Eric Starr: Verifiable Credential Adoption in Government

Today’s guest is Eric Starr, Co-founder & CEO of UltraPass ID—an IDtech product for governments.
Eric shares his story trying to solve civic problems through the political system via Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and how he ended up starting a company to reimagine how citizens interact with government.
We go through the problem caused by many government silos of personal data, why Eric landed on verifiable credentials to solve the problem, and why governments are a challenging but super important segment to target because they hold the keys to verifiable credential adoption.
Eric is convinced that solving problems for government stakeholders with real solutions, not with technological dogma, is the way verifiable credentials will be adopted.
Reach out and connect with Eric and his team at https://www.ultrapassid.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 ID tech products of tomorrow. I’m Riley Hughes, co-founder and CEO of Trinsic, and we build infrastructure for launching awesome identity products. I’m here with Eric Starr, co-founder and CEO of UltraPass ID, an ID tech product for governments. Eric shares his story trying to solve civic problems through the political system via Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign and how he ended up starting a company to reimagine how citizens interact with governments. We go through the problem caused by many government silos of personal data, why Eric landed on verifiable credentials to solve that problem, and why governments are a challenging but super important segment to target because they hold the keys to verifiable credential adoption. Eric is convinced that solving problems for government stakeholders with real solutions, not with technological dogma, is the way that verifiable credentials will be adopted.

Riley Hughes: I was super inspired by both the concrete use cases he brought to bear and his vision for the future of identity in government. With that, I hope that you enjoy the interview with Eric Starr as much as I did. Welcome, Eric.

Eric Starr: Thank you, Riley. Happy to be here.

Riley Hughes: Eric, could you give us just a quick description of what you’re building at UltraPass?

Eric Starr: Why don’t I start with a story? Because the story kind of tells the what, and I think a more colorful way, if that’s okay.

Riley Hughes: Please.

Eric Starr: My journey to UltraPass started, I’m going to say probably in March of 2020, but I want to give you a little backstory there. In the years leading up to March of 2020, I was civically engaged specifically with Andrew Yang’s presidential campaign. He and I have been friends for a long time, and when he decided to run for president, I got a call from him on a November day, and he’s like, I stepped down as CEO of Venture for America. I said, Yeah, I know. What are you going to do next? He said, I’m going to run for president. I said, Let’s do it. So many other people, when he said the same thing too, said, President of what? Right? And I was just like, Yeah, let’s go do it. He pulls out of the presidential race, and I’m like, Oh, I have all this time back. What am I going to do now? And then what happens? COVID. I was sitting in my apartment. I’m here in New York City, and I had the news on, and on TV you saw New Yorkers. They were crying, literally crying, because they couldn’t apply for unemployment insurance because the system kept crashing.

Eric Starr: And those that were lucky enough to submit an application had to verify it with a phone call, and the lines were busy. My career has been a technologist problem solver, mostly in finance, but always using technology to simplify processes, to provide discipline. I like to think of myself as like a mosaic builder. I take tiles of different pieces of technology and put them together in ways that create something really beautiful. So sitting in my apartment, watching people on TV, my fellow New Yorkers crying, I said, Why is it okay that we accept engaging digitally with the government? Why is that acceptable? And it got me thinking about all the other things that you and I know are broken when it comes to Digitally engaging with government, and that includes everything: DMV, Social Security, you name it. It doesn’t put a smile on anybody’s face and say, Hey, I got to engage with the DMV. Nobody says that. It’s like a running joke, actually, in the United States.

Eric Starr: So I put a deck together thinking, all right, I want to fix all of these things that are broken when we engage with government. And I reached out to Andrew, and he’s like, This is great. It productizes a lot of the things that I was talking about on the trail. Let’s go do it. With his influence, I put together a group of people to help research the problem of why does this problem exist? We know it does, but why does it exist? And what we came to learn is that people want a digital experience similar to the one they have with Amazon. Now, Amazon knows everything you’ve ever done with Amazon. They know what you like to buy, how you like to pay for it, where you like to have it shipped, so they can deliver a really easy and simple user experience. The challenge with government and digital is government is not Amazon. So, Riley, you live in the state of Idaho and you live in the United States of America. Those are two very distinct governments. Those two governments have data on you. Then there’s the city, and then there’s the county, what you live in.

