The Future of Digital Identity with Charles Walton, SVP & GM of Identity at Avast

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:03) Hello, my friends. Today, Joel is talking to Charles, the SVP and general manager of identity at Avast. And they discuss how we're moving towards a future where people have total control over their digital identity, the factors that are driving progress in the identity space, and advice on being patient and having more foresight in your career. All of this right here, right now, on the Modern CTO podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:35) Here we go. This is the Modern CTO podcast.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:00:48) When I was a kid, I just, you know, I fell for NASA. I wanted to be an astronaut and started my programming when I was about 16 on, of all things, an IBM 1620 with punch cards and dip switches and the whole bit. But as I was beginning to think about university, it was all focused on avionics. I wanted to go work for an aircraft company, studied control theory. Focus, focus, focus. I was going to go work on avionics on an F-16, and I ended up taking a real quirky, odd interview very late in the cycle coming out of engineering school, and that was a security company doing work with the US DOD.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:01:29) And I was incredibly intrigued, both with the company charismatic leader, and it was almost James Bond land. And so, like a quick flip, I get into security right out of engineering, and that's been the place I've been working in since. Those early days were DOD oriented, and, you know, it was basically classified related work: secure communications, worked on one of the earliest public key systems in the world at the time. And then really from there, we began to see applicability of this core technology set to the web. And then, kind of '94-'95, we began working on e-commerce protocols with Netscape at the time.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:02:16) And that then led to some work that I had done following that. I discovered that there are things like bonuses and stock options and a place called Silicon Valley and some really hot, interesting things that were going on. But at any rate, joined a spin-out of Bankers Trust called CERTCO that was trying to build a commercial, almost identity authentication system for commercial banking transactions. It was a fantastic approach, but probably fifteen or twenty years ahead of its time. Whilst I was there, I began having the view that, you know, wow, I think I can go start my own company.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:02:53) And I ended up going off and doing that, built that up to about 30 people. I was intending to do that for security with health care on the heels of HIPAA just coming about. And I began realizing that the health care community has got a lot to go, but I ended up finding a pivot into the bank card arena and ended up doing a great deal of work with security authentication for bank cards over the Internet. The real digital identity work began in 2012. I joined a Toronto startup as the CEO.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:03:28) And that was really building out a federated authentication and identity system that's dominantly used as national infrastructure in Canada right now. You can file your taxes, create a new apartment lease, or open up a new bank account using this service that's still operating. I'd taken a little bit of time off right after that and then ultimately joined Mastercard. There was a CEO initiative going on at Mastercard to build a new set of rails looking at the topic of digital identity, and had spent about four years there building a business called ID. And that involved work with Microsoft, with Samsung, and early entry into a number of markets. Just completely, completely fascinating at the time.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:04:16) And all through that time, from probably '93 when that "on the Internet, no one knows you're a dog" cartoon was published, I've been passionate about this problem of how to do things better. So that's kind of my story. I've recently joined Avast in June, a really hot, innovative company, and very excited about that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:37) What caused you—I'm going to talk a little bit about Mastercard and JP Morgan stuff, but I'm curious first, what caused you to want to join Avast? You could go anywhere.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:04:48) Yeah, no, exactly. And what I'd have to say is a company that for thirty-plus years has been at the forefront of securing people's devices and in a mode now of saying, you know, the next generation, the next challenge is helping people to secure their data and to secure their identity. I really came to know the CEO and the management team, a very tech-oriented, tech-focused company, real proactive drive. The CTO has been doing great work in the area of ethical AI. And I'd say, you know, a real tech culture.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:05:24) More than 50% of the people within the company are in engineering, and that's really where my affinity has been. And I just felt it was a really good fit.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:34) Are the founders still hanging around?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:05:37) The founders are not. They're both still on the board of the company, and, you know, they take great interest in what's going on, but they're not. Our CEO has got a fascinating story, having begun at the company twenty-five years ago as an intern and really grew into the CEO role with both the technical smarts, the business savvy. I'd say the passion for the topic and the longevity, which helps too.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:05) So from intern to CEO?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:06:06) It's just really a fantastic story and one of the most brilliant people I've had the pleasure to meet and work with.

