B Byrne, Clef

The SaaS Go-to-Market That Scaled to 124K Websites

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Episode Summary

B Byrne was 24 years old when his SaaS go-to-market strategy helped Clef reach 124,000 websites - by deliberately going deep in small communities instead of chasing a broad audience.

Clef replaced passwords with phone-based two-factor authentication, but faced a brutal chicken-and-egg problem: websites would not adopt it without users, and users could not use it without websites. B solved it by targeting one niche at a time, earning trust through personal relationships before expanding.

B Byrne is the co-founder and CEO of Clef, a service that replaced passwords with secure phone-based two-factor authentication. Hold up your phone in front of any computer, and Clef logs you in instantly using the same cryptography that developers have trusted for decades.

The idea came when LinkedIn was hacked in 2012 and over 6.5 million passwords were stolen. B was at Adobe at the time, building demos around mobile identity. He kept waiting for Apple to let phones replace passwords - and when it did not happen, he decided to build it himself with two college friends.

The biggest challenge was a classic two-sided marketplace problem. Websites would not add Clef without existing users, and users could not benefit without websites supporting it. The SaaS go-to-market strategy B chose was counterintuitive - instead of going broad, he went deep into small communities, getting Clef onto clusters of websites that shared the same user base. That way, each user could log in with Clef on five sites they used every day, creating real daily value rather than a novelty.

A manufactured PR stunt called the "Petition Against Passwords" got reporters at the New York Times interested. When the Times published a glowing review calling the product "magical," it did not drive immediate signups - but it gave Clef the credibility that security products need to earn trust. Within a month, the snowball started rolling through word of mouth.

B also talks about writing and open-sourcing the company's employee handbook, why he thinks HR is the most overlooked function at startups, and what he has learned about building culture as a first-time founder at 24 years old.

Topics: Product-Market Fit|First Customers

Key Insight

Clef CEO B Byrne grew the passwordless authentication product to 124,000 websites by going deep in small communities rather than broad - getting Clef onto clusters of websites sharing the same user base so each user could log in on five sites daily instead of one site occasionally.

Key Ideas

Clef faced a two-sided marketplace problem where websites would not adopt without users and users could not benefit without websites
B targeted small clusters of websites with shared user bases, creating daily value before expanding to the next niche
A manufactured "Petition Against Passwords" PR stunt opened doors with New York Times reporters who later published a review calling the product "magical"
The NYT article did not drive immediate signups but gave Clef the credibility needed for word-of-mouth growth over the following month
Raised $3.1M total - $150-175K from friends and family initially, then a seed round at the end of 2014

Key Lessons

🎯 Go deep in niches before going broad with SaaS go-to-market: Clef targeted clusters of websites sharing the same users, getting adopted on five sites each user visited daily rather than one site for many users - creating genuine daily value that drove word-of-mouth.
🤝 Manufactured PR stunts can unlock real credibility: The "Petition Against Passwords" was a fabricated campaign, but it opened doors with New York Times reporters who later published a review that transformed Clef from "weird goofy thing" to trusted product.
🧠 Credibility drives growth more than traffic for security products: The NYT article brought traffic but few signups. The real value came a month later when users finally had a reference point to share with others, proving that trust compounds over time.
🔄 Two-sided marketplaces require niche-first SaaS go-to-market: Clef solved the chicken-and-egg problem by concentrating on small communities where they could get both sides to adopt, rather than trying to grow users and websites simultaneously across a broad market.
🛠️ Open-sourcing internal processes attracts talent: B published Clef's employee handbook publicly, and it became a hiring differentiator - candidates applied specifically because they could see the company's culture and values before interviewing.
📉 The weakest engineer can be the best CEO: B became CEO because he was the least skilled coder, freeing the strongest engineers to focus on product. First-time founders should assign roles based on comparative advantage, not preference.
🚀 Write culture policies early before they become hard to change: B spent a year writing Clef's handbook before hiring the first employee. Written policies create accountability because the team can debate whether to change the policy or the behavior when they diverge.

Watch the Episode

Chapters

00:00Introduction

02:20B Byrne's background and why Oakland

05:03What drives B - learning faster than ever

06:10How Clef works - replacing passwords with cryptography

09:40The origin story - LinkedIn breach and Adobe experience

11:47From tinkering to a real company

13:05Raising friends and family funding

14:33The explosive growth year of 2014

17:40How the New York Times article happened

19:11Why the NYT piece drove credibility not signups

20:52What happens when you forget your phone

23:17The Medusa problem - solving one creates two more

26:37Going deep in small communities vs going broad

29:07Team size and hiring the first employee

29:51Why B became CEO at 24

30:14Building culture and values from day one

34:54Writing and open-sourcing the employee handbook

38:01Why HR is an afterthought at startups

39:31Lightning round begins

39:51Best advice - startups die from money or founder breakups

40:16Book recommendation - Creativity Inc.

41:06Most important trait - persistence

41:36Productivity habit - morning calendar email

42:34Business idea - virtual reality

43:10Fun fact - grew up in Alabama

43:48Passions outside work - Oakland city politics

Episode Q&A

How did B Byrne grow Clef to 124,000 websites with a niche-first SaaS go-to-market?

