I’ve never liked either approach. A rational understanding that AI is useful isn’t enough. There has to be a change of heart. And the best way to reach someone’s heart is to give them something to aspire to, something that matters to them personally.

So instead of talking about what AI means for the company, I wrote about what it means for each person’s career. AI is the biggest career accelerator any of us have seen. It’s an opportunity for personal growth, wealth creation, and building a future-proof skill set. As CEO, I felt I had a duty to explain to our team how we were empowering every Alchemist (what we call Lumos employees) to not only use AI, but use it to transform their own careers, and by extension, their lives.

Here’s the memo in its raw form. I hope it helps you think about how to communicate AI internally at your own company.

Memo: Agentic AI Internally at Lumos

Everyone talks about “AI-first companies.” I want to talk about AI-first careers.

Here is my bet: In 2026, 90% of you will be a manager.

It doesn’t matter if you are an SDR, a Designer, or a VP. You will manage a team of AI agents that do the heavy lifting. The most valuable people in the market won’t type faster or click more. They will orchestrate. They won’t do the raw work. They will become managers of infinite minds.

This isn’t just for engineering. Imagine a Customer Success Alchemist. In the old world, you spend hours clicking through Salesforce, Slack, Linear, Pylon, and Gong just to figure out who is unhappy. You drown in complexity. In the Agentic world, you wake up to a briefing. Your agent noticed that AppStore usage for “Acme Corp” dropped for six weeks straight. It flagged that five of their admins just authenticated into a competitor’s product. It listened to every Gong call to find the pattern. Then it drafted the save email, built the renewal deck, and listed three strategic ways to fix Acme’s specific pain.

You don’t hunt for problems anymore. You decide how to solve them. You stop being a pure executor and start being a strategist.

Lumos Is Your Training Ground

Of course, this shift is personal to us. Our mission is to help companies run a new workforce of humans and agents safely. We cannot build the platform for the Agentic future if we aren’t cutting-edge users of this technology ourselves.

But the more important message is this: Lumos must build this future for you. You cannot build a future-proof career if you stay stuck in the past. We want Lumos to be the place where you become the best version of yourself. The job where you learn the skills that define the next decade of your life. We are building the most capable, high-leverage workforce in the industry.

Decorating the Box vs. Breaking the Box

Becoming an Alchemist is a mindset shift. Most people spend their careers decorating their box. They get comfortable. They try to get a little faster at the manual tasks they have always done.

Alchemists don’t decorate the box. They break it. They push against the walls until the box cracks.

The tools you use today will be outdated in six months. The most successful people at Lumos won’t be the ones with the most tenure. They will be the ones who ask “Why am I doing this manually?” and then fix it.

People often ask me: “Andrej, how do I find time to learn this on top of my work?” That is the wrong question. This isn’t extra work. We are asking you to work differently. Think about an elite athlete. They don’t just play the game. They go to the gym. They study the tape. That is what we need to do.

And we are already seeing Alchemists do it across Lumos:

• Design: Karina T. didn’t just design a sidebar. She shipped it.

• Ops: Elise used Replit to build an internal tool that automates deal reviews, saving the GTM team hours every week.

• Support: Our Support team uses Cursor to diagnose issues instantly instead of manually digging through logs.

• Sales: AK built prototypes of customer feedback to make customers feel truly heard.

• Engineering: Zero built a prototype of a new AI product in a single day just to see what it would look like.

They didn’t wait for permission. They saw a way to break the box, and they took it.

Our Investment In You

If you lean into this, you won’t just help Lumos win. You will increase your own career potential by 3x. Becoming the “AI Professional” in your role, whether that is Marketing, Sales, or People, is the highest-ROI career move you can make right now.

But you shouldn’t have to do it alone. For you to succeed, the company must provide the rails, the budget, and the time. This memo is a commitment of investment in you. The next sections lay out the principles and the systems we are deploying to make this real.

The Principles

1. Continuous Reinvention Is the Job. The single most important skill at Lumos is no longer “Python experience” or “Enterprise Sales tenure.” It is the speed of your evolution. You won’t be a master of AI because AI changes every week. Instead, you must be a master of continuous improvement. If you are not climbing, you are sliding. We will evaluate effective AI use in performance reviews and hiring rubrics. If you are the person who reinvents a stale process, you are the person we want to reward.

2. AI Doesn’t Fix Mediocrity. Okay, this is the “tough love” portion of the memo. AI creates a dangerous illusion that foundational learning matters less. This is a trap. The best engineers with AI are almost always the best engineers without it. To truly leverage these tools, double down on the basics. Read blogs, reflect on your day-to-day, and sometimes build things the hard way to make sure you understand the why. If you stop learning, you become dependent. If you keep learning, you become unstoppable.

3. Prototype with Agents. In a GSD (”Get Shit Done”) culture, the first phase is the Prototype. Never start with a blank page. Whether you are building a slide deck, designing a marketing funnel, or sketching a product feature, use agents to generate the first draft. They create information for you to edit. You can produce a prototype that teammates can react to in a fraction of the time. Don’t write the code from scratch. Orchestrate the agent to build the skeleton, then apply your judgment.

4. If You Do It Weekly, Automate It. Look at your calendar. What do you do once a week or once a month like clockwork? If you do it semi-frequently, an agent should do it for you. We don’t want you spending brainpower on repetition. We want you spending it on strategy. Engineers investigating the same class of bugs? CSMs spending hours building QBR decks? Sales reps researching prospect financials? Automate it.

5. Shared Wisdom, Centralized Tools. Learning is self-directed, but it shouldn’t be lonely. The tool landscape is confusing. While we encourage you to experiment with everything, we will curate a central “Golden Path:” a set of approved platforms for coding, writing, and analysis. We will have DRIs (Directly Responsible Individuals) to guide you and Office Hours to unblock you. We expect you to share what you learn. If you find a killer prompt, post it in #general_working_with_ai. If you build a great workflow, demo it.

6. Mastery over Novelty. We invest in “Iron Man suits” that make you faster. But we avoid Hype-Driven Development. Chasing every new model on Twitter kills momentum. We focus on a Golden Path of our core AI stack (Claude Code, ChatGPT, Gong, Clay, etc.). The real leverage comes from mastering the classics. We value someone who extracts 100% from our core stack over someone who has tried ten tools but mastered none. Tool Expertise, not Tool Selection.

7. Grit over Gloom. Learning to prompt well is an unobvious skill. It is normal to feel frustrated when an agent gives you a hallucination or bad code. Don’t give up. The first prompt is rarely the right one. Loading context takes practice. Debugging an agent is a new muscle. Find the “AI Alchemist” on your team and shadow them. Create study groups. We will shout out the failures just as much as the wins because that is how we learn. This shouldn’t induce angst. It should feel like unlocking a superpower.

The Systems

Principles are the mindset. Systems are the mechanics. We have over ten systems at Lumos that operationalize all of this. Here are the five most interesting ones, the ones I think could actually change things at your company, too.

• The AI Council. A group of internal leaders who meet to orchestrate our AI strategy, find the hidden gems across the company, and remove blockers.

• The “Sharpen the Axe” Block. We explicitly protect monthly time for Tooling Maintenance. Use this block to refine your setup, organize your prompt library, or debug your local environment. Do not push feature work during this time. We invest hours now to save days later.

• The “Automate Yourself” Hackathon. Once a quarter, we pause BAU for one day. The goal: build a workflow that automates the most boring 20% of your personal job. You don’t build for the company. You build for your own sanity.

• Head of AI Ops. We have a dedicated person who owns AI operations and leads all of this. One person to 3-4x over 100 people. That’s a good investment.

• The New Hiring Rubric. We are changing how we interview with pragmatic AI questions and case studies. For example, an engineer will have a coding interview where they have to use AI, and we watch how they work in that environment.

What I Hope You Take from This

That was the memo. Here is why I’m sharing it publicly.

I’ve talked to dozens of founders and leaders over the past few months who are struggling with the same question: how do I get my team to actually adopt AI without resorting to threats or empty cheerleading? The answer, for us, was to make it personal. Stop talking about what AI means for the company’s bottom line. Start talking about what it means for each person’s career, their earning potential, their relevance in a market that is moving very fast.

The companies that threaten employees into adoption will get compliance. The companies that invest in their employees will get transformation. That investment pays back 10x because people who feel ownership over their own growth, and see their company supporting them in that journey, bring a completely different energy to the work.

If any of these principles or systems resonate, steal them and make them yours! Or send me an email to andrej@lumos.com or a message on LinkedIn [link] if you want to connect.

