Carlos Korten: Lessons Learned From Bindle’s Health Pass

In this episode, we chat with Carlos Korten, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Bindle Systems. Bindle built one of the largest private-sector deployments of decentralized identity in the USA, and Carlos shares tons of stories from the trenches of getting hundreds of thousands of consumers on board.
We dive in to the go-to-market strategies Bindle employed, including how they sold directly to verifiers, and how if they could do it over again, Carlos would focus even more narrowly on verifiers. We talk about their business model and what they learned about making money with verifiable credentials. And we talk about some of Carlos’ hard-earned lessons that he recommends to anyone building an IDtech product.
From discussing the founding of Bindle, its journey through the pandemic, and then the decision to pivot away from a COVID product, Carlos and Riley’s discussion makes for an engaging episode.
To contact Carlos or to learn more about Bindle’s current focus, reach out to carlos@bindlesystems.com.
Reach out to Riley (@rileyphughes) and Trinsic (@trinsic_id) on Twitter. We’d love to hear from you.

Full Transcript

Transcript lightly edited for clarity.

Riley Hughes: Welcome to the Future of Identity podcast, where we talk to the people building the identity tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder of Trinsic, and we build infrastructure for launching awesome identity products. In this episode, I chat with Carlos Corton, co-founder and chief product officer of Bindle Systems. Bindle built one of the largest private sector deployments of decentralized identity that I’m aware of in the United States, and Carlos shares tons of stories from the trenches of getting hundreds of thousands of consumers on board. We dive into the go-to-market strategies they employed, including how they sold directly to verifiers and how if he could do it over again, he’d focus even more narrowly on selling directly to verifiers. We talk about their business model and what they learned about making money with verifiable credentials. And we talk about some of Carlos’s hard-earned lessons that he recommends to anyone building an identity tech product.

Riley Hughes: But most of all, I really just enjoyed hearing their story, from the founding of Bindle through the pandemic, the deployment, and their decision to pivot away from a COVID product. I was engaged the whole time. I hope you enjoy this episode as much as I did. And one more thing before we jump into the episode, I’ve been getting some great feedback on the podcast recently. If this episode is useful, please share it with a friend or colleague. We don’t do a lot of self-promotion or ads or anything, so spreading the word is really the best way to signal to us that this content is valuable and that we should keep doing it. I’m always open to feedback as well, so if we can make the podcast better or if you know of a guest that we should have on, I would love to hear from you. Thanks so much in advance, and with that out of the way, I hope that you enjoy my conversation with Carlos. Carlos, welcome.

Carlos Korten: Thank you, Riley. Great to be here.

Riley Hughes: So Bindle built an ID tech product, and you executed really well in the middle of the pandemic. And I know that now you’re working on a handful of other things, but I thought it would be interesting to tell the story of the Health Pass product, which from my perspective seemed to be one of the most well-adopted and best executing Health Pass products of that era. And I thought it’d be interesting to just dive in from the beginning, talk about how it went, how it ended, and what insights we could pull out along the way.

Carlos Korten: Yeah, I’d love to talk about it. Backstory to Bindle Systems is I’m the CEO and president of Passing and Hudson, which is a business incubator. And we’d started putting R&D time into digital identity in like a 2016 and 2017 type of a time frame, but we were looking for a commercial application. And it remains a kind of elusive thing for anyone in the SSI space to figure out how do you make money off this type of an infrastructure. I think the philosophy is really strong, but in terms of like how do you actually turn this into a business, really tricky. And then the pandemic hit, and you’ll remember the months when everyone was wondering how to reopen the economy and how are people going to travel again and how are people going back to the theater and how are people going to go to school and how are people going to do that in a way that’s privacy preserving and respectful of civil liberties and things like that. There was a real push and pull and a lot of social stress. And even before the vaccine was deployed, there were already efforts to reopen the economy.

Carlos Korten: One of the things that we used as a milestone is what would it take to reopen Broadway in a COVID era? And there are a bunch of companies that will cease to exist unless the economy is reopened in some way. So the founding team was like, hey, this is the perfect opportunity for us to inject self-sovereign identity into the world. What we liked is that the pandemic was a complete blue ocean space. There’s just no incumbency. There were no expectations. Everyone was just grasping for solutions. So that lends itself really well to a startup. We recruited a CEO from Samsung Global Ventures, and then we had co-founders from Amex and from Time Warner. And we used the know-how that we had put into identity from Passage and Hudson, and then put that into our version one of our COVID product. And we were alive within a couple months. At our peak, we had about 350,000 downloads and 400 revenue clients. We congratulated ourselves that, hey, this is the biggest SSI deployment, privately held deployment in the U.S. That was true then. I think it may still be true. I’m not sure.

