The following interview is a conversation we had with Rob Leslie, CEO of Sedicii, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $4 Million Raised to Build the Future of Data Privacy Infrastructure for an Online World
Brett
Hey, everyone, and thanks for listening. Today I’m speaking with Rob Wesley, CEO and Founder of Sedicii, an identity verification platform that’s raised over 4 million in funding. Rob, thanks for chatting with me today.
Rob Leslie
Great to be here, Brett.
Brett
Yeah. So, before we begin talking about what you’re building, let’s start with a quick summary of who you are and a bit more about your background.
Rob Leslie
Yeah, great question. I’ve got, I suppose, a reasonably interesting background. Grew up in Ireland. I graduated having studied electronic engineering at university. I immediately went to Japan, where I was planning to stay for maybe two, three years, and was there for nearly 20 years. I worked for a number of japanese companies, was headhunted by Dell when they were starting in Japan. Learned an awful lot at Dell when I was there. And then after I left, Dell joined a startup, which we grew over the next four years, and it got acquired in the early two thousands. I came back to live in Ireland in 2003 and started a business with a friend of my brother’s in the compliance space, where we built a network connecting all the business registries around the world together into a single network.
Rob Leslie
Because back in the early nineties, getting good information on companies and directors was an extremely difficult thing to do. So we just made it really easy for banks and insurance companies, other financial institutions that had compliance requirements to source that information. And it was probably along that journey that I started looking into what became the kernel of Sedicii, which was all around trying to identify who people were reliably, through a fully digital channel, and preserving their privacy along the way. So we’ve been looking at different kinds of privacy enhancing technologies, things called zero knowledge proofs, and more recently, multi party computations, and very recently, a thing called messages computation, which is a sort of new iteration of. Of multiparty computation.
Rob Leslie
And I’ll explain a little bit more in detail what these are later on, but it’s some magic cryptography that allows you to do some very cool things with data without the need to share the data.
Brett
Nice. But, yeah, let’s dive into that in a second. But a couple of questions just so we can better understand who you are as a CEO and as a Founder. So what Founder do you look up to the most? And what we always tell guests here is it can’t be Elon Musk, because were getting tired of hearing that one over and over again.
Rob Leslie
Yeah, well, actually, probably, you know, one of the founders that I was sort of took a lot of leadership from in my early career was a guy called Akio Morita. He was a japanese Founder. He was an engineer, very similar to me, an electrical engineer, and he was the Founder of Sony. And I read a book called Made in Japan that he wrote probably in the mid eighties when he wrote it, but it described the whole journey that he went on when he created Sony. And an extremely interesting read that it was his desire for miniaturization, for taking really great ideas and turning them into superb products. And you probably see some of his ideals in how Apple has evolved in terms of its devotion to creating great customer experiences with its products. So that was probably my first one.
Rob Leslie
I think after that, Dell had another big impact on me, Michael Dell, and his way of marketing products, his innovations in the supply chain, how to eliminate large amounts of inventory and turn your stock incredibly quickly in order to save money. Again, very clever in terms of how he applied these things. So I’ve got japanese experiences and us and european experiences as well. So a lot of different things that I draw on at various times in my career.
Brett
Nice. And what was it like for you being a foreigner doing business in Japan? All I know about that is I followed the. I can’t remember his last name, but Carlos Guzan’s case there, he was making a lot of claims about how Japan’s not very friendly to foreigners doing business. There’s. Is that true or what are your views there?
Rob Leslie
I would say he’s looking at that slightly through, you know, tinted glass or tainted glasses because of his experience. I never had anything but good experiences. You know, the Japanese are generally extremely trusting, very polite, very easy to do business with, you know, you, as long as you’re straight up and you’re pretty respectful of them and of their products and their cultures and so on, that will be reciprocated. And I had nothing but good experiences all the way through. Having said that, they would be generally very conservative, and there’s nothing wrong with that at all. And very, I suppose, slow to make decisions in some respects, but that is because generally they try to reach consensus before embarking on something, because, you know, once you’ve got consensus, you know, everybody’s marching in the same direction.
