Caryn Seidman Becker谈Clear从破产到IPO的翻盘

He said to me, “What makes you think you can be the CEO of CLEAR?” In my mind, I was like, “Good question.” I leaned over the table and said, “Because I am a complete [?] animal.” So that was that meeting, and he still said no.

So, Caryn, I think a great place to begin is to talk a little bit about CLEAR first. We're going to rewind the clock in a few minutes and go back to the beginning and tell your entire story.

Everyone knows CLEAR because they've experienced it in the airport, at a stadium, or somewhere else. I more want to know the version of CLEAR that people might not appreciate about the business and the product, having just experienced it that way. Maybe let us in on some of the surprising elements of CLEAR—the business and the product—that get you excited about it today and in the future.

When we started CLEAR 15 years ago, what we said was, “Today it's a travel-centric company, and tomorrow it's the de facto secure identity platform in travel, leisure, access, and commerce.” We didn't say healthcare. It was a kind of ballsy vision, but one that really came from my experience on Wall Street of watching products become platforms. The concept of identity—to make experiences safer and easier, physically and digitally—was the foundation of CLEAR.

Again, this concept of “enroll once, use everywhere.” As a woman, I'm always digging through bags for all these plastic cards to prove who I am and what I have access to. I think that's ridiculous because nobody ever really looks, and it's incredibly clunky, incredibly expensive and inefficient, not secure, and a bad experience. So, that is the foundation of CLEAR, and we're really at the earliest stages.

When you think of the magic, or the secret opportunity, it's that over 30 million people today have enrolled. What I love about that is that it's opt-in, it's privacy-protected, and it's data-secure. We will not sell or share your data. We're here to deliver you amazing experiences, and we're here to deliver our partners enhanced security and reduced fraud, which has become a big problem.

I think the basic secret to CLEAR is that identity is foundational across so many industries, and people don't think of identity as the problem. They think of fraud or compliance or a frictionless experience, or whipping out cards, or insider risk. There's actually a story today in The Wall Street Journal about North Koreans infiltrating workforces, which is a real problem. That's all identity.

Bringing it to life with the government and through public-private partnerships, in airports and in other sectors like healthcare and online, where anonymity rules and creates all sorts of problems, or securing workforces—I think that's the secret and the opportunity at CLEAR.

What did you learn about the product-to-platform switch or flip that happens for companies from your Wall Street days?

I invested in a broad spectrum of companies. I started out in risk arbitrage and then went on to asset management and hedge funds. In 2002, we started Arians Capital, which stood for art and science, which is my view of investing. It's highly quantitative and highly qualitative: art and science.

We had the good fortune—although every day didn't necessarily feel that way—of investing in Apple, Amazon, and Priceline in 2002. When you looked at Apple, they used to have signs in their boardroom that said, “5 down and 95 to go.” That was their market share. They had candy-colored Macs and this iPod with a big white dial in the middle that people thought Zune might ultimately crush.

Or you thought about Amazon, which was books, music, and video, then a few more categories, but lots of people thought they were going to go out of business. Amazon's leader was on the cover of Time magazine. I think it was “Amazon Bust” or something of that nature.

Then Priceline was opaque travel and almost went bankrupt after 9/11. Those were all products that you watched become platforms. Priceline turned into Booking and a global OTA offering you a lot more than opaque travel, and Apple and Amazon speak for themselves.

I saw unconventional leaders, as the old GE leadership kind of went. Unconventional leaders delight consumers, innovate, do really smart acquisitions and capital allocation, and create these platforms on which they could build multiple verticals.

When I looked at CLEAR, which was bankrupt, I saw the same thing. I saw this identity platform. Travel was where it died and where we brought it back, and I thought it was where security, identity, and customer experience absolutely collided, but that you could use it in so many other places and connect you to all the things that make you you.

Identity is completely contextual. I'm always Caryn, but when I check in at the doctor's office, I'm Caryn with UnitedHealthcare, with an X copay, with a medical record that, by the way, I should own and have access to and be able to share anywhere I want.

I go into a building, I'm Caryn, I'm an employee, and I have access to the 10th floor. Or I'm Caryn, I'm a visitor, and I'm going to the 48th floor today from noon to 3:00. But I'm always Caryn, and I'm having to do all these things. My favorite is when they take your picture and give you a sticker, like this is useless.

1. The Vision for CLEAR

This concept of a secure identity platform was definitively modeled off what I experienced as an investor. The old Bill Gates definition of a platform was this idea that more economic value was created on top of the platform than was captured by it. At that point, you became a real, proper platform, or something like that.

It's evolved a lot. There are third-party platforms in the sense that they enable outside businesses to build, and then there's more first-party use of the install base—the fundamental identity layer, in your case—that you've created through a product that lets you create all sorts of other things.

How do you think about that difference, like opening up identity as an API to outside developers versus owning the experience yourself?

Here's how I look at it. I think there are—I like analogies—and I would look at American Express as a vertically integrated financial services company. They have the customer, they have the merchants, and they have the bank.

Certainly, American Express has some of the best experiences when you lose your credit card. I had fraud on mine yesterday. You send a new one, the bills go right through because they're vertically integrated. It's a better customer experience.

I look at CLEAR and think we're a vertically integrated identity platform. We have our members on the platform, and then we have different assets. We have the enrollment, we have the verification, and we have APIs and SDKs for our partners to connect into them. We have real estate in airports, awesome ambassadors at airports, hardware, and software.

The opportunity to have all those assets and be able to use them in different ways is really important. I would argue it's a little bit open in that we're connecting for our partners and bringing that member to a partner, whether it be Home Depot, LinkedIn, or a hospital, either for the workforce or the patient.

I like us bringing our different assets. Some of our partners want hardware; they want someone to check in at the front. Some of them, we're really working on e-gates and automated, end-to-end lanes in our airport real estate to drive that end-to-end, frictionless, more secure experience.

How could we use our ambassadors and our concierge product? I like having the assets, being vertically integrated, and being able to disaggregate them. That's how we're looking at CLEAR.

Maybe it'd be fun to break the story of the last 15 years into chapters and talk about each chapter a little bit. Everyone knows CLEAR now, but obviously you bought it out of bankruptcy. Not everyone—there are a lot of people listening who will know CLEAR, and we welcome them to the platform. We'll welcome them all.

The origin stories are super interesting to me and how these things get started. You were a professional investor. I remember the first time we talked, you said you didn't want necessarily some of your IRR or something to be on your tombstone and have that be the thing you were known for.

I didn't want to die and have people say, “I pick good stocks.” That wasn't good enough.

It wasn't good enough. So maybe talk about the pure origin of why you went searching for a business in the first place, how you found this one, and what it's like to buy something out of bankruptcy those first couple of days.

First, I will say that, in many ways, bankruptcy is a completely surreal experience. I talked to a few CEOs whom I had invested with through the years, like Bobby Kotick or Martin Franklin at Jarden, and they said, “Bankruptcy is decided on the courthouse steps.” It's true.

But I definitely believe, and I tell my kids, that life is a journey. I started off in risk arbitrage in 1994, when I graduated from the University of Michigan. I didn't even know what pro forma or EBITDA was, but I figured it out real fast.

2. From Wall Street to CLEAR

That was the M&A period of aerospace and defense under Secretary Les Aspin, and so I really got to know the aerospace and defense industry, in which biometrics has been part of the defense industry for a long time. That was my first understanding of biometrics.

Also, in the '90s, we invested in Cable & Wireless and satellite subscription-based businesses. Again, we were buying wireless spectrum in the '90s. DirecTV was really starting to grow, as were EchoStar and the cable companies. Microsoft invested $1 billion in Comcast in 1997. That was a really big deal, and they started to do broadband.

So, I understood the power of subscription-based businesses.

I also did bankruptcy work while I was doing risk arbitrage, and I love a turnaround. I like to say happiness is a low bar, and there’s not a lot lower than bankruptcy. Then you get into the 2000s, after the dot-com bust, and the turnarounds that we saw in products that became platforms, and incredible companies like Apple, Amazon, and Priceline that were built.

I had all that experience, which meant I believed, right? I saw the art of the possible. I’d also seen giant failures like Tao, Enron, and WorldCom—the things that everyone thought were going to be great and weren’t. Ultimately, I had invested in Loral, which got sold to Lockheed Martin. That turned into L-3, which was a management buyout of Lockheed Martin. It stood for Lanza, LaPenta, and Lehman Brothers.

