Venture Everywhere Podcast: Mark Straub with Jenny Fielding
Venture Everywhere Podcast: Mark Straub with Jenny Fielding
Jenny Fielding, co-founder of Everywhere Ventures, catches up with Mark Straub, founder and CEO of Smile ID, on Episode 11: 3,2,1...Smile ID.
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Mark Straub is the founder and CEO of Smile ID, the leading digital KYC (know your customer) and identity verification provider in Africa. Smile ID helps companies scale rapidly across Africa by confirming the identity of their users in real time, using any smartphone or computer. Prior to Smile, Mark was a venture investor for more than a decade at Khosla Impact and DFJ, covering multiple continents including South Asia and Africa.
This episode is hosted by Jenny Fielding, co-founder and managing partner of Everywhere Ventures (previously The Fund). In this interview, Jenny and Mark discuss the layers of complexity involved in doing business in African countries, and how the idea of creating an “Africa stack” came about. Learn how Mark was inspired by his VC experience and portfolio founders to transition from investor to founder. Listen till the end for a comparison on the mentality of an investor vs founder and an unusual superpower!
If you liked this episode, please give us a rating wherever you found us and be sure to subscribe to Venture Everywhere. To learn more about our work, visit Everywhere.vc and ideas.everywhere.vc on Substack. You can also follow us on LinkedIn and Twitter for regular updates and news.
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Jenny Fielding
Hi, and welcome to the Everywhere podcast. We're a global community of founders and operators who've come together to support the next generation of builders. So the premise of the podcast is just that: founders interviewing other founders about the trials and tribulations of building a company. Hope you enjoyed the episode!
Jenny Fielding
Hi, Mark, great to see you. Welcome to Venture Everywhere, our new podcast. Actually, you'll be on season two, which is pretty exciting. We had our first season. The concept is simple. We've got 500 founders and operators who are part of our community that are our LPs, and then another 260 portfolio companies. And there's a lot of overlap amongst that group. And so why not have founders interviewing founders? Sometimes you got me, but oftentimes, it's other folks in our community interviewing other people. So we like to say we have content forever.
Mark Straub
Thanks, Jenny. It's great to be here. Thanks for having me.
Jenny Fielding
Well, welcome. So I know that you are living in London, but originally from the US. So maybe you can back this up and give us a little bit of background of kind of where you're from and how you got into the world of investing. And then founding companies.
Mark Straub
Sure. Yeah. So I'm an American. And though I'm living here in London, I've only been here for about a year and a half. I like to say, I'm a stranger here, myself. I grew up on the East Coast, close to Washington, DC. And I think, probably was pretty impactful for me in terms of having a very global perspective and a lot of interest in what was going on around the world. As something my mom used to say. She said, like in DC local news is international news. And that definitely was true for me. And I remember, like, probably one of my kind of my first real, like, memories of intensely thinking about the world is reading the Washington Post each morning, and sort of having conversations with my parents and sometimes debating US foreign policy with them.
Mark Straub
I moved to California after college. I followed my brother who went out there for the tech boom. I worked in tech investment banking for a couple of years. I got there, like, right when everything had gone really bad. I remember like 1996 to 2000 was, you know, the original Internet, boom, bust. And then my brother moved out there. 98. And I moved out there for a summer in 2003. And it wasn't as cool anymore. And a lot of people had left, I think people were working in tech. I ended up working with a bunch of tech companies that had gotten public but probably shouldn't have been public. And so we were doing all these weird, sort of structured financings, and in some cases, M&A and downsizing. It was a lot of vegetables of sort of the financial markets - having to do a lot of Excel spreadsheets of cost cutting and crunching. So...
Jenny Fielding
I mean, if Smile doesn't work out, we had a job for you now!
Mark Straub
Exactly, these things always happen in cycles, right? So you learn something, and then it's not relevant anymore. And then seven, or eight or nine or ten years later, all of a sudden history rhymes. That was the early part of my career. And I guess it kind of jumped forward to what I'm doing now. There's a lot of things that happen. But I basically realized that I didn't want to be an investment banker. I really wanted to go work overseas, I wanted to work on problems that, to me, felt more impactful from a human standpoint. But at the same time, once I'd gotten this skill set of understanding finance and understanding business, I didn't want to just go do something like teach English, not that there's anything wrong with that. But I thought I've got a much more specific skill set.