Eric Starr: All of those governments have data on you. The problem is they don’t share the data they have on you with one another. One, it’s illegal to do that, and two, we don’t want the government knowing everything about us. So these laws are in place, these silos are created as a result of the country in which we live. Now, if data is siloed, it makes it hard to know everything about you when you’re engaging with government. So what ends up happening is you get frustrated. I don’t understand. I just shared this information with you yesterday, or I went through the same workflow with the IRS, and now I’m engaged with the DMV, and it’s like I’m starting all over again, which in fact you are, because they don’t talk to each other. To make matters even worse, if you live in New York City and you are a recipient of, say, food stamps and of public housing, those two agencies, those two departments within New York City cannot share information on you. The structural framework. of information at the government level is siloed. Therein lies the problem. So I set out, I’m going to solve this problem.

Eric Starr: And then we searched for solutions, and the solution we landed on is verifiable credentials. That is the genesis of UltraPass Identity. That’s what we do. We work with governments to embrace verifiable credentials technology to simplify the citizen experience. That’s the introduction to UltraPass and what it is.

Riley Hughes: Wonderful. I’m glad you started with that story. It sounds like a pretty cool friendship there, where your response to Andrew’s presidential campaign was the same as his response to your, you know, startup campaign, and both of which are kind of crazy and audacious. And congrats on everything you’ve accomplished so far. I’d love to dig in and talk more about some of your experience trying to serve governments. I’ve heard you say that when you’re selling into government, it’s like running into a burning building. Did you ever question whether or not there was maybe an easier vertical, or maybe you could take this same concept of resolving the silo problem and maybe start with something that’s a little easier?

Eric Starr: Yes, I thought about it for a half a second. That is not who I am. I’ll tell you another story. I was at an event with a wonderful organization called Him for Her, helps women get board roles at companies around the country. And I’m sitting next to one of the board members, and she tells me this story about fundraising. A representative of the company was going to meet with a donor, and she’s going to go in and ask for $300,000. It’s a nonprofit, him for her. And this person said, Don’t ask for $300,000. Ask for $10 million. She builds up the willingness to ask for the big number, and she got $3 million. Now this woman then said to me, she goes, Well, she should have negotiated up to five. But—and I said to her, you know, you and I have a similar point of view. Why aim low when you can aim high? It is really hard to sell into government. There are investors, as you know, that, Oh, you sell to government. We don’t like the sales cycle. It’s too long. It’s too difficult. It’s too this. It’s too that. Too bureaucratic. That’s what I meant by we’re running into a burning house.

Eric Starr: It’s really difficult to work with government. But when you think about identity and attributes and information about you, who’s the source of truth? There is your healthcare provider. There is your government. There is your schooling and your financial institution. But government encompasses almost all of those things. So government is where the source of truth is. So yes, it’s a burning house. Yes, there’s a lot of bureaucracy. Yes, it’s a slow sales cycle. But it is, in my opinion, the most important place to go after. So we’re working on some really, really big verticals, big use cases. So when you think about what are we focusing on, it’s big stuff, not the little stuff.

Riley Hughes: Yeah. When I picture a burning building in my head and I imagine somebody running in, I think of two things. Number one, they must be running after something precious. It’s a cat, or it’s the family photo album, or it’s a whatever. You know, it’s something important. And the other thing I think about is that it’s not everybody who’s willing to run in there. Were there other reasons that you chose to target these types of large municipalities with big problems to solve first, as opposed to starting with something a little lower-hanging fruit type of thing?

