In this week's episode, I speak with Founder & CEO of TrueBiz, Danny Hakimian.
Danny is a serial entrepreneur and digital identity expert. Prior to founding TrueBiz, Danny worked at Onfido for over 6 years where he was Onfido’s first US sales hire, later opening the company’s NYC office and leading strategic accounts in North America & Canada.
In the episode, we discuss the seismic shifts happening in the world of business verification and “Know Your Business” processes. Danny shares how TrueBiz is helping companies like Visa and Lightspeed Commerce with automating onboarding of merchants and new businesses.
TrueBiz’s solutions speed up merchant account activation, reduce manual review, and prevent prohibited businesses from accessing services. If you onboard businesses then you don’t want to miss this episode.
RESOURCES:
Connecting with Danny Hakimian
Danny Hakimian’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dannyhakimian/
TrueBiz’s website: https://truebiz.io/
Companies & Resources Discussed
TrueBiz is a Y Combinator-backed startup that reduces manual review during merchant underwriting and monitoring by automating the analysis of the merchant's web presence.
Always-On Merchant Monitoring is a TrueBiz solution that empowers risk and compliance managers with real-time risk insights across a merchant’s website daily rather than monthly, periodic reviews.
TrueBiz Case Studies and blog posts referenced:
How TrueBiz Empowers Visa Cross-Border Solutions with Speed & Scalability at Onboarding
“Lightspeed” Underwriting: How TrueBiz AI Tools Have Enabled Automated Onboarding
Flourish Ventures is a venture capital firm that invests in mission-driven entrepreneurs and industry influencers working toward a fair financial system.
Onfido is a digital identity platform that makes it easy for people to access services by digitally verifying them using its Real Identity Platform. The platform allows businesses to tailor verification methods to individual user and market needs in a no-code, orchestration layer. Onfido was acquired by Entrust in April 2024. Husayn Kassai, Eamon Jubbawy, and Ruhul Amin were Onfido’s co-founders.
Shopify is the leading global commerce company that provides essential internet infrastructure for commerce, offering trusted tools to start, scale, market, and run a retail business of any size.
Ecwid.com is a cloud-based e-commerce platform that allows users to create an online store without needing design or coding skills.
Legal Zoom is an online platform for business formation in the United States. It delivers comprehensive legal, tax and compliance products and expertise for small business owners through easy-to-use technology.
Wix is a website builder complete with a full suite of tools to build, manage and grow a businesses online presence.
Squarespace is a design-driven platform helping entrepreneurs build brands and businesses online.
Lightspeed Commerce is the unified point of sale and payments platform powering the world's best businesses at ~168,000 locations worldwide.
Thanasis Mandaltsis is the founder of Magic ID, which provides a decentralized identity platform that leverages the most up-to-date W3C principles for accessibility, internationalization, privacy, and security. Thanasis was an EXECUTIVE SERIES guest in season three. You can find the episode here.
Paypal Mafia is a group of former PayPal employees and founders who have since founded other Silicon Valley technology companies.
Y Combinator is a venture capital firm and startup accelerator that helps founders in the early stages of their companies.
Chaitanya Sarda and Rushabh Shah are co-founders of Y Combinator-backed identity verification startup AiPrise. AiPrise offers a one stop solution with pre-integrated identity verification and fraud detection APIs in markets around the world.They appeared on EXECUTIVE SERIES in season two. You can find the episode here.
Homebrew is a venture capital firm that focuses on seed-stage investing in startups based in the Bay Area and New York.
The Fintech Fund is a venture fund investing in the top 1% of fintech and decentralized finance startups globally.
FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Steve Craig: Welcome to the PEAK IDV EXECUTIVE SERIES video podcast, where I speak with executives, leaders, founders, and changemakers in the digital identity space. I'm your host, Steve Craig, Founder and Chief Enablement officer for PEAK IDV. For our audience, this is a video for a series. So if you're enjoying the audio version, please check out the video recording on executiveseries.peakidv.com where you can watch the full episode, read the transcript and access any of the resources or links that come up in today's conversation.