We invested in that. Biometrics were there. Lenta left and started L-1, and he was rolling up the biometrics industry, and we helped fund that. I was just a big believer in biometrics on top of everything else. It was used in the early 2000s in Brazil for voting and in Asia for financial services.

The consumerization of biometrics was happening outside the U.S., whereas I had only seen it in the defense area in the U.S. I believed in the consumerization of biometrics. So that is the whole journey put into CLEAR.

CLEAR shuts down on June 22, 2009. We went to cash at Arians Capital in September 2008—a little late, not too late. Then investors said, “Well, when are you going to—great, you’re in cash—when are you going to invest again?”

We had never been in cash. We were either 120% invested, 200%, or 80% long-short. We were nothing. I had 3 little kids. I had a 1-year-old, a 3-year-old, and a 5-year-old, and I was like, “I don’t know if I want to do this anymore.”

I had done it 24/7 for 15 years. I loved it. I thought it was the greatest industry. I met the greatest people. It’s a front-row seat to business. My late husband was in private equity at Apollo, and I was like, “That looks awesome—buying companies, controlling cash flows, really able to create and build.”

So I was like, “I want to buy something. I want to buy something that makes the world a better place.” My parents were in government. I’m originally from D.C. 9/11—I was 29 at the time—really changed me. I felt a responsibility and a moral obligation to help make this country a better place, and that we were lucky to be here and that we were all responsible for it as citizens.

When I found CLEAR—which L-1, the company we had invested in, had been a subcontractor to for the first go-round—I was like, “A product that could become a platform that could make our country safer and make consumers’ lives easier.” It was biometrics, which I believed in—the consumerization of it. Subscription-based businesses are incredible. It was the convergence of my entire professional career.

So we—myself, my husband, some advisors, and, at the time, my co-founder—went into a room in a law office, and we were bidding against another group of people who were former employees of CLEAR. We had money in escrow, and it was like: you’re reading other people’s documents, trying to understand what you should do. You have a maximum number, and we bid $6 million in cash, which I think was a little lower than the existing bid, but it was 100% cash that night, given to them, and we won.

You’re in this room going back and forth with the documents and strategy and talking for, I don’t know, 10 hours. You couldn’t eat and barely drank. Then you leave, and it’s almost like bringing home a new baby. You’re like, “I won. I have this company now. Shoot, what do I do with it?”

We had a double-sided, 5-page list of things to do because it was all shut down. The hardware was in different storage areas, and there were 190,000 members who were like, “Where’s my data? I didn’t get service.” There were airports that were mad, and TSA was mad.

3. The Origins of CLEAR

At some level, ignorance might be bliss. I was like, “We’ve got a great idea. We’ve got some capital. The business model makes a tremendous amount of sense. We’ve seen other leaders. We’ve seen what to do and what not to do. Off we go.” We’ll call that the prologue.

4. The Bankruptcy and Rebirth of Clear

Before we get to chapter 1, I have a couple of questions from everything else you said. The first is a little bit abstract and away from CLEAR specifically, but you said that you didn’t know what pro forma and EBITDA were. You’ve over and over again in your life and career immersed yourself in new areas and seemed to learn quite quickly. What can you say about that experience and getting better at it over and over again, and not being afraid of not knowing or performing in the other fields that you explore?

I’m a voracious reader. I think my team knows I send them articles now from somewhere between 3:00 a.m. to midnight. I am enormously curious. I grew up—there was no internet—but I read in my room every night, from Sports Illustrated to books, magazines, and newspapers.

I love learning, like you. I love the question “Why?” and trying to get to the bottom of it. I also think that I went to public school in Maryland and the University of Michigan. I was a political science major. I don’t know that people had enormous expectations of me. I did of myself, my parents did of me, and my grandparents certainly did, because they were immigrants. So I had no fear of failure, because there wasn’t too far down to go.

My uncle, who was an investment banker, lived in New York City his whole life. I would come here from Maryland, and he would take me places, and I just thought he was the smartest, most interesting man. I loved the movie Working Girl—the “Let the River Run,” the Coach briefcase, the coffee, and The Wall Street Journal. I thought, “That’s what I wanted,” and so that’s what I was going to do.

I think I have blinders on when I’m focused on something. Whether it be pro forma EBITDA or learning the Herfindahl index when you’re in risk arbitrage, I believe that everything except a few really scientific things is learnable. Now, with AI, I’m not sure what’s not learnable.

I actually just signed up for an AI design class that I haven’t fully immersed myself in yet. I just think life is about curiosity, and I’m a lifelong learner. I have no fear of not getting it and no fear of asking questions.

I was going to ask later, but I’ll ask it now because it’s relevant: how do your ancestors show up in your life? You said something about there being high expectations across multiple generations. Can you say a bit more about that?

My grandfather, who was my idol, Hyman Seidman, came to the U.S. at 17 years old in 1922. There’s actually enormous documentation about him coming here because he almost got sent back. His family stayed—or most of his family stayed—in Eastern Europe and ultimately died. He had 1 sibling who went to Israel and 1 sibling who was here.

To come at 17 years old, in the bottom of a boat, the SS Constantinople, to work, to not speak the language, to have no money, and to work in a hardware store that he ultimately took over—Seidman Hardware, which was across from the Barclays Center—that’s hard. Everything else seems a lot easier when you have that perspective.

He used to tell me to pull yourself up by your bootstraps and keep on moving. That’s just very empowering when you see what he’d been through and that he’d lost a lot of family, and was optimistic, loved this country, and had enormous gratitude, positivity, joy, and fun. He was never angry at what had happened to his family.

I believed in the art of the possible. He put his family through college. They were all successful and went on to build families. My dad served in the military. My uncle did, too. I like to do right by our country.

I have gratitude and belief in the art of the possible because I’ve seen it.

I think optimism versus pessimism is such an interesting thing. Are you just wired optimistic?

I am. One of my favorite sayings that I keep on my cellphone—I saw Shimon Peres speak right before he died—and he said, “Optimists and pessimists die the same way, but they live very different lives.” I thought that was a very powerful statement. I don’t know: if you don’t have optimism, if you don’t have hope, what do you have?

Well, you needed it going into the CLEAR thing with your $6 million. I’m curious about what was going on with CLEAR prior to that. How did it itself start before your involvement, and why did it ultimately fail the first time?

CLEAR started as a response to 9/11, when Congress at the time stood up TSA. It was a Republican-led Congress. If you look at, again going back to curiosity, the founding of the Department of Homeland Security, which I think is one of the largest and fastest startups—I might have these numbers slightly wrong—but it’s like 250,000 total employees of the Department of Homeland Security, which has all these subareas, whether it be CBP, ICE, FEMA, or TSA. Those are a lot of subsidiaries, if you will, under 1 corporate umbrella.

I think Congress wanted to make sure that there were public-private partnerships to drive innovation and expedite the traveler experience. So they put this program together called the Registered Traveler Program. TSA gave out a few licenses for the Registered Traveler Program for people to try and see what they could come up with in the world of public-private partnership and innovation.

Steve Brill had written a book, After: The Rebuilding and Defending of America in the Age of Terror, which was, I think, about the day after 9/11. He received 1 of those licenses and started CLEAR, and there were a few other companies that started as well. Ultimately, he was the most successful. He got into 16 airports.

I think he raised about $100 million of capital and then had some debt on top of that and was building this concept of a trusted traveler program, a registered traveler program with biometrics on a smart card. So it’s this one-to-one match, and it had 190,000 customers.

I think 2 things, maybe 3 things, happened. One was that the 2008 downturn came. So it started in 2003 but didn’t launch in Orlando until 2005. The highest percentage of first-time travelers in America go through the Orlando airport. Strollers, balloons, the whole thing. It creates a little bit of a customer experience and security challenge.

People are like, “Why did you start in Orlando?” I’m like, “Because they wanted us.” He launched in 2005. The economic downturn hit in 2008, which significantly hit business travel. He also had debt coming due in 2009, in the middle of a lot of other companies going bankrupt and having debt, like GM and Chrysler. Ultimately, the company shut down.

I think the technology was sort of before its time from a cost-on-the-tech-side perspective, not to mention the economic downturn. I think it was probably hard to convince some airports that they wanted biometrics. And so it shut down. It went into bankruptcy, as far as I know.

Obviously, CLEAR is in lots of places beyond airports, but the airport is the visceral thing that we can all call to mind and have probably used. If I think about the airport, it’s such an interesting physical supply limitation. You mentioned the public-private partnerships and a certain number of licenses. I can’t imagine what it would be like to launch a CLEAR competitor in an airport.

