Ten years ago, as we started our journey to build Dashlane, we had the intuition that almost all aspects of our lives would be connected to the Internet, and that the UX of the Internet, as designed, was not up to the task. And we also saw that one small, seemingly unimportant aspect of this broken UX—logins and passwords—was going to become a central issue in our daily relationship with the digital world.
Fast forward to today, and this intuition has been proven right. But with a new twist. As citizens and co-owners of the Internet, we have a choice to make every time we create an account or authenticate. Do we trust the two biggest data mining and advertising platforms the world has ever known to manage our identity, or do we want to preserve our digital independence? Ten years of history (and the current news cycles) prove that this choice matters, not just for us as individuals, but for the future impact of the Internet on society—for the Internet my children will grow up with. This serves to define our mission: make it as easy as possible for you to authenticate everywhere, while keeping you safe and in control of your own identity. Our mission matters now more than ever.
Building a private, secure, and credible alternative to the authentication solutions tech giants have created is an ambitious goal. The business model of these companies makes them formidable but in my view gives them no incentive to protect the privacy of consumers; they use their unprecedented scale and power in such a way that they are now in the crosshairs of regulators around the world.
Over time, with the support of some incredible tech investors who believed in our vision, we have assembled a formidable team to go after this goal. Millions of people now trust us with their digital identity. Tens of thousands of companies count on us to protect their employees.
Yet as I approached my 10th year at the head of the Dashlane team, it became clear to me that we were entering a new phase of our growth, one where the challenges would be different.
With the long-term impact of the pandemic, the border between home and work is being erased . The companies we work for, unlike tech giants, now have a clear incentive to help us protect our digital identity, both in our personal and professional life. The workplace has become an ideal battleground to accelerate the adoption of Dashlane and propose a viable alternative to Big Tech. Our roots in the consumer market have allowed us to build the simplest, most usable product in our category, one that employees of companies already love.
But to go further, while continuing to grow the consumer market for password management, we need to also excel at the capabilities that facilitate the sale, deployment, and administration of Dashlane in larger and larger organizations. And this may require experience that I am not in the best position to provide. Accordingly, after discussion with the board, we decided to launch a search for a new CEO, who would bring the track record of growing a software product to massive scale in the B2B world.
We are just at the beginning of this search, and we will take the time needed to find the outstanding CEO our team and our mission deserve, but I wanted to share this decision with our team in the early stages of the process, because transparency has always been Dashlane’s strongest value. I also wanted to share this information publicly, with our customers, as I believe this is great news for the evolution of our products and services. I remain as committed to our team and our customers as ever. We will be deciding the transition date with the board once we have more visibility on the progress of the search.
I am immensely proud of the work the Dashlane team has accomplished. It has been and continues to be a true privilege to serve as a member of this team. We have a lot to do in the next few weeks and months to better serve our customers and prepare the company for this transition. As a co-founder, a customer, and a shareholder of Dashlane, I am excited by the future chapters of our story. Now more than ever.
Emmanuel
Co-founder & CEO
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