This week, I'm thrilled to feature Danny Hakimian, Founder and CEO of Y Combinator backed startup, TrueBiz. TrueBiz helps businesses streamline their business account opening processes by reducing manual review during know your business checks and underwriting. Last year, the company raised $2.4 million in seed funding led by Flourish Ventures. Daniel is a serial entrepreneur and digital identity expert. Prior to founding TrueBiz, Danny worked at Onfido for over six years, where he was Onfido's first US sales hire, later opening the company's NYC office and leading strategic accounts in North America.
A graduate of University College, London. Danny is now based in the United States. Welcome, Danny. Thank you for making the time to be on the podcast.
Danny Hakimian: Thanks, Steve. Great to be here.
Steve: Let's get started. I shared just a little bit about TrueBiz in the intro, but I'd love to hear your standard elevator pitch when you're meeting prospective clients or partners. So what do you share with them?
Danny: So we help banks and fintechs streamline their business verification process. We do that by automating a review of a business's web presence. So in cases where they have a website, we can comb through the texts and images on the site. Together, we're looking through about 2,000 different sources around the web. Things like their social pages, reviews, local industry articles associated with the business. With that data, we feed it into our proprietary models to enable us to return a really detailed profile on what this business is doing. So two to 300 data points, like the industry classification, like sentiment analysis on the reviews or other connected businesses associated with the company in question. So the data allows them to get a much better understanding of the type of business it is and build confidence if it is a real operating business.
Steve: It's a very interesting approach to the problem. When you think about business verification, merchant onboarding, bringing on business clients, where have you seen major seismic shifts in the last few years?
Danny: Yeah. I mean, I think there's a few trends really sort of coming together to make a perfect storm in this world. The first, I think, has kind of been very commonly shared, the real growth, the number of new businesses that are being created around the world. This is a trend we saw re-accelerated by COVID and doesn't have any signs of slowing down.
I think part of that is really driven by how easy it's become to create a digital storefront. So from that perspective, you know, platforms like Shopify and Ecwid and others, can help you set up a business platform in minutes. The flip side of that is it's also making it easier for forces to create these types of fictitious entities.
So with just a few clicks and a couple of minutes of work, you can create a Delaware C Corp, you can create a legitimate looking online presence and look like a legitimate operating business. So that sort of combination, both on the good and bad, has created a perfect storm for our business verification being needed in a bit more of an aggressive manner.
Steve: Yeah, the tools these days to spin up business entities like LegalZoom or to create websites like Wix or Squarespace, it's just so easy to rapidly create those. So it's a fascinating trend. You talked a little bit about what you do. Can you take us through the core pillars of your solution? What are the key components of how companies are using you?
Danny: I mean, we think about the various stages of business verification and where we really fit in. Broadly speaking, you can think about two ends of the process. The first is on this initial onboarding, the underwriting, verification, KYB, whatever you want to call it.
In that process what we offer our customers is a really deep dive but rapid response of the business's web presence. So in under 30 seconds we give them the ability to get a general sense of what this business is doing. Like I mentioned earlier, returning close to 300 data points on the nature and the profile of the business.
Once we've gone through that initial onboarding and underwriting process for many of our customers, what they also want to do is just to keep an eye on the businesses in question. So you can imagine issuing an $50,000, $100,000 credit line, or I think some type of merchant service. You want to make sure the business is primarily still doing what they're claiming to be doing and ensuring they haven't really gone out of business or showing signs of potential closure.
So the second pillar of our business is really around the ongoing monitoring, keeping an eye on the business, the web presence, and broader activity around the web to see how things have changed. So it's really based on that initial underwriting, initial onboarding review, we call the web presence review and the Always-on Monitoring sort of process later down the funnel.