B targeted small clusters of websites sharing the same user base, getting Clef adopted on five sites each user visited daily rather than spreading thin across many communities. This created deep daily value that drove word-of-mouth growth within each niche before expanding.

How did Clef solve the two-sided marketplace chicken-and-egg problem?

Instead of trying to grow both sides simultaneously, B focused on one small community at a time - getting enough websites in a cluster to adopt Clef that users saw it on multiple sites daily, making the product genuinely useful and creating loyalty that fueled word-of-mouth.

What SaaS go-to-market tactic did B Byrne use to get press coverage for Clef?

B created a "Petition Against Passwords" - a manufactured PR stunt that got other companies to sign on. It earned attention from New York Times reporters who later wrote a glowing review calling the product "magical," which gave Clef the credibility a security product needs.

Why did Clef's New York Times coverage not drive immediate signups?

The article brought a burst of traffic but few people signed up. However, within a month the credibility effect kicked in - people who had been skeptical of a small startup now had a reference point to share, and word-of-mouth growth accelerated as users could tell friends to "read this NYT article."

How did B Byrne decide to become CEO of Clef at age 24?

All three co-founders were engineers, and B was the weakest coder. When the company needed someone to handle non-engineering work, B volunteered because the team would miss his engineering contributions the least - a pragmatic decision that let the best engineers focus on product.

Why did B Byrne open-source the Clef employee handbook?

When B tried to build a hiring process, their lawyers provided a standard legal handbook he could not understand. He spent nearly a year writing readable policies from scratch with HR lawyer review. After founder friends kept asking to see it, he published it publicly as a resource for other startups.

What SaaS go-to-market lesson did B Byrne learn about trust in security products?

Trust is essential for authentication products because any credibility gap can destroy adoption. B went to events within target communities, built personal relationships, and earned trust in small circles before trying to scale - a deliberate approach that prioritized depth over reach.

How did Clef raise its initial funding before the seed round?

B and his co-founders raised $150,000-$175,000 from friends and family, spending most of it on food, lodging, and keeping the founders working full-time. They did not raise a seed round until the end of 2014, about a year after the friends-and-family round.

What did B Byrne learn about startup culture that most founders overlook?

B believes HR is an afterthought at almost every startup because when everyone is friends, formal policies seem unnecessary. But he found that writing policies down created accountability - when practice diverges from written policy, the team can debate whether to change the policy or the behavior.

Book Recommendations

Creativity, Inc.: Overcoming the Unseen Forces That Stand in the Way of True Inspiration

by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace

Links

Clef: Website
B Byrne: X
Omer Khan: LinkedIn | X

Full Transcript

Omer (00:11.840)
Welcome to another episode of the SaaS Podcast.
I'm your host, Omer Khan and this is the show where I interview proven founders and industry experts who share their stories, strategies and insights to help you build, launch and grow your SaaS business.
Today's interview is with a guy who started his company with two college friends while he was still at school.
It was the summer of 2012 and LinkedIn had just been hacked and passwords for over six and a half million users had been stolen.
My guest had this idea.
What if you could come up with a better way to secure passwords by using people's mobile phones?
Now, it seemed a little bit of a crazy idea at the time, but he and his buddies got to work building the product and fast forward three years, they've now got over 124,000 websites using their solution and they've raised over $3 million in funding.
You're going to hear the story on how these guys took an idea and turned it into a business.
And we're going to chat about some of the challenges they've had to face along the way.
What I really like about this interview is seeing a 24 year old CEO who's really taking a very mature approach to building a long term business.
We look at what he's doing to build a great company culture and place where people really want to work.
Now, they're a team of less than 10 people right now, but he's doing a lot of really smart things which I think will help them to avoid a lot of growing pains in the coming years as they start to hire more people.
So lots of really valuable lessons here and I hope you enjoy this interview.
All right, today's guest is the co founder and CEO of Clef, a service that provides secure two factor authentication without passwords or tokens.
You just hold up your phone in front of any computer in the world and CLEF will instantly log you in.
The company is based in Oakland, California and it was founded in 2013 and to date has raised just over $3.1 million in funding.
So today I'd like to welcome Brennan Byrne.
Brennan, or I should say B.
Welcome to the show.

B Byrne (02:20.070)
Hey, Omer.
Glad to be here.

Omer (02:22.630)
So I was a little confused.
I went to your website, get cleft.com I watched the video and I listened to the woman with the English accent and I was like, is this a British company?
And then I kind of dug into it and it was like, you know, you're originally from Alabama and then you guys are based in Oakland.
So there's all these different sort of ingredients sort of coming into play.
But how did you end up in Oakland?