(Joel Beasley at 00:06:15) Oh, this is great. I want to talk a little bit—you said Mastercard. I injected JP Morgan because I got to do a series of interviews with different financial organizations that were like emerging technology, as well as ones that have been around for a long time, like JP Morgan. And one of the things that I found really interesting was that they all seemed super technologically advanced and not scared to make investments and having really great technology cultures. And I don't usually see that across an entire sector. Usually there's one or two people that stand out, but they seem to all really be pushing the boundaries.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:06:53) Yeah, absolutely agree, Joel. I mean, you take an organization in the financial services arena these days, and tech is central. It's the backbone of these companies. And so, both organically driving it and being acquisitive is pretty key to those sorts of organizations. And a number of them—the ones that will win will be the ones that do the best at it.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:07:18) One of the tough things for, frankly, any organization is to begin thinking a little bit over the horizon with a lot of creativity and to begin going where others haven't gone, as you've probably known in starting up your own company. You took, I'm sure, some real risks with both your personal life and your business because you believed in something. And gaining or getting to that level of innovation, of passion, and drive is a really important thing, I think, in organizations these days. So to be great at tech, you also have to be entrepreneurial, in my opinion. And really, the good large companies in the financial services companies that have fostered innovation and intrapreneurship are really the ones that I think are going to win.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:08) You make me think—when I started this company, my wife was nine months pregnant and I didn't have any income because I had just sold my share in a financial software I had built. And I didn't really realize how scary it was until somebody said something to me around Christmas time. So I started in September. And then around Christmas time when we were hanging out with family, like, "Wow, man, that's really crazy that you did all of that. You have the kid."

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:33) And all of a sudden, it just made me work a thousand times harder because I realized how crazy it was.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:08:40) I'd say a number of real, I'd say, interesting lessons. It was a great lesson when I ran my company. I got up to about 30 people, but I fueled the company myself. And my partner—we got to the end of the year one year, and it's like, "Oh gee, we each have to put $500K into this company to kind of get to next quarter." And it all ended up working out real fine, but there was a big, big, big gulp at that point.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:09:07) So I got my MBA in cash flow in about two hours that December.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:13) I think it's so funny when I hear people talking about, like, college and business school. I mean, there's definitely something to be said, and it's important that those things exist, but there is nothing like having your entire survival ride on it if you don't figure it out.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:09:28) Well, it—when you're rowing the boat yourself, it makes things real.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:35) So for people who, I guess, haven't ever used the Internet, can you explain what Avast is?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:09:41) That haven't used the Internet, who's that?

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:44) That's the only way that you would not know Avast. When I saw it, I had to double-take it. I was like, "Is that the security company? Is that the antivirus software?" And I was super happy when I saw the episode come up on my production schedule.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:09:59) No, no, indeed. I mean, again, the company's been around for quite a number of years, thirty-three years, in fact. It got going in 1990—1988—in Prague.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:10:09) And the founders were really passionate technology people who really wanted to sort issues of antivirus, to do that in a manner that was free to people. So they started really, really grassroots, really aimed at people and, you know, built a really strong culture. So AV is a key part of what we do today. The company interestingly claims 435 million people around the globe that use its products, and it's extended beyond that into VPN, privacy-related products, password management, secure browsers, and related spaces, but all in the category of helping people to protect their device and protect their interaction. Privacy has been a really important push for the company today and had made a decision late last year to begin evolving the business, not only in some sense playing a bit of a defense around people and their devices, but to begin empowering people.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:11:17) This notion of digital freedom, we see to be particularly important, and we see digital identity as quite essential to that. And so, had begun some study work in the early part of the year, and at that point had concluded that they really wanted to make a big push. They wanted to hire a general manager. Again, I was quite humbled to have been selected to come in and run that new business. And I'm now nearly six months in driving it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:11:48) I love it. That's awesome, man. What two or three talking points do we want to make sure that we hit about Avast? We talked a little bit about what they do. Is there any other things that we want to definitely make sure that we hit?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:11:59) Well, I think we want to talk about why identity, why is that important, the role that we're going to play related to identity, and why do we become a winner in the field?