Carlos Korten: And it wasn’t until Omicron, when the virus took a less lethal turn, and then the government in the U.S. started rolling back a lot of the restrictions on entering public spaces and things like that. The product just didn’t have a purpose anymore.

Riley Hughes: What was the product? You said you had 350,000 downloads. I’m assuming that refers to end users who’ve downloaded a wallet app of some sort. What did that journey look like for a user?

Carlos Korten: The way that would work is, let’s take Chicago Symphony as an example. They were in the market for a COVID solution so that they could invite their customers to re-enter a public space and feel safe. So it was very much about the perception of safety and feeling like they’re being socially responsible. The way that would work is we would run co-branding with Chicago Symphony and do awareness campaigns. So, like, congratulations on your tickets to the Chicago Symphony, and just realize that Chicago Symphony uses Bindle technology as its COVID solution. And here’s what you need to do: you need to download the app. And then you need to make some self-attestations about your infection, how you feel, your state of vaccination. And some of that was self-tested, and then some of it was verified credentials issued by medical facilities that were doing vaccinations. We were actually dealing with vaccine manufacturers themselves and receiving verified credentials from the manufacturers. So the credentials could come from different places, and then we left it to the client.

Carlos Korten: in this case Chicago Symphony, to decide: will they accept a self-attestation that someone was vaccinated, or do they need something issued by CVS or issued by a medical center or a clinic? That was kind of our base product. We had struck commercial agreements with testing facilities or companies that could do on-site testing. And so you could actually get on-site tested and then receive a verified credential from the on-site test, and then that would actually go into your wallet and then it would show up kind of magically in your mobile app, like, Oh, here’s my credential. What you show to the screening agent at the usher or the health security person at the client site was a QR code. It was a zero-knowledge proof, so to speak, right? So it’s stripped of all private data, like medical data and that kind of stuff. Most of our clients had compound conditions, like either need to be vaccinated or you need to have had the disease and have recovered within a certain time period, or you need to have taken this questionnaire, make self-attestations or whatever.

Carlos Korten: We were very flexible because opinions were all over the place in terms of what is responsible. And then some venues where people are tightly packed would have different risk profiles, like retirement homes would have very strict requirements, and then open-air public spaces would have much looser requirements. That was all just rules-based in our application, and the clients could say, Hey, listen, it’s got to be Moderna or not. We’re willing to take a self-attestation or a photograph of a CDC card. It was a little bit like roll your own, is the way that played out from a client management perspective.

Riley Hughes: Sounds like you’d been doing R&D in this space for a little while. You sort of knew the identity domain, and you had a team assembled to tackle it. The pandemic hits, and it becomes clear that the world needs a solution to this problem. People want to go back to life as it was, and although that maybe wasn’t in the cards completely, people were clamoring for anything to get a little bit closer to that. So it seemed like the perfect opportunity. How did you determine where to start? How did you determine how that go-to-market pattern would look, and where did you end up getting traction that surprised you?

Carlos Korten: We cast a very wide net. We started our initial outbound sales focused on industries that we felt had some sort of existential crisis, that their very existence was threatened by the pandemic. And so we went into theaters and live events. We got really early traction with live events in the summer of, geez, what was that, 2020, I think. We had the Grateful Dead and the Dead & Co touring group. It was one of our very first clients, and most of those are open-air concerts. And Bindle was basically an adjunct to their health security strategy. And basically they had a Bindle fast path, right? So, like, if you download Bindle and you load your credentials, here’s a fast path to get in. And for everyone else that has CDC cards or however else that they wanted to demonstrate that they’re health secure, that they would go through kind of the regular commercial lines. We had really interesting take-up with film crews, like football games, basketball games. The crew that was actually doing the recording. would need to be able to demonstrate that they were COVID compliant.

