Blake Hall
Co-Founder & CEO, ID.me. On 1 show, 1 appearance. The Shows tab opens the full record on each.
founderexecutiveother@Blake_Hall ↗LinkedIn ↗id.me ↗
Blake Hall is the co-founder and CEO of ID.me, a digital identity and verification platform. A former U.S. Army Ranger combat veteran who led a reconnaissance platoon in Iraq, he launched the company in 2010 after graduating from Harvard Business School.
1shows
1appearances
19statements
6resolved
4supported
1contradicted
67%fully supported
1said about them ↓ Everything Blake Hall said on any show that made the record, most notable first. Each card names its show and opens the statement there.
ID.me signed up over 40 million Americans during the 2021 pandemic
“During the pandemic, I think in like 20, 21, we signed up over forty million Americans.”
ID.me reached 130 million users, signing up approximately half of America
“We have a hundred and thirty million users. We signed up half of America now”
Larry Cochran wrote a $75,000 angel check after meeting Hall mid-flight
“Met him on the plane. He wrote a 75,000 dollar check. And that's how we actually got to our first close of 525,000 dollars.”
ID.me's enterprise customers include Apple, BMW, Ford, and General Motors
“Today, our customers are Apple and BMW and Fanatics and Ford and GM and Cedar Fair and everything else and Under Armour.”
ID.me surpassed $150M ARR with 30% YoY growth and 80% margins
“And now over a hundred and fifty million in ARR, the business is growing at over 30% year over year. Our gross margins will push through 80%.”
Online military discounts lacked a verification mechanism before ID.me's founding
“I realized there was this huge problem impacting military families where the whole country kind of wanted to wrap their arms around the military, whether it was retailers or nonprofit government programs. And obviously military families wanted to access those …”
Blake Hall pitched ID.me without knowing the difference between OAuth and SAML
“When we were first going out to raise, there was a VC that asked me, you know, are you guys using OAuth or SAML? And I didn't know the difference between the two.”
Blake Hall declined a $250,000 McKinsey offer to build ID.me
“I declined a quarter of a million dollars a year, give or take at McKinsey to pay myself 48,000 dollars.”
Hall: David Tisch invested $20K in ID.me after a 30-minute coffee
“He introduced me to David Tisch, who was about to become the managing director of tech stars, New York. When he was just coming through Boston, I had coffee with him for 30 minutes. He wrote me a check for 20,000 dollars.”
Identity wallets distribute user verification friction across multi-brand networks
“Where you could create an identity wallet, all these brands that are trying to reach the same segment of consumers, you could spread the friction of verifying them across all of the different brands that used it.”
Hall: Military service records are siloed and only digitized back to roughly 1980
“The source of truth for military service is DOD, VA, the National Archives, USAA for the banks. The National Guard is actually administered at the state level and the reserves is like in this, you know, different set. So all the data is siloed and then the dat…”
Blake Hall signed a $50,000 ID.me lease with only $12,000
“50,000 dollar lease is what I signed when I only had 12,000 dollars in the bank and no source of income or revenue.”
LivingSocial collapsed after raising $1 billion because it ignored unit economics
“Living social raised over a billion dollars. They went to zero. They went and they went to zero because they didn't validate their unit economics.”
Blake Hall: ID.me would have ended if Under Armour launch failed
“If that launch had failed, it would have been over.”
ID.me found product-market fit by acquiring 48,000 users in 45 days
“We signed up, I think it was something like. 48,000 users, the next 45 days getting paid an acquisition. And that was product market fit.”
ID.me powers single sign-on across 16 federal and 40 state agencies
“Once their identity is tied to the login, it can now move across 16 federal agencies, 40 state agencies where they have single sign on and they can verify just as quickly as somebody who does have, you know, this presence in records.”
In early pilots, 70% of ID.me users were new to partner brands
“And, you know, I think the early metrics that came back 70% of the users who used the program were new to file. The average order value was significantly higher than the typical.”
The other half of the tape: Blake Hall's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 1 time in 1 episode across the shows. every mention, with the transcript →
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A Product Market Fit Show 1
One line per show, most statements first. The link opens Blake's full record on that show: the calibration, argument clarity, speaking style and every statement made there.
| Show | Role there | Eps | Statements | Record | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| PRODUCT MARKET FITLEDGER | Co-Founder & CEO, ID.me | 1 | 19 | 67% 4/6 | full record on A Product Market Fit Show → |