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:12) Okay. Identity is pretty ambiguous. Help me out with that.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:12:16) Yeah. So, it is, Joel. And in a lot of ways, I would tend to define identity or, in this case, digital identity as that collage of information about myself. And when we think about our interactions online, we could go in and become quite anonymous, or we could confirm that I'm actually a live human being. And if we have that confirmation or signal, that's a piece of digital identity, and there's some good places to know or good reasons to know I've got a live human being out there, or I've got somebody that's over 21 or 55, or that it's actually Charlie, and Charlie is actually confirmed to live at that address, or that I actually do have a visa to enter Australia, or my COVID health status is fit to fly, or I'm a certified pilot, or my income level is between X and X.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:13:11) So I look at this set of, we'll call it, data items or attributes or what turn out to be assertions as data items that are verified by an authoritative third party brought together—this collage of assertions. In essence, this basket of verified claims about who or what I am is what I refer to as digital identity.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:38) I like it. And how does that express itself in Avast products?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:13:43) Well, it's a new area for us, Joel. The company—today—my business was just really formed in June, and we're in the midst of really both defining strategy and then building out a product set. So we don't have released or announced products yet in the area, but we will in 2022.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:06) Oh, that's exciting. I always like the stuff we can't talk about. So you came in to lead, basically create this business within Avast.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:14:16) Correct. Correct.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:17) Oh, that's awesome, man. I like that. That's super cool. So what challenges are you facing as a leader building something from scratch within a big organization?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:14:26) Yeah. So first off, doing this in a company like Avast with strong security technology privacy DNA certainly makes life easier. That was an important thing. That's number one. Number two, our CEO is pushing for this.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:14:45) This is not like Charlie invented this wonderful idea, and I brought it to the CEO and the board, and please, let's look for some funding and go build this out. This was the other way around. This was really the CEO and the board of Avast wanting to go after this field. So those are the things that I'd say have been made easy and are very supportive of—we're building a new business.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:15:11) We're building a new team. So, as you probably know in tech, you've got to have a group of people that just absolutely sing and connect. And so as we begin to grow both organically and inorganically, and we will grow in both ways, getting that cultural alignment, getting the teams of product and research and development and ops and marketing and privacy and security and commercial people all very aligned is going to be a key thing. We think that we're actually approaching this in a manner that's actually a bit unique. When you think about it, we're a tech company.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:15:54) We're a good-sized tech company. I wouldn't classify us as a big tech company, à la a Silicon Valley big tech company that we read about in the news. And that, coupled with our posture to be the user's advocate, which is always what we've done throughout all of our history, all the way back—our core business is about providing products to people and to small businesses. We are generally not selling into enterprises.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:16:23) And so that DNA of really working on the user, the consumer, the citizen's behalf has been a key part of what we do. So we think as a tech company with security focus, with a user's interest at heart, we're approaching this identity area in a super strong way. We think we're positioned really, really well. That's another thing that's really kind of helping us along. But it's a new area for us, and we're all working really hard to get the business up and going right now.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:58) I've always been interested to know how you can tell that I am me. It's really hard. And I've been watching it sort of be at first, I am me because I have my username and password. And then it gets more complicated than that, right? Then it's like, oh, I am me because I have my username and password and I can authenticate through my mobile device that's connected to me.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:20) And then it just gets more and more and more complex from my card not working sometimes if I travel. And sometimes when I'm traveling way too much, it'll just stop working because I did some series of actions that set that off and I had to call them up. So there are so many things inside of identity. When the board approached you or when you were approached about doing this, did they have a specific vision, a specific area of identity that they wanted to address, or were they just like, Charlie, come in. We know we want to do something with identity. Tell us what we should be doing for identity. How did that go?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:18:00) Yeah. So the first thing, it was not identity for enterprises because that wasn't the DNA of the company. Right? It was really identity for consumers. It wasn't about physical identity. It was about digital because that's the space that the company's in. But in a lot of ways, it was, let's go find an approach that helps people better interact digitally. Right? So that was kind of the frame or the problem set that I was presented in and then went off to really work strategy from there. As I've mentioned in this topic of collage, there's no silver bullet, Joel. Right? I mean, there's no silver bullet that confirms that you're you, and it really matters the data that we're trying to confirm. So as I described earlier, if I were trying to confirm live human being, there's certain things I might do. If we were trying to confirm, is it really Joel to open up a new bank account? We may look to a government identity document or check a government database or do two of those.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:19:05) We might look as well for information from a credit file. You might look for some in-market related activity, activity within a bank account or a utility bill. If you're trying to confirm, do I have a visa to enter Australia? That's a piece of identity data that's only really answered by the Australian border force. So you gotta go ask the question and say, does Joel have a visa that's active? It's really Joel out there. Is this actually active? So the techniques that are applied are very much related to use case. Some of this does come down to biometric-based information and how it compares to a legal identity document or a government agency that may have biometric data. So that's kind of one.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:19:56) And increasingly, it will come down to dynamic data about how you interact in the market, your activity. This mapping of your name to an address from Amazon or FedEx over the course of a year or two might suggest that your address is X, Y, or Z. So it's really this building this collage. There's not one size that fits all. If I'm conducting a transaction with a relatively low level of expectation or assurance, there's certain things you may do. And if you're trying to be more sophisticated about a transaction doing a million-dollar wire transfer, you may do some additional checks. So this bundling of assurance level, the data, the checks into almost a policy frame is the essence of the engine that we will put in place for identity verification.

