[MUSIC] >> Welcome to Category Visionaries, the show dedicated to exploring exciting visions for the future from the founders or in the front lines building it. In each episode, we'll speak with a visionary founder who's building a new category or reimagining an existing one. We'll learn about the problem they solve, how their technology works, and unpack their vision for the future. I'm your host, Brett Stapper, CEO of Frontlines Media. Now, let's dive right into today's episode. [MUSIC] >> Hey everyone and welcome back to Category Visionaries. Today we're speaking with Eli Wach, CEO and co-founder of Footprank, an automated onboarding platform that's raised $20 million in money. Eli, how are you? >> I'm doing well, Brett. Thanks for having me. >> No problem. Super excited. So as I was doing research for this interview, something under LinkedIn caught my eye and what caught my eye was that you're a stand-up comedian as a side hustle. Talk to us about what it's like as a stand-up comedian. Talk to us about what's going on inside your mind right before you go on stage. >> Honestly, what's going through my mind is I'm very excited for 10 minutes where I will not be checking slack notifications. I think it's really important to carve out time to do other things than just the day job, even though probably the founder you work non-godly amount of hours. To me, I think the important thing is just you can get to a point where you're very much tying your entire worth to the success of the company. I think it's silly and that companies are probably successful because of a lot of positive attributes of you, and you probably could apply them to a lot of things, and I've always really enjoyed making people laugh. I got in the stand-up officially because I DM a comedian and he performed the show on my roof back in COVID, and I opened for him and it went pretty well. The reason I really like to keep doing it is because I like to make people laugh when I'm not just trying to sell them a B2B SaaS product, and it's kind of a nice reminder for me that I can connect with people off Zoom, and I just think there's something really fun and beautiful of just getting up on stage and making a room full of people who you've never met before laugh over your dumb jokes about your love life or premiere breakup spots in New York City. Is that when you're like, what's your style of comedy, would you say? Probably dry. It's probably as nerdy as you'd maybe expect, even though I sadly had to retire. I had one that I loved about how I kept bringing up the grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam on dates, and it never went well. And it's a true story, and I realized that it also didn't go off for stand-ups. I'm still looking for my audience to talk about the grand Ethiopian Renaissance dam. I would say that it's composed of, like, crescendoing bits. When I talk about premiere breakup spots in New York City, I'm very passionate about getting people to break up on the intrepid, which, for those who don't know, is a retired aircraft carrier that now functions as a floating museum on the Hudson River. And I have a lot of reasons the two I'll give is that if you get broken up with your sat, if you get broken up with on an aircraft carrier, you're confused. And I think confusion is better than sorrow in that moment. And to me, I now have a growing list of people who've gone and done it there. So I like to have niche proposals, and I get a lot of joy when people take me up on my crazy ideas. That's awesome. I love it. What's your experience now? Let's dive into the topic at hand, which is book friends, everything that you're building there. Tell us, what does the company do? We're an automated onboarding platform. What that means is we give companies UX components. You can think about them as kind of like a tug-form type activity to onboard their users. That means we help them collect information, verify it. So both from a behavioral standpoint, is this information? Does it one exist in a database? Like, if you're applying to create a bank account, if you're applying to get a credit card, that company needs to verify you. So we help them do that. And what that means is we're saying, this is the data that they presented. One, is it real? Two, it's the person who's presenting it. The person who should be presenting it. And three, doesn't make sense in this time and place. So we help them do that. With information, we verify the same person who created the account as signing back in. So the jargon is that we solve KYC, know your customer. And then more broadly, for consumers, you can think about us like an Apple Pay for Identity. In that when you verify what a company uses footprint once, you will not have to fill out a form again. How do you uncover this problem? What were you doing before that position to say, "Oh, yes, this onboarding problem, it must be solved." Yeah, it's the dream of all kids, right? I was a student at Stanford during an interesting time for tech. My freshman year GDPR went into effect. And CCPA, I believe, got ratified towards the end of my freshman year. And I, for some reason, started taking law school classes about data privacy, because I found it interesting. And economics classes about data privacy. And I came to this weird conclusion that I don't think the