YouSaid · the spoken record

Blake Hall

lines on the record: 90
first: 2025-01-28
most recent: 2025-01-28
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Don't even know where to start. Honestly, I'm full of gratitude to so many people. Sergeant Berkman saved my life in Iraq, tackled me as like tracers. We're going by my head, said they almost took you out, sir. I'm so grateful for that. Kelly Purdue took me under his wing when I had no idea what I was doing. I wouldn't be an entrepreneur if it wasn't for Kelly. I'll just stick with two for right now. But man, I'm so grateful for all the people who've helped me along this journey. And I'm grateful to you for telling people stories in a way that we can all learn from. You're just a master interviewer and I really appreciate the collection of lessons that you've put together for everyone else to enjoy because you're doing your life's work as well, Patrick.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Idle and hypergrowth because the business is growing faster than most people. And that has its own thing where folks who would be fine in one position when they're overtitled, they become insecure and realize that they're not effective. And so what they'll naturally do is a defense mechanism is start to set other people up to take blame. It's really hard. It's really hard to be a”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If they can see the field or not, a physical analogy would be like if you had a sports coach that asks kids to sprint and there was like Tommy's running as hard as he can, but he's slow. And the coach was like, Tommy, if you only cared and if you tried harder, you'd be fast. The kid would be like, what the hell? That's just mean. So once you understand, it's not a effort thing. It's not a trying thing. It's a capability thing. Their brain doesn't work like yours works. It's cruel to try to do it because it's immutable. You can't train for it. It's literally, it's like your whole life. You're grooved into this pattern and it changes very slowly. So I think, honestly, that assessment, as well as getting the skills assessment culture kind of takes care of itself over time. If you bring in a jerk and nobody in the company is a jerk, those people get put on an island pretty quick. It's like an immune system response, but it's so hard. And the most common mistake that I've made is to promote and overtitle people, not realizing that doing a great job just means hanging on.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But these are the three that matter. Here's how I see if we execute on this, it hits that is that a line? I'm like, yeah, that's a line, or if it's not, we just revise it a little bit, we go. The other ones, I'd be like, what are you working on? And then you go, what's important? Well, all of it's important. And grade three, I'll be like, actually, these things are grouped under that and this is under that. And what I was actually doing, we had a chief people officer of background and talent. He had spent some time at Bridgewater. He would actually be able to predict what would happen after I had conversations with executives. I'm like, I couldn't make it more simple. He's like, that's not what he heard though because his brain works a different way. He just heard you giving him more work and he doesn't know how to approach it in a more creative way in a way that scales. It was to the point where it was consistent enough. I was like, what am I missing? And so now that we screen for that, it's remarkably predictive. I think the closing thing is it teaches you to be much more empathetic because I believe that most people show up to work trying to do a good job working their best. Once you understand stratum and how their brain works and whether”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But if you went up to the whiteboard, you could organize them and you could make it really simple. That's where you go, hey guys, it's really this. This influences all this other stuff. And so what you'll typically find with like Stratum Fourth thinkers is just a lot of detail. But what you'll continually have to go back to is, hey, listen, I love the math. I love the work. What's the headline synthesis? If you find yourself talking for like, you're like looking at this Excel spreadsheet and they haven't taken the time to just give you the headline number, you're probably talking to a stratum three or a stratum four worker. And it's just how their brain works. Stratum five is where it's simple. And then stratum six and seven is where you start to deal with like how concepts influence other concepts you're thinking over very long time horizons. So to be on our executive team, you have to be at least stratum five because you have to take a very complicated thing and make it clear. And I just noticed that as we were scaling, I would have different conversations with different executives. The higher stratum ones would come to me and they'd be like, I got 99 problems. Like everything's burning.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“She's thinking over millennia. He wants to make humans multiplanetary and all of his actions day to day are guided by this overriding mission to get folks to Mars as a broader bridge to being a multiplanetary resilient species. Who thinks over, and when you think about your CEOs of oil and gas companies and everything else and they're riding these broad macroeconomic trends responsible for geopolitical dynamics across different cultures, they have to be good at so many different things. And so what's remarkable is stratum four is the shift from linear thinking to conceptual thinking. But the thing about stratum four is they'll be able to start to feel concepts, but they wouldn't be able to go to a whiteboard and explain to you how the influence each other. So for us, like stratum four is where we want our VPs to be who are on the road, but keep in mind, it takes maybe five to ten years to move from one stratum to the next. Stratum five is when you can not only see concepts.