5 ms·

Off-topic, but: AgileBits is one of my favorite companies ever. - Fantastic product - … which genuinely helps people - … which has evolved and matured in an

by alanh 11y ago

Off-topic, but: AgileBits is one of my favorite companies ever. - Fantastic product - … which genuinely helps people - … which has evolved and matured in an impeccable manner - … which has, as far as I’m aware, never failed critically (no data loss or security breaches – hell, they are so proactive that 1Password saves multiple DB backups for you just in case they eventually mess up) - … which sports good and native apps for all major platforms, including icky ones I’m sure the founders don’t prefer. (They have this in common with WhatsApp!) - Helpful, knowledgeable, and quick support - Didn’t shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they weren’t on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters Whatever culture these guys have? Copy that.

dcposch 11y ago
> Didn’t shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they weren’t on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters Who has ever shut down a company for that reason? Typically startups die when they run out of money. Other than that I agree with you: they seem admirably humble and impressively reliable.
- mikekchar 11y ago
  I don't think it is as common as many people think, but I've experienced it in a few forms in the past. At one place we were making enough money to pay the bills and were growing slowly. The founder wanted an exit with multiples on his investment. He went shopping around to sell the company, but break even with slow growth is a hard sell. He eventually made the decision to discontinue the revenue making side of the company and focus 100% on building something that he thought could sell the company. He failed in that attempt. One thing to keep in mind is that for an entrepreneur it may not be a good business decision to keep working on a project that isn't going to have an exit. If you have no way to hand it off to someone else, then sometimes it is better to redirect your funds into something that is more likely to get you a better return. So in the case I mentioned above, he felt he couldn't get the return he wanted, so he redirected the resources of the company to try to get that return. Even though you can burn through a lot of companies that way, if you are eventually successful you can make a lot of money for yourself and your investors. Many of the people I've worked with in the past I call "serial entrepreneurs" and they know how to eventually win. It's not much fun if you are interested in building a product, though.
bad_user 11y ago
On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the $5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an anchor for comparisons. First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage. I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine. But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again. So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.
- mdaniel 11y ago
  > I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy (https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy) has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your keychain/vault. In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault it became a lower priority than it was before.

by alanh 11y ago

dcposch 11y ago

> Didn’t shut the company down after 2, 3, 4, or 10 years just because they weren’t on track to be a billion dollar company in the next few quarters Who has ever shut down a company for that reason? Typically startups die when they run out of money. Other than that I agree with you: they seem admirably humble and impressively reliable.

mikekchar 11y ago
I don't think it is as common as many people think, but I've experienced it in a few forms in the past. At one place we were making enough money to pay the bills and were growing slowly. The founder wanted an exit with multiples on his investment. He went shopping around to sell the company, but break even with slow growth is a hard sell. He eventually made the decision to discontinue the revenue making side of the company and focus 100% on building something that he thought could sell the company. He failed in that attempt. One thing to keep in mind is that for an entrepreneur it may not be a good business decision to keep working on a project that isn't going to have an exit. If you have no way to hand it off to someone else, then sometimes it is better to redirect your funds into something that is more likely to get you a better return. So in the case I mentioned above, he felt he couldn't get the return he wanted, so he redirected the resources of the company to try to get that return. Even though you can burn through a lot of companies that way, if you are eventually successful you can make a lot of money for yourself and your investors. Many of the people I've worked with in the past I call "serial entrepreneurs" and they know how to eventually win. It's not much fun if you are interested in building a product, though.

bad_user 11y ago

On the other hand they've been moving to a subscription model, starting a slow deprecation of the standalone product. Towards this end they've introduced the $5 / month family plan and killed the Mac-only option, while raising the price of the Mac+Windows option. At this point it's worth noting that the Windows client is old and buggy. They did this, as I said, to raise attractiveness of the $5 / month family plan, being the oldest trick in the book: setting an anchor for comparisons. First of all I find $5 / month to be expensive. Yes, that may be the price of 2 coffees, but if you pay that kind of money for any service/app used, pretty soon you're talking about real money. I also like to own things and I hate renting things, being a terrible tenant. I cannot justify a rent of $60 per year for services/apps unless they are investments producing money. Something like 1Password keeps me safe, but it doesn't make me more productive when programming and it's not helping me with sales either. I can justify subscriptions for Dropbox or IntelliJ IDEA or for keeping my domain active, but not for password storage. I guess what really bothers me is that 1Password is moving away from the things that made me pick it in the first place: standalone app, Dropbox/Wifi sync, Everywhere interface. I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault, to introduce GDrive/OneDrive sync as an option, to fix their Windows client and maybe to introduce a Linux client. Their new Windows client that's the successor to the old one is a "modern Windows" app distributed through the Windows store, which means I won't even be able to keep running 1Password through Wine. But there's another reason I prefer standalone apps. With the family/business plans they promise a web interface and they promise that after you are dead your wife or children will be able to access your vault. Of course, if I'm dead, the subscription would end because nobody would realize that they need to renew it in time, so that's an odd point to make. But skipping over that, this means that the vault is now stored on their servers and they have access to it and to your one password whenever you login. If you thought the Dropbox sync was insecure, think again. So unfortunately they took the bait and decided to spend resources on a subscription model, which is exactly what makes me run away. In the grand scheme of things I guess it makes sense and I hope it works out for them. But along with DRM, trusted computing and the overall trend of bait and switch, I find it to be quite treacherous.

mdaniel 11y ago
> I expected them to build the Everywhere interface for opvault I realize this may only partially help you, but onepasswordpy (https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy https://github.com/Roguelazer/onepasswordpy) has support for both Agilekeychain and the OpVault, if you find yourself on a system that isn't Mac or Windows, or otherwise is a PitA to get to your keychain/vault. In fairness(?) to Agilebits, the 1Password Anywhere really was just the most bare-bones possible, as it didn't support any of the encrypted items except Login; so no Passwords, Secure Notes, no attachments on anything. Maybe they just figured it wasn't worth the hassle to flesh it out, and then with opvault it became a lower priority than it was before.