Live data from Hacker News

1Password Has Raised $620M

blog.1password.com

121–130 of 723 posts

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#121
post #104

"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come…

Spot on. What's the best thing to migrate to?

KeePass

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#122
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Why do they need so much extra funding?! They've also (supposedly) been profitable since inception. It's likely that this round has a significant secondary, which means they're just cashing out part of a profitable business.

Exactly. An increasingly common thing lately is what’s effectively a “private IPO”. That’s what this sounds like - liquidity for investors / staff, and ownership to a small cadre of professionally managed funds vs. the Wild West open markets.

Funny, "private IPO" is exactly what I said to someone I was discussing these types of rounds with.

Going public has very tangible costs, but also massive intangible costs. Private markets are extremely frothy and keep ownership and control within an aligned group of investors. This can make all the difference in the world to management.

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#123

"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come…

> Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. Because 1Password is easy enough to use that my wife and I can share a family plan without her getting frustrated. If one of us has a login the other needs, we can easily share it. When I evaluated KeePass, the Wife-Accep…

[deleted]

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#125

"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come…

> Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. Because 1Password is easy enough to use that my wife and I can share a family plan without her getting frustrated. If one of us has a login the other needs, we can easily share it. When I evaluated KeePass, the Wife-Accep…

Nerds continue to fail to grasp the value of UI/UX. This has always been why FOSS and similar solutions have failed to compete in the market in spite of being "free" and often technically superior.

UI/UX is everything. Apple became the most valuable company in history on the back of UI/UX alone. Their tech is decent but not that much better than anyone else's, but their stuff is at least marginally easier to use and that's worth more than the GDP of quite a few countries combined.

The importance of user experience is only growing as the world becomes more and more time poor and we move more and more into an "attention economy." Saving seconds counts. If it doesn't work instantly it's broken, period.

Here's two ways I can explain it:

(1) If you value your time at $100/hour and you have to spend one hour a month maintaining something "free," that free thing costs $100/month. That's fairly expensive. It only makes sense to do this if you have a lot of surplus time on your hands.

(2) If you have ten million users and make a UI/UX improvement that saves them one minute a month and you value their time at an average of $50/hour, you just created about $8.3 million in value since that's the value of the time you just saved.

A rule of thumb that I use is that every step required to do something halves adoption. So if you have a 10 step install process, only 1 out of 1024 people who look at your product will make it to trying it.

Every developer needs to have "user experience is everything" tattooed on their forehead.

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#126

This kind of announcement tends to ring all kinds of alarm bells for me. What kinds of changes should we expect to make those huge investments worthwhile for the investors? My 1Password installation is grandfathered from a time when it was just a standalone app, without subscription. Will it just stop working one day to bully me into subscribing? Can you even start using 1Password these days without buying a subscrip…

Unfortunately yes. You'll still be able to use your license but once that version becomes incompatible with your OS you won't have a choice but to upgrade. I'm disappointed I won't be able to keep the Dropbox sync in 1Password 8. They did have this survey to gauge interest in self hosting it: https://survey.1password.com/self-host/

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#127
post #15

Great for 1Password - I love the tool and I'm a strong advocate. But ... Why such a large round? Why not go for an IPO?

I think this type of massive up-round investment is basically an IPO, likely a fair amount of secondary level of exit for founders, employees, and wouldn't be surprised if the seed/first round investors were able to unload a little (if they even wanted to)

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#128

"1Password Has Raised $620M" Ah fuck. They now need to grow at any cost to earn all that money back. And they'll throw their users under the bus, if they have to, because it's either grow like a unicorn or go bust. Also, I sincerely have no clue how a password manager could be so expensive. Last time I checked, the excellent KeePassXC was still free open source and developed by volunteers in their free time. How come…

Because cloud and enterprise. Sure, labour costs are expensive in our industry. But it's under-appreciated that once you need physical infrastructure, sales and enterprise support, that really tends to eat into your millions.

Please excuse my ignorance about this, but what do "cloud and enterprise" costs entail? Password managers seem to me like a pretty basic CRUD app. I'd imagine the average user has a few KB's max stored, and data transfer is presumably very small (no images/video/other binary data). And enterprise users are presumably running the infra on-prem so I'd think the main costs have to do with support.

Is marketing the thing with the huge price tag, or are there other huge costs I'm not thinking of?

Re: 1Password Has Raised $620M

#130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, care to explain your viewpoint further?

Because the need to meet ROI always leads to selling data.

Only Sith deal in absolute slippery slope fallacies. Besides, this is a paid product with steady MRR, there's plenty of growth to be had without compromising the product. The recent integration with Fastmail for one-click creation of disposable addresses is a great example.
Post reply on HN