Who knows the password to the root account for your hosting provider? For your GitHub organisation? For the admin account of your mail provider? If these are only known by one person then there’s a big risk that when you need them they might not be available.

I have seen AWS accounts with the root email belonging to an early engineer who fell out with the other founders and was uncontactable. I’ve heard of a sold SaaS app where completion was delayed because nobody knew the password to the root account to transfer it.

Would you accept working in an office where master key was still held by the previous tenant? If you sold second hand cars would you forget to get the keys from the seller until you had a buyer for the car? I don’t think so!

Shared password managers are like an office safe where you keep important things. Even better as you can share individual passwords with those who need it without having to give them the master key. They also allow you to generate unique and strong passwords for every service you use. Meaning if one service has a breach and the password is compromised whoever has it won’t be able to use it to get into other services you use.

In the very early days of a startup it might feel like not worth worrying about but having this information centralised means not hitting road bumps when you first need to update your early infrastructure.