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ef2eecee7655f814bd7a9228ba0c6992?s=200

I'm passionate about startup culture, leadership and employee engagement, coming from the experience of having left big corporate, packed up with my wife and kids and moved from Australia to the US to pursue startup life.

Director of Culture

Clayton Moulynox

…and other black tie insights from EY’s Entrepreneur of the Year® awards.

Two weeks ago, I suited-up in a tuxedo and Ubered my way to the **Ernst & Young Entrepreneur of the Year® Awards** at the Westin Seattle. On a day where my biggest achievement may well have been putting my own bow tie on, I was soon to be humbled by the achievements of the entrepreneurs being recognized at the gala.
"Humble" is a word I closely associate with entrepreneurs — at least those who "break the mold" (which was the very tagline the folks at EY were attaching to this event). Case in point: [_Eugenio Pace, Auth0 Co-founder and CEO_](https://auth0.com/blog/Eugenio-pace-auth0-CEO-wins-ey-entrepreneur-award/), and the reason I found myself in a monkey suit dabbling in libations and hors-d'oeuvres along with a number of colleagues as we posed for photos and obligatory (yet completely unnecessary) selfies outside the Grand Ballroom.
Eugenio, who I've worked closely with for over three years, was accompanied by his wife Maggie, and both seemed calm and relaxed — joining in our jovial conversations, saying hello to connections, smiling … always with the smiling these two … certainly not hung up on what others might perceive as the enormity of the situation. After all, some guy named Jeffrey P. Bezos won this award once.
Our group of ten was seated at lucky Table #30 in the ballroom enjoying our starters as the lights dimmed and formalities proceeded. We were reminded of the history of the event, some of the inspirational stories and the efforts and passions of many of the people behind it. It was clear we were expected to be rowdy and make some noise as on the tables were LED-lit half moon tambourines, whistles, and little hand drum things you spin across your palms. We utilized them effectively. Some videos introducing the finalists were played, including an amusing "what would you rather" video. Would you rather be in the *Hunger Games* or *Jurassic Park*? Eugenio chose *Jurassic Park*, "because I like running, and I think there would be a lot of running in that." (For the record, I'd choose the *Hunger Games* because, well, Jennifer Lawrence.)

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="What do @eugenio_pace, @JeffBezos, and Jennifer Lawrence have in common? Just this blog post, probably..."/>

As mains wrapped up the awards began. The format was to announce the finalists in a specific category (there were eight or nine categories in all) after which the golden envelope was opened on stage to reveal the winner. If you've ever watched the Academy Awards then you get the visual. There were a couple of categories and deserving winners before we arrived at the category that Table #30 was most invested in: B2B Software & Services. Eugenio and Auth0 were among some great Pacific Northwest nominees, including Manny Medina of Outreach.io and Todd Schwartz and Evan Richman, the co-founders of SkyKick.
"Ladies and Gentleman, the award goes to..." a pause for dramatic effect — I took the opportunity to arm myself with a flashing tambourine and hand drum twizzle stick thing — "the winner is Eugenio Pace." Table #30 goes wild! There are kisses, back slaps and handshakes at our table before Eugenio makes his way to stage.
Now, let me circle back to my earlier comment about being humble. In my interactions with entrepreneurs over the years, I've found them to be less in awe of what they've achieved but instead in greater awe of the people they've surrounded themselves with and what is still ahead to be achieved. From my relationship with him, this certainly rings true for Eugenio. And what he says on stage will probably have you convinced too.


 <iframe src="https://player.vimeo.com/video/275898844" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" webkitallowfullscreen mozallowfullscreen allowfullscreen></iframe>


On stage, Eugenio accepts his award: "Standing here, it's very tempting to think I am here on my own merits," he starts, "but I believe that self-made men are a myth. We are the product of the contribution and love of so many people in our lives and I've been very fortunate to have so many great people across my life." He specifically called out his grandparents, parents, sister, brother-in-law, teachers, wife, colleagues, and his team. He ended with "I'd like to think this award is yours as much as it is mine." Cue applause and mad waving of the sparkly tambourines.

