N+1>N It's Part of the Auth0 Culture
A couple of weeks ago I posted an article about an interaction I had with the CTO at Auth0, Matias Woloski. On just my second day, I got feedback from Matias about how I could improve my pitch for who we are and what we do. At the time, I related this to one of our core pillars, We give a shit. After thinking about it more, it also brings up another one of our core pillars, “N+1>N”.
What Does N+1>N Mean?
In short…
Next time, do better. Next time, improve on last time. Don’t be afraid to try. Learn from your experience and constantly improve.
At Auth0, we aren’t afraid to make mistakes because those become learning opportunities. It’s a core tenant of Agile, but it’s something many companies struggle with. We do take it seriously.
You can imagine, at times, that it is hard to have a positive attitude towards failure. I’ve been in situations with a “blame culture”, where the end goal is to find the person to blame. That mentality is not looking towards the future. It’s not focusing on what we learned to make sure we do it better next time. And it’s not focused on the fact that people are human.
So, How Do You Explain Auth0?
Well, the good thing is Matias gave me a cheat sheet. I love how he broke it down based on different potential audiences. I think that’s important because as a speaker, it’s my responsibility to adapt my message to the people I’m speaking to. Matias understands that.
20 Second Pitch
“Think about Auth0 like your authentication and authorization microservice. But… built by hundreds of people, with all the features that would take you a long time to build yourself. That is operated for you, always improving, with advanced security features and great reliability and scalability.”
The 1-minute speech is a lot longer, so I’ll leave that to your imagination. Or…maybe you’ll hear it from me in person!
Non-tech Friends/Parents Pitch
“You enter usernames and passwords everywhere on the internet, right? Well, a developer has to implement all that. We provide that as a service for them, so they can spend time implementing their application instead.”
This is probably the easiest to use for the widest audience.
Grandparent Pitch
“We make the internet safer.”
I like this one a lot…lol