Carlos Korten: And this was still in the era of masking and bubbles and stuff like that. I know the NBA had a bubble that they were playing games, but it was in a very regulated and gated kind of a way. And then we were doing credentials for the crew that was doing the audio and the video and doing the production. So our strategy was to focus on institutions that had a critical need, and then wherever we got early traction, we would double down and try and sell more of those. So we had a number of universities where they want to fill the stands, but then also they want COVID credentials for the referees and the umpires and for the players themselves, and then also for the janitorial staff that’s cleaning the facilities, stuff like that. And each of those groups has their own screening criteria. So the student body had different criteria than the athletes themselves. If you’re a student athlete, you need to have been tested within the last week, and if you were a student, the requirements were less stringent. There wasn’t consensus. There wasn’t a mandate, a federal mandate.

Carlos Korten: It was a little bit like jurisdictionally and regionally, and then even at the level of a board of directors. My board of directors says that we have to do this, and then we would implement a policy that kind of conformed to that.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. As I’ve seen ID tech products launch and companies try to create ecosystems, I’ve seen two approaches. One is the kind of cast a wide net, spray and pray, see what gets traction, which obviously has the advantages of, like, nobody knows a priori where things will take off. On the other hand, there’s advantages to building where there’s overlap. Where there’s one user who can download the Bindle app once and use it at multiple places, for example. You might want to call these clusters or heat maps or something like that, where you can get subsets of people who have overlap. And generally that works better when you are narrowing in or doubling down on a specific thing versus going wide. So how did you balance those two things? Did you find that there was a greater uptick of adoption when people could reuse the app in multiple places, or did it not really matter? Were people just fine to download it once for the Chicago Symphony and then just delete the app afterward and never use it again? What did you learn from that?

Carlos Korten: That’s a great question. So what we found was in our initial deployments, in just getting off the ground, that it was going to be single client. So it was the Chicago Symphony, and most of those customers had never downloaded Bindle before. There wasn’t the expectation of massive reuse. But what ended up happening was that within a community, call it an industry group, we kind of went viral within the symphony orchestra space. And it turns out that all the managers of symphony orchestras across the nation, they all talk to each other about what are you doing about COVID credentials, and we started getting buzz within that circle. So we started picking up orchestras and symphonies in other cities as well. The closest we got to geographic density, where we felt like we had a path to consumer reuse, was in Indianapolis. And I give credit to the institutional leaders in Indianapolis.

Carlos Korten: They kind of knew of each other, and they kind of self-organized to say, Hey, listen, we’re going to use Bindle, and this is like their artistic institutions, like museums and then also sports teams and things like that. And they started self-organizing to say, Hey, listen, this works even better if we all agree to use the same platform, the same technology. And so we started hosting a couple of informational sessions about Bindle technology with a cross section of business and institutional leaders from Indianapolis, and there was something that was building there. And it never quite came to fruition because after Omicron, everything kind of died down and people found other solutions. But I think if the pandemic had persisted or become more lethal, I think that we would have seen something early on in cities like Indianapolis, maybe in Chicago and D.C. as well. We were getting interesting kind of buzz and traction, and that would have been the first place where I felt like we’d gone from client engagement to geographic density, which is more of a network effect.

Carlos Korten: But in the time that we were operating, we hadn’t quite gotten to a place where we were seeing the type of reuse that you would want to see out of a persistent and sticky network.

Riley Hughes: It sounds like you’re saying that that group in Indianapolis came together almost of their own volition. Is that right, or did you do something intentionally to bring that group together, and did you try to foster it with events or some other kind of marketing?

Carlos Korten: We didn’t market it. They were bringing it to us. And so in biz dev and sales, we were just having high-quality conversations with people who are decision makers, and it was open and transparent and very serious conversations about what’s it going to take and how do we get over adoption concerns and things like that. Our clients were bringing as much innovation to the conversation as we were. And I give our partnership and sales team a lot of credit for cultivating a context and like-minded partnerships to foster that kind of dialogue. And I would say if Indianapolis had taken off, then I think we are seeing the makings of that in San Diego, in D.C., and some of the university towns where we were adopted by the university. We were internally thinking about, hey, listen, now that we have Dartmouth on tap and the Dartmouth student body is going to be carrying our technology around, why don’t we go do sales in and around the Dartmouth area and maybe onboard clients that way?

Riley Hughes: When you’re talking about individuals downloading the application, a lot of times with the intention of using it at one place and not necessarily reusing it in a lot of places, it almost sounds like there doesn’t really exist a super strong chicken-and-egg problem like exists in other places. It sounds like you were able to sell to a relying party or a verifier a solution that solved their need. You offered a solution for the other sides of the network, but that you were able to sell directly to the verifier. Is that the case, or is the chicken-and-egg problem more than meets the eye in this case?

