YouSaid · the spoken record

Caryn Seidman-Becker

lines on the record: 106
first: 2025-07-08
most recent: 2025-07-08
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

“People love traveling. You need innovation in airports. You need public private partnerships. And when you have willing partners in the public sector, you can do great things together. And if you go through airports, they don't look materially different than the past 20 years. Such a huge opportunity to be frictionless from home to gate. What if you knew you had a reserve parking spot or where the Uber should drop you off and a concierge could meet you and you went through an automated end-to-end lane and then you had your coffee waiting for you on the other side or you knew you could get into a lounge? Shangri-La and then you knew that you were on the flight and that it was two hours late and Uber sent the car for you as opposed to everyone doing this when they land and what if you used it as a mobile key? Those are all the things we're doing.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We're creating a new industry and identity. But even before you get to identity, we started here in 2010. Pre-check started in 2011. People thought that was going to kill us. Little did they know we could integrate. And now we actually sell pre-check. Our view was great. You want to start other kinds of trusted traveler programs? We're a great enrollment mechanism. This is exactly what we do for the past year. We have been enrolling people in pre-check and it's a great partnership. And I think there's so much more to go there. So then they thought pre-check was going to kill us. There's always something else. It's like, guys.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So it's fine. Let your haters be your motivators. He said to me, What makes you think you can be the CEO of Clear? In my mind, all the good questions. But I leaned over the table and I said because I am a complete fucking animal. So that was that meeting”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It ate eyeballs. That's how we ran the business. And when we turned positive in 2017, so we raised capital in 2010 from myself, the gentleman who started it with me, and some outside investors, mostly here in New York City, and Bill Miller, who was a strategic partner at Ariance Capital. And one of my great mentors and partners. He was on our board for the first years, and as an early investor in Amazon, he was certainly great to get his wisdom and his advice. And then in 2012, we raised some capital from those same outside investors, really individuals, went to Silicon Valley. I came back with zero in 2012 and zero in 2015, which was fine. One of the guys said to me, I won't say the name of the fund. He said, what makes you not going to? But I do keep his picture in my photos. He's no longer there.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Members, bookings, free cash flow, free cash flow is the ultimate measure of a business. As a girl who comes from Wall Street.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sir, would you like to be a clear member? Are you coming over and saying it? Sometimes we put out candy bowls, we did different things. Who doesn't want to mint when they're traveling or hand sanitizer in the 2020 timeframe? It was great ways to get the word out and to educate and to have team members who could make more money and to have people bring technology to life. Innovations about bringing people what they did not know they wanted. And people don't Google biometric security at airports, specifically not at the beginning. having people explain the technology, explain the privacy, that was crucial. We believed it to be a very efficient and powerful business model. We run the business for members bookings and free cash flow. I have said that for 15 years.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So we thought that this could be a good business model if you got to certain penetrations of certain cities. That being said, it took longer and it was harder. I did not take a salary for the first five years and got paid in stock. And to me, that was a privilege. We turned cash flow positive six and a half years in, and we had burnt through $53 million of cash to get there. We were very cheap, very efficient. Airports are a really interesting place. Think of it like concentrated shopping malls. I didn't think, oh, I wanted to start a business in an airport. I thought I wanted to build a secure identity platform, but airports are the great place to start a business because you have millions of people coming through these buildings every day that see your brand a tipping point for us was when we allowed our ambassadors to do the selling for us. Social media is a really noisy place to try to get someone's attention and certainly getting noisier, having an ambassador who gets a commission so that they can make more money and their awesome people say, sir, would you like to learn about theirs?”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You own your own Libre, which the other company didn't, it had outsourced the labor and the technology, which really impeded the margins. But again, going back to the power of a subscription-based business and cost per gross ad and LTB to CAC, those things were in my blood and I understood them deeply, understanding what we thought it would take to break even from a subscriber basis, looking at every MSA, understanding Denver and Orlando and San Francisco and New York, what was the volume of the airports, what percentage of that volume did you need or what percentage volume of that population seemed realistic. We owned wireless companies. Nextel actually was one of them. What percentage of the city is on Nextel and what do you need to break even? I like coming at things bottoms up and top down and sideways. We said that the TAM was 35 to 40 million people that traveled five or more times a year. What percentage of those people did you think you would have? Then looking at the cities, all sorts of different ways.