Unfinished Business:  Partnering with the Gigya team again to fix login & registration once and for all
Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov, founders of OwnID

Unfinished Business: Partnering with the Gigya team again to fix login & registration once and for all

I’ve spent more than a decade building infrastructure for managing “digital identities”.  Before I became a Partner at Mayfield investing in early stage enterprise software companies, I was the CEO at Gigya. Gigya was most known for creating the Customer Identity & Access Management category starting back in 2011, powering login & registration as a service for 700 customers and becoming Gartner & Forrester leaders in the space.  

Our key belief at Gigya was that existing login and registration systems were built for IT with only security in mind, whereas customer experience and privacy were an afterthought. At Gigya, we had a goal of improving customer experience, creating best in class login and registration and giving users control over their data by offering consent management. Yet despite managing 1.7B user identities and getting acquired by SAP, the mission wasn’t complete.

The process of registering and logging into websites & applications is still terrible today. First, passwords are the bane of the internet. There are too many of them and I always forget them.  And people keep stealing them. They should go away!

Also, filling in set afterset of profile fields, again and again and again, grows so tiresome. Personally, I’m OK sharing data knowing when in exchange I get a great service and hopefully a customized experience. I also feel reasonably protected with things like CCPA and GDPR. I just don’t want to have to fill in yet another profile form!

Why hasn’t this improved? Well, there have been efforts. We’ve seen the Yubikey and RSA tokens. Super secure, but do we really want to carry around something on our keychain when I’m not even carrying keys anymore? We’ve seen passwordless solutions where you have to download another application on my phone. Do I really want to download yet another app? Not really. We’ve also seen SMS sign in or “magic” link emails. But those never feel quite right. Those solutions feel disjointed, and are oddly time consuming. We’ve seen “new buttons” that create streamlined sign up and checkout. The problem is no one clicks on them. 

As a founding team at Gigya, we thought there still must be a better way. Since Gigya’s acquisition, we’ve continued to think deeply about this problem. This led to the inception of OwnID, a distributed customer identity management platform. OwnID was started by founding team members from Gigya - Dor Shany and Rooly Eliezerov - both of whom I’ve had the privilege to work with for almost 15 years now. With OwnID, there is no more remembering passwords or having to repeatedly prove your identity online. OwnID is completely web-based (no app needed) with a “Skip Password” button that can be natively integrated by any website on top of their existing registration/login system using OwnID’s self-service console. By distributing customer identity, OwnID creates a network effect across websites & apps without having to remember passwords or repeatedly prove your identity online, creating near frictionless sign up and login. OwnID is being used by customers such as Nestle and DeLonghi that are seeing a 20% increase in registration / login rates and 38% reduction in account recovery requests.

OwnID is our second act. It’s our renewed effort to give consumers control over their digital identities, by creating a 10x better customer experience and removing the need for painful passwords or having to enter data again, and again, and again. I’m thrilled that Mayfield has led a $6.2M seed round, and I’ve joined the board in a joint effort to take care of our unfinished business from Gigya. Onwards & upwards.



Cameron BaSaing

Sales @ Zesty | Slashing cloud costs

1y

Congrats! Couldn't agree more about how tiresome passwords are (which inevitably get stolen). Thanks for sharing the awesome news!

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Giuseppe de Palo

Enterprise segment Lead - Industrial manufacturing & Consumer Products @Google Cloud

1y

Super, great news! Looking forward to working with you in the future 💪👍👏

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Rooly Eliezerov Not of but How :) congrats team !

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so exciting 👏

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Marina Luderer

Creative Leader | Brand Designer | Digital Marketer

1y

Not if, but how… Congratulations Patrick and Rooly.

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