B Byrne (02:51.920)
So we ended up in Oakland.
I left Alabama and went to school outside of la.
Pomona College, which is little, and after school, got sort of the startup bug and moved to San Francisco.
And that's actually when we started working on Clef for the first time.
And then sort of being in San Francisco and getting to be a part of the technology scene there, I had a little bit of startup fatigue.
I felt like every time I went out or went to a bar or sort of anytime I was trying to not be working, I would end up around other people who were all doing startups and were asking work questions.
And so I found myself spending all of my free time in Oakland and just got to know some of the communities over here and sort of like the stuff that's happening in this city and was increasingly drawn to it.
And so when my two co founders at clef, Marc and Jesse, moved to the bay and joined me, I insisted we set up shop in Oakland.
And so we've been here since, and it's been great.

Omer (04:05.500)
So Oakland, from what I know, didn't have a great reputation some time ago, but it's quite a happening place these days, right?

B Byrne (04:13.250)
Yeah.
I think that Oakland is a city that's got this super interesting history, both on, if you watch the sort of economics.
There was this period where they were building all of the boats for World War II and there was this big boom and a lot of industry in the city.
But then after World War II, all of that business left and there was very, like, the economy of the city took this steep downturn that took a very long time to recover from.
But at the same time, it has this great history of community activism and support.
It was the home of the Black Panther movement.
There's been so much rich cultural stuff coming out of this city, but I do think it gets the reputation for the sort of economy more than anything else.
But, yeah, it's a really cool, cool place to be.

Omer (05:03.500)
That's great.
So what gets you out of bed in the morning?
What drives you to do what you do?

B Byrne (05:09.500)
Yeah, an interesting question.
The thing that I. I have a bunch of friends who call me and say things like, I want to start a company.
And I always say, why?
Why would you do that to yourself?
It's so, so much work.
And they invariably say, like, well, you do it.
Like, why are you doing it?
And I always respond with the fact that I have never learned faster in my life.
I have this feeling that doing Clef, working on a problem like this, there are no limits, like there are no rules about what I can do to succeed within the realm of what's legal.
And every time I work a little harder or try something a little bit further out there, I get rewarded for that so much.
So the thing that's getting me out of the bed in the morning right now is just how quickly I'm improving, improving both as a human and at my job running this company.

Omer (06:10.590)
I like that.
I'm a very learning oriented person as well.
So it kind of, that's something that resonates with me pretty well.
Hey, so before we get into sort of telling your story, it'd be great if you could, in your own words, explain a little bit more about Cliff.
So I kind of explained that, you know, you can kind of hold up your phone in front of the computer and it sort of instantly logs you in, but tell us a little bit about what's happening in the back end when, when somebody is, is, is doing that.
Yeah.

B Byrne (06:46.730)
So maybe it's useful for me to give even one more step of context than that, which is that our goal with Clef is to replace passwords and that sort of an urgent thing that needs to happen in the next five years.
Whether or not Clef is the company that does it, the sort of existing security infrastructure around passwords is just crumbling and the expensiveness of that infrastructure failing is growing quickly.
So the things like the Ashley Madison breach, the Home Depot breach, the Sony breach, those are all password based failures that are costing huge, huge sums of money and more than just security and money of those companies.
It's also increasingly frustrating for people.
When I had to remember five passwords and they could be my dog's name without any numbers, that was one thing.
But Now I have 100 passwords or 200 passwords and they're all supposed to be different and they've all got these weird requirements.
It's just a note scalable solution.
We can't just make more complicated passwords that are more different.
And so what we sort of have done is developers and sort of engineers abandoned passwords as a way of logging in to most important things about 20 years ago and started using SSH and these sort of cryptography based logins.
But that hasn't come to the rest of the world.
And what we wanted to do was take the exact same cryptography, the same tool that's sort of tried and tested among technical folks, and make it easy enough for everyone else to Use.
So for anyone who's technical, CLEF works just like ssh, which is to say that we are doing this sort of key handshake thing.
And the big benefit of that, like the sort of TLDR of why that's useful, is that CLEF doesn't have to store anything about the user that could be stolen.
So if our database got breached and someone looked at everything we had, there's nothing in there that is really important.
And also every time a user logs in, if someone were to intercept that message and read it, there's nothing valuable in that either.
So the main vectors of attack, which are intercepting messages or breaching databases, just don't work against these systems.
And so that's like the really big security benefit of using CLEF.
At the same time, by getting rid of passwords, we get to make the experience of logging in a lot easier for people and a lot nicer.
And that's, you know, when we talk to people about what we do, I would say the vast majority of the sale is, hey, we're going to make your life easier.
And then as a footnote, by the way, this is also much, much more secure.

Omer (09:40.560)
Got it.
How did you come up with, with the idea for this business?