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Had built a model when we started. We come from finance, we'd built models garbage in, garbage out. But we did think that this could be a good business if you own your own technology.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, and so I buy into that. My middle daughter always tells me it's just not that deep. Can you go back and change that? I think if you raise your price and you have to lower your price, I don't think that's good. I think sometimes doing things that would make your workforce feel not stable. So you want to be thoughtful. But one of our other core values is embrace change. I think the only thing constant.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've seen a lot of these scenarios in my head before. What if we did that and what if we did that, and how would that, and then you have the data and you're like, well, that would make that go by 500 basis points. That would have a negative implication over time. That could drive my margin to this. I like to move. Bezos talks about the door and if it's a really big decision.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If you believe life is short, and I definitely believe that, I don't want to waste time. I love data. I love information working in the stock market makes you more decisive. You're never going to have perfect information. You got to put together the mosaic. You have to understand your thesis. You have to see how that is weighing relative to your thesis. And you need to move out. Maybe you don't need to take an 8% position. Maybe you want to start with a 2% position. Wall Street gives you incredible discipline. You better have done your work before you need to do your work. So when I head into a meeting, I'm like, we should know them better than they know themselves. We should really understand and have war roomed this 10 ways from Sunday because it's all about the preparation. Kevin Durant, the basketball, all the practice that he does before the game, I do feel that I think a lot, probably too much. And so that actually my bias for action, I'm playing chess in my head all day long. Well, what if? Well, what if? Well, what if? Things are always coming out of left field.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I have a very busy mind, so at some level, I'm always thinking, being a girl, the power of blowing your hair gives you 20 minutes to think. I am always thinking my friends will laugh. I can be a little spacey sometimes if I'm driving. I'm like, oh, I didn't know. How did we get here? My mind was 20 different places. Bias for action can sometimes lead to impulsivity. And I think you need to guard against that. I have consistently surrounded myself with people, including my late husband, who was like, you got to stop. Just push pause on that for one second. Slow your roll. I respond very well to that. But one of my sayings is that every week is 2% of a year. So when someone's like, let's meet on that in three weeks. I'm like, we're going to wait 6% of the year to have that conversation. That's insane”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They were rooting for your success. Plenty of people rooting against your success, but that gets you up every morning to know that you can make a difference in someone's life. Security is job one, and then that someone could have breakfast with their family because they had a more planful and less stressful trip at the airport. I happened to be a neurotic flyer, so I'm worried about turbulence and terrorism. And I didn't like leaving my kids. And so to know you could change that for someone, that's a giant win.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Every day you're just hacking at it. And then I was on the floor of the Orlando airport at 4 30 in the morning when we launched and people would hug us. And then you knew you had something when we were rolling out the old kiosk from storage and people were hugging us that we were bringing it back. That was the greatest feeling because to know that it meant something to people.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You're making it up as you go along, and then every day you're like, fuck, didn't think of that. We have a playbook now that we're in 59 airports and more to go, but you fake it till you make it. I would just keep talking to people. And I had seen great operators and I would ask them questions. Ed Breen is one of my great heroes. We had invested in general instruments, which then got sold to Motorola. And then he became the CEO of Tyco to turn it around after Dennis Kozlowski. So I would ask Ed lots of questions. These leaders were so generous with their knowledge and their experience.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People will write anything in emails because it's totally anonymous going back to identity. We told people we were relaunching at the end of October and that they could come back. We then hired 20 people in Orlando, 10 for each lane. I had read setting the table. It's amazing book, Danny Meyer, one of my great heroes, and he became an investor in Clear. And that was awesome. So we hired Union Square Hospitality, I think it was called Hospitality Quotient, to do the training of our team members in Orlando. Okay, I read the book. I like that. We want to be hospitality and service oriented. I think it's missing in the airports. We got to rebuild the software. We got to find the equipment. We got to hire some people. I don't even remember how we hired them. I went down to Orlando. I participated in the training. I got to know all the people at the Orlando airport.