laws were doing anything all that helpful. I think that data is very valuable. Targeted ads could become pernicious, but in general, I actually don't think they were as bad as made out to be. I think Apple's just really good at marketing and Facebook, because really bad at defending their marketing. And I just started getting really interested in this broad space of what would it mean if people owned their data? And spent the rest of my time in school researching that. I graduated when I worked at a venture capital fund called General Atlantic, and I got to wait a lot of our work there across security, privacy identity, and came to see a couple of things. One was that for people to own their data, they had to own their identity. But two, I kept speaking to companies rebuilding onboarding, so stitching together for five different solutions. And more broadly, every time a consumer would go and get a Robinhood account, the Coinbase account, rent an apartment, rent a car, they had to refill out this form. And that's annoying for people. There's friction involved. But I promise you, it's a lot more annoying for companies than that. The drop off impacts their human economics. And then it's really bad for both people and companies in that fraud becomes much more rampant in a world where everybody's doing this in a vacuum. And just started to come to this conclusion that there are an infinite amount of bad actors in the world. And by that, I mean, you know, me and you could take the rest of this podcast and just generate millions of fake identities. But there's a fun amount of people in this call too. And kind of said, you know, there's so many companies trying to find the needle in my haystack, what if we can build the company to harvest the hay? To me, that sounded a lot more achievable. And that's what we set up to do. Guys, you set up to do that. Talk to us about the first three to six months. What was going on? What were those conversations like? Yeah. And after fundraise, we're a seed company that fun little stanza. Yes. In hindsight, when I go back and audit my calendar, mine looks a lot less productive than my co-founder, Alex's. Often tell people that I think at the beginning, the CTO just is going to have a more important role in a way than the CEO in that they're building the core product. And you're out there trying to sell people something that just doesn't exist. I think the productive things were, look, I think enterprise sales takes time. And talking about a vision takes time and you never know who's going to go where. I remember speaking probably eight months into the company, some of it out of your time range, but eight months in, we were pitching a company. And it really struck a chord and they weren't looking to change their vendor. But then one of the people at that company, he became the head of risk, an even bigger company, four months after that. So when we were about a year old and messaged me on LinkedIn saying, hey, I haven't forgot about footprint, just starting a new job. I'd love to use you because we set up some time to talk. So I do think early moments as a CEO can feel frustrating in that you will look back and say, wow, I had 40 meetings this week and nothing actually came from it. But I think you'll see in time that's not really true. And that you're slowly planting seeds, some of which will grow. And for early stage companies, you don't need to get 100 customers your first year. You're trying to prove you can get 10. And that kind of changes maybe how you think about how well you spent the time. How long did it take you to get your first paying customer? So a year. We started the company February 2022, I feel old now. And it took essentially a year to build V1 of the product. So we say that we went live with our first customer. I would say maybe in the third possible day, we could have had a live customer. In that we have a pretty complex product and we think that there wasn't a lighter weight version of the V1. I kind of pushed back on lean startup ships something and then you'll figure it out. And maybe that's fair in some industries. I don't think you can do that with personal information. As we're seeing right now with banked out of riches, you just can't pivot with PII. But yes, answer your question. It took a year. And was the value prop that you started with the same value prop that you have today? Or what was that early value prop? Yes. So the value prop we started with was very much the reason we got our first couple of customers. And it continues to be why we get a meaningful contingent of customers. I would say at this point, we have a couple of different value props that will resonate differently. The initial one was really if you read my initial business plan back from before we started the company, it was all about bringing security and identity together. The simplified version of footprint was if you're onboarding people, you need to store their data. And if we want to make identity portable, we need to have strong security. So it was a very oversimplified version of the pitch, but the idea was, companies are onboarding people and then they have to figure out about the data. So we'll do both in one. And what we learned is that, does that resonate with every company? No, some don't care as much about security. In