Mark Straub
Anyway, I ended up reading a book called Banker to the Poor, it was about Muhammad Yunus and microfinance. And I moved to India in 2006. And I worked in microfinance for a little more than a year in India, traveled the length and breadth of the country. And that's sort of also when I really started thinking a lot about how you make life better for people who are living in very constrained financial circumstances. And inevitably, I kind of came back to technology as an enabler, because so much was being done manually. And then, around 2007 When I was leaving India, mobile top ups or credits began getting traded, like minutes would get traded, like it was money like it was payments, and you could start seeing how this was going to ultimately end up in mobile money. So I came back to the US because I wanted to more deeply understand technology and I worked for a tech VC for a while. And then I found -
Jenny Fielding
It's unclear that we didn't meet then, because that was when I started my mobile company which I was out in the Valley pitching people. It is called Switch mobile, it was mobile Voice over IP company in 2008. And I like went up and down Sand Hill Road and talked to everyone. So there's a chance that we did meet at some point.
Mark Straub
I want to go back and check my emails from then, there's a good chance. So fast forward, like I ended up starting a VC fund with a very successful venture capitalist from the US. And that fund, we focused on emerging markets. And during that path, I really started understanding a lot of the problems that led me to start Smile Identity a few years later. So yeah, that's the background, I don't know, 20 years, and hopefully in a little less than two minutes.
Jenny Fielding
I actually liked the beginning story of what inspired you growing up in the DC area, because I think many of us actually don't have that experience. And you know, as Scott and I are kind of sometimes feel like moving a boulder uphill by explaining to, you know, our LPs or our community, you know why and how we're investing in places like Egypt, or Sao Paulo, and all of these seems like that was kind of part of your DNA. But it seems like the rest of the world is starting to catch up, especially in the venture world, maybe in the last few years. But Scott always describes, you know, when he was a partner out in Silicon Valley, and like, his firm was like, "why are you even getting on a flight to go anywhere? You know, everything is right here, Scott."
Mark Straub
Right. There used to be a joke in Silicon Valley, like, the clocks on the wall read Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Santa Clara. Right, which is, we don't need to travel more than 45 minutes to meet all the entrepreneurs that matter. That obviously has changed. It's changed in waves over time. But that wave now is tsunami, of innovation that happens everywhere. And I think the mindset at some point in the last five, six years changed from being, you know, Silicon Valley as a place to it's a state of mind. And certainly COVID sort of forced that on the world. Because of what it did to distributed work and remote work. I remembered something that I don't know if you want to dig into this. But the reason I first got connected to The Fund is because of Scott. And Scott and I both went to UVA, but I didn't know him well then. But we met at or to say we reconnected or we had our first kind of real in depth conversations at the Indian Pakistani border.
Jenny Fielding
Sounds about right.
Mark Straub
Yeah. And we met - I was there traveling around on the weekend. We go to Amritsar, North India and Punjab. And then we went to the Volga gate at the border. I was with a handful people who were working at Google at the time. Yeah, that's when we met and we started chatting. And then I think the next time we met up was in Kenya. Like, I think Obama was speaking. So yeah, I think he and I probably always had that perspective of like, there's really interesting things happening in other parts of the world. And it's worth paying attention and being there and seeing then how they can connect back to what's happening with technology and innovation.
Jenny Fielding
Which seems so simple when you say it. But you know, the truth is, it's pretty complex to do that, right? And so I feel like both of you guys were kind of at the frontier of doing that, which is pretty cool.
Mark Straub
You know, I just read, I know, we're way off the topic of technology. But I've been reading the book about Bourdain, the biography of him. And there's a great little clip with Anderson Cooper. And I guess he talks about how like people who are drawn to go to other parts of the world, often they have a hunger for learning about something else. Or there's something that they're not quite, they need to know more about. And I guess we probably have that in our DNA. And maybe that's, there's a lot of kindred spirits out there like that.