Eric Starr: One of the superpowers of UltraPass is having access to lots of different levels of government. Now, that is true certainly in Los Angeles and in New York City. They’re big, so we have touchpoints there for sure. Think about it the other way. I forget the city you live in.

Riley Hughes: Coeur d’Alene.

Eric Starr: I don’t know the mayor of Coeur d’Alene. I don’t know if I know anybody that knows the mayor of Coeur d’Alene or whoever runs their IT group, right? So it’s probably harder for me to actually start in one of the smaller municipalities. We’ll start anywhere where I have some touchpoint, some access that gets us that initial crack in the door, so to speak. Because if we showed up and says, Hey, we have a great idea. Let’s put gumball machines at every parking spot to generate some revenue, that is going to be a very quick meeting. We’re not coming in with something that’s never been tested before. You know, these credentials have been— used, I don’t know, millions of times. It’s new in terms of what our use case is with respect to these governments. So you go in there with a solution that can solve these problems, eventually get to the right people who are looking to solve that problem. You can make some progress fairly quickly.

Riley Hughes: We’ve spoken quite a bit about the United States. How do things differ internationally in a way that’s, like, sort of maybe helpful or not to UltraPass’s mission?

Eric Starr: As an American, I want to solve the problems that I have to deal with as a citizen of the United States. As the CEO of UltraPass, there’s that practical: we need to find revenue. And if the revenue comes overseas, we need to be open-minded to it. There is a wonderful use case that we are working on in the Philippines. So there’s something called PhilHealth, which is the national health insurance, and everybody has a little PhilHealth card. And when you go to the hospital and you present your card, somebody at the hospital has to call PhilHealth to confirm that you’re actually covered, how much money is in the account. If there’s not enough money in the account, it gets covered in another way. But just by those couple of sentences, you can already appreciate that is terrible. What makes it so beautiful is there’s one issuer, PhilHealth, issues to 70 million citizens, and there are 1,200 hospitals. So there’s 1,200 verifiers. That’s not an overwhelming challenge. It’s actually elegantly simple to solve. Now, have we solved it? No. Are we having conversations? Yes.

Eric Starr: Would we love to solve that? Yes. So it’s not limited to the United States, although obviously for me personally, I prefer to solve problems at home, but we need to be open-minded to where the opportunities present themselves.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, that’s really helpful. As you look at ecosystems around the world, many ID tech products face this issue of the chicken-and-egg problem as it relates to the issuers in the ecosystem and the verifiers in the ecosystem. How do you think about the dynamics of the chicken-and-egg problem as you’re trying to create an ecosystem of governments that are able to verify people in a way that is so much more seamless than they can currently do it with the silos that exist?

Eric Starr: So I did mention that it’s a burning house, right? But however, you point out one of the benefits of working with government is that the chicken and egg problem is easily solvable. I’ll give you an example where the verifier is not government, but yet the government can instigate the utilization and adoption. So in New York City, there’s a program called Fair Fares, which provides discounted MetroCards to people below a certain income level, and New York City is retiring the physical plastic MetroCard. So the question is, okay, well, how’s the city going to get money or discounted MetroCards onto people’s cell phones? And they’re working with a fintech to do that. The fintech raised the question, well, how do we know who qualifies for the program? So in talks with the city, we said, well, why don’t we do it this way? You know, the city knows who has qualified for the program. We will issue those recipients a digital credential onto their cell phone, and then they can share it with the fintech, who can then in turn send them their money.

Eric Starr: So the third party, the relying party, is not government. However, this is how you drive adoption. If you want your money, click here. Everybody’s going to click. It’s not like, well, I could still not use it. There is no alternative. I mean, that is a really heavy-handed way of doing it, but it becomes a super elegant solution because the alternative is way worse. Now, obviously not everybody’s going to do it. There’s some people that don’t know how to do it. At the margin, the truth is I don’t worry about those at the margin. From a technology standpoint, there are solutions to solve those things, right? Send somebody a credit card in the mail that can use Tap and Go, fine. But that is going to be a very small percentage of the users. The government doesn’t want to do that. It’s way more expensive to do it that way. Things get lost, printing the physical cards, all those things, right? So there are solutions for those that are not part of the 95% that will just click on the link, but that’s not an UltraPass problem. That’s a problem for others to solve.