that security, you know you have to verify your consumers. Some companies will say, you know, we think our encryption at rest is fine. We think that they're keeping enough examples showing that it's not the case. But regardless, what we learned is that the companies that did take that seriously, one tended to be, I'd argue, smarter companies. I'm biased, but I think that they were willing to work with startups too. So whether it's companies like Yield Street or Grid that we began working with, I think they really saw that value prop of the combination of security and identity. And that's what we really continue to, when you look at how the product evolved, that's the core of it. Because we wanted to vault data, we cared a lot about front end. Because our pitch was, if you use the footprint front end, you're never touching a social security number. So we're verifying it and we're storing it. What that evolved into is us becoming, by far, the most focused company on the front end experience of onboarding. onboarding is the term that I used when you asked me what we did at the start. I said, we're an onboarding company. You would not have found that in a footprint pitch at the beginning. I think we became an onboarding company because our desire to solve security led us to solve the front end of onboarding. This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media, a podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage, and grow their own podcast. Now, if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast. I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. Now, back to today's episode. Now, just to tie this into news that's happening right now, I think it was the last few days, maybe it was a week ago, that there was a big data breach with maybe we don't want to mention their name, or if you want to mention it, you can do so. If that bank were using a tool like Footprent or a platform like Footprent, would their users have been safe from this data breach that occurred? Yes, but simply, I spoke a little bit about encryption at rest, and it's what most companies use. And the problem is that encryption at rest, my co-founder gives an analogy that that's the equivalent of you go home, like you leave an office at night, and you turn a key to lock it and you put the key under a door mat. And that's just not, most modern databases are not getting too technical. They support basic encryption at rest, where you could enable this in Postgres, MySQL, what have you, really think that's checkbox security, in that it means that when the data is at rest, and it's not in use, it's encrypted. So you would be covered if something broke into the data center, and stole the database drive right out of the machine, when data wasn't being used. The problem is that as soon as any part of your perimeter, or any part of your outside is compromised, the encryption at rest becomes useless, because the data is already encrypted. So that means that if somebody is able to get into a third party application, maybe a dashboard of yours that you're running analytics on through Rachel, we as Rachel have not, whether you're just an example, or anything else that they have a backdoor in. We also see this a lot with account recovery, where at MGM, they were kind of, a lot of the sports spending companies had data breaches back last fall, and a lot of the home loan companies had breaches this January, and healthcare companies in March, and now banks, fraudsters tend to move at segments at a time. But the issue here is that they're able to compromise these in more simple ways than you'd think. Denology we give about nitro enclaves, which is what corporate uses, is that it's a much more secure environment, whereby one only registered people can access the enclaves, so it's much more, part of this is a permissioning process. But from a security standpoint, it's understanding essentially that data will often be in use all the time. So it's making sure that the data essentially even when it's in use is almost encrypted, that you're doing most functions on it, or when it's encrypted. Denology that we would give is that if encryption at rest is putting a door key under a door mat, bookprints, nitro enclaves are you take the key, and then you go inside a loaded castle, but then you need to bring the initial home inside the moded castle to use the key. To us, it's kind of breaking apart that key from where the data is that's really important. So yes, we think that we could have prevented that. We think part of this also comes from the fact that data sharing is to me really ties back to the initial thesis and why there's so much identity theft. Quite frankly, too many people have your data that don't need your data. If you onboard to a FinTech, four different partners may have your data that you don't even know about the FinTech, their KYC provider, their partner bank, and maybe the best provider that works for the partner bank, and maybe a fifth of a regulator comes in. The way footprint sees the world is the user essentially owns the data, and those are permissioned parties who may have access to the data for specific reasons. But oftentimes, because we're connecting as ecosystems, they don't need to see it. So the FinTech doesn't need to see your social security number, because we're