
Ask HN: When / how did you untangle personal accounts of the tech founder? - jaxn
My current venture started as a personal project. That means that all of the passwords are tied to me personally. This means the domains are in my personal registration account, the code is a private project under my github user, the 3rd party APIs we use are tied to my personal developer account, etc.<p>As I am looking to grow from using occasional contractors to building a tech team, it is probably time to start untangling all of that. I assume this is fairly common among HNers.<p>So, when did you untangle the mess of accounts? How did you do it?  Did you create a tech@domain.com email for all of the account logins, use a different email per service? Store API keys in something like LastPass or a secure Evernote folder?<p>Or did you just leave it alone? It is my company and I don&#x27;t have outside investors, so I don&#x27;t plan on going anywhere anytime soon.
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primitivesuave
I prefer to use external SaaS that allows multiple members of a team to login
independently, so we don't have to worry about sharing a single
username/password. For things like SSH keys and GitHub repositories, we pay
for private organization repos that are shared with the team. API keys,
passwords, etc are stored in a private GitHub repository that is only
accessible to myself.

One interesting aside to your query is "what happens if I get hit by a bus
tomorrow?" That is, will the startup cease without its CTO? My solution has
been to keep a handwritten password in a safe in my house, and provided an
extra key to a trusted third party (my parents). So if worst comes to worst,
my legacy will not end when its domain needs to be renewed.

Hope this helps, and good luck!

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jaxn
That really does help. I am using private repos now and will shift them to an
organization. However, I had not thought of storing password and keys in a
repo. The sharing doesn't seem very granular, but it makes it easy to document
and store the history.

I like the safe idea too.

Very helpful comment.

