If you ask Eugenio Pace to describe himself, “engineer” would be fairly high on the list.
“Being a CEO is pretty busy,” he told TechCrunch in a call last week. “But I’m an engineer in my heart — I am a problem solver,” he said.
Pace, an Argentinan immigrant to the U.S., founded identity management company Auth0 in 2013 after more than a decade at Microsoft. Auth0, pronounced “auth-zero,” has been described as like Stripe for payments or Twilio for messaging. App developers can add a few lines of code and it immediately gives their users access to the company’s identity management service.
That means the user can securely log in to the app without building a homebrew username and password system that’s invariably going to break. Any enterprise paying for Auth0 can also use its service to securely logon to the company’s internal network.
“Nobody cares about authentication, but everybody needs it,” he said.
Pace said Auth0 works to answer two simple questions. “Who are you, and what can you do?” he said.
“Those two questions are the same regardless of the device, the app, or whether if I’m an employee of somebody or if I am an individual using an app, or if I am using a device where there’s no human attached to it,” he said.
Whoever the users are, the app needs to know if the person using the app or service is allowed to, and what level of access or functionality they can get. “Can you transfer these funds?,” he said. “Can you approve these expense reports? Can you open the door of my house?” he explained.
Pace left Microsoft in 2012 and founded Auth0 during the emergence of Azure, which transformed Microsoft from a software giant into a cloud company. It was at Microsoft where he found identity management was one of the biggest headaches for developers moving their apps to the cloud. He wrote book after book, and edition after edition. “I felt like I could keep writing books about the problem — or I can just solve the problem,” he said.
So he did.
Instead of teaching developers how to become experts in identity management, he wanted to give them the tools to employ a sign-on solution without ever having to read a book.
“We exist because we want to make developers more productive,” he said.
Pace knows better than anyone the struggles of coding and software development. When he’s not running his company, he’s knee-deep in his own code. His blog contains coding project after coding project — from cloud-based pill trackers to hacking Amazon Dash buttons — and his GitHub account has more self-contributions in the past six months than in the past year. He’s a developer at heart, hacking away at anything he can get his hands on.
“We are an engineering company that produces things for engineers,” he said. Having knowledge of how to code, he explained, gives him the “understanding” of what his customers go through.
“I can be one of them very easily and so I can empathize with their pains with their struggles,” he said. “I can be an engineer gives me the gives me the empathy to put myself in the shoes of everybody out there, and achieve something better and more aligned with it.”
Pace, as a first time CEO, said he had a lot of preconceived ideas of what a boss should do. “I see myself as a catalyst — an obstacle remover — that is here to ensure that anybody can do the best and remove their whatever’s in a way for them to doing the best job,” he said.
Clearly, it’s paying off.
In the past half-decade since its founding, Auth0 has grown from a handful of staff to close to 500 employees in five offices around the world. In all, the company has 23,000 customers — about 7,000 paying customers, said Pace, amounting to 2.5 billion logins per month. A fraction is large enterprises paying for corporate sign-on services. But the majority of his customers are developers in the company’s free tier, processing just a few logins per day.
Auth0 could be making more money if it wanted. “We’re not profitable because we’ve chosen to reinvest and continue to sustain the high scale of growth,” he said. “But we are more efficient every day — in the way we acquire customers, the way we service customers, in the way we ship new design capabilities.”
He also said the company’s efficiencies come from his global employees, most of which work remotely. “About 60 percent of our workforce of our team works from remote,” he said. “I think we have a strategic advantage by being able to tap into the global talent pool.”
“For us, zip code is less important than time zone and time zone is less important than talent,” he said. “So we find the talent we like to bring in.”
“We have teams that are built in such a way that the time zone allows them to live a good life — too good work-life,” he said. “But that doesn’t require you to be in the same location to the same building same office all the time.”
Pulling in the best talent from the early days, he said, was a major factor in the company’s successes today.
“It’s something that I’ve been relentless in my job as a CEO is in building the best possible team in all these things,” he said. “And so building a great team early on investing on a great team has been one of my best decisions.”
For startups following in his footsteps, Pace said having a laser-focus on the customer is key.
“Get out in the world and find a customer,” he said. “It’s the number one thing you need to do.”
“Forget about investors, forget about your pitch — forget about any of that,” he said. “Focus relentlessly on getting your first customer because that is the true validation of what you’re doing,” he said.
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