How Permit.io CEO Or Weis grew Permit.io to $1.5M revenue with a 14 person team in 2025.

hey folks my guest today is ore weisse the ceo and founder of permit.io and co-maintainer and author of open source opal.ac he's a serial entrepreneur who's passionate about developer tools previously founding rookout.com a leading production debugging solution and managing upwards israel's largest founders plg community before becoming a founder he worked as a lead engineer in multiple cyber security and big data companies intelligence corporations and as a consultant for the ministry of defense as a vp of r d at netline ct cyber division or you're ready to take us to the top yeah i'm excited to be here it's gonna be fun you're one of these like super smart ex-israeli defense guys huh uh well i i try my best i did get an early start so i started working with uh with software at the age of five thanks to my bigger sister and uh yeah and i got to serve in the intelligence score in the idf in 8200 and that's really kind of a really a runway for acceleration that uh basically changed my life and uh and is awesome so what years how old are you were you when you were in the idf um so i was between 18 and 2 up to 24. so i served for slightly longer than than most um and i obviously i started off just as a as a grunt and i moved my way up to be a an officer and a team lead but throughout most of my role i was very hands-on as kind of a software engineer reverse engineer etc etc so what were you doing i mean am i allowed to ask questions about what you did at 8200 yeah you can ask about everything but i'll have to kill ya so well i don't want to die so is there anything you can share with me that wouldn't get me killed just to give us a sense of what you were working on so actually it's it's been more than seven years since my service so i can be slightly more open about it but i absolutely can't go into much detail but i can tell you that worked a lot in software engineering and cyber security and i can tell you that i had the good fortune of working on projects that were critical for the security of both the state and israel and other allied nations um i worked on a lot of cases that i described in other talks as working on high stacks and high stakes uh for example i had a situation where i was required to deploy software to production but people told me you only have four attempts to get this right and if you fail people would die so not exactly see icd um and obviously a lot of stakes and i also in that specific incident i ended up running into a bug that uh kind of uh thwarted our endeavors initially and we really tore our minds to find where it is and it ended up being a vulnerability in windows itself in the operating system and i think um seven years later or so it was announced as a cve but before that it was unknown um so we both had to dive deep into the stack and also handle those high stakes and those kind of situations i think really taught me a lot about um taking software to the edge into the extreme cases and making the best out of it i mean just to be clear i believe the 1800 unit it's you guys are that's a part of the israeli intelligence corps it's also the largest and best known and really i mean this would be the unit that if i'm making this up okay but this would be the unit if another country was it was trying to launch a cyber attack on israel you're this would be the group that's trying to prevent that cyber attack not just cyber attacks so 8200 is essentially the equivalent of the nsa it's just not a civilian body it's a military entity but otherwise it's exactly the same i even got to work a bit with the nsa as part of my service uh which is cool it's very interesting to see the differences between between the two um and what's unique about 8200 is it it gets its first pick out of uh the draftees into the idf and uh it's fully independent it's structured in a way so if the entire idf the entire state of israel crumbles to dust it should still be able to function on its own and that also creates a lot of interesting mechanics within the organization oh what's going on there youtube good to see you guys now imagine this you love watching these interviews with sas founders but imagine if we took all of the valuation data out from over 2807 interviews i've done manually saves you a lot of time well we've done this we've built it into the beautiful interface inside of founder path check this out i'll show you how you can access this in a second but you log in you connect your stripe account you see your valuation real time you can see what it changed over the past 88 days and even set goals for valuation this year now the secret evaluation is there's many different ways to value a sas business so the reason you're going to see three or four different valuations inside of your frowner path dashboard this is all free by the way is because depending on who's doing the buying of your sas company you're gonna get a different valuation a vc is gonna pay a different valuation private equity firm is different if you're gonna do a minority sale that's different and if you sell the whole business that's a different valuation you can see all those when i hover over here right so the teal is what a vc would pay yellow is what private equity and red is if you sold the whole thing outright now what's cool about this is this is not built off random data again you guys hear these interviews on youtube all these datas are built from real-time valuation data points founders share with us on the show so traction 1.2 million seed round 3.7 raise they sold 22 to their business go in here and filter by the event maybe you only want to see companies that have sold the whole business well here are a bunch that have been acquired the valuation and the multiple maybe you're going out right now and you're raising your seed round well go in here and look at all this recent seed deals that went down what they raised what valuation they raised at and what percent that they sold there's never been a larger data set of sas valuations than what you can get now inside of founder path and we're thrilled to bring it to you all right we're going to go back to the youtube video here in a second but if you want to check this tool out if you want to jump in and sign up you can check it out for free to get your valuation at this link this link founderpath.com forward slash products forward slash evaluations or if you go to founderprep.com and hover over products click on get your evaluation here and go ahead and sign up to give it a whirl again all that valuation data live right inside the platform i hope to see you there all right let's jump back into the interview yeah certainly deterrence that would be though even if you take us out we still exist um i guess last question um if if the prime minister of israel was trying to send private communications to another country you guys would also handle things like encryption of those messages and things of that nature right that's a separate body was so that's actually a difference from the nsa the nsa is responsible both for uh securing the infrastructures and uh intelligence monitoring um uh the isnu or 8200 is only responsible for intelligence i see and can in collecting intelligence yeah just basically just collecting intelligence in a lot of different ways a lot of different spectrums a lot of different texts but just collecting intelligence which is a lot of work by itself i'm getting a sense i can't ask for you to give me an example of some intelligence you collected and how you did it um let's see maybe i can so there's also things that are kind of um open that are as part of the unit so part of it is something called uh awesome open source intelligence so just having someone to comb the web uh searching through articles searching for information there um that's also part of the intelligence work done in that unit but that's i'd say definitely the least of it a lot of things on the other spectrum uh even if i told you you'd probably think that i'm kind of reading from a science fiction story um and yeah i probably shouldn't go into those but all right let's go into permit it is it's probably that all right fair enough and probably worse than anything i can think because that's what's required in today's world but permit.io so what are people paying you for what's the company do so it's very straightforward we allow developers to bake permissions into their products in an easy fashion in a way in a way that it's future proof so they only have to build it once they don't have to constantly rebuild it i got to that as in my previous company out i ended up rebuilding access control for our product five times in a three-year-old company oh jesus i was like that's annoying that's probably four times if not five times too many and uh and we quickly realized that this is common for basically every product you've seen these interfaces these capabilities across the space a billion times things like user management with the ability to assign roles api key management approval flows ability to ask permissions from another user audit logs the ability to see who did what within the system the ability for each of the tenants within the system to see that on their own uh and invites and impersonation and emergency access and you've seen all these things a billion times and every time you saw them some poor schlep of a developer had to build them from...