned that you have over 10,000 items stored in one password? Oh, right. That was my problem. Was it? I was like I had like, I was like stress testing the limits of this thing. I'm going to see how many I have right now because I probably have way more than 10,000.

And that was crazy. Like I actually, I use every time, every time our people on our team tell us the performance is fine. I'm like, we ever use it at that test over 10,000 items in one password. You weirdo, Chris. You weirdo. I know. I'm sorry. Right now I only have 6,539 items, and that's across 10 volts. So I don't know. It's much more reasonable.

We should say it's not just passwords because, right, there's secure notes. Is that what it is, Chris? Because, you know, I save all sorts of secure notes in there for like, you know, my- No, it's mostly passwords. I mean, this will tell you my scar tissue. This is why I am such a, I don't know, weird OCD person. I mean, if you go all the way back to, like, the early days when I was, like, taking screenshots of things and posting it to Flickr, like, I tried every goddamn app that came out. And back when, you know, before Open ID and before Google authentication, you would, you know, use mostly the same password everywhere until a password manager came along and allowed you to, you know,

change your password and not use the same password everywhere. And then you needed a place to record all those passwords, hence one password, hence the proliferation of all those assignments. So, yes, I use many of the features, you know, including, you know, I've got passport information and address information. I've got Wi-Fi passwords. I imported my keychain at one point back when there was a separation. I don't know, before OnePassword actually used a keychain to store the information and then somehow that changed.

Anyways, I have a lot of... Yeah, so I think that's probably more than like any other one password user. But you just downloaded the OnePassword 8, right, as well today? I did. I did. So that was pretty nice. How was it? Was it fast for you? Like, did you see any performance issues there?

You know, I haven't, I haven't gone too deep with it yet. I did sign it. I will, you know, this is not going to be a therapy session for me necessarily, or I don't want it to be, but I will say that, let me, let me set this up a little bit. I have resisted the whole subscription software kind of migration, like as heavily as I could, and I keep falling. I feel like, you know, it's just like a million tiny, you know,

red ants kind of like eating my feet and eventually, like, I just kind of give in and I die. And one password was one of those where I switched, browsers. Chrome had gotten so slow and so bloated for me or whatever, and I found a browser called Sidekick. And I, of course, you know, migrated my extensions and all the rest. And Sidekick is built on Chromium, so, you know, it should have been a clear migration. But when it came to one password, the one, like, and this is a security feature, actually, the one password extension didn't work with Sidekick because it wasn't signed to work with that browser.

So it was actually, it would have been insecure, essentially, to work with any random browser, because blah-b-well, I'm not going to get into the details. And so I had to switch to a one-password X membership, which was the new version of the extension in order to use it with Sidekick. And so that's when you finally got me to switch over to be a subscriber. And so now that I've downloaded one-password X, you know, you guys are in this interesting kind of liminal phase as a sketch is, for example, of moving from, you know, you buy a license, you own the software. If you want to upgrade to the next version, you buy the next license versus now it's more of a subscription. So I guess to try to answer your question, I haven't gone too deep with it, but I feel like as a result of using more and more of the web-based and cloud-based features of OnePassword, I'm going to notice how performant it is.

And especially, I don't know if you guys have what the plans are for being cross-platform. It's interesting. And we could argue what is native and what is not. But to be honest, for me, performance is very, very important. And I actually tested the native and quote-unquote a native. one password side by side. And the version that we have right now is faster. Like the UI-wise,

things that I can do there are faster. And how do you achieve that? Like, let's talk a little bit of what's working in your favor. Because one of the things that I heard you guys talk about before is that, you know, you've moved over Rust. And, you know, I don't know. Also, like software, especially as complex as a product like OnePassword, develops just a lot of kind of cruft and stuff over time,

you know, unless you've rewritten it recently. And my sense is that one password has a lot of old code that goes way back. And so this opportunity with one password eight really was an opportunity to move really to a web front end and a stronger kind of foundational core. And so that gives you some of the new web architecture stuff to speed up the front end. Is that accurate or are I getting that wrong? Can I jump in for a second? Just a second. I want to say that we did rewrite one password of one password.

in the past a few times and I think we it was always a very painful experience and it always involved a lot of work so people should not their software right but I think in this case it was justified and I let Michael do to say to tell you why okay Michael why don't you introduce yourself hi yeah I'm Michael Fay I'm the VP of engineering for the client apps here at one password nice and thanks by the Chris thanks for having us this is cool I mean Yeah, I had to learn what a Twitter space was, but once I got that sorted, like, this is great. So there's this story that I have that I sort of tell to everybody that I interviewed to come join my team.

And it's that, you know, if you go back to the beginning of OnePass, right, it started as, you know, Dave and Rustin built this thing in a cave out of spare parts, you know, way back way. And it's a Mac app, right? And it was, they built it to solve a problem that they were having as they were developing websites, which was, Rostom was, Rusum was, Bruce and Dave were building sign-in forms and contact forms and had to keep typing stuff in. And they were like, you just write an app that does this for us. This is ridiculous. We'll do that. We'll take a weekend.

We'll do that. We'll put it up on some, you know, conversion tracker and Mac update. And then we'll get back to work. And of course, you know, it blew up and it went from there. So started as a Mac app when the iPhone SDK came out, it became an iPhone app. We hired a Windows developer and an Android developer at, at some point along the way. literally like one of each and said, hey, like, here's what the iPhone app looks like. Here's what the Mac app looks like.