Rob Leslie
It leads to much less turmoil and confusion later on, you know, provided you’ve got that agreement upfront. So it’s one of the things that I probably struggled with later on in my career because, you know, the first 20 years of my working life was in Japan. So all my sort of formative thinking would have been created during those years when my experiences would have dictated, you know, how I would have, how I do things later on in life. So I spend quite a lot of time trying to ensure consensus is created. And I definitely try to be very respectful in my dealings with people. Even when, you know, we have disagreements on various different things. You can disagree, but, you know, still must be respectful of people’s time and commitment and their passion as well.
Rob Leslie
So, you know, that can cause problems sometimes because, you know, you get some brash westerner who, you know, really wants to force his idea or her idea down your throat and, you know, you’ve got to deal with that in the most respectful way possible.
Brett
Interesting. That makes sense. I think that’s really helpful context for us, you know, to better understand what makes you really tick as a Founder and as an entrepreneur. And that’s, you know, a perfect segue into, you know, what you’re building today. So I know you touched on it a bit there at the start, but let’s dive deeper there. What was the aha moment for you when you decided to really launch a company that is doing what you guys are doing today?
Rob Leslie
I suppose for me it was a personal experience. You know, I got ripped off, actually. I fell victim to a scam. I ended up buying a, quite an expensive camera on the web, and lo and behold, the camera never showed up and my money disappeared. And part of it was because I thought I was buying it from a real store, a real person. And with a little bit of investigation, I was able to find out that it wasn’t a real store, it wasn’t a real person. Everything was completely fake. And I wanted to be able, I suppose, to help people figure out that the people you do business with, that you deal with online are real and that you can substantiate claims that they make about themselves and do this very easily. Very quickly.
Rob Leslie
We have got into a world today where a huge amount of our daily lives are conducted through online channels, and we can do pretty much anything we want without ever meeting anyone. And as a consequence, you know, we’re seeing fraud and scams increase at a phenomenal rate at the moment. I mean, if I said to you that the criminal economy is the third largest economy in the world, it’s worth somewhere between five and $6 trillion globally, you know, you probably fall off your chair going, really that much? And it is that much when you add all the different forms of crime that are committed, and a huge amount of it is done online. So what I wanted to do was to create a platform that made it easy for anyone to verify that the person or business they were dealing with was genuine.
Rob Leslie
And that’s what we’ve sought to do using the technology that we’ve developed using some of this cool cryptography. As I mentioned earlier, the zero knowledge proofs and multi party computations. And what these things do, essentially, is they allow you to prove things to somebody without having to disclose the underlying information, or to compute something without having to disclose the information used in that computation. So a simple example would be, I can prove to you that my driver’s license has a date of birth. That makes me over 18 or over 21, but I don’t have to disclose my date of birth to you. So I’m protecting my privacy in the act of communicating something about myself that you need, maybe to.
Rob Leslie
To provide me with a service, which could be providing me with a bottle of wine that I want to buy online or something like that. So it’s taken a long time to, I suppose, get to the point where people are realizing that privacy really does matter. It probably was the 19, not 19, the 2016 US election when Trump got elected. And Facebook and Cambridge Analytica started, you know, using people’s data in ways that have never been imagined or intended, and in, you know, not good ways, either. So, you know, people started to realize the value of data and how that data could be used in both good ways and bad ways, and ways that could damage them, ultimately. So what we. What we’ve come up with, essentially, is a platform that allows, you know, a whole bunch of pretty cool computations to happen.
Rob Leslie
Things like credit scoring or risk scoring, or, you know, being able to compile a health record on somebody from a multitude of different places without ever having to see the raw data or to put all that raw data together. So I’m able to, you know, preserve your privacy, but still deliver the value that you want, you know, in ordering a drug or whatever it is that you want online in order to fix an illness or a disease that you might have.
Brett
Interesting. I’ve been talking about that a lot with my girlfriend. Whenever we order wine, whenever we order alcohol, that’s the process where someone comes and delivers it, and then I have to literally give them my id, and then they sit there and take pictures of it. I don’t know if they’re actually taking pictures of it in the app, or if they’re just have their camera open and they’re taking pictures of it. And I’ve talked about how I just feel very violated every time I have to do that, because I just gave some random in person, my id number, my address, all of that information, which I really don’t want to share.
