WEBVTT
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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, brian LoFermento, and we are all in for such a treat in today's episode because we have got an incredible guest whose work has impacted, quite frankly, all of us, every single person here in the United States of America if you're tuning in from the US, which I know a lot of you are and also, this is someone who is a pioneer in her industry, and what I love about that is she isn't just a pioneer because she's got the skills, she's got the experience, but also because she's one of us, she's a fellow entrepreneur who has realized wait, I know all of these things, let me be even more impactful under my own business and rolling out new technologies, new solutions, into the world.
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So let me introduce you to today's guest.
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Her name is Janice Kephart.
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Janice is a national security and identity expert with over two decades of experience in identity policy and biometric solutions.
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If it sounds super complicated, janice is going to take away a lot of the confusion there.
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She served as border counsel to the 9-11 Commission and has testified before the US Congress and the UN Security Council on issues of identity and national security.
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Janice is also the CEO of Identity Strategy Partners and the founder of ZipID, which I'm so excited to hear about that business.
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Beyond her expertise in national security, she's a spoken word artist and narrator.
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She's super talented in all the ways.
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This is someone who's appeared on TV, on a radio in so many capacities made it really easy to research her body of work up to this point.
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She's also released an audiobook of her great grandfather's work, cherokees of the smoky mountains.
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I'm personally so excited to hear all the things that go on inside of janice's head.
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We're all in for a treat today.
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I'm not gonna going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Janice Kephart.
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All right, janice, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks so much for having me.
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This is going to be a lot of fun.
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I'm looking forward to it.
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Heck, yes.
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Well, the first very fun part is I feel like I had to boil down all the cool things that you've done into just a short little snippet.
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So take us beyond that snippet.
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Who's Janice?
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How did you get into all these cool things?
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So actually it's an interesting story.
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Maybe I got into the issues of counterterrorism and identity.
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It started way back when in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing my brother-in-law was in the building at the time.
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He ended up passing away a few months later from complications of the smoke inhalation and I never forgot how it felt to not hear from him until five o'clock that that event happened in February 1993 at the World Trade Center bomb.
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The Trade Center bombing terrorists had detonated a park truck underneath the building and it was happened at about nine o'clock in the morning.
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We didn't hear from him until 5pm and then in May of that year he passed away from complications from the smoke inhalation.
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So it was very tragic and I always held that with me.
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And when I had the opportunity to work for the US Senate Judiciary Committee I was strangely and maybe karmically, assigned to the Counterterrorism Subcommittee and Technology.
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It was the Counterterrorism Technology Subcommittee on issues of terrorism there and brought forward a lot of information that was not known at that time about foreign terrorist activity in the United States.
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And then when 9-11 happened I was very privileged and honored to be able to support the 9-11 Commission in their investigation.
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So in the course of all that investigation, it became very clear that the solutions to things were not just policy.
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The solutions to things that I was dealing with had base in technology as well, and so I became sort of this techno policy expert, translating technology and policy and facts for the greater good of our country.
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But being a bit of a maverick and stepping outside of that, I realized that there was only so much good I could do within the confines of the government itself.
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To really pursue the vision that I had for helping secure our country the way I wanted to, I had to step outside the box and start my own business, and so, in 2017, I started a federal services company called Identity Strategy Partners and then within that, because I'm a lawyer as well compliance issues around identity emerged.
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I became an identity biometrics expert.
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I really focused on that primarily, and ZipID is an evolution of wanting to make sure, and ZipID is an evolution of wanting to make sure that a solution could come for a very complex into something that potentially could make me happy and be lucrative and still provide value.
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So that's what ZipID is for me today.
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So right now, I'm actually running two companies and hopefully soon, just one of them, which will be ZipID, but that's kind of a piece of it.
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And then the whole creative piece of it also feeds, I believe, strongly into my entrepreneurship too, because I'm willing to take risks and be creative about the solutions that I provide.
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And that is a different piece of me but, I think, essential to who I am.
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So very mission driven always have been.
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But the commercial sector and entrepreneurship and the new way allows me to be happier and do something really valuable for the commercial sector when I've always focused on government.
