Better Auth, by a self-taught Ethiopian dev, raises $5M from Peak XV, YC

Because the author of this library is an ambitious startup founder and would like to grow his tool into a business.

And many have done this before (selling auth). 0auth, Clerk, Supabase, etc.

Any more I'm missing?

That this is not an oauth backend but a frontend library that you hook into something.

That doesn't sound right. The initialisation code has a database connection string argument. YOu wouldn't do that from a frontend.

This library just hashes passwords and handles oauth2 callbacks. But it also requires a database to "store user data", which is really out of scope of an auth library. But I would like to hear how one goes from a country I've never heard about before to raising 5 mil as a JavaScript library "startup".

> from a country I've never heard about before

How is your lack of geographical knowledge relevant to any of this?

> How is your lack of geographical knowledge relevant to any of this?

It doesn't matter where the country is located on the map. If you happen to be a citizen of a developing country, your opportunities are extremely limited, and that is why I'm curious how he managed to get into the US and make a startup out of something that doesn't make sense to be one.

> The initialisation code has a database connection string argument. YOu wouldn't do that from a frontend.

Definitely /s

Did he get into the US before or after getting into YC?

How is all of this relevant or even interesting?

Do people in the US still think that people living abroad are playing with rocks and sticks all day when they are not hunting for food?

It isn’t – I was trying to make the same point basically. (I’m not in the US, though I haven’t started a $5M company yet, either.)

> How is all of this relevant or even interesting?

Is YC not super competitive and in order to get in you and your co-founder would have to have graduated from some super prestigious university ala MIT?

Privy just got purchased by Stripe: https://privy.io/blog/announcing-our-acquisition-by-stripe

Auth is hard to get right, fiddly at the best of times, and is no one's core competency.

It's almost always part of the box not the chocolates, and so is an excellent candidate for outsourcing. I can see why companies attack this space.