Reed McGinley-Stempel
- Co-founded Stytch in 2020 with Julianna Lamb, both from Plaid
- Built a developer identity platform around passwordless as the default, not an add-on
Bio
Reed McGinley-Stempel co-founded Stytch in 2020 with Julianna Lamb, its CTO. The two met at Plaid working on bank-account authentication, where they saw how much engineering time went into authentication flows that were never the product. Stytch launched with email magic links and grew into a full B2C and B2B identity platform.
Profile built from public company and press records.
Where their work shows up
Most identity platforms added passwordless to a password-first product. Stytch started from the other end, which changes the defaults: passkeys, magic links, and device fingerprinting as the primary path, with fraud and bot detection treated as part of authentication rather than a separate purchase. See the Stytch profile, the best passwordless CIAM providers ranking, and Auth0 vs Stytch.
Related on Start with Identity
- Blog94 percent of enterprises say they can revoke access in 24 hours. 35 percent found out they couldn't.
FIDO Alliance and HID surveyed 500 IT and security decision-makers for The State of Physical and Digital Identity in the Enterprise. The headline gap: near-univ
- BlogAmazon says 175 million customers now sign in with passkeys
Amazon reports more than 175 million customers have enabled passkeys, signing in six times faster, with passkeys now the default on mobile for anyone who has se
- BlogBlack Hat USA 2026 recap: passkeys get broken (twice), and AI agents get an identity perimeter
Our identity takeaways from Black Hat USA 2026: two independent passkey implementation attacks, a wave of AI agent identity and governance launches, an open sou
- GlossaryMagic Link
A passwordless login where the user clicks a one-time link sent to their email. Simple to ship but inherits email security and deliverability limits, and is not
- ExpertCo-Founder and CEO
Todd McKinnon co-founded Okta in 2009 with Frederic Kerrest after both came from Salesforce. Led the company through its 2017 IPO and the 2021 Auth0 acquisition
- ExpertCo-founder and CEO, Clerk
Colin Sidoti co-founded Clerk in 2019 with his brother Braden Sidoti. Clerk ships authentication as embeddable UI components, APIs, and an admin dashboard, aime