And if you read this and thought “I want to be at a company that actually operates this way,” we are hiring Alchemists at Lumos who want to build the platform for this new era of humans and agents working together. Jobs are open here [link].

The Agentic era is here. Let’s ride the wave vs. watch it from the shore.

For those of you who are new, I am Andrej, CEO and co-founder of Lumos, and I send out thoughts about AI, Agents & Cybersecurity to amazing people (that’s you!).

What a week in cyber. Anthropic accidentally shipped the 512,000-line source code of Claude Code to npm because someone forgot to exclude a debug file. Days earlier, they had leaked their unreleased Mythos model through a misconfigured CMS. Mercor, a $10 billion AI startup that trains models for OpenAI and Anthropic, confirmed that hackers stole 4 terabytes of data through a compromised open-source library. And the Axios npm package, downloaded over 100 million times a week, was found carrying a Remote Access Trojan.

The Mythos leak hit especially hard. CrowdStrike dropped 7%. Palo Alto Networks fell 6%. Okta tumbled 7%. Stifel’s Adam Borg said the model could “elevate any ordinary hacker into a nation-state adversary,” which as we’ve recently seen with the Stryker hack, is a serious claim.

I think the market reaction, while directionally interesting, missed the actual point. The question isn’t whether cybersecurity software will become irrelevant when foundational models get this powerful. It won’t. The question is what kind of software remains valuable in a world where intelligence is omnipresent.

My thesis: the market correction is warranted, but not because Mythos will swallow software. It’s warranted because most platforms that exist today are designed for a world of scarce intelligence, and it’s genuinely unclear which incumbents will own the future. The companies that redesign around abundant intelligence will thrive. The ones that bolt AI features onto yesterday’s architecture will not.

Two weeks before any of this happened, Sam Altman said: “We see a future where intelligence is a utility, like electricity or water, and people buy it from us on a meter.” That framing has a historical parallel that I think explains a lot. It involves a shaft, the electrical revolution, and a thirty-year mistake.

The Factory with the Shaft

In the 1890s, a typical factory was organized around a single massive steam engine in the basement. That engine powered one enormous drive shaft that ran through the building, with horizontal shafts branching off on every floor. Every machine in the factory connected to these shafts via leather belts and pulleys. The entire physical structure of the building, its shape, its layout, its multi-story design, the placement of every machine, was dictated by one constraint: proximity to the power source. A single factory could have a mile or more of shafting running through its ceilings, wasting a lot of energy to friction and consuming more floor space than the machines they powered.

Then electricity arrived. And here is what’s fascinating about what happened next.

Phase 1: The Swap. The factory owner ripped out the steam engine and dropped in one big electric motor in the same spot. The shaft, the belts, the dark narrow multi-story building, all of it stayed the same. He swapped the energy source and called it progress. By 1900, nearly two decades after electricity was commercially available, less than 5% of American factory power came from electric motors, and the factories that had adopted it saw almost no productivity gains because they were still organized around the shaft.

Phase 2: Motors on Each Machine. It took a full generation before someone asked the obvious question: why is there a shaft at all? When you can put a small motor on each machine, the machine doesn’t need to be near the shaft. It doesn’t need to be on a particular floor. It can go anywhere. The belts disappeared. Individual machines gained autonomy. Productivity started to improve because each station could operate independently. But the building itself, its multi-story layout, its narrow floor plan, its basic workflow, was still the same structure that had been designed for steam.

Phase 3: The New Factory. The real transformation came when a new generation of architects threw out the building entirely. Albert Kahn designed Ford’s Highland Park plant as a sprawling, single-story, half-million-square-foot structure encased in glass. Layout followed workflow. Machines were arranged by the sequence of production, not by proximity to a power source. Productivity growth jumped from roughly 1.5% to over 5% per year through the 1920s. The University of Brighton described the shift well: electrification replaced “gears, shafts and belts” with “more abstract ordering principles such as the ‘sequence of work’ and the ‘route of manufacture.’”

I’d say the revolution wasn’t electricity. It was rebuilding the entire factory, free from the confines of the shaft.

Three Eras of AI, Mapped

Now map this onto what we’re living through. The cost of querying a GPT-3.5-level model fell from $20.00 to $0.07 per million tokens in under two years, a 280x cost reduction. Intelligence is rapidly becoming a utility input.

The question that actually matters is whether you’re swapping the engine or redesigning the factory.

Era 1: One big motor (2022 to 2024). ChatGPT arrives. Everyone bolts an AI chatbot onto their existing workflows. You copy-paste text into a chat box, get a better draft, copy-paste it back into your doc. The underlying work doesn’t change. This is dropping a new energy source into the same factory, but keeping all the workflows that came with the shaft.

Era 2: A motor on each machine (2025 to 2026). Claude Code, Manus, and their peers put agents inside your actual tools, and those agents complete entire tasks end-to-end: writing and shipping code, reviewing pull requests, debugging production issues, drafting and sending documents. Gartner projects 40% of enterprise apps will embed agents by end of 2026, up from less than 5% in 2025. The belts are gone, and the gains are real. But the factory layout, the way work flows through your organization, is still the old one.

Era 3: The new factory (2027 and beyond). Fleets of specialized agents working in parallel, coordinating with each other, with humans directing at a strategic level. The human’s job shifts from doing the work to designing the system, setting constraints, and handling exceptions. This is the single-story factory floor organized around workflows. We haven’t seen this yet. While it’s clear this is the future of software, it’s unclear which companies will get there for every software category.

Two Moats That Endure, and Everything Else

When intelligence is water, cheap, abundant, and metered, what creates lasting value? Here is the question I keep coming back to: in which world would even an omnipotent foundational model, one that can reason, code, and hack better than any human, still not be enough on its own? I’ve been thinking about this constantly, and I think it comes down to two durable moats and a set of advantages that are rapidly commoditizing.

Moat 1: Context (The Organization’s Operating Knowledge)

Drop the world’s smartest engineer into a company they’ve never seen before. They don’t know which team owns which system, or why a particular configuration exists, or what happened last time someone changed it. They don’t know that this database has a fragile dependency nobody documented, and that the last person who touched this workflow caused a two-day outage. That engineer isn’t just unproductive in their first weeks. They’re actively dangerous if they start making changes without that context.

This is exactly what happens with powerful AI models operating on generic information. A model that can reason brilliantly but doesn’t understand how your specific organization works will produce output that sounds right, but is wrong in ways that matter. HBR found earlier this year that AI ROI is determined not by model capability alone, but by how precisely intelligence is grounded in the organization’s operating context. A developer on Hacker News captured this nicely: “Swapping between models takes 5 minutes. Getting the context right is where all my time goes.”

Foundation Capital recently wrote about an idea they call the “context graph,” and I think it captures something important. Most enterprise software today stores current state: here is what this customer record or this codebase looks like right now. But agents need more than that. They need to know why things look the way they do. Why was this exception granted? Who approved that discount, and based on what precedent? Why does this team handle approvals differently from that team? That reasoning is the connective tissue between data and decisions, and today it almost never gets captured in any system. It lives in Slack threads, in people’s heads, in the institutional memory that walks out the door when someone leaves.

A context graph makes that reasoning durable and searchable. Instead of just storing what happened, it stores why it happened: what inputs were considered, what rules applied, what precedents existed, and who made the call. When an agent needs to act, it can look at how similar situations were handled before. And because every new decision adds another trace to the graph, the system compounds. It gets smarter with every interaction, not just with every model upgrade. The moat shifts from “having data” to structuring the decision history that no foundational model could ever contain on its own.

Moat 2: The New UX (Orchestrating Fleets of Intelligence)

Today’s AI interaction is like writing instructions on a piece of paper, sliding it under the door, and waiting. The chat interface is the command line of the agent era. We haven’t invented the GUI yet.

As we move from Era 2 to Era 3, the fundamental design challenge shifts. It’s no longer about directing a single agent. It’s about orchestrating a fleet: which agents handle what, how they share state, how you decompose complex goals into agent-sized tasks, and critically, how you calibrate trust. When do you let the agent run autonomously and when do you intervene? How do you set boundaries? How do you review exceptions? Gartner saw a 1,445% surge in multi-agent system inquiries for a reason: this is the problem everyone is running into.

The companies that figure out how to make humans and fleets of agents work together effectively will own the next era of enterprise software. It’s a narrower surface than today’s sprawling dashboards, but it’s where all the value concentrates.