B Byrne (09:47.750)
It's kind of a funny story.
I was at Adobe in 2011 right after Steve Jobs wrote the letter saying that Flash would never be on an iPhone.
I don't know if you remember that, but it was a pretty dramatic thing.
He published it on apple.com what a lot of people didn't consider at the time was that Adobe had just bought omniture for between 1 and $2 billion.
And Omniture was an analytics platform that was based entirely around tracking people with Flash.
And so without Flash going to mobile, it was like a huge existential concern for the company.
And so I was on the strategic Alliances team.
And what we were trying to do was to prove to some of our big customers that Adobe would still be able to provide value for them even without Flash.
So I built about 100 different demos over the course of several months showing that we were going to be able to know who people were on their phone without Flash being the method of doing that.
And I think that today we look at it and it's obvious that cookies ended up being a cross platform solution that worked pretty well for that.
But at the time we were trying device fingerprinting and WI fi router memory and all these different things that we could do to remember who a person was.
As I was working on this project LinkedIn had their password breach, which today, looking back, is nothing, but at the time was the biggest breach in history.
And it just seemed obvious to me that we would be using our phones to do the sort of login that I was used to using as a developer.
But as I waited for that to come, I kept thinking, like, oh, the next iPhone will let me use it to log into my Mac.
But it kept not happening, and so I decided to build it.

Omer (11:47.820)
Okay, so you had the idea and your two co founders, Mark and Jesse, is that right?

B Byrne (11:57.060)
Yep, that's right.

Omer (11:58.260)
So you guys got together and said, okay, we're going to go and build this thing.
Was this something that you thought of at that point as, okay, we're going to build a business, we're going to go and get some funding?
Or was it more like, hey, let's get together and let's geek out on building some technology here?

B Byrne (12:17.220)
Yeah, it definitely started as the geeking out kind of thing.
Mark and I first started tinkering with it and I was just like, I have this sort of idea.
I don't know if it would work, but let's play around with it and see.
And as it started to sort of take shape, I had been working with Jesse on some other projects and was really impressed with him, and I started lobbying to get him to join the team, and eventually I succeeded.
And after he joined, it sort of became a more serious thing and we started sort of moving it towards a business.

Omer (12:54.930)
Did you look for funding sort of right away, or did that happen later on in the journey?

B Byrne (13:05.890)
Pretty quickly we started to try to assess funding.
It was our first time as founders for all of us.
And so as we started working on Clef full time, we went to assess, like, what was available to us.
And I would say that pretty quickly realized that the stage where the product was at and who, like, where we were, we weren't going to be able to raise a big round.
And so we raised a little bit of money from friends and family first to sort of power us through the beginning of building it.
And then it wasn't until about a year after that that we ended up raising our seed round.

Omer (13:48.330)
When you raised money from friends and family, what did you spend that money on?

B Byrne (13:56.730)
Almost entirely food and lodgings for founders.

Omer (14:00.090)
Okay, so it was just just to kind of pay the bills and keep you guys going, right?

B Byrne (14:03.770)
Keep the lights on.
Yeah, we raised about 150,175k from friends and family.
So there were other things that that money, like, we spent money on Servers.
We ended up having an office that was separate from the house we were living in.
We had some help doing PR stuff for a couple of months.
There were definitely a few other things we spent money on, but the vast majority of that was going towards keeping us working.

Omer (14:33.870)
Okay, now from what I understand, 2014 was a big year for you, that you guys started with a relatively small number of users or customers, well, let's call them users.
I don't know if they were all what the financials were behind there, but.
And by the end of the year that that number was well over, what, a hundred thousand, right?

B Byrne (14:56.980)
Yeah.

Omer (14:58.020)
So tell us a little bit about what happened during that year that drove the growth for you guys.
What were you guys doing?

B Byrne (15:07.440)
Yeah, so we had tried a bunch of different things to sort of cheat growth.
The most interesting challenge about Clef is that if you go download the app today, you may not have any websites where you can log in with it because the websites have to decide to accept it.
But for a website to decide to accept it, they want customers to already have it.
So there's a chicken and egg problem of a sort of two sided market.
And we tried a bunch of different things to try to cheat that and bootstrap it.
And I think all of those things ended up playing a role in the eventual tipping point.
At some number of people.
With the app installed, it became more appealing for other folks to use it.
But I think the process for us was very much.
We had.
We didn't raise our seed round until the end of 2014.
So during that year it was very much just us with our heads down, trying to listen and improve the product.
And we had the real belief that if the product was good enough, people would use it.
And I think part of that is naive.
Like we really had the fallacy.
And at the beginning, I think it was like a major mistake that if we built something, something great, that users would come.
And we definitely stopped sort of relying only on product.
But still our thesis was the operating thought at the time was we have to get the product good enough for people to really want it.
And then we also need to be talking to the people who would want it to figure that out and so that they will use it when it's ready.
Over the course of 2014, December 2013, there's a new York Times piece that was really flattering about.
Clef used the word magical to describe the process, which is sort of one of those buzzwords that Steve Jobs used.
So it means a lot.
And that was the thing that kicked the snowball a little bit.
And then 2014, we were just trying to keep listening and improving the product and it was moving through word of mouth.
So I went to a lot of events among people who are our users and sort of got to know people because trust is so important for our product.
But otherwise it was spreading entirely through word of mouth.
And just because we were so focused on the product.

Omer (17:40.630)
Do you know how that the New York Times article came about?
Were you pitching to those guys or did somebody there just come across CLEF and decide to write about it?