Like, go ahead. Like, go build yourself a one-password app. And here's some, you know, here's a designer that could help you with some of it. And we sort of went. And we had separate teams that were building all of our apps and building them in parallel. And at the time, like, they were, we were using Dropbox to sync your data or we were using ICloud if you were on Apple platforms. And that was fun.

fine and it worked well and we certainly had a lot of success there because we're still here today. But even when I was running the Apple team a few years ago, I would find out stuff that the Windows team did when I read about it on our blog, right? I'd be like, oh, that's cool. The Windows team added this new feature. How many people are we talking about, by the way? Like, how big are these teams? Like five people each. Oh, okay. So like a big coordination problem. Yes, yeah, no, it certainly, it shouldn't have been. But nonetheless, like, we were all independent. Like, you know, we were like that we've got our roadmap.

We're building our cool features. The other teams are building their cool features. No, you know, no big deal. And if someone, one of the other teams added a feature that we thought was cool, like we'd go and build it. And but we'd do it from scratch and do it our own way, right? And make our own thing. And so we ended up in this space where we just had separate teams building separate things,

even though they were all one password apps. And even when we introduced, like six years ago, when we introduced OnePassword.com, we still built the support for the service into the client apps separately. And so we had effectively five, four or five full implementations from back end to front end of a one password app and including the communication, all the code and all the logic and everything for communicating with the server. And we tried to do a much better job of sort of documenting the APIs and documenting the database structures and everything. And still we ended up with differences among the clients that when it came time to change things, you know, our server lead would come to us and say, hey, like, it's time to add this new feature to your apps. When can you get this to us?

And myself and every other platform lead would say the same thing, which was like, I don't know, man, like, now's not a good time. I'm busy. like maybe in a few weeks. And like everybody's few weeks was different than everybody else's few weeks. And it just started to paralyze us. Like we just could we couldn't move. We were so excited to have a service, but like we couldn't move fast to save our lives because it's,

you know, like I said, different code stacks. So we said, all right, let's time out. Like this is ridiculous. Like let's take a step back.

And so we started to look at options for creating a shared code library, a back end. Wait, wait. So when was this? This was two, three years ago, two and a half years ago. Okay. Okay. Yes.

We had, we did have a false start where we sort of like tried a thing. It didn't work out. And then we had to sort of stop and start over it. We've used multiple languages to say that. And learn new things along the way. Yes. So, and I won't go into all the super details of that. But so, but at a certain point, like, so in earnest,

back at the end of 2019, leading into 2020, we started to build this back end common, what ended up being the one-password core, which is just, it's a headless one-password app, right? It encapsulates

all the logic of what makes a one-password app, so everything about the cryptography, everything about communicating with the server, the database code, the logic for enforcing permissions up to the front end that says, like, This person can edit an item, but this person's in read-only mode.

All of that stuff lives in one spot. And the goal being that if we consolidate the bulk of the one password app into one spot, then when it comes time for the server team to tell us, hey, look, we're making a change. Cool. We can have one person potentially go and make that change, and we redeploy that to all of our apps at the same time. And so that's where we sort of, we did a thing that you're never supposed to do in software. which is we rebooted all of our apps. We hit file new project on five platforms effectively, right?

Like we said, okay, we're going to build, well, we're going to build a Linux app because we've had customers asking for that for 10 years now. So we think we can build a Linux app. Let's go do that. And we're definitely going to build a new Windows app. So let's do that. We're going to build a new Mac app. And in fact, we sort of said we're going to build two new Mac apps.

And I'll get to that in a second. We're going to build an iOS app. We're going to build an Android app. But since they're all based on this core, we can have these thin UI wrappers around the bulk of the one password, like this HUDLess 1Password app. And it should be easy to build. We should be able to move pretty quickly.

We should be able to get these out the door and move on. And now we've reset. So as we go forward, when we want to build new features and solve new problems and stuff, we have this incredibly strong base to do this on. So what you're seeing now with the long, of one password for Linux back in May, the one password for Windows early access June, and then today's one password early access for Mac. These are the first three of the new core apps. What you're going to see next is one password for iOS and one password for Android,

also built on top of the core. And those are going to complete the first phase of our rewrite here. So that's sort of like where we've been and where we've gotten to so far and a little bit of where we're going. So I'll pause there for questions. I mean, thank you. That's an amazing just chronology in terms of where you guys have been. I had many questions as you were kind of walking us through that. You know, I think one of them is in some ways, I don't know, like the growth of one password is one of these kind of obvious things in retrospect. And I suppose maybe I'm a little bit too close to it because I've worked in the identity space for a long time and, you know, saw the promise of one login, you know, from way, way back in the day.

And our whole sort of reason for being was to destroy the password. And it just turns out the password is far too useful and far too straightforward. And, you know, as the guy that came up with a hashtag, like, I should have known that and known better that a more complicated solution, even if it's more secure, ultimately would probably not take off, given all the second order effects that a single sign on, you know, incurs. I mean, for example, and one of that thoughts that I had, actually, I think this is a big one from an architectural perspective, is that one password used to sort of exist on your personal machine. And, you know, eventually, yes, you added syncing through Dropbox. And that actually was a really big deal.

And I feel like Dropbox and OnePassword kind of lived together because you'd sort of get to a new computer or you'd have your work laptop and you'd sort of sync your one password full. and that was one way of keeping your life, your digital life, kind of consistent across these places. My question, I guess, is about when you started to move into building up the web services side of this, because that never felt like it was part of the One Password, and now it feels like it's an essential part of what OnePassword is becoming, just as everything else is moving to the cloud and we're dealing with thin clients. So help me understand that, because one of the big architectural changes, And I've discovered this in my own life as I have gotten my partner onto OnePassword.

