Blake Hall - 战斗、服务与创新 - [Invest Like the Best，第408期]

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Hello, and welcome everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. Invest Like the Best is part of the Colossus family of podcasts, and you can access all our podcasts, including edited transcripts, show notes, and other resources to keep learning at joincolossus.com.

Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

My guest today is Blake Hall. Blake is the co-founder and CEO of ID.me, a secure digital identity network with over 100 million members. He was an officer in the United States Army and served our country for 4 years as a rifle platoon leader, battalion reconnaissance platoon leader, and battalion logistics officer.

We explore his formative years in the military and transition into entrepreneurship. Blake shares powerful stories from his time leading scout sniper missions in Iraq, including how his unit achieved a 90% success rate in high-stakes operations through relentless preparation and learning. He shares the origin and evolution of ID.me, a company dedicated to verifying digital identities to combat fraud and simplify login experiences. We discuss the role of identity in the modern economy, frameworks for building company culture, and evaluating executive talent.

I am ridiculously inspired by Blake, and I'm so grateful for him and all the Americans who serve this country. Please enjoy this discussion with the awesome Blake Hall.

Blake, I was wondering where to begin our conversation based on prior ones that we've had. One place that's really interesting for me, and that I've always been fascinated by, is your experience in the military, and specifically the experiences you've had that have taught you lessons that you think would be pretty impossible to learn had you not had the experiences you had in the armed forces.

Maybe you can tell us a little bit about what you did, give us a sketch, and then I want to spend some time on the formative stories that have shaped your worldview—stories that maybe wouldn't have shaped you had you not had those experiences.

1. Purpose Starts In Childhood

Thanks, Patrick. I think you're always formed by your childhood first, and I grew up around amazing people in my life. My grandfather was a war hero in World War II. He fought and landed at Anzio as a 17-year-old Browning Automatic Rifleman and stood guard on the Rhine when Germany surrendered. He won a Bronze Star with valor for crawling out in front of 3 German machine-gun nests as he was splicing a line that allowed the forward observer to call in artillery that beat back a Nazi counterattack that was about to wipe out his battalion. Today, that would probably be a different medal, but it was a Bronze Star with valor in World War II.

My dad served for 30 years, graduated from West Point, and was a brigade commander. The lens I grew up with was really about purpose and service, a full appreciation of America—that what we enjoy in this country is quite rare in terms of our freedom, and those freedoms are supported by the bravery of young men and women who are willing to sacrifice everything at Omaha Beach, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa.

For me, I didn't actually want to go into the military, but I felt I needed to in order to serve. I learned a lot of lessons along the way that we can talk about. I'm really grateful for that upbringing because I think it gave me a context and appreciation for what we enjoy as far as our way of life that I might not have had if I'd grown up in a different way.

What was the brief timeline of your personal experience in the armed forces? What did you do, and where were you? Paint the picture for us.

2. The Road To Iraq

I went through ROTC at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 2000, it was peacetime. It was just a way to pay for school. Then 9/11 happened, and overnight I realized that when I graduated in 2004, I was going to go to war.

I figured if you're going to go to war, you might as well play with the varsity. I resolved that I wanted to be an Army Ranger. My mom's from Queens, so growing up, my grandfather on my mom's side had driven me around the city and showed me the Twin Towers, the Chrysler Building, and everything as a kid. It was super personal to me, as I'm sure it was to a lot of Americans, and I wanted to defend the country after we had been attacked in that way.

I commissioned and went through Airborne School to become a paratrooper, attended Ranger School, had a rifle platoon for 5 months, and then was selected to be the scout sniper platoon leader, which is the most senior platoon leader position in an infantry battalion. Ultimately, we deployed to Iraq from 2006 to 2007.

I fought in Mosul, every neighborhood in Baghdad, Karbala, the outskirts of Fallujah, and Lake Tharthar, so I got the full tour. Our mission over there, right before we went into combat in Mosul, was that some 3-letter agencies came in and said, “Hey, listen, forget everything that you guys have learned about reconnaissance and precision engagement. You're just going to be running kill-capture missions against senior Al-Qaeda leadership, and we're going to give you some equipment and some intelligence assets to help you do that.”

For the next 15 months, that's all that we did: run down mostly Al-Qaeda vehicle-bomb networks. I was 23 years old at the time, and so it was quite a lot of responsibility.

Can you describe a story within the story of that 15 months that pops most immediately to mind, to zoom in on a specific episode and help us understand what you were doing?

3. Learning Under Fire

I think leadership starts with caring. I remember when I got to Mosul. To this day, I'm terrified of letting my friends down. I had 32 scouts and snipers. I'd met their wives, their parents, and their kids, and if you make a wrong decision in combat, you could lose 1/4 of your platoon—bam, a suicide belt, and they're just gone.

The 1st thing I did was get to Mosul, go up on top of a hill, get down on my knees before God, and say, “There's a verse from Isaiah that says, ‘No weapon formed against me shall prosper.’” I claimed that promise for my men, and God was just amazing to us over the next 15 months.

My 1st firefight was in a neighborhood called Tarih in northeast Mosul. I think it's the same mosque that was there where Baghdadi made himself the caliph of ISIS, the Islamic State. We had a high-value target in the neighborhood, and as I'm getting my guys out of the trucks—we were in these Strykers—they're 20-ton vehicles with 8 wheels, and they can do about 55 miles per hour.

To a layman, I think it's almost like a lightweight tank with a .50-caliber machine gun on top, and it's got the sound signature of an F-150. It's pretty quiet. As I'm getting out, the 3-letter agency attachment says, “Hey, sir.” He's like, “Be careful. This commander is marked as extremely hostile and dangerous.” I was like, “What Al-Qaeda commander is not extremely...” Like anything else, as soon as you get a little cocky, I was in a courtyard talking to some of the folks when AK rounds hit right over my head.

The cinder block was spraying into my face because the rounds were that close to where I was. We were immediately into a firefight. That was my 1st firefight. I'd thought a lot about whether I would be brave when it counted, and whether I would care more about the team and my job than about myself.

There were 3 Al-Qaeda fighters shooting at us. I put my snipers up in overwatch, got the team aligned, and was running through an alley as we were getting shot at. It felt like my heart was literally beating out of my chest. It's really hard to describe just how loud combat is and the adrenaline.

We were maybe 5 or 6 minutes into the firefight before I realized that it wasn't a training exercise. There was just so much muscle memory drilled into you through repetition that I was like, “Oh, wow, this is a 2-way range,” and we were just deploying. We ended up assaulting that house and taking it down. That was the 1st firefight.

A couple of days later, we were just driving down a street. I was with the outgoing platoon leader, Duke Ream. He was orienting me to Mosul, and as we were going, we saw this utility pole. You could see the line going to the asphalt, and it was clear that the asphalt had been altered. It felt like slow motion.

I was trying to toggle my mic to call back to the truck behind us: “Break right, IED.” Before I could toggle it, boom—black smoke.

It was a pipe bomb. It actually breached the hull of the Stryker, this armored vehicle. Shrapnel went into the compartment where the driver was sitting in the front, but, miraculously, between his body armor in the back and this display that kind of wrapped around his head and neck, all the shrapnel hit that instead of him.

That was, like, day two in the firefight, just a few days later, and I remember thinking, “That’s the first week. I’ve got…” We didn’t know we were going to get extended. I was like, “I’ve got 51 more in front of me.” At that moment in my life, it’s amazing to have this conversation because I was so focused on what was right in front of me: keeping my men alive and hopefully myself, too. But that’s maybe an introduction to the first week in Mosul.

I want to come back to something you said there, which reminds me of what you’re building now: the fact that you got extended from 12 months, I think, to 15 months. I’m putting a pin in that because that’s going to become a relevant detail when we talk about the origins of the business in a little bit. I’m curious, in that stretch of time, what did you learn about yourself that you didn’t know before?

4. The Combat Learning Curve

I think the thing that you can’t know is whether you’re going to be brave. Everyone’s scared when you’re in combat. You’re not normal if you’re not scared. But character is about pushing all that down and doing the right thing for the men that you lead when the chips are down.

Honestly, every firefight is different. For me, just in terms of becoming a man and as a rite of passage, it was: will I be able to do my job when it counts? You just don’t know that until you’re shot at, and it changes over time. The military has done a lot of research now to show that, over the course of your deployment, at around month 6 or 7, you go into “God phase”: you’ve survived enough of combat that you’ll actually take extreme risks.

When we hit that time mark down in Baghdad, we got into firefights where other captains would come out with us and ride. I’d be walking around, my snipers would be walking around laughing, pointing, and shooting. They were like, “You guys are just absolutely insane.” But then, as you get closer to coming home, you start, almost like in sports, playing not to lose.

