Mike Liberty

So as you said, I started my career in finance.

And after four years of that, I was kind of looking to make a transition to technology.

And so I went to one of the portfolio companies that the private equity firm that I was working for owned and started working there.

It was in the insurance industry.

And basically that was my first exposure to tech because I built out the business intelligence system for them.

And

So that like gave me a picture into all the inner workings of the operations.

And then I knew I wanted to get into tech, but I didn't really have a background to get there.

So went to business school and then coming out of business school, got hired at PayPal.

And interestingly, I think the only reason the guy who hired me over there was because I had a passion.

minor professional career playing blackjack and he was hiring me into a role that was fraud detection and so I was used to the cat and mouse game that you played with casinos and can it could put my my feet in the shoes of the fraudsters like so to speak although I wasn't breaking any laws but similar cat and mouse

Yes, I guess I was benefiting from a little bit of ignorance when I joined PayPal into that fraud detection team.

And what I did was...

head up digital goods fraud there.

And one of the things that just struck me was I had never considered the possibility that the merchant would actually end up taking the liability for fraudulent orders or fraudulent transactions.

And that just seemed backwards to me.

It's like, why would I as a merchant have to set up an intricate fraud detection system?

And that led me to only spend a brief time at PayPal because I was like, all right, well, this is fundamentally broken for all these different merchants.

And it struck me as very unfair as well.

And so after about a year there, Raj and I left and we started Signified.