Top Secret #13: Launching Tesseral (Also: Powerpoint, Pizza Clocks, and Project Silica)
Hey everyone, we have a few pieces of really exciting news to share. You may notice that I’m sending this note from a different domain.
We have publicly launched Tesseral, open source auth infrastructure for business software. It’s a massive expansion of the functionality we offered with our previous open source project, SSOReady.
Tesseral includes everything that a software developer would need to manage users. It has elegant hosted login pages, it manages sessions, and it supports a variety of authentication factors from vanilla passwords to Login with Google to SAML SSO. Tesseral comes with built-in support for multi-factor authentication – including passkeys, which means end users can have an elegant Touch ID experience. It layers in some great enterprise features like directory provisioning (i.e., SCIM) as well as some nice convenience features like user impersonation, user invitations, and self-service settings pages for end users.
We have a lot more coming soon. We’ll soon be shipping a best-in-class role-based access control (RBAC) product. We’ll be layering in webhooks for change data capture. We’ll add an audit logging product.
We’re really proud of what’s in place now and extremely excited about the opportunity to make Tesseral even more powerful.
Furthermore, I have the distinct pleasure to share our seed financing news. We have raised $3.3M from Y Combinator and angel investors like Paul Graham and Jessica Livingston of Y Combinator, Calvin French-Owen of Segment, and Steve Bartel and Nick Bushak of Gem. We also had a number of early SSOReady and Tesseral customers join the round.
I’m immensely grateful to our early investors and customers for their continued support and trust. I’m energized. We love working on this stuff, and we really feel we can do something special here.
Thanks to all of you on this mailing list for your support! It means more than you know. Drop me a note at ned.oleary@tesseral.com if you want to catch up. I’d love to hear from you.
For those wondering about the future of SSOReady, don’t worry; we’ll uphold our commitments to you. We’ll continue to support SSOReady. After all, Tesseral relies pretty heavily on the SSOReady code!
What We’re Reading
Databricks reportedly weighing acquisition of Postgres startup Neon: shortly after a major equity financing for rival Supabase, Neon looks like it’s joining infrastructure juggernaut Databricks. I’ve felt uneasy for a while speculating about where this database-as-a-service market is going. I personally enjoy Supabase for making toy apps – and I’ve used Neon with some success too – but I don’t entirely understand their appeal for professional use cases. Let me know if you’re using Supabase or Neon or something similar at scale; I’m curious to know what you think.
Can Starbucks be turned around? I continue to be fascinated by the challenges Starbucks is facing. I basically agree with new CEO Brian Nicol’s perspective: that the core product experience has deteriorated and that the business has grown too complex. I’m worried that Wall Street has underestimated the task. Starbucks is too big and has been on the wrong track for too long for the turnaround to take effect quickly. For the business’s sake, I hope investors will have the stomach for a few more rough quarters.
Walgreens to be acquired by private equity firm in $10B deal: this is actually a few months old, but I think it’s relevant, given the previous link about Starbucks. I did a brief stint with grocery retail clients at BCG, and the partners I worked for insisted that we all do several store visits. That means we literally walked the aisles, taking notes on endcaps and out-of-stock inventory. It’s amazing what you can learn in a week of store visits. A lot has been made of Walgreens-Boots’s struggles (including their bizarre LARPing as a healthcare provider) but I’m basically convinced that management just didn’t spend any time in their stores. They’re just whiffing on the basics. I worry that Sycamore has a value creation plan that looks good on Powerpoint but has little basis in store operations.
DOD plans to fast-track software security reviews: good news out of the Pentagon? I spent some time in DC a few months back talking with cybersecurity leaders in aerospace and defense. It seems like people have a pretty low opinion of the current state of affairs. Given recent events, though, I worry whether the Trump administration takes security seriously enough to make thoughtful, productive reforms.
Nerd CornerTM
A few years ago, I skimmed a fascinating paper outlining a novel technique for chemically engineering DNA for random access archival data storage. I’ve had a bit of a pet interest in weird storage media since then. There’s some related work out of Rice, for instance, that uses E. coli as a read-only storage medium.
I recently stumbled across some research work that uses quartz glass for data storage. Microsoft in particular is doing really interesting stuff with its Project Silica. One interesting property of the Project Silica work is that it’s impossible to accidentally overwrite data during reading. Write operations use some femtosecond lasers, while read operations rely on microscopy using ordinary light. Moreover, it turns out that quartz glass storage just doesn’t degrade like magnetic storage media.
You can learn a little more about the Microsoft work here. I’d be lying if I pretended to be an expert – or even particularly knowledgeable – on this stuff, but it still fascinates me.
Other Cool Stuff
Live multiplayer minesweeper: this was on Hacker News a while back. It’s a pretty neat variant of the familiar minesweeper game
Pizza clock: a clock running on Raspberry Pi that displays the current time using … pizza slices
Ladybird: if you’re on the same corners of the nerd internet as I am, you’ve likely heard of Ladybird. But I think it’s worth revisiting. This is an insanely ambitious project: to build a new web browser from scratch.
From The Archives
(1999) Open source in open court
(2006) Growing Wikipedia refines its ‘anyone can edit’ policy
(2010) The next digital decade: essays on the future of the internet
(2010) Meet the fastest growing company ever [it’s Groupon]
(2013) Blackberry chief: tablets will be dead within five years
Thanks,
Ned