What’s really interesting is that you take the most casualties at the beginning of your deployment, when you don’t have a lot of context about what the enemy is doing, but also at the end, when you’re playing not to lose. It’s actually in the middle. When I got back, as I was about to come home, I would think about what I’d done in the middle of my deployment, and my hands would shake because I was just thinking, “Oh, my God.”

There are these overarching lessons about whether you’re going to be brave enough to put the team and your brothers before yourself. But there are also these other contextual things that influence groups, and I think as a leader, you have to understand those team dynamics, too, because the whole point of leadership is to be inversely correlated with the context.

When the team’s playing not to lose, you have to counter that with extreme aggression in terms of mindset to offset it, because you know where the team is headed. When they’re taking too much risk, you need to try to mitigate risk and pull it back.

The other thing was similar to entrepreneurship. We were given a novel problem set. I had a team and we had a mission, but we had never practiced using signals intelligence and different techniques to basically be a SWAT team. That was new.

A lot of it was just the scientific method: having a certain way of doing things and then codifying learning. When we would come back, we would say what worked really well that we should keep and what didn’t work so well. Over time, that led to a lot of specialization.

Maybe the arc in terms of performance, if you can codify learning and feedback loops, is that the average success rate for these kill-capture missions was 44%, I think, give or take. In the first 3 months, we were in the 20th percentile, which is to say that we sucked. But around month 3, we hit average. Then we caught the head of the Mujahideen Shura Council for Mosul, which is a clearinghouse of nationalist and extremist Islamist groups, and we caught the spiritual leader of Northern Iraq for al-Qaeda.

So we were designated the kill-capture force of choice for Northern Iraq by Colonel Townsend, who went on to become a 4-star general. By the end, our success rate was over 90%, and I think by some metrics we were leading the theater in terms of our efficiency. There was a lot to learn. That was my first real job. I had a lawn-mowing business and did lifeguarding, but that was my first real job.

What did you do to drive from average to 90% as the leader?

I was relentless in preparation. I had an amazing team where there had been a lot of prior selection. In recon, you get to pick whoever you want, so I had already screened my team for certain skills to make sure that I had a good group around me.

But the platoon leader is responsible for the maneuver, getting the folks to the right place at the right time, and orienting them to the target. I spent basically all of my free time studying these terrorist cells and their patterns—what was called their pattern of life: where they would be on a Tuesday for lunch, what their tendencies were.

It’s just like anything else. Humans get lazy and complacent. If you’re willing to put in the time, you can really get a feel for how a person operates and where they’re likely to make a mistake.

I think the biggest difference between mediocre leaders and great leaders is that great leaders plan for contingencies. Before we even went on a mission, we would plan for all the things that might happen, so when they did happen, we knew what to do.

Relentless preparation and learning are so important because they inoculate you against risk proactively. But if you do find yourself in a position where everyone’s in fight-or-flight, the adrenaline is going and it’s really difficult to communicate and tell everyone exactly what you want to do, the more you’ve rehearsed and prepared for it, the better you’re going to be able to execute when it counts. The military really drilled that into me, and I’ve carried that particular lesson with me throughout my life.

I’m curious because you’ve earned the answer to this next question more than most people I’ve ever met. In addition to that idea of preparation, what are your other most deeply held beliefs about leadership and what makes for great leadership, both from lessons you’ve earned yourself and from the leaders that you worked with or around?

5. The Leadership Standard

You have to be credible. That’s the most important thing. You have to be credible. You have to care.

When I went through Ranger School, there was a moment… You go through 3 phases: Benning phase, mountain phase, and Florida phase. I had this miserable experience in mountain phase. It was wintertime, so it was freezing. I got a little bit of poison ivy right at the end of Benning phase, and I begged the medic to give me some steroids because I’m super allergic to it. They didn’t give me steroids. The poison ivy spread all over my body.

They saw that. Then they finally gave me the steroids, which weakened my immune system. I got bronchitis. You’re carrying 75- and 80-pound rocks up a mountain in mountain phase, and I could barely breathe. I would see starbursts of color as we crested a ridge because I just couldn’t get enough oxygen.

I was still so proud of completing mountain phase. As a personal achievement, I think it was where I had to dig deepest in terms of grit. It got to the point that, when you jump into Florida phase—the final phase of Ranger School—the doors are opening, and I remember getting to this point where I didn’t care whether my parachute opened because I was that miserable. I had poison ivy everywhere, and I felt terrible.

I went in at 195 pounds. I graduated at 162, so I was just starving. I remember thinking, “I don’t care if it opens or not.” But I also realized I would die before I quit.

That’s the purpose of that school and what it means to have a Ranger tab: it separates people who are psychologically really tough and resilient. As a social signal to the men that you lead and to everyone who sees it, it’s an indicator that you have grit.

As far as what gives you the right to lead, you have to put yourself through a crucible where you can prove to yourself and to your team that you’re worthy to lead that tribe. I’m super grateful to Ranger School for providing that to me.

The other part, after the grit part, is that the leader has to be the most skilled at whatever it is they do. When I showed up and talked to my men, I said, “Listen, I might not be the fastest, I might not be the best shooter, I might not be the best at combatives, but I’ll be damned if I’m not top 5 in everything.”

You have to be really good at what you do across the board. It’s like sports: the team captain isn’t necessarily the best player on the team, but they’re one of the best players. I think that combination of grit and skill really matters.

The hard part now about being a founder is that, if you’re fortunate enough to scale, you take on more and more scope, and the skills you need to be effective expand. So you need to be a relentless learner.

At the core, if you care about people, if you have the grit to put in whatever hours it takes and you’ll never give up, and then you’re curious and capable of learning the skill that you need, you have to do all 3. You have to do it in an excellent fashion if you want to keep up with what is required to lead a team and to be an effective leader.

In Iraq, where the stakes were my men's lives, there wasn't anything I wasn't willing to do to prepare myself for that. I think those habits that were so deeply set from when I was a young man in my early 20s have carried through to today.

Is there an episode of leadership from someone in your orbit during your time overseas that most exemplifies leadership to you—something you saw another leader perform?

Yeah. My worst day in Iraq, we were in a neighborhood called Dora, which the L.A. Times referred to as “Al-Qaeda's Alamo” in Baghdad. We were 13 months into combat, and we took more casualties in 2 weeks in that neighborhood—a 3-by-5-kilometer box—than we'd taken in the previous 13 months. It was literally hell. There was standing sewage because Al-Qaeda didn't care about the locals. They'd put so many bombs into the sewer system that the sewage just spilled out.

It was a Sunni neighborhood. You had a Shia Iraqi army military unit that would snipe at people as they went out for groceries and things, and then little kids would chuck grenades at us. If there's hell on Earth, it was probably Dora.

The law of explosives is that the force travels the path of least resistance. If you have concrete on 2 sides and underneath, but the road is dirt, it's a natural charge that directs upward into the bottom of a vehicle. There were 2 elements to this. They would put 500-pound buried bombs underneath the roads that would literally saw a Stryker in half—these 20-ton vehicles, from front to back, just ripped completely in half—to give you an idea of the force.

When I saw this during the SERE that I wasn't getting a lot of sleep, the first thing I did was go to the operations center and say, “Give me the infrastructure plans for all the sewage systems in Baghdad.” I went out to the truck with my radio telephone operator, and we had a graphic overlay of the streets. We stayed out there until 3:00 in the morning, even though our next mission was at 6:30, until I had the final thing done.

Once I had mapped it, I pushed it out to all the other trucks in our unit, and I said, “For us, we are never going to drive on these roads if we can avoid it. If we do have to drive on them, you guys are both going to the rooftops. You're going to cut every single wire down to the street.”

Phil was unfortunate enough to go across an intersection that had one of these 500-pound bombs underneath it. My platoon was the first one to respond to that scene, and it was devastating, as you might imagine. He was severely concussed but relentless in providing aid to his guys and getting them into the trucks. I'm going to get emotional about it, so I'm sorry.

We raced a few of the guys who were critically wounded to the Green Zone, to the combat support hospital that was there. Phil was just unbelievable. When his men were finally taken care of, he was so concussed that he was puking. He knew that he was about to pass out, and he grabbed me by the lapels and said, “Blake, my guys. Take care of my guys.”

For me, that's what it is right there. His men love him for it. When the chips are down, you care more about other people than yourself, and his will—even though he was physically really banged up—got him through it. I think America is super lucky to have leaders like Phil Schneider. He was decorated for heroism for what he did that day.

