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Paul is a seasoned technology entrepreneur and leader with over 18 years of experience in…
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Announcing ScaleFT
Announcing ScaleFT
I'm excited to announce that I'm co-founding a startup: ScaleFT In the last 6 and half years, I've seen so much: From a…
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Paul Querna shared thisToday, agents operate terminals with limited visibility, relying on screenshots and hoping the screen updates in time. We introduced Squire, our C1 internal software factory, where we aimed to integrate AI tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Pi, which are primarily terminal applications. While agents can interact with these tools, the challenge lies in understanding the outcomes of their actions. Terminal applications needed a Document Object Model (DOM). To address this, we developed agent-tui and have open-sourced it today under the Apache-2.0 license. Agent-tui transforms terminal interactions by providing agents with a queryable interface, akin to how browser automation revolutionized web navigation. It interprets the screen by name and responds to actual states rather than relying on arbitrary sleep timers. The intriguing challenge: the most complex terminal application to manage is another agent. We tackled this by demonstrating Codex operating Pi live—an inception of agents managing nested agents. Software was originally designed for human users. We are now focused on reconstructing the toolchain for agents, and we are doing this in the open.
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Paul Querna shared this"UI is pre-AI." - @Naval https://lnkd.in/gDHVzQcU He called the shot. We built it for Identity.
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Paul Querna shared thisTLDR; We have a 4-letter domain name now. The dream of the 90s has been accomplished. Making the move to C1 externalizes something we've known for awhile: Our shift to Identity Infrastructure. The systems, data, and workflows that move businesses forward.
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Paul Querna shared thisSo very excited to welcome Justin Erenkrantz to the C1REW!Paul Querna shared thisI am excited to have completed my first week at ConductorOne! I'm currently drinking from a firehose - it's a lot of fun to work together again with Paul Querna and other very familiar faces! We'll be building out a NYC-based engineering, product, and design office complementing our Portland and SF offices. If you are local, hit me up if you want to grab a coffee and learn more about what we're up to and potentially join our C1rew! Let's go!
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Paul Querna shared thisI’m proud to share that ConductorOne has raised a $79M Series B, led by Greycroft with participation from Accel, Felicis, and CrowdStrike. This raise will accelerate what we’re building: AI-native identity security at scale. We are the breakout winner in identity security. The momentum, the caliber of companies choosing us, and the problems we’re being trusted to solve all prove it. We’re winning because of three things: the technical investments that let us scale where legacy tools break, an incredible team that executes with grit and creativity, and an obsession with customer outcomes. A great team made this possible. A great team will take us forward. If you want to build the future of identity security, now is the time to join us: 🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀 https://lnkd.in/gW2BjENC
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Paul Querna shared thisI joined Danny Allan on The Secure Developer podcast to talk about the future of Identity. Authentication is getting pretty good, “solved-ish,” even**. Which means attackers are now focused on authorization and standing privilege. We also dug into how AI and ephemeral agents are changing the landscape, and how automation can finally remove the human toil from IAM. Listen here: https://lnkd.in/gzA9VSFx ** look I have a perspective on the dependability of hardware token/passkeys at enterprise scales but social media isn't the place for nuance, is it.Autonomous Identity Governance With Paul Querna | The Secure Developer - Episode 170 | SnykAutonomous Identity Governance With Paul Querna | The Secure Developer - Episode 170 | Snyk
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Paul Querna reposted thisPaul Querna reposted this"It is really a passing of the era, not just a man" 💔 I cannot imagine my life had I not met Mikeal Rogers. I've said before that "JSConf changed my life" but behind the scenes there was always Mikeal. He carried a spark to act effortlessly everywhere he went. It inspired me to build, to challenge myself, to make footsteps others could follow & benefit from. From late nights on IRC, to the hallway tracks at NodeConf, to conference organizing, to NodeForward & io.js, to the Node.js Foundation, and to in the end just talking about 2600 magazine and comic books, Mikeal’s energy was truly boundless & infectious. He understood that the voice of the contributors – the voice of the people showing up to do the work – should be the loudest voice in the room. Beyond our work together, our friendship is how I met my partner Tracy and in turn why my family exists. When we learned of his illness Tracy & I wanted him to get to meet the family our friendship created, which is where this most recent photo together came from. Mikeal's passing is a tremendous loss; yet he is gone but not forgotten. I know now that I will spend much of the rest of my life aspiring to pay forward what he gave to me & to others. Links to his obituary in today’s New York Times death notices, a GoFundMe for his children, a blog post from the OpenJS Foundation, and a place to share your own memories of Mikeal are in the comments below 🐢🚀😪
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Paul Querna liked thisPaul Querna liked thisC1 has been acquired by Workday! Congratulations to founders Alex Bovee, Paul Querna, and the entire C1 crew. I’m beyond ecstatic for this team, what they’ve built, and the outcome they’ve earned. This deal makes C1 our most valuable exited company to date. We co-invested in C1’s pre-seed in 2020 alongside Accel and went on to invest several more times over the last six years, including in their Series B last year. C1 also has Rackspace roots. Co-founder and CTO Paul Querna is a former Racker and someone I’ve known for 15+ years. Paul is one of the most talented and technical founders I’ve ever worked with. Paul came to Rackspace through our acquisition of Cloudkick back in the day. While he wasn’t a founder of Cloudkick, it quickly became clear that he was the technical brain behind the product. I spent years trying to keep Paul at Rackspace, and I was successful for a while. Eventually he left to start his first company, ScaleFT, which was acquired by Okta, a leader in the identity management space. At Okta, Paul met Alex Bovee, the co-founder and CEO at C1. I didn’t know Alex before C1, but it didn’t take long to see the combination of deep product experience in identity and intense sales and leadership vibes. Last year I told my investors that I thought Alex could be the CEO of a public company one day. That won’t happen with C1 now, but let’s see what happens at Workday and beyond. :) Congrats again to C1 and Workday. I think this is a super smart move for both teams, and I feel incredibly fortunate to have backed Alex, Paul, and this company from the very beginning.
