OwnID is a passwordless authentication platform for websites and apps. It eliminates friction in registration and login and makes authentication more secure. OwnID can be easily added to existing registration and login forms.
Daniel Karp, Partner, Cervin: So thanks for joining me today. First question - What inspired you to start OwnID?
Dor Shany, Co-founder & CEO, OwnID: After being part of the identity space for the past 15 years, I understood that some things haven’t changed in the industry for the last 20 or 30 years. Your identification is almost the same as it was 30 years ago. Users still need to choose passwords, and that’s getting more and more complicated over time. It’s a huge burden for users. One in three users will stop the registration flow, just because of password issues and we were thinking about the pain this causes to businesses. If I’m a website owner and I have one in three users drop because of password issues, that's definitely something that needs to be fixed right away. And that’s what OwnID is about, that’s why we started, to fix broken identification issues.
DK: The company has been around for about a year and a half and you’re a first time entrepreneur. What advice would you give yourself now, if you were to start the company again?
DS: It’s pretty hard to give advice to myself, but I think it’s about understanding what types of signals I can listen to, in order to improve. And it’s about understanding what is changing in the market. For example, a lot has changed in the passwordless world since we started— there have been many technological advances, such as WebAuthn and passkeys. Also Apple, Google, and Microsoft are going in one very specific direction with the technology. Once we understand these signals, we can leverage them for the business. Sometimes we need to change the business to align with where the market is going, with what customers want, with evolving problems, or even new problems. We need to be super agile. As a startup, you need to change the way you work based on signals from end users, businesses, and the market.
DK: That makes sense, especially as you’re increasingly engaged with the market and getting more customers and use-cases. There’s the initial idea of what the company stands for. As time elapses, the robustness and cohesiveness of what you can do, as well as the universe of things that you can do, grows. That said, you have to be very focused on the customers, on what the market is telling you to do right now, versus the broader opportunity.
DS: Sometimes it’s the marketing telling us that we need to do more of one thing instead of another. Sometimes it’s not a complete change of plans, but it’s about something that we thought we needed to invest a certain percentage of time in, and apparently, it’s more of a real problem than we saw, so we put tremendous focus and value on that listening process.