(Joel Beasley at 00:20:49) I like it. I've got two questions and you can decline to answer them if you want, because they're kind of in this area and I don't want to hit on something too sensitive. The first one is, as you're talking and you're putting together this team and you're doing it within this organization that doesn't have a public mission, right? As far as like we're this team and we're going to build this product. It's not like public information. Do you have any challenges with recruiting people? How do you handle, is it any, I've never had to do that before, so I don't know. Is it any different than recruiting a normal position or?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:21:25) Yeah. So a couple things. I want to clarify. We've not announced a product that we've got out in market, but what we have done is we've expressed a vision for what we're going after that we're trying to enable people and their digital freedom. We're intending to build a capability, a product that I might call a smart digital agent.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:21:51) So a software answer that works on my behalf that will help me to authenticate to end destinations, that will help me manage that basket of digitally signed objects and to present them, to keep track of where I've gone. If I find that of the 100 or 150 digital relationships that likely you and I both have out there and your address is changing, it would be kind of nice to hit a button and just say, hey, change the address and boom, the digital agent takes care of the rest under my control to go change my address at places where I interact with. If I want to go open up a new bank account or confirm other details in an insurance relationship or I'm gonna go become an Uber driver, would be really nice to do that in a more simplistic way and to hold information about where I've been.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:22:48) So that's the level of discussion that we tend to have with people. We see that this really is following the identity industry in the category of decentralized identity or what's called self-sovereign identity. So people understand what that's all about, and it's actually a pretty exciting space. So we've not had, I'd say, difficulty at all. In fact, just the counterpart of creating excitement on folks coming into the company.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:21) Have you been following what Sir Tim Berners-Lee is doing with Solid?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:23:26) I have, and had some conversations with he and John at Inrupt as they were first getting started. I don't want to comment about our product or their product because that's kind of a different matter. But many of the principles that are described about kind of giving back the semantic web, Web 3.0, decentralized finance, these are all spot on the space and the area that we're working and really trying to create a trust layer, a trust framework using digital identity for people. I think we're trying to do this in a manner that says you got to go bridge the world as it exists today. Right?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:24:13) We're not going to change the world. We're not going to go rewire right out of the box how things work. So we've gotta figure out how to begin bridging from the world that exists today, which does work to a very centralized paradigm to one that is more decentralized and ideally to do that out over time. And it will be through innovative customers and innovative partners that begin operating this way. But you've got a lot of respect for what they're trying to do with Solid and at Inrupt as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:24:46) Yeah. I got to talk with them and two of them sort of explained it to me like I was a child. I was like, teach me, help me understand this. And what's been interesting about it is I don't see it as a direct competitor, what you're doing, because I don't know the exact product you're doing. But in concept, what I've been seeing, because you know how you'll talk to a bunch of different people and this pattern will start to emerge. This concept of putting the data and the power back into the consumer's hand and making it easy for them to control things tends to be where the industry is headed as a whole. Because I just keep seeing project after project after project with that sort of at its core.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:25:29) No, exactly, Joel. Let me give you an example because I, you know, with I'm Avast and colleagues and so on, really trying to bring this right down to the world today and, you know, do we conduct decentralized identity transactions today. Right? It's a very esoteric statement. But it struck me. I was in Canada a few weeks ago, and in Canada, if you want to go into a restaurant, you actually have to confirm your COVID vaccination status. That's number one. So you need two shots, and you need to kind of demonstrate that you've actually been vaccinated, number one. Number two, you've actually got to prove that that credential belongs to you. And I ended up conducting physically a decentralized identity transaction as I was going into that restaurant.