Connecting those two is sort of the risk decision layer underneath that. So we give customers the ability to maintain internal black lists, businesses, merchants that they don't necessarily want to see again. And tied into that is our data consortium. So our risk sharing network allows customers to opt in to share cases of known fraud with other customers on our network. And as it allowed us to see almost 100,000 businesses flagged across that network as known fraudulent actors. So those are kind of really the three pillars of the business.
Steve: We've had a few guests on the series that have consortiums, and I think it's better together, right? The more data that you can bring in, the more we can combat some of this fraud, because fraud finds a way, right? It'll work from one company to the next.
I'm curious what types of companies have been leveraging TrueBiz today. If you have any specific examples, I know there were some notable press releases, if you can just share who's using it.
Danny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we work quite broadly across financial services. I think there are two larger verticals, really any type of unsecured lending is really where we found our sweet spot today, whether that's the merchant services or general sort of unsecured lending of other varieties. Mostly for companies that really want to ensure they're working with real legitimate operating businesses. Some of the case studies we have publicly on our website as our work with Visa cross border solutions team. Other public companies like Lightspeed Commerce is a customer of ours. But we work also with a very wide range of the US acquiring banks and global fintechs onboarding businesses today.
Steve: And what were the very specific challenges that they were facing when they came to TrueBiz and what are some of the results that they have from… and of course I'll link to the case study so people can check those out, but just want to get your perspective.
Danny: I think maybe even outside of those case studies, what we see broadly across the market is a lot of companies are still doing a lot of what I'd call Google work. They're trying to get a general sense on is this business a legitimate operating entity or not.
And the analyst or the underwriter is sometimes spending 10, 15, 20 minutes Googling around, clicking on the website, searching through the web to see what they can find. And it's often really a gut check on is this a real legitimate operating business. And if it is, is it a business we can actually work with and they're on their size, their scope, their location, etc.
So really what you'll see in these case studies, Steve, -- will link to in the comments -- on things like removing a large amount of that manual review process, taking a 20, 30 minute process and reducing that to 30 seconds with a result that TrueBiz can return. So generally again, what we're helping customers do is just almost double the amount of automation they can deliver. That’s half the amount of time it's taking them to review the business in question.
Steve: For our audience, some might not know that Danny and I worked together briefly at Onfido and Danny had a tremendous reputation for solving problems for customers. He was in the commercial team. I'm curious, Danny, if you could share to go a little bit into your background, how your time at Onfido influenced, first of all, your approach to being a founder, but also your approach to, you know, consultative selling and solution building with your clients.
Danny: Absolutely. I mean, I think one of the core premises of these early days at Onfido was always about kind of listening to that customer need and trying to act and form kind of based on that.
And I think that's kind of always informed my thinking on how to build and ship as a product and broader strategy going forward. Obviously, I think that, you know, everyone who has spent the last decade plus in the KYC space, was conscious and aware of this kind of broader challenge with business entity verification.
It was something, you know, we had discussed internally. And I think for a variety of reasons, I think correctly decided not to really foray into it because it's such a different challenge to involve. You know, I think for me personally, it was during the COVID PPP loan fiasco that this problem started to become acutely aware in my mind, where, you know, there were customers I'd worked with for many years calling me on a Sunday night, calling me at six in the morning on a Tuesday saying, “Hey, you know, we know we have a problem here with a lot of fraud application for PPP loans. We just can't really find solutions to fix this quick enough, scalable enough, to solve the problem on time.” So that was really, I think the kernel in my mind to say, you know, what would a solution look like? And working with many kinds of industry partners and customers that, you know, I've known for many years, starting to form really the genesis of TrueBiz off the back of those conversations.
Steve: When you and I worked together, I remember many situations where the clients or prospective clients asked, can you do a KYB, a know-your-business? And it was always, well, we could do a KYC on the beneficial owners of that business, but the workflows for business verification, very different. The signal is very different. So it's great to connect those pieces. Well, while we're on the Onfido topic, I'm curious. I don't think I've ever heard your Onfido, like how you got started story. And it's pretty crazy that you were the first hire in the US. How did you get connected to Husayn, Eamon and Ruhul, who are the original trio of co-founders for Onfido?