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This one guy said, My grandma had big balls, and you have bigger balls than my grandma. And I was like, first of all, interesting. Okay. So I called him. You're an owner operator. And I was like, hey, it's Karen from Clear. I got your email. And he kind of shrunk. And I was like,”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“From a marketing perspective, I wrote the emails, I signed my name to them, I was in customer service, and we said clear is coming back. It was 290,000 people. We knew who they were. One of the beauties of being an identity company. Know your customer. We told them we were going to do right by them and make them whole. We got some nasty emails back.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Bankruptcy is really interesting. You get the hard drives of the company. So you were looking at their old documents and learning. But first, it was finding the hardware that was left, we were going to reuse it. Number two was actually rebuilding the software from the ground up because we didn't buy software. They didn't own their own technology and we wanted to rebuild the software from the ground up. Number three was we closed in April and the Orlando Airport wanted Clear to come back and you need one person to go first and they wanted to. So we had to win that. So we wrote the RFP for the Orlando Airport. Other people did too. And then they protested our win. So you had to go down to the Orlando Airport and share with the board and the community why Clear would be good and serve them well”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I wish I documented more of it. Number one, you had to find where the inventory was. Let's go to the real basics. It was, where's the equipment? And we would go to the San Francisco Airport. We were like, hey, where did you put the clear equipment? And they would take us to a storage facility and it was all the way back there one airport threw them away. I was like, you threw away the hardware because in it we bought $10 million of PP&E. We bought $10 million of hardware. So I was like, for $6 million, we bought a brand that we were too cheap to change. People were like, why don't you change it? It's really sullied. I was like, I don't know. I think it's pretty good and we don't have a lot of money. So people know what it is and we're sticking with it. Ultimately, we changed the logo. And I love the name. We bought 190,000 members, biographic and biometric data. They had to opt back in. They had to come back to clear and we would give them whatever months they had left. I think in aggregate about 75% of them did come back. And then we bought $10 million of hardware. I also say we bought a hard drive of what to do and what not to do.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Driving innovation to make travel safer and easier, and also learned a lot from our experiences in 23 and early 24 to make sure that we move forward and not backwards.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And not being able to say much about it because they were pretty retaliatory was also pretty painful. I think we're on the other side of that. And there's so much you can do to drive throughput. The airport experience should be and can be amazing. People love travel in the US, quite frankly, around the world. And I actually give huge credit to Airbnb. They transformed the travel industry by creating infinite capacity. And I don't think people have fully wrapped their heads around that. It used to be like, oh, I want to stay at the Marriott and wherever, and it's full. So I guess I'll have to wait. There's always a room somewhere for you if you want to go. You see what's happening with air traffic control. Our systems are rigid and a little bit analog. They have to be invested in. We have to partner. Travel is such an important part of the economy. And I think it's also an incredible part of families and experiences and growth and learning and curiosity. I know for my family, it's been our best memories and our time together. Feel really fortunate. We're hell-bent.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Pouring Christmas, my kids were like, What are you doing? I was taking pictures of E-Gates and Banks of E-Gates. You go to Dubai, it's the same thing. You absolutely should have end-to-end automation, and there's so much you can do to transform the travel experience. So on a very personal and professional level, watching our customer experience degrade when I knew we could do so much about it was horrifying.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“All sorts of backups, and I think that is about building trusting relationships with the public and private sector and being able to communicate. There's a lot of great people at TSA and at DHS who do believe in innovation and public-private partnerships. But as I like to say, debanking didn't just happen in crypto. And it was a very eye-opening experience to be on the other end of that to not have transparent partners who wanted to work through things together, but instead just wanted the government to do everything. That was very eye-opening. And also, I think made us better, made us more innovative, and I think has positioned us to work really well with an administration who sees infrastructure as a major need here in the US and in order to be competitive. You shouldn't have better travel experiences in Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo, and London than you have here in the US. We have the greatest companies.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What I can say is that they put in some physical escorting policy so that a clear employee who verified you had a stand with you, which created all sorts of challenges. All of your team members are standing in line. Also, they wanted to recheck at an extremely high level, identity documents. And that created.