The Future of Identity

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

In this episode, we talk with Jon Gelsey, founding CEO of Auth0 Inc, which sold to Okta for $6.5B, as well as the CEO of Xnor.ai which he sold to Apple for $200m. Jon told the story of the early days of Auth0, including how they got their first $1m of revenue. Then we spent time diving in to how new technologies get adopted—Jon even went as far as saying that technology adoption is always incremen...

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

In this episode, we chat with Carlos Korten, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Bindle Systems. Bindle built one of the largest private-sector deployments of decentralized identity in the USA, and Carlos shares tons of stories from the trenches of getting hundreds of thousands of consumers on board. We dive in to the go-to-market strategies Bindle employed, including how they sold directly...

In this episode, we sit down with Nate Soffio, Co-founder and & CEO of Portabl. Nate is applying decentralized identity to fintech and open banking, which is such an important but also challenging use case. We discuss the ins and outs of Portabl’s user experience and how it differs from other reusable KYC products. Nate also provides insight into lessons learned, deliberate product decisions P...

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

In this episode, we sit down with Sarah Clark, SVP of Digital Identity at Mastercard, to discuss Mastercard’s ID network. As one of the world’s largest payments networks, Mastercard has been on the leading edge of reusable identity. Sarah takes us into Mastercard’s corporate strategy related to identity, plus some of the specific go-to-market strategies the company has employed in Australia and Br...

In this episode, we sit down with Keith Uber, VP of Sales Engineering at Ubisecure, to discuss the role of verifiable credentials in identity and access management. Keith shares his insights on Organizational Identity and how vLEIs change the game, create new business opportunities, and unlock efficiencies for representatives of businesses to transact more seamlessly. Keith also shares his perspec...

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

Today’s guest is Eric Starr, Co-founder & CEO of UltraPass ID—an IDtech product for governments. Eric shares his story trying to solve civic problems through the political system via Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and how he ended up starting a company to reimagine how citizens interact with government. We go through the problem caused by many government silos of personal data, why Eric l...

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

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

Today’s guest is Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Disco.xyz. We start and end this episode with Evin framing identity as the coolest, most interesting thing people should be working on. She paints such a compelling picture in language that’s so accessible, and she shares tips on how the rest of us can level up our messaging to attract more users as well. We break down Disco’s product and the o...

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

Today’s guest is Sebastian Mellen, Co-founder and CEO of Cerebrum. His team is building an IDtech product called vID, tackling data and compliance problems in healthcare, HR systems, and even youth sports teams. In this conversation, we cut right to some meaty topics, including some of the biggest challenges that IDtech products tend to face. Sebastian gives insight into Cerebrum’s trojan horse go...

Today’s guest is Chris Ingrao, a co-founder of Lumedic—a company whose mission it was to transform the patient experience in the US healthcare market. Lumedic launched an IDtech product in production and was on the brink of several incredible adoption breakthroughs, but through internal reorganization, its potential unfortunately was not realized. In this episode, Chris takes us on a journey from...

Today’s guest is Katrie Lowe, Co-founder and CEO of Domi Labs. We start the conversation talking about how Berlin’s hyper-competitive rental market led Katrie to build a digital rental passport to streamline the experience for property managers and tenants to exchange information in a rental process. We go on to talk about Domi’s product experience, including the clever ways their product implemen...

Today’s guest is Jeffrey Schwartz, Founder & CEO of Dentity whose mission is to make the internet a safer place for people everywhere. Jeffrey’s background in the automotive industry (of all places) opened his eyes to the need for better digital identity. He co-founded Dentity to solve the trust problem in peer-to-peer transactions and discusses the surprising breadth of use cases they’re alre...

Welcome to The Future of Identity . Normally, show host Riley Hughes (Co-founder & CEO of Trinsic) talks to the people building IDtech products, but the purpose of this solo episode is to introduce the purpose of the podcast. In this short episode, Riley covers: The future of identity and why it is better How great products will get us there Why now is the right time—IDtech is the new Fintech...