What’s Fleeting

Everything else that feels like a moat today is rapidly commoditizing. Integrations are being swallowed by protocol standards (Anthropic’s MCP, Google’s A2A, the Linux Foundation’s AAIF). Memory is being given away free by foundation model providers. Classic UX patterns are losing relevance as agents handle more work in the background. Individual AI features like summarization and risk scoring are table stakes the moment a better model ships.

Any software product whose primary moat is one of these is in a race it will lose. The platforms that endure will be the ones that build deep context layers and design the new orchestration UX, then plug in whatever foundational intelligence is cheapest and most capable at any given moment.

Identity for Humans and Machines

Let me apply this to the domain I spend every day in: identity.

Identity has always been the connective tissue of the enterprise. It answers the most basic question in security: who has access to what, and should they? But the scope of that question just expanded by an order of magnitude, because it’s no longer just humans who need identity governance. AI agents need it too, and they might need it more urgently.

When a human has overly broad admin permissions they never actually use, the risk just sits there. The access exists on paper, but in practice nothing bad happens because that person never exercises those permissions. When an AI agent inherits those same permissions through an MCP integration or an API key and operates autonomously at machine speed, that changes completely. An over-privileged agent can read, write, and delete across systems faster than any human could intervene. Figuring out what agents are allowed to do, what permissions they actually need, and preventing catastrophic errors at machine speed is the single biggest security challenge of the next two years, and it’s fundamentally an identity problem.

And there’s a beautiful recursive property here. The better you solve identity for AI agents, the more confidently organizations can deploy those agents, which accelerates AI adoption, which creates more demand for identity management. Identity isn’t just a security problem in the agentic era. It’s an enablement problem. The companies that make enterprises safe deploying fleets of agents will unlock the entire Era 3 transformation.

Are You Swapping the Engine, or Redesigning the Factory?

If you are evaluating security platforms today (or any enterprise platform, really), the question to ask is whether you’re buying a better motor or a fundamentally different factory.

The electricity story tells us something important. The revolution was never about power. It was about what became possible when you stopped organizing everything around the constraints of power delivery. The factory that reorganized around workflow didn’t just get more productive. It became a fundamentally different kind of place: brighter, safer, and built around the people who worked there instead of the machine that powered it.

Intelligence is becoming water. The companies that redesign their architecture around this reality will define the next decade. The ones that keep the shaft will wonder why the new motor didn’t change anything.

In some cases, the incumbents will adapt and own this future. In others, new players will emerge. At Lumos, we’re building the new factory for identity. Let me know if you want to chat about that!

With positive vibes,

Andrej
www.lumos.com

Today’s post is all the agentic movement in software. We just relaunched www.lumos.com to reflect our vision: identity governed the Agentic Way.

If you want to build real, enterprise-grade agents, this is your place. Lumos is the first AI-native identity company. We apply autonomous software to one of the hardest problems in cybersecurity.

The last few months have been exciting. I wrote this to show how autonomy will change software, what we are building, and how you can plug in. Hope you enjoy it!

About Cybersecurity and Identity

Let’s start with the market. Cybersecurity is growing because crime is moving online. Thieves no longer need to break into a building. They infiltrate your digital systems. The spammy texts that ask you for gift cards are the cartoon version. The real danger is attackers getting access to corporate accounts that open the doors to a company’s most valuable data.

And the numbers back it up. In Q2 2025, the 18 largest cybersecurity vendors grew 14.6%, outpacing overall IT spend at 8% and GDP at 2% [link]. Cyber matters. Boards know it, and data shows it.

Within cybersecurity you have several markets: email security, network security, endpoint security, … Identity is one of its core markets. Identity makes sure people and services can access software and data successfully. It gives people the access they need for productivity, while keeping it to the minimum for security. And because identity is the key, it’s also where most modern attacks begin.

Take the MGM breach last year. Attackers impersonated an employee, called the help desk, and got a reset. With those credentials they signed in to SSO, escalated to high-privilege access, and spread across systems. MGM later told regulators the incident would cost about $100 million. More than 70% of breaches use identity techniques! That’s why identity protection matters.

Identity protection is one of the biggest opportunities in cybersecurity. Among those top 18 cyber vendors, three companies are focused on identity: Okta, SailPoint, and CyberArk. Each now generates over $1B in ARR, focused on different jobs:

• Okta (Access Management): Helping users log in - like the key to your hotel room.

• SailPoint (Identity Governance): Controlling who gets which permissions across apps - like the front desk deciding which keys to hand out.

• CyberArk (Privileged Access Management): Securing the most sensitive resources, like secrets and API keys - the in-room safe and all-access keys.

These companies built serious products. They all were founded in the 2000s, in a world with fewer apps, fewer identities, slower change, and no AI. That is why identity is so interesting right now. It has become far more critical, and the incumbents weren’t designed for this new reality.

What’s the Problem in Identity?

Identity has many problems, but the one Lumos is tackling first is governance: deciding who gets access to what, and for how long. The demand for stronger governance began with the SaaS revolution, when teams started buying their own tools and “shadow IT” spread across companies. Suddenly, every app came with its own identities and permissions. Now the AI wave has made it worse: it’s not just humans who need access anymore, but bots, agents, and service accounts. The access surface didn’t just grow, it has 10x’d.

However, IT and Security did not grow at the same pace. IT is still drowning in access tickets. New hires need accounts. Developers need short-term access to sensitive AWS permissions. ServiceNow and Jira queues are always full.

Security faces a different fire. Every quarter they review who has access to which accounts and permissions. They try to spot the dangerous ones like broad admin rights, then remove them. Auditors ask for proof with screenshots and logs while everything keeps changing.

So, organizations turned to Identity Governance. On paper, it promised order. Control over who gets access, why, and for how long. In practice though, it added overhead. Identity Governance projects became some of the most complex and costly identity initiatives for companies to implement. The proof is that even Gartner issued a “do not attempt without significant support” warning.

The root challenge is simple. Most platforms still expects humans to do the heavy lifting. A tiny team of one or two people must decide who should have access to what across thousands of employees and contractors. This same team must then review tens of thousands of accounts to ensure compliance and that no one is over-privileged. It’s fascinating how they do it. Rules in spreadsheets. Manual updates. Emails to chase approvals. Screenshots to support audits. A decade ago that was hard but possible. Today the scale and speed make it impossible to brute force.

Identity needs to shift. It needs to move from manual routing to intelligent control. From tickets and spreadsheets to autonomy.

How Do Agents Change the Future of Software Beyond Cyber?

Cybersecurity challenges are growing faster than traditional solutions can keep up. While I could go on forever about the opportunity in Cybersecurity and Identity - let’s talk about today’s hot topic: Agents. Nearly every week, another major player announces their own. To understand why this matters, we need to look at how we got here and what this shift means for the future of software as a whole.

The LLM wave started for most people in 2022 with ChatGPT. The next real shift arrived in September 2024 when OpenAI introduced o1, a model built to reason through problems instead of guessing the next word. This unlocked a new class of software that can plan, evaluate its own steps, and improve with feedback. In short, agentic software.

Unlike cloud software that digitized work people were already doing, the agentic transition is different. It moves tasks people once owned end-to-end into flows that software can now fully handle on its own. Think about today’s e-commerce support. An AI agent greets the customer, verifies identity, pulls the last order, checks warranty and policy, asks a clarifying question, triggers the refund through the payments API, and sends a confirmation email. No handoffs. The loop closes itself.

This is why “AI-powered” is not the same as agentic. Most AI in products today is either ML or a copilot. In cybersecurity, this might look like flagging anomalies, assigning a risk score, or answering questions in text. Useful, but still requires a human to act. Agentic software on the other hand completes the action. It understands context, learns from feedback, and adapts when reality changes. It runs a workflow from intent to outcome. That’s the difference. A generic LLM wrapped around an MCP server will not do that. You need a domain brain that knows the goal, the tools it can call, and the rules it must follow. That is how you move from an answer in chat to a finished outcome.

I find the evolution of automobiles to be a helpful mental model. Over the past century, what we can expect from your standard car has evolved steadily. We’ve gone from manual shifting to automatic transmission. Added lane centering and self-parking. Then supervised highway driving. And now, fully driverless rides in geo-fenced zones. Each step handed more of the task to the system, with clearer rules and stronger safety checks. Software will follow the same path. More sensing. Better planning. Less human routing. More human judgment where it matters.

This is the path Lumos is taking in Identity. We started with assist. Have already graduated to autonomy in low-risk cases, like approving or denying whether a user needs a certain permission. And will expand into real time dynamic decisions as our technology learns a given customer’s patterns and objectives. The destination is Autonomous Identity. We are building the platform to continuously manage access so teams can focus on building.