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Paint your house pink, or that you have to buckle up when you drive. And what's amazing is that thematically you will get similar answers from the same person at a certain level of thinking. So for example, if you ask somebody about buckling up when you drive or painting your house pink, they might say like, yeah, it's annoying, but it keeps you safe. And I think it makes sense and people should buckle a lot more often you're in a conversation about buckling up when you drive and we should probably be more responsible about that. The systems level thinker will have a totally different answer. They'll be like, that's because it's the same question. So they reject the frame first. They go, what we're really talking about or what are the limits of individual freedoms when it comes to some broader impact on the surrounding community or public. And so maybe let's just talk about that. You could talk about cigarettes in public too, right? So let's talk about that. And now you're into a completely different conversation. So what's truth thematically is true systems level thinkers, they think over different time horizons. So think about Elon Musk.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Equivalent of speed. And so people talk a lot about systems level thinkers. Well, what do they mean? So the first thing you want to do is you want to separate linear from conceptual thinkers. And so this theory of stratum, we have these two trained psychologists that administer interview tests. You could ask a Rorschach block question like, what do you think about a bachelor's degree? Should we legalize cannabis? Do you think that it's okay to...”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Our brains hear the same words, but interprets it into different meanings. So maybe the easiest example would be like if you asked Thomas Jefferson or your average high school student about what's the purpose of education, you would get two very different answers. Jefferson's going to be talking to you about how an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. The high school is probably talking to you about whether they should go to vocational school or whether they should get a bachelor's degree or join the military. It's very tactical. And so at root, what you're screening for is you're screening for linear versus conceptual thinkers. And what's amazing is that so for our overall selection, we have the triangle, which is skills capability. It's sort of your habits and expressed values in terms of behavior. Maybe your childhood. We can fix a lot of things. I can't fix your childhood, so we want to screen for that. Then for executives, you have, it's really like the cognitive.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so his other rule was if you have a choice of unit to go to the one with the worst reputation so that when you He had fought his way up through Anzio into the Alps, and it was wintertime, and everyone in the Alps on the front lines, they all had frostbite or frostnip of some form. And he got pulled on a detail to go all the way back to headquarters for something that they needed to do. And so he's in the back of this truck. And as they got further and further back, he started to see jackets and gloves and furlined parkas until they're back at headquarters. Everyone's got the latest, greatest cold weather gear, and there's heaters and stuff. And meanwhile, he and his brothers who are in the Alps on the front lines have none of that. So I think there's more general lesson there to be extrapolated, which is leaders eat last, always serve those who you're responsible for who are at the tip of the spear before you take care of yourself. And that's more, again, back to caring and selflessness. But those are the three rules that he gave to my dad after his experiences 66 months in combat.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Really intentional about that to make sure that as you scale, you don't end up sideways. And you need only look at Paul Graham and the whole Google Gemini thing was going on where you want an image of George Washington and God forbid show an actual historically accurate picture of George Washington. That's a great example of if you emphasize things other than truth and merit and excellence, you end up with pretty bizarre outcomes. I've been pretty ruthless about enforcing culture because I know what it is to be in an intimate, close team where everyone's treated fairly as an individual don't care about anything else other than performance. And I want that for everyone who works here. It's a wonderful environment. It's what I loved about the military and what I'm really passionate about enforcing here at IDME as well.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Defined our cultural values, first rule is don't be a jerk. And what we mean by that specifically is if you were not emotionally self-regulated, if you can't control your fight or flight response, you're not welcome here. Because ultimately, that's when we do things that are really mean and cruel is when we go into fight or flight. And actually, there's a lot of research too that shows a really good CEOs and rangers for that matter are able to move out of fight or flight very quickly, this briefing after Ranger School from a Delta Force recruiter who showed us the cortisol profile of a ranger graduate versus general public. And he's like, here's the profile of somebody who's exposed like a life and death traumatic event. And it's three or four days before it goes back to normal. Here's the profile of Ranger School graduates. And it was like a 30 to 45 minute rebound effect that after near life of death, you and I could be talking like this. And it's fine. So anyways, so there's that. There's always compete, which is grit. We don't hire pessimists here. Love critical thinkers, but we want optimists who can believe in a contrarian point of view if they have first principles conviction. I think you want to be”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's not good or okay to be racist in any direction. And just like you would want your kids elementary school teacher to treat everybody, not giving preference, but teaching kids about character and you're