From Seed to $6.5B: Coming Full Circle with Auth0 (Live in Seattle)
You're invited to a fireside chat with Auth0 CEO Eugenio Pace and Auth0 seed/Series A lead investor Sunil Nagaraj on Monday, February 2.
In venture, most relationships are brief. You meet a team. You make a bet. You help where you can. And then—more often than not—you part ways long before the ending is written.
Every once in a while, you get something rarer.
In 2014, while I was at Bessemer Venture Partners, I made a $1 million seed investment in a then-tiny company called Auth0. Here’s the actual investment memo from July 2014 to lead their seed round at which point I joined Auth0’s board. Less than 12 months later, I went on to lead their $7 million Series A. For over 2 years, serving as the only investor on their board, I got to work shoulder-to-shoulder with the founders as we worked to build an enduring company around their vision of a developer-centric identity platform.
Seven years later, Auth0 sold to Okta for $6.5 billion.
That outcome has been written about before—including in my 2021 blog post, The Power of “Nerdy and Early” Investing.
But next week, that story gets something it almost never gets in venture: a live, unfiltered sequel.
A rare rewind—live in Seattle
On the evening of Monday, February 2, I’ll be hosting a fireside chat in Seattle with Auth0’s co-founder and CEO, Eugenio Pace.
👉 Event details & RSVP: https://luma.com/hz8rtzdp
We’ll talk candidly about:
What Auth0 looked like at seed—before the logo, before the narrative, before product-market fit
How culture and leadership building morphed at each stage of the business.
How trust between founders and early investors really gets built—and tested
And what seed-stage founders routinely underestimate on the road from “interesting” to enduring
If you’re building from zero—or backing companies that are—that’s where the real signal lives.
Why this still matters
It’s easy to compress success into a headline: “Startup X sells for billions.” What gets lost is the long middle—the years of ambiguity, product rewrites, pricing debates, hiring mistakes, existential doubt, and slow, compounding progress.
What made Auth0 special wasn’t just the outcome. It was the consistency of the partnership from the earliest days. I left Bessemer in mid-2017 to start Ubiquity Ventures, but that relationship endured—because it was built on shared conviction, not convenience.
That arc—from first check to final chapter—is vanishingly rare in venture. Which is exactly why it’s worth studying.
Watch the 2021 interview (now public)
In December 2021, Eugenio and I sat down for a long-form conversation with TechCrunch about Auth0’s journey. Until recently, that interview lived behind a paywall. It’s now fully public—and well worth watching ahead of the event:
Final note
If you’re a founder in Seattle—or an operator thinking seriously about building something enduring—I’d love to see you there. Stories like this don’t repeat often. When they do, it’s worth slowing down and asking why.
From seed to $6.5B doesn’t happen by accident. Let’s talk about how it actually happens.
Ubiquity Ventures — led by Sunil Nagaraj — is a seed-stage venture capital firm focused on startups solving real-world physical problems with "software beyond the screen", often using smart hardware or machine learning.
If your startup fits this description, reach out to us.