Let’s talk Lumos - The First Autonomous Identity Company

From the beginning, Lumos applied machine learning to identity. When Agents became a reality, we evolved. Enter Albus, the world’s first Identity AI Agent. Albus supports IT and Security leaders in reasoning through tough access decisions and then taking action with confidence. With Albus, we brought agency to identity.

We’re building toward end-to-end agentic workflows. Most “AI-powered” tools today are just a thin chat layer on top of data. Helpful, but they stop at a recommendation. Agentic software goes further by delivering outcomes.

To do that, you need an architecture built for autonomy. The incumbents from the 2000s, and even many “next-gen” SaaS vendors, were not designed that way. Lumos was built AI first, which makes the platform flexible enough to layer in reasoning, actions, and feedback loops. So when a user has risky access, Albus checks the user’s background, tests it against company policy, calls the right APIs, logs the evidence, and learns from the outcome.

Customers across industries, from Grow Therapy in healthcare to Cava in food & hospitality to Pinterest in tech, are all leaning into this new way of building.

To bring this to life, let’s look at a common use case: Role-Based Access Control (RBAC).

As a reminder, the goal of Identity Governance is simple: give people the right access at the right time. Most companies try to do this through RBAC, where 1-3 person IAM teams write “rules” that define what access someone with certain HR attributes should get by default. On paper, it sounds straightforward. In practice, it’s slow, expensive, and always a step behind. Teams hire consultants, interview business partners, and map access by hand. Months pass, the business changes, and the rules already reflect the reality of six months ago.

Large enterprises can spend seven figures a year just maintaining RBAC, while smaller ones struggle to absorb the cost. Take Netskope, one of our customers with ~3,000 employees (who recently filed their S1!). How should a team of one or two engineers decide what hundreds of teams should get by default?

That’s where Albus comes in. It analyzes usage patterns, understands the purpose of app permissions, and learns from admin feedback to propose role definitions. Admins edit, Albus learns, and the result is a living rulebook that stays current.

The result is scale + speed. We worked with a large tech company and built their full role architecture in under three weeks. Their team told us it would have taken twelve months without Lumos, and by then it would already be stale. Albus helped them move fast, saved millions, and gave every employee a better first day. And, RBAC is but one one of many agentic workflows for identity use cases.

To celebrate the new launch of lumos.com, our design team also gave Albus its own brand. Albus isn’t just “the Lumos Agent.” It has its own name, identity and even a logo that evolves from the Lumos logo. Why? Because Albus is more than a set of features. It’s truly a teammate. I’ll make sure the design team does a longer post on how they built the Albus brand.

Join the Autonomous Movement

It’s a privilege to be building right now. We are living through a new software moment, and we get to help shape it. When it comes to agents, there is no handbook. The smartest people are still debating single agent versus multi agent, how to evaluate them, and what “good” looks like in production. It is truly Day 1.

Every platform shift creates new leaders. Salesforce replaced Siebel. Workday replaced PeopleSoft. The next wave of autonomous software is already coming. Teams like Sierra and Decagon are rethinking support. Gong is reshaping sales. Cursor and Cognition are redefining how developers build. And, Lumos is doing the same for Cybersecurity. We want to prove that autonomous systems can secure a world that grows more complex every day.

Someone asked me yesterday why I’m so fired up. Of course, the opportunity is massive. The cloud era created dozens of billion dollar companies by moving work to a better model. The agentic era has started and it will do the same. Building in cybersecurity is meaningful work and the stakes are real. You protect from crime and keep businesses running. But the truth is bigger than opportunity or security. Henry David Thoreau once said that humans became tools of their tools. I feel that every time I open Instagram or Twitter. Agents give us a chance to flip that script. With agents, software finally seems to be serving us, not the other way around.

This is a rare window. Be part of it! We are hiring across product, platform, and AI. If you want to build autonomous software with us, check out our new careers page or send me a note on LinkedIn. Welcome to Lumos.

Today, Lumos is 130+ strong. We’ve built real momentum, launched functions from scratch, and solved problems I couldn’t have imagined on day one. But when I think about this journey, it’s not just about scale - it’s about stretch.

Every stage of growth asked something different of me. They only way I’ve kept up? The people I’ve hired.

So to mark my four year anniversary, it only feels right to share the 4 lessons I’ve learned as CORE’s leader. A true nerd 🤓 at heart, I like to hire people from whom I’ll learn. And my reports have not disappointed.

Lesson #1: Trust people to lead (then get out of the way)

When our Head of People Katie joined, I told her she could have one resource. I’d assumed she’d want an HR Business Partner. Thinking I was the best manager, I basically built the case and served it to her on a Notion platter. NOPE. Instead, she spent her first 30 days deepening her understanding of where Lumos was, where we needed to go, and then oh so politely told me, “That’s not the right solution, we actually need something different. A People Ops partner who could own systems, execution, and operational rigor.”

It wasn’t the direction I expected but she was right. Like 10x right.

She didn’t take my idea as a prescribed solution. She created her own, rooted in the right outcomes, and led with clarity from day one.

Hire captains of their ship - and don’t steer for them, or they can’t lead.

Lesson #2: Hire to be Humbled (in the best way)

I am not an Engineer. I am our token SWE0. But I am data-obsessed.

Hiring our Head of Data with the perfect blend of Data Engineering/Analysis/Science/insert-buzzword-here was admittedly one of tougher experiences. I was miles outside of my comfort zone. I figured my biggest learnings would be throughout the hiring process - including how to ask peers for help. Wrong.

Clay joined and rewrote every playbook - including how to accept a job offer (apparently, it’s from the ski slopes 🏂)

Early on, he told me a goal was to never hire analysts. And he wasn’t joking. 4 months in, he has a GPT-powered model that lets anyone at Lumos self-serve data - no SQL experience needed, no barriers to access, just direct insights. Never would I have thought of that. I would have followed more obvious routes, not reimagined the problem entirely and delivered something smarter. Once I got over my imposter syndrome, I realized my role as his manager wasn’t to shadow his work—it was to align on principles and goals, dive deep when needed, and then quickly come back up to unblock where necessary.

It’s ok to not know everything - that’s why you hire experts. Let it push you to learn, stretch as a leader, and explore beyond the obvious.

Lesson #3: Call my baby ugly (just not my real baby. He’s perfect)

After 4 years, I’m known for the infamous line Call my baby ugly. Though in the last year it’s been updated with a very important modifier you can’t call my real baby, Tadhg, ugly. Then we’re going to have some problems #mamabear.

It might sound harsh but here’s the truth: what worked at 30 people doesn’t always work at 130. And if you’re scaling right, some of your proudest systems will eventually become blockers.

In our newest member, Peter’s first 2 weeks as our Head of Finance, he came in, took a look at processes I had built back in our scrappy Series A days, and immediately asked: “Wait.. why are we still doing it this way?” and if he could immediately restructure our Finance Dropbox folder structure. My cheeks have never been so red from embarrassment - and he was dead right.

At first, there’s always a flicker of discomfort when someone rebuilds your work. But that’s exactly why you hired them. If change isn’t happening, growth isn’t either. Tadhg’s most obvious signs of growth are when we literally have to decommission that favorite onesie because the clasps won’t close anymore. It’s hard to let it go, but if it no longer fits, in the words of Marie Kondo, it’s time to thank it for it’s service and let it go.

Letting go isn’t a sign of failure. It’s a sign of growth.

Lesson #4: Build the foundation first (then add the floors)

To this day, our now Programs and Ops specialist, Elise, holds the record for most hats worn at Lumos 🎩 Over 3.5 years, she’s gone from Lumos’ Founding Talent Sourcer to a key part of the GTM engine…with a quick pit stop as Pitbull.

Her story is what I joined a startup to coauthor. Being a manager isn’t about telling people what to do and checking of the weekly 1:1s. It’s about deeply understanding your reports - their interests, strengths, and stretch zones - and looking out for relevant opportunities that align with business needs. Maybe even those they wouldn’t have seen themselves.

Since the beginning, she’s always wanted more - never chasing scope for the sake of it. We’ve had open conversations about when it was time to stretch, when to stabilize, and when to dive into the deep end. And I’ve never put her on something “just because you’re here.” Ok maybe once, but in my defense, my idea of cool swag was “cheugy”. Other than that, every project, workstream, or mission has been intentional with clear alignment between her skills, our business needs, and opportunities for learning. We’ve had conversations around “what good looks like”, prioritizing depth, second-order thinking, and delivering excellence over breadth. And with each milestone, her scope expanded and company impact multiplied.