Now she and I have a shared vault. And adding social to any software makes it infinitely more complex. So I understand the aspect of building client software. But walking through the journey of how, like, you know, the cloud and, you know, building more web software became part of what you're doing. Because I think that story actually is similar to other Mac developers and their journey as well. Yeah, so I love this aspect of our history a little bit because that change from standalone vaults that you could opt in to sync over Dropbox or iCloud to

having a hosted service was something that we struggled with for a while and not struggled with like as a moral quandary, but struggled with from a technical point of view because we knew that we knew that, that the strength of one password was that not just in sort of the strength of the cryptography and everything else, but there was real strength in the fact that there was no one central repository for everyone's data. And as soon as we became- Perspective, yes, exactly, like- Exactly, right?

And as soon as we became a hosted service, we're a honeypot, right? We have one spot we can go or someone can go to just get everybody's data. You're like the mountain knocks the passwords, or you don't want to become that at least. Yeah. Exactly. Right. So like we, we, before we even wrote like a single line of code for, for the new hosted service, we said like, we got to, we got to solve this problem. Like we can't, we cannot be a honeypot for for these people. And so, uh, our security team is absolutely brilliant. They came up with this concept of, of the secret key. Uh, so basically it, you take your password and then you take this long, randomized string of digits and you're slapping together. it encrypts your data to such a high degree that it's computationally and feasible that anyone could ever break into it, right? It's like the one actual use case of quantum computing, which we'll never get here. So we're fine. Yeah.

So it's, yeah, I mean, we had this idea that like we should be able to take our database of customer data and just put it up on GitHub, right? Just go ahead. Like, go ahead. Anyone can download this thing and try your best, and it would never matter. That was the bar that we wanted to reach for the security that we had. So and the account password plus secret key got us to that point. So great. Like we solved that aspect.

The other thing, of course, that's always made us. So to be clear, you did actually achieve that level of security. Oh, yes, yes, we did. All of our passwords are not all on GitHub? No, your passwords are not on GitHub. Yeah, I want to be super, super clear. Yep, don't want to leave that ambiguous. Okay.

No, it's, it is, no, it was a benchmark we wanted to hit, but like obviously not the only level. of security. Does need to be tested, but that was the benchmark. Okay. Yeah, yeah. And so the other thing that's always made us a really strong offering is the fact that, like, your data is on your local device, and we didn't want to have a service where you had to be online to go get your stuff, right? So in many ways, like the one password apps that connect, the one password apps connected to the one password.com service are really no different than they've ever been. Like, it downloads your data locally. It's stored locally on your device. It's encrypted on your device. It's transmitted backup to the service fully encrypted and everything else.

But like if you're on a train going through a tunnel, you can pull up all your data and pull out a password or pull out your passport or anything else. So there it's, yes, we have a hosted service, but it's not in sort of the traditional like live, live access to your data only when you're connected to the internet type, type experience. But it also enables us to do things like you were talking about with you and your significant other that you've got you've got shared data now right like I have a vault for me and my

wife that's that's like where everything goes and it's so great to just be like uh do you like like I don't know the kids social security numbers like all right well I have them she has them like everyone has everyone's ever social security number so like simple use cases like that are so much more powerful now and if we were still sort of in the old model it just wouldn't have ever scaled because you find for two people maybe, but like you get up to a team of 10. What like really like you're looking at conflicts conflict resolution. Like it's a real mess. So so it's been a huge, huge win in that regard. Does that answer your question? Yeah. Okay. Yes. Brian has a question. Yeah. Well, by the way, I need to I need to turn on that

shared thing with my wife. Although to this day we don't have that. Wait, wait, wait, wait. Let me pause before you jump into this. Yeah. This is, it's not a lot of like a game changer, but it's like a relationship saver. And at least, hold on, let me finish. Yeah, yeah. And a lot, or it's a relationship destroyer. That's also possible. But one of the challenges with security is getting people who are not in the space

and don't really know how to assess the risk of their digital footprint or their digital experience to adopt these things. And so I found that when I created this shared, and I actually used Dropbox to do the sinking. The share folder with, it's called a vault. It allowed my partner to basically get much more protection and, you know, sharing secure credentials than what she was doing before, which, you know, like many people do, is to reuse the same password in many places or to have a series of three or four passwords that they reuse. And then they will share them amongst their family members and everyone remembers it. And then they start using those and they propagate it like a virus.

And so what this allowed for was to essentially teach. someone how to use a password generator that's going to create something that's more secure, that's not memorable, but have a place to store it and then to use that in multiple places. So I just want to point this out because I did not understand this use case previously, and it's one that I think has really, really improved, at least my sense of overall security and my partners. And so, yeah. Well, and I was going to say, we've been married 10 years and we still don't have,

we still have separate bank accounts and separate credit cards. So there's a lot of things that we haven't joined. But speaking of that, like, you know, I, you know, we were just talking about like kids social security numbers. Like those are the secure notes and things like that. Or even just like filling in credit cards. Even just kids having passwords, you know? Right, right. Exactly.

How do you get them to like use something that's secure? Well, our kids aren't old enough that if they have to log into something, I got to do it for them. But so, all right, I'm sorry. I'm, I'm hemming and honing to. Chris, Chris asks the product questions. Yeah, the product questions, I asked the business questions. And I don't know who wants to take this one. But last month when your latest round was announced, I believe you guys announced that you had like 90,000 business customers at this point. To what degree have you guys up until this point been consumer facing? And to what degree is sort of the business side of it, the enterprise side of it, the enterprise side of it. it may be the future for y'all? It's something that as we've grown, we talk a lot about, like, who is one password for?

