Toby Rush: $100M Exits, Splitting Companies, Timing Startups, and Ideem Killing 2FA
In this episode of Smart Friends, I sat down with Toby Rush to unpack a founder’s journey that spans four startups, a nine-figure exit, and a relentless obsession with building. We explored what it means to untangle personal identity from the success or failure of a company, how childhood experiences can echo into entrepreneurial motivations, and why taking sabbaticals between ventures can be a strategic move.
Toby also walked me through the genesis of his new company, Ideem, which removes the need for 2FA (those annoying sign-in texts) for payments and security tools built for a global market.
Links to Platforms:
We discuss:
Why tying your identity to your company can be both a strength and a liability
The critical decision to shut down a beautiful but unused blockchain product—and return investor money
How trusted digital IDs could change how we prove who we are—from checking out online to entering a secure facility
Why simply having a trusted device could be a stronger way to log in and why invisible two-factor might be the future
What it’s like to run a global fintech startup from Kansas City and the cultural learnings that come with it
This episode is a must-listen for founders, builders, and anyone navigating the emotional and strategic complexity of early-stage startups.
Quotes from Toby:
“When the company is dying, that doesn’t mean I’m dying. And when it’s thriving, that doesn’t mean I’m a good person.”
“You should absolutely take a window of time when one chapter ends—just having time to yourself is all the justification you need.”
“Two-factor authentication is alive and well—it’s just invisible now.”
“We reduce friction for the user, fraud for the merchant, and cost for everyone.”
“If you’re serving two totally different customers with one product, you probably have two companies.”
“The magic moment is at checkout—remove friction there and everything gets better.”
“Passwords are terrible. If I can just look at my phone and log in, that’s a win.”
“You need friends who can sing your soul’s song back to you when you’ve lost the melody.”
“From almost out of money to a $100 million term sheet in five weeks—that’s the startup rollercoaster.”
“Authenticity, credibility, and trust are incalculable in value.”
“If the thesis is right but the timing is off, you can build something beautiful that no one uses.”
“Stop with the techno-babble. We won’t call them NFTs—we’ll just call them useful.”
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Learn more about Toby Rush:
Additional episodes if you enjoyed:
Behind the Scenes of a Nuclear Microreactor Startup with Matt Loszak, Founder CEO of Aalo Atomics
World-Changing Potential of Next-Gen Batteries with Eli Dourado and Ethan Loosbrock (Ouros Energy)
Episode Transcript:
Eric Jorgenson: I like to start, this is my favorite question for getting to know people – who are your heroes?
Toby Rush: Oh, wow. Who are my heroes? I haven't... I'm going to take a step back and think about that for a second. Who are my heroes? Strong faith background, so Jesus I'd have to say is one of just the leadership and the impact that he has had on the world continues to reverberate kind of throughout the ages. Sometimes, I cringe saying this, like Elon Musk isn't a hero. I have a ton of respect for a lot of the stuff that Elon does. I can't stand some of the stuff that Elon does. But as an entrepreneur, the stuff that he has done just blows my mind. I just can't help but admire a lot of that. I've got friends that serve in politics in DC and I have the utmost respect for them and doing it for the right reasons. And it's super hard, but they're in it for the right reasons in the game. And they take a lot of abuse from a lot of sides. So, a few folks that have- public service has always been near and dear, those folks that are willing to dive in and serve not for their own benefit but for the broader good has always had a place in my heart.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's awesome. It's a very good- I think it's very good to be able to take lessons and admire people even if you don't admire the whole package. Like we all have things to be admired for. We all have things that we're perhaps less excited about, about ourselves. But if there's not a long list of people that you are excited to trade lives with, I think it’s generally a good sign that you've made a bunch of the right decisions for you personally.
Toby Rush: No, it is. Like, I love my life. I got an amazing wife and four kids, and I've made tons of mistakes, and they've all made me who I am today, and I genuinely like who I am and proud of what I've accomplished.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. That's another one of my favorite questions, actually, that you just reminded me of with that is, what is something that you have had to teach yourself very deliberately that is like a core part of sort of what makes you who you are?