taking the job of proxying it to the bank. Same thing with the best provider. They don't need to see it because we're taking that job of proxying to the bank. So we think some of this comes to the idea of can we simplify the ecosystem of how many people need to actually touch this data and in part of its technology problem. Do you ever have days where you just think maybe there's no way to solve it because all of the data is out there? Like when I put my own information into how I've been pwned, I have indeed been pwned like 15 times. So now I'm kind of numb to this idea of, yep, my driver's license is out there and my social security is out there. You want to think about whatever else out there, like is it too late for some people or what are your views there? Yeah, you're spot on. I like to say we try to operate in the world of zero trust fraud, which is exactly what you said. Your identity is out there. That's why I think it's really important to not find a person in a vacuum as your identity because there could be an infinite amount of people not to be scary who have your identity. It's why I think it's more important to build the database of deduplicated identity. So what we mean by that is when the moment a second Brett shows up with your information on a different device, we know one of you has to be lying and we can start stepping both of you up to submit the utility bill for your address. Do you submit your W2? I call it a dual, jokingly, not to bring it back to colonial America. But to me, it's like, duals serve the purpose. And we're not going to give you an old musket and go to, we talk in New Jersey and take 30 paces. But to me, the way we think about it is that if we know there's going to only be one breath, we know there's only 300 million people of a certain age in America, we've shrunk the pool of who we're evaluating. So that's how we think about that. There's 10 to $15 billion a year about any company on the internet. And to me, it's tragic that as you just said, people have accepted that as part of the social contract of the internet, that there's just the risk of identities out there. Or you can pay $300 a year for life lock. I think that's outrageous. And if we're successful, you should be paying $0 for that. That should come with the internet. What about the markets that you focus on? So it sounds like there's a lot of different markets that you could go after. I see on the website, there's four core markets listed out there. How did you decide initially which market to focus on? Talk to us about that decision making. And the reason I asked is I think it's always hard for founders to decide where to focus and where to put time and energy. That's a great question. So the four markets on our website, one is banks, one is fintechs, one is real estate, and one is car auto. And how we got to those, each is maybe a bit unique, I guess that's why, possibly it's hopefully an interesting answer. Some of them seemed very obvious. If we are going to build a big company, we need to be in the banks. And there were incumbents, there's one incumbent that did a really good job with banks. And we're proud now we're two and a half years old. And if you go to different partner banks, different vast platforms, we're pretty much not the only other KYC tool approved. And that was very intentioned by us, which was, this is going to take time. Our first customer in no world is going to be a bank. There is no chance that the first customer for KYC tool is a bank. It was never going to happen. But there was no world which we would be successful if our first 100 customers were only fintech. And I think that's part of the balance that you have to think about from your go to market at the beginning, which is, yes, you're solving for your problem of when I get customers. But all the customers are pretty equal and autopilot is pretty equal. So we're now starting to see two and a half years in that pay up in a very big way with banks. That was not the case at the beginning. But it was still conversations that we really sought out. And we really wanted to learn you. Even if you're not going to be our customer for a year, what could we build in a year you want to be our customer? Probably a nice transition into out of where two of fintechs, which was one, yes, a bank is not going to be our first customer. But a YSE company probably will be in that we're going to work really quickly and solve problems for them. We think fintechs are the companies that work with banks. So the best way for us to get into banks was we work with fintechs who work with those banks and told those banks that they should work with footprint. So that was a very symbiotic relationship. Those were the early companies we really went after to us, whether it's investment platforms like composer or bloom that we thought we worked really well with or fintechs like I talked about YSE companies like trade and COBA, which were in the batch the first summer of footprint. Those all seemed like companies that really wanted to work with us and we could learn from. Now the last two buckets, real estate and auto, I would not have had those on a map when we started the company. And the reason why is that when I looked at our competitors, they didn't have logos on their website from those areas. I think what we