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

In this episode, we discuss the difference between a use case and a business case and how to bridge the gap. We also talk about the humility required to change your mind about your idea when you’re wrong. And one of the most pivotal things Timothy has changed his mind about in recent years is that blockchain isn’t needed for SSI. We close by talking about where Timothy thinks the most ripe path to verifiable credential adoption lies in the near term.

Multiple resources for SSI entrepreneurs are recommended within the episode and are listed below:

• The Cold Start Problem - Andrew Chen (Book)
• Running Lean by Ash Maurya - (Book)
• Disciplined Entrepreneurship by Bill Aulet - (Book)
• Without Their Permission by Alexis Ohanian - (Book)

To reach out to Timothy, email him at [email protected]

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

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

The main takeaway from this episode is that involving end-users in your product development is key. You’ll hear how the biggest barriers for the NHS staff passport were not technology problems but user experience and adoption problems. And as an end-user of his own product, nobody can speak better about these points than Manny. He then breaks down those learnings and how he’s applied them to adjust both the product and go-to-market approaches he’s taking at Truu.

This is an amazing opportunity for IDtech builders to shortcut the trial-and-error process of launching a product, by hearing what worked, what didn’t, and what Truu is doing about it next.

To learn more about Truu or to contact Manny, email [email protected]. Visit Truu’s website at https://www.truu.id/.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Today’s guest is Evin McMullen, co-founder and CEO of Disco.xyz.

We start and end this episode with Evin framing identity as the coolest, most interesting thing people should be working on. She paints such a compelling picture in language that’s so accessible, and she shares tips on how the rest of us can level up our messaging to attract more users as well.

We break down Disco’s product and the origin of their term of choice—the “data backpack”. We go into some of the choices they made in their journey, including how NFTs and verifiable credentials relate in web3, and how they’ve tackled the 3-sided cold-start problem most IDtech businesses face. We also spent some time talking about the factors that make now such a compelling moment in time for digital identity and IDtech product builders.

Evin is easily one of the most fun people in the digital identity world. She has such a way of taking complex things and turning them into snack-able bits of content. If you don’t come out of this episode with a new pithy way to describe digital identity, you should probably go back and listen again because there are so many useful takeaways.

To get your very first data backpack, visit app.disco.xyz. Learn more about Disco at disco.xyz, and follow Disco on Twitter @discxoxyz. Follow Evin on Twitter at @provenauthority. And feel free to join Disco's Discord community.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

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

With hundreds of thousands of users, MySudo has defied conventional wisdom that consumers won’t pay for identity services, making it among a handful of successful, sustainable IDtech businesses. Paul breaks down how they’ve succeeded by taking a practical product approach and by talking about use cases rather than features.

Our conversation naturally led to a discussion about how decentralized identity fits into their roadmap, which Paul called the biggest privacy breakthrough of the next decade. We talk about some of the opportunities and challenges in this nascent space, including navigating the complex technology landscape, how to find good problems for decentralized identity to solve first, and how their experience building what some would call a “web2” identity product is informing the way they tackle the UX of verifiable credentials.

This is a conversation that will interest anyone who has a passion for privacy and safety online and will be very insightful for anyone building a consumer identity product.

To learn more about MySudo and Anonyome Labs or to get in contact with a team member, visit https://anonyome.com/.

Download MySudo on the Apple Store. Download MySudo on Google Play.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Today’s guest is Sebastian Mellen, Co-founder and CEO of Cerebrum. His team is building an IDtech product called vID, tackling data and compliance problems in healthcare, HR systems, and even youth sports teams.

In this conversation, we cut right to some meaty topics, including some of the biggest challenges that IDtech products tend to face. Sebastian gives insight into Cerebrum’s trojan horse go-to-market strategy into large corporates, how they’ve translated self-sovereign identity language into “enterprise speak”, how they’ve addressed the chicken-and-egg problem that exists in many IDtech ecosystems, and much more.

Sebastian’s perspective on the importance of forming strategic partnerships to break into regulated industries will be super useful to other IDtech product builders.

Learn more about Cerebrum at https://www.cerebrum.com/. Reach out to Sebastian on Twitter.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

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

In this episode, Chris takes us on a journey from Lumedic’s founding, to acquisition, to innovating inside a massive health system where they truly had the ability to build an ecosystem from the ground up.

Chris shares a tremendous amount of wisdom from his three years working on thorny, multi-stakeholder problems in healthcare. He touches on the nuance of designing an economic model where all parties are aligned, and how to establish trust between a large group of stakeholders.

You’ll be fascinated to hear how close 30 millions patients were to having access to verifiable immunization records in their mobile wallets, and tens of millions of dollars of savings were on the line if they were successful. And yet, sometimes the biggest barriers are not technology barriers.

Lumedic’s story definitely needed to be told—there are so many lessons for IDtech builders in a variety of industries.

You can reach out to Chris on LinkedIn.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

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

Katrie then breaks down why Domi chose to focus on a very specific use case in the real estate vertical. A theme of this episode is focus, and that focus has led to a super deep understanding of the value propositions that Domi’s customers are willing to pay for. The answer is surprising. We’ll give you a hint—it doesn’t have to do with self-sovereignty, decentralization, or privacy. And despite that, it was fascinating to hear Katrie break down why Domi chose to build their IDtech product using self-sovereign identity anyway.

Learn more about Domi Labs at https://domilabs.io/ and on LinkedIn. Reach out to Katrie on LinkedIn.

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

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

Jeffrey then drops loads of knowledge about what he’s learned building a consumer product, from the user experience and onboarding lessons learned, to the messaging that resonates with consumers and businesses (including overcoming the baggage with the term “web3”).

Jeffrey continues with a bit of a hot take about the role of industry working groups and standards bodies, and how he prefers doing over talking. He explains how their single-minded focus on customers and product has been key to their success, and how they’ve balanced developing a great user-experience with the principles of self-sovereign identity.

Learn more about Dentity at https://www.dentity.com/ and reach out to Jeffrey (jeffrey (at) dentity.com).

Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.

Welcome to The Future of Identity. Normally, show host Riley Hughes (Co-founder & CEO of Trinsic) talks to the people building IDtech products, but the purpose of this solo episode is to introduce the purpose of the podcast.

In this short episode, Riley covers:

1. The future of identity and why it is better
2. How great products will get us there
3. Why now is the right time—IDtech is the new Fintech
4. Why the identity space needs a term like “IDtech”
5. What to expect from The Future of Identity podcast

Thank you for joining us. Make sure to subscribe to the show to get new episodes as they drop. Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id). We’d love to hear from you.