HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.
I’m the CEO and Co-Founder of Frontegg. Married to Anna and father of Liel, Aviv, and Mia. Before founding Frontegg, I worked in different software and product positions for 15 years, in several constellations and spaces.
I started coding at the age of 15 and ever since then, I’ve been fascinated by customer-facing products and the ability to fascinate others through my vision.
What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?
Frontegg is a first-of-its-kind full-stack user management platform, empowering software teams with user infrastructure features that modern apps must have.
Why Frontegg? My partner in crime, Aviad, and I, thought about our vision more than anything — we wanted to build a platform that helps companies “hatch” innovation. We wanted to make a product that makes a statement on how modern products should be constructed and presented to their users, a product that does not hide on the backend but has a Front vision as well.
What is the origin story?
Aviad, CTO and Co-founder, and I first met at our previous positions at CheckPoint. Both of us come from a background that’s rich in the experience of launching modern applications. This gave us a rich perspective on the repetitive nature of spinning up such products. With each product, we needed to handle the same tasks all over again. Instead of concentrating on building something magical, our teams had to stop in order to build user management features like authentication, audit logs, roles and permission, API tokens, and more. All these features are super important, but also not related at all to the core mission at stake.
We understood that if we were experiencing this time after time, then we’re not the only ones. So we built Frontegg. We want Frontegg to provide all the user management capabilities companies need, so they can focus on what makes their product truly valuable and unique.
What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?
The Frontegg team is composed of a group of brilliant, dedicated, remarkable team players. I believe that what makes a strong company is its talent, and I am happy we’ve been able to gather around our product such an amazing team. Without the right people, you cannot succeed. Looking at what we were able to create in 2 years makes me humbly appreciate the Frontegg team.
We keep thinking about users and how to make them happy and put that as our first KPI for success.
If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?
Grilling up some tasty BBQ. Or another startup.
At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?
Our core KPI is user adoption, making sure our users are able to use our platform smoothly, removing any friction involved with user management.
What’s most exciting about your traction to date?
Constantly improving and building the product roadmap by focusing on customers. Hundreds of percentages of growth in interest, traffic, and active users on our platform.
What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?
I am really excited about WebAuthN and the next generation of authentication.
I’m mostly worried about the rise of common weaknesses (CWE) in the category of access control of applications. Recent OWASP’s Top 10 list placed application Broken Access Control as the leading web application risk and stated that 94% of applications they examined were tested for some form of access control. In my opinion, the rise of frameworks, tools, and competition are putting high pressure on developers to deliver features without putting enough emphasis on how to create secure products while keeping velocity high.
What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?
I prefer to surround myself in the right environment and I believe HackerNoon gathers brilliant people together. Different opinions, different approaches, and plenty of learning.
What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?
Stop wasting time and do what you’re passionate about, no matter how hard it is.
What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?
During this crazy period starting with the pandemic last year, it was inspiring to see how quickly humans can adapt to a new reality. For us personally, it was fascinating to see that VCs got very quick on their feet to continue investing in innovation, engineers were still looking for opportunities for the next steps of their careers and startups found a way to sell their products in new methods without the need to meet in-person. For me, it's living proof that nothing can stop technology and innovation.
You can vote for Frontegg as Startup of the Year on the Tel Aviv page.