Toby Rush: Oh, man, early childhood, I had a really rough early childhood and just very instable – parents in and out, adopted, am I wanted? Am I loved? Am I good enough? And so, there's a tendency for that to lead to people-pleasing and always being overly concerned about, are people going to like me? And am I successful? And do I have what it takes? And it's a really- and it's easy then as an entrepreneur to put that, the business in place of that. So, if the business is successful, I'm successful. If the business is doing well, if people like the things that we're producing, then people like me, and you start to intertwine your identity with that of the company. And I have multiple times have had to untangle those. I was like, no, like when the company is about to fail, that doesn't mean I am a failure. If the company is dying, that doesn't mean I am dying. And conversely, if it's going really well, that doesn't mean I'm a good person. And so, untangling that, for me, very early childhood hardwired of, am I good enough? And do people like me? And putting my business in place of that as a proxy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I imagine there's an advantage and a disadvantage to that. Like when your identity is so closely intertwined with the company, you can bring a level of like care and intensity and effort that is probably really hard for people who have like, oh, this is just a job for me.
Toby Rush: No, it is true. You've got- that is an interesting balance. Because I think I do care deeply about things that I put my [?] in. There is definitely reputation to it. And you want to carry- hopefully you're working on something you actually care about, so both the work product that you're doing. This is my fourth, I'm on my fourth startup from scratch. And a question I actually got from a lot of folks are like, why are you still doing this? Like this is your fourth one. And some of my previous ones have been really successful. Like I don't need to keep doing this. But I love it. And I think when I really took a step back and asked myself, I'm just a builder at heart. I love building product. I love building teams. I love building companies. And my wife laughs, like my happy place at home is in my woodshop where I'm building tables and products and like that's just fun to me. Like I think if I were not doing anything, I would find something to go build.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, you had- you took sort of a, I don’t know what you would call it, a sabbatical, a break. You had a really big exit and then it sounds like you were in the woodshop for a couple months, a couple of years.
Toby Rush: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think on my LinkedIn it is funny, I got more comments on it. I think taxi driver, family planner, or Uber driver, Uber driver, family planner, and tinkerer, I think is what I put. I get a lot of fun comments on that one. It was, it was good to unplug for a little bit and take some time. And doing the startup life is not for the faint of heart or its very taxing on the time. So, when you do get the opportunity to take a window to just have some fun and step back a little bit and enjoy some of the things that is a little bit harder to enjoy while you're in the midst of the building. So, yeah, I was able to take...
Eric Jorgenson: Especially with a young family. Like being able to take some time and be like fully present, that's a huge, huge benefit I think. A lot of people should take like a- work harder to take a mini retirement when their kids are like, I don't know what the perfect sweet spot age for that is. You probably have a stronger opinion on it.
Toby Rush: Oh, yeah, I don't have an opinion other than you take it when they come. Don't think, oh, I’ll just do a little bit more. I'll just jump straight back in. I mean, I always encourage people, if they're leaving one job or going to the next or finishing one startup whether they are successful or failure, if they have the opportunity to take a window of time, absolutely take it. Like we get too consumed with what's next and what do I- how do I continue to show progress or continue to justify my time, and just having time to yourself is all the justification you need.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, especially if you have that drive to like continue to prove yourself by creating and continuing to do that. It's also addicting. It's fun. It's like exciting. When you have that pace of like, the pace and the stakes and the level of investment of feeling pulled into the present because you're really in the trenches and like the sense of overcoming some of those challenges is like hard to set that aside.
Toby Rush: No, absolutely.
Eric Jorgenson: So before we- your whole background is like very interesting. But before we like flashback, I think given where we are, what's the thing that pulled you sort of back into the trenches from your life of leisure?
Toby Rush: My life of leisure. Well, actually, I've done a number of things. I actually tried a blockchain company two or three years ago that did not go well. I built a really beautiful product that absolutely nobody used. That was painful, definitely one of those identity checks of like, am I still doing this because I don't want to have a failure, or do I really believe this thing has something, and I came back and like, we're three years out. We're four years out. And more of my time and my investors’ money isn't going to make a difference. So, we actually sent money back to the investors. Like, hey guys, this is so far out. We should just call it now. A lot of my investors are like, but why? And I was like, I walked through all my logic and what we've done and what we're thinking about, and they're like, okay, we get it. And we trust you. What are you doing next? I'm like, I don't know. I don't have a plan yet.
Eric Jorgenson: Uber driver, family planner.