And one of the core tenets that we keep coming back to is like, one password's for everyone, right? At the same time, we look at sort of where we have, as a company, we think we have the most growth to do. And we really have a big opportunity, we think, in in the business space. And so we're taking some, we're taking some opportunities to move more into that space and try and tackle some of the problems that we think we can solve in the business space. And you've seen that, well, you maybe have seen that in some of the recent announcements we had earlier this year. We launched a product called Secrets Automation, it's basically one password for cloud services, right? So now, and it integrates in with normal one password, such that, like, you could go and set

up an Amazon web service and use one password to provide the passwords for it or provide tokens for it and know that those passwords, those tokens are stored securely in one password, and it's all managed and you can go and you can go and roll those keys. Like if someone, let's say that someone leaves a company that had been managing these keys for you, Like a company can just be like, all right, cool. Like, I'll just roll those tokens. That person is gone. They don't have access to this anymore.

So, like, we're moving beyond individual password management in that way, but it is all additive, right? It's not at the expense of still providing the experiences and the solutions that we need for customers that are, you know, a family or an individual or a small team, right? Indeed. To what degree, though, I've done a couple stories recently about the big platforms all saying that they're going to kill passwords, Microsoft saying it, Google saying it, everyone's saying it. And we're moving, in theory, towards a future where it's, you know, biometrics and things like that. A company with the name password and the name, you guys still, you guys still see a space and a use case for you all. in a future biometric world? So, yes. Like, one of the cool things about, so first of all, yes. Like, I think that it's, it would be ignorant of me to say, like, don't worry, like, that's all a bunch of bunk.

Like, that's never going to happen. Like, no, certainly not. I think we're all looking forward to it. I think it would be great if you don't have to worry about the fast ones at all. Right? Yes, much more concise than I was going to say. Yes, the technologies that are being proposed to do these things, like, we're excited about and looking at ways that we can adopt them so that we, like, one password could become

potentially a passwordless option, right? Like, okay, cool. Like, we're all in on this, on this future because we think that it's the best way to go for everybody. I mean, you functionally are for me already anyway. I have no idea what any of my passwords are. Like, so it doesn't really matter. It's just the click of a...

This is true. Yeah. And integrated with password autofill and iOS, right? Like, you're signing in using your face and stuff is just working. Yeah. So, I mean, one of the questions, I think is also like where this goes. Because I think having been so intimately familiar, both with like your history and with the evolution of authentication on the web and the increasing places where it's not just

authentication, you know, it is authorization and access. And increasingly, you know, now the world that I'm in, in the fintech space, there's KYC, which is know your customer, which requires increasing levels of authentication with different providers like the government and things like that. I'm sort of reaching a little bit, but I am curious how you guys think about this, because I think it's important to think about where this goes, which right now, obviously, we're in this very interesting moment when in order to go out to many places in the world, you're going to need to have some sort of proof that you've been back.

vaccinated. And OnePassword sits in this very interesting place, you know, where you guys could provide, at least the underpinnings of or the access to. As far as I know, there's no way for me to add vaccination or proof of vaccination as a type of information to OnePass password. Or am I mistaken about that? You are mistaken. We did add a medical record type. Okay. It is, I will say, it is a place to store your personal information. It does not act as any official government. document. So I think that's part of my question, right? Like, on the one hand, there's a storing of the secrets, and then there's the using them in different contexts. And increasingly, at least Apple seems to be, you know, we had this earlier conversation about what Samsung's doing, but I feel like Samsung, at least in my impression of those

devices, aren't really thinking about the way in which people become somewhat more merged with their technology, I guess. And what I mean by that is I'm thinking about how I can use my clipper card in San Francisco to, you know, go and get on the same. subway by just waving my phone, you know, or my watch over the turnstile. And so one password has access to a bunch of these credentials that I would want to use in lots of different circumstances. So to what degree do you see an opportunity maybe to either provide leadership in that space or to store some of that information and then to be able to replay it in different contexts?

Or do you simply want to kind of like be the place where the secrets are stored and that's your business? So we're only, it's like you, it's like you've been hanging out. in some of our Slack channels. Like this is so fun. Like we, this is a type of thing that we talk about a lot is sort of like,

how do we take that data that people do store in one password and make it more actionable? And it's, it's a tricky proposition in a lot of ways because the thing, you know, the behaviors that you were talking about

using, using your phone to just, you know, get on the subway and stuff. Like, yes, absolutely. Like,

that's, that's something that a hardware, an integrated hardware software provider could totally build and create. And as a purely a software provider, we're sort of at the whims of what the hardware providers can give to us in that way. So it does present challenges, which is to say, like, there's nothing today that I think that would sort of get us to where we need to be in that space.

But it is something that we're always looking at ways to sort of take advantage of and, and yeah, make the stuff that's in one password just more actionable. The vaccine passport thing is such a cool idea because it's one of those things. It's like if there were a standard that we could implement, like we would be there. Like with that, like, I mean, I'm not going to pre-emount the product. You're almost there, right. Like we would love to be able to provide something like that. So I guess that's part of my question too, because I don't have, you know, as a consumer of your product,

you know, I have my own perception of how it's used. and who uses it. But I have no idea about the kind of commercial conversations that you're having, or if you're having conversations with governments or with other places, again, that would really want to equip their citizens or their customers with secure credentials. I mean, there's, you know, the whole crypto space, obviously, and what's happening with Web3, I think is very relevant to what you guys are doing. You know, you guys use very similar, I don't know if it's the same cryptography,

but the same approach where you have some sort of massive key or a seed phrase, and that's the thing that secures your account. And so anybody that gets a wallet in the crypto space, suddenly at least has sort of an adjacent comprehension of what one password kind of offers and provides and how it does it. And by the way, I store all of those in one password, but go on. Right.