The theme of humbleness and humility was largely present throughout the evening. Universal Cells CEO Claudia Mitchell, winner of the Life Sciences category, told the story of how she was supported by many people over her 20-year business journey, not least by her mother who originally lent her the money to found the company, but who tragically passed away just months before Mitchell's company was acquired for $100 million. CEO of Alaffia, Olowo-n’djo Tchala, another category winner, committed to taking his award to his mother’s grave in his home country of Toga in recognition of the contribution she'd had in his life and that of his seven siblings. Other award winners expressed similar sentiments.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Eight Auziros, our CEO, and his wife went to the @EY_EOY Awards. This is what happened."/>

Later that evening, when most of our crew had left, I was standing with Eugenio, Maggie his wife, and Jenna Isherwood, an awesome Auth0 colleague. His large shiny trophy was nestled on a window ledge next to us because it was too heavy to hold. We were enjoying another drink and laughing at each others' stories...ones we've probably all told before. Eugenio was tapped on the shoulder by a man he didn't know who congratulated him, wanting to know more about his thoughts on the security space. Of course, even in his celebration, he happily gave the man his time and attention. Buoyed as ever about the future. Humble as always.



<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />

Award-Winning Entrepreneurs are Delightfully Humble

auziros:jeana-tahnk

Jeana has been in the tech industry for 15+ years, both as a communications professional and writer. As Director of Global Communications at Auth0, she works with her internal team and external agencies to amplify the company's visibility worldwide and establish its leadership in the identity industry. When she is not working, she can most likely be found on a field watching one of her three kids playing sports, or cleaning up after her one-year-old retriever who chews everything.

Senior Director, Global Communications

Jeana Tahnk

Positioning is based on completeness of vision and ability to execute

**BELLEVUE, Wash. -- June 19, 2018 --** [_Auth0_](https://auth0.com/), a global leader in Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), today announced that it has been named as a Visionary by Gartner in its June 2018 Magic Quadrant (MQ) for Access Management. Positioning is based on completeness of vision and ability to execute.

“We appreciate Gartner’s evolving perspective on the Access Management landscape and their willingness to acknowledge Auth0 as a Visionary,” said Eugenio Pace, CEO and Co-founder of Auth0. “We are excited about our placement as a Visionary and consider it a milestone to land here in our first year participating in the process.”

Auth0 was founded in 2013 as a Universal Identity Platform that provides developers with extensibility, flexibility, and programmatic integration with identity into applications. From the company’s inception, Auth0 was created as an identity platform designed to handle the rigors of any possible use case: B2B, B2C, or B2E. Its universality has provided global enterprises with the ease of managing all identity through one single platform.

Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner's research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose.

<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />

### Media Contact:

Jeana Tahnk 
Corporate Communications 
Auth0 
[jeana.tahnk@auth0.com](mailto:jeana.tahnk@auth0.com)

Kasia Hall 
Matter for Auth0 
[khall@matternow.com](mailto:khall@matternow.com) 
971-246-7898

Auth0 Debuts as a Visionary in Gartner Magic Quadrant for Access Management

Vittorio

Vittorio Bertocci is a Principal Architect for Auth0. Before Auth0, he had a lengthy career with Microsoft, where Vittorio worked with Fortune 100 and Global 100 companies, including working on Microsoft’s Azure Active Directory team as principal program manager focusing on the developer experience. He contributed to the inception and launch of Microsoft's claims-based platform components (Windows Identity Foundation and ADFS, ADAL and MSAL SDKs, ASP.NET middleware). Vittorio is a well known speaker, educator and published author.

Principal Architect

Vittorio Bertocci

...or at least, they won’t as often or as thoroughly as advertised.

Open standards in identity are a good thing. An excellent thing. They’re one of the few aces in the sleeve we have in our industry for keeping complexity under control. When it comes to selecting an open source SDK, assessing whether two or more solutions can collaborate, decomposing problems and requirements into well-known patterns and units of meaning that act as a common language the industry can use to communicate and make progress — open standards are the social norm that enables all that and more.



