The below is a full (unedited), machine-generated transcript of a Youtube session / podcasting episode I recorded with Michael Crandell, CEO of Bitwarden in Q4 2022. You can view the video/listen to the podcast on Youtube, Apple Podcast, Stitcher or wherever you get your podcasts.
Erasmus Elsner 0:20
Welcome, everybody to another episode of Sand Hill Road. I have a great guest with me here today. It’s Michael Brandon, who’s the CEO of bit warden. Welcome, Michael.
Michael Crandell 0:28
Thank you so much, Erasmus. Great to be here.
Erasmus Elsner 0:31
And where does this podcast find you here today?
Michael Crandell 0:34
I’m sitting here in in Santa Barbara, California,
Erasmus Elsner 0:37
maybe start at the at the very beginning one, what is that warden? And how did you get involved? Because my understanding is you joined for the series a back in 2019.
Michael Crandell 0:47
Absolutely good working as a password manager. So it helps you create strong, unique passwords, which keep keeps you more secure online. And then it helps you use those in a super easy way, including through autofill. For example, when you’re on a website, autofills, your username and password. So it’s really focused on helping people stay safe online, and combating all the breaches that we read about every day, about 80% of which happened because of passwords. My own involvement started in 2019, the company was already up and running, I was founded by my colleague, our founder, Kyle spearin. In 2016. He was a kind of a cloud systems engineer and looking around at the password management market. And he didn’t really like what he saw. And he thought he could build something better. So he set out to build bitwarden. And, importantly, he decided to make it open source. So he thought what’s what’s going to bring attention to this password manager that I Kyle sphere, and I’m building, I’m gonna make it open source. And in fact, that worked and works often with software because it attracts, it can attract if it’s a good product, a global community of users, and contributors to the product. So he decided to make it open source was a smart decision. Because now as we arrive in 2022, and one of our competitors was breached a month ago and lots of headlines about what did the hackers get with bit Warden, because it’s entirely open source. Nobody needs to wonder what we’re doing with your sensitive data, you can go look at GitHub. And in fact, security researchers and many developers worldwide have done that. And so they can trust that we can never get at the passwords. They are encrypted locally. And when they’re sent to bit Warden is just a bunch of encrypted gobbledygook that we store on behalf of the user and help synchronise across their devices. So that’s what bit Warden is. Yeah, that’s interesting. But let’s
Erasmus Elsner 2:56
go a little bit back, because I think it’s quite an impressive indie hacker story, I went through there was holding a full time tech job. And he was doing this as a side hustle the way I understand it just released it on Reddit. And it really took off. And he was sort of taking the site hostile, and I think, piece by piece started to build it into a fully fledged product. And then I think in 2019, he must have said, well, this is getting too big for me, I need capital providers to scale. It’s bringing in a professional CEO like yourself, who has years of experience running software companies talk about this sort of trajectory, as I think it’s quite an interesting bootstrapper journey that Kyle went through there
Michael Crandell 3:37
it is, in fact, I’m glad you brought it up the story of origin of bitwarden. And what Kyle did is an amazing story to me, I just have huge admiration for how he basically founded the company. Again, he got the core idea of I can do something better than what’s out there. Some of the major password managers had gone through acquisitions by PE companies. So he thought he could build something better, and again, decided to make it open source as a way of making it available out in the world and differentiating. It was a really smart decision at the very beginning, as I understand it, yes, he did build it on the side. And then it started to take off. And as he told me, he wanted to ask his wife if she was supportive of him quitting his job to go full time on bitwarden. And he made the smart decision of asking her that question while they were both running a 5k race, which in my view, having done some running in the past, it tends to make for a shorter conversation because you’re breathing hard while you’re asking five I don’t think it would have mattered. She was very supportive and said yes. So he took off. The business was actually cashflow positive since day one. So he had built a strong business through 2019 and