started to see is that those were areas that did not legally have to do KYC. So if you're a bank, you need to verify somebody. If you're a apartment building and you're renting an apartment, it's at your discretion. Now we've seen a huge rise of fraud in those areas because real estate companies, auto companies have been invested the same that banks have to try to solve these issues. And we started to see there's a very opportunistic space in that these were companies willing to also take a chance on us because we were, became pretty focused on solving specifically the issues not just facing an identity verification, identity verification for cars, for apartments, because we saw it was a pretty green-filled space in a broader space where KYC is a bloodbath. There are so many companies trying to do this. So many may be an exaggeration, but they're a dozen versus the amount that we're trying to solve it for those areas were maybe three or four. We saw those as really good opportunities. What did you do or what are you doing to build trust with your customers? And what I see as a consumer, every now and then I'll sign up for something and it'll say, text this link here and take a picture of your driver's license. And I swear like 50% of the time, it doesn't work. And I just end up frustrating and a random air message. And I've walked away from companies that I was going to use and not use them because of that problem. And I'm sure these organizations are very aware of that too. It's high stakes. If they have a bad onboarding experience where they can't even get in, they're obviously never going to be a customer. So as a startup that's three years old now, what are you doing to build that trust with customers so that they know that when the consumer gets to that screen or that page, it's going to work? Great question. There are a couple answers I'd say there. From a here product perspective, it goes back to a lot of what I maybe said at the beginning here about how do we get to our product. We focus so much on the front end. And what you are described is the experience that companies really want to avoid it. It was a bad dog scan. It kept crashing. The form didn't work. And to me, I'm not surprised by that because it's tough to build good onboarding. It's tough to build good dog scanning. As weird as it sounds, it's tough to build the form to collect information. If you have a PO box, you can't pass KYC. Companies should not let you move forward there. To me, if you study the companies that came up for us, really none of them, maybe one or two, add front ends. None of them had front ends as customizable as footprint. There was always a trade-off between fraud and friction or trade-off between design and external tooling. And we've essentially built what we call components, which really eradicate this. They are invisible boxes that can overlay over the design you want, then really control the user journey. So from a pure conversion friction standpoint, that's how we solve that. And then from a trust standpoint, part of that to me comes from our background in security. We are a security company. So if you're going to be scanning a driver's license, we do think people feel a bit better knowing that if they click the pop-up to learn more, they'll say that we're first and foremost a security company. And that was always in our roots. With that said, I think trust takes time with both customers and consumers. Really good advice that I was given by Stardel, who led our Sea Ground and Index, was that your first customer is probably not going to the one that says, how can I trust you? You're so early. Because there's not a good answer. You can say you're charming. You can invite them to a stand-up show. You can set up a Slack channel and give them your phone number. But if this is somebody who doesn't want to trust that type of company, it's not really going to work. So that's the first thing that we would say. The next thing that I would say is trust with, I think, end users takes time. We even said it was plaid. They're much older. And I take for granted because I'm in fintech, I think about plaid a lot of days. But by asking people who are not as familiar, it may take a bit of jogging for them to remember that they've definitely gone through a blog flow at some point in their life. So I think you can't be naive and you can't take customer trust for granted. And what I will say is, I don't know how long it takes to build it, but I know you can lose it really, really quickly. And that's once again why we care so much about things like security. