authentication
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Rodger Desai and the case of the vanishing password
A shared village phone helped Rodger Desai see what mobile technology could do. At Prove, he has spent years pursuing a more ordinary miracle: letting people get on with their lives online.
Joe Siegrist and the trouble with the keys
He helped build LastPass to make passwords less of a chore. Then Joe Siegrist had to answer a harder question: what makes people trust the company holding them?
Eric Woodward and the quiet work of making money move
Before advising Baselayer, Eric Woodward helped build the identity and risk systems behind Zelle. His career follows a deceptively simple question: who is really on the other end of a transaction?
Rakesh Soni Built a Business Around the Moment Before ‘Welcome’
A clumsy registration form gave Rakesh Soni his opening. Thirteen years later, LoginRadius manages the quiet exchange of trust between global brands and more than a billion digital identities.
Alex Salazar Is Building the Permission Layer for AI's Hands
Before Arcade could help AI agents act, its founders had to let their first idea fail. Alex Salazar's career explains why the useful product was hiding in the permissions underneath.
Vivek Nair
Vivek Nair is the co-founder and CEO of Multifactor (YC F25), an applied cryptography company building zero-trust authentication, authorization, and auditing for AI agents. He earned his Ph.D. in Computer Science from UC Berkeley at 22 as a Hertz Fellow, published landmark work on privacy in virtual reality, and served as a technical lead in cyber units at the Department of Defense and CIA before starting the company.
Sagi Rodin
Sagi Rodin is the CEO and co-founder of Frontegg, a customer identity and access management (CIAM) platform for B2B SaaS companies. He started coding at 14, served as a database instructor in the Israeli army, earned a computer software engineering degree from the Technion, and led cloud security work at Check Point before spinning the idea for Frontegg out of a problem he kept hitting: every new app needed the same login, user management, and admin plumbing built from scratch. Founded in 2019 with CTO Aviad Mizrachi, Frontegg has raised roughly $70 million and gives developers plug-and-play identity infrastructure so they can focus on their core product.
Dedra Chamberlin
Dedra Chamberlin is the founder and CEO of Cirrus Identity, an Oakland-based cloud identity company that helps more than 200 universities run single sign-on and federated login without the friction. She arrived at identity management sideways - a UC Berkeley psychology major with master's degrees in city planning and Latin American studies who volunteered for a one-year networking internship and never left. After two decades inside UC Berkeley and UCSF IT, where she rose to Deputy Director of Identity and Access Management and chaired the University of California's system-wide identity strategy workgroup, she founded Cirrus in 2013 to build the education-specific identity tools she wished vendors had made. She is a board member of SimpleSAMLphp and a founder of IAM-HER, a community advancing women in the identity field.
Orisa Cherenfant
Orisa Cherenfant is SVP of Industry Relations & Strategic Growth at Twilio, the cloud communications platform powering billions of messages, calls, and interactions globally. A first-generation college graduate from Cape Verde who earned dual degrees in Finance and Marketing from Boston College, she built her career through GE's leadership development programs before moving into tech. At Twilio, she leads industry partnerships and growth strategy, speaks at major conferences like MWC Barcelona and Twilio Signal, and was named a 2025 Entreprenista 100 Award winner. She is based in Los Angeles with her partner Eli and their twins, Margaux and Maverick.