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
We have to go out to different databases that are sources of truth for medical professionals. And so this is where I start to geek out because what you want to do is you have to be like, what's the source of truth for whether or not you're a medical provider?
It'd be the federal DEA number, Health and Human Services is a national provider identifier, and then state medical licenses are issued at the state level. For military, it's obviously DOD, VA, and then maybe non-intuitively, the National Archives is actually the repository of military records down in St. Louis.
And this is what we call the trust graph, which is maybe this isn't just for everybody. It's only for tax professionals or lawyers or for doctors or for... HR staff at Social Security uploading W-2s and W-3s. So you have to figure out what's the source of truth for that claim. If you said, I went to Notre Dame, how would I know that?
We can actually go back to the registrar at Notre Dame with your permission, and we could find a record in the registrar's database that shows that you went there, your graduation date, and your degree. So a lot of the connectivity you have to build is our connections into sources of truth. As you say something... we can instantly go out and see if it's true.
And so maybe the distillation of all this is that if you're like, everyone knows if you're out at a bar and if you like walk up to a girl cold, you're fighting an uphill battle from the start. But if you, for both of you, because he's like, who are you?
But if a mutual friend introduces you and says, oh my gosh, Patrick is amazing and vice versa, then all of a sudden you're into an amazing conversation. That's effectively what we're doing. We're that trusted intermediary, kind of like Visa between banks and merchants, but for a lot more ID cards to say, hey, this person just said they're military. A merchant's like, I don't know.
But we're like, no, no, no, DOD, we're good. And now they can have a trusted interaction in a way where they're both better off. while keeping bad guys who didn't serve or do stolen valor stuff out. And I just think that's so amazing because when I came back from combat, there was so much goodwill. I couldn't go out in Nashville in my uniform without people buying me lunch. It's incredible.
Often, I wouldn't even know who did it. The waiter or waitress would come over and just be like, hey, listen, someone picked up your bill. And to be able to provide infrastructure that allows that connection to happen without humans in the loop so you don't have to always interact in person like it's the 1950s and keeping the stolen valor out is just really, really cool.
When I think about what I want my kids to say to me when they grow up is, Daddy, did you really have to manage different passwords and logins at every website? In the same way that somebody who grew up before Visa or MasterCard would be like, wait, you had to pay cash everywhere? That sounds terrible. So in Europe, this has already happened.
There's BankID in Sweden and the Nordics, and now our co-founder is Estonian. And in the Nordics and Estonia, they don't have a different login for different websites. They have BankID. The average Swede uses it five times per day. It's the same login for healthcare, for government, for banking, for commerce, and you control your own data. So the login security effectively is your wallet.
And what we're creating is a digital twin to a physical wallet. The root of trust within your physical wallet is your driver's license. It's your government-issued photo ID. That's why government has been so important for us because a lot of the credentials that we carry, they're public. These medical licenses, the state license, they're all published on public portals.
There's no notion of a breach. They were meant to be public. The hard part is knowing that you're you. If somebody's going in to prescribe narcotics, is that really a doctor or is that somebody who's going to prescribe narcotics by the leader and contribute to the opioid crisis and everything else?
So the more that we can just replicate exactly what your physical wallet does in digital form, it makes your life safer because we have the root of trust that you're you. And it makes it easier because you're in control of your identity. And when you want to get access to something, you don't need to reprove who you are.
And our first mantra of user experience is never make the same person do the same thing twice.
So I love how markets develop. I'm such a nerd for it. Economics and American history are my double majors at Vanderbilt. So take Henry Ford. Henry Ford, maybe the most famous entrepreneur ever, invents the assembly line, invents the automobile, and he does the Model T and he's like, I did it.
Everyone needs the Model T. And what's remarkable is at phase two of the market is Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM, General Motors, comes along and goes, no, Henry, they don't all want a black Model T. They want pickup trucks and minivans, and they want different colors. And GM just kicks Ford's ass for the next two decades. Ford doesn't catch up until World War II.
I think over and over, you can see the 1.0 version of a market is monolithic, and then it just explodes and personalizes. So the same thing is true, like Facebook and Friendster and MySpace, pretty monolithic. And then just look at what we have now, TikTok and X and Instagram and Snapchat and threads, all this other stuff where the market is personalized.
And so the V1.0 of digital wallets are payment wallets. where PayPal and eBay, like the hardest thing, the most ubiquitous thing on the internet early on to enable commerce was to pay for stuff. And actually payments are interesting because most of identity is exclusive. It's not about ubiquity.
The reason that you have military ID is to separate you from everyone who's not military or a student ID is everyone who's not a student. Credit cards, kind of everyone needs payments. So it's interesting. It's the logical place the market would start. But then it just stopped. And so there's been all this, let's just make it easier for young people to pay and everything else.
And like this very myopic view, I came in from outside the industry and said, no, when I think about my wallet and my identity, payments is just one part of it. And in fact, If I'm out buying something at a store and the cashier says, hey, can I please see some ID? They want to see my government ID.
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