been approached by the folks that headline, who had Have a great way of identifying and kind of tracking young companies as they’re growing and noticing moon, and they had been in touch with Kyle. And the conversation started about, hey, could this be something even bigger than what you’ve already built? So they called me and said, Do you want to take a look at it? After he said, Sure, I think it could be bigger. So we met in San Francisco and had a great dinner. And I was immediately taken by Kyle is very humble, very easygoing, and wickedly smart, and also super productive. And he had built all this. And I liked a number of the principles he had put in place, being open source, being very community oriented, offering the self host option. And having this fully free, featured free version, they all seem to come together to me to provide a very defensible mode, but also a great platform with potential for growth. So we linked arms, and he and I went out and found other investors to put together the the consortium, if you will, of investors in the series there. Yeah, that’s
Erasmus Elsner 6:09
interesting. I talked with headline this week, as you mentioned, they’ve built a sourcing engine that sort of aggregates a lot of the metadata, but also core data. And it’s interesting to see how that really worked out to identify a company that was not in the market that was not walking around Central roads, trying to pitch and lustrous enough straight, they’re oftentimes the best, the best investments, was it difficult for you to to join a project that’s been built on a bootstrapped basis, because you have to run a different playbook, right? As a bootstrapper. You have to sort of have everything very lean and mean. And many bootstrapping are quite hesitant to bring in lots of, you know, employees, they try to keep it under their control. How was it stepping in there,
Michael Crandell 6:54
frankly, it’s been a lot of fun. And it’s been delightful since day one. When I met Kyle for that dinner, he had one other employee. So it was a two person company very bootstrapped, as you mentioned. But I have an affinity for that too. I’ve bootstrapped companies myself, several in the past. And I like that stage. And I really admire the efficiency. If anything, our investors, were a little bit mystified by the fact that we were able to continue to grow fast, but run the company on a cashflow, positive bases. And, you know, comment on the VC business, as you well know, a year ago, as we sat here, the fashion of the day was investing, growth at any cost. Just grow, grow, grow, doesn’t matter how much you burn, how much you spend that Wharton was not that we were growing aggressively, and quite fast, but we were doing it on a cash flow, neutral or positive basis. And so we didn’t need to raise any money, and then 2020 to hit and we’ve all watched how that’s evolved. And now all the fashion is efficient growth. So suddenly, we became fashionable. Although if you look at the whole history of business, it’s always great. Ultimately, all companies need to become not just cashflow, positive, but profitable. And so we had to be a great basis and story to go out and raise more. And that puts us in a position now to really continue to invest very aggressively at a time when other companies are pulling back. But back to the Kyle story, he hired one other person while we were raising the money. And then I joined as number four, I was used to it, it was not unnatural for me at all. And I got to join tile and try to very much respect everything that was working well don’t screw anything up was one of my mantras at the beginning. And also, it wasn’t difficult for me to admire the principles he had put in place and honour those and try to add what I could to make the flywheel spin faster. So one of the areas I really focused on, that I had experience in was continuing to build out the product and the company and the service for larger customers for enterprise customers. So that involves getting certifications like sock two and sock three, and HIPAA, it involved privacy certifications. GDPR see CCBA. And it involved the typical things Kyle had started pen tests, source code audits, and then you know, SLA is for enterprise customers and enterprise licence agreements and the kinds of terms and conditions that they expect. Once you build all that out, you create a lot of trust with larger customers, they feel more comfortable buying from you. So since then, we’ve really had a great partnership. I didn’t see myself as coming in to change anything, but rather to try and again, get the flywheel spinning faster with what was already working.
Erasmus Elsner 9:55
Yeah, I love the open source angle, maybe unpack a little bit how Open Source is helping you on the go to market side?
