Blake Hall
speaker
270 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Jan 2025
last heard Jan 2025
Blake Hall’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Even if you don't have the R&D budget of a Disney, even if you're like a little app developer that's like just getting going, has dreams of competing with the giants, but doesn't necessarily have the budget to make your login and identity experience on par. So I looked at Disney. I looked at Amazon as another one of amazing data about feedback loops.
And the problem is that the newer upstarts don't have that data. But if people begin to take their own data with them and they're starting to populate profiles of their tastes and their preferences, and if an app developer is willing or is able to have somebody give them consent to access some part of their identity graph, you could actually create a level playing field.
I had both sides. I mean, I had Russian callers calling me up during the pandemic and telling me where I lived, where my kids went to school. We had private security on the house when Christmas, where I had former Marines that were around it. So I've gotten a lot of death threats as we've cut off fraud. And for me, whatever, I don't care. It's my family that I care about the most.
I think on the corporate side, we're disrupting these data brokers. And we went through an episode in 2022, just a couple of years ago, where these data brokers basically created a lot of misinformation and FUD.
And I just had no idea how the media worked and how this whole dark arts work thing where lobbyists pull the wool over staff's eyes and get them to write a letter and get principals to sign it. The media covers the letter. They don't even care what's true. They won't even come to you to be like, is this accurate? They just cover the letter.
And then it's the Mark Twain quote, like a lie gets twice around the world before the truth has time to lace up its boots. And that's exactly what happened to us on the way up. Phil Knight talks about that in his book, Shoe Dog, where once the incumbents don't have a product or a business model response, they start to come after you to tarnish the new technology as unsafe.
Love that question, because that is a job of a leader. The job of a leader is to basically, from first principles, look at a team and be like, hey, you're fine, but the scope creep, you're doing way too many things. You need to focus. You do best.
And so that's how I think about credit bureaus play a really important role in the economy in terms of figuring out your credit worthiness and whether or not what's the probability you're going to pay a loan back based on your reputation. But should they be the gatekeepers of identity? Heck no. That doesn't make any sense.
That's why you can literally look at who has a fine time with credit bureaus, higher income people who has a tough time. Why? Because they're underbanked or unbanked. And so why would you want to make those vendors the gatekeepers for identity? And so when I'm like, how would you really design it if you were to do it from just pretend that nothing exists?
And you'd say identity naturally comes from health care and from government. Your identity life cycle begins in a hospital where you're born, you get a birth certificate, and then the birth certificate is sent off and the Social Security Administration issues you a social security number.
So when you literally just back up to cradle to grave, what happens cradle, you would go, your financial life cycle doesn't really begin until you're, I don't know, 17 to 19 years old. So as an entrepreneur, I said, all right, credit bureaus are for credit underwriting, which is an overlay. The real identity should come from the government and from healthcare. And that's the right place to start.
Now it's going to take time because you're like building this new way of doing things while the existing world continues to putter along. Just like Visa and MasterCard didn't get rid of cash payments overnight. They just gradually shifted the mix. But I really stuck to my guns on that.
My running joke with the treasury was I've stopped measuring the sales cycle in terms of weeks and months, but instead by the number of children I fathered. It's And all the board meetings, you can imagine they were like, Blake, should you do banking or maybe you should go into this other thing? And it's all given a lot of things, but not on this. Your identity needs to come from the government.
Yeah, I think it just depends on for what. So if you want to turn your mobile phone into a wallet, great. And so you'll see a lot of what Google and Apple are doing with transit cards and maybe your driver's license or your passport on your phone to get through a TSA checkpoint. Now you'll see that in some places.
That's all well and good because in person, the attack surface is inherently limited. Attackers in China... obviously can't show up in mass in the Dallas airport. And deep fakes, there is no concept of deep fakes in person. You can clearly see if somebody's got a mask or something on or some sort of disguise.
So if you just wanted to replicate exactly what a physical wallet does in its analog form, cool. And that's where a lot of the innovation has been going. The problem is really risk. When you start to put things online, where now the attack surface is global. So this notion of a physical wallet was designed for inherently local use. It just moves where you move.
But now when you go online, you can literally go anywhere. Like an attacker in China can come attack American systems. You need a lot more capability. And so the limitation of of the hardware manufacturer's approach, they have basically said, we're not going to be able to see anywhere the ID is used and there's no tracking and they'll put it underneath privacy.
And I would say for physical interactions that are localized and for use cases where the risk is morality, maybe adult websites or kids in social media, all good. Client side's great. But when you look at financial risk, the way the market operates is quite different. Your bank can actually see everywhere that you transact. And for some reason, as a society, we've decided that's okay. Well, why?
Because credit card fraud is a real issue. And we've actually decided that If it looks like your Visa card has the potential to be everywhere that you want to be, but if it actually starts to fly around, your bank can see that and go, hey, time out. Let me go talk to Patrick, make sure this is legitimate. And there's consumer protection.
So if you go, oh my God, and it was compromised, that's not me. In a client-side model, when you start to deal with financial risk where the phone manufacturer can't see it, imagine this. Imagine there's a 65-year-old woman. She's somebody's grandmother. She's about to retire. She's been scammed by one of these LLM-enabled AI scams that is really sophisticated. Her 401k balance goes to zero.
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