Eric Starr: So that’s an example of how you drive adoption when you partner with government.

Riley Hughes: That’s a really helpful example and use case. What is that thing that is driving adoption? Is it the button that says, Click here to get your money? Because I imagine that moment when they click there to get their money is the moment they onboard into a wallet. Is it that ease of that first adoption of a wallet, maybe, that is sort of the linchpin to drive adoption here? Is it the government mandating it for a service that’s used on a daily basis? Or is there something else that you think maybe we can generalize from this lesson about how to drive adoption in an ecosystem like this?

Eric Starr: My head is spinning here because you brought up the wallet. I don’t like talking about the wallet. UltraPass can develop a wallet, as you know, right? But we’re not in the wallet business. In fact, one of our projects, we’ve abstracted the wallet from the user. They obviously have access to it. It’s got their credentials in it, but they don’t actually have to go into it. UltraPass’s goal is not to create a Web3 world, but rather to solve real problems that affect real people. And if that means a Web2 solution, so be it. Decentralized identity does not mean— Web3. It certainly can be, but doesn’t have to be.

Riley Hughes: This is more of a discussion I would like to have with other members of the community. Is it our responsibility as builders of ID tech products to facilitate adoption of the more traditional identity wallet with credentials that they can share, or not? It certainly shouldn’t be an end in and of itself. The goal is not to create a Web3 world. That is only useful to the extent that it solves the problem at hand. One of the other interesting insights from your use case and your anecdote is that you only got to that level of specificity in that use case by going deep and talking and understanding the problems that the city was facing, and having those conversations and getting deep with a customer, understanding the pain point, and rolling out a product to solve that pain point. And so I think that whether there is a wallet as a concept that a consumer needs to get educated on should be a byproduct of actually solving the problem. And if the right way to solve it is by abstracting away the wallet so that the user can have a more streamlined experience, then great.

Riley Hughes: But if there’s some value in having the user understand they’re interacting with a wallet so that they can reuse that credential at another place as well. That’s great too. It probably will depend on the use case.

Eric Starr: You hit on the other side of it, the reusability, which is so vital for verifiable credentials to become ubiquitous. The only way they’re reusable is if you understand conceptually that you have an ID wallet in which these credentials live, from which you can share. So that is absolutely a feature of our solution. Whether it’s required at the initial stages of deploying a solution that solves a problem, it’s not required. I’d like to think that as holders do more of this, there will be the early adopters that want the wallet, they want the transparency of every credential they have, and they begin to really use it everywhere. That will happen. I don’t know exactly when and who the winners of the wallet wars will be, or the credential types, but it obviously is a part of the solution that we do deploy.

Riley Hughes: Yeah, I think I could talk about this for hours, and I’d love to move on to asking about how governments will help drive verifiable credential adoption. So just to frame the conversation a little bit, I talk about ID tech as being where fintech was 10 or 15 years ago. Fintech and open banking exist as they are today to enable people to take the data out of the silos that it’s originally from, take your data out of your bank account, and put it into a fintech app. This is what Plaid allows you to do. This is what open banking enables. And verifiable credentials really allow people to take their data out of their silos, as you described, with really the problem here being government silos, and reuse that data across various domains, various other silos, wherever it’s useful to them. This is a long way of saying governments have the best silos. You mentioned who’s got the source of truth. It really is governments. On the other hand, governments are slow moving. Most governments are cautious about how they are deploying things like this. How do you see this playing out?

Riley Hughes: Do you see governments leading in verifiable credential adoption? Do you think that other industries will sort of lead the way and governments will need to catch up? Or how do you see this playing out?