Danny: So I actually originally met Husayn at an Oxford University hackathon a few years prior to starting. We might have been Facebook friends. And at the time that I joined Onfido, I had actually just moved to San Francisco for a prior startup that had kind of got me through the kind of the tent of the difficult US work visa approval process.
By the time I had arrived, the company was actually winding down. So I had a very short window to try and find another job to keep me in San Francisco and not heading back to the UK. And I saw Husayn had actually, at the time people were like tagging their locations on Facebook a decade ago, and he said, “just landed in SFO.” So a spontaneous coffee chat later, I think he did a great job at convincing me that, you know, the future of identity kind of lays at Onfido's feet. And so that was kind of the first foray into the company. It was obviously a much smaller operation when I joined than what it was when I left six, seven years later, so a great journey in between.
Steve: It's those micro moment decisions where you saw that post and you could have said, “hey, maybe I'll reach out another time,” but you, you shot your shot and you had a meeting and got to Onfido, that's great. When you had moved to San Francisco, you were from somewhere else. Obviously you went to school in London. Are you originally from London, from the UK? What's your personal background?
Danny: Yeah, I grew up in North London, a small part of North London, called Finchley. But yeah, this is going to be my 10th or 11th year in the US. So US, it's home. I became a US citizen a few weeks ago. It's very exciting. So yeah, this is where I call home today.
Steve: Back on the Onfido topic and getting back to business stuff, when you join the team at Onfido, were you already familiar of the concepts of identity verification or KYC or RegTech, or was that completely new to you as you joined?
Danny: Yeah, it was definitely new to me. I mean, it was actually so long ago at Onfido that Onfido wasn't even like a real digital identity company. The company started in criminal background checks, which many people may not know or remember.
So that's what Onfido was doing before a sort of a quasi pivot into pure IDV. I think from a personal perspective, I was always very conscious of this challenge around digital identity for consumers and businesses. My parents, kind of immigrants to the UK themselves, launching small businesses. I was always acutely aware of some of the challenges of getting access to financial services, digital services with that type of profile.
So I think that was the subconscious, sort of awareness of the nature of digital identity for individuals and businesses from that age.
Steve: One more question on Onfido and then we'll move back into TrueBiz topics. I recently interviewed Thanasis Mandaltsis of Magic ID. He's another Onfido alum, and there's this growing list of ex-Onfido folks that have started companies.
We could dub it the ‘Onfido Mafia’, like the PayPal Mafia. There's probably more out there that are ready for that next step. For any of those, ex-Onfidos, what advice would you have to follow in your footsteps and get the company going if you're on?
Danny: Yeah. I mean, the general advice is do it. I think, you know, a lot of people who have gone on to start companies post Onfido, have often seen the kind of the white space and the blue ocean that we're truly aware of during our timeline. So, there's still plenty more to do and I'm excited to see more people jumping into them.
Steve: We've got to put in a Nike solution. Just do it. Get out there and do it.
Well, let's get into TrueBiz. I want to go into a few topics, but the TrueBiz startup story is interesting from my-- when I read you are in the YAC, Y Combinator summer class of 2022. And one of the first episodes I did for EXECUTIVE SERIES featured a pair in that class, AiPrise with Chaitanya Sarda and Rushabh Shah. They were both in the same cohort. I'd love to hear about your overall YC experience, which obviously is still ongoing. Because once you're in, you're in. How's the program help?
Danny: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the AiPrise are good buddies. We were in the same batch together. They actually have a TrueBiz integration into their workflow tool. I think for us, Y Combinator was a very strong driver and helped us shape the type of company that we are today. Really, I think on two fronts, that kind of rigorous focus on the customer, trying to-- that kind of cliche, the quote of building something people want is really driven on a core and driven home.
I think the other component that I think ourselves and a lot of other YC backed companies sort of getting DNA early is that speed of iteration and speed of kind of responding to feedback. So I think having that kind of drumbeat sort of built in on these kind of 90-day, very intense cycles. So we've continued on going forward.