Jenny Fielding
For sure. Well, having just come back last night from my seven week adventure abroad. I definitely relate to that. So I'd love to talk a little bit more about Smile, kind of the early days and the inspiration. My own little interest in Identity started probably in 2012 or 13, where I had just a very light experience. Which is: my legal name is Jenny. And oftentimes gets put on documents as Jennifer because people just assume. And so I had this like whole banking thing where like all these documents were said, Jennifer, but my legal name is actually Jenny. And it was because you know, some person at a bank, just assumed. And so I just kind of started thinking about that idea in a very simple way.
Jenny Fielding
In 2015, I met three young folks with a great kind of perspective on where they thought KYC was gonna go. And they started a company called Alloy, which I was lucky to be the first investor in. And there were some threads that were kind of similar in terms of what they were trying to do because when they pitched me originally, although the vision was much bigger, and it's changed over the years, but you know, originally it was like, hey, credit cards are turning down 50% of people because they're doing a simple name check. And they're seeing like, the names don't match the addresses don't match somebody's last name when they get married. You know, all these things. And I was like, Oh, well, that actually happened to me. And that's crazy the simplicity of how they're doing their KYC. So that was kind of the first spark for me. Obviously, you've taken it to another level. But I'd love to kind of hear how you got started around that idea and where it's gone.
Mark Straub
Yeah, yeah, actually, I love the Alloy story. I may have only sort of heard it more and more now from other people who are close to them when they were getting started. But Laura Spiekermann actually was an intern at a company that I invested in, in Kenya 10 years ago. Which is why when her name popped up with Alloy I was like: where have I? Oh, yes, that's right. She did that thing in Kenya.
Jenny Fielding
That's wild.
Mark Straub
Yeah, so she knew this problem. I mean, she obviously - now they know this problem. I mean, they're the experts at it in the US. But she understood it in Kenya 10 years ago. And there's very similar kind of story of that company that she was helping out, was onboarding and continues to onboard merchants in East Africa for payments purposes. And I was involved in that business. I was involved in another business, it was a lending business. I was involved in another business in West Africa, this payments business, all of these businesses were running into fraud in one way or another when they were trying to onboard users. And so what they do is they throw friction at the problem. And I talked about this being the three P's: either people, process, or paperwork. So you throw that friction at the problem. And it solves the fraud, but greatly reduces your growth rate, like what you can actually achieve as a business. In the US that comes across as a bunch of declined applications. In the context that I was operating in at that time, it can either be declined applications, or a ton of manual work that slows everything down. Which is why - sort of like, well, it takes two days to do this, and five days to do that, a week to open up a bank account. You know, if you ever read these, like ease of doing business reports that the UN puts out about different countries, obviously, like many countries in Africa, near the bottom of those lists. Some of it has to do with compliance and legal requirements and the headaches associated with registering businesses. But some of it has to do with things like opening up a bank account. And a lot of those things are because there's so much manual work that's involved.
Mark Straub
The truth is that technology actually can solve, and in many cases has solved this problem. But you have to design the technology to be thoughtful enough and local enough to work within the context of that particular country or that particular use case. You know, in the US, if you kind of think about identity, we've had like generations of companies that have been building in this space, but we don't think of them as identity companies. If you kind of go back to like the white pages. And if you go back to the credit bureaus that were originally built in the 70s, and 80s, these companies ended up becoming the original sort of sources of KYC for banks. But as the needs got more sophisticated for consumers, the rule sets didn't necessarily evolve. And as the channels grew and expanded to mobile channels and internet channels, you also didn't necessarily have companies that were built for that. So new companies got built companies like Onfido, companies like Jumio, that we're especially with the advent of the shared economies, you needed to do ride sharing, onboarding, and you need to do Airbnb onboarding, and flight onboarding. And these companies got built. And then you had more and more sophisticated financial services needs. And those companies didn't quite meet those. And so you have a company like Alloy that comes in with an orchestration layer. So if you're Canadian, you know, here's the rules. If you're in New York, these are the rules. If you're actually above a certain age in this state, here's the certain rules. And so understanding that level of complexity, which Alloy has done, is really critical.
