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
But then they're not done. They still haven't gotten access. So they either give up, which is the worst thing, or they have to go to the call center. There's probably a credit bureau waiting for them too that also doesn't have coverage. And then they have to go in person. By the time they get in person, just think about how you would feel. So that's awful.
And what I realized is that for worse data coverage, they actually made more money. If they had the data coverage, it would have passed on the first attempt. But when they didn't cover somebody and that person tried to just repeatedly attempt multiple times, you might end up paying tens of times, so 50 times 25 cents. And I was like, you know what?
That's just such a perverse business model where you actually make more profit and revenue for having a deficient product. I resolved, I said, I'm never going to have a business model that is misaligned with the incentives of this B2C ecosystem that we serve, that I'm only going to charge a government customer when we successfully authenticate somebody and get them access.
And that actually makes sense for the users that if we're not able to get somebody through who's not fraudulent, we suffer as a business and rightly so. Now all of our incentives are aligned in harmony with who we serve. I think it's value and alignment with stakeholders.
And once you commit to it, those are some of the things from a values basis as a founder that I really enforce is sacred that we'll never violate. It's core to our DNA and who we are.
And if you don't screen for it, you're in for a tough ride. So I think e pluribus unum, out of many, one. This is the whole premise of America, that what our country's struggling with right now, that everyone is welcome as long as you are committed to the fundamental American values of freedom, that you can criticize any religion, you can burn any book, and you will not be met with violence.
People might have problems with that, just like I'll have a problem if you burn the American flag, but the fact that you can do that and not be harmed shows that you live in a free country. So when you let people in who fundamentally reject the premise of your country, your culture begins to suffer. Our country is suffering for that right now because we haven't been intentional about it.
The same thing is true at the company. So right now, the whole country is struggling with this battle really between enlightenment values and postmodernism. And if you let that conflict into your company, it's like a wagon that has two hands pulling on the wheel. Is it merit or is it something else? What are we really focused on driving?
For me, what I loved about the military, what I loved about growing up, what I loved about fairness and what my dad told me, three rules that his grandfather had given to him. And one of them was never think that you're better than the men that you lead. And that we come from different backgrounds, we come from different places, from different experiences, but we're all army green.
And your job is to treat everyone fairly according to the same standard. And that's what I loved about service, that if you listen to my guys talk to each other, But the other part would be like, these guys would all take a bullet for each other. They're brothers.
And so true intimacy is being able to be open, not malicious, to love each other, joke and have a good time and not have folks throwing yellow cards because you said something just ridiculous. So if you want to move fast, You don't want ideological tension. I'm really deliberate about that. We published some value statements about our commitment to really classic liberalism.
Everyone is equal before the law. It's not good or okay to be racist in any direction. And just like you would want your kid's elementary school teacher to treat everybody, not giving preference, but teaching kids about character and you're responsible for what you do. And that's all that matters.
Crazy to me, that's even a question, but it's therefore even more important that you screen that out at the beginning. Once you move past ideology, you're looking for, I basically designed our cultural values around all the patterns that I'd seen across my time in the military about what makes for effective teams.
So you can imagine selection as a triangle where one point of the triangle is skills, one point of the triangle is capability, just raw sort of intellectual potential. The other one is your behaviors and habits. And you can hear this echo to Aristotle. We are what we do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit. FBI profilers, the best predictor of future behaviors, past behavior.
We defined our cultural values. First rule is don't be a jerk. And what we mean by that specifically is if you are not emotionally self-regulated, if you can't control your fight or flight response, you're not welcome here. Because ultimately, that's when we do things that are really mean and cruel is when we go into fight or flight.
And actually, there's a lot of research, too, that shows that really good CEOs and rangers, for that matter, are able to move out of fight or flight very quickly. I had this briefing after ranger school from a Delta Force recruiter who showed us the cortisol profile of a ranger graduate versus general public.
And he's like, here's the profile of somebody who's exposed like a life and death traumatic event. And it's three or four days before it goes back to normal. Here's the profile of ranger school graduates. And it was like a 30 to 45 minute rebound effect that after near life and death, you and I could be talking like this and it's fine. So anyways, so there's that.
There's always compete, which is grit. We don't hire pessimists here. We love critical thinkers, but we want optimists who can believe in a contrarian point of view if they have first principles conviction. I think you want to be really intentional about that to make sure that as you scale, you don't end up sideways.
And you need only look at Paul Graham and the whole Google Gemini thing was going on where you want an image of George Washington and God forbid, show an actual historically accurate picture of George Washington. That's a great example of if you emphasize things other than truth and merit and excellence, you end up with pretty bizarre outcomes.
I've been pretty ruthless about enforcing culture because I know what it is to be in an intimate relationship close team where everyone's treated fairly as an individual, don't care about anything else other than performance. And I want that for everyone who works here. It's a wonderful environment.
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