responsible for what you do. And that's all that matters. Crazy to me, that's even a question, but it's therefore even more important that you screen that out at the beginning. Once you move past ideology, you're looking for, I basically design our cultural values around all the patterns that I'd seen across my time in the military about what makes for effective teams. So you can imagine selection is a triangle where one point of the triangle is skills, one point of the triangle is capability, just raw sort of intellectual potential. The other one is your behaviors and habits. And you can hear this echo too Aristotle, we are what we do, excellence therefore is not an act, but a habit. FBI profilers, the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Loved about the military, what I loved about growing up, what I loved about fairness and what my dad told me, three rules that his grandfather had given to him. And one of them was never think that you're better than the men that you lead. And that we come from different backgrounds. We come from different places, from different experiences, but we're all army green. And your job is to treat everyone fairly according to the same standard. And that's what I loved about service. If you listen to my guys talk to each other, part of you would be like, oh my God. But the other part would be like, these guys would all take a bullet for each other, their brothers. And so true intimacy is being able to be open, not malicious, to love each other, joke and have a good time and not have folks throwing yellow cards because you said something just ridiculous. So if you want to move fast, you don't want ideological tension. I'm really deliberate about that. We published some value statements about our commitment to really classic liberalism. Everyone is equal before the law.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you don't screen for it, you're in for a tough ride. So I think e pluribus unum, out of many one, this is the whole premise of America that what our country is struggling with right now, that everyone is welcome as long as you are committed to the fundamental American values of freedom, that you can criticize any religion, you can burn any book, and you will not be met with violence. People might have problems with that, just like I'll have a problem if you burn the American flag, but the fact that you can do that and not be harmed shows that you live in a free country. So when you let people in who fundamentally reject the premise of your country, your culture begins to suffer. Our country is suffering for that right now because we haven't been intentional about it. The same thing is true with the company. So right now the whole country is struggling with this battle really between enlightenment values and postmodernism. And if you let that conflict into your company, it's like a wagon that has two hands pulling on the wheels. Is it merit or is it something else? What are we really focused and driving? For me, what I...”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think maybe I'll start with philosophy and then I'll go into how I did it Friday typically to separate the two. I think philosophically I just don't believe in charging customers for anything unless I've created value that demonstrably makes them better off. So I never wanted my incentives at odds with my customer. And I view if someone buys our software, I want that person to get promoted. And if somebody uses our software, I want their life to be better for IDME having been a part of it. So that's where I'm coming from, which just goes back to service and purpose, which are core drives for me and for a lot of folks who are built that way. Now, I saw two things. When I saw that basically Visa and PayPal were the V1.0 of this market.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Want to get access to it, there's the IDM button waiting so that you don't have to create a login and fill out forms and waste hours of your life or maybe even have to go in person if they use a vendor that doesn't cover you because you live overseas. If in five years we can be everywhere that you want to be to borrow a line from Visa for online use cases and we're helping connect people to relevant financial programs and benefits that matter faster than what an amazing impact and legacy to leave on the world.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Of the story when I was first starting, there were about 750 million dollars of combat pay that had been approved by Congress to soldiers who were stop lost involuntarily extended. Congress approved it like two more years. And at the end of it, about a quarter of a billion dollars went unclaimed because government just couldn't get the word out. All these service members had to do is fill out a form and they would get $5,000. It was crazy. And a quarter of a billion dollars of combat paywind expires. So the same thing is likely happening right now in LA. There's all these programs and things that can help. But if you're displaced, you're trying to get your dog or your cat and just figure out a hotel room. You don't have time to research FEMA or nonprofits and figure out what's going on. And so we have this amazing ability that if we're doing it right, that whether it's disaster relief, taxes, retirement, graduating from college, buying a house for the first time, we can help provide a curated view of here's all of the government and nonprofit and private sector offerings that are relevant to you.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, in five years, I wouldn't want there to be logins that you would have to create at every single website you would go to. The same way that when you open up your laptop and you're just able to open up Word and you're able to open up Adobe and all these other systems, I think you should be able to open up Coinbase or Chase or Social Security or IRS's apps. And then the flip side of that is as we are able to label and tag more content, we're able to help people navigate really difficult life events like disaster relief in LA right now. What's really interesting is every use case around this is what is needed to access it. Like you've got to be a doctor for prescription app or you have to be in a disaster zone for FEMA aid and everything else. There's going to be some access policies that we need to know about in order to make sure that you're you and that we've established trust to the right level. But also how do we help you find out about those programs when you don't know about them? And this is actually the other part.