B Byrne (17:52.480)
Yeah, it's actually a pretty funny story.
Well, we had done a big press push in the summer before around a thing we called the Petition Against Passwords, which was something that we made up and got a bunch of other companies to sign on to.
And when we did the Petition Against Passwords, we got in touch with several reporters at the New York Times who were lightly interested but who didn't end up writing about it.
And a couple of months later, when we were releasing some new features for clef, we reached back out to them and they were like, oh yeah, sure, come talk to us.
We were really surprised that it happened.
And the sort of positiveness of the review also was surprising to us.
We were really, really excited at the time it happened because we had reached out previously about that petition against passwords, which was like a very manufactured stunt.
That was like the first thing we did that got anyone to pay any attention to us.

Omer (18:56.680)
And okay, so the article gets published and what happened?
Did you start to see a spike in signups almost the next day?

B Byrne (19:11.480)
No.
So actually the article happened and we got a big burst of traffic, but very few of those people signed up.
But what happened?
And it took about a month.
There was about a month gap.
But what happened was all of a sudden we had credibility.
We had gone from this weird goofy thing that maybe was interesting or a cool demo to now we had some badge that said someone could trust us and that if they really wanted to use a tool like ours, it wouldn't be frivolous.
We weren't like a fly by night organization anymore.
Honestly, we still were, but it didn't seem like we were to the outside world anymore.
So I think that's the.
It took about a month before that sort of credibility stuff started hitting it setting in.
And then all of a sudden we just found people taking us much more seriously.
People started using the product and like they had like a reference point to tell other people about it.
Like, oh, there's this really Cool thing that I've been using.
You should read this article in the New York Times about it.
And it just like it was the nudge we needed to get the ball rolling because once people liked it and could talk about it, there's just a lot more room for us to succeed.

Omer (20:27.550)
Yeah, yeah.
I would say in this space where you are dealing with authentication, trust is huge.
Right.
I mean, if there's any question about, you know, your credibility, then that, that really it can be hugely damaging to the business.

B Byrne (20:51.630)
Absolutely.

Omer (20:52.670)
It's interesting, I think, using the mobile two factor authentication and I love the concept of clef, what happens in situations if somebody forgets their phone.

B Byrne (21:07.010)
Yeah.
So the real challenge with any form of two factor auth today is that if you don't have your phone with you, you can't log in.
And that's true for CLEF as well as every other two factor solution.
And so one of the things we're banking on sort of as we build our business is that our phones become increasingly important and ubiquitous.
If battery life doesn't ever improve, then that is a barrier to everyone using it all the time.
But we're betting on the fact that our phones are going to keep getting better and more important and they may end up looking like watches or things on our face or something under our skin even.
But that belief that our mobile devices are going to become increasingly critical parts of our lives is a bet I'm happy to make.

Omer (21:55.960)
Yeah, no, I agree with you.
And I think the mobile device, I think is becoming more and more ubiquitous and, you know, all over the world, not just, you know, in the Valley or the Seattle area or somewhere like that.
So.
And I think that, you know, I mean, personally for me, I carry my iPhone everywhere.
And now that when you start using things like Apple Pay and using the Starbucks app to buy your coffee,

B Byrne (22:28.710)
it

Omer (22:28.830)
kind of becomes more and more critical.
And it was funny because I was in, in a Starbucks the other night

B Byrne (22:32.950)
and

Omer (22:35.350)
I kind of parked up, went inside, ordered, and I was like, oh, you know what, I'm sorry, I forgot my phone.
And it was just funny because, you know, a year ago it'd be now I forgot my wallet.
But now it almost seemed like the wallet wasn't that important.
Right.
Everything's happening on the phone.
Okay, so.
So the New York Times article kind of gave you the momentum and sort of the breakthrough, but I'm sure it wasn't all smooth sailing.
So give me one example of a challenge or a difficult time that you guys faced.
And either in terms of growing the business or maybe some technical challenges and what was going on.

B Byrne (23:17.330)
Yeah.
So, I mean, I think that in general, it's never easy.
The thing I've found most true about startups is that every time I solve a problem I think is unsolvable, I am presented with two more that are harder.

Omer (23:34.220)
It's like that Medusa kind of thing, right?
You cut off the dragon's head and two appear or something, right?

