Greg Kidd —Your identity is a right and a responsibility
From taking a company public on the Nasdaq to investing early in startups like Twitter, Square, and Ripple to a stint at the Federal Reserve — Greg Kidd is a serial entrepreneur and investor, founder of the Hard Yaka investment group, and co-founder and CEO of GlobaliD.
Now he’s focused on making his vision for digital identity a reality — a vision developed from his decades of experience in the industry as both a builder of companies and as a regulator.
Today’s identity systems are broken — making us vulnerable to massive data breaches, helping to spread misinformation through fake users, and undermining the institutions of democracy and society that hold us together and empower us to reach our potential — all while excluding billions from the existing system.
A new approach is clearly required.
A journey of a thousand miles
Greg’s first notable success involved taking his bike messenger startup Dispatch Management Services public on the Nasdaq. That challenging path toward an IPO would influence his view on the impact of innovation and the role of regulators.
Along the way, he ran into a guy named Jack Dorsey (in rather unconventional means — after Greg discovered a young Jack had hacked their systems), the founder of Twitter and later Square, of which Greg was an early investor in both.
As the founder of the Hard Yaka investment group, Greg has backed, supported, and advised hundreds of startups. Other names on his investment portfolio include card issuers Marqueta, Apto, and Optimus; Coinbase, Uphold and GateHub in the exchange space; as well as TransferGo and Viamericas in the payments industry.
As Chief Risk Officer at Ripple, Greg sowed the seeds for what would later become GlobaliD as he spearheaded an internal initiative around digital identity.
What makes Greg unique within the space are his stints on the other side of the fence as a consultant and regulator, having spent time at Booz Allen and later at the Federal Reserve in the payments group, where he worked closely with ex-regulators from Promontory.
After all, progress in fintech is driven as much by disruptive innovation as it is by deft navigation within a web of rules and regulations.
This pragmatic perspective is foundational to Greg’s approach as a technologist and entrepreneur, seeking out solutions that solve problems for people, disrupt the industries in a creative way, but still remain compliant and scalable as they make their way into the mainstream.
A tale of two dystopias — Mad Max and George Orwell
Greg believes that digital identities should be redefined and built from the bottom up (much like the Internet and the World Wide Web) rather than top down via large corporations or governments.
Within that spectrum lies a healthy middle ground that Greg likes to illustrate by comparing “Mad Max v. George Orwell.”
On the one hand, we want to avoid total anarchy of a Mad Max reality, where everyone is anonymous and side steps rules and regulation at will — a fantasy of more extreme crypto advocates.
On the other hand, we also want to avoid an Orwellian dystopia, where we can no longer escape the gaze of Big Brother — an issue best reflected by what’s going on today in China.
Instead, identity should work for people to increase their privacy and mitigate fraud arising from anonymous or unknown entities. And for substantial adoption, it’s key that digital identities are practical and easy to use while providing a high degree of control to their users.
Proving your identity — but without giving up the goods
Shifting the balance of power from corporations and governments back to individuals — such as granting people the right to control who they share private data with — is just the start.
Today, we regularly disclose and expose our private data and personally identifiable information (PII) in order to prove that we are who we say we are — a practice that promotes fraud and data theft. Why expose that information if we don’t have to?
Instead we should be attesting the existence and compliance of required data and allow those attestations to serve as proof of identity — rather than the private data behind them — thus eliminating the risk of redundant data exposure. While the PII data would sit securely in an encrypted vault, those attestations would live on a public blockchain.
Within this framework, individuals are able to register unique names and collect attestations linked to their identity. It’s a solution that avoids the pitfalls of both Mad Max and Big Brother, complying with regulatory needs while also giving users the power and flexibility to protect their privacy.
Ultimately, the goal is to have global, interoperable, and neutral identity systems and protocols much like how we have interoperable and neutral systems and protocols that power the World Wide Web.
Identity is the permission to act
“Identity in itself is not that interesting. It’s what you can do with it.”— Greg Kidd
Identity not only defines you and your role in society — it serves as a mechanism that allows you to fulfill that role. Current identification systems do provide this value to some extent, but they lack trust, security, and reach.
Fake news and fake users prevail on social media platforms because of low trust barriers, influencing not only public opinion but also election outcomes by fomenting dissent and division.
On the other end of the spectrum, services that require high trust such as banking consequently excludes those most in need, many of whom lack proper identifying documentation, a pressing issue exacerbated by the recent migrant and refugee crises around the world.
Greg believes that an identity is a basic human right. It’s the foundation of a society based on trust.
But an identity is merely the permission to act. In order to empower individuals, every identity should be linked to a basic wallet that can hold and move funds, enabling them to actively participate in the global economy.
GlobaliD and beyond
Greg co-founded GlobaliD in 2017 with the goal of building a neutral and portable identity framework for individuals and entities that supports secure and private management of their permission and funds.
Greg recently helped launch the Self-Sovereign Identity Incubator in association with the Sovrin Foundation, a Y-combinator style incubator for startups developing digital identity solutions that empower people for all kinds of every-day use cases — everything from maintaining medical records to voting, education, banking, and communication.
In the exchange society we live in, it’s imperative that we regain control of our identity, as it serves as the key to basically every interaction in our increasingly digital environments.
With GlobaliD, Greg is working to make that a reality.
