Venture Everywhere Podcast: Toby Rush with Jenny Fielding
Toby Rush, co-founder and CEO of Ideem chats with Jenny Fielding, Managing Partner of Everywhere VC, on episode 74: Ideem it Secure.
In episode 74 of Venture Everywhere, Jenny Fielding, co-founder and Managing Partner of Everywhere Ventures, talks with Toby Rush, founder and CEO of Ideem — a next-generation authentication platform built to streamline payment verification in high-friction, high-fraud markets. Toby shares Ideem’s journey from a prototype co-developed with a global bank to a scalable solution tackling the challenges of digital payments in emerging economies. Toby also discusses Ideem’s use of cryptographic device binding to eliminate one-time passwords, reduce fraud, and deliver a seamless customer experience in regions experiencing rapid digital payment adoption.
In this episode, you will hear:
Addressing the high cost and user friction of OTPs in emerging markets
Security risks introduced by passkey synchronization across devices
Building go-to-market strategies through local partnerships and global networks
Evaluating identity verification frameworks amid evolving regulatory pressures
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TRANSCRIPT
00:00:00 VO: Everywhere Podcast Network.
00:00:14 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 enjoy the episode.
00:00:33 Jenny: Alright. Super excited to be here today with my good friend, Toby Rush from Ideem. Welcome, everyone, to Venture Everywhere, our podcast where we talk to founders in our community. We certainly have a lot of them. Welcome, Toby.
00:00:48 Toby: Great to be here, Jenny. Excited to have the conversation.
00:00:50 Jenny: Great. You have such an interesting history. You live in Kansas City. I feel like you've really done things your own way in many ways. Take us back a little bit to your first journey into entrepreneurship and what really gave you the confidence and the spark to start your own.
00:01:07 Toby: This is actually my fourth startup from scratch, so I've actually gotten questioned quite often. It's like, “What are you doing? Why are you still doing this? It is so hard, and it is such an emotional knife fight every day.” So I actually took a step back and was like, “Why do I keep doing this?”
00:01:20 Toby: I just love to build. Fundamentally at my heart, I love building products. I love building teams. I love building companies. I love building momentum. Just the builder journey.
00:01:29 Toby: This is the fourth one from scratch. My first one was way back in 2003, so over 20 years ago, when we were putting cameras on forklifts to automate data collection. The joke is we let forklift drivers become race car drivers.
00:01:40 Toby: And then the computer vision took me into my second company, which was a biometrics company. We were doing an eye based biometric before biometrics on smartphones. I think I was just too naive to think like, “We have these cameras. Why don't we just replace passwords on smartphones?”
00:01:53 Toby: I got so much pushback. They're like, that's a dumb idea. If people were to put biometrics on smartphones, Apple and Google would already be doing it. And we got lucky. That was a scenario where timing was perfect.
00:02:03 Toby: So I started that company in Q1 of 2012. Apple came out with Touch ID in Q3 of ‘13, so just 18 months later. And then Apple Pay the next year, and we were just right place, right time. So we were able to sell that one to Alibaba. I ran all of biometrics for three years. Crazy stories working with a major tech player in China.
00:02:20 Toby: The next one, it was a great idea and terrible timing. We tried to build a really seamless way for Web2 users to move to Web3 and no Web2 users were moving to Web3. So I was way too far ahead of the curve there.
00:02:31 Toby: So now I'm back building again, still in the authentication identity space. The past three have all been in this authentication identity cybersecurity, predominantly financial services. Just still having fun building.
00:02:41 Jenny: It's interesting with the second company where you've started to get into the rumblings of this space. Maybe you went in with a beginner mindset or a naive mindset, as some might call it. And in fact, that led to your success.
00:02:55 Jenny: Oftentimes, there's this debate. Second time, third time founders or novice founders, we fund both because we find that sometimes you need that naivety just to do something that is going against incumbents and doing that crazy thing.
00:03:10 Jenny: And then sometimes having experience in the space can just be such an accelerant. I feel like that's the case in the company that you're building, and you're so fired up about it. Tell us a little bit more about what got you excited and the vision for Ideem.
00:03:24 Toby: What we're doing here at Ideem is how do you make the authentication process, specifically payment authentication process, easy and invisible? When someone goes on the merchant process, if you hit pay, that's the magic moment.