Michael Crandell 10:03
Absolutely. Well, mostly, it’s a way to achieve frictionless adoption, you don’t have to do a whole lot of marketing, paid advertising, etc. If you have a great product, it, that’s what open source does. It’s an incredible product lead growth engine. In our case, we’re a bit of a new form of open source. As you mentioned, I think traditionally, most open source projects were focused on infrastructure, software, web servers, database servers, load balancers, all the stuff that runs the internet and on an infrastructure level. But bit Warden is really an application. Yes, there’s a server component, but it’s mostly an app that end users use. And so we’re a bit of a new formulation. One of the advantages is, we don’t really compete with ourselves the way some infrastructure software does, because with infrastructure software, you’ve got developers or the central customers using it, and they can easily download the source code and build it. Bit Warden, as a product is really composed of a server and about 10 different clients that access the server in order to let you use your passwords wherever you need them. So just to spell it out, we run on Mac OS on Windows, on Linux, we run on Android, and iPhone, we run on all the major browsers, Chrome, Safari, Firefox, Vivaldi, and we have a command line interface and an API. Why? Because if you’re depending on the system, to create and manage and let you use passwords, you really never want to remember them, you just want the system to be able to access them when you need them. And so that’s what all these clients do, whether you’re in a web browser, whether you’re in an internet cafe, on your phone, or on your tablet, whatever it is, you should be able to access the passwords. And so with all of that, nobody really know developers gonna go build that word loop to use it at their company. What we do get as a benefit from open source is incredible transparency in the market. And larger customers really like the fact that our source code is vetted by security researchers, that it’s completely open for them to vet themselves if they want, and that anybody can contribute to it, if they want to fix a bug or add a feature. That’s all very appealing. We complement that on the other side, by having a fully free version, a full featured free version, where the last major password manager that has a full featured free version that isn’t crippled in one way or another. And that’s a little bit our way of giving back to the world. We don’t treat those users as the product, we don’t try to track data from them or sell any data. What we do expect is if you liked the product, you’ll tell others about it. So it’s a word of mouth engine, and hopefully are for users become ambassadors for a bit word. And that’s how that whole product lead growth engine works for us, Erasmus.
Erasmus Elsner 13:10
I did a bit of research in advance and I went to a small site called Hacker News, which is pretty much the home of all the developers and password is by far the most loved Password Manager. If I can play however, devil’s advocate and be sort of the venture capitalists in the room, asking you about defensibility with as your open source, what is keeping an Amazon to basically download the entire code base, and just putting a monetization layer on themselves,
Michael Crandell 13:40
just Sure. It’s basically the licencing scheme. And it’s critically important in open source to get that right. I think we’re all at this point in time, we’ve learned a lot from what we’ve seen in the past, and how companies have evolved. And certainly I got to take advantage of that when I joined bit warden and made a major focus, our licencing scheme, Kyle had already set it up pretty well, it’s most of the code is under GPL. But the server is under a GPL. It’s it’s the a GPL licence, which is very restrictive for others who want to run the code as a service unless they want to open source everything about the service that they run, which would be all the adjacent code at Amazon, for example, in your in your example. And so Amazon really steers clear of AGPL projects. In addition, as we’ve added more features, particularly around the enterprise features, as opposed to the everyday or free features in the consumer market. We created something called the bid Wharton licence. It’s an open licence, but it’s restrictive in terms of anyone being able to copy that and use it themselves outside of us granting permission. So it enables the case where an enterprise might want a commercial licence as a customer, we’re able to do that But others are not able to use that part of the code at all without our permission. So we’ve split the code off at some something like others have done. I think elastic has something similar. I know you mentioned Couchbase. I think they’ve taken their approach. But I think we’re all hopefully smarter now about not being taken advantage of by anyone, including hyperscale. Cloud, just running off and monetizing what we spend all all this time and energy on Yeah, absolutely.
Erasmus Elsner 15:31
And talking about sort of the open version versus the closed features, the enterprise features, I went on the, on the website and looked at your pricing model, there’s obviously this consumer focused application layer where you have the free, entirely free option. But then there’s also, I think, if you want to have something like single sign on features SSL, you need to upgrade, maybe talk about the different tiers, pricing tiers on the individual site, but then also how we think about it on the enterprise side. As always, we’re open source tokens key to get that right from the beginning.