But it’s time for industry vendors to stop bragging about their support for open standards.


For one, ***open standards are now table stakes***: Do you hear wearables suppliers brag about their support for Bluetooth, or refrigerator manufacturers boast that they can plug in your country’s power grid without adapters? *Of course* they support Bluetooth and come with standard power cord — that barely deserves a mention on the package — the battle for winning your favor is fought on completely different features. Positioning support for bleeding edge standards like token binding or [WebAuthn as a differentiating factor](https://webauthn.me/) is indeed informative, but in the year 2018 support for SAML, OAuth2, and OpenID Connect should be a given.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Use of core identity open standards should be considered table stakes, says @auth0’s @vibronet."/>


But there’s a subtler point, an epiphany I myself had only recently. Contrary to what’s commonly boasted by providers, in the general case ***open standards in identity won’t prevent vendor lock-in***.

Can open standards help to decouple you from vendor-specific considerations? You bet they can — but only for the most basic entry points in their ecosystem. When considering solving the problem of identity and access management, it’s tempting to focus on the mechanics of authentication — and once that phase is solved, consider the matter closed. If you can get a JWT from vendor A using an OpenId Connect OSS SDK, you just proved to yourself that you can likely use the same SDK to repeat the process to get a token from vendor B — hence you feel locked to neither. Think about it for a moment longer, tho. Once the demo is done and all the hands have been shaken, your developers will start working with the vendor of choice and the tokens they’ll request won’t be for proving a point —they’ll be for invoking API, which in turn represents programmatic access to data and functionality. If you look at the reality of the industry today, you’ll see that very often the vendor supplying you with support for OpenId Connect & Co is also the owner of the API you are using to access data and functionality (documents, storage, calendars, inboxes and the like, plus any hosting/serverless capabilities).


Imagine your team fully embracing those API for say a couple of years, going for the deep integration that Mr. Bezos describes [here](https://www-geekwire-com.cdn.ampproject.org/c/s/www.geekwire.com/2018/jeff-bezos-amazon-web-services-lock-never-want-customers-trapped/amp/), then deciding to switch to a new vendor. Sure, the use of OpenId Connect means that adapting your clients to requests tokens from a different source should amount to a simple string update; that’s vastly better than if you’d have to switch between proprietary systems … which incidentally, is exactly what you’ll have to do to migrate all the assets you created using the data and functionality API which are downstream from the token acquisition, use, and validation phases. Which migration task do you think will bring the highest costs and complexity, hence creating those inhibitors traditionally associated to vendor lock-in?


To be clear, I am not saying that there’s anything wrong with the above; in fact, most vendors go out of their way to make your data exportable and help with transitioning it elsewhere if you so choose. The only thing I take exception with is the statement that a vendor using identity open standards will avoid vendor lock-in, as per the aforementioned argument identity is only a fraction of the things that you’ll most likely take a dependence on from a vendor’s offering.

<include src="TweetQuote" quoteText="Find out why @auth0’s @vibronet says open standards alone in identity won’t prevent vendor lock-in."/>

Now, with all that said. There is a notable exception in which the use of open identity standards won’t lead to vendor lock-in, and it occurs in the special case in which the vendor being considered only focuses on the identity aspects of the development of your solution. In that case, there is no upsell agenda! You already know where I am going with this: Auth0 falls exactly into that category of “pure breed” providers. If a vendor only focuses on helping you to easily implement standard-based authentication flows, if that’s the only thing you are paying that vendor for, then by definition, it will be easy to use the very same standards to point your applications to a different supplier. That’s not to say that the scenario prevents the solution from *also* taking dependencies on specific features — not every aspect coming into play in identity solutions is codified in form of standard —however, it is safe to say that “pure breed” identity vendors such as Auth0 come much closer to fulfilling the promise of sparing you from hard vendor lock-in.