Toby Rush: This one actually was a bit of a surprise. A friend of mine was working on another company here in town, a startup. And said, hey, Toby, I'm really struggling. I've got- we're not making traction. Just a lot of challenges. Can you help me? Come give me a second set of eyes. And when I jumped in, I'm like, dude, you have two products. They were initially based on the same core technology, but as they developed, they really are two separate teams, these are two separate companies. And as you're looking at raising money, VCs might like one, they might like the other, but almost no one's going to like both together. And so, it's like, hey, let's spin this one out. And one of them I actually knew really well, was in authentication identity. So, I understand identity and authentication really well. And it really was- it's exactly what that was. So, using really advanced cryptography, crazy cool stuff that cryptographically binds to your device and serves as a two-factor authentication. So those really annoying six digit codes you get texted, the authenticator apps, the push notifications, we get rid of all those, the really simple drop in SDK that really payments is where we're focused. It kind of makes payment authentication easy and invisible. And so, when you can more easily accept payments with less fraud, no friction, that's a big winner, especially in emerging markets. Like the US is so isolated and insulated. When we think about payments, all we have are credit cards. We live like, I don’t know what the percentage is, it's got to be high 90% are done on credit or debit cards. And we have an issue, we just call up Visa and say, hey, fix this. And they do. Most of the world lives on instant payment, whether that's account to account or to a wallet. And so instant payments are instant fraud. And so, they do tons of authentication on the front side to make sure that you are really you before allowing an authentication to go forward. So, we're able to kind of cryptographically bind a device. We also leverage kind of the local, the face ID or touch ID, the local biometrics, combine those two and provide what's called a payment passkey or payment authentication to cards, to wallets, to pay by bank. And so, working at that location where a user is a customer of the merchant as they're going through that checkout flow, but as soon as they hit pay, you're also the customer of that payment method. So how do you authenticate a user who's a customer of two different entities, but keep that flow really seamless? That's the specialty that we're focused on.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. The last thing you want, I'd imagine, is additional friction at the moment of transaction.
Toby Rush: That's the magic moment. That's what everybody's going for...
Eric Jorgenson: Everybody spends so much time and effort removing milliseconds from that. And then all of a sudden, you've got a two factor auth and a text and a dead zone and all of that stuff slowing you down. So, this actually like, is it fair to say that like two factor auth is dead and it's just like a matter of time?
Toby Rush: It's funny, two factor authentication is alive and well, it's just invisible. So, you still want to say, is the person present? Is their device present? We just happen to do that in a way that's seamless and invisible to the user. So, we keep strong security, we just reduce the friction, fraud, and cost of things that we talk a lot about. How do you reduce the friction for the user, fraud for the merchant, and cost for the merchant.
Eric Jorgenson: Two-factor auth is dead, long live two-factor auth.
Toby Rush: Yeah, long live the invisible two-factor auth.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes, the text messages are dead, the two-factor auth lives on. That is very cool and an exciting piece. So, were you involved in the decision to break up that initial company?
Toby Rush: Oh yeah. I'm like, hey, [?] basically you either have to shut one of them down, or you've got to split them and let them both live. And then they came to me and said, hey, would you want to run this piece? And initially when I looked at it, it didn't have- like the vision that you started to articulate was not nearly as clear kind of back then with the head. It was two-factor authentication, but it was standard login. It was a huge, massive global bank was kind of the design partner. They were a customer, they're rolling forward, which is great. I'm like, you just can't sell to big, massive banks. That's super hard. And the more I looked at it and thought about it and dug into it and did a bunch of, just reached back to my own network and said, hey, how would this matter? How would this matter? And just being very clear with it, friction at time of checkout was a massive, literally a global pain point. And so, yeah, I was like, yeah, that actually sounds fascinating. I know the space. You basically get a product that's already built with a murky global banking customer. And we kind of got off to the races.
Eric Jorgenson: That's awesome. So, do you think that's a general heuristic of like, if you see a technology that serves two use cases, like you should basically always split that up and have a company organized around one use case?