Michael Crandell 16:04
Yes, that’s working well, for us, we have the free version, for a basic user gives a lot of protection, it’s quite full featured. Then we have two paid versions on the consumer side, a premium version and a family licence. The premium version is $10 a year, it adds additional storage and some phyto to multi factor authentication capabilities on top of the free version, and it gives you priority support. And then the family version is as you might imagine, kind of a package for a whole family without paying the same $10 a year for everyone. I believe that’s $40. For the business versions, we have two teams and enterprise. And they’re distinguished by features. And they start out for an annual licence at $3 a month for teams $5 a month per user, for enterprise enterprise also offers another distinguishing feature that sets us apart from the competition, which is the option to either use our SaaS, hosted version, or to self host. And there’s still a lot of larger companies out there that want to self host for a whole variety of reasons, whether you agree with them or not those reasons as a vendor, it’s really important to be able to provide that as an option. And importantly, customers who self host can move to the SAS version, or vice versa, if they change their mind, once they’re using the product understood. And let’s talk a little bit about traction. And assume that the bulk of the revenue sort of was in the self serve consumer facing product when he joined. And this has, I assume, pretty much shifted more to the enterprise side. Talk a little bit about so the focus of the company, and how you’re, you know, expanding on that revenue base? Yes, well, first of all, we really still honour ourselves serve quite a bit. Erasmus, the self serve engine, the product lead growth, plg motion is an amazingly efficient engine. And it’s one that we want to keep running. So I’m very honest with our sales team, which was another part of the company I built after I joined Kyle that if I had a choice, I choose a self serve sale every day of the week over a sales assist sale. It’s just more efficient, right. And some of the great companies out there Atlassian, data, dog, Twilio, they were all built on that model and has been fantastically successful based on it. But that model does allow for complementing with a sales force, one of the old truisms in plg is use sales to learn not to sell. I modified that a bit. I use sales to learn and sell nothing wrong with sales selling, but still a very significant portion of our new ARR comes from self serve. And a significant portion comes from the sales team. So it’s it’s a balanced motion for us. And that’s working really well. Obviously, some customers want to talk to salespeople, they have questions. But the more material you have, the more product availability that anyone can go to the website and experience. The farther along that prospect will be when they get to the sales team. So my pitch to the sellers is I would take the self serve sale any day of the week. But it’s like the law of gravity that some customers are going to want to talk to salespeople and when they get to you, they’ll be that much further along in the process and make your job easier
Erasmus Elsner 19:49
and talk them a little bit about competition. The elephant in the room in that space, especially on the enterprise side is one password I think which raised a massive 650 Malossi receipt I think the crossovers the tighter Global’s are also in that you’ve announced a Cirrus II underpinnings. He was the lead by PSG. So you’re also well capitalised. I mean, we talked about it last year, it was an Bonanza in terms of capital was cheap, how are you viewing that sort of competition, but also your financing strategy.
Michael Crandell 20:20
There is a lot of competition out there. And it’s also a huge market. And, you know, as in the cloud computing market, there’s, there’s one big leader, but as they said early on at Amazon, it’s not going to be a winner take all market, there’ll be many players, that Warden is increasingly significantly differentiated against the competition, we are different, we’re different by being open source, we’re different by all the investment we’ve put in our enterprise version. And we were the first, for example, to do integration with SSO systems and other integration points. So we’ve really doubled down on an enterprise offering that’s very compelling, and and ahead in the market. And then at the other end of the scale, we have this full featured free version, which is an incredible marketing engine for us using users as ambassadors into the world. So at the end of the day, fundings are great, it certainly is the fuel, we can run the company and continue to invest. But mostly we don’t focus on that we focus on our customers, and not the competition. And I think that’s the formula for success here is pay very close attention to your customers to your community. And as you noticed on Hacker News, and go on Twitter, you can go on Reddit, we have the largest communities and the most vibrant ones. And that’s a huge asset moving forward. So we’re going to stay very focused on that. And one of the areas we invest in is also in customer support, we still support the free users, for example, and give very fast priority support to our business users. And we’re very global, the product has been translated into nearly 50 languages. So if you put all of that together, we are a different offering out there. And by continuing to focus on the customer, that’s our strategy for how to continue to grow and succeed.