Well, but exactly, right? So I guess I'm just trying to like, you know, there's this one password eight kind of early release thing. And, you know, that's a story. And we can talk about the underlying changes of electron versus Swift UI or, you know, using or moving away from Mac technologies. you know, people are going to have their sports teams and they're going to, you know, want the Yankees or the Red Sox to win. That's fine. I guess I am more interested in the future of authentication and identity because I've been in this space for so long, and you guys have too.

So if you give me any sense for where you should be these opportunities and the conversation that you're having, that would, I don't know, I think that'd be really, really interesting. I think the wallet came up so often, right? And we even had a blog post about how to use one password for cryptocurrency. And we really wanted to implement some levels, like some support there. But imagine doing that on five different platforms, right? And I think that's where it kind of stopped. Isn't that true for Metamask and like the other ones? Like aren't they going to have to do the same?

Or are you saying that they have less service area to worry about because they're more focused just in the crypto context? No, no, I'm just saying if you want to do this. We had five, if you remember, before one password eight, we had five different teams working on different platforms, right? And every time we want to implement a new feature, we're like, okay, now we need to coordinate all these five teams. And just the amount of work basically stopped a lot of projects. But like, I guess is that not also just the nature of building software in 2021? one. I mean, tell if I'm wrong.

You're obviously close to it. That's kind of what we're like, that's what we want to get away from, right? So like it's, it's, I would, as much as I like want to dive into like, the, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to be a little bit of a frustrating guest because I'm not going to answer your question, uh, directly. But instead I'm going to, I'm going to twist it and answer it the way that I want to. Perfect. Which is to say that like, if we sort of like bring this back to like the whole like, you know, one password eight and the platform thing, like this, it is the thing that I'm the most excited about is because of this one password core, because of the fact that like, yeah, we do have, we can affect change across all of our deployment platforms in one code base. It sets us up for those types of conversations and those types of like going out and solving those types of problems in a way that we're, we just couldn't before, right?

Like, this is sort of that first step that level sets us, and it says, cool. Like, now we don't have to worry. Let me pause because I know it just happened, which is that I'm doing the thing that I normally do, which is like, cool, cool, cool, what's the next thing? And so first, I will just sit and kind of acknowledge, you know, what one password eight represents for you guys in terms of cohering around a strong core that then allows you to then even entertain those thoughts. Because in the previous world, prior to eight,

like suddenly you have five teams and have to spin up and coordinate, and it's like a shit show. So it's like, how are we going to make this happen? And now it's like, well, we've come together, we have a common code base. Now this allows us to have the conversation that we weren't able to have before.

Yeah, and I'll even butt in there and say from like the business perspective because I know Brian's a big fan of that. And who holds his voice so people know who's talking about? Oh, sorry. So this is Andrew Byer. I'm the lead of our browser experience here at One Passport. Thank you.

Thank you. So from a business perspective, one of the really interesting things, origin story about one password is Dave and Rustum built this company up completely privately held. We had zero inside or outside investment for the first 12, 13 years of its lineage, right? And because of that, that did kind of prevent some of the scale up. So for a little bit of background history, I joined this company a little over four years ago. and I was about like around 50 employees at the time and people were freaking out. They're like, holy cow, this is huge.

This company's getting big, right? We are now in a little less, a little over four years pushing 500 employees, right? So we've scaled up in four years 10X from an employee's perspective. So I can be completely honest and say there have been companies from the fintech space, from different spaces who reached out to us in those earlier days and wanted to build integrations. And we were just like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. there's no way we can support that right now, right? Like we're just not of that size, right?

So one of the really interesting things about, you know, investment and growing the team is we actually do have some things in the pipeline now where we are integrating with other businesses, bringing new functionality to you directly within the app, within the browser. One example of that that isn't like the all in becoming, we're going to re-roll all of authentication for the the web is our integration with privacy.com that we launched late last year.

And that basically gives you the ability to create and store in one password, these generated credit cards, virtual credit cards directly as you're checking out. And that was a great example of a mutual partnership between one password and this other company. Because let's be honest, like we're over here writing client apps. We're not spinning up fintech. We're not building a bank service. You know, we're headquartered in Canada. There's a lot of regulation around that.

But what's cool about that is now where we're super strong, which is we're built into, you know, your digital life. We can now offer companies like privacy the ability to have their service built directly into one password, you know, right as you're signing up and creating that generated password, you can now generate a virtual credit card, fill that on the page and go about your business. And as an added benefit, you can now store that credit card in one password, access that CVV verification number later. And it really kind of, I know Brian recently talked about the friction of checkout, right, on one of the TechMean podcasts.

Like, we helped eliminate the friction of checkout. And that's the kind of areas where we are going to be able to really push after with this foundation and with as we scale and as we build this incredible organization. Yeah, I used, I just said that. I use one password to fill in my credit cards. I used to memorize my credit card numbers. I haven't. I did. It's like remembering like phone numbers. Well, I used to do it. I used to do it. I understand. Well, okay, so I had a quick question on this and then we can probably wrap up pretty soon. One of the things you just said, I think is important. We really didn't even talk about it because we talked so much about the authentication piece, the software piece. But like the fintech world is on fire. And the fact that there is more of this. movement to virtual credit cards, you know, and essentially bringing some of the, you know, credential best practices to, I guess, you know, financial credentials. Like, it seems like one password is well positioned to sort of be like your one credit card. So how do you think about, I guess, maybe verticals that are relevant from a business perspective, you know, and Andrew, I'm specifically interested in your perspective. You know, you guys took this investment from Excel and I'm sure

they're awesome work with, they have a bunch of portfolio companies, it just feels like there's a strategic opportunity there for you guys to, you know, as they said in their blog post, to kind of really try to own that space. And the question I have is like, well, what is that space? And how do you guys think about that? Yeah, I don't know if I can answer that question great, but I will say that like one of the reasons why we partnered with Excel wasn't really to get the money. It was to access all of the companies that they work with, right? So we brought them on as a board of directors. The first investment was somewhere around like 18 months ago or so.