Maybe it’s possible, but there’s not real estate. There’s a certain number of lines and whatever. What are the pros and cons of having a business that has such a unique physical supply bottleneck, and both a barrier to entry but also a barrier to scale? If everyone signs up for it, is there a diseconomy of scale where now the CLEAR line’s longer than the TSA line or something? It’s such an interesting business dynamic, and I would love you to just riff on it from as many angles as you can.

I didn’t know much about airports when we started CLEAR in 2010. But you’re right, there are these really interesting structures. There are 400 and change in the US, but at the end of the day, in the world of 80/20, 80% of the traffic goes through the top 60 to 80 airports in the US.

There are these hubs, and within them are municipal employees, airline employees, federal employees with TSA, or, if there’s customs, CBP. Local police and fire departments play a role here. You don’t necessarily have all the constituents going in the same direction because everybody has their own stakeholders and their own priorities. Airports are a really interesting place to do business, and they are capacity-constrained both on runways and physical real estate.

A few things. One is that we always viewed CLEAR as a force multiplier, bringing technology in that could help the throughput and enhance the security, not to mention bringing badged and trained employees into the building to help partner. We viewed ourselves as Switzerland: with the federal government, to help with security; with the airlines, to help get their passengers through happily and safely; and with the airports and the municipalities, to help enhance the experience and drive revenues, because we pay them a percentage of our revenues and create great jobs in cities.

So we viewed it as a win-win-win. As the volume grew, we would have technology, like the EnVe technology we just launched, that’s 5 times faster. But over time, you could create new opportunities, if you will. For instance, we invested in a company called Landline, which is replacing regional jets with buses and is able to go to the back of the airport as opposed to the front door. Because you’re right, you can’t put millions of people through the front door.

Today, there are 3 million people every day going through airports. Our numbers are that by 2030, you’re going to have 4 million—another million people a day. Most of them are coming through the major buildings. You couldn’t put them through today. And so the question is, what other doors can you put them through?

Can you do off-site screening and bring them through on buses? We’re trying to launch end-to-end automated lanes so you can have greater throughput. Can you privatize the physical screening opportunities so that you can have greater throughput? Oftentimes, it’s a staffing issue. The equipment is there, but there aren’t enough people to staff it.

Airports are also super interesting because you have these peaks. If you watch an airport—which I never thought I would be doing, but I do—the volume goes from this to this to this. You have to staff for peaks, which is really hard in a staffing business. So you do need automation. You do need e-gates. You do need off-site screening. You do need people to come to the back as opposed to through the front.

I think there are all sorts of opportunities if you’re innovative, creative, and partner-oriented to drive secure throughput with a better customer experience at airports. Anytime you get a little stuck, you need to move and try new things.

What is the EnVe technology like? What is it specifically?

EnVe is our new face-first technology, and it’s now in all of our airports. We started with smart cards. Going back to the beginning, our first 6 years were smart cards until we went to the cloud. We went to the cloud in 2016, at the same time we partnered with Delta, and that was a really transformational moment for CLEAR, both in terms of scale and technology, because you didn’t need a smart card. You could enroll and use it immediately.

But that was fingerprints and eyes. To us, it’s clear that face is one of the winners, one of the really important biometric winners. And so we are face-first with our EnVe, which makes it 5 times faster to verify.

Many people don’t have good fingerprints. Little-known fact: if you’re a teacher, if you’re working with chalk, certain ethnicities don’t have great fingerprints. Eyes can be a little bit of a chicken dance even today. So face-first is—we call it EnVe—in enrollment and verification.

How do you think about this problem that comes with success? There are sort of 2 things that happen with scale. I had the experience recently of using CLEAR at an NBA arena, and it was amazing because there was this incredibly long line to get in, and then I literally walked right in. No line at all.

The converse is that so many people have CLEAR at an airport that there have been times—not often—when I’ve been there and had to skip the CLEAR line because it was literally longer than the other lines. How do you think about that problem, maybe in airports specifically, that you’re a victim of your own success when more people have it? You don’t control the whole airport, so you’re subject to some constraints that you can’t change.

I think there’s a really important point, which is that working with the government can be hard. I would say that the last 4 years with the Biden administration were really hard, and in fact, they put some policies in place that really challenged our throughput and the customer experience. We’re on the other side of that, and so when you can innovate to drive throughput, when you can leverage technology at the speed that the private sector is capable of, you can solve bottlenecks with willing partners.

We did not have that in the Biden administration. We certainly feel like we have that in the Trump administration. They definitely care about making airports great. They definitely care about throughput, the customer experience, and security, and they believe in innovation in the private sector and partnering together to do that.

I would say—and I’ve been very public about it—that our customer experience degraded in 2023 and part of 2024, which caused throughput issues. It wasn’t because of volume. It was because of some policy decisions that were put in place that impeded the customer.

What were those? I’m curious—what was the literal nitty-gritty of it?

What I can say is that they put in some physical escorting policies, so that a CLEAR employee who verified you had to stand with you, which created all sorts of challenges. All of your team members are standing in line.

They also wanted to recheck identity documents at an extremely high level, and that created—all of which kind of defeats the purpose—all sorts of backups. I think that is about building trusting relationships with the public and private sectors and being able to communicate.

I would say there are a lot of great people at TSA and at DHS who do believe in innovation and public-private partnerships. As I like to say, debanking didn’t just happen in crypto. It was a very eye-opening experience to be on the other end of that, to not have transparent partners who wanted to work through things together, but instead just wanted the government to do everything. That was very eye-opening.

It also made us better, made us more innovative, and I think has positioned us to work really well with an administration that sees infrastructure as a major need here in the US. In order to be competitive, you shouldn’t have better travel experiences in Singapore, Dubai, Tokyo, and London than you have here in the US, when we have the greatest tech companies.

I was in Singapore on Christmas. My kids were like, “What are you doing?” I was taking pictures of e-gates and banks of e-gates.

You go to Dubai, and it’s the same thing. You absolutely should have end-to-end automation, and there’s so much you can do to transform the travel experience. On a very personal and professional level, watching our customer experience degrade when I knew we could do so much about it was horrifying, and not being able to say much about it because they were pretty retaliatory was also pretty painful. I think we’re on the other side of that, and there’s so much you can do to drive throughput.

The airport experience should be and can be amazing. People love travel in the US, quite frankly, and around the world. I actually give huge credit to Airbnb. I think that they transformed the travel industry by creating infinite capacity, and I don’t think people have fully wrapped their heads around that. It used to be like, “Oh, I want to stay at the Marriott,” and it’s full, so I guess I’ll have to wait. There’s always a room somewhere for you if you want to go.

You see what’s happening with air traffic control. Our systems are rigid and a little bit analog. They have to be invested in. We have to partner. Travel is such an important part of the economy, and I think it’s also an incredible part of families and experiences and growth and learning and curiosity. I know for my family, it’s been our best memories and our time together. I feel really fortunate.

We’re hell-bent on driving innovation to make travel safer and easier, and we also learned a lot from our experiences in 2023 and early 2024 to make sure that we move forward and not backward.

Can we go back to chapter 1? You no longer have your $6 million. You now have CLEAR. What was the process like of figuring out what the business could or should be—the development of the business model, go-to-market, all the basic, basic stuff? What did you do, and what did you learn in that first chapter?

That is a great question. I wish I had documented more of it. Number 1, you had to find where the inventory was. Let’s go to the real basics: Where’s the equipment? We would go to San Francisco airport and say, “Hey, where did you put the CLEAR equipment?” They would take us to a storage facility, and it was all the way back there. One airport threw it away. I was like, “You threw away the hardware? We bought $10 million of hardware.”

For $6 million, we bought a brand we were too cheap to change. People were like, “Why don’t you change it? It’s really sullied.” I was like, “I don’t know. I think it’s pretty good, and we don’t have a lot of money, so people know what it is, and we’re sticking with it.” Ultimately, we changed the logo, and I love the name.

We bought 190,000 members, biographic and biometric data. They had to opt back into CLEAR. They had to come back to CLEAR, and we would give them whatever months they had left. I think in aggregate, about 75% of them did come back. We also bought a hard drive of what to do and what not to do. Bankruptcy is really interesting: You get the hard drives of the company, so you’re looking at their old documents and learning.