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So that kind of is an overview, I guess.
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I love that overview, janice.
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I'm so appreciative of the way that you spelled that out and very appreciative of your work and the fact that, hey, you're preaching to the choir here as an entrepreneur.
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A fellow entrepreneur is that we can have so much more impact when we go out under our own umbrella.
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You and I were joking together off air before we hit record about the fact that you are a subject matter expert that is so well established over the course of your career, of your career.
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I found clips of you talking on CNN, testifying in front of Congress, testifying at the United Nations and so many important roles that you've played.
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Where my head goes, janice, is I'm just like.
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You're so good at all these things you do.
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I always think about.
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If you want to be a practitioner, be a practitioner, but you, you talk about the maverick inside of you.
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You said I also want to be in charge of negotiating contracts and getting clients and building new tech solutions and marketing and branding and all of these things.
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Where did that come from, janice?
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Because I love the fact that there was an entrepreneur living behind all of that subject matter expertise you built.
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I think it's the creative piece.
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I think it's the creative side of me.
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It's the what more can I do?
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How much further can I push myself?
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Where is my limit?
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Am I good at everything, brian?
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No, I'm not.
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I'm not good at everything, but there's a lot I am good at.
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And what I'm really really good at and I found out was that, even though I'm a lawyer by trade, I'm kind of a solution engineer in my head.
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So I love problems and solving them, and I've been doing that with the government for ages and maybe I got a little confident I could do it well and then I was like okay, so I can solve problems.
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There's this one particular problem that ZipID is solving niche.
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I'm killing it.
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We're gonna be next generation, the whole thing.
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But what more can I do?
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How much more can I push myself?
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And who do I need to surround myself with?
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Maybe it's not just the government policy, people.
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Maybe the way entrepreneurs think and people who support entrepreneurs is so different, as you can imagine, from the way the government thinks.
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It's nearly completely the opposite.
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I'm much more in line with the way entrepreneurs think than I am with government, and so I am forcing myself to learn a lot of things that I haven't before, but I'm also surrounding myself with the people that know how to get this stuff done when I don't have the answers.
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So branding and that sort of thing, that's my creative side.
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Am I perfect at it?
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No, but I have the ideas and I can help know where to go to get the help to execute.
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So the entrepreneurship piece of this for me is having a mission and having a vision that's bigger than the product and then being able to execute all of that and seeing what I can do, and I guess I like to take risk, and that's a big part of it too.
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I don't mind.
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I don't mind the risk, I enjoy it.
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So yeah, I love that, janice.
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I want to go a little bit deeper into ZipID because I love that, that delicate balance that you talk about between the way that government thinks and the way that I'll just lump in traditional institutions, think about things versus entrepreneurship.
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Because the second our team landed on ZipID's website.
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First things first.
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It looks beautiful and it looks like something that an entrepreneur innovates and puts out into the marketplace, because here we are talking about I-9 compliance, which I'm sure is not the most exciting thing, but, janice, I do want you, I want you to introduce listeners to that.
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But what I want to interject before I toss it back to you is the fact that you've taken something like that and applied technology technology that when I scroll through your website, I think to myself.
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Obviously I'm far removed from the job market, but I think to myself why is this not the way it's already existing?
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Like thank you, janice, for bringing us into the current in the future day.
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Talk to us about that, because it is going into an archaic dare I say archaic world and applying entrepreneurial, innovative thinking to bring a new solution to the market.
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Right.
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So the super fun part about this is that government can't get beyond itself.
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Often and I've worked deep in government I still contract with the government.
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They can't get out of their own way.
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So the federal government has put the whole 4-9-9 issue that you mentioned.
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So the federal government has put on every single employer in the United States the requirement to legally authorize their new hires before they start work, as they start work within three days of starting work to be technically compliant, work within three days of starting work to be technically compliant.
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And in doing so you have to prove that the person both has legal authorization to work and their identity.
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But the fact of the matter is the government has provided and this is part of our secret sauce ninety six different compare IDs to use to complete this form, and then the employer is supposed to look at those IDs and look at the person and go, oh yeah, it's the same person.