And I think our customers are the kind of folks who are familiar with our company are always impressed by just the amount we are delivering. And expanding on the products month in month out, in the past few years. And I think a lot of that is credit to the kind of culture and mindset that's imprinted on the company's DNA from an early start.
Steve: It's definitely a common theme that I've heard when I ask similar questions to other founders or when I read content from investors is they look for customer centricity. They look for adaptability and agility to really move fast. You moved pretty fast outside of the program because within the first six months you raised, as I mentioned in the intro, $2.4 million in a seed with Flourish Ventures, but also Homebrew, Fintech Fund, and dozens of fintech founders. That was a really tough year though, the end of ‘22, going into ‘23. A lot of the venture capital funding dried up. What was your process? How did you tackle ensuring that you could get capital for TrueBiz? Is there a plan you put in place? I'd love to hear about that too.
Danny: Yeah. I mean, I've always believed you can't really control the macro environment and the kind of the noise of the week that goes on VC Twitter. But, what you can control is building a strong, sustainable, fast growing business.
So I think that's always been our focus from day one. I think as a result of that focus, both from the customer centricity, the speed at which we're able to kind of demonstrate kind of the results we can drive, you know, we ended up with great partners like Flourish and the others you mentioned. So for us, you know, I think we're-- we've always kind of focused on those business fundamentals and I think delivered on many of those. Given us the opportunity then and today to kind of expand our capital options as and when we need.
Steve: The thing that's impressed me, and I've been following your business since you first announced it on LinkedIn, is just how frequently you're doing updates, you're moving quickly, you're delivering value, like there's a constant flow of great valuable releases.
Just recently you had an announcement, it was last month -- we're recording this in July of 2024 -- where you talk about Always-On Merchant Monitoring and you mentioned that earlier, can you share the-- how it like actually works from a product standpoint? Like how do the customers consume it? How do you kind of build for these big companies like Visa? I mean, it'd be a massive undertaking to support that.
Danny: Yeah. So maybe to add some context on how we see the status quo today with kind of the monitoring side. Many of our customers run a programmatic monthly lookup on some kind of legacy vendors that will take a look at the website and say, “yes or no, does something exist here or something high risk exist here,” and usually returning again, the results in a spreadsheet.
Others may do an annual or biannual refresh where again, that kind of re-KYB the company, and hope they haven't missed any of it. We think that process is highly antiquated and has a lot of issues with the emerging risks between the refresh window. Again, if you're only looking at a case of what this business is doing once a year, the business can completely change from one day to the next.
The ownership might change. The whole nature of business… you know, if you say, “hey, you know, we're-- I don't know, Steve is an IDV sort of expert and podcaster. And tomorrow he says, you know, maybe cannabis is more lucrative, but I'll use the same entity to do that.” At the moment, you know, that risk is brushed under the carpet for many FIs.
What we launched with Always On Monitoring was something our customers have been demanding for a while, is an ability to get almost a real time alert should something fundamentally change with the business in question. How we're doing that is analyzing the broader web on a daily basis to say, has anything fundamentally new, made low risk component and onboarding into high risk.
So moving from this monthly or annual window to one where you're getting an alert in near real time or at least in within 24 hours should something fundamentally change with the business in question.
Steve: What are some of the key business benefits that come out of that? Certainly they would action against it as it reduced risk or is it operational expense savings? Like what's the tangible business benefit?
Danny: So one of the key drivers is reducing that risk. You know, if there is a 30 or 60 day window where you haven't found out the business is closed or the business has moved into a high risk window. Obviously, you know, depending on the line of the type of business you are, there's a risk of delinquency on the loan, there's a risk of the card network, the Visa - Mastercard coming in with a fine.
But ultimately it's also about maintaining a healthy portfolio of businesses across your entire network. So giving you that real time update. Also reduces the kind of the operational load of having an individual manually have to go and kind of trigger this refresh on an ongoing basis. Let's sort of compare this to, you know, you probably remember 10, 15 years ago when people were doing like OFAC, PEPs, and Sanctions screening on a monthly basis.