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think there's a really important point, which is working with the government can be hard. The last four years with the Biden administration was really hard. In fact, they put some policies in place that really challenged our throughput and the customer experience and were on the other side of that. When you can innovate to drive throughput, when you can leverage technology at the speed that the private sector is capable of, you can solve bottlenecks with willing partners. We did not have that in the Biden administration. We certainly feel like we have that in the Trump administration. They definitively care about making airports great. They definitively care about throughput and the customer experience and security and believe in innovation in the private sector and partnering together to do that. And I've been very public about it, that our customer experience degraded in 23 and part of 24, which caused throughput issues. It wasn't because of volume. It was because of policy decisions.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us, it's clear that face is one of the really important biometric winners. We are face first with our envies, which makes it five times faster to verify. Many people don't have good fingerprints. Little known fact, if you're a teacher, if you're working with chalk, certain ethnicities don't have great fingerprints. Eyes can be a little bit of a chicken dance even today. Face first is, we call it NBN enrollment and verification.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Specifically, so the Envy is our new face first technology that we don't align. So it is now in all of our airports going back to chapters. Our first six years were smart cards until we went to the cloud. And then we went to the cloud in 2016 at the same time we partnered with Delta. And that was a really transformational moment for Clear, both in terms of scale and technology, because you didn't need a smart card. You could enroll and use it immediately. But that was fingerprints and eyes”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Creative and partner oriented to drive secure throughput with a better customer experience at airports. And at any time, you get a little stuck and then you need to move and try new things.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“million people a day. And again, most of them are coming through the major buildings. You couldn't put them through today. And so the question is, what other doors can you put them through? Can you do off-site screening and bring them through on buses? We're trying to launch end-to-end automated lanes so you can have greater throughput. Can you privatize the physical screening opportunities so that you can have greater throughput? Because oftentimes it's a staffing issue. The equipment is there. But there's not enough people to staff it. And airports are also super interesting because you have these peaks. If you watch an airport, which I never thought I would be doing, but I do, the volume goes from this to this, to this. You have to staff for peaks, which is really hard in a staffing business. And so you do need automation. You do need e-gates. You do need off-site screening. You do need people to come to the back as opposed to through the front. There's all sorts of opportunities if you're innovative and”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“that could help the throughput and enhance the security, not to mention bringing badged and And we viewed ourselves as Switzerland with the federal government to help security, with the airlines to help get their passengers through happily and safely, with the airports and the municipalities to help enhance the experience, to help drive revenues because we pay them a percentage of our revenues to create jobs in cities that are great jobs. So we viewed it as like a win-win-win. And that as the volume grew, both we would have technology. We just launched our NV technology that's five times faster. But over time, you could create new opportunities, if you will. So for instance, we invested in a company called Landline, which is replacing regional jets with buses and able to go to the back of the airport as opposed to the front door. Because you're right. You can't put millions of people through the front door. And today there's 3 million people every day going through airports. Our numbers are by 2030. You're going to have 4 million.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I didn't know much about airports when we started clear in 2010. You're right. There are these really interesting structures. There's 400 and changed in the US. But at the end of the day, in the world of 80-20, 80% of the traffic goes through the top 60, 80 airports in the US. There are these houses. And within them are municipal employees, airline employees, federal employees with TSA, or if there's custom CBP local police and fire departments play a role here, you don't necessarily have all the constituents going in the same direction because everybody has their own stakeholders and their own priorities. Airports are a really interesting place to do business and they are capacity constrained both on runways and physical real estate. We always viewed Clear as a force multiplier, bringing technology in”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He slaunched in 2005 the economic downturn hit in 2008, which significantly hit business travel. And also he had debt coming due in 2009 in the middle of a lot of other people being bankrupt and having debt like GM and Chrysler. Ultimately, the company shut down. They were sort of before their time from a cost on the tech side, not to mention the economic downturn, not to mention, I think it was probably hard to convince some airports that they wanted biometrics. And so it shut down. went into bankruptcy at the end of that year.