Carlos Korten: We turned our back on a couple of vectors, like return to work, where employer has different needs. We actually said, we’re going to focus on these open venues, and we’re going to focus on theaters, and we’re going to focus on basketball games and that type of thing. So we picked our space and then just realized that, hey, listen, it’ll be enough for a consumer to download the app just to get into the Grateful Dead show as a one-off. And if we get them a second time, that would be nice, but that wasn’t really our strategy. But internally, we talk about flip the switch, right, which is like, hey, if you sign enough of these one-offs, then at some point you can flip the switch and then talk directly to the customer because they’ve got a relationship with so many Bindle clients that now we can talk to them as Bindle as opposed to talking to them as the Chicago Symphony.

Carlos Korten: And I think if we had played it out, I think that’s the way things would have emerged, is that people would have become familiar with Bindle technology through the Chicago Symphony or through the White House Correspondents’ Dinner and some of these events that we managed, and then maybe be pleasantly surprised when the professional conference that they’re attending actually is using Bindle, and they’re like, oh, I already have that app installed, and it already has credentials in it. You know, selling Bindle was just too hard to start as the persistent brand. I had mentioned we had a whole Broadway strategy, which was like, hey, let’s get the hotels and the theaters and the bars and the restaurants and get geographic density and try and sell Bindle into the entire community. And we just found that was actually a very heavy lift. From outside, it was hard to build that type of community adoption. Where we were seeing it happen, like the Indianapolis example that I was sharing, it was coming from them as much as it was coming from us.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, to a certain extent, founders or product leaders can sort of will their products into existence, but I think that a lot of times we make the mistake of looking at something too, like, top down and thinking, ‘Oh, we need to have this ecosystem exist, and that ecosystem will have all these players—the hotels, the bars, the whatever—and then we try to go top down and almost design the ecosystem we think needs to exist, as opposed to solving a problem for a customer first and then watching the emergent ecosystem that emerges from that.’ And it seems like that was the more successful strategy for you.

Carlos Korten: I think that’s exactly right. My own tendency is to jump to the end state. It’s like, what does it look like at maturity? And that’s easy to get excited about because where you have ubiquity on all sides, then the value story is really clear. But we had to peel it back to the first iteration where you’ve got no adoption on any side. Like, what is the one bit of viable commercial opportunity? And we found that, and then we were starting to parse into, like, how do you go from individual sales to this type of community sales? I think that that would have worked. I think if the pandemic had continued, that we would have started to see community-wide adoption of the tech. And using the singleton experiences as evidence, as proof, to say, ‘Hey, Chicago Symphony has been using us for months, and this will work more generally for museums and for art studios and other things in the community.’ We had really interesting traction in the art community, and again, I attributed to the whispering campaigns that those communities have amongst themselves.

Carlos Korten: Once we penetrated into an industry vertical, then the industry kind of discovered us, and then we were getting inbounds from— Those commercial players. So I think when we do it again, we keep looking at the model where we win clients, and then they drag along their customer base, and then we convert individual clients into clusters that then give us community leverage, and then flip that into, you know, consumer penetration.

Riley Hughes: You know, there’s a lot of ways that different people try to measure product-market fit, which is what every business needs to get its product up off the ground. Some have these quantitative measures, and others have these surveys that try to get at it. And I heard one person say, you know what, the only thing that really matters is, is it spreading by word of mouth? If you have something that people really love, it will spread by word of mouth. I find it interesting, Carlos, that we are talking a lot about the verifiers when I’m thinking back to the pandemic. I remember people talking about, just go out and get access to the state vaccine database, or just go work with Quest or the hospitals or the testing facilities and go get your penetration via that way, right? Because the consumer is getting a test, they’re getting a vaccine, they’re getting whatever, and if you could just give them a credential alongside it, wouldn’t that be great? I mean, correct me if I’m wrong, it doesn’t sound like that was your strategy.

Carlos Korten: We tried going to the issuers initially and talked to a bunch of them, including some of the clinics that were doing mass vaccinations and stuff like that, and even some of the state and federal agencies that were doing it. One point of observation is the vaccine data nationally is fractured and very difficult to get, and there wasn’t a really clean data signal on vaccinations. We were not the only company that was trying to get that data signal, and we just didn’t have the time to wait for that infrastructure to fall into place. So we started going into more private channels to try and find issuer signals, even to the level of the private individuals. So the nurse practitioner who performed the vaccination, if we could get an attestation from that individual that they just vaccinated someone and then use that, like, we are going down those channels. It turns out some data signals we just couldn’t get. Others, it was kind of contingent on, hey, could we create some sort of economic incentive for them to participate?

