Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song calls himself a reluctant founder, but he's spent his career on one of the internet's hardest problems: knowing who's really on the other side of the screen. He joins Penny Lee and Sunayna Tuteja to explain why that question matters even more once AI agents act and pay on our behalf, at our direction, and how "know your customer" is becoming "know your agent." Rick breaks down how Persona proves both that a real person is present and who that person is, and why your years of online history are the one thing AI can't replicate. He also shares the Digital Taxonomy of Fraud that Persona built with the University at Buffalo to give the industry a common language for identifying AI-driven selfie fraud, and explains why he's still an optimist: far more people want to stop fraud than to commit it.
Persona co-founder and CEO Rick Song calls himself a reluctant founder, but he's spent his career on one of the internet's hardest problems: knowing who's really on the other side of the screen. He joins Penny Lee and Sunayna Tuteja to explain why that question matters even more once AI agents act and pay on our behalf, at our direction, and how "know your customer" is becoming "know your agent." Rick breaks down how Persona proves both that a real person is present and who that person is, and why your years of online history are the one thing AI can't replicate. He also shares the Digital Taxonomy of Fraud that Persona built with the University at Buffalo to give the industry a common language for identifying AI-driven selfie fraud, and explains why he's still an optimist: far more people want to stop fraud than to commit it.
0:00 - Introduction
1:28 - The reluctant founder: Persona's origin story
6:12 - What is the agent economy?
10:06 - From KYC and KYB to KYA
12:56 - Proof of humanness, proof of identity
17:27 - Fraud, industrialized, and the Digital Taxonomy of Fraud
22:18 - Will fraud send us back to cash?
27:49 - Identity verification in Washington
32:15 - What Rick would never hand off to an agent
33:40 - Takeaways