Mark Straub
Well, in Africa, you can imagine, there's just as many layers of complexity. You know, in Nigeria, you've got three different tiers of KYC, depending on what kind of bank account you're going to open up. And each tier of KYC has different requirements. And some of those requirements require different kinds of datasets. Some of those datasets have restrictions on who's allowed to access them. So you've got to do a lot of local work. And then of course, the trick is if you can turn that local work into software, that's really when the magic happens. And people get these experiences of just downloading an app, clicking a few buttons, taking a selfie, and all of a sudden, they've got a bank account. And they can collect money, they can send money. But there's a ton of understanding both from the compliance side, from the user experience side, and then actually the engineering side to make all that magic happen. And obviously, that's now within Africa, like where we're focused on is making that work. You know, we've done that really well in Nigeria and Kenya, in South Africa, in Ghana and Uganda. And now we just keep continuing to expand the number of countries in Africa where we can really deliver great experiences.
Mark Straub
So just backing up for a moment, you spent money yours as a venture capitalist, how did you identify that this was the problem that you wanted to spend, say, the next 15 to 20 years of your life solving?
Mark Straub
Yeah, I mean, I did see the problem emerge from within my portfolio. And I talked about how the companies are sort of trying to solve it with whatever they could throw at it, people and paperwork. But the lightbulb moment for me was actually, I used to fly back and forth between Mumbai and Nairobi, because that's where we had a number of portfolio companies in one of the VC firms that I managed. And the markets were similar in terms of the way people used technology and like the problems they're trying to solve in their lives. But India, of course, is one country. Africa is 52 to 54, depending on how you count. And so when India adopted a national ID system and put it into place, it's called the Aadhaar system. It pretty much revolutionized how you do onboarding across the country, not overnight, but in a matter of maybe one or two years. And in India, where I lived, I knew how hard it was to get a bank account or a SIM card, it was three days of waiting. Someone has to come visit your house. All of a sudden, all that went away. You could get a SIM card in two minutes. You walked into a shop, you put down your thumb print, and you walked out with a SIM card.
Jenny Fielding
But what year was that? That's pretty amazing.
Mark Straub
So the system itself got started, I think in like 2012. They finished building it around 2014. It's around 2016 when everything changed. Then Reliance Geo, which is a telecom in India, became the fastest telecom to ever reach 100 million subscribers. They did in six months. They use 1) free data and 2) automatic KYC to make that happen. It was the automatic KYC part that was interesting to me, because I thought if only this kind of thing existed. In India, this whole set of solutions, which is the National ID system, the E-KYC solution, biometric authentication, and the payments layer, this whole thing is called India Stack. That's the kind of the syntax they've come up for this whole set of protocols.
Mark Straub
I started saying to myself "If only there was an African stack." And there were pieces of it that were coming together, the payments piece actually was largely coming together with different companies. So you had Flutterwave, you had Paystack. And then the mobile money markets, you had M-PESA, and Airtel money and a few other telecom mobile money programs. So the the payments piece was coming together, but the underlying layer, you think about like a TCP IP, like a seven layer, you know, stack or like similar burrito, as I explained to my family. The identity layer was really messy, and not clear for people in Africa. Well, for companies that tried to do business in specific markets in Africa, I should say. And so you had, in some countries, widely available physical ID cards. In some countries, partially available physical ID cards. In some countries, they had a national ID, but it was there was no card, it's only a number. And then sometimes the databases were up to date, sometimes where they were not. It was very messy.
Mark Straub
And our idea was: if you could solve that, and start piecing together the Africa stack alongside the payments companies, that that would really change the rate at which companies could scale and onboard customers, and it would reduce a lot of the pain and friction and frustration from Africans' lives. That to me was like a big light bulb, having experienced some of the suffering that you've talked about, like the situation with a bank and your name and getting it wrong. Both myself having had flights canceled because the airline ticket I bought was used with my card while I was in Lagos and I call Amex. They say, Well, I'm sorry, the IP address was Lagos. And I said, Well, that's racist. They're like, Yeah, well, I don't know what to tell you. I mean, I just realized, like, this was a problem worth spending...You know, it's now been seven years. I mean, I knew this was going to be years. I thought this was a problem worth spending a great deal of my life on.
