Q&A with Craig Pearce - Infectious disease fighter, serial entrepreneur, Bitwarden user

It started with a tweet:

This use case caught the Bitwarden team’s attention. A few DMs and emails later led to a live conversation with epidemiologist Craig Pearce, an infection control professional in Canada. As his tweet suggests, when Craig isn’t busy partnering with healthcare workers in infection prevention, he’s bringing business ideas to life.

Craig, a Bitwarden user, has built over half a dozen startups from web apps to ecommerce businesses. He’s also successfully sold a couple of businesses he started. Few tools have proven to be as critical for Craig as Bitwarden, especially during a startup acquisition process where he needed to transfer hundreds of accounts, logins, passwords, and information to the acquiring company.

Ongoing COVID cases in his province mean Craig and his team are working around the clock. So we’re grateful he made some time for this Bitwarden Q&A.

Q: Tell us a little about yourself!

A: My background is in healthcare and infection prevention and control but I’ve always been interested in the Silicon Valley tech scene. One day, a friend and I were riffing on ideas. We were two dads who were frustrated with the challenge of finding and registering for child care, which is why we created an app that connected parents and child care providers, and helped operators manage their childcare centers.

We eventually sold DaycareIQ/KidGenius, which became one of Canada’s largest childcare center directories. From there, I continued to launch a series of other startups.

Q: How did you hear about Bitwarden?

A: I read about Bitwarden through Hacker News and immediately signed up. My personal account has over 270 items now. The Bitwarden Chrome plugin, mobile app, and overall cross-platform support makes it easy to use. I promote Bitwarden to my wife and friends all the time!

Q: What was your approach to password security for your startups?

A: At DaycareIQ/KidGenius, we were using a Google doc to document passwords in plain text. Our passwords were set to the same sequence: name of the account + exclamation mark + year. Or, we’d write it out. We weren’t controlling what employees could see or share either. One of our accounts got suspended because we had lost track of account details and couldn’t even reset it.

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Q: What was the ‘aha’ moment for you to start using Bitwarden as a business tool?

A: After we were acquired, it occurred to me how embarrassing it would be to hand over an entire Google doc filled with passwords to another person. When the sale finally went through, I spent hours finding all of our passwords and putting them together in a password manager for the new owners. I wanted to provide the passwords in something other than a word document. The ideal way to share passwords is through a password manager and Bitwarden made the entire process incredibly smooth.
When I launched my other startup PrestoText, Bitwarden was one of the first services I signed up for. The password for all other services were generated by Bitwarden and stored in my vault. No two accounts had the same password. When I sold PrestoText, I simply handed over a single password for Bitwarden and the new owners received access to all my accounts!

Q: Thanks again for your time, Craig. One last question. What advice would you give to other entrepreneurs?

A: If you aren’t using a password manager for your startup, stop everything right now and sign up for one. If you do one thing in your startup, do this! Use a password manager!

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