I have a question that is hard to ask and maybe impossible to answer, but I'm asking it because I want to understand. The way I think of you is that you've gone a level up, and the way that you started ID.me was to serve this community in a deep and real way, and we'll tell that story in a minute. But this is abstract for those of us who haven't been in service, certainly not in such incredible harm's way.

I'm curious to help people understand the people who are doing this for us—the nature of taking life or seeing life taken among your friends, with the ultimate stakes—and to try to help people understand those stakes. I'm sure the answer is that there's no way of understanding it unless you go through it yourself, but this is the ultimate sacrifice that so many people put themselves in this kind of harm's way to make. Do you have a closing thought on the nature of that life, of living that experience, that people can understand why this group is so critical to support?

Yeah, I'll try to do justice to it, because I lost some wonderful friends who were just amazing people and gave their lives for this country: Richard Hankes, my interpreter Roy, who died with the platoon that followed us, Garrett Slaughter, and Ryan Dennison. They were just wonderful people.

If you serve this country, it's because you believe that people have a right to live free: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. That's the core of what we enjoy, but it is protected at great cost. You want to protect the weak and the vulnerable who are being oppressed—truly oppressed—in terms of their values and what they're allowed to say or do.

The way that manifests is that we would have situations like this. There was an Iraqi woman who was Sunni, and her husband was Shia. As the sectarian violence was going on, some of the Al-Qaeda militants who'd moved into a neighborhood called Amiriya liked his car. They just pulled him out of his car a block away from his house, shot him in the head, and then took his silver Mercedes and drove it around. She basically had to look at her husband's murderers every day.

She took her 3 kids and walked down this super-dangerous road to Baghdad International Airport—maybe 7 or 8 kilometers—with a 3-year-old and a 5-year-old. She just showed up and said, “I want justice.”

We let her down. The legal system let her down. Everything checked out. We caught the guys she talked about and found a lot of evidence. They were tied to Al-Qaeda. The car was there. We lost the war in our prisons.

Why you serve is for that woman. If you believe human rights are universal and that what America has is special, then it is worth defending. Therefore, politicians have a sacred responsibility to make sure that our military is used judiciously and to protect our way of life.

The men that I just talked about who gave their lives were exceptional men who could have had amazing lives, could have had families, and accomplished great things in industry. They sacrificed everything for all of us, and you can't help but be moved by that.

If you go to the Army-Navy game and watch the cadets and the midshipmen who are literally willing to give their lives to protect our way of life, it's the most noble thing that you'll see. I believe firmly that humans are meant to live free, and to be a part of a group whose very nature is to be selfless is an incredible thing. It's an incredible thing to be around.

I think a lot of Americans are jaded. If you spend some time around our military and folks who put the whole country and our way of life above themselves, you can't help but be inspired and start to feel patriotic about why America is so special in the world.

I'm so grateful for this first 30 minutes and for you sharing all this. It's an incredible, incredible story. I, and all of us listening, I'm sure, are so grateful for what you and your team and everyone else like you did and do.

I think it's the perfect bridge to set up why you started the business that you're now leading. Originally, I want to hearken back to that 12 versus 15 months and the benefits that were supposedly accessible to the people for those extra 3 months that they deployed, but how hard those are for our veterans to get, and that original intention and nature of your idea for this business.

Maybe you can bridge that story for us and tell us what you did originally when starting ID.me, why you did it, and who you originally served.

6. A New Mission After Combat

The closing chapter in Iraq, which was the last thing that we did, was that we were asked to target a vehicle-bomb network that had set off, I think, at least 17 vehicle bombs in Baghdad. It killed thousands of people. The British SAS had been targeting them, had not been successful for various reasons, and asked us to help.

Over the next 10 days, we caught 9 of the top 10, and the entire level of hierarchy underneath them was gone. The last thing I did in Iraq was stand in front of my 32 guys, all of whom came home, thank God, to their families, which I'm grateful for every day.

I said 2 things. I was like, “I'm pretty sure we all know Iraq. The story of Iraq probably isn't going to turn out the best. But for what we were asked to do, the math is pretty simple. This network killed thousands of people, and if it continued, it would have killed thousands of people more. It doesn't exist anymore. Intel folks came in and said, ‘We've never seen a network taken down this fast, ever.’”

I said, “You'll never see the faces of the people that you saved from the car bombs that didn't go off. But what an amazing thing to tell your grandkids about—that you made a real difference here and an impact for those people.”

You go from that, and I didn't believe that America's strategy was making the world better because we were just creating these power vacuums and everything else. I didn't want to be a part of taking life or risking life if I didn't feel like we had a strategy and a specific end that made sense. I didn't feel I could continue to serve in the military because there wasn't a strategy.

But I missed the purpose. You don't have to question the meaning of your life when you're trying to get to a terrorist and a phone before a car bomb goes off in a market full of innocent civilians.

So I went from that scene and got into Harvard Business School because my battalion commander refused to write me a letter of recommendation unless I applied to Harvard. I said, “Sir, I haven't used a three-syllable word in the last year. I don't think I'm ready to write an essay for Harvard.” He said, “You're going to apply to Harvard, or I'm not going to write a letter of recommendation.”

So all of a sudden, I'm in Cambridge, Massachusetts. I'm 26 years old. The biggest decision is where to go on Friday to have a beer with my friends. I just couldn't shake it because I'd seen and been exposed to so much, and I knew that life is short. You don't have a lot of time. None of us know how much time we have.

War had just infused lightning into my bones. Every time you get one of these kill-capture alerts, it's just a flood of adrenaline. In some ways, it makes you an addict. So I realized, “Oh my gosh, I've basically been turned into an addict by these 15 months of really high-intensity tempo.”

I want to make an impact. What combat taught me is that you can't take anything with you. Material stuff—who cares? What matters is making a positive impact on someone else's life. Looking for that sense of purpose, I started to see statistics that the military community suffered from identity theft at rates nearly twice as high as the general population.

I can walk you through the story, but that ultimately became the thing that I gravitated toward because I felt it was a worthy mission to solve with my life. If something happened to me—if, God forbid, I were to die—I would do it trying to accomplish something that mattered, and not being a cog in the wheel at a consulting firm or in banking that's just making capitalism work a little bit more efficiently.

I think the nature of risk was quite different. I thought risk was going into an organization where I didn't believe in the mission. I felt like I was wasting my life. I didn't really care about the financial side nearly as much, because how could you after coming out of combat? I'm super grateful for that.

But it was very schizophrenic to go from a time in your life where you're like 70 years old—maybe, in normal time, your friends are dying and you're contemplating your own mortality. Most of us will get there later. I kind of had already been there and then felt like a time traveler coming back. It really shifted my whole mindset, and it's why I started ID.me, because I felt like it was a worthy mission to improve people's lives.

I didn't know it would grow to become a multibillion-dollar company like it is today. I just wanted to help the military community that I came from to start. But that's the bridge for how I got from the military to running this technology company.

Can you tell us the story of the earliest days—the very first things that you did, for whom, and why you cared about those specific things at the start that have grown into this big thing?

7. From Marketplace To Identity

The first thing, I just want to be honest here: I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I spent a summer at McKinsey, and the McKinsey people were wonderful. We built a business model. The first phone call was to this telecom company, and they said, “$17 million.” I went home that night and I was like, “I don't care.” It didn't move the needle at all.

A few things happened. I saw that there was a need for a better solution for the military community, and I started to dig into that. I naively did this as an academic project my second year at business school. I said, “Let's incorporate. I'll solve this problem. It'll be easy, and then I'll be on with my life.”

Looking back, I couldn't have known less about what it means to run and start a company and make sure that it is built to last. A few things happened. One, this is more the luck part of it: my brother insisted on investing $20,000.

I love my older brother. He's the hardest-working guy. He works his tail off. I actually begged him not to. I said, “Please do not invest money, Russ. No.” He insisted on it, and I said, “Do you know what this is going to do to my stress level? I've been a lifeguard, I've gotten shot at, and I've mowed some lawns. Don't do this.”

He said something to me. He said, “You've never failed in anything you've done in your life.” I said, “No.” Then I said, “That's so messed up, man.” But he insisted on doing it, so he invested a $20,000 check in me.

David Tisch was one of our first investors. He ended up becoming really impactful. He's with BoxGroup, one of the best angel investors in the country, and was the first managing director of Techstars New York.

What David Tisch did that I really am grateful for was, I was talking more about business development and relationships, and he pointed me to this book, Steve Blank's Four Steps to the Epiphany. He said, “You really need to read this book to understand how to build a company.” It's wonderful. It's basically the scientific method for how you build a company, stage by stage.