00:03:36 Toby: All this energy has been spent by the merchant ahead of time. That's what the banks and the payment methods, everybody wants that. That's what you're wanting to do. I want to hit pay. And especially in emerging markets, there's so much friction that happens when you want to hit pay.
00:003:48 Toby: So what we've done is developed a really simple piece of software that makes that payment authentication flow seamless and invisible. Specifically, we can reduce friction, fraud and cost for all parties that are involved.
00:03:59 Toby: The “aha” for me was these technologies, actually co-designed with a global five bank that wanted to eliminate two-factor authentication, make it invisible. So we have this really cool piece of software that cryptographically binds to the device and is super geeky and technical, which I love.
00:04:14 Toby: When I saw it, I'm like, oh my gosh, emerging markets would so be able to use this because they do so many text messaging on OTPs or WhatsApp. They redirect you to the app to approve something and the flow is terrible.
00:04:25 Toby: It was because of my experience with so much emerging markets and realizing that instant payments in emerging markets means instant fraud. And so they tend to do lots of extra authentication on the front end, which is friction, which reduces the fraud, but makes experience terrible. So it was a combination of really understanding identity authentication space, understanding emerging markets and saying, hey, this is a big need, but it's actually not in the US.
00:04:48 Toby: It was also interesting talking to a lot of US Investors. They're like, yeah, that's not really a problem. I don't see it. How much have you done payments in Indonesia or the Philippines or Latin America? What we're building at Ideem is a really simple piece of software that makes payment authentication easy and invisible in predominantly emerging markets.
00:05:07 Jenny: Can you talk a little bit about having entered emerging markets? I've traveled around the world, but it took me a long time to make my first investment in an emerging market.
00:05:19 Jenny: And now we invest across Africa, across LatAm. We've invested in the Philippines where you just came back from. What was that like when you first started working and selling and being involved in emerging markets?
00:05:31 Toby: Again, this is the benefit of having been there and done that. I called up the CEO of one of the largest wallets in Indonesia and said, I've got this new product. This new idea. I think it's not working with major banks, which is where it was initially designed, but it's working in emerging markets. And I described it.
00:05:46 Toby: He was immediately like, oh, my gosh. You're doing cryptographic device binding. We send almost a million OTPs every day. You send how many OTPs? It was crazy the number of OTPs that they would send these text messages to WhatsApp.
00:05:58 Toby: And he's like, yeah. It's a major issue. It's a board level discussion. It's a ton of cost. It's a ton of friction. The regulators are breathing down our neck to do something different. I'm like, so if we did this, this and this that would help? He's like, Absolutely.
00:06:10 Toby: That was an example of because I had a network that was my entry point into those markets. And I've done a lot of work because of my work with Alibaba across Southeast Asia. So going into the Philippines or Malaysia or Thailand or Singapore, that's just so much easier for me to do.
00:06:23 Toby: And then having great investors. Again, the thing that I've learned, being on my fourth company, all the money is not the same color. It's so true. Investors who understand business, can make relationships, can make introductions are so powerful. And so as I was raising this round, I wasn't really looking for domestic investors or people who just did domestic, but really understood, in particular, emerging markets.
00:06:42 Toby: One, they quickly got the pain point, but then they've been super helpful. So short of that, it would be crazy, almost impossible to just parachute into an emerging market country and think that you can make headway without trusted relationships.
00:06:54 Jenny: Tell us a little bit more about your go-to-market because it is so global, which is exciting. But where do you go first or next?
00:07:02 Toby: Honestly, this is the area that I think we are the least mature in. We're still trying to figure it out. Ideally, we can go through partners. You also realize partners want to simply go sell something. They don't want to have to go evangelize it.
00:07:11 Toby: So the current thought process, we're still figuring it out. We're early. We've got to go tackle a few ourselves. You almost have to go direct to get some reference accounts in those countries that people know and can trust. Then it's just trying to get partners, a local presence.
00:07:25 Toby: Emerging markets in particular trust locals. Again, they love that it's an American tech because there's something cool about having an American technology, but they want to sell.
00:07:34 Toby: So it is a pretty good combination of if you can find a local partner that's willing to be boots on the ground, manage your relationships, be the person that can pick up a phone call and talk to, but having a cool American technology that's used globally by really big banks and really deep cybersecurity is an interesting one-two punch.
