“What if [insert Big Tech firm] competes against us?” It’s a question every startup asks itself.
There’s the flip side too, though: What if a Big Tech firm becomes your startup’s biggest customer?
This is exactly the case for Yubico, the hardware maker of the popular
security dongle called Yubikey.
… and for years was an “obscure security firm” with only 5 full-time employees, according to The Information.
The company was trying to solve a problem with the ubiquitous two-factor authentication (2FA) process:
There are actually a number of ways to bypass 2FA, from phishing to intercepting tokens. Yubikey partially solves the problem by requiring a user to plug its dongle into a USB port as another layer of security.
While the ~$45 dongle is not a silver bullet (it could not have prevented the SolarWinds hack), organizations are snapping them up.
Today, 9 out of 10 of the biggest tech companies as well as world leaders (e.g., Angela Merkel) use Yubikey. Banks have rolled them out to high net-worth individuals (not me) and it could be coming to your office next.
With 300 employees now, Yubico expects revenue to rise 70% this year (from $200m in 2020) and may be prepping another key startup question: “When’s the IPO?”