06/11/2025

About Silvan Auth

Let me start with a quick recap of my journey. Last year, I sold my software company to pursue something new, something that would put my skills to work for a better planet, especially for nature. That motivation led me to my first idea: calculating the CO₂ emissions of servers and automatically offsetting them by planting trees.

A few steps later, I moved beyond precise CO₂ calculations and decided to focus on massive overcompensation instead. The goal was to make a bigger impact, more easily. This shift not only made the idea more actionable, it also broadened my perspective on what kind of product I should be building. I took a step back to reflect on what I’m trying to achieve here. In doing so, I identified a few key areas where people are able to make a difference:

• The political realm has the most power, but moves slowly: Goals are often set far into the future, delayed, or questioned altogether. It’s great that people are putting their heart into it, but it is a very long-term process.
• Individuals care deeply, but have limited impact: Many people want to help, but as one person, there’s only so much you can do.
• Businesses sit in between. They have tremendous influence, access to capital, and the power to drive meaningful change. Unfortunately, a greener earth is a difficult investment to justify. Yes, it is something we all need, but it doesn't generate any money directly. And at the end of the day, businesses exist to make money, which makes perfect sense.

I now realize that this is my mission: to extract money from businesses and redirect as much of it as possible into initiatives that help restore the planet. But let me be clear: I don’t want to trick companies into paying for something they don’t need. I want to build products that are genuinely valuable, even without the environmental benefits. The main difference with the competition is that a large part of that money is used for something good. On top of that, I'll be hosting everything I build on Leaf.cloud, a cloud provider that I’ve become really excited about. I mean, they're from Europe, run on green energy, and the heat generated by their servers is reused to warm public buildings and provide hot water. How genius is that!

So, I can build anything that businesses need. Great! But what? I've got loads of ideas, from developer tooling to video conferencing, but in all cases I need a way for a user to login. As a developer, this is always a pain to do (safely), which is why there are a lot of services to make this easier. Most of them are from the US, which is increasingly becoming a downside. Aside from that these services make it more complicated than it needs to be. All this is to say, this is becoming my first product!

Say hello to: Silvan Auth, a green auth provider from Europe. It aims to be easy to use for end-users and low effort for developers. The next step is building a console to manage your userbase. Stay tuned, for (slightly more frequent) updates about this ;-)