Rob Leslie
Yeah, exactly. And that is exactly the problem that we’re trying to solve. I mean, there you’re putting your blind trust in that delivery person that they’re not going to do anything that they shouldn’t do with the id information that you’ve given them. But you shouldn’t have to put yourself in that position. You should be able to allow them to scan your id, for example, and just get a confirmation that says, you know, bread is, you know, over 21 or whatever the check is, without ever seeing or capturing any of the other pieces of information, because it’s irrelevant to them. They don’t care. They don’t care what your name is. They don’t care where you live. All they care about is that you’re over the age of consent for whatever service or product you’re buying.
Rob Leslie
And, you know, it could be medicinal drugs, it could be alcohol, it could be guns, it could be, you know, cigarettes, a whole bunch of controlled products, for example, that you need to be able to verify who somebody is and that, you know, it is appropriate for them to be able to consume that product or service.
Brett
And just so I could visualize it, you know, let’s say if, you know, in that ordering experience, you know, it’s through Doordash, what does that experience look like for me, as the consumer? You know, what would I be sharing with them so that they could, you know, validate that I’m 21? And then, you know, what is, you know, doordash doing? Or how can they have confidence to make sure that, you know, they aren’t getting in trouble for selling to someone who’s under 21.
Rob Leslie
Yeah. So there’s a number of ways that you could do it. One is, you know, obviously what you’ve just described where, you know, you flash your driver’s license, a scan of that would take place, and they’d return a result to say, yep, you know, Brett’s a good guy. He’s over the right age, but equally, you could just say, you know, my name is Brett and I was born on the 1 January 1960. Just for argument’s sake, it would be great if Doordash could take that information and go to an authority somewhere, which might be a state agency, and say, I’ve got this individual who’s claiming his date of birth is this, and they could return a result that says, yeah, that is a genuine individual, and here’s what he looks like. And they give you back a photograph.
Rob Leslie
And when the delivery guy shows up at your door, he looks at the photograph that he’s been served and compares it to the guy he’s given the bottle of wine to. And if they match, he now knows that he’s got the real person who’s been approved over a particular age. And, you know, he’s done and dusted, and he’s learned nothing more about you because he’s got a copy of your face, which he has anyway, because he’s able to see it. And as soon as that transaction is complete, you can forget it. You can just forget about the photograph. It’s done, and you don’t need to hold on to it anymore.
Brett
Got it. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Wow, that’s really cool. And who is adopting this technology right now? Is there a specific market where you’re seeing the most adoption?
Rob Leslie
Well, obviously, any regulated sector has a need to do this. So probably our biggest. We’ve two customer segments, I suppose financial services is one where any bank credit union, when they open an account for somebody, has to verify who they are and, you know, for transactions over a certain amount in order to stop money laundering. There’s, again, a huge number of checks that take place to make sure that you are who you say you are. The second area that we’ve seen a lot of growth in is any organization that has children working in sort of close proximity to adults to make sure that the adults don’t have any criminal convictions for child molestation or anything that could put the children at risk.
Rob Leslie
So, again, doing background checks on individuals in a very seamless, private way is something that we’ve seen quite a sizeable growth in it. And it was Covid, actually, that kicked it off, because previously, a lot of these checks would have been done face to face, where you’d literally show up and present your id over a counter to somebody. But when Covid came about, that all had to move online, and again, being able to do all of these checks through a channel that was privacy sensitive, that gave you back the result that you needed in order to, you know, facilitate the enablement of a service to children was going to be really helpful. So we’ve seen a lot of growth in that area as well.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And what’s next for you guys? Where do you go from here? Or what are you most excited about over the next, let’s say, six to twelve months?
Rob Leslie
Great question. So we’ve embarked on a project with a. An organization called Nillion and Nillion is a decentralized network that allows a piece of information to be fragmented and distributed across a network and processed as if it was all together. But you never put it back together. And they’re using technology that we’ve created that sort of facilitates all this. And what we think this is going to do is make a huge impact on areas where security and the sensitivity of information is paramount. So think about things like credit card data, or passwords, or private keys for crypto wallets, where I don’t want any single party having access to the entirety of that information.