Carlos Korten: And then those conversations usually ended with, how many customers do you have and how many verifiers do you have listed? And as, you know, especially in our early days, we’re like, we got none. And then some of these were regional health medical clinic-type institutions, and they’re like, well, what’s your density in the New Jersey area, and what’s your density in the Southern California area? We just couldn’t demonstrate density, so they would kind of lose interest because there was a non-zero tech lift for them to start issuing these credentials. And then in the end, it turns out that the verifiers didn’t really need to get all the way back to the system of record. The paper competition that we were up against was just show your CDC card. So that was the baseline, which is like, if you have a CDC card and you’ve been vaccinated, just show the card. The bouncers don’t even really read the content. They just glance at it. And so the sophistication of the next best alternative was really low.

Carlos Korten: And so we’re competing with paper, and paper is super convenient, easy to forge, but the verifiers are kind of okay with that. So in the end, we spent less time getting right to the source of the best optimal verified credential issuer, and then we started relying more on private attestations as a verified credential, which is like, I assert that I’ve been vaccinated, or I assert that I’ve recovered from this disease, and this is the date of my recovery. And most of our clients at the time were comfortable or satisfied with those types of assertions. For the ones that weren’t, they would usually try and do some sort of closed loop vaccination or testing regime. So where they would be their own issuers of credentials. You’d have to be tested on site. They would issue the credential. and then they would scan the credential or a derivative of the credential.

Riley Hughes: So do you think you would do anything differently if you could go back with the knowledge that you have now about the go-to-market? Would you just completely ignore the issuance side, or do you think that you would do some other things on the verifier side to build more density so that you could convince the issuance side? Would you bring some other arguments to bear to try to move that forward, or do you think that it really just played out the way that it was destined to and that it wouldn’t have really gone differently if you could do it over again ten times?

Carlos Korten: I think we spent too much time chasing the issuer side. And I’m of the mindset that uptake will come from the verifier side, and that we’re being too pure about the systems of record and the source of these data signals, and that in initial iterations, you could do with much less assurance in data quality. I would spend much more time on the verifier side, and to the point where our product was trying to be a generic product for all COVID use cases, and we didn’t want to over-specify our product to any industry. If I had to do it again, I might build some of that customization to build the verifier adoption and get deeper into the specifics of some of those industries just to build scale, and then use the scale as evidence of adoption to go back to the issuer side to say, Hey, by the way, now we got tens of thousands of clients in the following industries, and they all need COVID credentials and they want higher-quality COVID data. So now we have an economic model with scale that could unlock the issuing side.

Riley Hughes: I’m curious to dig in a little bit on the business model. I think that this is an area where there’s not a lot of data out there. A lot of people don’t share exactly how they charge or who they charge or why. And yet it’s one of the most kind of important and under-validated elements of the entire reusable ID space. So I’m curious, you mentioned you had 400 paying clients. How did you charge them? How did they pay?

Carlos Korten: To be fair, we kept changing our pricing model because at some points we thought we were overcharging or undercharging. Every time we lost a client on price or ostensibly on price, we’re like, Oh, we’re charging too much. And then we would have a lot of soul searching in terms of, hey, do we want to suppress adoption for revenue? I think the honest answer is I don’t think we ever really nailed the economic model. We knew the verifiers were motivated to pay, and they almost at times seemed price insensitive, and that the issuers needed economic motive to participate. Our intention was always that we would collect from the verifiers and we would distribute some portion of that revenue to the issuers who had minted certificates that went into admission to these events. And still believe that that model is true. We never brought it to realization. So on the verifier side, we started with a pricing model that was too complicated, that had too many tiers and it was too variable.

Carlos Korten: We should have gone to a little more of a fixed pricing model or something with very simple tiers, with a free price point and then with volume that we could earn a margin, and then have something in the economics that we could incent the issuers to participate. But then we were trying to build scale, and any kind of revenue model is a blocker to scale. So we’re like, Hey, should this all just be free? And by the way, we’re trying to do a solid for society and reopen the economy. Like, should we really be charging money for this? But if I were to do it again, I think that we would have a very expansive free segment, and then we would have like these premium products for enterprise-scale adoption. Some of the enterprises were really price insensitive, and they would have paid anything. And so we’d be fools to just give that away because we frankly needed the money. It might have been one of those things where, like, hey, listen, we’re not going to give you a pricing model. Please pay us what you think is fair.