He introduced me to some other folks, and one of my classmates invested $80,000 in me. What was pretty crazy is that even a year into it, as I was raising our angel round—we put together roughly $1 million in a convertible note—I would continually have investors listen to the pitch and say, “I'm going to invest, and I'm going to invest $50,000 or $75,000.”

They would thematically tell me 2 things. They'd say, “I don't think”—because the initial name of ID.me was TroopSwap—“I don't think that this business model is going to be successful.” But then they would say, “I believe in you, so I'm writing the check.” Then they'd say, “By the way, here's a picture of my daughter. This is her college fund.”

It was a baby. I was like, “What is that?”

Completely wild start to this whole thing. Tell us, what was that pitch? What were you pitching them with TroopSwap that became ID.me?

I've been fascinated by how big companies start, and all the big companies actually start in a pretty focused way. Facebook started just for the Ivy Leagues first, and then students, and then grew up. Dan Rose, who's been on your show, talked a lot about that: you only start with students, and at some point they opened it up to everybody. I think their users increased by 4 or 5 times.

Uber started with affluent riders and black-car drivers. Pinterest started with Midwestern moms. Paradoxically, to get big, you have to focus small.

I thought there was a void in the market around Craigslist in terms of trust. Because military families move so much, I thought you could have a gated community of maybe the military and then students, and that would actually be a way to disrupt the peer-to-peer classified and marketplace space.

A few things happened. As I was giving this pitch, USAA and Military.com loved it, but then I called them back and they said, “Fast for us is 2 to 3 years to give it a pilot.” That sucked. I got to a low point in 2011, when Kelly Perdew, whom David Tisch had introduced to us, was our first board member. I said, “Kelly, I don't know if this is going to work.”

That takes a lot for somebody who's been through Ranger School or whatever, to be on the verge of quitting. I don't quit at anything in my life. He said, “Blake, first, never say that to anybody ever again.”

“Especially to investors.”

He said, “Chin up. We're going to get through this,” which I'm super grateful for. Your best friends in life are super positive when the chips are down and they're for you. Maybe when your head's getting too big, they're pulling you back down to earth to ground you. Kelly's been that for me.

We basically had this learning: we couldn't get enough distribution to get the buyer-and-seller part going, but we were also spending three-fourths of our time on identity—actually making sure that somebody signing up was in fact a member of the military community.

As we talked to different marketers from various firms, like Microsoft and Under Armour, they said, “We're not really interested in your app or some gated garden or whatever. You don't have enough users to make it meaningful. But your ability to actually know if someone is a part of a particular community is really important and valuable. We would use that within our own channels.”

A few things happened. I saw that on Veterans Day, veterans trying to get a free Bloomin' Onion at Outback were taking in their paperwork, which had their Social Security number on it, and showing this form with their Social Security number to a stranger to get a fried vegetable. No wonder identity theft is twice as high. You're showing your Social Security number to strangers all over the place.

Then I talked to a marketing manager at Microsoft, and they were delivering e-learning vouchers to veterans in person and making them bring their paperwork in. I said, “Doesn't the in-person redemption defeat the entire point of e-learning?”

She said, “Yeah, we know it sucks, but we don't have a way to know on our website if somebody is a part of the military community, so we're not able to keep it safe. And because we're not able to keep it safe, we have to find distribution through brick-and-mortar channels.”

I said, “And if you had a way to keep it safe?”

She said, “We would bring it online.”

Then these different retailers said, “By the way, it's not just the military. It's pretty much every segment.”

It’s students, it’s teachers, it’s first responders, it’s social influencers, it’s beauticians. And that was the aha moment where I said, “Wow, it’s not an app, it’s a utility.” It’s like what PayPal was for the early days of the internet with payments: we could be this identity utility.

If we’re spending 3/4 of our time on identity and login trying to build an app, if we could build this utility, then all these other developers that might want to create experiences based on trust could just use us and build on top of that. That’s actually the right thing to do. There are some key moments in terms of how we did the pivot that I could talk about, but that was the learning.

I have one question going back to something you said earlier around the book that David gave you, The Four Steps to the Epiphany, the Steve Blank book. Is there anything from that book that you, looking back on that time, find to be the most valuable that other people out there should think about?

Yeah, the 4 steps, just really quickly, so maybe I can give you the CliffsNotes. The first one is just the pure scientific method: form a hypothesis that there’s a problem worth solving and what that problem is. The way that you validate the hypothesis is that people are willing to pay you for the solution to solve it. Until you’ve done that, you don’t earn the right to even figure out if you’ve got a scalable company.

This constant iteration is what most founders struggle with: “Am I even working on a problem that matters?” You could convince yourself that your baby’s not ugly every day, but the only way to really validate that the problem is meaningful and your solution is the right one is to get people to pay you. Jeff Moore has written all this other literature around what part of the market to target.

So, the first 2 steps are: “I have a hypothesis about a problem and my solution for it,” and then step 2 is, “I validated it because somebody paid me to solve it for them.” Once you’ve passed step 2, in The Four Steps to the Epiphany, step 3 is: How much revenue do I get from that customer when they pay me, and for how long? How much does it cost me to acquire them? Those are your unit economics.

You can see companies that skip the stage from 2 to 3. This is LivingSocial, which raised $1 billion here in the D.C. market and went to zero. If you violate The Four Steps to the Epiphany, if your unit economics are upside down, you’re just going to set money on fire. Groupon pivots from daily deals to e-commerce, takes a haircut from $20 billion to $5 billion, but survives and is still around today because you can’t violate the steps.

If your unit economics are good, step 4 is really culture. It’s the Jim Collins book Good to Great: a great team, great retention, focus, alignment, and all the things that help you capture, hopefully, a disproportional share of the market. What’s really amazing is you can’t skip stages.

This is why you raise a ton of money from investors in Silicon Valley: congratulations, you just ratcheted up expectations. If you don’t fundamentally know your ideal customer profile and whether you have product-market fit or not, you can get really perverse incentives where folks try to move the revenue line up even though the underlying unit economics are toxic.

Yeah, the genetics of the business are bad and therefore screwed. I’m starting to wonder, then, about if we zoom all the way to today, if you can give us an overview on the topic and the importance of identity.

This is something that I met you through Mickey at Ribbit, and Mickey and I were having this long, fascinating discussion about the role that identity has played and will play as a sort of primitive for millions of workflows, products, and actions that we take as humans. It was something I really hadn’t thought all that much about.

You take it for granted that you prove you’re you in a variety of different ways. Some are janky and terrible, and some are whatever, but I never really thought about it too much. Could you give us an overview, as you see it, on the role and importance of identity as a function in the modern economy?

8. Identity Fights Fraud

Identity is how you make life safer and easier, and here’s why it matters. In April, the Government Accountability Office released a report on fraud in federal spending. This is just federal benefits at the federal level; it does not include federal dollars at the state or tribal level. They estimated that the government loses $233 billion to $521 billion per year to fraud.

To put this in context, total aid to Ukraine is $65.9 billion. The U.S. defense budget is $824 billion, so if you take about half, it’s about half the defense budget lost every year to fraud—just federal dollars at the federal level. It’s 2% of GDP. An aircraft carrier costs $13 billion. That’s the magnitude of what we’re losing right now when we have extraordinary debt of over $30 trillion and interest payments. It makes ransomware look almost insignificant by comparison.

We played a pretty central role in stopping fraud during the pandemic. There are 7 states on record that have credited us with stopping $270 billion worth of fraud, and let me zoom in on the impact that we had. We went into Arizona in October 2020. When we went in there, 6 months into the pandemic, Arizona had 570,400 new weekly unemployment claims in a state where there are only 7 million people, including kids.

The state agencies would tell us, “We know it’s fraud, not because we have any advanced tooling, but because the bots are filing the claim end to end in less than 60 seconds.” All that you need is a name, date of birth, and Social Security number. You could pinky swear that you’re a Lyft driver, and you could start collecting $600 per week.

The week after we were introduced, it went down to 6,700 claims per week. Michael Wisehart, the director over there of Arizona DES, said, “Hey, Blake.” He said, “Listen, we processed about 265,000 claimants that we’re paying on a weekly basis.” He said, “I feel it’s my job to make sure that we’re not paying these out to organized crime and overseas groups. So we’re going to run those 6 months’ worth of claimants back through y’all in December.” I said, “Okay.” When they did that, of the 265,000, how many do you think even tried to verify their identity?

Oh, God. I don’t know. Some crazy number.

92,000. Two-thirds didn’t even try. We were able to successfully authenticate, I think, about 86,000 or 87,000 of the 92,000, which is our job, and then other service channels handled the rest.