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Written a book 912, which was the day after 911 He received one of those licenses and started clear. And there were a few other companies who started as well. And ultimately, he was the most successful. He got into 16 airports. I think he raised about $100 million of capital and then had some debt on top of that and was building this concept of a trusted traveler program, a registered traveler program with biometrics on a smart card. So it was this one-to-one match. It had 190,000 customers, then two things, maybe three things happened. One being the 2008 downturn came. So it started in 2003, but didn't launch in Orlando till 2005, the highest percentage of first-time travelers in America go through the Orlando Airport, strollers, balloons, the whole thing. It creates a little bit of a customer experience and security challenge. So that was the first place. People are like, why'd you start in Orlando? I'm like, because they wanted us.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Clear started as a response to 9 11 when Congress at the time stood up TSA. It was a Republican led Congress. They wanted public-private partnerships. If you look at the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, which I think is one of the largest and fastest startups, I might have these numbers slightly wrong, but it's 250,000 total employees of the Department of Homeland Security, which has all these sub areas, whether it be CBP, ICE, FEMA, TSA. Those are a lot of subsidiaries, if you will, under one corporate umbrella. Congress wanted to make sure that there were public-private partnerships to drive innovation to expedite the traveler experience. They put this program together called the Registered Traveler Program. TSA gave out a few licenses for the registered traveler program for people to try and see what they could come up with in the world of public-private partnership and innovation. Steve Brill had”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I am one of my favorite sayings that I keep on my cell phone. I saw Shimon Paris speak right before he died. And he said, Optimus and pessimists died the same way, but they live very different lives. And I thought that that was a very powerful statement. If you don't have optimism, if you don't have hope, what do you have?”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Never angry at what had happened to his family. I believed in the art of the possible. He put his family through college. They were all successful, went on to build families. And my dad served in the military. My uncle did to do right by our country. I have gratitude and I have belief in the art of the possible because I've seen it.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My grandfather, who was my idol, Hyman Seidman, came to the US at 17 years old in 1922. There's actually enormous documentation about him coming here. He almost got sent back. Most of his family stayed in Eastern Europe and ultimately died. He had one sibling who went to Israel and one sibling who was here. So to come at 17 years old, bottom of a boat, the USS Constantinople, to not speak the language, to have no money, to work in a hardware store that he ultimately took over Sideman hardware, which was across from the Barclay Center. That's hard. Everything else seems a lot easier when you have that perspective. He used to tell me to pull yourself up by your bootstraps, keep on moving. That's just very empowering when you see what he'd been through and lost a lot of family and was optimistic, loved this country, had enormous gratitude, positivity, joy, fun.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm not sure what's not learnable. I actually just signed up for an AI design class that I haven't fully immersed myself in yet, but I just think life is about curiosity and I'm a lifelong learner and I have no fear of not getting it and no fear of asking questions.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Love learning. I love the question why and trying to get to the bottom of it. I also think when public school in Maryland and the University of Michigan as a political science major, I don't know that people had enormous expectations of me. I did of myself. My parents did of me. My grandparents certainly did who were immigrants. So I had no fear of failure because there wasn't too far down to go. My uncle, who was an investment banker, lived in New York City his whole life and I would come here from Maryland and he would take me places and I just thought he was the smartest, most interesting man. And I love the movie Working Girl and Let the River Run and the coach briefcase and the coffee and the Wall Street Journal. That's what I wanted. So that's what I was going to do. And I think I have blinders on when I'm focused on something. So whether it be pro forma EBITDA or learning the Herfendahl index when you're in risk arbitrage, I believe that everything ex a few really scientific things are learnable. And now with the AI.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm a voracious reader. I think my team knows I send them articles now from somewhere between 3 a.m. to midnight. I am enormously curious. I grew up, there was no internet, but I read in my room every night from Sports Illustrated to books.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shoot, what do I do with it? We had a double-sided five page list of things to do because it was all shut down and the hardware was in different storage areas and there was 190,000 members who were like, where's my data? And I didn't get service and airports who were mad and TSA who was mad. And at some level here, ignorance might be bliss. We've got a great idea. We've got some capital. We felt the business model makes a tremendous amount of sense. We've seen other leaders. We've seen what to do and what not to do. Off we go.