00:07:50 Jenny: Can you talk a little bit about the challenges in this space more generally? So there's a lot of folks jumping into identity. I think many of us believe that this is one of the pain points of today and tomorrow. What are some of the challenges about working in this space?
00:08:04 Toby: There's so much fear, uncertainty, and doubt that people want to throw around, because it is hard. There's two aspects when you think about identity. There's identity proofing. So prove one time that you're human and that you really are Jenny and that you are who you say you are. And then how do you continue to authenticate against that profile going forward?
00:08:19 Toby: So how do you initially prove that you're a real human and you're the human that you're claiming to be? And then how do you make it easy to continue to project that offline identity into an online world in a way that is both very secure but very seamless?
00:08:31 Toby: So the challenge is helping people understand what is the problem you’re trying to solve and then thinking longer term, more industry standards. Because there are so many interoperable components here, people aren't going to go adopt a completely proprietary solution. But you can have a proprietary approach. But the interface almost has to be something more standards based.
00:08:50 Toby: Another thing that I've learned along the way, you can have the most amazing whiz-bang thing in the world. But if you were the only one that does it that way, people aren't going to just up and wholesale change everything they're doing to fit what you're doing.
00:09:00 Toby: So understanding ease of implementation. Ease of implementation is probably one of the biggest inhibitors to progress, especially in the financial services world. If it's hard to implement, forget it.
00:09:10 Toby: Understanding the evolving landscape and what's called identity verification or IDV, and then the ongoing authentication. Open banking is really pushing a lot of this in some really cool ways in emerging markets. So banks are turning into wallets. Banks are turning into open APIs.
00:09:25 Toby: Of course, in the last 12 months, we've seen the rise of the agents, the agentic everything, but in particular, financial service. How do I pay for this? How do I give an agent authorization to buy something on my behalf? That's a pretty scary thought because if it goes wrong, that agent buys a whole lot of stuff.
00:09:39 Toby: Visa just came out with a bunch of announcements around an agentic payment framework. A lot of folks are trying to figure it out. It is a quickly evolving landscape between traditional old school emerging markets, where they're just trying to get on and get away from cash, all the way up to some really sophisticated agents acting on our behalf in an autonomous fashion.
00:09:55 Jenny: It's so crazy. I have a chapter in my book on the Philippines. And this one story that I recount is it's 2007. A friend comes back from the Philippines and is like, oh, I've seen the future, and recounts how payments were working there, which were all mobile at the time. I mean, literally 2007.
00:10:12 Jenny: You could transfer money through your phone. And then you could go to McDonald's and pick up your cash and get a Big Mac. I remember hearing the story, 2007, and just being like, I wanna be part of that future and we are so far behind in the US.
00:10:28 Toby: We were the first to cell phones, first computers. We have computers. They skipped computers, went straight to mobile. They didn't have credit card. They went straight to mobile apps.
00:10:36 Toby: Sometimes those fast followers get to leapfrog us, at least for a while, until we catch up. But a lot of these emerging markets, they're so innovative. We don't give them enough credit. Sometimes the necessity is the motherhood of all invention. You can even invent some really cool hacks to make things work.
00:10:50 Jenny: Totally. Another thing I talk about in my book is this idea of the Everywhere Mindset, and I go through a few of the characteristics. I feel like you embody that mindset, and yet you're not from New York City or San Francisco or London or whatnot.
00:11:04 Jenny: Tell us a little bit about Kansas City, the community there, and how you've been able to seamlessly pair these multiple worlds because I think it's so cool and impressive. We don't hear or see about people like you all the time.
00:11:18 Toby: Yeah. Kansas City is not always on the top of the list of where is entrepreneurship happening? I think I have a very curious disposition. For me, when I think about first principles of life at a much larger scale, it really comes back to relationships. You have these deep, meaningful relationships, and that is much of the source of your identity and joy in life.
00:11:37 Toby: That is really an eye opening experience of like, oh, when I'm 80 years old and I look back on the things that I've enjoyed, it's going to be because of the people that I was with, the journeys that we've had, the relationships. It's not going to be how much money I made. It's not going to be the car I had, the size of house I have. It's really going to be these relationships.
00:11:53 Toby: And so, if I were to really optimize my life wherever I could for deeper and more meaningful relationships, I will be the wealthiest people in the world with the treasure we actually all care about. It makes so much sense. When I say that to people, they're like, well, of course.