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Paul Querna liked thisToday C1.ai signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Workday. Six years ago, Paul Querna and I started C1.ai (formerly ConductorOne) on a belief: identity is the control plane for how work gets done, and it was fragmented and broken. AI accelerated the pain of how broken the stack is for most companies. Every business now runs a combined workforce of people and AI agents. These identities need to be governed at machine speed, with security, policy, and automation built in, if we’re going to forge into the AI future. Workday knows who each person is and the mission of each agent. Every new hire, job change, and exit is already a Workday event. The Workday Agent System of Record is a home for enterprise and personal agents. C1.ai governs what each of them can access, across Workday and every other system. The strategic alignment couldn’t be clearer. Joining Workday accelerates our ability to bring our agentic identity platform to far more organizations, far faster. To the C1rew: you built this. To our customers and partners: thank you for betting on us early. We will continue to provide you with the exceptional service you expect from us. Read more: https://lnkd.in/ga6q8xwP.
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Paul Querna reacted on thisCongrats Alex Bovee and Paul Querna and the entire C1 crew! This is game changing and will take the industry awhile to process. The agentic control plane needs to be built on enterprise context and governance. Workday + C1 have the potential to be the missing layer! You can’t just evolve a legacy IAM product to solve this. You need to be built native for agent speed and scale as core infrastructure. Excited to see the next chapter and making waves!
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Paul Querna reacted on thisPaul Querna reacted on thisToday is my last day at Harness. This one is a little hard to put into words. Drone started in 2011 with a pretty simple idea that was novel at the time: run CI workloads in containers. It became a popular open source project with hundreds of thousands of installations, grew into a profitable business, and was acquired by Harness in 2020—an acquisition that all started with a cold Linkedin message to Jyoti Bansal… That message changed the trajectory of my career. I went from building a small startup to operating at a completely different scale, leading much larger teams and lines of business, solving some of the hardest problems in software delivery at scale, and learning a tremendous amount about what it takes to build and grow an enterprise software company. There were plenty of highs, plenty of hard lessons, and a lot of moments I'll carry with me. I'm grateful to the teammates, customers, and friends who were part of the journey. I'm especially thankful to Jyoti for his mentorship, trust, and the opportunities he gave me along the way. I'm excited for what comes next. Stay tuned.
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Paul Querna liked thisPaul Querna liked thisOne day later and we’re still thinking about it. Thank you to everyone who made the first C1 Transform what it was: every speaker, every attendee who brought their hardest questions, and the whole C1.ai team behind the scenes. You came to define the AI transformation with us, and that’s exactly what happened. See you next year at Transform 2027. Alex Bovee Paul Querna Karl McGuinness Travis McPeak Talha Tariq Sachin Malhotra Àyodélé Àbéjídé Derek C. Kris Murphy Justin Pagano Ivan Burazin Sam Bisbee Chi Zhang Rochelle Mattern William Bengtson Kevin Paige Chuck Fontana
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Paul Querna liked thisPaul Querna liked thisEveryone's talking about putting AI to work. On October 6, we're getting the people actually doing it in one room. C1 Transform is our inaugural conference: one day in San Francisco with the technology leaders deploying agents, governing access, and getting real work done in the agentic enterprise. Hear from our founders Alex Bovee and Paul Querna why this is the room to be in. 👇 📍 The Clancy, SF | Oct 6 Save your spot: c1.ai/transform
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Paul Querna liked this154 apps in 2 days. A customer recently went live with C1 and went completely ham using our C1 AI on-boarding agent, out of the box integrations, and AI connector builder.... and setup 154 apps in 2 days. This was a moment for me. The moment where C1 winning based on our first principles was an inevitability. Wind it back: when we started C1 - one of the first principles of our business was that we wanted to accelerate time to value through an opinionated product and integrations that "just worked". There were so many horror stories of long drawn out implementations and shelf ware with the governance and identity platforms. It was the norm for the industry and for some reason was generally accepted as just the way things had to be. We've changed the game completely with our agentic integration platform, C1 AI, and 500+ out of the box connectors. It makes setting up your tenant dead simple. It's impossible to compete against that kind of time to value. It's not 2x better or 5x better, it's 100x better. Legacy identity software is cooked.
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