We were immediately hit with 4 denial-of-service attacks out of West Africa. There’s something called a DNS query, which is a Yellow Pages lookup. It maps out your infrastructure. 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, date of birth, and Social Security number that these criminal groups were using belonged to a real person. If they need help and the bad guy beats 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 2 weeks at the same time. We enabled them to reopen.

And so on and on. Then the fraud moved to Florida with the bot attacks in January. It moved to New York in March, and that’s ultimately why 27 state unemployment agencies adopted us in 15 to 18 months.

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 and international veterans get access to the VA, because when I left the military, you had to go into the VA in person to prove your identity.

But now that the pandemic has ended, this next evolution is deepfakes. AI has 3 phases: LLMs and text, then media with face and voice, and you’ve got Sam Altman and Scarlett Johansson going back and forth about stuff. The Nigerian print scams are 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. In the same 90-day window in 2023, it went up to 1.3 million.

Holy cow.

The net of all of this, to your original question—why is identity so critical?—is this: What I learned in Iraq, what General McChrystal taught us, is that it takes a network to fight a network.

If you have an inherently decentralized enemy that is learning, asymmetric, and amorphous against a centralized foe, the decentralized insurgency is just going to crush you. The only way to respond is to do what General McChrystal did: empower the edge, give local autonomy, redesign the organization to flood everyone with real-time intelligence, so your network of good guys can respond in real time.

That’s tough to do as a general. That’s why he’s so remarkable. He said, “We need to get the captains, lieutenants, and sergeants the tools and push the decision-making to them, because we’re really fighting a network, and this is a network war.” As a shared service, we are effectively the network of good guys that are able to see patterns that other folks can’t.

For example, we're over at the Treasury, and then we're over at these unemployment agencies. We were able to see 50,000 identities that had been used for unemployment go over to apply for business-owner aid. For owners of transportation companies, you can't be unemployed and own a transportation business at the same time. But the signal of what's going on with the same identity at different levels of government hadn't existed before.

And so you appreciate this is why we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year: we're getting picked off one by one, where the attackers are just going to the most vulnerable agency. 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, consistent security, and feedback loops if you're going to withstand the assault of organized crime.

We ended up helping NBC News break the story that APT41, which is China's economic-warfare arm, was directly attacking individual Americans to steal their unemployment benefits. I've shared some videos on LinkedIn as well of some of these deepfakes, where these Chinese threat groups are targeting individual citizens to try to steal their tax refunds and defraud the Treasury. The net of it is that we're losing hundreds of billions of dollars a year. Those dollars also represent hundreds of thousands to millions of victims, and the money is flowing, in many cases, overseas.

It's a national-security issue. The other side is that people hate managing logins and passwords, and if we can both make it safer and easier for people to interact online, that's become my life's work.

Can you describe the building blocks of signing up to begin with? For me, as a human being, there's some verification and authentication process. Those are different. How do you do that? What are the ways that I prove that I'm me?

I also want to ask about the non-ID.me versions of this. I remember you telling me about a branded relationship with the customer, like Apple might have, or Google might have, or CLEAR might have. I want to talk about the ecosystem—not just ID.me, but the ecosystem of people that represent a way to prove your identity and get access to something or stop something.

What are the building blocks? How do you literally know a person is a person? Walk us through that. It seems like this is a really important thing for the future.

9. Building The Trust Graph

Time is one of the most important aspects of identity—not just for technology, but for relationships in general. Think about the first time that you met your best friend or your wife, and what you knew about them then versus what you know about them now. Time, the frequency of how often you interact with someone, and the quality of those interactions really inform your perception of their identity as it relates to you.

You have a lot more touchpoints over 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.” 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.

You're probably not doing SIM swaps, changing your phone to different devices, and porting your phone number that often. You probably change your phone every 2 to 3 years. You've likely had the same phone number for over 10 years now. That tenure, when it comes to identity, really matters.

If we can look at records and see that Patrick's phone number has been tied to Patrick since he was at Notre Dame, and then you prove possession of that phone number, we can see that the phone number hasn't been ported. That's really good. If some bad guy was setting us up from college—

Call him.

It's almost like the bad guy saying, “You know, I started seeding this phone number in college, and now I'm 55, and I'm going to—”

They deserve it.

Yeah. These guys aren't playing the long game. What's really interesting is that most folks have a phone number with tenure. Now, it's not for everybody. You'll find that 85% to 90% will have a long relationship with a phone number, but 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 subscriptions, and they may be avoiding collection 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 that's Patrick.”

The basic premise is that there's a big theme in security right now about moving away from passwords. This is also why you want a shared service to do it. How long is it going to take each company to figure out how to do passkeys, 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 securely prove that we're the owner of the login credential? It's going to take time. Whereas if it's more of a SaaS approach, where it's already baked in as a capability, 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. They just have to say, “Yeah, please turn that on,” or we turn it on and they say, “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 5 doctors in the country uses us to prescribe narcotics and other controlled substances. That is not sufficient for you to be Patrick or for me to be Blake. We have to go out to different databases that are sources of truth for medical professionals.

This is where I start to geek out, because you have to ask, “What's the source of truth for whether or not you're a medical provider?” It would be the federal DEA number, Health and Human Services' National Provider Identifier, and state medical licenses, which are issued at the state level. For the military, it's obviously the DoD and the VA, and then, maybe not intuitively, the National Archives is actually the repository of military records down in St. Louis.

This is what we call the trust graph. Maybe this isn't just for everybody; it's only for tax professionals, lawyers, doctors, or HR staff at Social Security uploading W-2s and W-3s. 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 find a record in the registrar's database that shows that you went there, your graduation date, and your degree. A lot of the connectivity you have to build is connections into sources of truth. As you say something, we can instantly go out and see if it's true.

Maybe the distillation of all this is that everyone knows if you're out at a bar and you walk up to a girl cold, you're fighting an uphill battle from the start. You're fighting an uphill battle for both of you because she's asking, “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 having 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 says, “I don't know,” but we're like, “No, no, no. DoD—we're good.” 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 people engaging in stolen valor, out.

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 in my uniform without people buying me lunch. It's incredible. Often, I wouldn't even know who did it. The waiter or waitress would come over and just say, “Hey, listen, someone picked up your bill.”

To be able to provide infrastructure that allows that connection to happen without humans in the loop, so you don't always have to interact in person like it's the 1950s, while keeping stolen valor out, is just really, really cool.

We obviously won't have time to go into all the intricate ways that you've built this network, and I think the shorthand you provided is right. But would it be a convenient way for me to think about it that if I, Patrick, have an ID.me Wallet, there's some amount of work that goes into establishing that wallet and relating it to me?

Then there's some set of steps that I can use to deploy that wallet to check in at lots of different places and effectively create this layer of convenience for me. Instead of going to the VA with my documents to get my extended 15-month deployment benefit, I can just do it digitally and much faster.

I know it's more complicated than that, but at its most simple, that's a convenient way for us listening to think about it.

When I think about what I want my kids to say to me when they grow up, it's, “Daddy, did you really have to manage different passwords and logins at every website you went to?” And I'll be, “Yeah.” It's the same way that somebody who grew up before Visa or MasterCard would be like, “Wait, you had to pay cash everywhere? That sounds terrible.”

In Europe, this has already happened.

There's BankID in Sweden and the Nordics, and Janelle, our co-founder, is Estonian. In the Nordics and Estonia, they don't have a different login for different websites. They have BankID. The average Swede uses it 5 times per day. It's the same login for healthcare, government, banking, and commerce, and you control your own data. So the login security effectively is your wallet, and what we're creating is a digital twin of 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 are public. These medical licenses and state licenses are all published on public 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 in to prescribe narcotics, is that really a doctor, or is that somebody who's going to prescribe narcotics by the liter and contribute to the opioid crisis and everything else?

The more that we can replicate exactly what your physical wallet does in digital form, the safer it makes your life, because we have the root of trust that you're you. It also makes your life 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. Our first mantra of user experience is, “Never make the same person do the same thing twice.”

Obviously, everyone who's interested in investing has spent some amount of time studying Visa and Mastercard as the gold-standard business models. There really aren't higher-quality businesses than these because the network effect associated with them is so incredibly powerful, and therefore, their margins are crazy high. I've heard you describe what you're doing as Visa in 3D, in some dimension. Can you describe the business lessons that you've learned from Visa and why you think the way you're building ID.me will be such a good, enduring business beyond just the service that it renders for its customers?

10. The Identity Network Business

I love how markets develop. I'm such a nerd for it. Economics and American history were my double majors at Vanderbilt. Take Henry Ford. Henry Ford, maybe the most famous entrepreneur ever, invents the assembly line, invents the automobile, and he does the Model T. He's like, “I did it. I did it. Everyone needs a Model T.”

