After 17 years of building a company from nothing to a high-growth leader in the market, I’ve decided to step down as CEO and to transition into the role of CTO.

Our History

I started this company back in 2007 with the idea of building tools that companies actually need. It didn’t start as an authentication platform, or more specifically a CIAM platform. It started out with a high-performance and highly accurate profanity filter named Cleanspeak.

I didn’t raise millions of dollars from venture capitalists or take out monster loans so I could go out and hire a bunch of engineers, sales people, and marketing folks. Rather, I just sat down, started writing some code, and then tried to find people to buy licenses. I also kept a day job for a while and did a bunch of consulting on the side to help keep the lights on and pay the bills.

It took years to get things off the ground and start making enough money to hire people. But Cleanspeak was never quite destined for massive growth and scale. After about ten years of trying to get Cleanspeak to scale, I decided it was time for some new scenery. We left a small group of employees to maintain Cleanspeak, which made sense because it is a solid piece of software that required little support, and started kicking around ideas for something new.

We actually ended up building a community forum called Gather. We decided initially that it should use existing authentication systems rather than having its own. This fit the model of most of our Cleanspeak customers, who all had their own login systems. Long story short, the forum didn’t take off. But we had to build our own authentication system to test Gather with. That authentication system solved our own problem, so we figured, it would probably solve a lot of other peoples’ problems.

It was at this point that we stopped working on Gather and focused all our attention on what would become FusionAuth.

Over the next eight years or so, we put all of our energy into FusionAuth and spent long hours adding features, fixing bugs, marketing, and selling to customers. Right from the start, FusionAuth had immediate adoption. We saw tons of developers downloading our free version, asking for new features, and requesting support. We had paying customers within the first few months after we launched, and each year, we had more.

During the early years, we’d see 200-500% growth in revenue. We started to outgrow our small team and I couldn’t handle all the inbound sales inquiries by myself. We had to expand. We started hiring sales people, sales engineers, marketing folks, support engineers, and developers. Things kept growing and we kept helping more companies solve complex problems.

And remember, we did all of this without any funding or debt — completely bootstrapped. It wasn’t until late 2023 that we took our first funding to help accelerate growth.

The Next Stage

We’re now at a stage where continuing to scale and maintain hyper-growth requires a new skill set.

I’ve always been great at building products from the ground up and building a company from nothing. Scaling to nine figure ARR is not something I have experience doing, nor is it where my skills lie. In order to take FusionAuth to the next level, we needed someone with experience scaling companies, but also someone that understands that FusionAuth is first and foremost a developer tool.

After running an exhaustive search, I met Brian Bell and almost immediately knew he was an awesome fit. He had a background in developer tools (at Split), identity (at Ping Identity), and had helped scale numerous companies. It also helped that we aligned on nearly everything and the likelihood of major contentious issues was near zero.

We made him an offer, which he accepted, and he joined the company at the end of June 2025. 🎉

What’s Next for Me?

With Brian Bell in the CEO seat, it was time for me to get back to my roots. I’m an engineer at heart and love building products that people need. And I also love solving complex technical problems and continuously striving to make things simpler. I also love coding, which I’m hoping to do much more of.

Going forward, I’ll be taking on the role of Chief Technology Officer (CTO). I’ll help our engineering and product teams ensure that FusionAuth continues to be the best solution in the world. I’ll also continue to look at the future of customer identity and ensure that FusionAuth continues to be a leader in the space.

There’s a ton of work to be done and new features to add to the platform, so stay tuned for some truly awesome announcements from the FusionAuth team!

Get Started Today

Whether you’re building your first application or scaling to millions of users like Betty Blocks, FusionAuth adapts to your needs:

• Download and deploy in minutes with our self-hosted option
• Start with FusionAuth Cloud for managed infrastructure
• Integrate seamlessly with our comprehensive SDKs and APIs
• Scale confidently with our dedicated architecture

Ready to see why developers and enterprises choose FusionAuth? Schedule a demo or start building today.

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