00:12:08 Toby: But people don't live their lives that way. It's like, can I get a little bit more money over here? Can I get a bigger house in this other part of the same town? And so you end up sacrificing friendships and relationships for the sake of these other things.
00:12:20 Toby: My wife, we both agreed of, hey, let's try to really optimize where do we think we'll get the deepest, emotional, meaningful relationships. That was Kansas City. And this was way back early 2000s when we were trying to figure out where do we want to land.
00:12:31 Toby: This is even before I really knew I wanted to be a full time entrepreneur. This was very much first principles, early days thinking. So that was Kansas City. And so as we've continued to invest in people and build roots.
00:12:41 Toby: Even here in Kansas City, we decided to move right across the street from one of my best friends. And then another friend moved in, another friend moved in. We had up to 14 houses of my best friends in the world right here in Kansas City. I could never recreate that somewhere.
00:12:52 Toby: So as I thought about the things that are important to me and want to prioritize, those relationships are definitely a huge piece of that. A strong faith component as well.
00;13:01 Toby: But I love building. I love technology. I love the speed and the innovation. You have very much a creative side to me. This creativity thrives with entrepreneurship, especially technology entrepreneurship, because it's as big as you can imagine. But I love building. I love relationships. That works here in Kansas City. The world travels, so I've been able to travel and do business all over the world. I know you've traveled far more than I have even. It's just worked.
00:13:22 Toby: Clearly I knew I could have moved to San Francisco and followed the traditional path and gone to New York or Austin. Didn't feel authentic to me. It felt like I was chasing someone else's dream. If I just step back and really ask myself first principles, what do I really want when I'm 70 or 80? It wasn't necessarily gonna happen in San Francisco or New York.
00:13:38 Jenny: That makes sense. And then just give us a little color of some of the entrepreneurial activity that is happening in KC. There's some great events that you're part of and things I'm always hearing about. Is it booming? Is it getting there? Is it expanding?
00:13:51 Toby: I've been at this since 2003. So, what? 22 years now. I have had the benefit of seeing over a really long period of time just the momentum and things that people are doing. I would say my answer today is probably the same as it was 20 years ago. It's good. I wish it were better. That is the case every single year. It's better, but I sure wish we were better.
00:14:08 Toby: We're never going to be Austin. People say, Hey, we should be the next Austin. I'm like, “No, stop that. We're going to be Kansas City and we're going to do what we do well.” So we do it. We have a great ecosystem. We punch well above our weight for where we're at. We've had a number of great exits. We have a really helpful, engaged community because we know we have to be.
00:14:22 Toby: Entrepreneurs where groups get together, it's not kind of a knives out. It's a open hand, “Hey, how can I help? What do you need? How can I be helpful?” We have a number of great events. The VC community is great. We've got the full capital stack of angels in pre-seed and seed and A and B and a number of private equities and family offices have gotten engaged. So it has continued to grow over 20 years. But I always wish we were better.
00:14:42 Toby: I heard someone frame it like we have this huge flywheel and you push on the flywheel. You push on it long enough with the same amount of energy into the flywheel, the flywheel keeps going faster and faster and faster if you keep putting the energy into that. And so I think the flywheel continues to go faster and faster, but we always want to go faster.
00:14:57 Jenny: Love it. And then what's your feeling on the future of work and work from home versus centralized teams? How are you guys building your teams? Because as you mentioned, you're gonna have global presence. But how are you being thoughtful about team building?
00:15:13 Toby: It is a question I have with my team, I've had with lots of other CEOs and entrepreneurs in the space as well. I fundamentally do this because I enjoy the people. I enjoy the relationships. And so I've both experienced myself and talking to a lot of others.
00:15:26 Toby: Fully remote is so easy to fall into very transactional. It doesn't always, but it's easy to fall into that. It takes an enormous amount of work not to make your daily work transactional. But you can't always be in person either. It's unrealistic with the talent and the global nature of so many of the companies.
00:15:41 Toby: So what we do is three days a week in person, two days are kind of flexible. Some people are two and three. And of course, we do have a number of folks that are also remote. So those that are remote, again, we try to be thoughtful about lots of touch points, lots of group team meetings as well.