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Co, a marketing leader's best friend in these times of budget cuts and efficient growth. We help marketing leaders find, hire, vet, and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70 percent less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit global talent.co. What about the go to market strategy? What does that look like today? Yeah, we're interesting in that we are predominantly top down outbound, but the inbound we've gotten are our biggest customers. A point which I don't really say with pride, but I say with, you know, if we're having public companies come inbound to us, having open sandbox accounts and really liking the product, we've somewhat failed in not having gotten in front of them. That said, it's probably good to their products ahead of sales, given that it's a much bigger team. But to date, it has mostly been open, you know, I think in the early days, there's no formula. It's your scrappiness of getting in front of companies and delivering. I don't think as you start to get that phase of product market fit, it becomes more around just, can we generate the opportunities, knowing that you're not going to generate every opportunity back to the idea that you don't need to win every customer at the beginning, you may be able to win 10. It's kind of true for your one and maybe your two, you need to win 30 and keep the 10 from the first year. That can keep the advancing of it. We're constantly trying to get more mature, whether it was moving off of founder-led sales and bringing on people to the team, moving off my notion to rules like Apollo and HubSpot to now beginning to invest in marketing channels like LinkedIn or Google from an advertising standpoint, really trying to get more and more scientific of, "Okay, we now have enough brand recognition where can we start to understand if we invest a dollar in one of these four channels, which one will have the highest payback?" And if we know each of these channels will take X amount of time to lead to a meeting, how long does it take for one meeting to convert and then what would be the average sales size? Really trying to get out of, you know, pure founder, hand in the wind, this is where I think one that you're out to, "Okay, this is what we need to do to actually hit that goal." So that's kind of been a bit of the evolution, especially in your three. What marketing channel are you most excited about? I would say I'm optimistic about Google ads. It's not really the sexiest answer, but people go there for answers. So I do think that we've just not really spent money that AOC is a competitive search term, but I do think that there's a reason search terms are competitive and that people are searching for them. And I say that there will never be a better use of money than the day we're in. There will be a time when that's not true, but for early stage startups, we have a lean team. We try to be very responsible to runway, but even with all that said, and you can spend $1,000 to get a $50,000 customer. Take your multiple, whether it's 2024, 2022, the good use of money. So I'm excited they're in that thing I've just always shied away from, because I didn't want to do the experiments. And I'm excited to see how that turns out. Who is that persona that you're typically targeting? I would guess that if it's a financial institution, then they have a head of KYC or someone responsible for compliance. Is that the persona when you're selling to financial institutions or is it someone else? It's typically a product leader who sits in kind of fraud risk identity. That's what it typically is in that product is very closely tied in here in that you could argue that KYC is the first part of your product that a consumer interacts with. If you want to trade stocks on Robinhood, you need to verify yourself first. That's why it really becomes a strange sounds a product decision. But in full print, because of all that we do, people get looped in who would not have been looped in the past. Historically, you would not bring your CISO to a meeting with your KYC tool. There's full print you will, because we're also your security tool. Got it. Makes a lot of sense. Today, what do you think spend the most important go-to-market decision that you've made? I'm a huge fan of Slack Connect, and I create Slack Connect channels after every first call. And I add, depending on the reception, I'll just start adding people from our engineering team, and we will start essentially async integrating you. Sounds small, but big companies don't do that, and the co-founders of big companies will not reply to messages every hour of the day. And I think those are the things that you do to gain trust. So, I'm a huge fan of Slack Connect, and I do think it is the best tool. What does your Slack look like? Is it like 400 channels? What does it look like? It may have. Yeah. It's grouped into customers, even now that our customers have really grown, I'm beginning to even like sub-bucket those, and in different tiers of kind of prospects in terms of what stage they're at. And then I do have a dormant channel, and then I have essentially recurring calendar invites to myself to go through each bucket and message them at different cadences. So, there's actually a process to it. The other thing I'll say is I turn on LinkedIn notifications for most prospects, and I like and comment on all of your stuff. And that also adds up in my opinions. Yeah, I need to figure out something to tame my Slack chaos. We have about 50 clients, so we have an internal channel for all clients, and then we also do a Slack Connect with the clients. So, just there, we're at like over 100 channels, and that's not counting all the other internal ones. So, got to figure out something there. It doesn't seem sustainable. So, if you do figure out a good way to tame that, please let me know. I'm taking a call next week with a company that claims they help you, like sift through your Slack support. So, I'll email you if it's good. So, that's