Sustainable growth doesn’t come from endlessly chasing more. It comes from doing what matters really well - and then building up from there.

Year 5 means Lesson #5

What that’ll be is for our two future additions to say. Our Head of Rev Ops and Head of Talent.

I know what they’ll be owning. But no idea what lessons they’ll bring. That’s the exciting part.

Every great hire I’ve made at Lumos has had one thing in common: they’ve challenged my thinking. That’s why you join high growth startups - that’s how you grow.

The next chapter of the CORE team’s growth isn’t just about adding capacity. It’s about adding perspective, challenge, and fresh ways of thinking. The best hires always surprise you - and I can’t wait to meet whoever does.

So here’s my not so subtle recruiting plug:

If you want to scale with imagination, build with heart, and be surrounded by people who will stretch you in all the best ways - come work with us!

• Head of Talent

• Head of RevOps

But what if we never had to choose at all?

As I approach my four-year mark at Lumos, I’ve found myself reflecting — not just on my career, but on my identity. I have been meaning to share something about my return from parental leave for months, but like many working moms, I hadn’t quite found the headspace. Then, during a conversation with our CEO, Andrej, something shifted.

He asked me a simple but powerful question: “What’s next for you?”

Lately, every decision I make comes back to one thing: Tadhg, my son. I want to build a life filled with opportunity, joy, and stability for him. I want to be the best mom I can possibly be. That’s the mission that matters most to me right now.

But in that moment, Andrej reminded me of something I had forgotten:

“Don’t forget what your mission was before you became a mom. That mattered deeply to you too.”

And he was right.

Before motherhood, I had a different mission — one that gave me purpose and shaped the way I showed up at work: to be an example for women in tech. To show what leadership could look like — and who it could look like. But somewhere in the rhythm of Zoom meetings, diapers, deadlines, and bedtime routines, I had stopped holding that part of myself with the same intensity.

So, what if we never had to choose at all?

Where My Identities Meet

That conversation helped me see what I’d been living all along — that motherhood and leadership aren’t competing forces. They’re two parts of who I am. And when I structure my life with intention, both can thrive.

Motherhood hasn’t pulled me away from leadership — it’s made me better at it. It didn’t dilute my ambition — it refined it.

It’s deepened the very feminism that first drew me to this path: the belief that women deserve to pursue whatever they want, without apology. I love working. I love building. I love lifting other women in the workplace. And I want Tadhg to see that you can show up fully for your family and for yourself.

But showing up for both doesn’t happen by accident — it happens by design.

My mornings now begin at 5:30am — not to get ahead on work, but to get in “me time” before Tadhg and I’s daily morning bottle and walk and the day actually begins. At 5:30pm, I log off for what’s become a sacred block in my calendar: “Mom Time.” But that boundary wasn’t always there. It took a week of not being there to put him to bed — and the emotional toll that made it clear something had to change.

I’ve removed Slack and Gmail notifications from my phone. I close my laptop at the end of the day — and actually shut it off, mentally as well as physically. When people ask “what surprised you most about motherhood?” This is it. How freeing it felt to stop living in two places at once.

Ironically, those boundaries haven’t held me back — they’ve made me sharper. I’m more focused during the hours I’m on, more intentional in how I delegate, and more trusting in the strength of my team. I’ve mentored others to grow into new roles and learned to fiercely protect my time without guilt. Most importantly, I’ve let go of the myth that I have to do it all — and by modeling that openly, I hope I’ve given others permission to do the same.

The Power of Voice

I no longer feel the need to hide my boundaries or soften them to make others more comfortable. Motherhood gave me the courage to say no — and the clarity to see that setting limits isn’t a weakness. It’s leadership.

It also reshaped how I think about how we lead. It’s showing, not just saying. That boundaries aren’t barriers — they’re foundations. That presence, not overextension, is power. You don’t have to work 100 hours a week to be successful — you just have to be 100% dedicated during the hours that matter, and unapologetic about protecting the rest. Don’t get me wrong - there will be some long nights; but they come after bath time and on occasion.

When I think about what it means to be an example for women in tech today, it’s no longer just about being the only one on a Zoom call who looks like me. It’s about using the voice I have to lift others — and creating the conditions for more voices to be heard.

More than anything, I want Tadhg to grow up in a world where leadership doesn’t mean doing it all alone — but making space for others to rise with you.

To Other Women Walking This Path

If there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s this: voice what you need. Speak up — even when it feels uncomfortable. Even when it goes against what’s expected.

Say what matters to you — even if it’s not what seems to matter to everyone else. I chose to split my maternity leave into two phases, not because it was typical, but because it was right for my family. That wasn’t selfish — it was advocacy. Advocacy for the people and parts of your life that can’t speak for themselves.

So if you’re walking the same tightrope — between motherhood and leadership, between ambition and presence — I hope you remember this:

You don’t have to choose one.

You just have to give yourself permission to be all of it.

But how do you build that kind of connection in a remote-first world? Today's interactions happen through Slack messages and Zoom calls - not around coffee or in the hallways. How do you create a culture that feels real, human, and deeply connected?

At Lumos, we believe that connection doesn’t happen by accident—it happens by design. Since day one, we’ve made it our mission to create an environment where talented people don’t just work beside each other but with each other. We are intentional about how we build bonds in a hybrid world and focus on fostering deep partnerships through play. These elements aren't just culture initiatives; they’re part of how we work, collaborate, and thrive as a team.

Building Bonds & Partnering Through Play

Every great story has a place where its heroes gather—a home base, a training ground, a Batcave. A place where these heroes tackle challenges, devise strategies, and cement friendships. At Lumos, we’ve designed our hubs, offices, and team rituals to serve this purpose. They bring our team together to collaborate, problem-solve, and, most importantly, build relationships that make us better.

1. Creating Spaces to Gather

We recently opened our San Francisco headquarters, a space designed for Bay Area-based Alchemists to work in person and for teams to meet up. We don’t deny the power of face-to-face time. These gathering points are where ideas flow freely, bonds deepen, and shared experiences come to life.

We also have “Hub Cities” in places where there are five or more alchemists living. Each of these hub cities has a selected “mayor” to help plan and facilitate monthly events, whether its a coworking day, a cocktail making class, or a candlelight concert.

2. The Power of In-Person Meetups

Remote work gives us flexibility, but in-person moments create the magic that keeps our culture alive. We've really invested here, and built an operating rhythm around three company trips a year:

• February: Company-wide offsite

• June & September: Department-specific offsites

These aren’t just about meetings and workshops. They are about replacing “coworkers” with teammates. Squares on a screen with real people. And the impact is undeniable. After our most recent company-wide offsite, 92% of Alchemists reported feeling closer to each other with one even saying:

"The best part of the offsite wasn’t just the team sessions—it was the little moments. The late-night karaoke. The deep one-on-one conversations. The inside jokes that somehow make meetings more fun even weeks later. I came back knowing my team, not just working with them.”

This is why we invest in these moments. Because when people truly know each other, trust comes naturally—and great work follows.

3. Rituals That Keep Us Connected

The challenge of hybrid work isn’t just bringing people together—it’s keeping the bonds strong once everyone goes back home. We know our Alchemists crave more time together, so we've created small rituals that make connection a habit, not just an event:

• Humans of Lumos: Inspired by Lumos’ story-led approach, this bi-weekly series spotlights an Alchemist who shares their life journey. From walking red carpets to growing up in a different country, these stories humanize the people behind the screen.

• Question of the Day: Every morning, someone drops a random question in Slack. It could be thoughtful (What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?) or ridiculous (If you could only eat potatoes one way for the rest of your life, what would you choose?). What follows? Pure chaos. Debates over whether fries or scalloped potatoes are the superior choice. Passionate discussions about peanut butter preferences. A thread that somehow leads to three people scheduling a meet-up. It’s all about giving serendipity a place to happen.

• Coworking Zooms: Sometimes, you just want to work alongside others without the small talk. So we created #coworking_zooms, where anyone can drop a Zoom link and work together, no agenda needed. Some listen to a shared playlist, others just enjoy the quiet background noise of teammates focused on their tasks. It’s a simple way to bring back the feeling of “working side by side” in a remote world.

4. Partnership Through Play

In every great story, playfulness and humor aren’t just side elements—they’re how characters bond. If the Guardians of the Galaxy can save the universe while cracking jokes, why can’t we?

At Lumos, we live by the value Paint in Pink, which reminds us that work should be ambitious and fun. Playfulness isn’t a distraction—it’s a competitive advantage that fuels creativity and trust.