Erasmus Elsner 22:18
You’re in a great position as you as you didn’t brace not that crazy 2021 area, but you really focused on driving the metrics you had battery, which is multistage firm also in the series A and then you had PSG which comes out of Providence, they do a lot of vine build. Also on the software side, it seems like in your case, it is really more of a traditional growth equity round. Talk a little bit about what sort of options you and Kyle considered, because I can assume that there was not just one term sheet out,
Michael Crandell 22:50
correct, PSG is an amazing investor, and one that I’ve known for, geez, about a decade now. So well, before I got involved at Wharton, and VCs will often tell you, it’s nice to get to know you before we consider an investment. In this case, I had known them a very long time, and we had some discussions about them investing in RightScale. Back in the day, that didn’t happen. But importantly, we got to know them. And both had mutual respect for each other. So there was a relationship there from long before with a growth company like that Warden, you we get a lot of reach outs all the time, from interested investors who want to get to know us talk to us, etc. and had many discussions over frankly, over a couple of years. But again, being cashflow positive, we could be very picky and very choosy about if and when we raised money. And as we saw 2020 To unfold and the shift from growth at any cost to efficient growth as a kind of a foundational principle that investors were taking on. We got more serious about talking to investors. And we were serious about talking to investors who understood our efficient growth model and philosophy and appreciated it. We didn’t want to get in bed or get married to somebody who had a very different picture. And we didn’t want to do it at a time when the valuations were so astronomical, that when the economy shifted, that can create a lot of stress and it can force you to do unnatural things in pursuit of trying to make good what was into the future. So having known PSG and Tom Reardon and Govind demand over some time period and in discussions with them, I also am friends with who’s now the chairman of a company called logic monitor was another Santa Barbara company in the in the monitoring space doing super well was a PSG investment. And so I could talk with other CEOs who had had PSG as an investor and get back backchannel references, and so on. So our philosophies are very meshed, there was no, you know, difference of opinion about where we were headed with the company, and that just all fit together fantastically well. And Kyle and I talked about it and said, Boy, this is a great chance to build up the war chest again, at a time when other companies are doing layoffs. They’re pulling back, they’re having to struggle to think about how do we get to cash flow neutral. And we were, we were at that already as a starting point. So again, it’s gonna let us continue to invest in the product and the company in the interest of offering better things to customers. So you’ve just raised 100 mil Series B, you haven’t refreshed in the bank out, and there’s a lot of things you could do with it, you could spend it on the go to market, you could spend it on product, you could spend it on officers tell us a little bit about the use of funds here, as there are so many options out and
Erasmus Elsner 25:56
we’re sort of deploying it.
Michael Crandell 25:58
So of course, we’re going to invest in the product via the product and engineering teams, the people who build out new features, new capabilities, we are working on a new product called Secrets manager that does for developers What password management does for end users. So we’re very excited about that we are going to invest more in go to market, we’re going to invest more in our customer success team, we really have this incredible community and user base that has grown organically. And there’s lots of opportunity for us to continue to invest in talking to those people more finding out how we can help them finding out how we can help grow their their footprint within their company so that more people are protected by password manager, or secrets management moving forward, we’re going to look at expansion into other adjacent areas. One that we mentioned when we took the funding is the passwordless technology movement that’s been talked about for a decade, and more of it is happening right now. Our thesis is that it’s not going to take over the world all of a sudden. But it already is an important technology for authentication. In the form of things like touch ID face ID biometrics across different platforms. And those are already technologies that are built into bitwarden. Today, but there’s room to do more and more there alongside the password world. Our view is is not religious about that it’s not very strident, it’s simple. Users are going to have to authenticate themselves to a variety of systems. And we want to be the platform in the product that enables them to do that very securely and easily. Whatever the context, and whatever the technology is. So people are out there saying kill the password for long live the password that’s irrelevant. It’s what helps a user authenticate or login with this property with that website, whatever the technology is, make it simple, make it easy and make it secure for them. So we’re going to invest also in the passwordless space. And of course in go to market, it never hurts when you have a great product to help more of the world become aware of.