00:15:54 Toby: But some entrepreneurs are like, well, because we have some people remote, we want everybody to be remote even when they're in the same city. I don't agree with that. Let's optimize the best we can. So wherever we can, we like to be together. We like pulling people in when they are remote, coming to Kansas City. Tough when some of our work is so international.
00:16:10 Toby: But it's evolving. I don't think we have an answer yet. I don't think it's fully remote. I don't think it's fully in person. It's a hybrid combination between there. I'm curious. What do you think?
00:16:18 Jenny: I love the thought of you hiring someone in the Philippines and then them coming to an off-site in Kansas City and being like, welcome to America. That's so awesome. I think the world needs more of that.
00:16:28 Jenny: I'm of the mindset that every team has to establish their own culture and what works for them because I've actually seen it work both ways. So I don't think you can be so dogmatic about it.
00:16:37 Jenny: I like the idea of distributed teams that then come together in person at offsites. And I think the cost is about the same, as opposed to like having dedicated office throughout the year. If you do three or four really good offsites where everyone comes together and you're not on your phones, and you're just for those three days really engaged with your colleagues like our Kauffman experience.
00:17:00 Jenny: We became so close because we had those crazy trips to Japan and that magical trip. So I do feel like you build something when you're having dinners and going out and just that time is very special.
00:17:14 Toby: You've got to have a relational component. When you feel like, hey, this is my team, I don't want to let them down, or we're in this together, both in the downtimes when it's super hard and you've got your chewing glass at a thousand yards there. You had a huge win, and everyone's really excited.
00:17:27 Toby: And if you don't have that relational component, you almost can't do it. Startups are too much of a roller coaster, or it's too emotional of highs and lows. If you don't have that relational resilience, I don't think you can make it.
00:17:37 Jenny: What are some of the qualities that you look for in your team? As you're hiring your leadership team, are there certain archetypes you look for and not necessarily experiences, but that intangible.
00:17:49 Toby: What I've seen on salespeople, if you're not genuinely outgoing and competitive, it's going to be hard. Did you play sports? Were you competitive? Do you like being out front? Were you in the school play?
00:18:01 Toby: There's just some fundamental things. Especially I like asking about high school and college because you're not thinking about you're building your resume. So if you were just naturally, yeah, I was the team captain of my basketball team, or even it could be chess club, it could be anything. But those folks that are both outgoing and competitive on the sales team is super important.
00:18:16 Toby: On the technology side, if you're a musical, wow. By far the best architects and even CTOs or leaders of engineering teams. There's something about this musical mindset that makes you super creative.
00:18:29 Jenny: I haven't heard that before. Tell me more.
00:18:32 Toby: Oh, my gosh. By far, the best architects I've ever worked with. They have a musical talent. I do think there's something to this creativity that you need, because it's not just I'm a VP Engineer, and I'm going to go process, and I'm going to hammer things through. Like, sure, you need those sometime. Especially in the startup, you've got to think around the corner, and you've got to be willing to be creative. So I love musicians.
00:18:49 Toby: I've seen other CEOs. There's this mental stability, just because you've got so much coming up. One day, you're on top of the world, you're the most amazing person, you're on a podcast, you're on the front page of this trade magazine, or you're up on stage, and those are great.
00:19:02 Toby: And the next day or sometimes the same day, your customer is pissed off and something's failing or something bad happened on the team or your key team members leaving. Having the ability to stay steady in that is crazy important. But they got to be a storyteller. They got to be personable. They got to be able to lean into that.
00:19:17 Toby: I also like that you mentioned a combination of a little bit of experience, but not so much experience they look into coast to the finish line. So you want someone who's still hungry. I would much rather have someone who's rough around the edges, but super aggressive, hungry, curious. They wanna learn because you can guide those guys.
00:19:33 Toby: When you get the I've done this for thirty years, and I'm an expert, and this is simply how it has to be done. I’m like, you know the bank right down the street, you probably should go work for them.
00:19:41 Jenny: Okay. So help me see the future a little bit, especially in payments. Tell me where you think the next five years, especially around identity and authentication and fraud. Where are we going? Because it's a very confusing time. Many of us are nervous that we're not really gonna be able to keep up, especially around the fraud side. So help me see the future.
00:20:00 Toby: The IDV, the identity verification on the front side, is super hard. I am not typically a huge fan of governments playing an outsized role in private commerce. But this is actually one of the areas that they actually could do a pretty good job because they've got the resources. The risk is, again, some of privacy.
