For the time being, we’re really just focused on getting as many users as possible. Our future plan to monetize is based on a freemium model – similar to how we monetized OkCupid, except Keybase won’t have ads. *Fun fact: We have only one employee who’s not an engineer or designer. Chris and I are still very much involved in the day-to-day engineering. We spend on hiring and supporting the best people we can find to build Keybase. For example, we’re in a WeWork instead of building our own space. We’ve been able to make our money last because we try to keep our expenses low on most fronts.
#Keybase stock series#
But instead of doing a Series B, we were lucky enough to enter into a multi-year partnership with SDF. That money lasted us until about 2018, when we would have done a Series B. Our Series A was from Andreessen Horowitz in 2015. The founders were emphatically pro-privacy in the press, and they were introducing cool features. These are great for sharing pictures you don’t want to become public, or deleting what you’ve said so the internet doesn’t remember your every word. I first created a Keybase account in 2017, when the company was introducing interesting features like Teams (a group chat) and support for exploding messages, which are deleted from the platform after you view them. That’s exactly what’s happening now with Keybase (with a bonus splash of cryptocurrency fever). VC investment has, so far, ruined Reddit (Normcore post), Twitter (Normcore post), and Imgur (paid Normcore post). If you’ve been reading Normcore long enough, you know what happens when VCs come around: it’s time to grow quickly or die. On top of this foundation, we’ve also built encrypted chat, file sharing, and Git on a single platform that works across all of your devices – so, you can think of us as Slack/Dropbox combined and encrypted (or Signal with support for large groups).Īnd then the VCs came calling. They then decided to flesh out the concept so that users could also use the platform to have secure, encrypted chats, and so that they could also chat with people who had verified their identities with Keybase through other platforms like GitHub, Twitter, and Reddit.Įventually, they built out social features : They initially built a directory of PGP keys (cryptographic keys that you can use so that no one can decrypt your communication with someone else) that became popular through Twitter. We knew that privacy would be a growing concern because, at that time, people hypothetically knew that the internet wasn’t secure, but they also widely believed that individuals didn’t have the wherewithal or interest to exploit the insecurities.
#Keybase stock how to#
We had good reason to collect that data – so we could match people – but we spent a lot of time and effort thinking carefully about how to best protect it.
When my co-founder Chris Coyne and I were working on OkCupid, we were surprised by how willing our users were to entrust their most deeply personal data to the site. They left OKCupid and started working on an app that was oriented towards a need for privacy.
What to do? In 2015, Max Krohn and Chris Coyne, two of the founders of dating site OKCupid, found themselves wondering the same thing. Telegram is my messenger of choice, but their cryptographic algorithm is still under question. Signal is wonderful but a huge headache to use. ) You could use iMessage, which is in theory secure (if you trust Apple’s newfound market-based commitment to privacy) unless you message someone on Android. (Whatsapp founder Jan Koum specifically left Facebook over privacy concerns. You could try Whatsapp, but that’s now owned by Facebook which means, in spite of end-to-end encryption, Facebook could potentially still be accessing that content. But Facebook automatically scans these messages for abuse and combs through them manually for other, random pieces of information. Someone is always listening: either the company providing the chat service, or governments (Normcore post), or third parties who want to scoop up data.įor example, you could try Facebook Messenger. Today, it’s nearly impossible to have a truly private conversation online.
0 kommentar(er)