First, it was finding the hardware that was left because we were going to reuse it. Number 2 was actually rebuilding the software from the ground up because we didn’t buy software. They didn’t own their own technology, so we had to rebuild the software from the ground up.

Number 3 was finding Orlando airport. We closed in April, and the Orlando airport wanted CLEAR to come back. You need one person to go first, and they wanted us to, so we had to win that. We wrote the RFP for the Orlando airport. Other people did too, and then they protested our win. You had to go down to the Orlando airport and share with the board and the community why CLEAR would be good and serve them well.

From a marketing perspective, I wrote the emails. I signed my name to them. I was in customer service. We said CLEAR was coming back to 90,000 people. We knew who they were. One of the beauties of being an identity company is that you actually know your customer. We told them we were going to do right by them and make them whole.

We got some nasty emails back. I was like, “Wow, people will really write anything in an email.” So then I would call them. I was like, “Hi, I’m Caryn from CLEAR. I got your email.” One guy said—and how blunt can I be on this podcast?

Blunt.

He said, “My grandma had big balls, and you have bigger balls than my grandma.” I was like, first of all, interesting. Okay. So I called him because you’re an owner-operator, and I was like, “Hey, it’s Caryn from CLEAR. I got your email.” He kind of shrunk. I was like, “Well, people will write anything in emails because it’s totally anonymous.”

5. Building the Business Model

Going back to identity, we told people we were relaunching at the end of October and that they could come back. We then hired 20 people in Orlando, 10 for each lane. I had read “Setting the Table,” an amazing book by Danny Meyer, one of my great heroes. He became an investor in CLEAR, and that was awesome. We hired Union Square Hospitality—I think it was called Hospitality Quotient—to do the training of our team members in Orlando.

Again, it was like, okay, we want to be hospitality- and service-oriented. I think it’s missing in the airports. We’ve got to rebuild the software. We’ve got to find the equipment. We’ve got to hire some people. I don’t even remember how we hired them. I went down to Orlando, and I participated in the training. I got to know all the people at the Orlando airport.

We communicated with them. You’re making it up as you go along, and then every day you’re like, “Fuck, I didn’t think of that.” That’s just what it is. I wish I had documented it. We have a playbook now that we’re in 59 airports and have more to go, but you fake it till you make it.

I would just keep talking to people. I had seen great operators, and I would ask them questions. Ed Breen is one of my great heroes. We had invested in General Instrument, which then got sold to Motorola, and then he became the CEO of Tyco to turn it around after Dennis Kozlowski. I would ask Ed lots of questions, and these leaders were so generous with their knowledge and their experience.

Every day, you’re just hacking at it. I was on the floor of the Orlando airport at 4:30 in the morning when we launched. People would hug us, and then you knew you had something. When we were rolling out the old kiosks from storage, people were hugging us because we were bringing it back. That was the greatest feeling: to know that it meant something to people and that they were rooting for your success.

There are plenty of people rooting against your success, but that gets you up every morning—to know that you can make a difference in someone’s life. Security is job 1. Someone could have breakfast with their family because they had a more planful and less stressful trip at the airport. I happen to be a neurotic flyer, so I’m worried about turbulence and terrorism, and I didn’t like leaving my kids. To know you could change that for someone, that’s a giant win.

I’m curious to hear a little bit about thinking versus action in your business life. You exude this intense bias to action.

Oh, yes. That’s one of our core values.

That’s great. You—I didn’t know that. I promise I didn’t know that or look that up. It sort of just comes off you. I’m curious when you’ve needed to stop that, if at all, and retreat and think. I’m very interested in this dichotomy. Brian Armstrong from Coinbase has this great, simple phrase, which is that action produces information. Actually, you can learn faster through action than through thinking, is one way of thinking about it. Say a little bit about action orientation versus stepping back to think.

I have a very busy mind, so at some level I’m always thinking. I guess, being a girl, the power of blowing your hair gives you 20 minutes to think. It’s like our shower.

I am always thinking. My friends will laugh. I can be a little spacey sometimes. If I’m driving, I’m like, “Oh, I didn’t know—how did we get here?” My mind was 20 different places.

I think bias for action can sometimes lead to impulsivity, and I think you need to guard against that. I have consistently surrounded myself with people, including my late husband, who were like, “You’ve got to stop. Just push pause on that for 1 second. Slow your roll.” I respond very well to that.

One of my sayings is that every week is 2% of a year. When someone says, “Let’s meet on that in 3 weeks,” I’m like, “We’re going to wait 6% of the year to have that conversation? That’s insane.” If you believe life is short—and I definitely believe that—I don’t want to waste time.

I love data. I love information. I think working in the stock market makes you more decisive. You’re never going to have perfect information, so you’ve got to put together the mosaic. You have to understand your thesis. You have to see how that is weighing relative to your thesis, and you need to move out.

Maybe you don’t need to take an 8% position. Maybe you want to start with a 2% position. You better do your work. I think that Wall Street gives you incredible discipline. You better have done your work before you need to do your work. When I head into a meeting, I’m like, “We should know them better than they know themselves.”

We should really understand and have war-gamed this 10 ways from Sunday because it's all about the preparation, right? Kevin Durant, the basketball player—all the practice that he does before the game. I do feel that I think a lot, probably too much. And so, actually, my bias for action is because I've been playing chess in my head all day long: What if? What if? What if?

And look, you can never—you know, things are always coming out of left field. But I have seen a lot of these scenarios in my head before, which I've actually never articulated. But that's real. So I'm like, well, what if we did that, and what if we did that, and how would that work? Then you have the data, and you're like, well, that would make that go up by 500 basis points. That would have a negative implication over time that could drive my margin to this.

But, yeah, I like to move. I think Bezos talks about the one-way door and two-way doors. I buy into that. My middle daughter always tells me, “It's just not that deep, right? Can you go back and make and change that?”

I think if you raise your price and then you have to lower your price, I don't think that's good. I think sometimes doing things that would make your workforce feel not stable, you want to be thoughtful. But one of our other core values is embrace change. I think the only thing constant is change, and so I'm really good with that. I sometimes forget other people are not as good with it, so it's something I'm trying to be more thoughtful of.

I love the 2%. I won't forget the 2%. It is true. It's crazy. Well, let's meet in a month. Really? 10%.

Back to, like, chapter 2 or whatever, I'm curious how you originally thought about the trade-offs in the business model itself, and maybe just to hear a little bit more about the business model itself—of margins and pricing and product. I'm always fascinated by the things left on the cutting-room floor, like maybe you almost did something but didn't do it, and you went this way instead.

So, in the early days, as you were thinking through how this could be a big, sustainable business—and I'm also curious to hear about how you financed all this, because you started with $6 million, but everything else you're doing costs a lot of money too—what were you working through in those early days as you got your arms around what the business model should be?

So, I think a few things. We had built a model when we started, right? We came from finance; we'd built models—garbage in, garbage out—but we did think that this could be a good business if you owned your own technology, if you owned your own labor, which the other company didn't. It had outsourced the labor and the technology, which really impeded the margins.

But, again, going back to the power of a subscription-based business, right, and cost per gross add and LTV to CAC—those things were in my blood, and I understood them deeply. So, understanding what we thought it would take to break even from a subscriber basis, looking at every MSA, understanding Denver and Orlando and San Francisco and New York—what was the volume of the airports? What percentage of that volume did you need, or what percentage volume of that population seemed realistic?

We owned wireless companies—Nextel actually was one of them—and it was like, what percentage of the city is on Nextel, and what do you need to break even? We had done—I like coming at things bottoms-up and top-down and sideways, right?—in different ways.

We said that the TAM was 35 to 40 million people who traveled 5 or more times a year. What percentage of those people did you think you would have? Then looking at the cities, right? So, all sorts of different ways. We thought that this could be a good business model if you got to certain penetrations of certain cities.

All that being said, it took longer and it was harder. I did not take a salary for the first 5 years and got paid in stock, and to me that was a privilege. We turned cash-flow positive 6 and a half years in, and we had burned through $53 million of cash to get there. We were very cheap, very efficient.

Airports are a really interesting place because, again, think of them like concentrated shopping malls. I didn't think, “Oh, I wanted to start a business in an airport.” I thought I wanted to build a secure identity platform, but airports are a great place to start a business because you have millions of people coming through these buildings every day who see your brand.