And as you can imagine, like these things take a bit of time to build those relationships, get those kind of future plans in place and then really launch a new product with it, right? And what's funny is like we kind of, the reason why we trended on Twitter was, and we keep harping on it, right? Ristam and I are keep harping on it. It's like, we just built the foundation, right? We built the slack of one password. Now we are building all of the Slack apps or the one password apps that will connect in and allow you to access all of those. And one of the great things we get out of working with someone like Excel is they have a ton of these companies that they work with and that they back. And they've been setting up those relationships for us and allowing us to explore the next really big thing.

And when we build the next really big thing, it will be consistent. It will be delivered cross-platform, mobile, desktop. web everywhere. And that's one of the places where one password is really greatly positioned in this market, right? There's not a lot of people that have a lot of browser extensions, but if you're a one password user, you're guaranteed to have that integrated into your browser. Even Apple announced web extensions in iOS 15 and iPadOS 15, so we're going to be there. We're going to be able to bring these services that may not build something that would directly connect into your browser. We're bringing that capability to them.

and we're bringing that capability to our users. Yeah, okay. So I am trying to close this, but like you just brought us something that I think is super relevant, super important, and also one that's just not a conversation that we get to talk a lot about, which is the extension piece of this. Because there's a constant question about antitrust

and about the extensibility of software, about things like app stores and the control over those. You guys have made a very successful business being probably one of the most downloaded and installed extensions across all the different browsers. You live and die based on those extension rules. And historically, extensions can be really, really insecure and problems, you know, cause lots of problems for browsers.

I guess it does seem, on the other hand, you guys have surfed that wave or set of waves really effectively and are one of the few businesses that really kind of builds a top of browsers. Does that, or is that any concern for the future? I mean, the web seems to be moving towards APIs and sort of point-to-point integrations, but you guys live on top of the browser experience itself. So do you expect that to continue to evolve, especially on mobile?

Well, that's a really good question. And I would say, like, two years ago, I'd have a different answer. I do want to quickly say, I forgot to interject. We did actually add support for Sidekick. It's even in one password seven beta, by the way. Oh, I know. It just broke today. So I filed a bug on your, on your,

community forum. But yes, I really appreciated when it was there. And now that's gone, now I feel the pain. So yes, you have my feedback. So the, the actually integrating with browsers, I think, was a fear at one point. It's a kind of an interesting back history where Dave and Rustum were actually like swizzling Safari and injecting their code before code sentence was a thing. I remember that. That was a big hack, right? Nobody can build a business like this. They were literally hacking the browser and adding in just random code. to get one password rolling, right? So we have been in the browser extension game

before there were browser extensions, which is kind of a fun... It's like you invented the category, right? Right. But I will say like, so, you know, we were concerned at certain times, right? Like Apple kind of were killing off extensions as we saw it, but last year they launched web extensions,

which is the common API shared between chromium-based browsers, Firefox, and now Safari. And they just announced in the last year that they're bringing this now to iPhone and iPadOS. And I'll be honest, it's like everything. There's a lot of places where I think there can be improvement. We have a lot of, you know, we're working on it every day to try to make it better. But, I mean, I wouldn't say that Apple would be going all in on this bet and talking about it at WWDC if they were planning on killing web extensions in the next year or two, right? And to add to that point, there's actually Apple and Google and the W3C just launched a Web Extensions community group,

which is basically an open community that anybody can join. Many members from OnePassword are there. There's people from Firefox. There's people from even our competitors that are there trying to basically build the foundation for the very next version of the Web Extensions API. So there's a heck of a lot of investment from Google, Apple, Microsoft, Mozilla, like all of the big names. We literally have to work with all of them, but they're all kind of coming together to set that next big web extension

web standard. So we're feeling pretty safe there. And then, of course, you know, worst case, you're using side tick. You know, there could always be a one-password browser, right? Like there's always options if the extension area gets shut down. Yeah, that makes sense. All right, guys, this is super helpful, super useful. I really appreciate you guys all being gained for this, you know,

for taking some of my salty comments, which is normally where I start, and then I kind of like unravel a bit. You guys did get, oh, you know, you pissed off the internet. But I feel like it's a lot of, the trend lately is like, oh, there's something that happened, and I wasn't consulted,

and therefore I'm angry, and then, like, you learn a little more. And, you know, you guys seem like you're in pretty good spirits. That's the last question I'll ask, which is, what is your impression of the response, right? Like, my sense is that you guys see this, and you're like, wow, that's weird.

Like, why you guys are all freaking out? But I'd love to hear it from you. You know, you see this and you see some of the feedback. What are people getting wrong? What do you think, you know, is right in the criticism so far? I think everyone should answer that, but I'll add mine real quickly. But I think Rue and Rostom probably have different feelings about it. Essentially, I knew exactly that this was going to happen, right?

Like, I complain about electron apps being slow sometimes on my machine. The difference is which electron app it is, right? So I use VS code every day. It's been built on Electron. It's backed by Microsoft. It's an incredible app. And the truth of the matter is we've built this one-password headless client. We can really swap out any UI front end that we want in the future.