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But you know what if they get it wrong?
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That is where worksite enforcement if you've ever heard the term immigration and custom enforcement doing worksite enforcement they're doing it on the I-9.
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And if any part of that I-9 is inaccurate, you get fined extensively.
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So to me this is an unfair burden to put on employers.
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Why can't the government solve this?
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They have a program called E-Verify, but E-Verify doesn't verify identity at all.
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It verifies your social security number and that is it, and employers don't really know that, but that is the truth.
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So, basically, what I'm doing is I'm enabling the government to do what they want it to do but have never been able to implement, because they refuse to use the biometric technologies that are available and super accurate now to help do the identity authentication portion.
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So I am providing identity authentication along with a completely automated, streamlined, always accurate completion of this form.
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It seems like something that should have been done years ago, but there are a lot of players in this market and nobody's done it.
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So that's where we're starting with ZipID.
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I have bigger plans in the future, but we're starting with this little form and I'm going to get this market under my belt.
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And then we're starting with ZipID.
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I have bigger plans in the future, but we're starting with this little form and I'm gonna get this market under my belt, and then we're gonna go further than that.
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Yeah, I love that.
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Janice, I'm gonna put you a little bit on the spot for some of the entrepreneurial mindset stuff here, because when I look at the course of your career, you're so comfortable talking about all things identity, even the technicalities the lawyer in you came out, janice.
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When you're talking about the three-day timeline for I-9 compliance, and when I think about that, your business obviously is the fruit of so much of the stuff that you had done leading up to it.
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And I think about all entrepreneurs.
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We all have our inner mindset struggles when we start our business of who am I to be doing this?
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And a lot of people will probably look at your example, janice, and say, okay, testifying in front of Congress, testifying in front of the United Nations, 9-11 commission work, all of these things that you've done, and they probably think well, for Janice this is easy.
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All the doors are already open to her.
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She's got the credibility, she's got the connections.
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Give us the reality.
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What's that picture actually look like?
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There's a lot of competition.
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I'm brand new and you know when you're a startup, people worry about your viability, right, your long-term viability.
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So I have to put us on the map and accelerate us.
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The biggest challenge I will say, brian, is that there are 72 million new hires in the US a year.
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Can you imagine the demographic I'm trying to figure out?
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We've got remote, we've got in-person hires, we've got all different types of industries in the US, with all have different believe it or not customer discovery has shown all different issues with the i9, all different types of pain points.
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So I'm literally trying to ball it all up and give a solution that bubbles up the biggest pain points and then also offer something that nobody ever thought was possible, which is the identity authentication piece on top of it.
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And we were successful in getting the federal government to change the regulation to allow for a digital type of solution like ours now.
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So that was a win.
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But, yes, I have the credibility.
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But my other issue is I'm known in the identity sector and I'm known in government.
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I'm not known in who my demographic is, who is human resources.
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So I've been working extremely hard to try to pull my knowledge of identity and build my following and educational piece of this which there's a big educational piece with this to the HR world.
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But it's a challenge and I am trying to figure out all the CRM around this and the best way to go to market and to market this.
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And we have a lot of ideas and we're bouncing them around.
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But, as you know, as an entrepreneur you kind of have to throw a few things at the wall and see what sticks and then go where your clients want you to go.
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And so that's what I'm trying to keep my ears open to them and not make this a Jenna show in any stretch of the way.
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Yeah, really well said.
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So many important considerations.
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And speaking of challenges, janice, as you were just rattling some of those off, I actually hadn't thought of remote work.
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How has that changed?
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When I was a teenager and started working, you know you go in and they physically look at all of your documentation I hadn't even thought about the differences of today's work environment.
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That said, you're building a technology solution around all of this.
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We've all heard the term of MVP minimum viable product.
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Janice, how the heck do you even sit down with such a big problem?
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You're talking tens of millions of people every single year.
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What's your MVP look like?
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What did that roadmap to launch look like?
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How did you make sense of it?
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So I was extremely lucky.