Jenny Fielding
Awesome. So fast forward within the business, like you just raised a Series B, no easy feat in this crazy market. So tell us a little bit about your vision for expansion across the continent and beyond. And you know, a little bit more about closing that epic round.
Mark Straub
Thanks. Yeah, fundraising is hard. It was easier for a while, maybe in 2021. And then it got hard again. One of the things that I took away from the experience is how precious your time is. Because ultimately that money really equates to time. It takes a lot of time to raise money. And then once you have it, the amount of money you have really sort of creates basically a measurement for how many things you can do with people's time, and how much time you have to do those things to make them work. I think what we've been spending time now thinking about is, how do we efficiently grow the business and still achieve the very sort of lofty ambitions that we had for ourselves, which is the original vision of the company. It was to make it easy for anyone to prove their identity, regardless of the origin of their IP address or their ID card. And we thought that the way to do that was to make this work in Africa, because that's of the roughly billion people in the world who struggle to prove their identity, according to various UN reports, more than half of them live in Africa. And so we thought, if we could solve that, you really solve more than half the problem.
Mark Straub
And now a lot of it is like going back and looking at how we did or are doing international expansion in one market or another. And avoiding situations where we have sort of ongoing fixed or unlimited costs, with unclear visibility into timeline of revenue or profits, right. So you sort of shift that from like, I want to do things that are milestone based. And I want to make sure that every kind of time that we have to approve budget, or we have to increase costs, we're doing so where it's tied to positive cash flow, that's going to come back within some projected period of time. So it's a lot of like rethinking about the metrics that we use to measure our own success, and then getting the company to understand that what we did before like, Yay, we raised a series B, fantastic. Okay, now stop, we're going to do something different. And that's really hard, especially as the company gets beyond a really like early stage startup, as you get into more of growth stage company. You can't just get everyone together in a room and sort of say, okay, like, this is how we're going to do things. I mean, we got people across 10 countries. So you've really got to distill down the essence of what you're doing into, you know, a couple of metrics. What we're trying to do right now is come up with one metric, and basically get people to understand like, everything you're doing really needs to tie back to this particular metric. And if you're spending your time on something, and you can't see how it relates to that metric, you probably should talk to your manager about what you're working on.
Jenny Fielding
Makes sense. Hard to get everyone aligned, how many people at Smile now?
Mark Straub
Yes, we have over 50, think we're about 55 right now. And then we have a handful of folks who are either advisors, or local board members and directors in different markets that we operated.
Jenny Fielding
Alright, so not at the 100 person breaking point. But moving that way.
Mark Straub
Yeah, I found that somewhere after 22 ish, or 25 ish employees, things changed. We have never run a company that's at 100 or more. But I've definitely noticed that, you know, above 22, all of a sudden, the way things operate, just really, it changes. And you've got to also change in the way that you kind of communicate and help people organize.
Jenny Fielding
Here's a fun question. What's one idea that experts in your field, say that you disagree with? So obviously, you probably have pretty strong opinions about technology and scaling through Africa? So I kind of love that question, especially for you.
Mark Straub
My one core belief that most people would disagree with me on. I mean, this is sort of the essence of starting this company. Because Africa, and other markets that are also at similar stage of economic development, some parts of Southeast Asia, India, because these markets are now building new identity infrastructure that is different and more modern than what we have in the US. My crazy belief is that, at some point, in the not too distant future, that African consumers could actually be easier to verify, and therefore trust and transact with than US consumers.
Jenny Fielding
And why is that?
Mark Straub
Because I can do a stronger identity verification right now on someone in Lagos then TransUnion can do on somebody Los Angeles.
Jenny Fielding
It's incredible.
Mark Straub
Because we can do a biometric confirmation of a user in real time, who's signing up for financial app from their phone, measuring basically the biometric match from their face against the photo on file inside of either a bank or a national ID system in Nigeria. Which is not something that you can do currently in the US with any sort of scalability.