Toby Rush: Yeah, I think, it'd be really around who are your customers, what's your go to market, and what does the long term product roadmap look like? So, if those really start to diverge, you got to split them. So actually, we're talking to a really good VC friend of mine. And they're like, hey, we've got this thing. And he's like, guys, here's the challenge. And he articulated it really well. He’s like, if you have two products, product A and product B, if product A is really successful, product B is not going to get attention. If product B is really successful, product A is not going to get attention. If they're both really successful, you don't have enough money or time. And so, you are far better off of just like splitting them, let them survive on their own. If they're great ideas, they'll continue. It's really hard to do, especially in a startup, to do multiple things. It's a different go to market, a different product that... there's not a lot of across sale upsell, better to spit them out.
Eric Jorgenson: And the team just gets to kind of like pick a lane and...
Toby Rush: Well, again, this one, the teams were almost already separate. So, the core software team was already kind of working on one product or the other. So it actually wasn't a lot. I mean, there's a handful of folks, but it was- [?] was pretty excited just because they felt the stress was well. They're like, hey, what are we doing? And we're distracted. And am I doing this? Am I doing that? And it's amazing how- I mean, doing startups is stressful enough. Adding that kind of ambiguity, it's bad for everybody.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, I think Naval had a good articulation of like stress as like steel, material is under stress when it is pushed in two different directions at the same time. Like people is the same definition of stress. So, if you're trying to focus all your energy on two very different things, of course, you're going to feel stress. So, that's a really- it's an interesting thing to go through. I feel like a lot of people don't have the maybe courage or confidence to like make a call like that because it feels so final to like separate these two things and let them each live or die on their own.
Toby Rush: Well, another... I love a lot of the behavioral economics, like the Malcolm Gladwell. And one of the things that really struck me a long time ago when I was reading... people love optionality and they fear the lack of optionality. So, you give someone, like there's this test, the idea is like there's three doors. And so, you could spend money to keep a door open because you didn't know what prize is going to be behind each door. And even when mathematically you told the person you will lose more money by keeping all three doors open, people just wanted to keep all three doors open because there's this weird human psyche about lack of optionality is bad. And so, when you think about I'm going to split two companies, you lose an optionality. You get a- this team's going to bet on this horse and this team's going to bet on this horse, and we wish the other team well, but you lose optionality. And sometimes that is a hard decision to make as a human.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Were those tough conversations like among the team or the investors as you were sort of separating those entities?
Toby Rush: No, again, we try to- it's one thing... I've learned over 20 plus years of being an entrepreneur – articulate well, be really authentic, know your stuff, and come open handed as like hey, here's what we're thinking. This is why we think it. Give us some feedback. This is what we think the right path forward is. And that, not always but a vast majority of the time, people come to the same conclusion, or they're like, hey, I get it. I don't have a strong opinion. I trust you. But nobody was like that's a terrible idea. And so, it was good discussions, but not negative in any way.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's great. So, I think you sort of hinted at this, but I think it's always a question worth sort of drilling down on. Who is the customer of Ideem? Who's the person who's like purchasing, making the decision to purchase this product from you? And downstream, I imagine getting pushed out to users like...
Toby Rush: No, this is actually a fun one. So, I'll tell you what our customers are today, and we're finding there's a new set of customers we hadn't thought about. So, our customers today are payment wallets and banks that are doing payments. So, you might be a pay by bank or the credit card. So if you're kind of doing those, and then we’re selling directly to the bank because they have to authenticate the user as they're checking out. And so, the flow looks like I hit pay, a little web modal pops up, and then if it's pay by wallet, pay by bank, buy now pay later, like that's our customer. That little view pops up. We've cryptographically bound to that browser. We say, yep, it's the same device. You don't need to send an OTP. You don't have to ask for authenticator. You don't have to do a push notification. It automatically does all those, and it goes away, like less than one second. Up and down. And that's has been. What we're finding is that in the world of credit cards, holy smokes, Visa and MasterCard make this a complicated space. They do some amazing things and the amount of acceptance, and it's hard. I don't mean to degrade them, but man, they make it complicated as well. But there's a new capability. It was actually started in Europe of all places called 3D Secure. And they are allowing the merchant to do what's called a strong customer authentication. So, think about doing a face ID, we do the device binding. You can pass that through with the payment flow to the issuing bank, that's the bank who actually is giving you the credit card. And they'll take that, like, oh, the merchant has already done authentication, called a delegated authentication. And I can accept that as a payment authentication, and I don't need to do anything more. And so, in that case, we're actually selling to the merchant. So, they want higher accept, what is called acceptance rate, acceptance means the card process goes through. It doesn't get rejected. Again, in the US we have- this is not a big issue in the US. Internationally, they could have 3 to 7% failure rates on every transaction, on card transactions. And you imagine, in the US we're like, I hardly ever get a transaction declined. Gets declined all the time. Well, again, if you can pass in strong authentication...