I would say a tipping point for us was when we allowed our ambassadors to do the selling for us. The internet or social media is a really noisy place to try to get someone's attention, and it's certainly getting noisier. Having an ambassador who gets a commission so that they can make more money—and they're awesome people—say, “Sir, would you like to learn about CLEAR? Sir, would you like to be a CLEAR member?”

Sometimes we put out candy bowls. We did different things to try to—who doesn't want a mint when they're traveling?—or hand sanitizer in the 2020 time frame. And so, it was a great way to get the word out and to educate, and to have team members who could make more money and to have people bring technology to life, right?

Innovation is about bringing people what they did not know they wanted. People don't Google biometric security at airports specifically, not at the beginning. And so, having people explain the technology and explain the privacy, that was crucial. We believed it to be a very efficient and powerful business model.

We run the business for members, bookings, and free cash flow. I have said that for 15 years: members, bookings, free cash flow; members, bookings, free cash flow. Free cash flow is the ultimate measure of a business, as a girl who comes from Wall Street. Like a good hedge fund, it ain't eyeballs. And so that's how we ran the business.

We turned positive in 2017. So, we raised capital in 2010 from myself, the gentleman who started it with me, and some outside investors, mostly here in New York City, and Bill Miller, who was a strategic partner at Arians Capital and one of my great mentors and partners. He was on our board for the first few years and was an early investor in Amazon. It was certainly great to get his wisdom and his advice.

Then in 2012, we raised some capital, again, I think from those same outside investors—really individuals. I went to Silicon Valley; I came back with $0 in 2012 and $0 in 2015, which was fine. One of the guys said to me—I won't say the name of the fund—“What makes you think you can be the CEO of CLEAR?” I'm not going to say his name, but I do keep his picture in my photos. He's no longer there, so it's fine. Let your haters be your motivators.

So, he said to me, “What makes you think you can be the CEO of CLEAR?” In my mind, I was like, “Good question.” But I leaned over the table and I said, “Because I am a complete [?] animal.” So that was that meeting, and he still said no. He still said no.

Look, I think that we're creating a new industry in identity, but even before you get to identity, we started here in 2010. PreCheck started in 2011. People thought that was going to kill us. Little did they know we could integrate, and now we actually sell PreCheck.

Our view was, great, you want to start other kinds of trusted traveler programs? We're a great enrollment mechanism. This is exactly what we do. For the past year, we have been enrolling people in PreCheck, and it's a great partnership. I think there's so much more to go there.

So then they thought PreCheck was going to kill us. There's always something else, and it's like, guys, people love traveling. You need innovation in airports. You need public-private partnerships, and when you have willing partners in the public sector, you can do great things together.

And if you go through airports, they don't look materially different than they did for the past 20 years. There is such a huge opportunity to be frictionless from home to gate. What if you knew you had a reserved parking spot, or where the Uber should drop you off, and a concierge could meet you, and you went through an automated end-to-end lane, and then you had your coffee waiting for you on the other side?

Or you knew you could get into a lounge like Shangri-La, and then you knew that you were on the flight and that it was 2 hours late, and Uber sent the car for you, as opposed to everyone doing this when they land. And what if you used it as a mobile key? Those are all the things we're doing.

6. The Future of Airport Innovation

Yeah. You said great investors. The name of your firm is art and science. It's qualitative, quantitative together. So many investors are trying to analyze things when, ultimately, the creation of new net-new value can't be analyzed ahead of time other than in very broad strokes.

You're betting on the airport, or this—you being a complete fucking animal—and the airport being a great place to apply that energy. Now, having done it from both angles, being the investor and the founder, builder, CEO, how would you invest differently than you did prior to the experience?

7. Investing Insights and Strategies

I think about that, and truth be told, I have not bought a single stock since we ended Arians because if I can't focus and do it, I'm not doing it. And I own a lot of CLEAR stock and have investments in other places, but I'm focused here.

I think I would be such a better investor. So, okay, here we go. Number 1: We invested in Amazon. They announced Prime, and it went down. The stock went down, right? And we were like, “Oh, what do we like?” And then the shipping, and what are the losses? And it's like, let's start with the TAM.

Let's start with the total addressable market if you had Amazon Prime. Let's start with the art of the possible: if those people signed up, if they were stickier, and if they did more, what could that be? What could the incremental margins be?

I would spend a lot more time on org charts, people, and systems. We are in the midst of changing our billing system to Stripe, and we are super excited about it. The opportunity set there is important. I remember every time someone had an SAP transition, the stock blew up, right?

It's about understanding the culture, the people, the systems, the total addressable market, their penetration, and all the second derivatives of that. At any time, 1 metric can be a little wonky, right? But the question is: What is your ultimate thesis, and is that derailing it, or is that just—nothing is straight up and to the right. Almost nothing. Maybe OpenAI is right now, but there's a lot of gyrations along the way.

You have to understand that those gyrations are part of business, but also understand that we would go visit Kodak, and ultimately Kodak and Kmart and lots of companies can go away. I live with that paranoia every day for 15 years, right? You can go away. You can become totally irrelevant. What are you doing? What is your product roadmap? What is your innovation roadmap? When will you get there? What will the impact be? And, say, where can we go?

Those are things that I think I did, but not with as long-term a perspective as I think was required: to really map out the art of the possible and then probability-weight the getting there. What can Amazon Prime be? What can the iPhone be in the ecosystem of the apps, and then the economy that that's going to create? It can't just be, "Yeah, they're creating an iPhone, and they're going to sell 10 million or 10 billion." What can that be? I think to really map that out, and then the impact on the margins, is game-changing and allows a lot more patience.

Does that boil down to imagination about the market and belief in the leader? Are those the 2 things that you would focus more on as a result of this experience?

Yes. Again, I would focus on free cash flow and optionality, which we did. I think those 2 things create that free cash flow and optionality. Look at Priceline: they bought Booking.com and Active Hotels. Those were transformative acquisitions, but you need the free cash flow or the balance sheet to be able to do those things, and you need the management that has that kind of foresight.

I also think you've got to be decently paranoid. I prefer management teams that are humble, nose to the grindstone.

8. The Importance of Free Cash Flow

The answer to this will be a lesson for every business owner. What does optimizing for free cash flow feel like as a leader? I used to tell our management teams, when I was an investor, "You should just lever up and buy back stock. I don't know why you're not more levered. The optimal capital structure is X."

When you run the business and you're responsible for all the employees, and you're wanting to invest in the business or leave cash on the balance sheet for potential M&A or whatever, levering up doesn't necessarily feel like the great thing. Free cash flow and the optionality it creates allows you to think more clearly.

When COVID hit, that was a transformative time for CLEAR. We took $20 million, which at the time was our marketing budget, to zero on February 26 or 25. We took our salaries to zero, and we created a leave-of-absence plan for our ambassadors so that when it really happened on March 12, we were prepared and pivoted to creating Health Pass, connecting people to their test information and ultimately their vaccine information, and connecting those data packets to professional sports leagues like the NHL so they could have the Stanley Cup, which they had never missed in all of their history, or to OpenTable and Resi for dinner reservations.

It allows you to be offensive, not defensive, and that is a massive mindset shift. I believe in the growth mindset, so thinking offensively about what you're going to build, what you could buy, or what you could do is really freeing. I imagine being very levered could be constraining, specifically in difficult times.

And again, going back to embracing change, you've got tariffs, pandemics, and financial markets. It's incredibly freeing. What are the sorts of things that you've done that have most positively impacted your free cash flow—your free cash flow margins?

I think it's an output of the business, quite frankly. We run the business efficiently. It's a capital-efficient business, and we are really thoughtful about resources. I think we continue to get better at that. How do you drive efficiency? How can AI impact member care?

We have a little sign: "AI to impact every workstream, every day, for everyone," whether it be legal, finance, HR, recruiting, member care, scheduling, or coding. We're always looking for efficiencies. I guess I was the girl who got all As and a B, and my dad would say, "Where'd you get the B?" Now it's, "Well, okay, how do I do better?" Every day, I do think we can do better. How can we do better? How can we rethink that? How can we drive a better marketing campaign?

I think it's everything, everywhere. The subscription-based business model with high incremental margins generates strong free cash flow. We've invested some of that back into our enterprise identity platform, which is a here-and-now opportunity to reduce fraud, prevent insider risk, and drive compliance, efficiency, and automation on the enterprise side. It's just awesome.

What does Wall Street least understand about the business? What do you get the least credit for in the price, or something like that?