00:20:17 Toby: Being able to use your driver's license, like mobile driver's license, is becoming a pretty big thing, at least in the US. Verified credentials, there's another concept of how do you have a university issue credentials that you actually went to this university? Credentials that your driver's license essentially was called a verified credential.
00:20:33 Toby: It's funny. These are really NFTs. So it's funny if you go back in the world, nobody wants to call them NFTs. “Do not call them NFTs.” But they're cryptographically signed digital credentials that prove that you went somewhere and did something.
00:20:44 Toby: So I think we're going to see a lot more wallets in this sense and these verified credentials, whether it be from the government who says you're a valid citizen of this country or you're an employee of this company, you went to this school. And so these verified credentials, especially when they're working together, I think they’re gonna do a great job.
00:21:02 Toby: There's a lot of sophistication around privacy centric server side biometric face recognition in particular. AI has given those guys just fits right now because it is so freaking good. But it'll be a pillar. So I think identity proofing has not been solved yet. Once that's done, everything's gonna be tied to this.
00:21:19 Toby: This is your link to the world. So as long as you have this and it's easy for you to connect to here, then this will project into the rest of the world. So your phone will absolutely be the container for these verified credentials. It will be the thing that lets you authenticate to it digitally.
00:21:35 Toby: The agent world is going to mix things up a lot because typically we always go back to strong customer authentication. So strong customer authentication is like, this is Jenny. I know it's Jenny. Jenny can now make this purchase. But when you have authorized an agent on your behalf, there's a whole other element of it called delegated authentication that gets super crazy.
00:21:53 Toby: The future is going to be more and more seamless because if anything, people trend towards frictionless and companies who want to win have to do the same and they'll build technology underneath that.
00:22:04 Toby: Smart glasses puts a little bit of a wrinkle, but I think most smart glasses are going to be tied to your phone. So it's not like you're not going to have a phone. You might sometimes wear these other peripherals, but I don't think it'll be your core. So your phone is going to be center of everything.
00:22:17 Jenny: Until now, I think it's going to be the chip in the forehead.
00:22:19 Toby: Believe it or not, my first company was RFID, and this was back in 2005. I would get these emails that, like, this is gonna be the mark of the devil. They're gonna insert a chip in your head. You can't get any food if you don't have them. I'm like, woah, girl. Calm down. We’re gonna be okay. Don't think we're going that way.
00:22:36 Jenny: But in this space, what's one idea that experts in your field say that you disagree with?
00:22:42 Toby: It's funny. We're actually in the middle of one right now. So on your phone, you have face ID or your biometrics. Those are great. When this initially came out, the idea of your biometrics and it has a private key and it's on your device. And so if you biometrically verify your device, two factor authentication, super easy. It's awesome. So everybody started moving towards this direction called passkeys, and it was super popular.
00:23:01 Toby: Well, unilaterally, Apple and Google decided to allow those to be synchronized amongst all your devices. Like, oh, that's pretty nice. It's convenient if I'm on my phone, now it goes to my MacBook. It goes to my tablet or kind of the Android world, the same. That's pretty convenient.
00:23:14 Toby: But it shot a massive hole through the security because it used to be that was always on the device. Well, now I can create a group in my passkeys app. I could add you, Jenny, to that group. You would have my passkey. And if you went online to verify, the bank doesn't know if it's you or me. It is terrifying.
00:23:30 Toby: And so in general, passkeys that are synced are convenient. Apple and Google honestly just don't care sometimes. A lot of the regulators, they're in this weird position of, Hey, we want two-factor authentication, but even synced passkeys are much better than passwords, which I agree with, but they're creating a whole new set of problems.
00:23:48 Toby: Something we're working on with our technology that we actually have. It's a really good approach on like, hey, we can resync these passkeys. You got to give banks the ability to control their own destiny. You just can't outsource authentication to Apple or Google because they have their own strategy. They have their own agenda, and that's not always going to line up.
00:24:02 Toby: A lot of the big banks would agree with that. They're like, Yeah, we can't outsource control. But if you're with the newer fintechs or the newer folks, like, yeah, we'll do the Apple to that. We'll let Google do that. But there's an element of risk that comes with that.