Jenny Fielding
Yeah, well, that's actually - I'd love to hear a little more about that. You know, as you are working in Africa, the infrastructure there, more different or lack of infrastructure - does that make your business easier? Because we've seen that in a few of our companies where they were actually able to move faster than I think they'd be able to move in the US, based on what was previously built or not built.
Mark Straub
Yeah, I think the way I would describe it, it's not that it makes it easier or harder, it's that we have to learn a different muscle. So the muscle we're really good at, is figuring out how to build software, and also work with regulators in areas that are not clearly defined. And this is a big difference within our markets then versus in the US, and the US has a little bit of dislike now in the crypto space.
Jenny Fielding
The crypto people wouldn't agree with you.
Mark Straub
Crypto is the best example. So I actually think what US companies are dealing with in crypto right now is the closest parallel, I can sort of explain to what it's like dealing with, in many industries in Africa. But particularly in in the identity industry. I would say with one major difference. I think the trend in the US between regulators and industry participants is generally one where the regulators are sort of becoming less aligned with them and pressing them down more. Whereas in our example, I think it's going the opposite direction, like we're increasingly aligned with regulators, regulators are increasingly aligned with us. But when we started, there was that similar sort of gray zone where there was a bunch of rules written about what KYC would need to entail for onboarding a customer into a bank account in let's say, Tanzania, or in Nigeria, or in Kenya. Those rules were written, sometimes 10, 15,f 25 years ago. And they were written as rough guidelines. And they are not taken into account anything about mobile devices, or whether a person's standing in front of you or not. And so for a while, we were building products that would make use of the National ID infrastructure that existed. But operating in this gray zone, we're like, Wait, this company is doing a verification against the national ID system with biometrics, they have got a full audit trail of it. But what they're doing doesn't exactly match what's written in the published regulations that were written 20 years ago. So does this meet government requirements or not?
Mark Straub
And then you talk to the government, and they would sort of be like, Oh, we'll issue you a letter of no objection. Which means we're not going to object to what you're doing. But we're not going to tell you that what you're doing satisfies the requirement. And this went on for years and years and years. But I think actually, what the regulators were doing, were buying themselves time to figure it out. And you'll see a lot of that, I think, in Africa. Regulators not being willing to accept something, but not necessarily stopping it, until they've kind of figured out what they want to do with it. Sometimes we see other the other approach, which is more knee jerk, which is people, they'll come out and say, and then particularly Nigeria, we saw this a lot last year. Where the regulator would come out and say, like, this thing is banned, or this thing can't be done. And then there'd be a public outcry. And within a matter of weeks, you'd see the regulators reverse themselves or create a public hearing process. So things aren't impossible. They're not necessarily easier. It's just a different skill set, you have to learn how to deal with it. You have to get really comfortable with anxiety.
Jenny Fielding
Well, yes, with that statement, I'd love to know, what was the transition between being an investor to being a founder? Because I feel like that's a big transition. So I was a two time founder, and there was a lot of anxiety, making payroll, you know, making sure the team was happy, all these kinds of things, which is different in venture, right? So I mean, I wake up in the middle of the night. And I'm like, oh shit, is our fund gonna do well? But I only have as much as I can do around that. Our portfolio are really the drivers of success, right? So it's kind of a different animal.
Mark Straub
I mean, I could almost just repeat the same thing is like, you know, going from an investor to founder you get really comfortable with anxiety. But I do want to say, I think investors also have the anxiety. It plays out in two radically different timescales. You don't get to see the outcome really, for like, it's only like 12 to 24, maybe in 36 months. It's like you get to start seeing that the consequences of those decisions. Where for me now, and I'm sure for you and your founder, like the consequences of your decisions on a daily basis start playing out like inside the month or inside the quarter, certainly inside the year. So the thing I actually feel better about and maybe the reason why I ended up becoming a founder was that I really wanted that faster feedback loop. I kind of found it frustrating to like sit around and wait. And I wanted to get my hands dirty. And I think if you talk to the founders I worked with back then, the criticism they probably would have had of me is that like, I got too involved. Right? I think that was a signal that maybe I should be an operator and not an investor.