9. Biometrics and Privacy Concerns

Well, we've bought back—let's see—we were, I think, at a peak of 155 million shares. We're at 133 and change. We've bought back a lot of stock. All the stock that we went public with at $31, we bought back at a lower price, if you want to talk about arbitrage.

I think there's a lot they don't understand. I don't think they understand the opportunity in the travel business. I think they think it's a zero-sum game, and we've long known that biometrics were going to go mainstream. That's been our view. There's a TSA report from 2018 on its biometric roadmap. We read it, so we understand that we believe biometrics are going to be everywhere.

The question is: What kind of experience are you going to build around biometrics? Biometrics are a feature, not a product. The product is the experience. I think biometrics going mainstream is new news to people, not to us.

I don't think they necessarily believe in our enterprise identity business, and that's fine. I appreciate "show me." When we were on the buy side, we called those evidence-based investors. When you show them the evidence, they get excited.

In the meantime, we buy back stock, we have a dividend, and we just keep building. In fairness—and I laugh a little bit—I was on the buy side, and I don't think I've done a great job telling the story or on the IR side. I think we can do a better job of creating consistent metrics that we can be measured on. We have to execute, and we have to do a better job of really sharing good metrics that people can measure and value the business on.

What is the bear case on biometrics, to the extent that there is one?

I think there are quite a few, quite frankly. Privacy and data security are a big one, right? You see some folks on Capitol Hill who are negative about the government doing it. There's certainly a concern about Big Brother biometrics in lots of countries. Estonia is a leading country on biometrics, India with Aadhar, Brazil with voting, and China with biometrics.

That also has another side to it, which is concern about privacy, concern about Big Brother, and concern about data security. I think that's a big one. Our being so transparent about privacy and data security, our ambassadors sharing the story, and our having a privacy policy that is very transparent—you can control your own data and purge it at any time—has been really important. But I think that is a big one.

I think that's the biggest one, quite frankly, which is also why I like being a private company doing it. But the experience of some countries and our history would say that it can go awry.

What is the biggest thing between us today and a future where my face just does everything for me? Where I can pay with my face, and I can opt into not taking stuff out of my pockets and just move through the world and get what I want with my face—what is in between us and that?

I don't think there's a lot. Look at your iPhone, your Google phone, or Samsung, right? First, Touch ID started, I think, in 2015 or something of that nature, and then Face ID. I don't think there's a lot in between that. I think it makes perfect sense. I think you need trusted companies to do it.

But the level of fraud has gotten so high, whether it be financial fraud—you look at peer-to-peer: Who are you? Who am I? You look at telehealth: Who are you? Who am I? It's not just a document. A document is not an identity. An ID is not an identity. You need total identity integrity. You need identity with depth. You need to connect you to all the things that make you, you.

As this anonymous online world rises, which creates all sorts of problems, and as the world goes more digital, we just did this partnership with Docu Sign. Of course, pushing enter is not a secure thing when you're wiring $1 million or getting a title or deed. That doesn't make sense.

10. Expanding Clear's Vision

Your face should be it. I just think that when it makes that much sense, when it's that feasible, and when you're doing it in other areas, it's a here-and-now moment. I think as long as it's opt-in—if you want to do it, if you don't, you do it the old-fashioned way, and that's a choice. It's like my mom cashes checks at the grocery store for a really long time. I still don't think she's used an ATM card. We're working on her.

I just think it's a moment, and I think used appropriately and in a trusted way. Look at crypto. How could you get locked out of your account if you can't remember your 12-digit hash? These things just don't make sense.

Then you look at the workforce side of the house, and people are coming in the front door with fake credentials or credentials that aren't theirs—real credentials because they got them from the call center, or they did it through other scams. You have to know who people are and what they should have access to, and you need to make people's experience more frictionless in so many different ways. So I think the next 5 years will be transformative.

I would love to talk about where the business can expand to physically next. Airports—I talked about the NBA arena experience that I had more recently. What is currently happening, and where will that proliferate in the coming couple of years?

So, enterprise identity. First of all, I think there's a lot more we can do in travel. Going for an end-to-end experience, what we call home to gate, is the opportunity—whether it be a reserved parking spot or your Uber, whether it be the ambassador and our new concierge program taking you either to our automated lanes, which we're working on, or ultimately to the gate. I know when I had 3 little kids and all the suitcases, all you want is somebody to help you.

Putting together that journey is still an opportunity in travel: creating off-site screening, privatized screening—lots of opportunities to transform travel in stadiums and arenas. With the World Cup coming in a year and the Olympics coming 2 years after that, I think there are some big opportunities to enhance the experience and enhance security in stadiums.

We're partnered with the Clippers, where you can use your face for age verification to buy a beer. Steve Ballmer did build the arena of the future, and I think there's a lot to be learned from that. But why should you need anything when you go into a stadium? You're a guest, and you should have a great guest experience. There are long lines to get a hot dog, long lines to get a beer. You pass your driver's license and your credit card down. That's super private, to have it come back. None of that makes sense.

Creating better and safer experiences in sports stadiums ahead of the World Cup, but certainly around the World Cup. We have this new capability to read your passport and the e-chip. So that's both REAL ID-compliant—which is, we didn't even talk about REAL ID, which is a little bit of a hubbub out there—and both for domestic and international fans as well. We want to be welcoming for all the fans who want to come and create safer and easier experiences.

But then after that, I think health care is an extraordinary opportunity, both for workforce and for patients, to create safer, easier, more compliant, more efficient experiences at check-in, when trying to recover your account, and when getting information on digital health records.

I like to say in health care that it was professional until it became personal, when my husband was diagnosed with cancer and I was trying to get his health records. You had to go to the 4th floor to get a CD-ROM at Memorial Sloan Kettering. You then brought the CD-ROM back to your office so you could digitize it, so that you could send those scans to other hospitals, whether it be Hopkins in Baltimore, or in Israel, or Japan, or Italy.

It was so incredibly hard. I thought, this is crazy. This is his data. This is our data. It was so hard to get on the portal if I lost my password. Maddening. It's insanity. And once you've seen it, you can't unsee it.

So I think the opportunity to transform health care—for employees, it takes minutes to log on to a system because there are different systems, and they have to do it multiple times a day. Those are times that they could be helping their patients. Not to mention, you look at cyberattacks on health care data. So there are so many ways to transform the workforce and the patient experience.

11. Personal Mission and Genetic Screening

Medical bankruptcy is a big problem because you don't know what you have coverage for and you don't know what you're going to be out of pocket for. It's crazy. My husband passed away 20 months ago. I still get bills, and I'm like, “Such a bad experience on so many fronts.” And it's 20 months later.

I know that our health care system needs extraordinary help to create safer and easier experiences. To connect it all, you think about telehealth, you think about rural areas, you think about: Are you the doctor? Do you have those certifications? You think about temporary staffing. You just keep going for the opportunity set for a secure identity platform that is not a point solution but can be used in multiple ways in that industry. It's an industry that operates on pretty slim margins.

Clinical trials. I always said, I would love to put my husband's data up there, and you find us versus I go find you. It is a maddening experience to go through ClinicalTrials.gov, which has thousands of clinical trials, to see which ones could apply to you, only to find out that he had a procedure or something that then meant it couldn't apply to you.

So the opportunity for transformation, for better outcomes in a more cost-efficient way, is here and now. Those are just a few; I could keep going. Identity is foundational across so many industries. We want to make sure at CLEAR we're not boiling the ocean. So there are a few areas we're really focused on right now, but I think over time they continue to expand.

How were you able to lead through the experience with your husband and cope? How did you do it?

Sometimes I ask myself the same thing. Again, I think I have these blinders on, and I'm very focused on what's in front of me. For COVID, you've seen 9/11, right? People are like, “Well, how could that happen here?” You saw the financial downturn of 2008. You see COVID. It's like you see challenges every few years. Going back to “embrace change,” you saw the dot-com bust. Every few years, it's different.

But it was just like, “This is it. What are you doing about it?” I don't get wrapped up in “How could this be?” It just is. And shit happens in the world that you would not expect, on the positive and the negative. I believe that it can, and I believe that you need to be prepared. I seem to do best under pressure and stress, which I should probably try to flip.

I'm prepared for crisis, I guess. Also, working in the stock market, people are like, “Can you believe the market's down?” I actually sent my son a few weeks ago—he's 17—a list of stocks that, for the first time, I thought were interesting because I wanted to show him “buy low, sell high,” right? It was down during the tariffs, and everyone's freaking out. I was like, “This is the moment.” And it happens all the time. They're only happy when the stock market goes up. It's like, that's not the rule.