Play as a Leadership Value: From the top down, playfulness is embedded in how we work.

Take our CEO’s recent challenge: If the sales team built $X million in pipeline within a few short weeks, he’d show up to the holiday party dressed as Princess Peach.

(They won. He kept his promise.)

These moments may seem lighthearted, but they serve a purpose. They show that leadership embraces boldness, fun, and a willingness to not take themselves too seriously. And when people feel psychologically safe to joke, experiment, and be themselves, they also feel safe to take creative risks in their work.

Traditions that Keeps Things Light: Since our early days, certain traditions have become part of our cultural DNA.

• Karaoke Nights: There’s nothing more vulnerable than belting out Total Eclipse of the Heart with your coworkers. And at Lumos, you can always count on someone to start singing at a company event.

• Zoom Banter: During All Hands meetings, the Zoom chat becomes an event of its own—filled with jokes, reactions, and real-time camaraderie.

• Slack Culture: From meme-filled channels to #music-but-better, our Slack isn’t just for work. It’s a space where personality thrives.

Why Thoughtful Connection Matters

We spend about 90,000 hours—one-third of our lives—at work (Harvard Business Review). The research is clear: companies with strong cultures see higher productivity, lower turnover, and better financial outcomes. But beyond the data, a great culture does something deeper—it makes work meaningful.

At Lumos, we believe playfulness isn’t just about fun—it’s about trust, authenticity, and the kind of relationships that make collaboration effortless. In the high-pressure world of an early-stage startup, those moments of levity aren’t distractions; they’re what sustain us. As The Little Prince reminds us, “What is essential is invisible to the eye.”

Our playful traditions, rituals, and spaces make those invisible essentials—trust, camaraderie, and shared purpose—tangible and strong.

This is what we strive for at Lumos: a culture where connection isn’t just encouraged—it’s ingrained. Where moments of play fuel innovation, and where shared experiences turn colleagues into partners.

But we know this is an ever-evolving journey. How do you foster connection and play in your workplace? We’d love to hear your thoughts—let’s build better workplaces together.

The Power of Systems

One of my all-time heroes is Pep Guardiola. He is probably the most influential coach in soccer history. He revolutionized soccer with a system called tiki-taka that every soccer fan knows: short, quick passes, constant movement, and high-possession play. Of course, the system was centered around amazing players like Messi, Xavi, and Iniesta. But countless teams have had great players and failed. What made Barcelona different was their system - just check out the video below. Talent alone didn’t bring Barcelona their success. It was their system that unified and amplified the team, which changed the history of soccer.

It's a mistake to think great people alone can solve every challenge. Without a great system, even the best talent can stray off course or row in opposite directions. In today’s day and age, when AI tools are making it easier than ever before to build products, consistent execution is the most important moat of a company. In order to execute well, you need A+ systems that unlock the full potential of A+ people. Yet, we often overlook our systems. Inspired by sports coaches who obsess over their team’s tactics, I continuously asked myself: what's the tiki-taka of Lumos? What are the systems that will make us win?

The System of a Story-Led Company

At Lumos, we follow the system of a story-led company. It’s even reflected in our name! Lumos is inspired by the magical spell from Harry Potter, a symbol of bringing light to the unknown. Running a company is like crafting a great story. At the heart of every story is a protagonist and their mission. Frodo ventures out to destroy the One Ring, Alice to find her way home and Harry to defeat Voldemort.

The same applies to building a great business. The day-to-day complexities of a tech company can easily cause us to lose focus, to row in different directions. We avoid this by learning from stories. Almost all stories have the same key components to help their protagonists reach their potential. As a story-led company, we broke it down into the 4Ps, which form the foundation of how we operate:

• Purpose - Build a Four-Bullet Secret Master Plan Everyone Knows.

• Principles - Promote and Hire by Values.

• Path - Create Rituals to Continuously Revisit and Refine the Course.

• Partnership - Bond Intentionally Beyond the Office Desk.

Purpose - Build a Four-Bullet Secret Master Plan Everyone Knows

Every great story starts with a call to adventure, a clear purpose. Most stories follow the simple structure of the Hero's Journey: an undeniable challenge, a worthy adversary, a vision for a better future, and a hero to lead the way. The true power of purpose lies in its simplicity. It’s a force multiplier that can make a company of 100 operate like 1,000.

For a long time, we had the vision and the strategy but they were buried in long documents. We realized that without simplicity, teams lose focus and start working on unrelated things. Tesla’s Secret Master Plan from 2006 is a perfect example of getting it right. Elon captured the entire vision and strategy in just a few bullets.

Our mission at Lumos is to unlock the power of software for everyone, human and machine. We aim to achieve this by building the world’s first Autonomous Identity Platform that manages access to software on auto-pilot. We are not quite ready to share our four-step secret master plan publicly but will do so in 2025. Stay tuned. 🙂

Key Internal Documents: The Lumos Secret Master Plan

Principles - Promote and Hire by Values.

Every great story features characters who stay true to their core principles. Harry, Hermione and Ron won together because they embodied the defining traits of House Gryffindor: courage, chivalry and determination.

Most companies today have a set of nice-sounding values that they splash on their career page. So did we! These look great and offer a nice script to recite in recruiting calls. However, the test of great values is the actual impact they’ve had on a company. How often were these values influencing the team’s actions day-to-day?

In order to make them impactful, we thought about how they connect to our system of a story-led company. We decided to make three key changes. First, we needed to make them memorable. To bring our values to life, we created a narrative called “The Anatomy of an Alchemist”— see here. Second, we integrated our values directly into the career ladder, ensuring that they guide how we hire, reward and manage performance, influencing every part of our work. Third, I personally interview every candidate and veto if the candidate doesn’t meet the bar.

Key Internal Document: Lumos Values & Operating Principles

Path - Create Rituals to Continuously Revisit and Refine the Course.

A great story isn’t just about the destination. It’s about the journey. The path a character takes to achieve their purpose is just as vital as the purpose itself. At Lumos, we faced the challenge of setting ambitious OKRs and crafting thoughtful strategies at the start of the year, only to watch them gather dust in forgotten Notion docs. We lost sight of the path we set for ourselves.

To change this, we built an operating system grounded in two key concepts: Sources of Truth and Rituals.

• Sources of Truth: These are our centralized, up-to-date repositories for strategy, goals and reflections. They provide everyone with a single reference point to stay aligned and track progress. They make sure everyone knows where we’re headed and why.

• Rituals: These are the consistent, intentional practices (e.g. monthly business reviews) that bring our Sources of Truth to life. They foster accountability, keep us aligned and make sure we constantly reflect, adjust and improve.

Together, Sources of Truth provide direction, while Rituals keep us on track. They transform our plans into progress, ensuring we don’t lose sight of the path we’re on.

Key Internal Document: The Lumos Operating System, Sources-of-Truth at Lumos

Partnership - Bond Intentionally Beyond the Office Desk.

Every mission comes with constant setbacks. To succeed, teams need to have each other’s backs. Teams that work best together will always outperform any collection of individual superstars. In great stories, this bond forms through shared adventures. Harry, Ron and Hermione didn’t grow inseparable over cafeteria lunches. They grew closer with every troll they fought and every Horcrux they hunted.

Lumos was born during COVID and has always been hybrid. Some worked remotely, others came in a few times a week. Winning teams aren’t just built by sitting together in an office. Resilience comes from shared experiences that build character. We do have offices in SF and NYC. However, our real investment is in quarterly offsites and monthly events. Even when we were just 50 people, we hired someone specifically to elevate these experiences to a production level. These moments create genuine connections, build shared purpose and make our teams far more resilient than routine work ever could.

Key Internal Documents: Lumos Work Programs

The Path Forward

I hope this gave you a real look into the “tiki-taka” of Lumos and how we bring our system of a story-led company to life.

In the next posts, we’ll dive deeper into each of these pillars. Here’s what’s coming up:

• Purpose: Our secret master plan.

• Principles: A refresher of our values & operating principles.

• Path: Our operating system for running our business.

• Partnership: Our program around building extremely resilient teams.

• And more

We’re hiring across almost all teams! If this post excited you about Lumos, feel free to check out our positions here.

-Andrej

Thank you to Amy Yin, Sean Stapleton, Leo Mehr, Tim Porthouse, David Vasquez, Alyssa Mike, Candice Ji for giving feedback.

It’s truly fascinating how our tools have evolved from hammers and screwdrivers in the world of atoms to digital apps in the world of bits. Software is truly embedded in every company’s DNA. As we depend more and more on software to run our companies, it's critical to properly manage a company’s app landscape. Today, we’d like to reintroduce ourselves to the world: Lumos is the first Unified Access Platform to manage a company's access to apps and data.