B Byrne (23:40.420)
Absolutely.
And I've used the metaphor a lot that before we got sort of traction, it felt like we were pushing a ball up a hill and it was heavy boulder, and we were working so hard to get every inch, you know, and we knew that if we could get to a certain point, it would tip and start rolling the other way without us pushing.
And we just needed to get there.
And in that metaphor, it seems like, okay, you get to the top of the hill, it starts rolling and everything gets easier.
Which it did get easier for us to sign up.
People, like, a lot of people sign up for Clef every day, and a lot of new sites add Clef every day.
But then our challenge became, how do we keep up with that ball as it is rolling increasingly quickly, it's going to go smash into a village and we have to push out of the way.
We're responsible for this thing now, and if it does damage, we're in trouble.
So now it's rolling and we have to catch up, and that's even harder.
And it seems like, oh, all the work was pushing it up the hill, but that hasn't ended up being the case.
So I think that there have been a couple of things that have been sort of like really panicky moments for us.
We had a customer launch Clef on their site and then have their site go down immediately.
Just because a bunch of our users went to go log in to Clef, we sent a email to our users being like, hey, go try it out at this new website.
Their website crashed.
The company I'm thinking about in particular was in Hong Kong, and so their developers were all asleep.
All our users were upset.
And why are you sending us a link that's going to a dead website?
There's also just been.
We got a lot of users from.
The way we've grown is to go into specific communities and sort of earn the trust of the people in those communities and then sort of grow in small circles as opposed to trying to sort of hit a really broad audience and be shallower.
So we've gone deeper in small groups, and every time we Switch groups, which has happened twice now.
So both times we've switched groups, there's a huge learning curve all over again.
So it's back to pushing the rock up the hill, and we've gotten a sort of model for it.
We know how much time it takes.
We know sort of the steps we need to do.
But it still is when you're chasing the ball and then you have to go back to pushing it up the hill, it can feel endless or very exhausting.
So it certainly has never been easy.
And I think that the challenges just keep escalating.

Omer (26:37.310)
Yeah.
Let me just sort of understand the way you talked about these smaller groups.
You looked at your market, you basically found, I guess, niches within that market and then decided to tackle one of those at a time so you could go deep enough, you could understand what the requirements of each of those groups was.
And, um, you had the.
It was probably more manageable as well for you guys to be able to onboard new customers that way before you started talking about looking at something else.
And was that a deliberate thing that you guys did, or was that something you learned along the way?
Because one thing I often see with people is that they.
It almost seems like counterintuitive.
They don't want to do that.

B Byrne (27:22.080)
Right.

Omer (27:22.280)
I mean, it seems like surely if I kind of go after the bigger market and bigger reach, then I'm likely to have more luck and more customers.

B Byrne (27:34.160)
Yeah, I think that it's a decision that a lot of people have to make, like whether they want to try to boil the ocean at once or to start with a small segment that they can make really happy.
For Clef in particular, our product lends itself very heavily to density in a network.
The more websites that you can log into with Clef in your daily life, the more useful the tool is.
If you use it on one website, it's cool.
If you use it on five, it changes your whole day.
And so what we wanted to do was to find a group of people where we could get it on five websites they used every day for a lot of them before we tried to get it on to a group that was five times as big once a day.
And so that's what we've done, is try to find a cluster of websites that all share a very similar user base and make sure that we serve them really well, that we get to know them, that we get to know their customers, that we get to know their needs, and then we're able to sign them all up and their customers just become like, these Incredibly loyal fans of klef because they're not just seeing us like, oh, hey, one website I use is trying this new thing.
We are sort of a pervasive thing for them.
And that means that it's much less likely when I meet someone new that they will have heard of CLEF or can use it on one website, but that the people who do use CLEF get to use it in a lot of places and really love it.

Omer (29:07.180)
Yeah.
What's the size of the team?
How many people do you have working there now?

B Byrne (29:13.340)
There are eight of us, so it's actually seven, but our eighth is starting today.

Omer (29:17.420)
Nice.

B Byrne (29:17.740)
I'm gonna go pick him up from the airport.
He doesn't start work today, but he's arriving today, so that's cool.

Omer (29:25.500)
So from what I understand, the three of you, the three founders were all sort of focusing on the sort of the technical aspects of the business.
And then at one point you realized there was actually other stuff to do and sort of a business focus and a company focus.
And then you kind of stepped up and took on the CEO.

B Byrne (29:50.600)
Right.

Omer (29:51.160)
And, and you know, I, I read somewhere about the stuff that you had been doing around creating the right kind of culture and thinking about values and, and stuff like that, and that really impressed me because, you know, I mean, you're, you're.
Are you still 24 or 25?

B Byrne (30:14.040)
I am 24.

Omer (30:15.532)
24.
And I don't mean this to sound patronizing, but it's like, it's not something you expect from a 24 year old to be thinking about those kinds of things.
And, you know, it really impressed me.
And I just wondered like, what was sort of the driver behind that?
What.
Why.
Why did that sort of become important to you?
Was that because you were seeing issues or it was just something that you felt was something that needed to be done?