Open standards in identity are an excellent thing. So good, in fact, that I propose that by now use of core identity open standards should be considered table stakes, a commodity offered by everyone rather than something to brag about —along the lines of what Carr discussed in his seminal article [IT doesn’t matter](https://hbr.org/2003/05/it-doesnt-matter). Moreover, vendors should articulate the advantages of open standards without hyperbole — they carry enough advantages on their own without having to attribute them magical properties such as the ability of single-handedly avoiding vendor lock-in, without specifying the special conditions (pure identity vendor) where that boast is almost true.

Learn more and [try a WebAuthn demo crafted by Auth0, here](https://webauthn.me/).

<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />

Open standards won’t save you from vendor lock-in

Eugenio Pace joins ranks of mold-breaking entrepreneurs in B2B Software and Services category

**BELLEVUE, Wash. -- June 19, 2018 --** [_Auth0_](https://auth0.com/), a global leader in Identity-as-a-Service (IDaaS), today announced that CEO Eugenio Pace has won the Entrepreneur Of The Year® 2018 Award in the B2B Software and Services category in the Pacific Northwest.

The award recognizes entrepreneurs who are excelling in areas such as innovation, financial performance, and personal commitment to their businesses and communities. Pace was selected by an independent panel of judges, and the award was presented at a special gala event at the Westin Seattle on June 15, 2018.

“To say that I’m truly humbled by this recognition is an understatement,” said Pace. “This award is a culmination of so many things - Auth0, our incredible team, customers, and my support system both inside and outside of the company. I am incredibly honored to be selected for this award.”

Pace continues to lead Auth0 through rapid growth, including more than 100% increase in customers and revenue in 2017 alone. The company also recently announced $55M in Series D funding and is experiencing global momentum as the demand for advanced, modern, and flexible identity management accelerates.

Since 1986, EY has honored entrepreneurs whose ingenuity, spirit of innovation and discipline have driven their companies’ success, transformed their industries and made a positive impact on their communities. Now in its 32nd year, the program has honored the inspirational leadership of such entrepreneurs as:

- Howard Schultz of Starbucks Corporation
- Pierre Omidyar of eBay, Inc.
- Jodi Berg of Vitamix
- Robert Unanue of Goya Foods
- Reid Hoffman and Jeff Weiner of LinkedIn
- Andreas Bechtolsheim and Jayshree Ullal of Arista Networks
- Hamdi Ulukaya of Chobani
- James Park of Fitbit
- J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr. of Marriott International, Inc.
- Lonnie Moulder and Mary Lynne Hedley, PhD, of TESARO, Inc.

As a Pacific Northwest award winner, Pace is now eligible for consideration for the Entrepreneur Of The Year 2018 National Awards. Award winners in several national categories, as well as the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Overall Award winner, will be announced at the Entrepreneur Of The Year National Awards gala in Palm Springs, California, on November 10, 2018. The awards are the culminating event of the Strategic Growth Forum®, the nation’s most prestigious gathering of high-growth, market-leading companies.

### _Sponsors_

Founded and produced by EY, the Entrepreneur Of The Year Awards are nationally sponsored in the US by SAP America, the Kauffman Foundation, and Merrill Corporation.

In the Pacific Northwest Region, sponsors also include Woodruff Sawyer.

## About Entrepreneur Of The Year®

Entrepreneur Of The Year®, founded by EY, is the world’s most prestigious business awards program for entrepreneurs, chosen from an independent panel of judges including entrepreneurs and prominent leaders from business, finance, and the local community. The program makes a difference through the way it encourages entrepreneurial activity among those with potential and recognizes the contribution of people who inspire others with their vision, leadership, and achievement. As the first and only truly global awards program of its kind, Entrepreneur Of The Year celebrates those who are building and leading successful, growing and dynamic businesses, recognizing them through regional, national and global awards programs in more than 145 cities in more than 60 countries. ey.com/eoy

<include src="asides/AboutAuth0" />

### Media Contact

Jeana Tahnk 
Corporate Communications 
Auth0 
[jeana.tahnk@auth0.com](mailto:jeana.tahnk@auth0.com)

Kasia Hall 
Matter for Auth0 
[khall@matternow.com](mailto:khall@matternow.com) 
971-246-7898

"entrepreneurship"