What's remarkable is that phase 2 of the market is Alfred Sloan, the CEO of GM, General Motors, coming along and saying, “No, Henry, they don't all want a black Model T. They want pickup trucks and minivans, and they want different colors.” GM just kicks Ford's ass for the next 2 decades. Ford doesn't catch up until World War II. Over and over, you can see that the 1.0 version of a market is monolithic, and then it just explodes and personalizes.

The same thing is true of Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace. They're pretty monolithic, and then just look at what we have now: TikTok, X, Instagram, Snapchat, Threads, and all this other stuff where the market has personalized. The 1.0 version 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.

Payments are interesting because most of identity is exclusive. It's not about ubiquity. The reason that you have a military ID is to separate you from everyone who's not in the military, or a student ID separates you from everyone who's not a student. Credit cards are different because everyone needs payment, so it's interesting. It's the logical place the market would start.

But then it just stopped, and there has been all this, “Let's just make it easier for young people to pay,” and everything else, with this very myopic view. I came in from outside the industry and said, “No, when I think about my wallet and my identity, payments are just one part of it.” 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.

When you realize 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. They can compare my face to me, and they can see that the credential looks legitimate and doesn't appear to be counterfeit. Once they trust that I'm Blake, if I show a health insurance card that has my name on it, they can trust that as well. This is why hotels collect your legal ID and your payment every time you go in, because the stakes are quite high.

From a first-principles point of view, I'm like, if the root of trust is our interaction with the government, and 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 card 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.”

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, standards, and incentive—can then go back to the private sector and make it really easy for people to open up bank accounts and check in at a healthcare clinic.

I'll share one story that's super meaningful to me. When we first started working with the VA, you had to go in person when I got out of the military. Then we brought it online. The more that I looked into it, I realized you had to have a presence in basically credit records in order to pass these federal standards, which I found deeply unfair for folks. Effectively, we had linked access to affluence.

I went back to NIST and said, “Hey, you've got to rewrite these standards to give an exception flow to people who are homeless or who live overseas.” Homeless veterans are super important to me; they always have been. I want to serve the most vulnerable.

One of the first gentlemen we got through was 81 years old. He lived in Tokyo. His wife had Alzheimer's, and he hadn't been able to get access to his VA benefits in years because there was no VA facility near him, and he couldn't travel. At 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.

Now we've had over 10 million Americans go through that process. The security and inclusion gains that we drove in the public sector as a shared service mean that anywhere the ID.me button is—if it shows up at a bank, a fintech, or a patient portal—he would no longer be locked out. Most of those organizations use data brokers that are only focused on domestic folks and don't cover a lot of low-income people. He would now be able to seamlessly prove his identity, making his life safer and easier than it was before.

When I think about what we get to do as a team, one, we get to protect people, which is my core drive. It's why I was a soldier. But we also get to give them time back. Visa in 3D means that once your core identity enables more access to financial services and healthcare, that's the next phase. But that will be done. We've already issued 65 million of these portable identities.

On top of that, think about your Netflix subscription and setting up an Apple TV or a Roku box, and how long it takes you to authenticate to every single streaming subscription. We could just turn that into API calls. Once we know that you're you, you could just tell us your subscriptions. We could fire off and say, “Hey, Netflix, Hulu, ABC, NBC, Paramount, whatever, is this person a subscriber?” “Yep. Cool. Bound. Authorized. Done.”

Checking in at Vegas, just as a tactical example to close this out, was always like being at happy hour. It would be an hour-long wait, and all your friends would be there waiting for you. It's so demoralizing when you're behind this long line. We went to them several years ago and said, “Hey, why don't we make this work more like airline boarding passes, where you can just do it on your phone?”

The human agent is the bottleneck. Clearly, it doesn't scale as you're turning over these huge hotels at 5:00 every day. Today, millions of guests use ID.me to check in to MGM and Wynn properties, and we save them an average of 15 minutes of their life, which is incredible.

Sometimes, when you look at the time savings from the access gains we drive for federal agencies, or what it means to do authentication before somebody might interact with a different system, we're saving, on an annual basis, hundreds of years of life that people spend waiting. I think, with my single life, that's really motivating in terms of giving people time back to spend in a way that is much higher quality than standing in line at a DMV or at a hotel. Instead, they could be with their family and friends.

There was another source of inspiration that I found really interesting, which was Disney and how they think about authentication. What did you learn from Disney?

Usually, if you're curious about the world, you can find examples of people who've already solved the problem that you're working on, but maybe in a more local way. What Disney did was really ahead of its time. If you were going into the park, you would authenticate with a biometric, with your fingerprint, in the MagicBand. If you were authenticating to the web app, you'd start with a password, because that's what most people were familiar with.

If you were on a mobile device and using their native mobile app, you would use whatever was on your phone, like Touch ID or Face ID. In many ways, I think Disney already figured out the most convenient way for you to open up your digital wallet based on the channel.

If you extend that to the call center, you'd ask: What would be the most convenient, safest, and easiest way for you to authenticate? The natural things you use when you're calling someone are your voice, a device, and a phone number. So the more you can make that the way that we recognize Patrick, the better.

Once that's done securely, there's a host of other things related to it. It could be that you've got tickets to the park, you might have a Fast Lane pass, and you might have all these other things. When I saw what Disney had done, I said, “All you really have to do is make this accessible to everyone and democratize it through a network.”

If we can build the same capabilities to allow for these really fluid in-person, online, and call-center experiences, then everyone will benefit—even if you don't have the R&D budget of Disney, even if you're a little app developer who's just getting going and has dreams of competing with the giants, but doesn't necessarily have the budget to make your login and identity experience on par.

I looked at Disney, and I looked at Amazon as another example of amazing data about feedback loops. The problem is that the newer upstarts don't have that data. But if people begin to take their own data with them and start to populate profiles of their tastes and preferences, and if an app developer is willing or able to have somebody give them consent to access some part of their identity graph, you could actually create a level playing field.

You mentioned the attacks that you suffered when you came between the international bot armies and their pot of gold. What have been the ways that more legitimate entities have tried to kill you? Who do you threaten that isn't an illegal attacker but is an incumbent U.S. company or something like that? What's that been like?

It came from both sides. I had Russian callers call me during the pandemic and tell me where I lived and where my kids went to school. We had private security at the house one Christmas, with former Marines around it. I've gotten a lot of death threats as we've cut off fraud.

For me, I don't care. It's my family that I care about the most. On the corporate side, we're disrupting these data brokers, and we went through an episode in 2022, just a couple of years ago, where these data brokers basically created a lot of misinformation and FUD. I had no idea how the media worked or how this whole dark-arts world worked, where lobbyists pull the wool over staff's eyes, get them to write a letter, and get principals to sign it.

The media covers the letter. They don't even care what's true. They won't even come to you and ask, “Is this accurate?” They just cover the letter. It's the Mark Twain quote: “A lie gets twice around the world before the truth has time to lace up its boots.” 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 business-model response, they start to come after you to tarnish the new technology as unsafe.

Yeah, it's a fascinating experience. I'm sure you told me last time we talked about this that you're a Ranger and you can get ambushed once, but not twice. What does that make you think about the future—about how building an enormous business necessarily bumps into lots of other entities that are self-interested?

I'm curious about what you think about credit bureaus, the role they play in all of this, or other groups of entities like this that you may end up displacing and improving upon for the end customer. How do you think about that as part of your job? It's not just this idealistic, “We're gonna build something really nice and everyone's gonna be happy.” Not everything is positive-sum. You're taking share from somebody else in some way. How do you think about that as part of your job as a leader?

I love that question because that is the job of a leader. The job of a leader is to look at a team from first principles and say, “Hey, you're fine, but the scope creep is too much. You're doing way too many things. You need to focus on what you do best.”

That's how I think about credit bureaus. They play a really important role in the economy in terms of figuring out your creditworthiness and the probability that 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.

You can literally look at who has an easy time with credit bureaus: higher-income people. Who has a tough time? Why? Because they're underbanked or unbanked. Why would you want to make those vendors the gatekeepers for identity?

I asked myself, “How would you really design it if you were to pretend that nothing exists?” Identity naturally comes from health care and from government. Your identity life cycle begins in a hospital, where you're born and get a birth certificate. Then the birth certificate is sent off, and the Social Security Administration issues you a Social Security number.

When you literally back up from cradle to grave, what happens at the cradle? Your financial life cycle doesn't really begin until you're, I don't know, 17 to 19 years old. 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 health care, and that's the right place to start.”