B Byrne (30:42.200)
Yeah.
So first of all, thank you.
I think that part of it is that.
Well, I'll say that.
So when we decided we all started, we were engineers and I was the worst engineer.
And so when we needed someone to do everything else, I volunteered because it was like, well, I'm the least will miss me doing engineering the least, which I think has been a good decision for all of us.
And we had been working as founders on CLEF stuff and not full time, but CLEF related stuff for two years before we hired our first full time employee, which is Darrell, who does business development for us.
And when we decided to hire someone, I had no idea what to do.
I had no idea what the right process for hiring someone was because I hadn't done it.
And so I was reading a lot online and paying attention to a lot of people who were critical of the sort of norms in the Valley.
And I went to our lawyers and I said, okay, what do I do to make a good hiring process and then to build a good culture?
And they were like, well, here's the handbook that we give everyone.
Here's the one.
And I started looking at it, and I was like, I don't understand what any of this means.
I'm not a lawyer, and it's like, impossible for me to read.
And they were like, yeah, but that's how handbooks are.
I was like, but I don't want that.
And they were like, well, you could write your own, but it's going to be a huge amount of work.
So I went and I searched and I started asking friends and other founders, like, what they were doing about their handbooks.
And like, what was the.
Like, how were people solving this problem?
And the answer I kept getting was like, oh, we don't know.
We just don't do much.
And a couple of companies had written their own handbooks, but they were really big companies, and it was still like a intimidating process.
And so I started writing Rs on my own, and I enlisted a bunch of help.
I got people who I respected a ton and whose opinion I liked to help contribute and sort of consult on the handbook.
And over the course of almost a whole year, like from the day we raised money and decided to hire someone until a couple of weeks ago, I was working and writing these policies, and I sort of did them one by one.
And I did a lot of research into what is the right way to have a hiring process, what is interviewing best practices, what are the different things people are talking about, and then working with an HR lawyer to make sure that everything I wrote was compliant but also still readable and approachable.
And through most of that process, I had the thought of, I just want to get this right for clef because I think that it's really hard to correct later in a company's history.
And I want to do it right from the start.
And also, I know so little about each of these things that learning about them and writing about them was helpful for me to figure out how I could be, how I could run CLEF well.
But as I got through the process and started talking about it with other founder friends, they kept being like, can I see that?
I want that.
And so I decided to open source it, which is Like a little bit weird because there's stuff about our salaries and things like that that are uncomfortable to make public.
But it's been really awesome to have it out in the world just because I think it is a resource that a lot of people want or people have a lot of questions about what it's like to work at a startup or how startup is run.
And that's pretty opaque normally.
But we've sort of made a foundation on which other people can build.
And there's no company that's should run exactly like Clef.
No one should take our policies exactly.
But it's a better starting point than I think existed before we published it, which I'm excited about.

Omer (34:54.560)
Yeah.
And I think it's not just the process of writing something down.
I think more importantly, I think the process that you've gone through has probably helped you to actually implement that.

B Byrne (35:10.090)
Right.

Omer (35:10.290)
And actually turn it into something that people that you hire can kind of see.
And it's something that you guys as founders start to sort of, you know, walk the talk as opposed to.
I mean most handbooks are written and nobody reads them.
Right.
So they kind of completely ignored it.
It's more about can you actually implement then and create that culture within your organization.

B Byrne (35:32.210)
Totally.
I think that's very true.
And part of that is that we're very invested in it.
None of these policies is something that we were told to do.
Each of these things is something we decided we wanted to do.
So there's some buy in there.
There's also a sense of once it's written down, we can argue about it.
Once we've published it, someone can say we're doing it wrong and we can have a debate.
Whereas as long as it's unsaid or in the ether or sort of just habit, it's really hard for us to argue whether it's right or wrong or whether we should change it.
And I don't think that we follow all of our policies to a T. There are several things that the policy is half step out of how we actually practice things.
But when that happens, we can all say to each other like, hey, our policy says we do X, but we're actually doing.
Yeah.
Why is there a difference and should we change the policy or should we change the way we act?
And that's been really, really useful for us.

Omer (36:39.580)
Yeah.
What do your hiring plans sort of look like over the next year?
You're planning to actually.
You have a few open positions that I think I saw on the site.
Right.
So you're still hiring?

B Byrne (36:51.020)
Oh, we do.
We're still hiring engineers right now, senior web engineer and mobile engineer.
But yeah, we'll be hiring a bunch over the next year.
I think that one great thing about the handbook has been that it is like a real differentiator for us in the hiring process.
I think that when people look at early stage companies, it's very hard to get a sense for will this be a culture that I fit in with?
And we've made a very clear statement of like, this is our culture and if you want to work at a place like this, we're going to be that kind of place.
Yeah.
So that's been like a really great bonus.
I would say that a huge number of our, sort of a huge amount of our pipeline right now of candidates is coming from people who are looking at things we're writing in the handbook and elsewhere and saying that sounds like the kind of company I want to work for.
And also your product is really awesome.
But it's been really interesting.

Omer (38:01.080)
Now that's a really good point because when people think about is that the kind of culture that I can kind of fit into or want to work in?
And that's a really difficult question to answer because a lot of the times people working in those businesses can't tell you what the culture is.
Right.
It kind of just happens by accident.
It just evolves.
And, and so I think the fact that you have been very deliberate about that and very transparent is huge.
And I think there's.
I love hearing that you kind of kind of went open source with that because I think that's the kind of resource that could be incredibly valuable for a lot of other startups and helping them to kind of think more about that aspect of running their business and hiring.

B Byrne (38:50.250)
Right.

Omer (38:51.050)
So it's great.

B Byrne (38:53.050)
I think that HR is an afterthought for almost every startup because it's a thing that when you know everyone and you're all friends, it's easy to not worry about the details of that stuff.
But it also means that a lot of founders don't learn about it until pretty late in the game of starting a company.
And I think it's all really important to building a great company.
So it's been awesome for me to learn about and get informed about, but it's also, I hope, a useful resource for other people to learn some.