So I think COVID was just: head down and have your priorities, which is, first of all, lead from the front. Take your salary to zero, right, and put that money in a fund for the people. I think that sets a tone from the first day that we're going to make it through and we're here for you, and we're also going to have to make some hard decisions. Communication is key.

My husband—that was a different kettle of fish. I'm the paranoid one who was always like, “Is this lump? Do you think this is cancer? Do you think this is cancer?” And he was like, “Stop.” And then it was—but it wasn't me.

In the heat of the moment, it was fixing him, right? There's a 3% chance of survival with pancreatic cancer. So, going back to blind optimism, why can't we be one of those 3%? We can be 49 and a half years old, incredibly healthy.

There's that. There's being there for your children, which is your job, right? You have to be there for them. This isn't about you. I think I like helping other people, and so you just put your blinders on. This is the mission, and we're going to tackle it, and failure is not an option. We didn't win that one.

And then it's, “Okay, how are we going to make sure that other people with the BRCA genetic mutation are aware of it? How are we going to honor Mark's spirit and his life? How are we going to make a difference in the world?”

I send my kids off to school every day with the saying, “Make the world a better place.” I think that's all of our jobs. So I'm really now fighting for genetic screening and really wanting everyone to be genetically screened. In Finland, they screen umbilical cord blood for 75 cents when a child is born and tell them their genetic situation when they're 21. That's smart. We should be doing that here.

I'm very mission-oriented. I care about people deeply—the CLEAR people and especially my family. I feel like you have to be a difference-maker, and you've got to lead from the front. You just do.

Thanks for talking about it and telling us about it. I'm fascinated to learn more about genetic screening, and it's probably something that you mentioned before we started recording: there's this strange ignorance-is-bliss tendency that we have around our health.

Maybe you can say just one degree more about what you've learned about that and how we might change it.

I'm incredibly curious, and I was not curious about the BRCA mutation. I didn't know much about it besides having heard about it from Angelina Jolie a while ago. My husband's brother was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April 2021, and it was the first time we found out that he was BRCA positive.

So my husband was screened, and I remember he peeked his head into the study in June 2021 and said, “I'm BRCA positive.” I was like, “Okay, we're going to deal with this.” We had him screened for skin cancer, and we had a CAT scan to make sure his organs were okay and to establish a baseline, because he was 49 and a half. His brother was 8 years older. It all came back good in July 2021.

It turns out they missed it. He was diagnosed in January 2022 with stage 4 pancreatic cancer that had metastasized to his liver. What we learned about the BRCA mutation at that point was that 2.5% of Ashkenazi Jews are BRCA positive. That is 1 out of 40 people. That was a shocking statistic to me. We had no idea.

If you're genetically screened early, you can monitor it and be on top of it. There are all sorts of things you can do. It significantly raises a woman's chance of ovarian cancer and breast cancer, as well as skin cancer and pancreatic cancer, and for men, prostate cancer. Mark's dad had prostate cancer 17 years ago, maybe more than that, but nobody bothered to test him for BRCA.

Our family is on a real mission with our Warrior Mensch Foundation, in honor of my husband and his legacy, to get the word out about genetic screening. We bought 2,000 kits for our synagogue, thinking, if we just give them to you, you'll go home. All you have to do is spit and send it in. Easy.

1,300 were picked up for the High Holidays. The rabbi, who was a dear friend of my husband's—my husband was chairman of our synagogue—spoke about it. We had little flyers on everybody's seat. I mean, what else are you doing on the High Holidays? You could read it. You can also pray.

12. Leadership and Company Culture

About 320 have been turned in, so only 25% of the tests that were taken have been turned in. Of those 320 and change, 7 of them are positive, which means that the 2.5% is actually there. Of those 7 that were turned in, somebody had their sister tested and she was positive. Somebody had their kids tested and they were positive, because you have a 50% chance of passing on the BRCA mutation if you have it.

Right now, I think the count is 10 or 11 people who will be proactive in their health screening and can hopefully avoid cancer or get it really early, which is the name of the game. But for the 1,000 people who didn't turn it in, we made a video, including my son. I thought, well, if they see an incredible kid without a dad, they'll be motivated.

Our rabbi has spoken about it, but to think that 1,000 people took it—$250,000 of capital went into it—and they don't want to know, after that 2.5%, means that 25 people have it and haven't done anything about it. That's devastating. Really figuring out ways that people can save their children, save themselves, and pursue early intervention—I think genetic screening is so important, not just for cancer but for other things.

I don't think ignorance is bliss. I think people think it can't happen to them, and I understand that feeling. I used to look at people who lost someone and be like, “Oh, that is so sad. They lost someone.” Now my kids and I laugh, like, “That's us.” People look at us that way. We don't want to be victims. We want to be changemakers.

I have this question I did not expect to ask. What is the most powerful idea or ritual derived from your religious tradition and faith?

13. Future of Technology and Identity

I would say it is 2 things. The first is the morning and night prayer that we do with our kids. I thought—and it was really Mark who led the way on that—that it was the best way to ground ourselves in the morning and to help us go to bed in the evening.

The other thing is Shabbat dinner, bringing people together on Fridays for Shabbat. When I grew up, it wasn't that much fun. It was the 4 of us at a table, but we have lots of people and lots of fun and flowing wine, and we do highs, lows, and acts of kindness.

Everyone goes around the table and talks about the best part of their week, the worst part of their week, and something nice that they did. Some people call it “happy-crappy.” That's been a great way to get our kids to talk, to share, and to share our own vulnerabilities with each other.

When my husband died, our friends all created a sign-up, and everyone hosted a Shabbat. It held my family up in a really hard time.

Incredibly beautiful and powerful. It's hard to know where to go from there. Back to biometrics—back to free cash flow. Maybe the right question is the power of relationships in leadership.

One of the things about you that interests me most is this incredible energy that you bring to the situations you're in. You've now led this business for a long time. You've led a lot of people through really hard times, and you've led them through a lot of success.

Maybe the fun way to ask it is: What do you respect most in other leaders? I'm sure you've also spent time with so many of the great leaders. What do you most respect when you see leadership in others?

I do love energy. It's what I'm drawn to: positive, big, daring energy. I love leaders who can also take that energy, stay quiet in a room, and empower others to speak.

When you went to Amazon or when you went to Apple, back then there were other incredible leaders who would share their stories. Ron Johnson was running the stores at Apple. When he spoke, he was the man. So you felt like, “God, there are so many big brains around the table.”

I love sports. I used to want to be a sports reporter. I thought Brent Musburger was all that. I worked for The Michigan Daily, but I never quite got to football. I was more on club soccer and volleyball.

I love a team: the power of a team, the joy of winning as a team. I always marvel when somebody screws up and they just help each other up. They cheer each other on. I aspired to do that as a leader.

They're tough and dedicated. They're creative. They're nonconformist. Those are the leaders that I like. And I think if you look at Ed Breen, Jeff Boyd, Bob Mylod, Jeff Bezos, Steve Jobs, and a bunch of other leaders, they're all very different.

I don't think there's a cookie-cutter way to be a leader, but I think it's authenticity and humility and big thinking and discipline and the 5 a.m. thing. I love it all, and I love that each one is different and what makes them tick.

I have a couple of questions about company building, just as a retrospective on 15 years of doing this. In terms of categories, what have you learned about hiring?

I'm not as good at it as I would like.

Oh, say more about that. I assume, historically, that everyone wants to win and that everyone's wired like you.

Yeah. Like, of course, aren't they? I have 3 kids, and I show up at the field trip and don't miss a soccer game or a birthday party, but I'm also sending emails at 2 a.m. So, of course, you can make it all happen, and you want to, right?

You just want to run, and you're curious, and it's not just a job; it's a way of life. I'm often disappointed, and I go in with that bias. I don't ask the right questions because I go in with this positive bias that you want to live it and you want to do it, and the customer says, “Jump,” and you say, “How high?” And I'm not right.

That is consistently disappointing to me, and so I'm working on that. I'm attracted to people who have humble beginnings, who have overcome adversity, who don't fear failure, who want to be team players, who are straight shooters, and who are nonbureaucratic.

CLEAR's the biggest company I've ever worked at. Again, hiring those people has been a great success, but I need to work on my bias that everyone wants to do it my way.