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:26:21) So the first thing I did was I took out my phone and my iPhone that had a COVID credential and a QR code. So I presented that number one, and the hostess said, okay, beautiful. Charlie Walton, I see that. Can I see your passport? Here's my passport, Charlie Walton. The face on the passport matched this face, and then I was allowed access. I got in. So think about that. Neither I nor the hostess needed to go up to any platform or any account structure anywhere to do that. My credentials were portable.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:27:01) My passport and my COVID credential on my device, and I presented them under my control, under my terms. I knew what was going on, and we were able to consummate that access transaction. So that idea of decentralized presentation of identity is really what this topic is all about. It fits very well with Tim Berners-Lee's vision as well. I don't need to go to centralized structures. I don't need to go to big platforms to conduct transactions. That's what this whole thing is about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:34) What's going on? We talked a little bit about Miguel and how he's doing smart cities. We were talking a little bit about legacy and that made me think of policy. How are governments responding to this sort of shift?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:27:48) Yeah. So, I'd say it's different around the world. You know, when you take a look at markets in the world, we got different lineups, different involvements of government. You know, I'll give you the example of Singapore. They've rolled out a national digital identity scheme called Singpass. Everybody in the country uses it. Great utility. It's super. But, again, a small place, a certain type of government there. They've really excelled. It's almost like Singapore Inc. It's a tech-oriented government, GovTech in Singapore. We've then seen, you know, government in the U.S. that through NIST has done some fantastic work on setting standards and frame. But the federal government is really not stepping up to create framework or design anything like what's going on in Singapore. I think one of the best examples, frankly, is within the European community, where we've seen government taking points of view, quite rightly, about privacy with GDPR.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:28:57) So I think GDPR was the starting point in beginning to say, you know, guys, time out. We need to be doing a little bit better about people's data, how you treat people and so on. And that's dovetailed into an initiative that the European Commission has had to create pan-Europe digital identity. But this digital identity was a very small bit of the basket we've talked about, just five basic fields. And it was part of an initiative called eIDAS. So it's an electronic identity scheme. And it had limited use. It was for government transactions only. And if you think about yours or my interactions with government, yeah, you do, but not very often. There's lots of other private sector things that are taken to bear.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:29:46) So the commission really began some work that consulted industry last year and have come out with a frame for almost a digital identity capability that's serving not only government, but serving private sector as well. And that's all built on these principles I've described of decentralized identity and self-sovereign identity. So I think the European community is doing a great job at trying to bring to bear answers with the private sector that will serve Europeans and ultimately serve their interactions even outside of Europe. So I think that's some pretty cool work. You might know or may be aware that the government in India had rolled out a biometric-based identity system called Aadhaar many years ago.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:30:40) And so what that involved was to say, let's go take Charlie's biometric data. We'll put the big data structure, and we'll use that as a way of identifying people as national infrastructure. So that was a very, very different way of coming to bear. I mean, probably a very difficult one to imagine would occur here or UK or other places like that. So we've seen varying approaches, light touch, no touch, heavy touch, and different tech answers to dealing with these topics of identity. I love what the European community is about to do, and that'll be an important area right in our backyard. As you know, we're Prague headquartered and London listed, right in our backyard that we're going to play pretty heavily there.