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's both. It doesn't have to be this monolithic trade off if you actually know what you're solving for, then if the attack surface is global and the risk is financial, you have to have a centralized entity like a major bank or a credit card network that can see things to provide feedback loops and protection to both customers and users. You start to deal with things where the risk is different, then all bets are off. But that's how I think about the approach, which is it's good it's also limited in terms of what it'll allow you to do when it comes to online transactions.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“401k balance goes to zero, and now this attacker out of probably Lagos and Nigeria isn't taunting her that he's ruined her life. And she goes, I need help. The reason banks can see that is banks can help. The reason that IDM can see that is IDM can help. We can provide recourse to the victim. We can also go back to the government agency and go, here's the audit trail of what we saw. This woman was not involved with any of this stuff. Or to the 401k provider in this case and say this is what happened. And now there's feedback loops. There's learning about what happened. For some reason, people are losing their minds when it comes to digital identity that there are just different forms of risk and what's good changes based on that risk. If you say it's decentralized, you can't see it. What you've actually said is there is no recourse for victims. There is no audit trail for the government. And if these really terrible things happen, you're on your own, which I think is unacceptable. So we actually think.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Morality, maybe adult websites or kids in social media. All good. Science side's great. But when you look at financial risk, the way the market operates is quite different. Your bank can actually see everywhere that you transact. And for some reason as a society, we've decided that's okay. Well, why? Because credit card fraud is a real issue. And we've actually decided that if it looks like your visa card is a potential to be everywhere that you want to be, but if it actually starts to fly around, your bank can see that and go, hey, time out. Let me go talk to Patrick. Make sure this is legitimate. And there's consumer protection. So if you go, oh my God, and it was compromised, that's not me. In a client-side model, when you start to deal with financial risks, where the phone manufacturer can't see it, imagine this. Imagine there's a 65-year-old woman, she's somebody's grandmother, she's about to retire, she's been scammed by one of these LLM enabled AI scams that is really sophisticated.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think it just depends for what. So, if you want to turn your mobile phone into a wallet, great. And so you'll see a lot of what Google and Apple are doing with transit cards and Obviously, can't show up in mass in the Dallas airport and deep fakes. There is no concept of deep fakes in person. You can clearly see if somebody's got a mask or something on or some sort of disguise. So if you just wanted to replicate exactly what a physical wallet does in its analog form, cool. And that's where a lot of the innovation's been going. The problem is really risk. When you start to put things online where now the attack surface is global. So this notion of a physical wallet was designed for inherently local use. It just moves where you move. But now when you go online, you can literally go anywhere. Like an attacker in China can come attack American systems. You need a lot more capability. And so the limitation of the hardware manufacturer's approach, they have basically said, we're not going to be able to see anywhere the ID is used and there's no tracking and they'll put it underneath privacy. And I would say for physical interactions that are localized and for use cases where the risk is”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And all the board meetings you can imagine, they were like, Blake, should you do banking, or maybe you should go into this other thing. And it's all given a lot of things, but not on this. Your identity needs to come from the government.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then the birth certificate is sent off, and the Social Security Administration issues you a Social Security number. So when you literally just back up to cradle to grave, what happens cradle, you would go, your financial life cycle doesn't really begin until you're, I don't know, 17 to 19 years old. So as an entrepreneur, I said, all right, credit bureaus are for credit underwriting, which is an overlay. The real identity should come from the government and from healthcare. And that's the right place to start. Now it's going to take time because you're like building this new way of doing things while the existing world continues to putter along just like VS and MasterCard didn't get rid of cash payments overnight. They just gradually shifted the mix. But I really stuck to my guns on that. My running joke with the Treasury was I've stopped measuring the sales cycle in terms of weeks and months, but instead by the number of children.