Carlos Korten: But I think we didn’t have the courage to go to market with that type of a pricing.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. Well, that would take courage for sure. If you look across your 400 customers and you tried to take roughly sort of composite average of a per verification, were venues paying, you know, 50 cents? Were they paying $2? Were they paying $10 to verify a user?

Carlos Korten: It was like 30 cents, 50 cents, that kind of thing. We did a couple of private events that are more in the, like, wedding or birthday party kind of thing. And for those, the per scan model just didn’t work. So we’re like, hey, listen, you know, we’ll do your birthday party for a hundred bucks. And mostly that pricing was just so that we wouldn’t have to deal with prospects that weren’t serious, because we would waste a lot of time in biz dev and partnerships with people that were just kind of doing explorations. That was a drain on our resources that we really couldn’t afford. So the pricing was a little bit just to defend our sales staff.

Riley Hughes: So do you think that you had unit economics such that if the pandemic had taken a different turn, or even if it just remained the same but public opinion never shifted the way that it did, do you think you had unit economics that would have enabled you to become profitable and sustainable, or would you have kind of changes on the horizon that you would have looked to make to be more sustainable there?

Carlos Korten: Yeah, we would have changed the model. I don’t think that our pricing model that we launched with would have been our destination pricing. We are testing into our launch pricing, so to speak, but I think that over time we would have discovered the right model. And I think that— we were too inexpensive for some, and we were leaving too much money on the table, and then for others, we were overcharging. And I think we are in the process of discovering the nuance of that pricing model. And I know for a fact that there are a number of institutions that would have happily paid 10 times as much as they had paid us, and would have been glad to support us even just as a community service. Like, we believe in what you guys are doing, and so we want to overpay you.

Riley Hughes: I’m sure it was different across industries and different across use cases, perhaps even geography. And then at the same time, if you capture all of the value that you create, you don’t leave any surplus for the customer to feel warm and fuzzy inside, and it’s, you know, much less likely they’ll refer you. It’s a tricky one. I appreciate you sharing the learnings that you have here, and, you know, if you learn anything else along the way, let me know, because I’m still trying to figure this out too. Curious, one other thing I wanted to touch on is I think that because of the cold start problem inherent here and the hard work that it takes for any individual company to build up an entire network or ecosystem on their own, we saw a lot of initiatives such as the COVID Credentials Initiative, the Good Health Pass, CommonPass, the Vaccine Credential Initiative, etc. What was your participation in those? What is your take in retrospect? Do you think those helped? Did you spend enough time, too much time in those kinds of organizations?

Riley Hughes: Would they have been more effective if they would have done something different, I guess? What’s your retrospective on how those initiatives impacted your adoption at Bindle?

Carlos Korten: So we paid attention to what was going on in terms of the standard bodies were working on things, and we participated in some of them, but a lot of them felt like they were an intellectual exercise as opposed to something really practical. And so, like, we would kind of listen with one ear, but a lot of what we built was just proprietary, what it needs to be, and just to get ourselves live and functioning. And what that meant was that we ended up with a stack that was off standards, and our verified credentials didn’t look like the VC standard and stuff like that. And it was a little bit like, hey, we can’t stop and wait for that stuff to resolve itself. And that was just a matter of being pragmatic and timely. I will say that when the vaccine credential standard came out and a bunch of states started adopting this vaccine standard, that was smart card. Once that started getting adoption, what we could offer our clients in terms of footprint and data quality became much better and very quickly. And so I really give the smart card group a lot of credit for smoothing the way.

Carlos Korten: And that started to give us a global footprint too, right, because there were institutions overseas that were adopting that same design pattern. So I’d say it’s a very mixed bag. I don’t want to be too harsh, but we may have wasted some time chasing some of the standards, and then we probably disregarded standards that we probably should have been more attentive to, and then we were beneficiaries of some too. And it’s hard to know in advance which of these things is going to be important. We were constantly listening and participating and making ourselves available, but then— It was like constantly making management decisions on, are we going to wait? Are we going to act? Are we going to adopt? Are we going to ignore? And I think that’s part of the job, is to navigate that.