(Joel Beasley at 00:31:27) That's pretty cool. It almost sounds like these smaller countries that can adopt quicker will move the technology forward faster and figure out all the little issues and then larger countries can adopt it.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:31:41) Indeed. But I think that's been true. What I've observed though is in some sense, no one's an island or no country's an island really any longer. And this idea of providing people with tools that just work kind of around the globe are really, really important. And that one's not been tackled yet, and that's a big area for us to tackle.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:32:08) And it's also an area that plays our strength. We've got great involvement customers in 50 plus countries around the globe. We've got a real global mentality to what we do, and we're gonna be bringing answers that are globally relevant. So how do you begin stitching together, let's say, good identity in Singapore with identity in Indonesia? How do you work cross border between Canada, the U.S., Mexico, UK? And you've got many identity problems that you're faced with. Students that go abroad, business-oriented interactions, you know, people that relocate. I don't know if you've had any friends that have either moved to Europe or moved here from a different place. But dealing with identity matters, taking out a new car loan, opening up a bank account, getting a credit card. Tough. Really, really tough.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:33:07) All anchored down in identity because there's not good local identity answers for those people. So you've got to begin working cross-border, and this will begin to help that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:18) Yeah, for sure. I was actually just talking about this the other day. One of my daughter's friends that they would do playdates with, they're from the UK. And so they were talking with me about all the process that they went through in order to establish credit over here and all of that. And it wasn't just super simple like you would imagine.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:36) We don't think about it because we're in, at least me, I don't think about it because I'm in the country I was born in. But it was interesting to hear. And when I hear those things, I just see money. I just see people are going to solve that problem and make a lot of money solving these problems and making it easier and removing that resistance for consumers.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:33:57) No, exactly. And you know, another area, and it's a challenging one, is in remittance payments. You know, where you've got a person who's gone abroad seeking work, working three jobs, sending money home, and paying ungodly percentages for the privilege of doing that. And very honestly, this area of decentralized finance, tying that with identity to solve a problem like that, boy, you could take a small fee for that, but you're not dealing with double-digit percent of the thousand dollars or the $300 that's being sent back home.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:38) There's DeFi. I like that you mentioned it. There are so many different technologies in different sectors making such huge advancements. It's literally my full-time job, and I can't even grasp like a sliver of it.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:34:51) It's a tough one. There's a lot of stuff going on. And again, the semantic web work that Tim Berners-Lee got started, stuff around this fuzzy envelope of Web 3.0. In the identity community, it's really been work on this Linux Foundation standards group called Trust Over IP, the DeFi initiative. There's just pockets of work going on, and we've been noodling on how do you begin getting a little better united and more collaborative about creating trust layer for many of these things.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:35:25) And that's kind of key. We think if you can go lick that trust layer with good digital identity that's sensitive to people, that's ethical, we let lots and lots and lots of different applications begin to bloom.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:42) Now, one thing I'm really excited to ask you. You've been doing this since like 1996, right? Like over 20 years, identity. You've been in the identity space for a long time. Is that right?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:35:53) I have. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:54) So go back to 1996, Charlie. What was he imagining the industry of identity would look like in 20 years? And then what did it actually end up becoming? How did those align or not align?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:36:10) I'd say that there's many notions that are around today that existed back then. I'd have to confess that there's a lot of things that we might describe as innovative today that really were constructs way back then. You know, it's turned out that just using that login and password is just so darn easy. And it's almost like we've needed to let the problem set and the pain catch up with the answers. So that's largely what I've seen that the tech has shifted.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:36:46) We've got, you know, great examples of using ledger technology as underpinnings to systems, and all that stuff's new. But largely, the techniques, you know, are about using the equivalent of a cryptographic token for authentication. They're beginning to use digitally signed objects to represent your digital identity. That stuff had been around way back then. I just don't think the problem set was worthy enough, and that's what we've all grown into.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:37:19) You know, $700 billion of identity fraud on an annual basis, $35 billion in card-not-present fraud. That is, you know, you've captured my identity and you're buying stuff online in my name, or you're claiming you never got the new shovels from gardenshop.com or the subscription. $35 billion a year. So these problems are becoming more and more pronounced. And people's use of devices, I've got lots more devices right now.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:37:50) I got a lot more relationships to deal with. I've got a lot more data. The pandemic has just driven digital crazy. Right? You just have to look at some of the stats on how digital commerce has grown, remote education has grown, remote government interaction, remote health, three really key areas where knowing the identity of the person you're dealing with and their attributes are really key.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:38:14) So I think, Joel, we're starting to get to the point where the fracture is here where much of the stuff that's been envisioned might finally be the right time. We may finally, 30 years later from that dog on the internet cartoon, be at a stage where we were able to do something about it, or at least I hope so, or I believe so.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:38) I've got so many things I want to talk with you about. But we're coming up on time, so I really wanted to get this question. We're working on a new book, and we're working on a chapter for communication over the next two weeks. So I've been asking guests, from a communication perspective, what's your best insight or advice or thoughts about communication?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:39:02) This is in the media communication, personal communication, business communication?