It was exactly how it worked. It would upload a CSV, it would wait for the result and hope for the best. Whereas today, many of the companies in the space have allowed a real time hourly alert. And that's really where we see this broader risk monitoring process moving in that direction today, which is what we delivered with the Always-on Monitoring solution.
Steve: I like your example for my business. And maybe I do shift to cannabis. Maybe I do shift to another industry. I think when you're dealing with unsecured lending, there's always these permissible use of funds. So being able to spot, okay, did we give a line of credit to this business when they're operating in a certain industry and then later they're doing something else, it maybe violates those terms. It's great that you can catch those.
Danny: Yeah, I think there's a kind of an interesting, let's say, intellectual difference between the KYC world and this KYB world. With an individual, you're not really verifying their reason to exist. You know, all you're really trying to detect is does-- is Steve real essentially, yes or no?
The core credentials never really change with an individual. Your name may change once or twice in a lifetime. And if that doesn't change, maybe you change address a couple of times over the decade. With a business, what you're really verifying is why does this fictitious creation exist in the world? Why has someone spent time creating this very separate entity to themselves?
And that fictitious entity needs a reason for being whether it's again, to sell IDV consulting services, or is to sell cannabis? And that reason can change on a dime. So that's really the kind of the big philosophical difference between verifying the individual and verifying the business. I think there's a nuance not necessarily well understood by those outside of the space.
Steve: It's a powerful way to think about it because you don't really ask those sort of questions for an individual in a KYC process, but a business exists for a purpose and businesses can be created much more rapidly than individuals.
I think one of the stats here in the US was far more businesses being created each day than people being born. So I like that; I like that.
Now the-- back to your product releases. You also just recently had a Q2 product update. There was a blog post that I read through. What were some of the significant updates that you did just recently in Q2 of 2024?
Danny: Yeah. I mean, so we are-- we're constantly improving the range of data and signals that we're ingesting, particularly in this initial onboarding review, we call the web presence review. So really the way to think about that product, it posts a two, three thousand different data points and signals that we're tying together in this 30 second window and trying to give our customers a real clear yes or no, pass or fail, should this be reviewed or does it go through.
So some of the new signals that we've added is the ability to analyze Google Street View image of a business, detect if there is any signage available in the components. So saying, “hey, we can see Danny Hakimian LLC is on the front of this store. It looks like they do have a physical update.”
We've added other ways of assessing the sentiment of the business and there are a broader reputational risk. We've developed a way to analyze the most relevant sample of the reviews that we can see. We've custom trained large language models. So also then highlight any cases of risk related to fraud, scams, delivery issues, product quality issues. That may-- you may end up seeing in delinquencies or chargebacks in your data.
So those are kind of the two of my kind of favorite features we released. There's about a dozen more in the blog posts, we'll maybe link in the comment. But those are some of the ways we're adding more detail and signal to the initial response that we are delivering all at the same cost. So again, being able to continually innovate and improve the product on a month by month basis.
Steve: And is your approach generally when you're envisioning these features to sit down with clients and say, “hey, where are you doing manual review? Where are you doing these manual checks?” And then work that into the plant.
Danny: That's really where like a lot of this process started, you know, sitting down with dozens of different teams across financial services and asking the simple question of, “yeah, what do you do?” And sometimes they kind of sheepishly look back at you and, you know, they were telling us, “we just kind of click around.” You know, the best companies had a kind of semi detailed checklist -- quote, unquote -- worst companies were just kind of doing a little bit of a gut check and saying, the analyst makes the judgment.
And you know, one by one, we started to automate layers of that component to a point where you'll see in some of these case studies on our website, where 70, 80, 90 percent of cases can either be auto approved or auto rejected in a fully automated way with far higher degrees of accuracy. So often that's kind of the leading part of the conversation is to understand not only what are they doing manually, but what are they trying to figure out manually? Beyond the actual like human task, what is the question they're really trying to answer or the confidence they're trying to build around this component of the [inaudible].