Riley Hughes: I think this is a really challenging one for product leaders and founders because part of your job as a leader of a product initiative, whether you’re a founder or a product leader, is to be, like, endlessly optimistic and rally the team and get everybody excited. And on the other hand, it’s part of your job to be a skeptic and a realist and try to see reality as clearly as possible and don’t drink your own Kool-Aid and try to see things for how they are, really. Sometimes it means this isn’t going to work and you should probably spend your time elsewhere, whether that means that the market just didn’t want the product, whether it means the market changed, like in our case here with COVID, with Omicron entering the picture and the virus just mutating in a way that made the product have a different impact than it did previously. When did you first know that things were going to need to change? And how did you get there?

Carlos Korten: This was the source of a lot of, I’d say, healthy debate among the founders. We disagreed on when it was time to stop. In retrospect, I think that we persisted with the COVID product for probably six months longer than we should have. We should have probably pulled the plug sooner and rolled forward sooner. But even in the scientific community, the jury was out in terms of what was the trajectory of the virus and the trajectory of the pandemic. And so if things had gotten worse or if the next permutation was incredibly lethal, then suddenly Bindle is super important again for society. And we’re like, listen, do we really want to mothball this thing? Because some of the variants that were in Southeast Asia or some of the variants that are in sub-Saharan Africa right now seem really problematic. We’re also divided in terms of revenue onset, in terms of like, hey, do we want to focus on earning revenue or do we want to focus on adoption? Initially, we were very focused on verified credentials with a lot of data provenance.

Carlos Korten: And then we shifted over time to more self-attestation, which we’re like, hey, if this is self-attested, why does it have to be a verified credential? Like, it’s super, super over-engineered for what this product is turning into. We should be able to do this with a much lighter infrastructure, and shouldn’t we pivot on that? Even if we do stay in the COVID space, is it really something that needs SSI and verified credentials? So opinions all over the place. I think that we got to a place where once the founders were unanimous, it was really easy to act. But while the founders disagreed, even amongst ourselves, it was really hard to push forward and refocus our attention. Once we mutually agreed that we needed to focus on something other than COVID, what we loved about COVID, loved, you know, so to speak, is there was a lot of blue ocean space and there was no incumbency, and society hadn’t set expectations for what responsible means and how to act. And so that’s a really great opportunity to set behavior and to set consumer expectations.

Carlos Korten: More generally now, these cases that we’re looking at, it’s very hard to find something analogous where there isn’t an incumbent process or an incumbent practice, which is much less sophisticated and much less reliable than verified credentials. Frankly, we’ve spent many months looking for the next great application for digital identity, and it’s not obvious.

Riley Hughes: There’s a lot of people out there tackling one of these other verticals that you’re talking about. And, you know, what is something that you learned that you wish you knew sooner that would be useful for these folks who are building in these areas, whether it’s tech stack you chose, whether it’s the go-to-market path you chose? I think there’s a lot of takeaways from this conversation so far, but is there anything else that you’d like to call out explicitly that would be helpful for people?

Carlos Korten: My axe to grind recently is that we do not lead our strategic conversations with identity anymore. It’s always to my prior point that, hey, focus on the verifier. What does the verifier need in all of its complexity, and embrace the complexity even if it’s beyond the horizon of identity. Just solve their problem and build the adoption. And so launch a product that is relevant to a verifier and build identity in as a necessary component. But you don’t lead with identity. I no longer believe that identity and data privacy is a winning pitch on its own. You need to lead with what is it that you’re unlocking. You’re getting customers in the door, you’re increasing sales. Like, what is it that you’re doing? And then the fact that you’re using SSI as the vehicle for that, your clients pretty much don’t care. We like to say that consumers really care about data privacy, and in the end, they really don’t care. So I really look at value independent of identity now.

Carlos Korten: And then just, you know, as a founding principle, we’re committed to the fact that we will use digital identity technology in our products, but we’re a product company and not an identity company. So I think that’s part of our pivot now, is that we’re looking for commercial solutions, and then we’re committed to making sure that identity is part of our stack as a core enabler.

Riley Hughes: Awesome. Well, those are really helpful. I tend to hear consistent things from folks who’ve been in the arena for a few years. They tend to come out with similar takeaways. And so hopefully the repetition on this podcast of some of these concepts of like, just solve a problem for somebody, you can incorporate identity into the product that you’re building, but focusing on solving the problem instead of focusing on the cool, fancy technology is something we hear a lot.