It just so happens that WebUI is the cross-platform UI platform of choice right now. And Electron just happens to be the vessel for getting kind of our native backend and our web. front end on every platform. And the industry is boring this out, right? Like, we all use Slack. Even Apple uses Slack, right? Most of the Apple commentators that are going to talk about this in the news, they're going to be discussing OnePassword using Electron on an electronic app, right?

Like, the hypocrisy aside, literally Slack is one of the best, most used desktop apps of this decade. And OnePassword is going to be the most used. best Electron app of next decade and we're I'm personally

extremely happy about that and I can't wait to see the future that's great answer Roof yeah much the same

in terms of like like I think we knew that this was coming right that we knew we knew that publishing a

one password app wrapped up an electron was going to be was going to hit our our fan base

and I will say fan base, like pretty hard, right? This is a pretty strong left turn from how we built our apps in the past, and yeah, it was something that we sort of saw coming. The piece that I'm hoping to get

to get to is sort of past the gut reactions and into the, like, the meat of it. Because we still, even though this is the tech stack that we've chosen for this, for this particular app, like, we still want to build great Mac apps.

So like, and we're going to try and do so on this platform. And I think that knowing where we've fallen short is the thing that I want to hear the most from people. Because we're at that point, or at least I know I'm at that point now where I've been living with this app and using this app for so long that like it's normalized for me at this point. So we need those fresh eyes. We need those people to tell us like, hey, like you got this part wrong. This needs to be better. so we can actually iterate and make it better and ship something to stable that people are happy about and people love. So, Roo, I want to hear from you on this just qualifying question, I guess, which is, it seemed to me that there was almost like a spiritual element to this response.

In other words, like, when I saw it, you know, and I was like, oh, it's electron. It was like, oh, there's another great Mac app that's, you know, gone the way of the web. and needs to be cross-platform because that's what the business world kind of meets. And so in a way, it sort of felt like this, I don't know, like a little bit of abandonment of where you came from. And I think what you just said was useful and good, which is that our expectations of these web apps and these electron apps is sufficiently low because of the way in which people often build these things and they don't optimize them. I think that, and I guess maybe I'd like to hear from you, you know, you're obviously betting, you know, more or less the company on the, this new direction, should people be concerned about that? And should they worry about losing some of these Mac roots and replacing them with

something more of the web? So I'm going to tell you another story. And I know that we're running along and I apologize, but it's a good story. So when we started this project back at the beginning of last year, we said, okay, we're doing file new project on all of our apps. Okay, what does that mean? Well, Linux has a ton of different windowing environments. We're not building native Linux apps, like native UI Linux apps,

where we're going to use Nome and all the different possible Linux permutations of UI. We're going to build an electron app there. We're going to build an app with WebUI there, and we're going to package it with Electron, and that's what we're going to ship. That'll be fine. All right, what about Windows? Well, Windows has proven to us to be a bit of, of a struggle to hit the ux that we want to hit using the toolkits that come available to build native

ui and windows so let's take and we'll ship web ui there and let's go ahead and we'll wrap that in electron that's fine good we'll do that what about on mac well mac we've always had a history of building native mac apps so let's try for that like let's let's do that but part of this project was consolidating our efforts a bit. So we had a huge amount of consolidation in the core already, fine, but we also wanted to consolidate our front ends too. Even though they're thin, we didn't want to be writing a whole bunch of different front ends.

So we said, let's bet on Swift UI. Let's try it. We're going to build a Swift UI Mac app, and that will share a whole bunch of UI with the iOS apps that we're building. That's honestly what I would have expected. So I'm very curious to hear this. So, okay, great. We're going to do that.

And listen, there's a little bit of hubris in this. Okay, I think there's a lot of hubris in a company rewriting all their ass anyway. But anyway, that aside, like, this is, we said, okay, like we're going to build a Swift UI Mac app. It's going to have to target relatively modern OSs to take advantage of the new Swift UI stuff in order to be good enough. we can't do that, though.

Like we can't set our minimum requirements to just be big sir for the new app because people keep their Macs for a lot longer. They just, we need to be able to cover a broader range of OSs. That's okay. We'll use the electron app on Mac as well to cover, to cover the OS's that the native app doesn't. So we can check all the boxes for the platforms that we need to hit, but we also know how important it is to people that we build a native Mac app and they're probably going to be on the latest stuff anyway. Let's go ahead and do that. And like, cool. We went, we went to town. We started building this thing and it was great. Like, we know, having a lot of fun, having a lot of challenges with Swift UI and learning stuff

and everything else. And we hit a point earlier, gosh, was it earlier this year? I think it was earlier this year, at times a blur. We hit a point and where we said like, okay, like, what are we really doing though. Like how are we actually going to get these things to finish? How are we going to ship this? How are we not going to confuse people by like which one they're supposed to download? Like are we putting our effort in the wrong spot? Like should we should we just pull back from this a little bit? And it honestly, it was a hard conversation. It was it was like we struggled this for a while. We said like listen. And it was at that point we said like look if we are only shipping an app that is packaged with Electron on Mac like people are probably going to lose their

minds when they see this. And so, like, we weren't wrong there. But ultimately, like, it was just, it was sort of like a nexus event of a lot of things coming together. Like, we could have said, fine, we're going to pivot and build an App Kit app. But that doesn't, that didn't fit with, like, us wanting to consolidate the front-end languages that we were using. So ultimately, like, we made the decision to go and build, go all in on the web UI, on

the desktop and say, look, we're going to do this. And it allows us to, you know, of course we get the benefits of like a cross-platform experience that the same features that we're bringing to the Mac. We're also bringing to Linux and Windows at the exact same time. But then you look at sort of, you know, we certainly did. And I hope that it starts to show through, especially as the early access goes on. It's like what things make this special or what make a Mac app special, right? If you look at this app, one of the things we added just a couple weeks ago was the fact that it's got that translucent sidebar that all new Mac apps have, right?