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There was a senior I had responded to a request for information years ago in the federal government to this very large company came to my firm, said can you help us devise a solution?
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They didn't understand what we were talking about, so we went off and we submitted our own response and the very, very senior government official loved it and when he left he brought all of his internal knowledge of the I-9s, the statistics of how it was used, what IDs were used, and he and I.
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He asked to join the ZipID team and for about a year and a half he and I worked on the workflow.
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So the point of the workflow is you don't have to know anything about this I-9 at all.
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Workflow is you don't have to know anything about this i9 at all nothing.
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You just come in and you just push buttons and it tells you what to do and the form will be auto filled.
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So that is um, that is sort of the core of it.
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But what we've done is it's super frictionless.
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It's completely built based upon technology so that all the information would be autofilled off of the IDs themselves, which makes the form accurate.
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And then we're doing a one-to-one between a selfie that we're requiring and the ID so that the employer can make a decision if they're confident that that person is who they say they are.
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The ID and the selfie match.
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And then we're autofilling everything on the employer's side and we're fulfilling some pain points that employers have as well, because not only do they have the remote worker issue, they have transparency across location issue.
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So I talk to many people charter schools, health organizations that have locations in multiple states and they don't know what's happening in the I-9s in the other states because other managers are doing them and they know that they're liable if immigration and custom enforcement comes along and does an audit, they're liable for anything done wrong in those other locations.
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So we've built transparency throughout the entire employer dashboard.
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You know exactly where every I-9 at every location and which HR person is working on them.
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We give you reminders.
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We're audit ready.
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We'll retain the data as you need, all with encryption.
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Nothing leaves our platform.
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So all personally identifiable information is secure is secure.
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I used all of my lessons learned from all the failures and successes of biometric companies and identity companies that I know because I know all the vendors, and I put that to work as well in this solution.
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So hopefully I won't have made any mistakes any huge mistakes as we launch.
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We're not going to be perfect when we launch.
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We're going to have a very strong, minimum viable product.
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But as development goes, things drop because you can't get it done on time, and so there will be details, little details lost, but we'll catch up to them very soon after we launch.
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Right now we're working to get those initial clients in and people are loving what they're seeing, they're loving the ui.
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They're like oh my god, this is wow.
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You know five.
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We're taking it from about 35 minutes to about five minutes total.
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that's crazy, all right.
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Well then, janice, I'm gonna ask you this question that when I hear cases like this, I've been asking this question more and more lately, and that is.
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It sounds like a no-brainer, like where's the stumbling block?
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Because, for me, obviously I'm not having these conversations, I'm just talking to you on a podcast and I'm a big fan of the work that you do.
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Especially, you called out the ui.
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That's what immediately stands out to me and that's what, for me, I immediately recognize.
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Oh, this is not a government solution, because this actually looks good and it actually functions well and it's so clear to see that.
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So, with that said, it sounds to me like if I'm an employer and I have to fill out the I-9, why wouldn't I use zip ID?
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Why wouldn't I go all in on something like this?
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Talk to me about some of the stumbling blocks or some of the objections that you've already foreseen and said no, we're going to have a way to counteract that and really penetrate the market.
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So the biggest issue is not my product, because people really like my product.
00:19:48.535 --> 00:19:56.900
The problem is there are these huge human resource information systems that already exist and they have like a PDF version of the Form I-9.
00:19:56.900 --> 00:20:08.925
It's not worth it to them to like upset the entire balance of their entire HR system, which often is both onboarding and then it's onboarding and then it's payroll as well.
00:20:08.925 --> 00:20:12.814
So there's a lot to it's the bamboos and the workdays, those kinds of ADP.
00:20:12.814 --> 00:20:29.057
So, to include the I-9 piece in, I am building the B2B piece of this, so we'll have three different varieties of B2B APIs that can be used by these larger companies.
00:20:29.479 --> 00:20:47.999
And we're learning which I was surprised that background check companies are also extremely interested in what I'm doing because of the identity authentication piece of it, that they can do both onboarding and identity authentication at the same time, which is huge to the background check folks.