Jenny Fielding
I love that. Yeah, it is frustrating sometimes where, you know, people are like, Well, do you think that you're good at preseed? I'm like, I don't know, ask me in 10 years. Although I have been doing it for a while. I have some data from my portfolio. But yes, the feedback loops are quite onerous, for sure. All right, superpower. What do you think the one thing is, if you had to distill all your many talents, down to kind of the one thing that you think you're better than other folks? For me, I know, it was really kind of bringing people together in a maybe unusual way. Like I can see things, maybe partnerships or relations that other people don't have. And I feel like that's, you know, one of my gifts that I kind of love leaning into. And it's been awesome for me as a founder, and really now as an investor, because that's my full time job.
Mark Straub
It's funny, you sort of took mine but I think there's something about that, which is actually I think that people who have that skill set, and are really good at it. Like, there's definitely a correlation between that and like good venture capitalists. Because that's just part of it. Like you start seeing things that other people don't see. And you're having all these different interactions with people where you have a synthesis of all those ideas, and you find you distill it down to like, the key insight. So yeah, whether it's founders who do that, or VCs who do that, it makes a lot of sense. I think I've got some of that. But I think, I don't know, maybe to make this more interesting. And people have asked me how I've done what I've done, you know, have we done what we've done at Smile in Africa, because it's very hard to go get integrated into these ID systems and do business in all these countries. And I think I have a tolerance for pain. That is just a little bit off the charts.
Jenny Fielding
That is an unusual answer, but a great one.
Mark Straub
Yeah, I seem to be willing to take on more pain and suffering than other folks. And I didn't really understand that until later in life. But I remember being a little kid playing basketball. And I was not very good. I wasn't very tall. But I was willing to run harder than anybody else on the court for the full game. And so by the end of the game, when everyone was gassed, I was like stealing the ball. I'm just willing to suffer for longer.
Jenny Fielding
Well, yeah, that's one of the things I think on our laundry list, is the resilient founder, right? Who can make it through the troughs of despair. All right, we're gonna wrap it up with a fun speed round. So I get the sense that you're someone that reads and listens to a lot of content. So anything that you're consuming right now that you're particularly enjoying?
Mark Straub
Just finished Biography of Benjamin Franklin, who is the first American who really lived in London, and he lived here for 20 years. And that was fascinating, because I didn't realize he was an entrepreneur, and a very good one.
Jenny Fielding
All right. If you could live anywhere in the world for one year, but not London, or the US, where would it be? So you're going to do another one year stint sabbatical somewhere
Mark Straub
Oh, my gosh, yeah, I'm going to cheat here. I'm gonna go to two of them. I'm gonna do six months in Italy. And six months in the Seychelles.
Jenny Fielding
All right, like any good entrepreneur hacking the questions. Okay, favorite productivity hack? You're obviously running a growing team right now, in many geographies and time zones. How do you stay organized?
Mark Straub
Hmm. I think the best thing that I found it's really simple is I keep a to do list. And while it's exhaustive, I kind of look back at that top three to do list. And I kind of make sure it's up to date each night. And then the next day, I'm kind of looking at that, at least when I go into the next day, I kind of know like, what the three things are, I need to accomplish. Really simple. I mean, there's 1000 things you can do from this standpoint. But that's my basic one.
Jenny Fielding
Love it. All right. Well, that's about it. Where should listeners find you?
Mark Straub
I am a Twitter junkie. I've been there since 2007. And my Twitter handle is Mark Straub. But also our company is Smile Identity. And yeah, we put out a fair bit of content. And for anybody who's actually interested in KYC, we do every six months, an exhaustive KYC report on everything going on and KYC in Africa, the next one's coming out in about two weeks. And if you follow Smile Identity on Twitter, you will get it.
Jenny Fielding
Fantastic. I'm happy to include that in the show notes as well. So, Mark, well, thank you so much. And yeah, real pleasure catching up with you.
Scott Hartley
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