Rick Song, Co-founder & CEO @ Persona, shares the origin story of Persona & what it’s like founding a business in a highly competitive, ultra-regulated environment. He shares early-stage challenges of building an identity-based product, how his company sought to achieve micro goals alongside long-term goals, navigating the logical & emotional factors that influence taking a leap of faith, and building universality within Persona’s user network. Additionally, Rick reveals his best practices for building a scalable business, identifying what’s wrong quickly & pivoting, and how to be an execution-driven founder.

ABOUT RICK SONG

Rick Song is the CEO and co-founder of Persona, the identity infrastructure company offering businesses the building blocks to create a personalized identity verification experience for any use case. Earlier in his career, Rick noticed a fundamental problem with identity verification: providers were taking a one-size-fits-all approach that did not meet businesses' needs and consumers' expectations. In 2018, Rick co-founded Persona with CTO Charles Yeh to tackle this problem with the mission to be the identity layer of the internet. Rick and his team are working toward making the internet a safer place by providing a customized solution that takes into account user base, regulatory requirements, appetite for risk, and unique verification requirements. Persona is backed by Index Ventures and Coatue and serves a wide range of industries with customers including Square, Sonder, Brex, Gusto, Coursera, and Toast.

"The hardest thing in a startup is connecting the dots between a product and a business. There are a tremendous number of products out there. A product solves a problem and everyone has problems, but just solving a problem doesn't necessarily mean building a business and connecting the dots between these two is the most difficult thing.”

- Rick Song   

Join us at ELC Annual 2023!

ELC Annual is our flagship conference for engineering leaders. You’ll learn from experts in engineering and leadership, gain mentorship and support from like-minded professionals, expand your perspectives, build relationships across the tech industry, and leave with practical prove strategies.

Join us this August 30-31 at the Fort Mason Center in San Francisco

For tickets, head to https://sfelc.com/annual2023SHOW NOTES:

• The origin story of Persona & how it addresses identity (2:01)
• How Rick came together with his co-founder, Charles (4:56)
• Rick’s advice for future founders on sticking with an idea & the right people (6:24)
• Early-stage challenges of building an identity-based business (8:45)
• Balancing the rational & emotional aspects behind taking a leap of faith (12:30)
• The benefit of creating / achieving micro goals (15:13)
• Navigating “the valley of death” as a moat in a highly regulated industry (17:10)
• Why Persona went universal with its client base to create a general product (19:53)
• Rick’s advice for building a scalable business & identifying what’s wrong quickly (22:51)
• Recommendations for starting a business in a hyper-competitive market (25:13)
• What it looks like for a founder to be execution driven (29:21)
• Knowing someone is ready to “out-execute” their competitors (31:38)
• How to get top-tier investors in a competitive environment (34:26)
• Rapid fire questions (37:59)

LINKS AND RESOURCES

• Veritasium - A channel of science and engineering videos featuring experiments, expert interviews, cool demos, and discussions with the public about everything science.
• Mark Rober - Former NASA and Apple engineer. Current YouTuber and friend of science. CrunchLabs founder.
• Coffeezilla - Internet detective exposing scams. I uncover scams, fraudsters and fake gurus that are preying on desperate people with deceptive advertising. If you have to ask... it’s probably too good to be true.
• Wendover Productions - All about explaining how our world works. From travel, to economics, to geography, to marketing and more, every video will leave you with a little better understanding of our world.
• ponysmasher - David F. Sandberg’s YouTube channel where he covers the behind-the-scenes of filmmaking, animation, and much more.

This episode wouldn’t have been possible without the help of our incredible production team:

Patrick Gallagher - Producer & Co-Host

Jerry Li - Co-Host

Noah Olberding - Associate Producer, Audio & Video Editor https://www.linkedin.com/in/noah-olberding/

Dan Overheim - Audio Engineer, Dan’s also an avid 3D printer - https://www.bnd3d.com/

Ellie Coggins Angus - Copywriter, Check out her other work at https://elliecoggins.com/about/