Rob Leslie
What our technology allows to happen is to take that information and break it up into many little pieces, bit like a jigsaw puzzle, and then store all of those pieces of the puzzle on different servers all over the world. Now, you would think that in order to process all of that information, I have to bring it all back together. But the beauty of our technology is that you don’t. You can leave it all fragmented and still process your credit card payment as if that information was brought back together. But it never does come back together. It stays in fragmented form. And because of that, it makes it very hard for a hacker to be able to steal that information and use it, because just by hacking one server, they just get one piece of the puzzle.
Rob Leslie
They’ve got to get all of the pieces in order to make sense of it, and that’s a really hard thing to do.
Brett
Got it. That makes a lot of sense. And in terms of breaking through all the noise here, are there any specific things that you’ve done to really rise above all that noise? As I’m sure you’re aware, funding is just booming right now. Startups are raising crazy money. How are you rising above all that noise?
Rob Leslie
That’s a really hard thing to do, but you’ve got to try and create some uniqueness for yourself. And I think what we’ve so far been able to do is demonstrate that the technology that we’ve created really is special. I use the analogy of baking a cake quite a lot. In order to be successful in business, a lot of things have to come together for you and really work. And the baking the cake analogy is you got to have the right ingredients in the right amounts mixed together for the right amount of time in the oven, for the right length of time at the right temperature. And if you do all of those things well, you’re going to get a great cake. And business is no different.
Rob Leslie
You’ve got to have product, you’ve got to have team, you’ve got to have funding, you’ve got to have promotion, and you’ve got to have the opportunity. And if you can bring all of those things together and get them to coalesce in the right amounts at the right time, you will actually end up with a really successful business. And the challenge is getting them all to come together at the right time. Profess to have the magic solution that allows you to do that. You know, it’s a moving feast. Every day you think you’ve got it and suddenly it shifts again and, you know, you got to go run after it. And, yeah, it’s a challenge, but one that I enjoy getting up every day to run after.
Brett
Nice. Well, last question here for you. What does excite you most about what you get to do every day?
Rob Leslie
Well, I think for me, it’s the impact that this technology is going to have on people’s lives. It’s one of those things that, you know, it’s a little bit like plumbing in a house. You know, when you turn on the tap, the water just arrives. But, you know, within the walls of your house and the street outside, there’s a lot of very complex pipework that allows all that to happen. And what we’re creating here, essentially is the plumbing that allows some very complex processes to take place that ultimately are going to make people’s lives better. The data that they provide safer and ultimately secure their financial futures, because nobody’s going to be able to show up and rip you off by being able to hack into your bank account or steal your identity or rob your credit card and start processing payments.
Rob Leslie
So we just want to make the world a slightly safer place, or maybe a lot safer place by making this technology available, you know, to everybody to use. And, you know, there’s still a lot of work to do, but I think we’re in a really good place. Some of the partners that we have are, you know, really well positioned to do that. And hopefully we’ve got the right ingredients in the cake tin and, you know, we’re about to stick it in the oven and hopefully get the temperature right so that we end up with a good business at the end of the day.
Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. I love it. Unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today. But before we wrap, if people want to follow along with your journey, where’s the best place for them to go?
Rob Leslie
Yeah, the best place is probably the web www.sedicii.com or we’ll be on Facebook as well, or Twitter. You’ll find us there. So just do a search on siddha and you’ll find a bunch of stuff about us equally. The project I mentioned there at the end called nillion. If you do a search on nillion, I think you’re going to find a whole bunch of very interesting stuff as well. Nillion. And look us up. I’d be very happy to engage with anybody.
Brett
Amazing. Well, Rob, thanks so much for your time. Really appreciate it, and wish you best of luck in executing on this vision.
Rob Leslie
My pleasure. Brett, it was great talking to you today. Thank you.
Brett
All right, keep in touch.
Rob Leslie
Take care.
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