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
And now this attacker out of probably Lagos in Nigeria is taunting her that he's ruined her life. And she goes... I need help. The reason banks can see that is banks can help. The reason that IDME can see that is IDME can help. We can provide recourse to the victim. We can also go back to the government agency and go, here's the audit trail of what we saw.
This woman was not involved with any of this stuff or to the 401k provider in this case and say, this is what happened. And now there's feedback loops. There's learning about what happened. For some reason, people are losing their minds when it comes to digital identity, that there are just different forms of risk and what's good changes based on that risk.
If you say it's decentralized, you can't see it, what you've actually said is there is no recourse for victims, there is no audit trail for the government, and if these really terrible things happen, you're on your own, which I think is unacceptable. So we actually think it's both. It doesn't have to be this monolithic trade-off. If you actually know what you're solving for,
then if the attack surface is global and the risk is financial, you have to have a centralized entity like a major bank or a credit card network that can see things to provide feedback loops and protection to both customers and users. You start to deal with things where the risk is different, then all bets are off. But that's how I think about the approach, which is it's good.
It's also limited in terms of what it'll allow you to do when it comes to online transactions.
Yeah, in five years, I wouldn't want there to be logins that you would have to create at every single website you would go to. The same way that when you open up your laptop and you're just able to open up Word and you're able to open up Adobe and all these other systems, I think you should be able to open up Coinbase or Chase or Social Security or IRS's apps.
And then the flip side of that is, as we are able to label and tag more content, we're able to help people navigate really difficult life events like disaster relief in LA right now. What's really interesting is every use case around like this is what is needed to access it. Like you've got to be a doctor for a prescription app or you have to be in a disaster zone for FEMA aid and everything else.
There's going to be some access policies that we need to know about in order to make sure that you're you and that we've established trust to the right level. But also, how do we help you find out about those programs when you don't know about them? And this is actually the other part of the story.
When I was first starting, there was about $750 million of combat pay that had been approved by Congress to soldiers who were stop-lossed and voluntarily extended. Congress approved it like two more years. And at the end of it, about a quarter of a billion dollars went unclaimed because government just couldn't get the word out.
All these service members had to do is fill out a form, and they would get $5,000. It was crazy. And a quarter of a billion dollars of combat pay went expired. So the same thing is likely happening right now in LA.
There's all these programs and things that can help, but if you're displaced, you're trying to get your dog or your cat and just figuring out a hotel room, you don't have time to research FEMA or nonprofits and figure out what's going on.
And so we have this amazing ability that if we're doing it right, that whether it's disaster relief, taxes, retirement, graduating from college, buying a house for the first time, we can help provide a curated view of here's all of the government and nonprofit and private sector issues offerings that are relevant to you.
And when you want to get access to it, there's the ID me button waiting so that you don't have to create a login and fill out forms and waste hours of your life or maybe even have to go in person if they use a vendor that doesn't cover you because you live overseas.
If in five years we can be everywhere that you want to be to borrow a line from Visa for online use cases, and we're helping connect people to relevant financial programs and benefits that matter faster, then what an amazing impact and legacy to leave on the world.
Yeah, I think maybe I'll start with philosophy and then I'll go into like how I did it Friday typically to separate the two. I think philosophically, I just don't believe in charging customers for anything unless I've created value that demonstrably makes them better off. So I never wanted my incentives at odds with my customer.
And I view if someone buys our software, I want that person to get promoted. And if somebody uses our software, I want their life to be better for me having been a part of it. So that's where I'm coming from, which just goes back to service and purpose, which are core drives for me and for a lot of folks who are built that way. Now, I saw two things.
When I saw that basically Visa and PayPal were the V1.0 of this market, I looked at how their business model was designed. Visa doesn't sell data. Visa sells trust and convenience. You decide if your money moved to a merchant when you want to pay. And what Visa did is they basically has a business model that adjusts to risk and value.
The amount, the financial dollar of the transaction is the value. And then risk is, well, is card present or is it not present? Is it online? And then grocery, jewelry, very complicated business model that they've unpacked. On a more round truth note, we were using a credit bureau, I won't say who, back in, this is like 2015 timeframe, and just for records validation.
So just if we try to find a name, date of birth, social address in records, could we find it? And these credit bureaus will charge you transactionally. So every time that you query their API, you have to pay money. How does that manifest in practice? I saw there were two veterans. One was in his 60s. The other one was in his 70s. One had just recently moved.
The other one had credit, even as an older person, just never had credit. These two folks tried 50 to 70 times each to prove their identity. It looks really cheap. It's like 25 cents an API call, or depending on what you're calling, it could be 10 cents an API call. But then you have to play it through in terms of, I can only imagine how frustrated those two veterans were with us at that moment.
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