Now, it's going to take time because you're building this new way of doing things while the existing world continues to putter along. Just like Visa and MasterCard didn't get rid of cash payments overnight, they 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 I father.” In all the board meetings, you can imagine they were like, “Blake, should you do banking, or maybe you should go into this other thing?” I'll give on a lot of things, but not on this. Your identity needs to come from the government.

What role do CLEAR, Apple, Google, and other huge players like that play in this whole identity story, to you?

I think it just depends on what you're using them for. If you want to turn your mobile phone into a wallet, great. You'll see a lot of what Google and Apple are doing with transit cards, and maybe your driver's license or your passport on your phone to get through a TSA checkpoint now. You'll see that in some places.

That's all well and good because, in person, the attack surface is inherently limited. Attackers in China obviously can't show up en masse at the Dallas airport. There is no concept of deepfakes in person. You can clearly see if somebody's got a mask or something on or some sort of disguise.

If you just wanted to replicate exactly what a physical wallet does in its analog form, cool. That's where a lot of the innovation has been going. The problem is really risk. When you start to put things online, 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 when you go online, you can literally go anywhere. An attacker in China can come attack American systems. You need a lot more capability. The limitation of the hardware manufacturers' approach is that they've basically said, “We're not going to be able to see where the ID is used, and there's no tracking,” and they'll put it underneath privacy.

I would say that for physical interactions that are localized, and for use cases where the risk is minor—maybe adult websites or kids and social media—all good. Client-side is 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. 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 decided that if it looks like your Visa card has the potential to be everywhere that you want to be, but it actually starts to fly around, your bank can see that and go, “Hey, time out. Let me go talk to Patrick and make sure this is legitimate.”

There's consumer protection, so if you go, “Oh my God, no, it was compromised. That's not me,” there's recourse. In a client-side model, when you start to deal with financial risk 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's really sophisticated. Her 401(k) balance goes to zero, and now this attacker, probably out of Lagos, Nigeria, is taunting her that he's ruined her life. She says, “I need help.”

The reason banks can see that is that banks can help. The reason that ID.me can see that is that ID.me can help. We can provide recourse to the victim. We can also go back to the government agency and say, “Here's the audit trail of what we saw. This woman was not involved with any of this stuff,” or go to the 401(k) provider in this case and say, “This is what happened.”

Now there are feedback loops. There's learning about what happened. For some reason, people are losing their minds when it comes to digital identity, even though 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 that 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. We actually think 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. If 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: it’s good, but it’s also limited in terms of what it’ll allow you to do when it comes to online transactions.

If you think about the, let’s say, 5-year-hence future—to give it not infinite time, but a decent chunk of years—what’s your dream for the state of ID.me and what it’s doing for people on that time horizon?

Yeah, in 5 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, you’re just able to open up Word and Adobe and all these other systems, I think you should be able to open up Coinbase, Chase, Social Security, or the IRS’s apps.

Then the flip side of that is, as we’re 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 that every use case has requirements for access: you’ve got to be a doctor for a prescription app, or you have to be in a disaster zone for FEMA aid and everything else. There are 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? This is actually the other part of the story. When I was first starting, there was about $750 million of combat pay that had been approved by Congress for soldiers who were stop-lossed, involuntarily extended. Congress approved it for 2 more years, and at the end of it, about a quarter of a billion dollars went unclaimed because the government just couldn’t get the word out.

All these service members had to do was fill out a form, and they would get $5,000. It was crazy. A quarter of a billion dollars of combat pay expired.

So the same thing is likely happening right now in LA. There are all these programs and things that can help, but if you’re displaced, you’re trying to get your dog or your cat, and you’re just figuring out a hotel room, you don’t have time to research FEMA or nonprofits and figure out what’s going on.

We have this amazing ability that, if we’re doing it right, whether it’s disaster relief, taxes, retirement, graduating from college, or buying a house for the first time, we can help provide a curated view of all of the government, nonprofit, and private-sector offerings that are relevant to you. When you want to get access to it, there’s the ID.me 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 5 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, then what an amazing impact and legacy to leave on the world.

I would love to know how you decided what your business model would be and what you’ve learned about designing a business model alongside a valuable product. In your case, when you’ve got this network that’s growing and the surface area of the network is so big, there are lots of different stakeholders.

You’ve told stories already today about how governments are beneficiaries, how consumers are beneficiaries, how companies might be beneficiaries, and how banks and other intermediaries might benefit from the use of this network. There are lots of ways that I could imagine you making money by doing your job and having your product be in the market, and you’ve chosen a subset of those, or one of those. How did you do that? What are your principles that others might borrow for: “Okay, I’ve got a good idea that’s valuable. It’s valuable to lots of people. I’m not really sure who should pay.” How did you get to that answer? And maybe just describe it a little bit for everyone.

Yeah. I think maybe I’ll start with philosophy, and then I’ll go into how I did it practically, to separate the two. Philosophically, I just don’t believe in charging customers for anything unless I’ve created value that demonstrably makes them better off. I never wanted my incentives at odds with my customer, and I view it this way: if someone buys our software, I want that person to get promoted. If somebody uses our software, I want their life to be better for ID.me having been a part of it.

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 2 things. When I saw that basically Visa and PayPal were the V1.0 of this market, I looked at how their business model was designed.

Visa doesn’t sell data. Visa sells trust and convenience. You decide if your money moves to a merchant when you want to pay. What Visa did is, they basically had a business model that adjusts to risk and value. The dollar amount of the transaction is the value, and then risk is: Is the card present or is it not present? Is it online? Is it a grocery purchase or jewelry? It’s a very complicated business model that they’ve unpacked.

On a more ground-truth note, we were using a credit bureau—I won’t say who—back in the 2015 timeframe, just for records validation. If we tried to find a name, date of birth, Social Security number, and address in the records, could we find it? These credit bureaus will charge you transactionally, so every time that you query their API, you have to pay money.

How does that manifest in practice? I saw there were 2 veterans. One was in his 60s, and the other one was in his 70s. One had just recently moved. The other one, even as an older person, had just never had credit.

These 2 folks tried 50 to 70 times each to prove their identity. It looks really cheap—it’s $0.25 an API call, or, depending on what your call is, it could be $0.10 an API call. But then you have to play it through in terms of how frustrated those 2 veterans must have been with us at that moment.

But then they’re not done. They still haven’t gotten access, so they either give up, which is the worst thing, or they have to go to the call center. There’s probably a credit bureau waiting for them, too, that also doesn’t have coverage. Then they have to go in person. By the time they get in person, just think about how you would feel.

So that’s awful. What I realized is that, for having worse data coverage, they actually made more money. If they had the data coverage, it would have passed on the first attempt. But when they didn’t cover somebody and that person tried to repeatedly attempt multiple times, you might end up paying tens of times—50 times $0.25.

I was like, “You know what? That’s just such a perverse business model where you actually make more profit and revenue for having a deficient product.” I resolved, and I said, “I’m never going to have a business model that is misaligned with the incentives of this B2C ecosystem that we serve. I’m only going to charge a government customer when we successfully authenticate somebody and get them access.”

That actually makes sense for the user, so that if we’re not able to get somebody through who isn’t fraudulent, we suffer as a business, and rightly so. Now all of our incentives are aligned in harmony with who we serve. I think it’s value and alignment with stakeholders, and once you commit to it, those are some of the things from a values basis as a founder that I really enforce as sacred, that we’ll never violate. It’s core to our DNA and who we are.

You said something to me about the business, which I found so interesting: that you don’t want diversity of values at ID.me. I want to ask a couple of questions about the principles and the culture in that step 4 of the Steve Blank book and how you’ve thought about philosophically deploying those things. Maybe start with that one as an example, and then riff on the other principles that you’ve established, like the one for the business model there in building the business, and the power of those principles.

11. Culture Shapes The Company

And if you don’t screen for it, you’re in for a tough ride. I think E pluribus unum—out of many, one. This is the whole premise of America, and what our country’s struggling with right now is 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. When you let people in who fundamentally reject the premise of your country, your culture begins to suffer. Our country is suffering from that right now because we haven’t been intentional about it.

The same thing is true with the company. Right now, the whole country is struggling with this battle, really between Enlightenment values and postmodernism. If you let that conflict into your company, it’s like a wagon that has 2 hands pulling on the wheel. Is it merit, or is it something else? What are we really focused on driving?

For me, what I loved about the military, what I loved about growing up, what I loved about fairness, and what my dad told me—3 rules that his grandfather had given to him—one of them was: “Never think that you’re better than the men that you lead.”

We come from different backgrounds, different places, and different experiences, but we're all Army green, and your job is to treat everyone fairly according to the same standard. That's what I loved about service. If you listened 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. They're brothers.