(Joel Beasley at 00:39:07) Uh, sorry. I forgot. Leadership. When you're leading people, communicating while leading people.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:39:16) I suppose I'll give you a few of my viewpoints. I've really come to the view and belief that as a leader, I'm really there to serve the people that I'm leading and really to knock down barriers to give them the opportunity to succeed. Frankly, to do that with good humor. As we all know, if we're not having fun in what we're doing, it's just not going to work, right? So I'd say leading by serving, leading with humor, leading with clarity, being fair, being honest, being direct. If you got bad news, pass the bad news.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:39:55) If you got good news, pass the good news, and do that in equal measure. Be open. Be transparent. Those are probably a few of the things that, at least, I end up using in the way I've led over the past 20 years. And I'd have to confess I'm still learning.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:12) Always, man. Because it's constantly changing. You can't not be learning. The variables are just in dynamic all the time. What would be the one piece of advice that you would give a new leader that's, let's say, let's actually bring this—I want to be more specific.

(Joel Beasley at 00:40:29) Let's say we go back to 1996, Charlie again. What's the one piece of advice you'd give him?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:40:35) That I'd give Charlie back in '96? Yeah. It's probably a little bit more patience. I was passionate, excited, pushing right now, but boy, it was almost on steroids back 20 years ago.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:40:52) And so some of it is using a bit of patience and maybe a bit more foresight in kind of planning things out. So I suppose that was it, a little bit more patience.

(Joel Beasley at 00:41:07) I feel you. That's my big thing. And I've noticed I'm extremely impatient, and I've noticed that just recently. I'm 34 for context, which is when I saw it was like in '88, I was like, oh man, the company started the year I was born. But what I've noticed is through my 20s and starting to enter my 30s, that it actually is becoming easier to be patient.

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:41:33) Uh, exactly. I've found that as well. I do think that there's measures and times of playing that right. We're at a time right now where I'm probably as impatient as I've been in a long time to push this business along. Right?

(Charles (Charlie) Walton at 00:41:53) Because I can almost taste it. I think we're going to begin hitting this really, really big over the next couple of years. And I'm just pushing very hard, again, with good humor and, you know, the smarts and a great team. But I think playing the patience card, it's almost the wisdom to know when to push and when not to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:16) Oh, yeah. And it's a hard one to talk about too because it's highly subjective. Like when we say patience, you got a whole spectrum of people with different patience levels listening and taking it differently. Exactly. Exactly.

(Joel Beasley at 00:42:28) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.