1Password Has Raised $620M

Nerds.

> ...explore beyond the boundaries of traditional password management.

This is a 50-50 proposition, at best.

I hope this doesn't mean I'll need to start looking or a new password manager.

Great news for a great team. 1Password makes a very solid product and the company genuinely helps improve the security ecosystem for their users (and, through working with browser vendors on things like extension security, all of us).

Hopefully they don’t go all cryptocoin and NFT with the funding… but given their dna, I think they will expand wisely.

I think lotsofpulp is on to something, but the other major possible answer that comes to mind is moving more into the enterprise space. If that happens, it'll no longer be for "us" because if they succeed, they'll inevitably make much more money in that space and be all but forced to pivot harder into it. That'd be much less of a betrayal than selling more data, but it would still mean that slowly but surely it would simply focus less and less on single user concerns.

IMHO it isn't intrinsically impossible to serve both enterprise and single customers, but the business people will always be internally grumbling about the slight additional expense that doesn't have a good ROI vs improving their enterprise product, and the marketing team will want every other screen to be an ad to upgrade to enterprise which discriminating users will rapidly get tired of. It'd take strong and even a bit quirky executive leadership to overcome those issues. Not impossibly strong, but strong.

Edit: Also, they don't have the option of slathering their app with generalized ads. Running ads in the context of a password manager would be insane and lose all their thought-leader users in a heartbeat, permanently. So that door is not open to them.

1Password is a SaaS utility that provides a tool for generating and storing login info and other sensitive information.

To me; that’s immensely valuable, but it’s solved for most by a combination of just using the same passwords or, on iPhones, iCloud Keychain.

Now some folks have dumped the better half of a billion into a tool I pay about $35/year for and is basically feature complete. They’ll want a return on their investment. How do you expect 1Password will give it to them?