Persona

“Once we close one customer of a certain industry, no more customers of that use case or industry. Like we're not even like going to talk to anymore unless it was in balance.”

“Almost after every single first of, like, our first 10 customers, we would almost rewrite things from the ground up to make sure that, like, it didn't feel overly specific for that one use case.”

“Face ID may be able to tell you that it's the same person, but again, our challenge is not about, is it the same person? The fundamental question we have is who are you within like some sort of registry? Who are you as recognized by the government?”

“It's actually unlikely thinking a long time about decision will actually dramatically improve outcomes. Especially for like very difficult, you know, like uncertain decisions, actually like making a decision and then quickly reverting or like just learning fro…”

“If you're just out trying to hire, like, some random engineer or technical person that you have zero experience with or otherwise I've seen some of the statistics around this. Your probability of, like, failure is, like, not just, like, two x higher. It's, lik…”

“I think we had a rule that we did not take any funds from any friends or family, because we just didn't want that additional pressure of any way, shape, or form.”

“No, I mean, I think this went on again, like even up until we were like a hundred people, I was like, look, like if you're joining us, it's probably a waste of your time and a terrible choice in your career, but you may like it, right?”

“And I actually think refactoring fundamentally is a product-driven question, not just a, like, tech debt-type question, right? I think, like, this quote-unquote, like, tech debt thing sometimes is overly how do I put it? It's I think, like, overly abstract of …”

“The faster that your product can get to a million, the faster your product is likely easily replicatable.”

“Back in the day, like, social security numbers weren't random. In fact, like, if you're born, like, I think prior to 1991 or something, your social security number is a company. The first five Is identified by the location of where, which hospital you were bor…”

“If there were one thing I credit to, the best thing that made personas, like, increase the persona success, it was how long I was at Square. And I'd like to say, you know, I was dedicated and like did a fairly decent job, but I think like above all else that a…”

“Persona is 70% referrals. We're, like, 400 folks, but, like, 70% is, like, someone who needs somebody else, right?”

“There's definitely a bit of that, but I will say, like, the only point I really felt, like, as a truly major jump on the product market fit questions, when I got one customer at 50, like, that actually felt, like, meaningfully different. After that, I wouldn't…”

“A lot of these vendors would promise you some sort of silver bullet saying like, this is the, you know, one silver bullet to solve all your identity problems, fraud would disappear, you know, very, very extreme claims. But the reality for us as a business and …”

“Even from the start of persona over the past five years, the amount of friction, the amount of effort to do that has not only has not decreased. It's actually only increased. Like we're watching the complication of how to be ourselves online get progressively …”

“I would say it's 80% luck, 20%, you know input, right? Like, it's so much luck that just went right, and it's not just luck from, like, a, oh, we stumbled on the right idea, the right timing. People who, like, ended up just in the right situations at the right…”

“I mean, a common question I actually get a lot is like, have we found product market fit or when did you feel as if you found product market fit? And I'll be honest with you, I still don't feel it.”

“The reason you know, so many folks here at persona are folks I've previously worked with. Like, I mean, 50 plus people here I've known, like, and worked directly with at some point in my career.”

“It was an e-commerce site. Actually it was a friend's friend of a friend's e-commerce site and they needed to do you know, like age verification. The only thing we were willing to really focus on was we will do anything around identity. It wasn't even like our…”

“Literally from day one, we've never really pivoted. We've never, like, our long-term vision was, like, almost crystallized even before our MVP.”