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love that question because that is a job of a leader. The job of a leader is to basically from first principles look at a team and be like, hey, you're fine, but the scope creep, you're doing way too many things. You need to focus you do best. And so that's how I think about credit bureaus play a really important role in the economy in terms of figuring out your credit worthiness and whether or not what's the probability you're going to pay a loan back based on your reputation. But should they be the gatekeepers of identity? Heck no. That doesn't make any sense. That's why you can literally look at who has a fine time with credit bureaus, higher income people, who has a tough time. Why? Because they're underbanked or unbanked. And so why would you want to make those vendors the gatekeepers for identity? And so when I'm like, how would you really design it if you were to do it from just pretend that nothing exists? And you'd say identity naturally comes from healthcare and from government. Your identity life cycle begins in a hospital where you're born. You get a birth certificate.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Boots. And that's exactly what happened to us on the way up. Phil Knight talks about that in his book, Shoe Dog, where once the incumbents don't have a product or a business model response, they start to come after you to tarnish the new technologies unsafe.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had both sides. I mean, I had Russian callers calling me up during the pandemic and telling me where I lived, where my kids went to school. We had private security on the house when Christmas, where I had former Marines that were around it. So I've gotten a lot of death threats as we've cut off fraud. And for me, whatever, I don't care. It's my family that I care about the most. I think on the corporate side, we're disrupting these data brokers. And we went through an episode in 2022 just a couple years ago where these data brokers basically created a lot of misinformation and FUD. And I just had no idea how the media worked and how this whole dark arts work thing where lobbyists pull the wool over staff size and get them to write a letter and get principles to sign it. The media covers the letter. They don't even care what's true. They won't even come to you to be like, is this accurate? They just cover the letter. And then it's the Mark Twain quote that like a lie gets twice around the world before the truth has time to lace up its.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And they're starting to populate profiles of their tastes and their preferences. And if an app developer is willing or is able to have somebody give them consent to access some part of their identity graph, you could actually create a level playing field.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Securely, then there's a host of other things related to it. It could be you've got tickets to the park, you might have a fast lane pass, you might have all these other things. And so when I saw what Disney had done, I said, all you really have to do is just make this accessible to everyone, democratize it through a network. And if we can build the same capabilities to allow for these really fluid in-person and online and call center experiences, then everyone will benefit. even if you don't have the R&D budget of a Disney, even if you're like a little app developer that's like just getting going as dreams of competing with the giants, but doesn't necessarily have the budget to make your login and identity experience on par. So I looked at Disney. I looked at Amazon as another one of amazing data about feedback loops. And the problem is that the newer upstarts don't have that data. But if people begin to take their own data with them,”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So usually, if you're just curious about the world, you can go find examples of folks who've already solved the problem that you're working on, but maybe in a more local way. So what Disney did is really ahead of their time, if you're going into the park, you would authenticate with a biometric, with your fingerprint and the magic band. If you were authenticating to the web app, you'd start with a password because that's what most people were familiar with. And then if you were on a mobile device and using their native mobile app, you would use whatever on your phone with like touch ID or face ID. And so I think in many ways, Disney already figured out what's the most convenient way for you to open up your digital wallet based on channel. If you extend that to the call center, you'd be like, what would be the most convenient way, the safest and easiest way for you to authenticate? And so the natural things you use when you're calling someone is your voice and a device and a phone number. So the more that you can make that be the way that we recognize Patrick. Now that's done.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But that will be done. We've already issued 65 million of these portable identities. On top of that, maybe your Netflix subscription and think about setting up an Apple TV or a Roku box. How long that takes you to authenticate to every single streaming subscriber? We could just turn that into API calls. So once we know that you're you, you could just tell us your subscriptions. If we could just fire off and say, hey, Netflix, Hulu, ABC, NBC, Paramount, whatever, is this person a subscriber? Yep, cool. Bound, authorize out, done, checking in at Vegas just as a tactical example to close us out. It was always like a happy hour. It'd be like an hour long wait. And all your friends are there waiting for you. And it's just so demoralizing when you're behind.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The end of this video chat session, which was this exception pathway that we had, he began to cry. It was just the most touching thing ever. And so now we've had over 10 million Americans go through that process. The security and the inclusion gains that we drove in the public sector as a shared service now anywhere where the IDME buttons add, if it shows up at a bank or a fintech or a patient portal, he would be locked out because most of those organizations use data brokers that are only focused on domestic folks and don't cover a lot of low income folks, he would now be able to seamlessly prove his identity. So making his life safer and easier than what it was before. And when I think about what we get to do as a team, one, we get to protect people, which is like my core drives why I was a soldier. But we also get to give them time back. So VSIN 3D means once your core identity enables more access to financial services and healthcare, that's the next phase.