Eric Starr: Governments are slow moving. True. But make no mistake, elected officials, so not government in the grand scheme of things, but elected officials are motivated by one thing: getting reelected. It’s that simple. What is going to get them reelected is what will become priority for government. If you and I create a groundswell of demand for solutions, not technology, and say, if you want this to happen, call your congressman, call your mayor, send an email, create demand on the part of the electorate, and say, I will vote for you if you do this, it will happen. And it will happen fast. So we think of the government as this thing that is a battleship that’s hard to move, but it’s not. It’s just getting the right people focused on the thing you care about, and then it will move quickly. This is part of our strategy. There are laws that are coming out in the United States around verifiable credentials. More specifically, there are age verification laws that are coming out. They don’t really know what compliance looks like.

Eric Starr: It’s so important for UltraPass ID to be involved in those conversations. This is what we do, and we are talking to the states that have laws passed. I don’t know if passing laws is going to create adoption for verifiable credentials, so I’m not going to— suggest that government should pass laws that can only be complied with with verifiable credentials. That seems like a stretch. I love what Utah has done with investigating the use of credentials in delivering government services, because that’s very strategic. So I would like to see 50 states have that law because, you know, the use cases are far more than, you know, how does a 13-year-old log into Twitter?

Riley Hughes: Yeah, this is interesting because governments are interacting with sort of two different kinds of parties, citizens and corporations or businesses in their jurisdictions. As we talk about what governments should do, as it relates to people versus businesses, could you speak a little bit to how should governments be thinking about the citizen experience versus the business or corporation experience inside their borders?

Eric Starr: Both matter. Owners of businesses, people that work at businesses. So remember, we always have to come back to, I just want to get reelected. So when it comes to businesses, and business have enormous influence on who gets elected, serving the businesses is as important as serving an individual. I’m going to bring some things full circle. I’m going to connect a few dots here. In working with businesses, so we’re working with the City of Los Angeles on a verifiable credentials project, and it’s focusing, our initial use case is to focus on business. When that was decided, I was super excited because almost everything else we’re doing is with the individual in mind. Because in a business, the holder of the credential is now a business. So what does this mean to a wallet? It starts to get a little bit more complicated. The solution we found that is going to work best is a web-based wallet with multiple users that have access and roles to do something with that wallet. That’s when we got into abstraction.

Eric Starr: You can abstract if you’re using a web wallet, much easier than you can if you have to download an app or something like that. So when I say full circle, that abstraction, that web wallet was arrived at because our holder was a business that needed multiple users access to that wallet. So there are solutions that we’ve deployed that can address both business and individual, but the delivery is different. I haven’t mentioned this, but now maybe it might be the right time. We’re agnostic to the credential type. We’re agnostic to the method. We’re agnostic to the wallet, because none of those things are actually the solution to a problem. Each one of those is a component to a solution, and the way in which you mix and match those components, those elements of a solution, may be different. For the task at hand, the project. So credential, method, wallet. We’re not picking winners there.

Eric Starr: As the need evolves into a particular credential type or wallet, then we’ll make sure we can migrate whatever solution we have into what is necessary for our customers to continue to operate in a seamless way. Anyway, long answer to business versus individual. There are less use cases for business than there are for individuals, but it doesn’t mean they are less important. I’m grateful that we’re involved in a business use case as well.

Riley Hughes: How should governments think about serving citizens who maybe don’t have the newest iPhone? They aren’t super digitally literate. Or maybe even some subsets of the population, probably more here where I live in Idaho than where you live in New York, who are simply distrusting of anything a government would do, those types of folks. How should a government think about rolling out modern verifiable credential-based identity solutions while, you know, not leaving out those other sort of subsets of the market?

