What Field Notes is
Field Notes is a series of unscripted conversations with the people who run identity inside real companies, filmed where the work happens, with no studio and no script. The industries and stacks differ, and the problems underneath are the same.
Iden isn't pitched in it. The problem is the subject. If a guest runs Iden, it comes up as part of their own story, and if they don't, it doesn't come up.
Why we started it
The teaser opens on factories. When they first got electricity, they pulled out the steam engine, dropped in a dynamo and kept the floor plan, shafts and belts included. It took close to 40 years before anyone redesigned the building around the new power. Pranay's argument is that identity is at that stage now. It has been solved a few times, and each time the new tool went into the old layout.
Pranay, Anchit and the founding team had watched dozens of companies scale into the same identity problems, and Iden was built as what they wished they'd had. Building it meant two years of calls, coffees and DMs with the people who deal with this daily, and notes on all of it: the onboarding that broke, the contractor still in the system six months later, the audit week that ate someone's December.
When we announced the show on LinkedIn, Pranay wrote that for two years he'd taken notes from anywhere identity came up, customer calls and DMs with sysadmins he'd never met, and that the Field Notes podcast series puts those things on camera. Iden's post gave the other reason: most IGA content is tools selling you tools. In Field Notes, the people who do the work describe it themselves.
Chapters
- Cold open
- Factories, dynamos and floor plans
- Where identity is stuck
- Why Iden exists
- Two years of notes
- Field Notes by Iden
- First reactions
The episodes
Transcript
Read the full transcript, about 200 words
Pranay's part of the teaser, from the captions and lightly corrected. The reactions after 1:27 aren't included.
You know when factories first got electricity, they yanked out the steam engines. They dropped in dynamos instead. But what they didn't change was floor plans, shafts, belts, nothing, right? And it took them almost 40 years to realize that, "Hey, what was actually needed was us redesigning the whole thing around electricity." So ultimately they changed the floor plans, and that led to fixing the problem at the root.
That's exactly where identity is today. That's exactly where it's stuck. It's been solved a few times, yes, but has it been really? I don't think so.
Between Anchit, my co-founder, our founding team and I, I think we collectively saw dozens of companies scale and face the same issues. And Iden was born out of what we wished we had.
So what followed over the next couple of years was a ton of research, conversations, coffees, DMs with people who deal with this on a daily basis. You know, the kind of stuff that never goes on record? That's what we're launching today. Field Notes by Iden.
2:43 · Field Notes Teaser · Follow the show on Spotify