Eric Jorgenson: Because of suspected fraud?
Toby Rush: A lot of fraud, really strong fraud rules. Like if you're in- I'll tell you how crazy some of the world is. People find this fascinating. If you're in Malaysia or Singapore, you make any online purchase, it sends a push notification to your phone and you have to go tap on, you have to open that banking app and hit okay. Even if you're on the same device, like you hit pay, you have to wait for the push notification, got to go to your banking app, hit okay, and then jump back to whatever the merchant’s app is. If you're in Nigeria, every single online transaction gets an OTP and one-time passcode, you get a text message with a six digit code. If you're in India, every single online transaction gets a text message with a one-time passcode. In the US, we don't have any of that. And so that kind of friction and that kind of cost leads to lots of failure. The OTB doesn't arrive. The person drops out. And so, as we really dive into the world of credit cards and debit cards, we realized there's this whole other kind of the merchant customer base. So still around payment authentication, but our technology can be used at the merchant to pass in with the flow. And then there's one other interesting use case, it's called verified credentials. So also in Europe, where if you are an employee, your employer can give you a digital credential that kind of holds- is in a wallet. If you have got, you've graduated from university, if you've gotten certain kinds of certifications as a technician, as a welder, as a plumber, as an electrician, you get issued these verified credentials. And then if you need physical access to a location, digital access on your phone to something, these verified credentials can say, hey, they can continue. So, the user journey is kind of the same. I'm the customer of some website or some, even say it's a business I want to do some business with. They want to verify, hey, are you really an employee of one of my partners? Well, you don't want them to jump out of that app and go do something else. So just like a payment flow, we can authenticate a user on behalf of two separate people at one time. So, this whole verified credentials world is fun and fascinating. As an entrepreneur, that's the stuff that's fun to me. I'm like, hey, we got this core product. Hey, it works great for wallets. It works great for pay by bank. We can solve cards. Like there's a lot of credit card uses in the world, and there's a whole new use case that is years... I mean, it'll be new for a while, but the use cases are fascinating around verified credentials.
Eric Jorgenson: And the verified credentials are for getting access to physical space?
Toby Rush: Physical and digital, both. Yeah. So if you show up, so think, a lot of like, there's seven or eight states now that let you do a mobile driver's license that's purely digital. So, imagine in your phone, but if you're going into a bar and they want to know if you're 21, why are you giving them your entire driver's license? Like they're simply asking are you 21, so you could query this digital verified credential, and it simply says yes or no. So, it's basically much better privacy preserving and it answers the question that they're really asking. You don't have to pull out this piece of paper and have someone take a look at it. And that's a really simple example of your drivers, a digital mobile driver's license as a verified credential.
Eric Jorgenson: That's an interesting one. And I like that because I feel like the prevalence of cameras, like if you would have told us 20 years ago, especially our parents 20 years ago, like there'll be cameras in front of your face every second of every day and everyone in the world will have one and you will never know if they're recording or not, that would seem like an absolute dystopian nightmare and especially like they're just getting smaller and they're just getting more common. So if there's a bouncer at a bar who has got those Rayban cameras on, and he’s taking a picture of every girl's driver's license that goes by with their address on it for a night, like that's a bad outcome. And having- like just confirming, yes, I'm 21, let me in, digitally, that seems like one of those things that is like so obvious, like the future should have something like that. But we just haven't had the cryptography necessary to do that before.
Toby Rush: Yeah, cryptography, digital infrastructure. And I mean, that's a simple one. What if you're doing a delivery? So, you actually delivering something or actually picking something up. How do I know you're the guy who's supposed to be here? Do you work for that company? Like, again, think of the gig economy. So how do you secure that? But again, you don't expect, again, even assume this is at a business. You've got an Uber-like service going to a business to pick something up and transport it somewhere. How do I know you're the right guy? You're not just taking my stuff. Verify credentials is a perfect use case. I'm on a website and I'm able to- even this one, I can get a discount because I'm a business partner. Like, do you actually work for that company? Did you actually graduate from that university? Did you actually have this Vo-Tech certification that you can actually go do these things? It's really a fascinating world when you think about digital credentialing and verified credentials.