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Co founder went into a room in a law office and were bidding against another group of people who were former employees of Clear. And we had money in escrow. You're reading other people's documents trying to understand what you should do. You have a maximum number. And we bid $6 million in cash, which I think was a little lower than the existing bid, but it was 100% cash that night given to them. We won and you're in this room going back and forth with the documents and strategy and talking for like 10 hours, couldn't eat, barely drank. And then you leave and it's almost like bringing home a new baby.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Buying companies, controlling cash flows, really able to create and build. So I was like, I want to buy something that makes the world a better place. My parents were in the government. I'm originally from DC. 9-11, I was 29 at the time really changed me. I felt responsibility and a moral obligation to help make this country a better place and that we were lucky to be here and that we were all responsible for it as citizens. When I found clear, which L1, the company we had invested in had been a subcontractor to for the first go around. I was like, product that could become a platform that could make our country safer, make consumers lives easier. It was biometrics, which I believed in the consumerization subscription-based businesses are incredible. It was the convergence of my entire professional career. So we being myself, my husband, some advisors at the time I come.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Big believer in biometrics on top of everything else. It was used in the early 2000s in Brazil for voting for Asia, for financial services. So the consumerization of biometrics was happening outside the U.S., whereas I had only seen it in the defense area in the U.S. I believed in the consumerization of biometrics. That is the whole journey put into clear shuts down on June 22nd, 2009. We went to cash at Arian's Capital in September 2008, a little late, not too late. And then investors said, great, you're in cash. When are you going to invest again? We had never been in cash or either 120% invested, 200%, 80% long, short. We were nothing. I had three little kids. I had a one-year-old, a three-year-old, and a five-year-old. And I was like, I don't know if I want to do this anymore. I done it 24-7 for 15 years. I loved it. I thought it was the greatest industry. I met the greatest people as a front row seat to business. My late husband was in private equity at Apollo and I was like, that looks awesome.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Do broadband. So I understood the power of subscription based businesses. Also did bankruptcy when I was doing risk arbitrage. So love a turnaround. I like to say happiness is a low bar and there's not a lot lower than bankruptcy. And then you get into the 2000s with after the dot-com bust and the turnarounds that we saw in products that become platforms and incredible companies like Apple and Amazon and Priceline that were built. I had all that experience, which meant I believed. I saw the art of the possible. I'd also seen giant failures like Tycho and Enron and WorldCom. So the thing that everyone thought was going to be great and wasn't. Ultimately had invested in Lorale, which got sold to Lockheed Martin, which turned into L3, which was a management buyout of Lockheed to stood for Lonzo Lapenza and Lehman. We invested in that. Biometrics were there. Lapenta left and started L1. And he was rolling up the biometrics industry. And we helped fund that.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, I will say in Media's Reese, bankruptcy is a completely surreal experience. And I talked to a few CEOs who I had invested with through the years, Bobby Kodak, Martin Franklin at Jardin. They said bankruptcy is decided on the courthouse steps, and it's true. I definitely believe and I tell my kids that life is a journey. I started off in a risk arbitrage in 1994 when I graduated the University of Michigan. I didn't even know what Pro forma or EBITDA was, but I figured it out real fast. That was the M&A period of aerospace and defense under Secretary Les Aspen. I really got to know the aerospace and defense industry, of which biometrics has been in the defense industry for a long time. So that was my first understanding of biometrics. Also in the 90s, we invested in cable wireless and satellite subscription-based businesses. Again, we were buying wireless spectrum in the 90s, direct TV was really starting to grow and EchoStar, cable companies, Microsoft invested in Comcast with a billion dollars in 1997. That was a really big deal. And they started.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“How I look at it. I like analogies, and I would look at American Express as a vertically integrated financial service company. They have the customer, they have the merchants, they have the bank. Certainly, American Express, I think, is some of the best experiences when you lose your.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Access to and be able to share anywhere I want. I go into a building. I'm Karen. I'm an employee and I have access to the 10th floor or I'm Karen and I'm a visitor and I'm going to the 48th floor today from noon to 3. But I'm always Karen, but I'm having to do all these things. My favorite is when they take your picture, they give you a sticker. This is useless. So this concept of a secure identity platform was definitively modeled off what I experienced as an investor.”
2025-07-08 · Invest Like the Best · Caryn Seidman-Becker: Rebuilding CLEAR - [Invest Like the Best, EP.432] · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source