Articles by Alex Salazar - Arcade Blog

Alex Salazar

CEO + Co-founder

Alex is a seasoned Founder/CEO and auth industry veteran. As VP of Product Management at Okta, Alex led their developer products, which represented 25% of total bookings, and managed their network of over 5,000 auth integrations. Later, as GM, he launched an auth-centric proxy server product that reached $9M in revenue within its first year.

Previously, as co-founder and CEO of Stormpath (acquired by Okta), he built the first Authentication API for developers, creating a new product category. The platform attracted 2,000 new developer signups monthly with a 50% activation rate and 30% 30-day retention.

Alex has a Georgia Tech CS degree and a Stanford MBA, with experience as a software engineer, enterprise sales rep, and product leader. He has a proven track record of turning innovative ideas into successful products.

Articles (28)

Approve Once, Scale Every Agent: How Governance Unlocks ROI

SEPTEMBER 2, 2026

The return on AI shows up when agents take on whole workflows in production. That value stays locked until you can control, scale, and prove what an agent does the moment it acts.

30 Days After MCP 07-28: Stateless Won, Now Come Skills, Triggers, & Identity

AUGUST 27, 2026

A month after the largest revision to the MCP spec, the debate over whether MCP is the right protocol is settled. Alex Salazar on what stateless actually fixed, and the three gaps that matter next.

Smithery Is Now Part of Arcade.dev

AUGUST 5, 2026

Arcade.dev has acquired Smithery, the leading public registry and hosting platform for MCP. Smithery co-founder Anirudh Kamath is joining the Arcade team.

Why We're Still Betting on MCP

JULY 27, 2026

The July 28 MCP release goes stateless, hardens authorization, and makes extensions first-class — and those breaking changes are exactly why Arcade.dev is betting harder on MCP. A maturity story, and why the protocol debate is over.

The AI Agent Budget Reckoning Has Arrived. Better Architecture Is the Answer.

JULY 21, 2026

The pressure has shifted from having an AI story to having AI results, and token bills are piling up. Why the ROI reckoning is a good sign, and how better agent architecture, not spending blindly or pulling back, is the answer.

ChatGPT Work Is Being Pitched to Enterprise. It Still Needs an Actions Runtime to Work.

JULY 15, 2026

From ChatGPT Work to Grok 4.5 to Muse Spark, the labs are all chasing enterprise knowledge work. But none of them shipped the enforcement, execution, or governance agents need to reach production, because that layer can't live in the model.

Your Workflows Don't Live in One Vendor's Product. Your Agents Can't Either.

JULY 13, 2026

The workflows enterprises want to automate are cross-system by definition. A vendor-native agent that lives inside a CRM can only see one room in a connected house, which is why bolt-on agents are the wrong architecture.

APIs Are Service Contracts, MCPs Are Intent Contracts

JULY 6, 2026

There's a tidy story that every SaaS vendor will own its MCP server, one-to-one with its API. It's wrong. APIs are service contracts; great MCP servers are intent contracts, and intents map to use cases, not vendors.

Fable 5 Is Back, the Authorization & Governance Lessons Haven't Changed

JULY 1, 2026

When the threat of a jailbreak forced Anthropic to pull Fable 5, it revealed that guardrails aren't enough. You need deterministic controls at the action layer.

We saw the action layer coming. Now we're going to own it.

JUNE 12, 2026

Arcade.dev raised $60M in Series A funding, led by SYN Ventures with strategic investment from Morgan Stanley and Wipro, to build the secure action layer for enterprise AI agents.

Anthropic Just Told You How Hard Agents Are. They Left Out the Hardest Part.

APRIL 22, 2026

Anthropic just published a deep dive on the infrastructure behind their Managed Agents. It's excellent work on the agent's brain—and it highlights exactly what Arcade.dev solves for the hands.

The Great Reversal

APRIL 15, 2026

In just twenty-seven months, Anthropic went from $87 million to $30 billion in annualized revenue, surpassing OpenAI. Here's how strategic focus on enterprise, Claude Code, and MCP created one of the fastest revenue reversals in tech history.

The 5 Most Open GTM SaaS Apps for AI Agents (and the Most Closed)

APRIL 14, 2026

GTM teams are among the first adopting AI agents for real work. Arcade.dev's ToolBench data reveals which go-to-market SaaS apps are actually ready for agent automation—and which ones are blocking the path.

MCP Has Already Won

APRIL 2, 2026

Critics say MCP is overkill, but the data tells a different story. Arcade.dev CEO Alex Salazar breaks down why MCP has already won the protocol war.

Arcade.dev Named to 2026 Enterprise Tech 30 List

MARCH 31, 2026

Arcade.dev has been selected to the 2026 Enterprise Tech 30 list by Wing Venture Capital, recognizing the most promising private companies across the enterprise technology stack.

The MCP Gateway Pattern: scaling agentic integrations without tool sprawl

JANUARY 21, 2026

MCP makes it easy to go from “agent” to “agent that takes action.” The trap is that success compounds: every new system becomes a new server, every team ships “just one more tool,” and soon your integration surface is too large to reason about, too inconsistent to secure, and too messy to operate.

New Year, New Agents to Make You More Productive

JANUARY 12, 2026

Most conversations about AI agents still start the same way: models, prompts, frameworks, followed by an incredible looking demo. Then someone asks, “Okay… when can it ship to production?”

Build on the Bubble: Why foundation model instability is the best thing that ever happened to enterprise AI

DECEMBER 18, 2025

Right now, somewhere in San Francisco, a foundation model company is losing money serving your API call.

Agent Skills vs Tools: What Actually Matters

DECEMBER 9, 2025

The agent ecosystem has a terminology problem that masks a real architectural choice. "Tools" and "skills" get used interchangeably in marketing decks and conference talks, but they represent fundamentally different approaches to extending agent capabilities.