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Standards and incentive, then you can go back to the private sector and make it really easy for people to open up bank accounts and to check in at a healthcare clinic. I'll share one story that's super meaningful to me. When we first started working with VA, you had to go in person when I got out of the military. Then we brought it online. And the more that I looked into it, I realized you had to have a presence in basically credit records in order for you to pass these federal standards, which I found deeply unfair for folks. that effectively like we'd linked access to affluence. And so I went back to NIST and said, hey, you got to rewrite these standards to give an exception flow to people who are homeless, who live overseas, like homeless veterans are super important to me, always have been. I want to serve the most vulnerable. One of the first gentlemen that we got through, he was 81 years old. He lives in a Tokyo. His wife had Alzheimer's, and he hadn't been able to get access to his VA benefits in years because there's no VA facility near him and he can't travel.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That you're like, okay, the root of trust is actually my driver's license or my passport. That's what authenticates and gives trust to every other ID card in my wallet that has my name on it because they can compare my face to me. They can see that the credential looks legitimate and doesn't look to be counterfeit. And once they trust that I'm Blake, well, now if I show a health insurance car that has my name on it, and this is why hotels collect your legal ID and your payment every time you go in because the stakes are quite high. So from a first principal's point of view, I'm like, If the root of trust is our interaction with the government, if everyone in banking and healthcare said, we don't want to be in the credential issuance business, that's what the government does. So you just bring over a government ID, whether it's an ID car, like a driver's license or a passport, and then we'll help you open up a bank account. I was like, well, that's how the market should work, that whoever builds a consumer-centric digital wallet that is able to be accepted by the federal government. And when you deal with the government, you're at the apex of risk.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 payment. 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I love how market developed. I'm such a nerd friend, economics in 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. I did it. Everyone needs the Model T. And what's remarkable is that 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 four ZAS for the next two decades. Like 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 and all this other stuff.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 into prescribed narcotics, is that really a doctor? 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“When I think about what I want my kids to say to me when they grow up, Daddy, did you really have to manage different passwords and logins at every website to? Yeah, in the same way that somebody who grew up before Visa or MasterCard to be like, wait, you had to pay cash everywhere? That sounds terrible. So in Europe, this has already happened. There's bank ID in Sweden, in the Nordics. Danelle, our co-founder is Estonian. And in the Nordics and Estonia, they don't have a different login for different websites. They have bank ID. 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My uniform without people buying me lunch is incredible. Often I would 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 for both of you, because she'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, 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 dole and 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To 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 to St. Louis. And this is what we call the trust graph, which is maybe this isn't just for like everybody. It's only for tax professionals or lawyers or for doctors or for HR staff and social security uploading W-2s and W3s. 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.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The login credential, it's going to take time. Whereas, if it's more of a SaaS approach where it's already just baked in as capability, if you use a shared service for login, that one capability as we deliver it through our R&D is instantly available to thousands of different organizations, that's a much more efficient way where they just have to say, yeah, please turn that on, or we turn it on and cool, thanks. So that's login security identity can take many different forms because you've got your legal identity, which is where we've focused on proving that you're you, but then you also have different personas, one out of five doctors in the country uses us to prescribe narcotics and other controlled substances. And that is not sufficient for you to be Patrick or me to be Blake. 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 able, what's the source of truth for whether or not you're a medical provider?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These guys aren't playing the long game. And so what's really interesting is most folks have a phone number with tenure. Now, it's not for everybody. You'll get to 85 to 90 percent will have a long relationship. And then you'll have expats coming back to the country, low income communities tend to switch their phone numbers more often because they're using prepaid devices instead of subscription and maybe avoiding collections calls. So it's not perfect, but just on that one signal alone, you can go, wow, if you did have a phone number for 20 years and showed possession, we're pretty confident right away that's Patrick. So the basic premise is there's a big theme in security right now about moving away from passwords. And this is also why you want to shared service to do it. How long is it going to take each company to figure out how to do pass keys, which is just a fancy name for touch ID or face ID on your device? Why can't we use things that are really convenient on our phones and our computers to be able to securely prove that we're the owner?”