perfect. Now, let's talk a little bit about fundraising. So, as I mentioned there, 20 million to date has been raised. What have you learned about fundraising throughout this journey? The biggest thing I say is if you don't believe in yourself, nobody will. It's why I really hate the idea of encouraging people just to start a company to start a company, because I don't think that's true belief in an idea, and it will get tested. And if your initial reason for certain the company was that a bunch of VCs told you to start a company and figure stuff out, I don't think it's going to go well. So, that's probably my controversial opinion on starting companies we get with, but I really stand by it in that VCs have a diversified portfolio, and you are not a diversified portfolio. So, your life is more valuable than that. In terms of fundraising, I think it's true you're painting a picture, and you have to accept that not everybody has the context you have, and that nobody has spent the amount of time you've spent with this idea, and with this company. And that's your problem to overcome. You cannot expect VCs to figure it out. VCs are really smart. They spend a lot of time in a lot more spaces than you are operating, but as a result, you need to accept that they're not going to have the depth that you have in your space. Now, I think we saw for both our student series A that the investors who let it were people who were spending time in his spaces. The shared world index was really had a deep background in security, and deep background in security being used in newer spaces, and really connected with the idea of identity security coming together. Amias and Adams at QED, Amias jokingly wrote in his blog post when they announced the raves that he had written an internal paper a couple years ago about how he never thought he'd invest in a KYC company, because he just couldn't find one with the vision that he really clicked with. And then, conversely, Adams came from Plaid, who is doing really interesting things in the identity space. There are people who nearly understood the space we're operating, but I think that that is somewhat what you need of if you have an idea, often it's going to be like founder VC fit. I'm a fan of taking VC meetings. Don't get on calls every week. I think the trapper cadence in between rounds is maybe three times a year. I think if it's just one, if not enough, I think anything more than three, you are somewhat wasting both of your times. You can ask VCs to make intros, if they don't. You don't have to take another meeting, but it's not the worst use of your time. And yeah, at the end of the day, I think you also kind of know of how ready you are to raise. And sometimes the timing isn't always perfect, but you need to really understand when that's going to be. And you have to, upon raising in a weird way, we'll remind you of why you started the company. Even if it's not going well during a moment, you will feel so backed against the wall and you will feel so strong in your conduction because that's where you need to get to, to get others to believe that it is this strange personal journey that I think will get you to reflect a lot. And you will get past impostor syndrome even by doing it. If you really are doing an idea that you believe in because you're going to remember that this is an idea that you've been so passionate about and that you really believe in. Final question. Let's zoom out three to five years into the future. What's the big picture vision look like? We want to be the identity layer to the internet. So what does that mean? I say two buckets. One is, as I said earlier, there's 10 to 15 billion dollars of identity tough to year. And we're successful at numbers should go down meaningfully. The second is dried, you know, one of the all-time syntax. Their mission is to grow the GDP of the internet. My belief is that about three percent of the internet's fraud. That's not just my belief, that's a lot of studies. Of course, successful, that number should go down. So eventually, corporate should essentially be like a blanket insurance policy against fraud on the internet. And that number goes down that creates a lot of mobility. And then lastly, you know, if you then go five to 10 years, it's back to the initial really belief that I think data, there's a lot of good that can be done with it if it's in the right hands and really putting that back in control of people. Amazing. Love it. All right, man, we're up on time. So we're going to have to wrap here. Before we do, if there's any founders that are listening in, they feel inspired, they want to fall along with their journey. Where should we send them? Yeah, we're on LinkedIn, hope print and Twitter. I post on both. I'm Eli Walks. Feel free to add me, follow me, follow the company. And yeah, I hope this was a lot of fun. Thanks for having me on, Brad. No problem at all. Cheers. This episode of Category Visionaries is brought to you by Frontline's Media, Silicon Valley's leading podcast production studio. If you're a B2B founder looking for help launching and growing your own podcast, visit frontlines.io/podcast. And for the latest episode, search for Category Visionaries on your podcast platform of choice. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you on the next episode. [Music]
