The Cloud Gambit Podcast: Cerbos CEO Emre Baran Talks Startup Growth & Shares Cerbos Insights

Cerbos’ CEO and Co-Founder, Emre Baran, recently appeared on The Cloud Gambit podcast, where he shared his journey from co-founding Yonja, Turkey's largest social network, to leading Cerbos. This episode is a must-listen for anyone interested in entrepreneurship, tech innovation, and scalable access control solutions. Emre's extensive experience in building and scaling successful startups provides invaluable insights into the challenges and triumphs of the tech industry. The episode offers a deep dive into the strategic decisions behind Cerbos and explores the future of authorization management.

Key Highlights

Early Beginnings and Yonja

Emre discusses how he and his brother foresaw the potential of social networks in the early 2000s, leading to the creation of Yonja. This platform quickly became Turkey's most trafficked website, leveraging the burgeoning trend of online photo sharing.

Transition to Google and Qubit

Emre's journey continued at Google, where he witnessed the growth of e-commerce and the need for personalized customer experiences. At Qubit, he further explored these ideas, helping retailers understand and influence customer behavior.

The Genesis of Cerbos

Frustrated with the repetitive task of building authorization logic, Emre co-founded Cerbos to provide a scalable, efficient authorization solution. He highlights how Cerbos addresses a critical gap in the market by offering a product that "just works," allowing developers to focus on core product features.

Challenges and Solutions in Authorization

Emre delves into the technical intricacies of Cerbos, explaining how it delivers fast, secure, and scalable authorization. Cerbos’ unique approach ensures that the solution can be integrated into various environments, from cloud-native to on-premises setups.

Cerbos PDP (Open Source) and Cerbos Hub (Enterprise)

Emre emphasizes the importance of open source in building trust and fostering innovation. He introduces Cerbos Hub, a new solution that provides centralized management for Cerbos instances, enhancing policy administration and security.

Learn more about Cerbos Hub

Transcript

Host: Emre Baran is the CEO and co-founder of Cerbos, an authorization management solution helping software companies implement and scale fine-grained access controls. In this discussion, we start with Emre's experience co-founding and operating Turkey's largest social network in the mid-2000s, and work our way to the present as we dig into how Cerbos gives developers a scalable experience for access control that just works.

Emre: It's going really well. Thank you very much. Thank you for asking. How are you?

Host: I'm doing well. As we just sort of talked about, I woke up this morning and my eight-year-old was making pancakes.

Emre: I hope it wasn't too much of a clean up afterwards. Making is the easy part, cleaning up. Just like code, writing the first piece of code is the easy part, making it clean is the hard part.

Host: Yeah, exactly. Operationalizing things. The day two is always the challenge it seems with everything. So, Cerbos is based in the UK, but you don't live in the UK, do you?

Emre: I recently moved away from the UK, but we are a completely remote company. We have employees from New Zealand all the way to Seattle around the world.

Host: Awesome. Good deal. So, how did you get into technology and land in the space of building some awesome startups?

Emre: I was classically trained in economics, and I found myself automating my job by writing Excel macros during a summer internship in an investment bank. Then, after my second year at school, I decided to study computer science.

Host: And then from there, you co-founded Cerbos?

Emre: Yes, we decided to focus on providing scalable and extensible authorization solutions that developers don’t have to build from scratch.

Host: So, have you been getting feedback from the customers regarding how Cerbos has helped their operations?

Emre: Yes, we hear two types of feedback. One type of positive feedback is that Cerbos just works and they don’t have to touch it. The second kind focuses on how Cerbos helped them save time and money in their operations.

Host: That’s great to hear! So, where can folks find you on the internet if they want to connect?

Emre: I am on Twitter and LinkedIn. You can also find Cerbos at Cerbos.dev.