Eric Jorgenson: That's super cool. Yeah, I mean, there's probably 20 different people that have shown up at my house wearing an Amazon vest in their own car in the last month. I'm like, I have no idea.
Toby Rush: You hope they're the right guy.
Eric Jorgenson: And blue vests are pretty easy to come by. I don't know if that should be our identity verification system.
Toby Rush: I have a pretty good bet that you could buy an Amazon uniform on Amazon.
Eric Jorgenson: Oh, yeah, yeah. They should just go arrest everybody who's doing that. If you bought an Amazon... that's a sting operation.
Toby Rush: Probably so. I'm sure they have some undercovers there.
Eric Jorgenson: So, this is- it sounds like it could be the merchant or it could be the bank who is the like accountable party in the event of fraud. And they are the people- the merchant sounds more motivated to remove the friction from the transaction. Like they want that 3 to 7% boost to their business by reducing the friction around the transaction. But everybody should be, I mean, they want more money to move, they want a better user experience.
Toby Rush: The bank makes money when the card sells. That's how they make money. And so, yeah, so they're very motivated. Everybody's motivated in the right direction. The only guy who's not motivated are the fraud guys, and we don't really care about the fraud guys.
Eric Jorgenson: No, I actually, I would like there to be global alignment on a single voter issue on whoever, capital punishment for whoever's perpetrating all of these frauds and text messages.
Toby Rush: Ooh, oh my gosh. You getting all the highway ones? Like the number of, you have a Kansas toll road you need to go pay. I'm like, oh my gosh, my kids have gotten them. My mom has gotten them. Everyone's gotten them.
Eric Jorgenson: I mean, the Netflix, Coinbase, spoofing.
Toby Rush: Oh, Coinbase, holy smokes.
Eric Jorgenson: Spoofing the actual like phone number of my bank and calling. Like I've seen- there's some very sophisticated frauds out there. And I don't know what Interpol is doing, but they got- we need to staff up Interpol and take out some fraudsters. This is not good.
Toby Rush: It is funny when my kids- they're smart enough now, if they see something fishy, they send it to me. So now, rather than just answering, span or not, it’s like, okay, look at the sender. See that +61? That is not the United States. You probably shouldn't trust international codes sending you random text messages about bills that you owe.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes. And that's a low level- That's an easy spot, but yeah, you can't start them too soon on these phishing scams.
Toby Rush: They're good. I mean, some of them are crazy good.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, and they're going to get better too. I saw somebody posting about a study that this university did about like manipulating users on Reddit, and they were using, they're feeding this bot the whole history of the accounts’ messages in order to identify things about them and then use that as inputs to make a more persuasive message. And so, the natural extension of that is like the more artifacts there are of you online that people can put together, the more, the easier you are to maybe spoof or convince, like you're just increasing surface area. Maybe we should end the podcast right now.
Toby Rush: Yeah, really, what are we doing? We're talking. Talking about lots of personal things. I mean, this could have all sorts of stories. No, one of the both crazy, amazing opportunities and challenges is this whole kind of agent world. So, AI agent, they can go do these things for you. Well, when an agent acts on your behalf online, how does it authenticate? Can it pay? Can it approve? Like, so how do you authenticate and authorize an agent to act on your behalf? And there, again, is a whole another realm of fraud and abuse and hacks and different ways bad guys are trying to get in. So it is not going away anytime soon.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, which is why it's good to keep the good guys ahead. And you don't hear a lot of- you don't hear a lot of new technologies that make fraud less likely and user experience better.
Toby Rush: It is. One of the funny things that I actually laughed at this particular- at Ideem and kind of technology. In the authentication world, there's something that you know, something you are, and something you have. Those are your only three factors you can choose from. Something you know is your password or pin. Something you are is your biometric. Something you have is, it could be a token, could be your laptop, could be your phone. And everybody wants to focus on something that you are, the biometric. I mean, that's the Eye Verify. So, I come from that world, know it very, very well. There are dozens and dozens and dozens of companies trying to solve that particular problem. Like I have no desire to jump into that overcrowded space. Then I looked at him like, this is a really interesting possession factor solution. And possession factor is always kind of the redheaded stepchild of the authentication world. Like nobody wants to focus on it. It's not very sexy. It's kind of boring in a lot of ways.
