NoahCode Story episode
S11 E13: From Frictionless SaaS Auth to Eliminating the 1:1 Drone Pilot Bottleneck at the Tactical Edge with Matt Hamann, Co-Founder & CTO of Rownd
Aug 19, 2025 · Season 11 · Episode 13 · 23 min
Passwordless authentication, and so much more
Matt Hamann knew he was going to be in tech way back in his younger days. His Dad worked for IBM, so there were always fun things to talk about and play with. He got his first family computer when he was 4 years old, and started programming BASIC when he was 8. Eventually, they got dialup through AOL - and he took off building websites with PHP & MySQL. Outside of tech, he is married with 3 kids. He loves to travel and spend time with his family. He also plays several instruments, including the piano and pipe organ, and enjoys tinkering with smart home devices.
Right around the time of the pandemic, Matt and his co-founder were pitching a new company idea in Y Combinator, around data privacy. After receiving the feedback that there wasn't a big market for the original idea, they started to jam on ideas on how to pivot - and quickly landed on how cool it would be to have password-less authentication.
This is the creation story of Rownd.
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