Managing Access is a Top Priority for CIOs & CISOs

We named Lumos after the spell that casts light in darkness to illuminate the increasingly complex landscape of apps. Now, companies use an average of 650 apps, many of them with hundreds of different permissions. Managing access to apps and data has never been more challenging for IT & security teams. Here’s why the stakes are so high:

• Identity as the Achilles' Heel of Security
  According to Gartner, 80% of organizations have experienced identity-related security breaches with substantial consequences. One such incident at MGM in 2023 led to a $100 million impact on its quarterly results. High-profile breaches at companies like CapitalOne, Equifax, Uber, Target, Facebook, and JP Morgan often result in CISOs losing their jobs. Although every breach is unique, there is a common theme: compromised credentials. When these credentials are compromised, it effectively means that the digital identity of the legitimate user is stolen, allowing intruders to access sensitive information and systems that should be protected.

• Employee Enablement with the Right Technology as a CIO Focus
  The rapid emergence of GenAI has underscored that technology is more than just a means to keep up — it's a vital competitive advantage. Over the past 18 months, CIOs have intensely focused on goals like "driving employee productivity through technology." Managing this in environments overflowing with hundreds of apps is challenging. We frequently hear from CIOs about the lack of visibility into their software stack or the days needed to fulfill access request tickets.

• Software Spending as a Top Concern for CFOs
  2022 and 2023 have underscored a critical shift: growth must be sustainable, not just rapid. For most companies, software spending is now second only to payroll. A recent Gartner poll showed that software spending is the #1 cost concern for CFOs. Yet, inefficiencies are rampant. Customers often have overlapping tools like Jira, Asana, ClickUp, and Monday, with as many as 25% of licenses going unused.Today's IT leaders are not only tasked with scaling but also with streamlining their software stacks.

This landscape sets the stage for Lumos to act and become the Unified Access Platform for companies.

Access is The Big Elephant Across Teams

Different teams manage hundreds of apps and permissions using various solutions that rarely connect with each other. This situation often reminds me of the blind men and the elephant analogy — everyone sees only a part of the problem and tries to solve it on their own:

• SaaS Management & IT Teams: IT’s mission is to enable employees to do their best work with their right technology. However, different IT sub-teams use various tools for specific needs: IT Asset Management keeps track of all software; IT Procurement finds ways to save money on software; and IT Operations manages employee onboarding, offboarding, and self-service access through multiple apps and systems.

• Identity Management & Security Teams: Security’s mission is about protecting the organization and earning & maintaining customer trust. Various teams do that in different ways. Information Security focuses on creating visibility over and securing sensitive accounts through Privileged Access Management (PAM) or Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement (CIEM) tools. GRC conducts quarterly access reviews to meet compliance standards such as SOX and ISO 27001 through spreadsheets or some specialized software. And, Identity & Access Management teams automate access workflows using Identity Governance (IGA) platforms. Yes, lots of abbreviations.

This situation highlights how teams work separately on specific parts of managing apps and access, often missing a unified view of the whole picture.

Uniform Data Models & Key Capabilities Unlock a Consolidated Platform Approach

It's somewhat ironic that companies often use 4-5 different apps just to manage all their other apps. Interestingly, these diverse systems are all built upon similar data models and capabilities. They all provide workflows to create and remove access based on an access data. For instance, PAM manages hundreds of AWS permissions, like access to an S3 bucket, while SaaS Management handles specific software licenses for tools like Adobe or Zoom. Meanwhile, IGA adjusts access to tools like Salesforce as employees' roles change. Despite relying on similar provisioning capabilities and data models, why aren’t our "blind men" seeing the whole elephant?

Historically, companies needed to invest hundreds of thousands of dollars to build integrations for provisioning access to their systems. There was no standardized protocol for creating and removing access to apps. SCIM, the main protocol for managing access, is not even 15 years old and still doesn’t support the management of granular permissions natively. It's only in the last 6-7 years that access management APIs have become a fundamental requirement for enterprise software. This recent development has opened up the opportunity to standardize these interfaces, potentially consolidating them into a single, streamlined infrastructure.

Introducing Lumos, the Unified Access Platform

Lumos is the first and only company to approach the access management problem holistically from day one. It is common knowledge that companies build product bundles over time to sell more into a captive audience. Usually, this is done way later in the lifecycle of a company. Our platform approach has been core to our strategy from the start. When everyone focused on building deep vertical solutions in the boom years of 2020 and 2021, it was an unobvious move to start a company with a platform strategy.

Fast forward to today, Lumos is the exact antidote needed to manage the “APPocalypse” with a consolidated approach. Lumos brings IT and Security teams together — enabling them to solve app and access related problems by merging the SaaS Management and Identity Management industries into one platform. Lumos helps IT teams discover all apps in a company’s environment, reduce software costs by eliminating unused licenses and duplicates, and allows employees to request software access through a self-service AppStore. Meanwhile, security teams use Lumos for quarterly access reviews to meet SOX and ISO27001 standards, reduce privileged access by granting temporary admin rights and manage joiner-mover-leaver policies.

We followed 4 core principles when building Lumos:

• Unified Source-of-Truth: Lumos operates as a single platform that serves as the ultimate source of truth for access, managing granular permissions across on-prem and cloud environments and for all identities — including employees, contractors, and machine identities. It tracks actual system usage and integrates spend data to accurately reflect the cost implications of each license.

• Full Use Case Coverage: Lumos was built to serve a broad spectrum of needs from day 1 whether that’s Identity Governance, Privileged Access Management, SaaS Discovery or Spend Management. Our goal is to break down silos between IT & Security with a unified control center to manage anything access-related - vendors to decrease software spend, apps to automate IT work and identities to protect against breaches.

• Interoperability: Lumos supports diverse interfaces to minimize the need for change management. End users can request access to software from their Command Line Interface, Slack, IT Ticket System, and a Web UI, while admins can manage Lumos via a UI, via Terraform or open APIs, allowing for extensive customization and integrations.

• AI-Powered: Lumos leverages AI across multiple use cases. Our AI integrates into a company’s ticketing system, picks up on any access request that wasn't natively created in Lumos and kicks it off through the proper approval chain. Our AI capabilities also extend to anomaly detection, analyzing employee data to suggest access modifications. And, we automate the ingestion of thousands of vendor contracts through AI-based OCR to identify the cost per license and quantify savings for license removals.

A Vision for the Future of Access

It’s more exciting than ever to be in the space of technology right now. The world of apps is on the brink of a transformative shift toward autonomous software. Initially, we moved from on-premise solutions like SAP and Oracle to cloud-based platforms such as Salesforce and Workday. Then came the consumerization of IT, enabling us to adopt tools like Figma and Slack with just a swipe of a credit card, enhancing collaboration like never before. Now, we're entering an era where software not only supports but actively takes over our routine tasks, functioning much like a virtual employee.

This evolution mirrors historical changes in manufacturing. Every company is operating two core factories: the product factory ("the factory") and the idea factory ("the office"). Over 250 years since the Industrial Revolution, our product factories have evolved dramatically — take the Tesla factory as an example, where robots perform the bulk of the work under human supervision. We are now poised to witness a similar transformation in the realm of software.

As software becomes increasingly autonomous, enabling us to create more than ever, the complexity also rises with more apps and more actors in play. This is where Lumos steps in — building the essential infrastructure to define the relationship between apps and actors. Rather than viewing our era as one of software excess, I believe we are leveraging these applications to their fullest to create unimaginable things. Lumos is here to ensure that you can harness this technology to its maximum potential without the headache, helping you navigate this exciting new frontier with ease.

Throw me a line on LinkedIn or check out our new website. Welcome to Lumos.

With positive vibes,

Andrej

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Stories are part of us

I loved storybooks growing up. As a child, I heard fantastic tales that helped me imagine impossibly bright futures. They shaped my way of looking at life. Remember the story of the tortoise and the hare? Such a simple story taught millions of people around the world the value of patience and persistence.

In fact, humanity is built on stories. From the earliest days of civilization, tales have been our compass. They've not just entertained us, but have shaped our very understanding of the world. Greek gods, Norse legends, or tales from the Mahabharata—these myths weren't just bedtime stories. They were frameworks that societies used to explain the unknown, teach morals, and instill a sense of purpose and community.