I'm also on the Home Depot board, and I have learned so much about growing people internally from Home Depot. I've learned from great leaders—incredible leaders—and an incredible company. They grow people internally in the most magnificent way. They take talent development really seriously, and so I've learned a lot from that.

We have great success stories at CLEAR of people who have been here 8 and 10 years in a 15-year-old company, started in one place, had 5 different jobs, and are significant leaders at CLEAR. I love those stories, but people are motivated by very different things, and you have to understand their motivation and their incentives and then where they fit in the organization. You don't want everyone like me.

Do you have a theory as to why more people aren't wired in this way? I don't know how to describe it—a “this is not a drill” type attitude toward life. Do you have a theory as to why, or were you always like this? Did you wake up, or was there a moment or a precipitating thing?

Like, “I know no other way.” I don't understand why others aren't like this. You just don't get why others are not like this.

I don't get it. My kids don't get it. Happily, they're all wired like Mark and me. Life is for the living. This is a great country. I have a lot of gratitude.

I didn't start with much of anything. My first job, my salary was $24,000 a year. My sister was FedExing me cash because I didn't have enough to pay my bills. So I don't know any other way.

I used to watch *The Last Lecture* by Randy Pausch, and he talks about Tigger and Eeyore. On one of my anniversaries, my husband bought me a Tigger stuffed animal, and it's energy, positivity—be Tigger. Who wants to be around Eeyore? Yeah, life is full of challenges. Life is full of disappointments. I've experienced more than my fair share, and I have gratitude and optimism.

I also think when you see the other side, this is it. So live your best life and make a difference for others and pay it forward. Be a changemaker. I don't know any other way, and I don't understand others who don't.

Nothing gets me more energized than someone who cares and loves the thing they're building so deeply. James Dyson was just making the rounds on the internet for an 8-minute keynote. He's 70 or 80 years old. There's something beautiful about the marketing advantage that comes just from that, just from the passion that oozes off these people creating these things.

And I get that from you. So that's part of the answer: just care deeply and love the thing that you're building. What else have you learned about marketing? Since you're running a consumer subscription business, you have to reach a lot of people. What are the good and bad lessons that you've learned about what to do and not to do in marketing?

It's interesting. I would say the same thing for genetic testing: your biggest competitor is inertia. Getting people to do anything, to move, is hard. Again, the test was free. All you had to do was spit. Not hard.

Not hard.

So hard. Save your life. Save your kids' life. Really freaking hard.

Inertia is really a tough thing to overcome. So trying to incent people to move and to do things takes a little bit of time. You have to cut through the noise. I do think having humans bring it to life, like we did with our ambassadors, is powerful, but word of mouth is powerful.

It's also a fragile world we live in. A fund manager used to say, "It's the staircase up and the elevator down," right? And we've experienced that, right? Somebody tweets something negative—it's one person's opinion in a moment in time, it goes viral, and that's the story. So it's fragile.

I think I could do a better job, quite frankly. I think I was saying before that, on the investor front, we need to share our story, tell our story, and humanize our story. I certainly think we have opportunities on that, but it is hard and it is fragile. I also think you live in a consumer world of "What have you done for me lately?"

It's like, I used to say with Nike, they changed the game. There used to be one sneaker every year, and then they started speeding up innovation, and it was, "What's the new sneaker?" Consumers want to be surprised and delighted all the time, often. It's like, "What have you done for me lately?"

Living in that world, you have to be launching features and products. You have to have an accelerated product roadmap. You have to talk about it. I think Uber and Airbnb have done a really good job of having 2 launch points a year to talk about their products and innovation. We just sort of put it out there.

Somebody was saying the other day, like the Heavenly Bed that I think Westin did, right? They did some event in Times Square, and it was a big deal. They said, "We have better beds in some of our hotels, but we didn't tell anybody." You've got to capture people's attention, and you've got to surprise and delight them. You also have to apologize when you do wrong and make it right.

Anything you've learned about investors that's interesting to you, being a company rather than a colleague?

Sometimes I'm surprised at the lack of big-picture questions. Really, we're right here. I'm like, well, the long term is made up of a bunch of near terms, but I feel like you would want to understand the long term to understand how the near term fits into it.

There's a lack of questions on free cash flow and how we spend the free cash flow. I don't even know that anyone looks at the cash on the balance sheet. People tell me that I wouldn't understand how people invest today because there's all these pods and quants, and that wasn't there when I left 15 years ago.

I was a value-oriented investor, which means different businesses have different return and growth characteristics and should be valued accordingly. That's how I looked at it. So I thought Apple, when we bought it for $14 with, I think, $9 a share of cash on the balance sheet, was a value stock.

14. The Kindest Thing Anyone’s Ever Done For Caryn

The Street thought they could earn 60 cents, and I thought they could earn a dollar. And then from there, here's where we go. Apparently, that doesn't happen as much. But I still think that long-term, value-oriented investing is the thing that yields the greatest fruit.

I had the pleasure of sitting with Charlie Munger 2 years ago in his backyard, and he's mesmerizing, right? I believe that that is how you create long-term value.

What most stood out from that day? What did he say that most—

Probably the fact that he still lived in that house. He was just in his backyard. His grandchild was in the house. The stories that he would tell, the crispness of his mind, his humor, and his humility—for someone with that kind of storied success. He signed his *Poor Charlie's Almanack*.

I think it was his humility and his curiosity: "Tell me about your company, right? Tell me about what you think biometrics can do. What can the margins be? What's the total market? Could it go global?" He was just grounded in basics. And he was funny. I felt lucky.

I guess I want to ask the same question. 2 more questions for you. The first is, tell us about your company. Where could this go? If you really put your dreamer hat on, what happens in the next 10 years for and because of CLEAR?

I think the world is safer and more frictionless for consumers and for enterprises. I think that we should have triple-digit members on the platform using it for various use cases.

That contextual identity is really powerful, and identity with depth—what we call Total Identity Integrity—is unlocking all sorts of experiences. You could actually leave your home with nothing, not even a phone, and be able to really transact in the world. That makes companies more compliant, makes costs more efficient, drives automation, reduces stress, delights people, and makes everyone more productive.

I think so much of what we have in this world is because we don't trust each other. I think identity is about building trust physically and digitally.

So, both in the U.S. and outside the U.S. for CLEAR, what part of the next 10 years for you personally gets you the most excited? You're going to be leading from the front. Which aspect is the most energizing?

Making CLEAR's vision a reality with awesome team members. We're spending a lot of time on enterprise leadership and "one team, one dream." That is very energizing: working with really smart, dedicated, motivated, high-integrity, creative people who all come together with different skill sets. I think that's awesome.

And then I get excited about both the art of the possible with travel, because I think travel is going to continue to boom and we are really going to start to unlock innovation to transform it, and enterprise identity. I think the way you apply for a job and then onboard for a job and then reset your password and get onto your computer and transact is going to be transformed.

I think that is a really important need in a world where cybersecurity challenges have risen significantly. So I get excited about the people that I'm doing it with, and the fact that then I can be open to doing other things. I don't have to be sending the emails and talking to the guy about his grandmother. I can do more.

I thought of one more. What is happening in the world in the next couple of years that most opens us up to innovation that entrepreneurs could take advantage of and make us better as a country?

I think the World Cup is a real forcing function for our country, and it's only 1 year away. It was in Doha last time, in the Middle East. I think the opportunity to bring it to the cities in the U.S—major cities in the U.S., L.A., New York, Atlanta, Miami—is huge, and that creates a real need in travel.

It creates a real need in sports stadiums and ticketing to make experiences safer and easier. I think we want to be a showcase for the world on what we can do, how we can entertain, and how we can drive security for the World Cup.

Then, 2 years later, it's the Olympics in L.A., which just had these incredible fires. How we drive mobility and security and hospitality in L.A. for the Olympics, I do not think is any easy feat. I think it will require real leadership and innovation.

I think those are forcing functions. You need forcing functions to galvanize people and say, "We have to make it by this date." Not to mention the 250th birthday of the United States, which comes at the same time.

I think that we have not moved fast enough on innovation in this country. I think we need reasons and pushes to move faster, to drive private-sector innovation and private-sector capital. I think it aligns with the needs right now, and I think those will really create opportunities for great companies.

I think you're right. I think we're lucky to have people like you driving this innovation. I find you to be just a total force of nature, and this is a total blast and a privilege.

When I do these, I ask everyone the same traditional closing question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you?

Probably the letters that my husband left me with.

Beautiful. Thank you so much for your time.

Thank you.