The Future of Identity

On today’s episode we talked with Eric Scouten, Senior Engineering Manager at Adobe, who has been working for the last four years on solving content authenticity. What does that mean? We’ll get into it in the episode, but suffice it to say that it’s an effort to bring trust to content online.

Was the pope really photographed in that puffy jacket? Was the photo of a war zone really taken this week, or is that from several years ago? ...

On today’s episode we spoke to Adam Gunther, SVP and General Manager of Digital Solutions at Equifax. This was a fascinating conversation about Adam’s journey leading decentralized identity at IBM, moving into an operating role within Equifax, and how their reusable identity strategy has evolved over time.

We talk about tactical factors that are needed for reusable identity adoption, like solutions to liability and common taxonomies...

In this episode we talk with Phil Windley, Sr. Software Development Manager at AWS, Cofounder of IIW, former Chair of Sovrin Foundation. We talked about his experience building and leading the Sovrin Foundation, which at one point was almost synonymous with the term self-sovereign identity. It was set up to be an identity metasystem that would reinvent how identity was done online… and we talk about why it didn’t end up becoming th...

Today we talked with Nick Thomas, cofounder of Finicity, which was acquired by Mastercard, where Nick went on to be the EVP of Global Open Finance Innovation. Nick has a fascinating career that has paralleled digital identity for a long time, as a cofounder of Bluetooth and FDX, the major open banking standards body in the US. These are both organizations that brought an industry together around common standards to grow the market ...

In this episode, we talk with Jacques von Benecke, CTO of DHI, the commercial and investment arm of the government of Bhutan. If you haven’t heard, Bhutan has launched one of the most complete SSI ecosystems in the world! We spent most of the time diving in to how it’s going since launching just a few months ago.

We get into metrics, like how many users have onboarded, and the growth rate over time. We cover use cases, business mode...

In this episode, we talk with Jon Gelsey, founding CEO of Auth0 Inc, which sold to Okta for $6.5B, as well as the CEO of Xnor.ai which he sold to Apple for $200m.

Jon told the story of the early days of Auth0, including how they got their first $1m of revenue. Then we spent time diving in to how new technologies get adopted—Jon even went as far as saying that technology adoption is always incremental, not revolutionary.

Then we talk ...

In this episode, we sit down with Harrison Tang, Co-founder and & CEO of Spokeo, which is a “people search engine”. Spokeo aggregates many sources of data about people and sells that data to verifiers. So at first blush, Harrison is an unlikely person to be a massive advocate for SSI and co-chair of the W3C Credentials Community Group.

We dig in to why Spokeo cares about verifiable credentials, and how verifiable crede...

In this episode, we chat with Carlos Korten, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Bindle Systems. Bindle built one of the largest private-sector deployments of decentralized identity in the USA, and Carlos shares tons of stories from the trenches of getting hundreds of thousands of consumers on board.

We dive in to the go-to-market strategies Bindle employed, including how they sold directly to verifiers, and how if t...

In this episode, we sit down with Nate Soffio, Co-founder and & CEO of Portabl. Nate is applying decentralized identity to fintech and open banking, which is such an important but also challenging use case.

We discuss the ins and outs of Portabl’s user experience and how it differs from other reusable KYC products. Nate also provides insight into lessons learned, deliberate product decisions Portable has made, and comm...

In this episode, we speak with Andrew Black, Managing Director of ConnectID, which is part of Australian Payments Plus. Andrew, who is an expert in the convergence of IDtech and open banking, sheds light on a unique approach to building bank-backed digital identity and the user experience that it enables. It was fascinating to unpack the role governance plays in ConnectID with some tangible examples, and analyze how the UX of an id...

In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Clark, SVP of Digital Identity at Mastercard, to discuss Mastercard’s ID network.

As one of the world’s largest payments networks, Mastercard has been on the leading edge of reusable identity. Sarah takes us into Mastercard’s corporate strategy related to identity, plus some of the specific go-to-market strategies the company has employed in Australia and Brazil where its network is ...

In this episode, we sit down with Keith Uber, VP of Sales Engineering at Ubisecure, to discuss the role of verifiable credentials in identity and access management.

Keith shares his insights on Organizational Identity and how vLEIs change the game, create new business opportunities, and unlock efficiencies for representatives of businesses to transact more seamlessly.

Keith also shares his perspective on how Ubise...

Today’s guest is Ankur Patel, Head of Product at Entra Verified ID which is Microsoft’s decentralized identity product. We begin the conversation by reviewing Microsoft’s storied history of identity initiatives, and why one of the world’s most valuable companies made decentralized identity one of their major focus areas.

We dive into the recent announcement about verifiable credentials on LinkedIn, which allows companies t...

Today’s guest is Eric Starr, Co-founder & CEO of UltraPass ID—an IDtech product for governments.

Eric shares his story trying to solve civic problems through the political system via Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and how he ended up starting a company to reimagine how citizens interact with government.

We go through the problem caused by many government silos of personal data, why Eric landed on verifiab...

Today’s guest is Timothy Ruff, General Partner at Digital Trust Ventures. Timothy is an early pioneer of self-sovereign identity as a co-founder of Evernym, a co-creator of Sovrin, and an advisor to several IDtech startups. Timothy has countless battle scars from being on the ground floor of so much innovation in the decentralized identity space.

In this episode, we discuss the difference between a use case and a business ...

Today’s guest is Manny Nijjar, co-founder and CEO of Truu, which is a healthcare-focused IDtech product that’s been involved in one of the most impressive production verifiable credentials rollouts to date. Their platform, alongside a handful of other vendors, helped the largest health system in the world respond to the COVID-19 pandemic—all while Manny was also serving on the front lines as an infectious disease doctor, leading hi...

Today’s guest is Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Disco.xyz.

We start and end this episode with Evin framing identity as the coolest, most interesting thing people should be working on. She paints such a compelling picture in language that’s so accessible, and she shares tips on how the rest of us can level up our messaging to attract more users as well.

We break down Disco’s product and the origin of their te...

Today’s guest is Paul Ashley, CTO and co-CEO of Anonyome Labs. Paul starts by talking about how the erosion of privacy online and the rise of data brokers and surveillance capitalism led them to create their IDtech product MySudo. MySudo is a privacy application that allows users to create secure digital profiles, or personas, with unique disposable phone numbers, emails, credit cards, and other identifiers to use across the intern...

Today’s guest is Sebastian Mellen, Co-founder and CEO of Cerebrum. His team is building an IDtech product called vID, tackling data and compliance problems in healthcare, HR systems, and even youth sports teams.

In this conversation, we cut right to some meaty topics, including some of the biggest challenges that IDtech products tend to face. Sebastian gives insight into Cerebrum’s trojan horse go-to-market strategy into l...