Eric Starr: There’s two things there that I want to focus on. The one is the less technically literate person with the less sophisticated device. Verifiable credentials, it’s not like either you go with us or you do the other thing. It’s and. It’s never or. As I mentioned on that FairFares example where someone’s still going to have to get a card in the mail. We need to solve the big problems with technology, but technology is not going to solve the big problems for everyone. That is not an UltraPass problem. That is a government problem. But it’s not hard. So it’s not or, it’s and. Then there’s the question about government, and I don’t trust the government for anything. I don’t want to touch it. I hear you. I don’t like big government either. You and I also know that, in the purest form of what we’re doing, we’re empowering individuals to own and control their information. That is what freedom is. So the problem isn’t, well, we’re— impeding on your individuality, on your freedom. We’re not. Communicating that is really challenging. I’m not sure yet, because we haven’t done this.

Eric Starr: How do you message that the solution being delivered is going to allow you to engage digitally and control your information and not be tracked across everything everywhere you engage? One of the reasons we landed on this solution is because to open up a website and it says, Hey, you want to log in with Google or Apple, a little part of me, like, dies inside. It’s like, no, don’t click on that button, right? Don’t do that. And really that’s the fear or the frustration that the people that you’ve described who don’t trust government, that’s the same feeling. Like, I don’t want to do anything government. I don’t want to click log in with Apple. So let’s find a way for people to engage digitally while preserving their freedom and their privacy. And you know, that’s what we can do for people. Because the alternative is just don’t engage digitally, which you might choose to do that. That’s fine. Don’t ever do anything online. But the tradeoff there is it’s going to make your life harder. You’re going to have to go wait in line somewhere.

Riley Hughes: It sounds like one of those problems that the elected officials who are interested in getting reelected will need to figure out how to message correctly. So Eric, this has been a tremendous conversation. Tell me, what is next for UltraPass? What are you working on right now, and what is top of mind for you?

Eric Starr: We are just getting started. So we want more pilot projects, more use case discussions. We want to speak with NGOs. We want to speak to eight government agencies. We want to speak with elected officials and start the conversation about solutions for the problems that they have and share the solutions we’re already working on for those that don’t really know that they’re out there. So we want more opportunity to deploy into the marketplace. That’s what we’re looking for. So right now, it’s not a lot of inbound from mayors and governors reaching out to UltraPass. That would be nice. We’re working on that. It’s part of our strategy. But to the extent that what we’re talking about resonates with any sort of organization that engages with the government or the government engages on behalf of their constituents, reach out. UltraPassID.com. There’ll be a way to connect with me and the team, see some demos of what we do, learn a little bit more about our story and our people. So that’s what we want: more use cases. And don’t be afraid if it’s a small one. We’ll talk also.

Eric Starr: We’ll speak with everybody. We’re small enough right now where we’ll respond to everybody about everything. And look forward to the day where we have to start prioritizing. But right now that’s not the day. We’re still a startup, and we’re eager and we’re hungry, and we have a sense of urgency to get things done.

Riley Hughes: Awesome, Eric. I always like to end with this question. Tell me what the future of identity looks like to you, and why that matters for the world, why that matters for governments. What does that world look like?

Eric Starr: So many ways to answer that question, Riley. First, it’s so important that we mitigate—I hate to use the word eliminate, but it would be nice—if we can eliminate fraud, identity theft is ruining people’s lives. And if it’s not ruining people’s lives, it is creating such a headache and so much wasted time. That is priority one for the future of identity, is eliminating fraud. If you were to ask me what’s the future of identity, it’s going to be in your identity wallet, and it’s going to allow you to do things in a much more secure way that preserves your privacy and that eliminates fraud. It’s coming. It’s going to happen, hopefully sooner, not later, and hopefully both Trinsic and UltraPass ID are big players in that space in the next 10 years.

Riley Hughes: I agree. Let’s make it happen. Thanks for listening. You can find us on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and wherever else you listen to podcasts. Feel free to reach out on Twitter 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. And thanks a lot for chatting with me today, Eric.

Eric Starr: My pleasure, Riley, anytime. Let’s do it again soon.