That, we didn't do that because it was easy because it also, it wasn't. But like, this would be really cool if we could bring this, this like, you know, this thing that makes, one of the things that makes a Mac app look like a Mac app. Like, let's see if we can bring it to our app. when we did. So like it was it was not it was not an easy decision to make. We're still we're still building a native iOS app right like that's I that's that's one that when it comes out later this year I'm I'm hoping that the reception on that early access day is a little bit better. But you know like this is this is where we are today we're doing we're

doing the best we can honestly I think we've done we've done really well so far with it. And I'm excited to see where we take it from here. Awesome. Well, I mean, that's a great, you know, to end on. Thank you for that story as well. I mean, I think, like, it's just there's, I don't know if I want to call like bad faith, but there is this sense that, like, oh, you know, they should have known, like, electron doesn't work.

And it's like, of course they do. Like, there's tradeoffs in all of this. And it's really, really hard, of course, when you, you know, first come upon information to have any sense for how much someone did or didn't think about all the issues that, you know, you personally care the most about. And because we don't live in, there's not a real kind of democracy and software development, you know, where people can vote, although, you know, that's the crypto world. It does feel like, you know, people have this immediate reaction that says, I don't trust you to do a good job. And I think there needs to be these kind of conversations that, you know, bring in and open up more of these literal spaces to have these conversations, to get your perspective, to see what the constraints are, to see what the tradeoffs are.

And then to think about how much you guys have had to think about it and also think about, you know, the amount of resources that you have. do you really want to grow from five to a thousand people just to be able to support, you know, a Swift Y app or something? Like, probably not. So anyways, again, we are, we're extremely fortunate to have such a passionate fan base. That is the big takeaway from this, right? Like, we made Twitter trending without having some wild controversy about our founders or CEO of the company, right? Our Twitter trending is over. Electron. You know what? So, like, that is. That is a testament to how passionate our users are.

And we are incredibly fortunate, and we are incredibly fortunate to be a company to actually be involved in a community and listen. For example, one of the things we did as part of this rewrite is our security team actually wrote a package to make electron apps more secure, to harden them after they're built. And we got to contribute that back to the community.

What is that one called for people that want to check that out? It's on our GitHub repo. It's on GitHub.com forward slash one password. It should be pinned up there if you don't find it. I think it's called like Electron Hardener or something like that. Obviously. Yeah, definitely check that out because, yeah, definitely, electron dash hardener. It is basically if you are like us and you want to build, take a Rust Library, build an Electron app,

you run this tool and it will make your app more secure, right? Like that is obviously a core fundamental of what we're doing. here at OnePassword. Even though I've heard Honeypot and Viruses mentioned in various conversations here, I would say, like, we do have the best security policies, practices, and, you know, trust from our users with regard to security and privacy. And so one of the technical challenges was, can we make an electron app that can give us the security guarantees that we require? And we were able to do that, and not only that, contribute back to the community. Got it. And on top of that, too, we also have Electron Secure Defaults, which is a starter project that can get you started with Electron so that it has a lot of those secure defaults turned on by well default.

And another talk from our product lead Mitch, Mitchell Cohen, which went up at one of the conferences this year to talk about the ways that we harden Electron as so that we can ship the most secure version of One Password. Wow. Well, this is also great news. So if people want to find this, I assume I'm looking at it right now. They can go to blog.1Password.com, but is there another place where they can go find out more about 1Password 8 or is it the best resource right now? Oh, yeah. Sorry, go to the blog.

Yeah. I went to the listener mode for a minute. I was like, oh, yeah, I wonder what people are going to say. This is a podcast or am I on a Twitter space? No, that is one of the cool things, right? This is the very first version of a fully flushed out rewritten app. So, like, of course there's going to be a few bugs here or there, But the level of polish we put into essentially what is the first beta version you can get is really outstanding.

It does look really good. And I noticed there's a little bug, a little ladybug icon on the top right of the app. And so I presume that's the best place to send feedback. Yeah, absolutely. You can file kind of issue or you can get directly into our feedback and kind of submit either through our forms, which we still have, because we've been a software company for a decade and a half. we have a community form. Die hard users love it,

but we also just have a regular contact form on OnePassor.com that you can kind of submit kind of issues and we'll get those prioritized in it. I got it. All right, guys, this was amazing. Thank you for saying on Super Long. I appreciate everyone here who's also been listening to this entire conversation. If you guys want to follow

the speakers, I highly recommend it. You know, reach out. They're not going to bite. They're open for your feedback as well. Brew, Sam, Andrew, Nick, Michael. I think that's all the speakers today. Brian, of course, really appreciate you guys showing up for another episode of the TechBeem Ride Home Experience. We will probably get this out, if not tomorrow, this weekend. But really appreciate you guys showing up and putting in all this effort to help us

understand what you guys are working on and get us excited about the future that yours are building. So thank you. Thanks, everybody. Cheers, thanks for having us. Thank you. Last time I talked to Brian, we were talking about e-bikes on Twitter and his voice was putting in saying no. So I've been wanting to talk to him with Oh, thank you, Andrew. I'm really thankful to have this conversation. Well, and by the way, you're right. The stories that I love the most are the stories of companies that go 14 years before they even have to take outside capital. So I am one of your fans.

So keep doing what you're going on, guys.