Top Secret #22: SAML Setup Wizard, Cookies Again, Giant Beavers, and Meat School
This week, we talk about our self-service SAML Setup Wizard, the many, many cookies we need to bake for new customers, AI job interviews, and consumers' revealed preferences.
Alright, so we’re running a bit of a promotion that my team is really enjoying... For anyone who both (a) signs up for Tesseral and (b) signs in a user in July, I will bake cookies and have them delivered. I’ll try to deliver them myself if you’re in the Bay Area. I already promised someone I’d deliver in-person to Perth, Australia, and that’s just not sustainable over time.
And honestly? I’m already on the hook to deliver way more cookies than I anticipated. This is really exciting, but please be patient with me, as I have never baked anything before. Frankly, that is a big reason why my team is enjoying this. That, and all the great feedback we’ve been getting.
We shipped a bunch of product improvements over the last week, largely in response to aforementioned feedback. The most exciting one: we introduced the self-service SAML Setup Wizard that people loved from SSOReady. Our industry’s status quo for SAML configuration is pretty dismal; you trade a bunch of emails with your customer’s IT admin.
With the SAML Setup Wizard, you can simply empower your customers to create their own SAML Connections: all they need to do is click through a guided experience in a Tesseral-managed UI. You can check out a demo on my Twitter page: https://x.com/nedoleary/status/1940842012342915147
We’ve also been polishing a ton of details. Here’s kind of a silly fix that went out:
Many thanks to our customers for pushing us to improve week after week.
What We’re Reading
Bear-sized Giant Beavers Once Roamed North America: alright, this is pretty awesome. There used to be huge beavers running around what’s now Minnesota. #BringBackBearsizedBeavers
Elliot Letter on Sumitomo Realty: as some of you know, I love reading activist investors’ letters. This is a pretty interesting one.
Welcome to Your Job Interview. Your Interviewer Is A.I.: pretty dismal, in my opinion. Hiring is already so extremely transactional. Something feels almost disrespectful to put candidates on the phone with a robot.
Once Popular Pre-IPO Investing Platform Linqto Files for Bankruptcy: alright, so I’m not personally a huge fan of the accredited investor qualification, but stuff like this sways me sometimes. From the article: “an internal investigation uncovered evidence that Linqto customers never owned the securities they thought they did.”
Jack Dorsey’s New Private Messenger App Doesn’t Need an Internet Connection: I don’t know what I think of this. Maybe it’ll work. I’m mostly skeptical how much average people really care about privacy when there’s nonzero costs – the revealed preference seems to be for convenience.
Marks & Spencer chair refuses to say if retailer paid hackers after ransomware attack: ransomware continues to be a big problem, largely because it’s so lucrative. In this case, “The breach also disrupted operations for weeks, leaving shelves empty, and customers unable to order online.” It’s no surprise that companies are willing to pay up.
Here’s What Mark Zuckerberg Is Offering Top AI Talent: if you’re as chronically online as I am, you may have seen this one. $300M pay packages – truly breathtaking amounts of money. That’s a reasonably big figure for the acquisition of a company. I don’t envy Meta’s day-to-day managers. From the article: “Andrew Bosworth, chief technology officer at Meta, said that not everyone is getting a $100 million offer during a Q&A with employees last week.” Rough.
Nerd CornerTM
Some days I think back on the college academic experience and wish I still had access to classes across all kinds of subjects. That feeling hit me hard recently when I discovered the Texas A&M Meat Science Program, specifically their immersive barbecue camp. Students there learn how to select, prepare, season, smoke, and grill meat, while also diving into the science behind meat tenderness, flavor development, and cooking methods.
Maybe I need to go back to school… or maybe I should just order lunch. In any case, I really enjoyed learning about the program and perusing its online storefront, too.
Other Cool Stuff
Here are some neat links for you:
From The Archives
(1984): Reflections on trusting trust
(2012): Shit Sam Altman says
(2012): Stop the paranoia: it doesn't matter if Google reads our email
(2020): The forecasting fallacy
Thanks,
Ned