Writing
Long-form essays on identity, AI security, CIAM, Generative Engine Optimization, and the practice of building software. 637 pieces, newest first.
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LinkedIn says GEO is a grift. Corporate job boards say it is a salary band up to $171K at Stripe, SailPoint, AWS, and Citizens Bank. I break down what these companies actually hire for, and why this looks exactly like the cloud and email revolutions did fifteen years ago.
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Every CTO re-litigates build vs buy for authentication every 18 months, and the framing is broken. The real question isn't build or buy. It's which parts of identity are commodity and which parts are your actual product.
Novo Nordisk confirmed a June 2026 data breach. The pharmaceutical giant behind Ozempic becomes the latest healthcare target in an accelerating trend.
On Space Exploration Day, the moon landing is a founder's lesson in sequencing: commit to the outcome before you have proof it is reachable, and build the proof on the way.
74,000 Fortinet admin credentials cracked by GPU clusters from config backups stolen via old vulnerabilities. Patching the device wasn't enough.
ShinyHunters breached Canvas LMS through a free teacher account flaw. Instructure paid the ransom. Data was already copied. 275M student records exposed.
Identity vendors rarely die of bankruptcy. They die of acquisition, then neglect, then a shutdown email. A complete history of every dead CIAM vendor, the pattern behind the deaths, and the questions that protect you from the next one.
France banned Signal for government use and built Tchap. A hacker stole 73K accounts, 643K messages, and 59K media files from French ministry conversations.
It is AI Appreciation Day. From an operator's seat, here is what AI actually changed: it collapsed the distance between an idea and a shipped product, and rewrote how customers discover companies.
On World Youth Skills Day, the advice that runs against the usual: stop future-proofing a single skill. The durable skill is learning a new one fast, under pressure.
24 billion stolen credentials in one database. 8.3TB of plaintext passwords and login URLs harvested by infostealers. The credential economy has scaled.
Whether Auth0 is too expensive depends entirely on who's asking. A framework for telling the regulated enterprise buyer (pay and negotiate) apart from the high-volume, cost-sensitive platform (migrate), with 2026 pricing and breach-cost data.
ShinyHunters weaponized a PeopleSoft zero-day to breach 100+ organizations in two weeks. 455K student records at Nottingham alone. Oracle's advisory came last.
ServiceNow shipped a REST endpoint with authentication disabled. Attackers queried customer data without credentials. The company knew since April.
The structured data that gets cybersecurity vendors cited by AI: five JSON-LD schema types, plus how to reference CVEs, MITRE ATT&CK techniques, and NIST controls as extractable entities.
Scaling a CIAM platform past a billion users taught me that customer identity is a trust problem: progressive profiling, risk-based auth, and passwordless done right.
Traditional vulnerability cycles take months from discovery to patch. AI compresses that to hours. CrowdStrike reports 29-minute breakout times and 89% more AI-augmented attacks year-over-year.
MCP concentrates every AI-agent-to-tool interaction through one interface, and that makes it a new attack surface. A breakdown of the vulnerabilities and how to secure them.
Marketing says GEO is theirs. Comms says it belongs to them. SEO assumes it's the next chapter of their job. They're all partly right, and the fight itself is the symptom of a deeper confusion: GEO spans layers no single team owns. Here is a model that resolves it.
Security leaders face over 10,000 alerts a day. Here is how to build a personalized cybersecurity news feed that filters the noise and surfaces the threats that matter to your organization.
Okta and Microsoft no longer define the CIAM market alone. Five developer-first, passwordless-native, and AI-ready platforms are growing fast by solving the specific problems the incumbents leave unaddressed. Here is where each one fits in 2026.
For decades, Gartner and Forrester shaped enterprise buying. Now buyers ask ChatGPT and Perplexity before they ever open a Magic Quadrant. Here is how analyst influence is actually shifting, and what it means for how companies build credibility.
America turns 250, and it is still the best place to build something the market has no words for yet. A founder's reflection on a career spent doing exactly that.
Every few months another tech giant is fined hundreds of millions for violating your privacy. The numbers are enormous, the violations keep accelerating, and the math explains why: the penalties cost far less than compliance. Here is what they really mean, and what you can actually do.
When a buyer asks an AI engine whether your product supports something, the answer often gets grounded in your documentation, not your marketing. Most companies treat docs as a cost center. In the AI search era, your documentation is one of the highest-value visibility assets you own.
PBKDF2 is not deprecated, but it is no longer the recommended default for new systems. Here is the honest, practical answer for developers: when PBKDF2 is still acceptable, when you should reach for Argon2id instead, and how to decide for your system.
Finding out your password was in a data leak is unsettling, but panic is not the right response and neither is ignoring it. Here is exactly what to do, in priority order, and an honest answer to how worried you should actually be.
Which is the No. 1 secure browser?" is the wrong question. Security depends on your threat model, not a leaderboard. Here is an honest comparison of Chrome, Firefox, Brave, and Safari in 2026, and how to actually choose.
When you name a feature something clever that no buyer would ever type into ChatGPT, you make your product harder to surface for the exact question it answers. Feature naming has always been positioning. Now it is discoverability, and product managers own it.
Before the Bay Area, before GrackerAI, there was Canada. My first company started there, the one that grew to manage identities for over a billion users. A Canada Day reflection on where a founder story began and why a smaller stage is a gift.
Traditional impressions on our properties fell 10-20% this year. AI search visibility rose 35%. That inversion is not a problem to fix; it is the new shape of B2B discovery, and the AI channel brings better-qualified buyers. Here is the data and what it means.