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And porting your phone number that often. You probably change your phone every two to three years. You've likely had the same phone number for over 10 years now. And so that tenure when it comes to identity really matters. If we can look at records and see, oh, Patrick's phone number has been tied to Patrick since he was at Notre Dame. And then you prove possession of that phone number and we can see that the phone number hasn't been ported because we can check with that's really good. That'd be, if some bad guy was like setting us up and like from. With like the bad guy. I started seeding this phone number in college, and now I'm like 55, and I'm going to ask it in.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Time is one of the most important aspects of identity, and not just for technology, just for relationships in general. Think about the first time that you met your best friend or your wife or whatever, what you knew about them then and what you know about them now. So time and the frequency of how often you interact with someone and like the quality of those interactions really informs your perception of their identity as it relates to you. And you have a lot more touch points for time you might know I'll trust this person with anything. You might know if I ask this person to do something, I'm going to prepare myself to be let down. And so what I learned in Iraq was a lot about how telecom networks work. And the thing about bad guys versus normal people is that bad guys do things that you can see in math related to time that make them stand out. So you're probably not doing sim swaps and changing your phone to different devices.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“These unemployment agencies, we were able to see 50,000 identities that have been used for unemployment went over to apply for business owner aid, for owners of transportation companies to like login or are you just contextually you can't be unemployed and own a transportation business at the same time But the thing is that signal as far as what's going on with the same identity at different levels of government that hadn't existed before and so you appreciate this is why we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year is that we're getting picked off like one by one where the attackers are just going to the most vulnerable agency and unless you have authentication as a shared service to normalize and standardize trust it's blockbuster versus netflix it's data centers versus gcp or aws you need to have standardization and consistent”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And so the net of all this to your original question, which is like why is identity so critical? What I learned in Iraq, what General McCrystal taught us is that it takes a network to fight a network. If you have an inherently decentralized enemy that is learning and asymmetric and amorphous against a centralized foe, the decentralized insurgency is just going to crush you. And so the only way to respond is to do a General McCrystal did is empower the edge, give local autonomy, redesign the organization to flood everyone with real-time intelligence. So now your network of good guys can respond in real time. And that's tough to do as a general. That's why he's so remarkable. He said, we need to get the captains and lieutenants and sergeants the tools and push the decision making to them because we're really fighting a network and this is a network. And so as a shared service, we are the network of good guys effectively that are able to see patterns that other folks can't. So for example, we're over at the treasury and then we're over at.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Florida with the bot attacks in January. It moved to New York and like March. And that's ultimately why 27 state unemployment agencies adopted us in 15 to 18 months. Now, the crazy thing was I actually hadn't built it for fraud. Initially, it was more for customer experience to put people in control to help homeless veterans, international veterans get access to VA. Because when I left the military, you had to go into the VA in person to prove your identity. But now that the pandemics ended, this next evolution is deepfakes, where in 2022, right before AI has three phases, like the LLMs and text, then the media with face and voice, and you've got like Sam Altman and Scarlett, Johansson going back and forth about stuff. The Nigerian print scams are like at a whole different level. In 2022, we had about 180,000 logins across our wallet that we saw were targeted by scammers for account takeover. The same 90-day window in 2023, it went up to 1.3 million.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“92,000. Two thirds didn't even try. We were able to successfully authenticate, think about 86, 87,000 of the 92, which is our job and then other service channels handle the rest. We were immediately hit with four denial of service attacks out of West Africa. There's something called a DNS query, which is yellow pages look up. It maps out your infrastructure. So we had 2.2 billion queries from IP addresses around the world. And then we saw hundreds of millions of Yandex IPs, which is Russia's internet service provider. I've never seen anything like it before in my life. What's really devastating is that every name data burst social that these criminal groups were using, that's a real person. If they need help, if the bad guy beat you to your own identity, you're done. The government agencies weren't able to tell who was friend and who was foe. So California shut down for two weeks at the same time. We enabled them to reopen. And so on and on, then the fraud, it moved.”
2025-01-28 · Invest Like the Best · Blake Hall - Combat, Service, and Innovation - [Invest Like the Best, EP.408] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source