Steve: It's such a continuous process too, because the ecosystem, the market is not static, it's changing. So there are new ways for businesses to be created, new tools for them to use. So they're always having to evolve. I had, just as a side note, I had a conversation once with a practitioner, a buyer of these solutions. And they told me that they started doing Google searches because their tools had some gaps. Google search results are updated very frequently, you know, multiple times throughout the day and they got in trouble where it's like, “hey, you could have Googled this person and found them.” But creating Google alerts for every single business is just not going to be sustainable for a big company.
I'm curious, Danny, when you think about this, where the market is going, the broader business verification market, what is your big picture vision? Like what do you set out or what are you setting out to do with TrueBiz ultimately?
Danny: What we're really doing here is we're helping our customers map out all of the world's businesses and then understand the people and the purpose behind them. So in this kind of early stage of our company's growth, really, we focus on this purpose component. But where we're editing is the ability to say, we can also understand the connectivity between business A and business B. And this business website seems to be connected to this business address, which is connected to this other website. This broader graph, the network of kind of the businesses around the world is really what is being-- really what's happening behind the scenes at TrueBiz. So, there's a feature also mentioned in the blog post called connected entities, which is really our foray to detecting transaction laundering.
So we're exposing other companies, other people, other websites that are linked to the company in question. So that's kind of the broader multi-year vision is to create a graph network of all the 400 million plus businesses around the world, and then help you understand why these people, why this company exists, and who the people are behind it.
So that's kind of really where we see our company in the broader industry growing in the years ahead.
Steve: It's very ambitious and it's a very powerful vision. Thank you for sharing it.
Well we're getting close to time on the episode, Danny. If you've seen any of the past episodes of EXECUTIVE SERIES, I like to go just a little bit further than the LinkedIn profile, try to do a lot of research on these. And I was looking into your background for the startups you did in the past. And there's one that's called FooGuru, and this looked to be an app that was to help people determine who's the greatest football expert. Now are we talking American football or are you-- or is this like football? What-- like, can you share more about?
Danny: And I'm a pretty big European soccer fan. This was a sort of like gaming app I launched coming out of college, which the kind of core premise at the time was being able to give you the ability to predict just the outcome of weekend soccer games and then compete against a league of friends to determine the winner. So it's something we ran for just under two years. So yeah, and what we were doing there.
Steve: Cool. And, and these days when you're not building TrueBiz, where do you spend your free time watching your favorite football team or what are some of the other things you like to do?
Danny: Yeah, that's definitely part of it. I've got a two year old at home, so I think that's really when most of my free time and attention goes. He definitely keeps us on our toes. And it's-- yeah, great to play with.
Steve: Kids are the ultimate startup, right? You kind of put a lot of energy into that and never know which direction it's going to go as they go through ages. Okay, congratulations on that as well.
As we wrap up today, Danny, what kind of conversations would you be looking to have from those that are watching or listening to this episode?
Danny: Yeah, for us, I mean, we speak every day with customers who are doing business to business counterparty risk assessments. So whether that's in a KYB flow or a merchant underwriting, yeah, we'd love to hear your perspectives on these problems and explore the ways we could help today and hopefully down the line.
Steve: And what's the best way for them to engage? They reach out on LinkedIn or you have a process through your site? How should they reach out to you?
Danny: Either way. I mean, feel free to directly message me on LinkedIn. Contact us through the website as well. It will trickle through to me. So yeah, feel free to get in touch and I will-- we'll follow up from there.
Steve: Well, Danny, thanks so much for taking the time to speak with me. I really look forward to watching the amazing things that you're doing with TrueBiz, follow your blog posts and I'm sure in the months and years to come, you're going to hit your ambitious goal there. Thanks again for joining today.
Danny: Thanks Steve, take care.
Business Verification with Danny Hakimian