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 ridiculous. If you want to move fast, you don't want ideological tension. I'm really deliberate about that.

We publish some value statements about our commitment to classic liberalism. Everyone is equal before the law. It's not good or okay to be racist in any direction. Just as you would want your kid's elementary school teacher to treat everybody without giving preference, teaching kids about character, that you're responsible for what you do, and that's all that matters.

It's crazy to me that 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 designed our cultural values around all the patterns I'd seen across my time in the military about what makes for effective teams.

You can imagine selection as a triangle, where one point of the triangle is skills, one point is capability—just raw, sort of intellectual potential—and the other one is your behaviors and habits. You can hear an echo of this in Aristotle: “We are what we do. Excellence, therefore, is not an act, but a habit.” FBI profilers say the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior.

We defined our cultural values. The first rule is “Don't be a jerk,” and what we mean by that specifically is, if you're not emotionally self-regulated, if you can't control your fight-or-flight response, you're not welcome here. Ultimately, that's when we do things that are really mean and cruel: when we go into fight or flight.

There's a lot of research that shows that really good CEOs, and Rangers for that matter, are able to move out of fight or flight very quickly. We had this briefing after Ranger School from a Delta Force recruiter who showed us the cortisol profile of a Ranger graduate versus the general public. He's like, “Here's the profile of somebody who's exposed to a life-or-death traumatic event, and it's 3 or 4 days before it goes back to normal. Here's the profile of Ranger School graduates,” and it was a 30-to-45-minute rebound effect. After a near-life-or-death event, you and I could be talking like this, and it's fine.

So there's that. There's “Always compete,” which is grit. We don't hire pessimists here. We want 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 really intentional about that to make sure that, as you scale, you don't end up sideways.

You need only look at Paul Graham and the whole Google Gemini thing that was going on, where you want an image of George Washington, and God forbid it show an actually historically accurate picture of George Washington. That's a great example of how, if you emphasize things other than truth, 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 on an intimate, close team where everyone's treated fairly as an individual, and we don't care about anything other than performance. 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 ID.me as well.

What were the 2 other things that your grandfather told your dad?

His other rule was, if you have a choice of which unit to go to, go to the one with the worst reputation, so that when you leave, you can see the difference that good leadership makes. Then he had one that was quite specific to his experience, but he said, “Never let your name be associated with S-4,” which is supply and logistics.

He had fought his way up through Anzio into the Alps, and it was wintertime. Everyone in the Alps on the front lines 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. He was in the back of this truck, and as they got further and further back, he started to see jackets and gloves and fur-lined parkas until they were back at headquarters. Everyone had the latest, greatest cold-weather gear, and there were heaters and everything.

Meanwhile, he and his brothers who were in the Alps on the front lines had none of that. I think there's a more general lesson there to be extrapolated, which is: leaders eat last. Always serve those you're responsible for, who are at the tip of the spear, before you take care of yourself. That's more, again, back to caring and selflessness.

Those were the 3 rules that he gave to my dad after his experiences—66 months in combat.

I love it. On the topic of performance, you turned me on to something I hadn't heard of before, which is this stratum concept behind levels of leadership. Can you explain what that is and how you found it useful?

Our brains hear the same words, but they interpret them into different meanings. Maybe the easiest example would be if you asked Thomas Jefferson or your average high school student what the purpose of education is. You would get 2 very different answers.

Jefferson is going to be talking to you about how an enlightened citizenry is indispensable for the proper functioning of a republic. The high schooler is probably talking to you about whether they should go to vocational school, whether they should get a bachelor's degree, or whether they should join the military. It's very tactical.

At root, what you're screening for is linear versus conceptual thinkers. What's amazing is that, for our overall selection, we have the triangle, which is skills, capability, and 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.

For executives, it's really the cognitive equivalent of speed. People talk a lot about systems-level thinkers. What do they mean? The first thing you want to do is separate linear from conceptual thinkers.

With this theory of stratum, we have 2 trained psychologists who administer interview tests. You could ask a Rorschach-blot question like, “What do you think about a bachelor's degree? Should we legalize cannabis? Do you think it's okay to paint your house pink, or do you have to buckle up when you drive?”

What's amazing is that, thematically, you will get similar answers from the same person at a certain level of thinking. For example, if you ask somebody about buckling up when you drive or painting your house pink, they might say, “Yeah, it's annoying, but it keeps you safe, and I think it makes sense. People should buckle up more often.” Then you're in a conversation about buckling up when you drive and how we should probably be more responsible about that.

The systems-level thinker will have a totally different answer. They'll be like, “That's bullshit,” because it's the same question. They reject the frame first. They go, “What we're really talking about is the limits of individual freedoms when it comes to some broader impact on the surrounding community or the public. Maybe let's just talk about that.” You could talk about cigarettes in public, too, right? So let's talk about that. Now you're into a completely different conversation.

What's true thematically is that true systems-level thinkers think over different time horizons. Think about Elon Musk. He's thinking over millennia. He wants to make humans multiplanetary, and all of his day-to-day actions are guided by this overriding mission to get folks to Mars as a broader bridge to being a resilient, multiplanetary species.

When you think about the CEOs of oil and gas companies and everything else, they're riding broad macroeconomic trends and responsible for geopolitical dynamics across different cultures. They have to be good at so many different things. What's remarkable is that stratum 4 is the shift from linear thinking to conceptual thinking.

The thing about stratum 4 is that 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 they influence each other. For us, stratum 4 is where we want our VPs to be who are on the road. Keep in mind, it takes maybe 5 to 10 years to move from one stratum to the next.

Stratum 5 is when you can not only see concepts, but, if you went up to the whiteboard, you could organize them and make them really simple. That's where you go, “Hey, guys, it's really this. This influences all this other stuff.”

What you'll typically find with stratum 4 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 looking at an Excel spreadsheet while they haven't taken the time to just give you the headline number, you're probably talking to a stratum 3 or a stratum 4 worker. It's just how their brain works.

Stratum 5 is where it's simple. Strata 6 and 7 are where you start to deal with how concepts influence other concepts. You're thinking over very long time horizons. To be on our executive team, you have to be at least stratum 5 because you have to take a very complicated thing and make it clear.

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 say, “Blake, I’ve got 99 problems, everything’s burning, but these are the 3 that matter. Here’s how I see it: if we execute on this, it hits that. Is that aligned?” And I’d say, “Yeah, that’s aligned. Or if it’s not, we just revise it a little bit. We go.”

The other ones, I’d ask, “What are you working on?” Then I’d ask, “What’s important?” They’d say, “All of it’s important.” And at stratum 3, I’d say, “Actually, these things are grouped under that, and this is under that.” What I was actually doing was— we had a chief people officer with a background in talent. He had spent some time at Bridgewater, and he would actually be able to predict what would happen after I had conversations with the executives.

I’d say, “I couldn’t make it more simple.” He’d say, “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 got to the point where it was consistent enough that I was like, “What am I missing?” Now that we screen for that, it’s remarkably predictive.

I think the closing thing is that 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 they can see the field or not, a physical analogy would be if you had a sports coach who asked kids to sprint and said, “Tommy’s running as hard as he can, but he’s slow.” And the coach is 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.”

Once you understand that it’s not an 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 that because it’s immutable. You can’t train for it. It’s literally 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, means culture takes care of itself over time. If you bring in a jerk and nobody in the company is a jerk, that person gets put on an island pretty quickly. It’s like an immune system response, but it’s so hard. The most common mistake that I’ve made is to promote and over-title people, not realizing that doing a great job just means hanging on to a title in hypergrowth, because the business is growing faster than most people.

That has its own effect, where folks who would be fine in one position, when they’re over-titled, become insecure and realize that they’re not effective. So what they’ll naturally do as a defense mechanism is start to set other people up to take the blame. It’s really hard. It’s really hard to be a manager.

I have so enjoyed you teaching me, and now us, about not only your story but the system that you yourself are building and working on, and the potential implications of it. I think your story, my obsession with this notion of life’s work, and stories like yours are what I’m always trying to find more of to show people as examples. Obviously, no one’s going to live your exact story, but the authentic nature of it, the unique nature of it, and the way you’ve embraced challenge and risk and all these things—I just find it deeply inspirational. So thank you for doing this with me today.

I ask everyone the same traditional closing question: What is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

I don’t even know where to start, honestly. I’m full of gratitude to so many people. Sergeant Berkman saved my life in Iraq. He tackled me as tracers were going by my head and said, “They almost took you out, sir.” I’m so grateful for that.

Kelly Perdew 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 2 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’s 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.

Thanks for saying so, Blake. This has been such a total pleasure. Thanks for your time.

Thanks, buddy.

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