Carlos Korten: I can give you one more lesson, and this is a little bit of a soft pitch for Trinsic. So when we went and launched in COVID, like, we did everything on a full proprietary stack up until the blockchain layer. We had a blockchain implementation that wasn’t homegrown blockchain; that was Blox. But at the time, the infrastructure of the service providers out there for identity, we weren’t familiar with them and we didn’t know how to implement them, and we felt like it was still an emerging space. If we were to do it again today, we would not build our own identity layer. We would use a company like Trinsic and use the types of features and capabilities that you guys have implemented so that we could focus on the business application layer and the client engagement stuff and the pricing model and the type of stuff that we’ve been talking about, without having to worry about the different ISO standards and the different VC formats and stuff like that, and just focus ourselves on the right level of the stack. That wasn’t the case when we launched.

Carlos Korten: We felt like we had to build everything ourselves. But I think that in the time since, the marketplace has really shifted, and I think that there are really good solutions out there for identity that save a product owner like myself from having to design and implement it.

Riley Hughes: Always appreciate a soft pitch, right? So appreciate that. But really, it goes back to, I think it was Jeff Bezos or something gave a talk about what makes your beer taste better. If you’re a brewery, focus all your efforts on just what makes your beer taste better, not all the ancillary things that you could be doing. And I think honing in on, as a company, what is your unique special sauce that you’re going to bring to the marketplace? If your special sauce is inventing new crypto or implementing standards, then great. If your special sauce is solving a business problem, then focusing all your efforts there and leveraging other components where you can is really helpful. Well, I like to ask everybody as we wrap, what does the future of identity look like to you, and why does that matter for the world? You know, fast forward 10 years. How do you think the landscape looks? Maybe feel free to bring in things like AI or anything else into how you think the future will shape up and how identity fits into that.

Carlos Korten: I think identity is maybe the most important problem in society today. I attribute all the truth and journalism problems and misinformation to identity. So I think the answer is that we’re going to somehow, as a global society, need to anchor on some sort of definition of personhood, some sort of absolute truth, and how is that recorded, and how is that portable, and how is that demonstrative? And then we kind of rebuild society from that kernel. So for public services and access rights and permissions, I think all of it needs to tie back to that kernel. Now, like, what is the leading edge? I mean, that’s what everyone’s kind of hunting at. How can you begin a transformation to that end state? But I do think at some point there will be some sort of reliable identity anchor, and then everything will emanate from that. So in lending and attestations of truth and legal obligations and, like, IoT devices will have digital identities. So all of it, I feel like it’ll be a pervasive technology at deployment.

Carlos Korten: And we’re in this really awkward place now where we’re struggling with all the downside of not having an identity infrastructure as a global society. And a little bit of what needs to motivate the change is to see how bad it can get. You know, it’s kind of bad. And it doesn’t help that the institutions that are bleeding a lot of money do the identity. They’re not incented to really report it to the street, right? Because their stock price is going to tank. But you know that companies like big banks and like the ticket masters of the world, they’re bleeding losses due to identity. And when the right recipe comes along, I think that’ll massively change their industries and how we experience them as consumers. So it’s the problem of our generation, and we’re right there for it.

Riley Hughes: The problem of our generation. I love it. Yeah. Well, thanks a lot, Carlos. This has been a super duper insightful conversation, from just getting into the weeds with you about some of the details of the Health Pass stuff to the kind of a pep talk here at the end, so appreciate that. Is there anything, Carlos, that you want to plug, anything that you’re doing? If people want to work with you, where should they find you?

Carlos Korten: We’re pursuing this hunch that we want to do digital identities for AI bots and personal agents as our next vector. Again, appealing because there’s a lot of blue ocean space there. It’s very promising from a convenience and ease from a consumer perspective. And then we think that there’s a lot of economic motivation for institutions as well. And the fraud and trust issues are dead blockers, right? So these personal agents will be constrained in what they can do just based on lack of trust. So to me, it just screams identity. We’re really interested in building a coalition of like-minded people that are thinking in those terms and see if we can unpack a protocol and a platform that can embrace that. So, yeah, you can send me an email at carlos@bindlesystems.com. But very interested in having that conversation with a wide audience of smart people.

Riley Hughes: Cool. All right. Well, thanks a lot, Carlos, and thank you for listening. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out on Twitter or X at Trinsic underscore ID and me at Riley P. Hughes, and visit Trinsic if you’re interested in building the ID tech products of the future. Subscribe to get new episodes as they drop.