Fast forward to today: The business world has realized the potential of stories and is packaging them as 'values.' Ideally, they should tell a story that guides our actions and decisions. However, more often than not, those values feel more like internal marketing than real beliefs that transcend short-term business metrics. It’s not an easy thing to get right, because there’s no logical “right or wrong” solution.

I strongly believed that the Lumos team could approach it authentically, showcasing who we really are, while telling a beautiful story — one that we can hopefully tell our family and friends many years from now.

The Story behind The Story

Our adventure started with a dream. We started Lumos because we wanted to transform an entire industry for the better. This inspires us to try our absolute best because we aspire to craft an exceptional story that will stand the test of time.

Seeking Excellence…

The Hero’s Journey celebrates a person who ventures forth, faces trials, transforms, and returns anew. For us, it’s IT (also known as IT Admin, Head of IT, and so on.) We want them to be seen as the Heroes they truly are. No modern company could function properly without them.

This intentionality creates a wonderful reinforcing motion: By striving to elevate others, we elevate ourselves.

You might think. Aren’t we overdoing this? Aren’t we just building a B2B product? Am I not just selling software? Sure, but that’s just one way to look at it. For any document, product, or business strategy, there can be joy and excellence. Joy, in knowing that you did things right. That you gave your all. This goes beyond “work”. It's a mindset we share. It's what brought us here.

As a High-Impact Organization…

Everyone talks about excellence, but very few actually reach it. It’s even harder at the top level in Silicon Valley, where tens of billions of dollars are invested every year. It’s an environment full of professional dreamers. It’s humbling, and at times, scary. However, every memorable success needs a big challenge.

We can build a movement, not just a product if we band together and help each other unlock our potential. We can find our zone of genius (which is always outside of our comfort zone) and solve incredibly challenging problems if we surround ourselves with stunning people that we admire. It’s a contagious energy that makes us succeed and have a blast with genuine connection and laughter.

And that’s where our values come into play. Values are our DNA that weave us together and give us shared purpose. They also reflect who we are at our natural best. They make it clear what we expect from each other. To prevent values from being just words in a doc, we set incentives. We reward, we promote, we manage performance based on these values. They are our guides. Because if we live by them, they become our unfair advantage that will help us create something special.

…True to The Lumos Way.

Frankly, “corporate values” can be awkward sometimes. If done incorrectly, they can feel bossy, dictating how to act and what to do.

To prevent that, we should look at them as guiding forces rather than as rigid laws. They showcase what makes us uniquely great. Think of the Hogwarts Houses. They're so distinct because of the different people in them. That’s what values do. They're uniquely you, me, we. They're that “yes, that’s us” feeling.

Values display our shared identity, as unique as our fingerprints, leaving marks on everything we touch. They create a distinctive aura that we can all rally around in a genuine way. When we talk about Lumos, we don’t just talk about the products we create but also the distinctive philosophy we live by. These values are the bedrock of our unique story. Values need to be memorable and honest so that they can be purposefully shared.

And, It Starts with Each and Every One of Us.

At Lumos, we’ve called ourselves 'Alchemists' since Day 1. Alchemists transform the ordinary into the extraordinary. They turn common matter, overlooked by most, into gold. It’s intentional transformation and creation. Our values are the intrinsic characteristics that describe who we are at our natural best. When all of those things come together consistently, magic happens. This increases the likelihood of our success.

Earlier, we mentioned how we can solve any problem if we surround ourselves with admirable people. And that stunning person is you. “The Anatomy of an Alchemist” describes our four values that each of us strives to display. That’s why we wrote our values as “I” instead of “We.”

We're each on our own Hero's Journey, striving to make a difference and return home transformed with amazing people by our side, just like the characters in the tales we grew up with.

Lumos Values — The Anatomy of an Alchemist

Set the Standard

The Inner Fire

I have this innate passion and drive to create my career’s best work here. To get a great outcome, I constantly ask for feedback to get better, build a habit of urgency and climb mountains if needed. In short, I either find a way or make one, going above and beyond what’s expected.

We held off coming out of stealth mode for two (!) full years, even when we had nearly $1 million in ARR. We wanted to ensure we had a story that was worth sharing before going public. If you're going to tell a story, tell a big one or don’t tell one at all.

And once we had it, we prepared for 6 months for it. We were okay and excited to iterate on initial versions again and again and again until we felt that the website, pitch deck and product is good enough.

It’s part of the Lumos DNA to try to set the standard when it comes to the quality and the drive to get to that quality. That’s why we value drive over experience in hiring. Drive isn't an inherent trait, it's more like a muscle — it can be developed, utilized, and become your unique strength. High drive quickens your learning curve, allowing you to surpass those with more experience.

Whether you're in marketing, sales or engineering, the underlying essence of setting a standard remains the same — the joy of creation, the innate passion to get it done well and the satisfaction of exceptional work. Why? Because we’ll be successful as long as we have stunning colleagues and big challenges.

Discover to Deliver

The Disciplined Mind

Curiosity combined with principled thinking can conquer any challenge. I don’t just assume what the problem is but I am curious to explore and ask “why.” Equipped with insights, I evaluate trade-offs and can showcase a clear reason why I took a certain action.

At Lumos, designing to delight and customer obsession aren’t just concepts; they’re what we do every day. It's not limited to 'design' projects but is applicable to any initiative. By diverging to explore problems and identify opportunities, then converging to advance with often incomplete information, we attain superior outcomes. This approach promotes both deep investigation and a preference for action through principled decision-making.

• Seeking Understanding: At the very beginning of Lumos, we started exploring B2C opportunities around finding shadow IT for users. After 20 interviews, we picked up for one interviewee that business might have better use of a shadow IT technology. And so, we iterated from there with dozens of more interviews. Over the first 12 months, we iterated on five different product ideas until we landed on the AppStore for Companies.

• Principled Decision Making: Our commitment to careful evaluation and principled decision-making manifests in our extensive strategic planning. We have a vision document spanning multiple years, yearly company strategy, individual team strategies, and quarterly plans that map back to that strategy. We are willing to invest time and care about principled decision making. Or, we scope in v0.5s for our features to keep focused while iterating fast. If we ship small, we can keep our momentum up and our bar high.

Paint in Pink

The Witty Smile

Painting in pink in B2B is about being playfully bold. One, I think big because optimism shapes reality. Two, I communicate and act with a smile, bringing levity into my interactions. Three, I win people’s hearts and minds through a novel story and a clear point of view.

If you think of the competitive landscape in IT and security, all logos are very blue and boring -- none of them are pink (maybe red). We decided to pick pink as our logo color because we believe in being a story-led company and choosing boldness.

Paint in Pink can be interpreted in different ways.

• Boldness over Success. Painting in Pink is bold and dreamy. Thinking big is a self-fulfilling prophecy. For instance, examining marathon times reveals how humans can surpass their perceived limitations by setting ambitious goals. You are 1.4x more likely to run a marathon in 3:59h than in 4:01h. This phenomenon is called the Pygmalion Effect. They named it after Pygmalion, an ancient Greek sculptor who fell in love with his creation to the extent that it came alive. At Lumos, we set an almost unreasonable goal of building one AppHQ that will consolidate multiple markets to become the App Company.

• Playfulness. Painting in Pink is quirky. We try to infuse our way of communicating and interacting with optimism and smiles, bringing levity into my interactions with others. A smile is often the shortest distance between two people, it’s a universal welcome. Join one of our Zoom meetings and you’ll see the Zoom chat blow up with fun remarks and crazy memes.

• Having a Point of View. Painting in Pink is a statement. We have a point of view and convey it through a story that is novel and clear - almost magical. We believe in being a story-led company. Check out our videos here and here that try to live this ethos.

Care Genuinely

The Golden Heart

I am eager to support co-workers and customers and proactively jump in to help -- your problem is my problem. I believe it is with this unity that there is victory. So, I care and proactively work on my relationships with people.

As simple as it is, we believe in caring. Caring is more than just kindness and positive words. It means being attentive to others, genuinely empathetic, and truly taking action for others.

Yet caring goes beyond just supporting our teammates — it extends to our customers, candidates, and external folks we interact with. For example, you can look at our G2 reviews to see how our customer support differentiates Lumos. Or at some of our internal posts, with our “taco culture” of sharing appreciation for one another, and with emojis for showing our values:

What’s your story?

Everyone has values that they live by and I’d love to know yours. Feel free to reply directly to this email, forward it to anyone that’s interested, and, if the above truly resonates with you, we’re hiring.

–Andrej

Different member of the Lumos team will be sending out emails 4-6 a year with tactical guides that provide you with all of the best practices and tools you need when being part of an early-stage company.

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