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 it's why I started ID.me because I felt like it was a worthy mission to improve people's lives. I didn't know it would grow to become a multi-billion dollar company like it is today. I just wanted to help the military community that I came from to start. But that's the bridge for how I got from the military to running this technology company.
First thing, I just want to be honest here. I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew is I spent a summer at McKinsey and the McKinsey people were wonderful, built a business model. The first phone call at this telecom company, they say $17 million. And I went home that night and I was like, I don't care. It didn't move the needle at all. So a few things happened.
I saw that there was this need for a better solution for the military community. I started to dig into that. I naively did this as an academic project my second year at business school. I said, let's incorporate. I'll solve this problem. It'll be easy. And then I'll be on with my life. Literally looking back.
couldn't have known less about what it means to run and start a company and to make sure that it is built to last. And so a few things happened. One, this is more the luck part of it. My brother insisted on investing $20,000. And I love my older brother. He's just like the hardest working guy. He works his tail off. And I actually begged him not to. I said, please do not invest money, Russ. No.
And he insisted on it. And I was like, do you know what this is going to do to my stress level? I was like, I've been a lifeguard and I've gotten shot at and I've mowed some lawns. Don't do this. He said something to me. He said, you've never failed in anything you've done in your life. I was like, that's so messed up, man. But he insisted on doing it. So he invested a $20,000 check into me.
David Tisch was one of our first checks in. He ended up becoming really impactful. So he's a box group, one of the best angel investors in the country, and then was the first managing director of Techstars New York. And what David Tisch did that I really am grateful for is I was talking more about business development and relationships.
And he pointed me to this book, Steve Blank, Four Steps to the Epiphany. He said, you really need to read this book to understand how to build a company. And it's wonderful. It's basically like the scientific method for how you build a company stage by stage. And he introduced me to some other folks. And one of my classmates invested $80,000 in me.
What was pretty crazy is even like a year into it, as I was raising our angel round where we put together, I don't know, roughly a million dollars in a convertible note, I would continually have investors that listened to the pitch and they would say, I'm going to invest and I'm going to invest like 50K or 75K. And they would thematically tell me two things.
They're like, I don't think because the initial name of IDMU is TroopSwap. They said, I don't think that this business model is going to be successful. But then they would say, I believe in you. So I'm writing the check. And then they'd be like, by the way, here's a picture of my daughter. This is her college fund. And it's like a baby.
I've just been fascinated by how big companies start. And all the big companies actually start in a pretty focused way. So Facebook started just for the Ivy Leagues first, and then students then grew up.
Dan Rose, who's on your show, talked a lot about that, that you're the only student and at some point they opened it up to everybody and I think their users increased by four or five X. Uber started with affluent riders and black car drivers, right? Pinterest started with Midwestern moms. Paradoxically, to get big, you have to focus small.
And so I thought there was a void in the market around Craigslist in terms of trust. And because military families move so much that you could have gated community of maybe military and then students. And that would actually be a way to disrupt the sort of peer-to-peer classified and like marketplace space. And so a few things happened as I was giving this pitch. USAA and military.com loved it.
But then I called them back and they're like, yeah, fast for us is like two to three years to give it a pilot. Yeah. So that sucked. And I was like, I'm not, it got to a low point in 2011 where Kelly Perdue, who's David Tisch introduced us, was our first board member. I was like, Kelly, I was like, I don't know if this is going to work.
And he said, Blake, and look, that takes a lot for somebody who's been through Ranger school or whatever to be on the verge of, I do not quit at anything in my life. So he said, Blake, first, never say that to anybody ever again. especially to investors. And he said, chin up, we're going to get through this, which I'm super grateful.
Your best friends in life are super positive when the chips are down and they're for you. And maybe when your head's getting too big, they're pulling you back down to earth to ground you. And Kelly's been that for me. So basically had this learning, which was we couldn't get enough distribution to get the buyer and seller part going.
But we were also spending three fourths of our time on identity, on actually making sure that somebody signing up was in fact a member of the military community. As we talked to different marketers from various firms like Microsoft and Under Armour, they said, we're not really interested in your app or some gated garden for whatever, like you don't have enough users to have it be meaningful.
But your ability to actually know if someone is a part of a particular community is really important and valuable. We would use that within our own channels. And so a few things happened. I saw that on Veterans Day, veterans to get like a free Blooming Onion at the Outback were taking in their paperwork that has their social security number on it.
And they would show this form with their social to a stranger to get a fried vegetable. No wonder identity theft is twice as high. You're showing your social to strangers all over the place. And then I talked to this marketing manager at Microsoft, and they were delivering e-learning vouchers to veterans in person and making them bring their paperwork in.
And I said, doesn't the in-person redemption defeat the entire point of e-learning? And she said, yeah, we know it sucks, but we don't have a way to know on our website if somebody is a part of the military community, so we're not able to keep it safe. And because we're not able to keep it safe, we can find distribution to brick and mortar channels.
And I said, and if you had a way to keep it safe, she said we would bring it online. And then these different retailers said, by the way, it's not just military. Pretty much every segment, it's students, it's teachers, it's first responders, it's social influencers, it's beauticians. And that was the aha moment where I said, wow, it's not an app, it's a utility.
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