00:20:47.999 --> 00:20:55.632
So it turns out I actually have a bigger market than I thought I had, but it's also a challenge because they can be kind of frenemies, right.
00:20:55.632 --> 00:20:58.880
Until I make them my friends, they're kind of my enemies, right.
00:20:58.880 --> 00:21:13.194
So that's the biggest challenge I have right now is getting inserted into a market that's relatively thick but has poor I-9 products out there right now extremely poor actually.
00:21:13.194 --> 00:21:14.698
So that's the biggest struggle.
00:21:15.460 --> 00:21:20.954
That's super interesting to hear about the landscape of it because, you're right, there's so many different stakeholders and you can plug in anywhere.
00:21:20.954 --> 00:21:30.559
I guess this question is not to Janice, the subject matter expert, but more towards Janice the founder, the fellow entrepreneur, and that is, when you look at that landscape, how do you pick?
00:21:30.559 --> 00:21:40.478
I guess it's a question of both business model as far as monetization and revenue strategies, but also, of course, we all need to pick our ideal customer and with such a broad market, it's almost a blessing and a curse.
00:21:40.478 --> 00:21:44.318
I would imagine that some days you debate yourself internally of which way should we go?
00:21:44.318 --> 00:21:45.442
How do you navigate that?
00:21:46.351 --> 00:21:49.890
So I have spent a tremendous amount of time exactly on that question.
00:21:49.890 --> 00:21:59.378
The customer discovery never really clarified who my customer was, because it was still everybody, because every employer has to do this right.
00:21:59.378 --> 00:22:06.344
So the usual thing that you do in entrepreneurial school, right, is you figure out your demographic.
00:22:06.344 --> 00:22:10.259
But my demographic has never really narrowed.
00:22:10.259 --> 00:22:25.982
So what we've done is we've focused on the employers out there who usually have the highest turnover your construction industry, your travel and industries.
00:22:25.982 --> 00:22:34.019
Then there's also a different type, which are your technology companies, who love cutting edge products right and have a lot of remote workers.
00:22:34.500 --> 00:22:40.325
So we have sort of the remote work piece and then we have the large turnover and hires.
00:22:40.325 --> 00:22:45.973
The large turnover and hires get us a lot of transactions right, and I need that right to build.
00:22:45.973 --> 00:22:48.737
But the remote worker, I need that right to build.
00:22:48.737 --> 00:22:57.605
But the remote worker, the technology companies, might gravitate to us, are gravitating to us because of we're bringing something new to the table and they like that.
00:22:57.605 --> 00:23:03.711
So it's kind of two separate segments.
00:23:03.711 --> 00:23:07.443
And then we have that third segment which would be our channel partners, which is our B2B, and that is going to be our biggest segment of all.
00:23:07.443 --> 00:23:08.867
I think that in the end, is going to be our biggest segment of all.
00:23:08.867 --> 00:23:11.617
I think that in the end is going to be our biggest segment of all.
00:23:11.617 --> 00:23:14.950
As I see it, those are kind of our three demographics.
00:23:14.950 --> 00:23:15.951
That I would.
00:23:15.951 --> 00:23:17.797
Does that answer the question?
00:23:17.957 --> 00:23:18.578
Yeah for sure.
00:23:18.578 --> 00:23:23.520
I love hearing the way you think about it as well, not just the answer, but I really love hearing the way you navigate that.
00:23:23.520 --> 00:23:34.550
You already know, janice, how much I enjoy switching gears in these conversations towards the end, which time always flies by in these episodes but I so cherish getting inside the mind of the entrepreneur as well.
00:23:34.550 --> 00:23:49.261
And what's really clear to me, janice, about you is that I think you share in one of my beliefs that everything that we do is a microcosm of life, and business is a microcosm of life, and you actually you brought it up a few times in our conversation today about how much the creative side of what you do.
00:23:49.261 --> 00:23:51.377
You're obviously a spoken songwriter.
00:23:51.377 --> 00:23:53.416
You are a vocalist of trip poetry.
00:23:53.416 --> 00:23:54.359
You do so many.