Omer (39:31.810)
Yeah, I'm going to include a link in the show notes so people can go and check that out.

B Byrne (39:38.610)
Great.

Omer (39:39.010)
Yeah.
My hat off to you, man.
That's very impressive.
All Right, it's time for our lightning round, so I'm going to ask you a series of questions and just try to answer them as quickly as you can.

B Byrne (39:49.620)
You ready?
I can do that.
Yep.

Omer (39:51.060)
All right, what's the best piece of business advice that you ever received?

B Byrne (39:57.340)
Someone told me that startups die for two reasons.
They either run out of money or the founders kill each other.
Not literally, but it's either founder breakup or running out of money.
And if we could avoid those two things, our startup would be successful.
I think that's very true and

Omer (40:14.390)
good advice.

B Byrne (40:14.990)
Most useful.
Yeah.

Omer (40:16.470)
What book would you recommend to our audience and why?

B Byrne (40:21.110)
I just read Creativity Inc. By Ed Catmull about running Pixar and just has radically changed my perspective on management.
I'm a pretty new manager and learning a lot, but I think it's a phenomenal book about particularly inspiring creativity in the people you work with.

Omer (40:40.860)
That's funny.
I just started reading that book too, and I think Pixar is just such a. I mean, they're not that far from you, right?

B Byrne (40:47.740)
No, they're in Emeryville.
They're really close, and I've been on the campus.
It's beautiful.
I have a big company crush on Pixar.

Omer (40:56.940)
Yeah, I think it's a really, really creative company.
All right, what's one attribute or characteristic in your mind of a successful entrepreneur?

B Byrne (41:06.210)
In line with that first answer?
I think probably the thing that I think most correlates with being successful at startups is persistence.
Startups are more failures than successes by a very wide margin.
And there are a lot of different qualities which are successful for different products.
But I think that just continuing to learn and grow, do the same thing over and over again is super valuable.

Omer (41:36.310)
What's your favorite personal productivity tool or habit?

B Byrne (41:42.710)
I get an email every morning from my calendar with a summary of everything I'm going to do in the day.
And it is absolutely integral to my ability to function.
If I didn't get that email, I would just not even be a useful person.
So that's like the thing for me.
Every morning I wake up to an email that I look at.
It tells me my day.

Omer (42:04.220)
Is that just like a Google Calendar type notification or is that something else you use?

B Byrne (42:09.100)
Yeah, it's just Google Calendar doing the notification.
But it took me a long time to figure out that I needed it.
And once I changed, I added it was just like, oh, now I know what I'm doing every day.

Omer (42:18.380)
Yeah.
And I guess that means you also have to keep your calendar up to date.
And kind of use that to plan your day and stuff like that.

B Byrne (42:25.960)
I live and die by my calendar, so that's easy to do for me, but definitely a necessary part of that tool.

Omer (42:34.040)
That's a great one.
It's a very simple sort of habit, but I think it's a very, very powerful one.
What's a new business idea or a crazy idea that you have in your head that you'd love to pursue if you had the extra time?

B Byrne (42:48.680)
I have a bunch of friends and working on it.
I'm really interested in virtual reality.
I think that right now a lot of people are making games, which is just about the most boring thing I can imagine doing with virtual reality.
And I'm so excited about some of the things that are going to happen there.
So if I wasn't working on this, I think I'd probably be doing something related to that.

Omer (43:10.200)
What's an interesting or fun fact about you that most people don't know?

B Byrne (43:17.160)
The one I usually use here you already gave away, which is that I grew up in Alabama, so such a novelty on the West Coast.
I also have a tattoo from the movie or from the TV show the Last Airbender, which I'm a really big fan of.
Wow, that's a.
That's something that most people don't know about me.

Omer (43:39.850)
I'm not going to ask where the tattoo is.
Let's just keep going.
What is one of your most important passions outside of your work?

B Byrne (43:48.740)
The thing I spend, like, the thing I'm most emotionally invested in outside of Clef is really is Oakland, the city I spend a lot of time working on thinking about city politics, development, how the tech industry is going to affect the city as it grows.
I really, really love the city and care a lot about it.

Omer (44:11.140)
Awesome.
Bea, I want to thank you for joining me today.
It's.
It's been a pleasure talking to you.
And I think I've learned a lot more from this conversation than maybe I thought I was going to just.
You just have a lot of, I don't know, just.
If I didn't know your age, I would be thinking, you know, I'm talking to a guy who maybe has a lot more experience.
Right.

B Byrne (44:37.350)
Well, thank you.

Omer (44:37.950)
So it's great.
Now, if folks want to find out more about Get Clef or Clef, they can go to getclef.com and if they want to get in touch with you, what's the best way for them to do that?

B Byrne (44:51.790)
Twitter is where I'm most active, so Brendan Byrne is probably best.

Omer (44:57.790)
Awesome.
Thanks.
Again, man.
And I wish you all the best.

B Byrne (45:01.470)
Absolutely.
Thank you so much for having me on.

Omer (45:03.630)
Pleasure.
Take care.

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