00:24:14 Toby: So as popular as passkeys are, I don't think people realize there’s a massive hole. This has only been in the last 18 months, 2 years, so it's relatively new. And so we haven't seen a ton of fraud from it yet. But if someone takes over your Android account or your Apple account, all those passkeys synchronize down to your phone, and you can act as that person.
00:24:30 Jenny: I hadn't thought about that. That's so interesting. I think we all think about just the seamlessness across devices.
00:24:36 Toby: And for most applications, that's okay. It's not that big a deal. But for banking and payments, it is a big deal. When a bank authorizes you on that device, they need you to stay on that device. And if it's a new device, okay, then let's go through another process again and make sure it's still you.
00:24:49 Toby: There's an interesting twist that didn't get a lot of press. People were afraid to call the emperor who has no clothes. Guys, I think the emperor has got no clothes here. Let's be honest. You're trusting Apple and Google, which are fine, but this is not multifactor authentication.
00:25:02 Jenny: Alright. Getting down to the end here so a few more questions. You're a product person. You love sales. You're a good fundraiser. You work across geographies. If you had to distill down to your one superpower, the thing that Toby is known for or Toby does best, what would that be?
00:25:20 Toby: I think I'm honestly best at more of the product side. I had a very technical background, and I love, enjoy and understand the cryptography of what we're doing. But because I'm also in front of so many customers, being able to see where things fit. Like, even an example of this product.
00:25:34 Toby: Initially it was designed for a large bank. I look at it, I'm like, that's interesting. But if we change it, allow it to fit into this FIDO2 passkeys interface, which everybody else already supports. We go to emerging markets, so they have this problem. Maybe let’s go to market? Again, that cross between products and go-to-market of understanding deep technologies, how to put a face on it, how to solve a problem.
00:25:51 Toby: I enjoy storytelling. I enjoy selling. I actually enjoy fundraising, even. Part of it is I have an idea or a thought around how this product can go solve a problem. And so, it's just fun for me to talk about. But I think I’ll probably best at understanding deep technology, putting the product and the face around it.
00:26:06 Jenny: Alright. Speed round, a book or podcast or something you are enjoying these days?
00:26:12 Toby: I just finished your book, which is great. I'll go beyond that. I jump around some of Lex Fridman's stuff, and then the people he gets on are just fascinating like Modi recently from India, I'm like, holy smokes. I really enjoy some of Lex's more long form, thoughtful podcasts.
00:26:25 Jenny: I know. They're so long. I feel like you gotta settle in for this.
00:26:29 Toby: Yeah. At 1.7x speed, you're in for an hour.
00:26:32 Jenny: Alright. This is a good question. If you and your family could live anywhere in the world for one year, where would it be?
00:26:39 Toby: Oh, Singapore. My kids love Singapore. I've been able to travel quite a bit with my kids, and they would say Singapore.
00:26:44 Jenny: Nice. You took the whole family when we went to Kenya.
00:26:48 Toby: We did. I've took the family to China, Singapore, Indonesia. We've done Africa. We've done South America, Central Mexico.
00:26:56 Jenny: Awesome. Favorite productivity hack?
00:26:58 Toby: On your iPhone, you have the little action button now. You can record a voice memo, but have it load into Notion for a task. You pull the button. It's like a voice memo, but I have it automatically go into my Notion task list. I have so many ideas, but I can't write it down, so voice memo and it's there.
00:27:15 Jenny: I feel like Scott and I need that because we're always on WhatsApp with, like, I have this crazy idea with each other. I feel like it needs to go into Notion or Slack or something. And then where can listeners find you?
00:27:26 Toby: The website for the company is at useideem.com. Twitter and LinkedIn is Tobias Rush.
00:27:31 Jenny: Amazing. Thank you, Toby. This was such a joy. I swear it went really fast, but always fun catching up with you. We're excited about Ideem and where it's all going.
00:27:40 Toby: Awesome. And it was fun. Good luck to the Everywhere team.
00:27:44 Scott Hartley: Thanks for joining us and hope you enjoyed today's episode. For those of you listening, you might also be interested to learn more about Everywhere. We're a first check pre-seed fund that does exactly that, invests everywhere. We're a community of 500 founders and operators, and we've invested in over 250 companies around the globe. Find us at our website, everywhere.vc, on LinkedIn, and through our regular founder spotlights on Substack. Be sure to subscribe, and we'll catch you on the next episode.