This week Adam is joined by Eugenio Pace, co-founder and CEO of Auth0. Auth0 is a for developers, by developers identity, access, security, and authentication platform built for the cloud that secures billions of logins every year. Mid 2020 they raised $120 million at a $1.92 billion valuation after being told no several times. Then, earlier this year in March they announced they were being acquired by Okta for $6.5 billion, in a bold and future-thinking all stock deal. This episode is full of wisdom, inspiration, and tactical advice that Eugenio has used to build Auth0.
Matched from the episode's transcript 👇
Eugenio Pace: Absolutely. A couple things there that I think are worth maybe digging deeper, from what you said. One is this person did not shame me. I felt ashamed. But what you said is absolutely true - he didn’t know everything, he didn’t have all the context. I was not able to explain the full context to him, for him to give me a better, maybe more informed opinion. It’s not his fault. Now, our first reaction is typically “How dare you?! You ashamed me.” That’s not what was happening. So I think that’s a superpower.
The other thing which I think it’s kind of like a prerequisite for entrepreneurship or for successful entrepreneurs is that obstacles and challenges - you can become victim of that, and say “Oh, look what happened to me! They told me no to this fundraise, or to this round. Or a customer tells me no. See? The world is against me, and I’m the victim of what’s happening around me.” I think a more positive approach, and a more effective approach actually, is to see all obstacles as opportunities. They’re there not to prevent you from moving forward, they are tests to check how much you want what’s behind them.
It’s the same way you go to the gym and you put more plates on your barbell. Well, the goal is not to hurt your muscles, it’s to make them stronger. And to make them stronger, you’re required to put a bigger obstacle, not a smaller obstacle. So that’s how I see obstacles.
[36:11] Obstacles are not there to just make your life miserable. You can choose to make your life miserable with obstacles, but you can choose also to analyze them and wrap them and help you make them better. So if a customer complains to you and says “Oh, your product is awful.” You can choose to say “Oh, they know nothing. They don’t understand. They are complete idiots. How come?!” Or you can say “Really? Tell me more. What’s missing? What were you expecting? What were you doing?”
In our journey we had so many customers telling us that it probably didn’t work for them, or we had an outage and the system was down, and they call me angry and upset, and say “You were down for five minutes. That’s terrible! I lost a lot of money, I lost credibility with my own customers.” And I apologized and I said “Tell me more about the patterns of how you use our system. Maybe we can use all of those to make our system better, and to make it stronger, and to deliver features that are more in tune with what the customer wants.”
So complaints and rejections from customers are kind of gifts that are wrapped in a nasty envelope. And once you get over the nastiness of the envelope, you can go into the gift that you can use in your favor.