Erasmus Elsner 28:21
And on the goat market site. What sort of the customer profile is a small medium businesses at large enterprises. What’s been the sweet spot what has been working, what hasn’t been working? What have you changed and learned during the sales process,
Michael Crandell 28:35
as you might imagine, as kind of a product lead growth model, we tend to start have historically started with smaller footprints and companies and grown from there and also quite a bit of traction in the SMB space. Among smaller, smaller customers. When I joined, we put a focus on going to the largest customers. And we have a whole set of those out there we have the largest space exploration company, I won’t use names because we we are mindful of confidentiality one of the largest national space research companies, one of the largest auto manufacturers, we have state and local and federal government in this country. We have government customers overseas and on and on consumer companies. So we have expanded into those. And that’s a natural progression that we’re going to keep building and flowing into. It’s interesting that we do serve everyone from the free individual to a premium customer and their family up through an SMB and up through large customers. More of the largest customer work has been done in the last several years. And there’s room for us to continue to to invest more there. I think that you have both the private consumer version and the enterprise version gives you a beachhead You know, you can start with a small family land and and then someone who really likes it, he brings it to the office and then that’s how you can get it wet into so many organisations. Yes. And we have a slogan now and the campaign we’re running called Bring bitwarden to work. That’s exactly what you’re talking about, you know, Erasmus, one of the realisations I had when I joined the company. In the very early days, Kyle, and I would sit around and talk with the first few employees. And the question came up, where are we focused on consumer or on business? And it was a totally natural question. And it took a while to realise that the question was wrong. It’s really we’re focused on consumer and business, not or business. And what was conceived was that there are two different things. Well, of course, there are feature differences, etc. But the principle that underlies it all. And if you stop and think about it, it makes no sense to protect yourself with strong unique passwords at home, but not at work, or at work, but not at home, you really should be protected everywhere. And as people, we have a private life, we have a work life. But password management is a habit that spans both. And it’s a habit you need to encourage and enable in both realms. So that was a great realisation for us and one that underlies our our philosophy about that virtuous circle from the individual user up to the largest corporation,
Erasmus Elsner 31:35
talking about building up the team. I mean, with the funding you raise, you could have a large headquarter, how do you think about building up a team you being based in Santa Barbara, talk about how distributed versus central you are? Yes,
Michael Crandell 31:48
we’re 100% distributed company. And it happened from the get go. You mentioned Kyle’s based in Jacksonville, Florida, I’m in Santa Barbara, employ his employee number one was in Dallas. And the second person that he hired while we were raising money was in Anaheim, California. So very early on, we had to confront the question, do we create a headquarters or do we not. And it wasn’t looking real good to create a headquarters when we were all spread out like that, even with a small group of people, Kyle wasn’t going to move, I wasn’t going to move. And more importantly, we didn’t see the need to at RightScale, we had sometimes up to half of the staff was remote and half was based in Santa Barbara. So I had a lot of experience in what it meant to have at least a major portion of our team working remotely. And I learned what the good things about it are and what the challenges are. And it does not come without challenges, no question. But we were seeing other companies successfully build 100% distributed companies like GitLab, for example. So we did have some models that we could follow as well as experience I had had. And we had to make that decision early on. In fact, some of the investors we pitched to Erasmus, back in 2019, asked me where we were to build the headquarters. And when I said there was no headquarters, they said, thank you very much, we don’t think we can really be helpful. Part of what we do is build a team in Silicon Valley, for example. And we have a great network here. But if you’re building a distributed company, good luck to you, but no, thank you. So it was a very conscious choice at the beginning. And it’s it’s had two major effects. One is that we do have to focus a lot on building the culture, I think you have to do that in person also. But the fact is, you don’t bump into other people at the coffee machine. So we do a number of things to help build the culture and connect people. But the other part that’s been a huge strategic advantage is our hiring base has suddenly become global. We have people in half of the United States, 25 states, 20 plus countries and six continents. So we were able to hire around the world that let us grow fast, while maintaining a very high quality standard of the people. Plus, as I mentioned, we have a very global user base 50 languages, etc. So it makes sense to have a team that kind of reflects that when you’re serving a customer base like that. So it’s been a great asset. And you just have to make sure you in extra invest in the culture and the connectedness of people. And by the way, we do get together we have meetups and so on. But when the pandemic hit, we didn’t lose our stride at all because there was nothing to change at the work from home stuff. Luckily, now it’s opening up. You know, it’s not for everyone. It’s not for every company, but for us. It works really well.