Eric Jorgenson: What does that mean, possession factor?
Toby Rush: So something you possess. So the three factors, something you know, password, something you are, is your biometric, and that's something you possess, you own or you hold is a possession, called a possession factor. So, focusing on the least interesting of the factors, but yet actually one of the most stable because you can do it completely invisible for a user. So, I can confirm your phone without you having to even acknowledge or do anything. And so, it's always on, it's always there. And so, you get really strong security with no friction. And then when you need to, you can do what's called a step up. So, you can step up the authentication into a face or fingerprint.
Eric Jorgenson: So that's a good segue into your kind of history with verification and authenticity. So, take me back to the, tell me the Eye Verify story. Where were you when that started?
Toby Rush: I'll go one step further. So, my very first company, we used cameras on forklifts, so computer vision, and we automated data collection at warehouses. So think about putting a camera...
Eric Jorgenson: When was this circa?
Toby Rush: ’03 to ’09. So, my very first company I started, dude, I was 27 years old. It was a long time ago. I started in 2003, and we were basically working in warehousing using data capture technology with RFID and computer vision. I was really captured by computer vision and what we could do with it. And when you're in a warehouse, one of the things that we realized is like forklift drivers are really good at dynamic and unconstrained environments. They want to drive like bats out of hell. They can drive so fast, but they hate barcode scanning. The stuff they always messed up. I'm like, hey, dude, dude, when you pick a palette up, always scan the barcode. I don't know how you mess that up, but they would invariably mess up what I picked up or where I put it down. Like, you scan something wrong. You simply didn't scan it when you put it down. And so, they're like, if we could automate the scanning on the pick up and the put down, drivers could just drive. They could literally- we joked that we turned forklift drivers into race car drivers. All they had to do is drive. We took care of all of the scanning. We had a camera on the front of the truck. And so, it was always looking. And so, hey, I see a pallet, I see a label, auto scan the barcode, so I know what pallet I have. And then we put 2D barcodes in the ceiling. And so, it was like your own indoor GPS system. You always had an unobstructed view above the forklift. And so basically you ended up with a really clean system that automated the stuff that forklift drivers hated and wasn't good at and let them just drive. So that was kind of- we sold that to a private equity, [?]. I did a roll up with them. So, I had a great experience with the private equity. Like, hey, we like the management team. We want to buy a couple of other companies in this space. So, we did that. I sold kind of my company to them, and then kind of with their money, I bought two more companies. So, a great experience really early on. So, I was with them for two or three years after the acquisition. But then a friend here in Kansas City said, hey, there's this professor at the University of Missouri, Kansas City, or UMKC, and they're doing some really cool things with computer vision. I know you're really into that. You should go take a look at it. I'm like, sure. So, went over and was just fascinated by Dr. Reza Derakhshani is the guy's name. And he was a bit of a mad scientist who like really creative, really personable as far as professors go. He was wicked smart, very creative, and again, very personable, easy to talk to. And so, as he was talking about what he was doing, he's like, hey, I'm using computer vision, just regular cameras. But I can look at the blood vessels in the whites of your eyes and determine a biometric, just like a fingerprint. But... we eventually called it the eye print. This was so university. They called it, I can’t remember, vat conjunctival vasculature of the sclera. Like literally it was like, yeah, it was like some crazy name. I'm like, okay, that never works. Like it's like the finger print. Why don't you call it the Eye Print? And so, we called it the Eye Print. And he had some really cool technology. Usually, a lot of the eye based technologies take special hardware, special lighting, special cameras, which made it impractical to scale. So you're never going to put that on a smartphone. And so, they in fact went to the university. They're like, yeah, we've got this great technology. We think it's airports, immigration and military. I'm like, okay, those are really hard to do startups in. And like, okay, tell me more. I tried to understand it. And I'm like, yeah, there's no chance you're going to do a startup in those spaces. But these smartphones have just come out with something they're calling the selfie camera. Could we use the selfie camera to be able to capture the image and do the same thing? And people are like, why would anyone do that? Like, because passwords are terrible. Like if I can just look at my phone and that logged me into my phone, that