[2:52]Hey everyone. I'm Matt Burns and this is Tech Crunch Live where founders help other founders build better venture back businesses. And oh boy, we we got a good show for you today. I'm very excited about this. Tech Crunch managing editor Ingrid London is here to talk to Mark Goldberg of Index Ventures and Rick Song of Persona. The topic is very timely with the explosion of AI tools and services over the last few months. Persona offers a range of services to provide digital identity because most businesses are not equipped to handle this test properly. Nor do they really want to. There are just too many pieces and the threat factors are constantly changing. Persona does the dirty work and they, well, they do it well. So, I'm excited to have Ingrid do this interview. She's covered Persona since their launch in 2020 and knows the market well and and she's just the best. You you're going to love her. We're going to take questions today too. So if you have any questions, please put them in the hop-in chat and then we'll shoot them over to Ingrid as soon as you do. So with that being said, uh let's let's turn the show over to Ingrid. Ingrid, how are you? Thank you, Matt. Thanks very much. Hi everybody. How are you? Um, as Matt said, if you have any questions at all, um, that you think of as we're chatting or things that I'm not asking that you wish I was asking, please send it through Hop in and we will, uh, try to get those questions answered. Although, I can't believe that I won't think of the good questions. But thanks so much to have um for for coming, Rick and Mark. Um, it's great to have you guys here.
[4:22]Um, let's just get right into it. Um, so Rick, um, Persona, very, very interesting company. You guys have been around since I think about 2015, isn't that right? We're actually founded in 2018, so tad younger than that. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, 18. Okay. Okay. So you guys have been around for several years. Um, you started out with um like verification tools and and um kind of an API to let companies kind of work that into their services so that any time they need that service, rather than building it themselves, they can quickly plug it in and use it. Um, then you kind of expanded into a larger platform play. Um, maybe you can just take us through a little bit where the opportunity is for you guys right now and where you're seeing your kind of newer um move, which started I think last year into the wider platform, versus your big bread and butter verification management. Well, so taking a step back in terms of like kind of where we were uh where we first started, um, you know, for myself like we started off in the identity space, really from the perspective that there wasn't going to be a one size fits all to tackle identity. And this kind of came firsthand from my experiences at Square where originally a lot of the identity uh techniques we were really applying at that time was largely focused towards compliance purposes and then gradually towards fraud and then increasingly towards trust and safety as well as Square's overall platform expanded to do anything from food delivery to payroll, business banking to of course later on Cash App. Um, and this perspective of like this no, not not being a one size fits all was really a catalyst for like how can we create Persona where we took more so of a building blocks based approach towards solving identity in a uniquely tailored way for any business out there. So whether you are uh Coursera or Reddit, whether you are uh Door Dash, um, no matter what business you are, you can create the ideal identity experience for your business. And speaking about like this transformation to platform approach, what we were actually seeing increasingly within the identity space is, in the past we often times thought about identity as this one-time interaction, where when you sign up, you know, you prove yourself, get that blue check mark and from that point onward, maybe, you know, this account is yours. But for a lot of these services, we're finding is that increasingly they need to know that it's the same physical person behind the screen for every single interaction. You know, if you're going to get uh alcohol delivered, you have to make sure it's the same person receiving that delivery. If you are taking a test on Coursera, it has to be the same individual, you know, verifying themselves, the same person who signed up for the account is the same person who gets this credential. Um, and this kind of lend itself towards this idea of, well, identity isn't just this one-time transaction, but increasingly a relationship. And that's where a lot of this original kind of idea around the platform itself came to be. Um, we've been thinking about that since like kind of 2018, but breaking into the market's always difficult from a like an organic platform play, so trying to find that wedge initially from a transactional like how can we solve essentially the highest risk, uh, lowest pain point, hopefully for a business type of use cases first. Uh, or sorry, uh, you know, lowest risk, highest pain point use cases and then gradually expand across the entire life cycle of the businesses uh needs. So, well, that's kind of where we saw that opportunity is this increasingly idea of identity matters across every single touch point for organizations. Okay. So that's quite interesting. So you basically like digging deep into a business and kind of providing something to help the business manage the person across all of their different products. But, you know, I know that the part of what you guys are doing, which is quite interesting, and we're going to talk about the AI aspect in one second for a different reason, but, um, one thing you're doing is you're kind of using two sort of prove a person is who they say they are by kind of triangulating a lot of data across the wider web. Um, now that obviously opens an interesting door, um, to you guys potentially helping people across the web wherever they go. So you're right now you're working for businesses, but have you guys ever like considered where you might turn that around and and work for the user? Um, is that something that you guys would ever want to do or do you feel like that's a different kind of product that would work somewhere else? I mean, I know Facebook tried it, didn't work, they kind of fumbled the ball on it. Um, LinkedIn probably had a great opportunity, which they also fumbled. They never really did do the verified thing. Um, Google tried it of course with um with Google Plus. Um, that also didn't work. Um, although nowadays you still get prompted all the time to log in when you're on a Google product. Um, anyway, do you think that there's an opportunity for that? Is that something you guys would ever want to do?
[8:59]Well, I I think it'd be our immediate term our focus definitely is on the business first. Longer term, I think the biggest challenge around ever going into consumer, especially in our space in which we're not just dealing with like digital identifiers, so unlike Facebook, LinkedIn, Google, where I would say these are more so of digital identities in a sense of uh I always joke back in high school, you know, my dog had a uh Facebook account that was managed by myself. So, it's kind of a different world at that time. Uh, for us, like we're dealing with kind of like the most sensitive personal information. And as a result, a lot of our focus and our perspective is that privacy's just as important. And going towards that direction raises a natural question around like, you know, digital surveillance around like privacy itself. So a lot of how Persona's always been structured is from from the idea of, we build infrastructure for businesses. We're more like an AWS or GCP in that sense in which we offer variety of services, but the data, all the interactions, as much as possible, belongs to the business itself. So that way when you establish a relationship with any business out there that's collecting your personal information, you know who it's going to, you're not wondering if it's going to through some third-party processor or anything on that front.
[1:18:08]No question. Thanks so much, Mark. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You want to start, Rick? Let's start with Mark.