Erasmus Elsner 34:54
And it really reflects what sits around sheets from GitLab told me he called me that when he was making the rounds With a series eight, he was being discounted based on the fact that he was remote first company. So I’ve talked about this quite a lot. If you get it right, if you’re having a huge advantage, you can really take advantage of these arbitrage opportunities in terms of talent read. Yes.
Michael Crandell 35:17
And, you know, the pandemic, as horrible as it’s been for everybody had a side effect that helped us, which was, everyone went remote. Many companies, particularly tech companies discovered that productivity actually went up. And while some people wanted to go back to the office, many people didn’t want to win that movement of back to the office happened. And so they started looking around for a company they could work for where they didn’t have to. So that provided even more inventory up there for for companies like us and suits.
Erasmus Elsner 35:51
So Michael, as we’re running against the clock, what’s next? We’re bit Warden, what are you excited about personally, in terms of the journey? Is there going to be a $650 million round in the making? Or are you going to stay lean and mean relatively to your large competitors? What’s the next chapter of bitten Warden look like?
Michael Crandell 36:10
Well, we got such a great funding in this round that one of the benefits is we don’t need to focus much on fundraising for the foreseeable future. So I don’t know if 100 million equates to lean and mean, I hope that we stay lean and mean. But I’m looking forward to our ability to invest to the product enhancements, and innovation that we’re going to add, it’s going to be a very exciting time. As passwordless merges into password based authentication, or OS as to how people can get in touch, it’s at wharton.com. go to bit wharton.com. If you’re not familiar with the product, download the free version, you can migrate from another product in about 10 minutes and get all your passwords moved over. Or whether it’s a browser or another password manager or just start using one. I hope you have the aha moment when you realise that the password manager keeps you safer than you can keep yourself and it really is a nice feeling of security. I would also recommend for people who are somewhat new to this area or experienced, check out our blog, there’s a tonne of material that we’re not comm slash blog, tonnes of brief and useful information there with tips and tricks and best practices for staying safe. And then also we do a number of events and there’s an exciting one coming up in December. On December 8, we host what will be our third year, hosting the open source Security Summit, which is a virtual event and it’s freely so anybody can attend it online. This year, we have Kevin Mitnick as one of the keynoters he’s maybe the most World’s Most Famous Hacker who’s on your side. On the good side. We have Eva Galperin, who’s the director of cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation and Miko, deepening those security and privacy experts, and many other speakers from different companies talking about what they’re doing to promote cybersecurity in their companies. That’s December 8. You can find it on bitwarden.com events, or just go to bitwarden.com. Scroll to the bottom, there’s an events link and sign up for free. They’re
Erasmus Elsner 38:22
wonderful yen Michael, thank you so much for taking the time. I think it’s your your third or fourth time as a CEO of a tech company. Looking back now, on all the different SEO positions you had, how does it feel?
Michael Crandell 38:34
It’s definitely the best it was my good fortune to be introduced to Kyle and have a chance to join Deke orden, that word news a force of nature out there. And to have such an efficient business model such a vibrant community of users and supporters. And to be part of a team where we get up in the morning. You know, one thing we say is, we imagine a world where no one gets hacked. And what a great thing to get up in the morning to be part of. So everything about it is great. You know, I hope I learned from past experiences and can help bring some of those learnings to what we all do as a team here.
Erasmus Elsner 39:11
Wonderful nightfall. Best of luck, continued success. And thanks for being here with me today.
Michael Crandell 39:16
Thank you so much, Erasmus.