logged me into my application, that would be a great user experience. And no one likes passwords. And I got a lot of pushback, like initially both from investors and the university. They’re like if that's such a good idea, Apple and Google would already be doing biometrics on the device. I'm like, I don't know, this feels like a good idea. Let's give it a try, see what we can do. And so, we launched Eye Verify in Q1 of 2012 and we got lucky, had a great phenomenal kind of technology engineering team. So, we built that little SDK. We were trying to sell it to Wells Fargo at the time. I remember this actually very clearly. And Wells Fargo was like, wow, this is really cool. This is really interesting. And Apple came out with touch ID, the fingerprint. And I'm like, oh crap. Did I choose the wrong modality? Like, so eyes and modality, fingerprints and modality. I'm like, did I choose, did I just screw up? And I called my board members. And I'm like, did I just like completely screw the company because Apple just chose touch ID and we're using the eye. Is everybody going to think you have to use touch? And it's like, absolutely not. Like they've just consumerized biometrics. That's exactly what you are. There's always going to be multiple options. And so, it's funny, the value of having kind of an experience and wisdom kind of along the way. And so, we were right place, right time. So we started in Q1 of 2012, Touch ID came out in Q3 of ’13, so 18 months later, and then a year after that, Apple Pay. And so, then everybody was like, payments, payments on your phone. That's what biometrics are going to be used for. And so, we had Wells Fargo, we had Citi, we had 60 banks in the US kind of using our little SDK. We were working with a bunch of folks over in Korea, Japan, China, and started calling Alipay, which kind of at the time was the world's largest payment wallet. Said, wow, this is fascinating. They offered to lead our series B. Right during that conversation, we had another strategic approach us and say, hey, we have 90% of the Android fingerprint market. We would like to be able to sell fingers and eyes to the Android world. Would that make sense? I'm like, yeah, that makes a ton of sense. And so, I basically got those two into a bidding war, and we were able to exit. But even that story, the story I've told a couple of times, I'll feel more- I guess we're far enough away, I feel more comfortable telling it. So in December 9th of 2015, I am almost out of money. In October of that year, my tier one VC out of Silicon Valley had committed to lead our series B and then completely backed out on us, left us crazy high and dry. Huge sucker punch. Fortunately, my investor stepped up. They gave us an inside round and kind of gave us a little more funding. But even that was coming to an end. It was going to be up at the end of December. Alipay stepped in. They were doing a bunch of testing. They like, wow, this is fascinating. They really, really liked it. And their corporate venture capital investment team said, hey, if our product team agrees to move forward, we want to lead your series B with a $20 million investment. Like, that's amazing. Like the largest customer that I could think of in the world, literally, they're my largest customer, wants to invest, which kind of gives me the inside track and gives me credibility with everybody else. And so, December 9th, we're having our, basically our final meeting with the product team. They've done a bunch of testing and they're basically going to come back and tell us their results. If those results are good and they decide to move forward, then I can get a little bit more money in to let me give enough runway to finish the wrap or to get the series B done. And so because, I mean, I can make December 15th payroll. I can not make December 30th. It's that close, and I've already done an inside round. I don't know where more money's coming from. It'd be super- yeah, it would have- it was dark days. Heavy days. I remember being in my kitchen and it was like, it was a nighttime call because it's morning over there, 12 hours off. And my wife's like, hey, are you ready for this call? And I stopped and I literally just started weeping, just crying. I'm like, I feel so much pressure. Like hardly anybody understands how close we are to the precipice. Everybody thinks we're doing well. And in many ways, we are doing well. If this call doesn't go well, I genuinely think it might be over. And my wife is amazing. Wives that take this journey with us are amazing. She basically just kind of held me, let me cry. And she’s like, hey, if this whole thing blows up, do you think I'll still love you? Like, yeah. Like the people that you respect, are they still going to respect you? I'm like, yeah. Like, does God still have a plan for your life? Like, yeah. Then just go do what you're made to do. It's all going to be okay. Everything that you actually care about, nothing's going to change. Just go do what you're made to do. And dude, having someone who has that kind of perspective in the dark of the night is just so powerful. One of my friends has a saying, a saying kind of for those kinds of moments, like we need friends in our life that can sing our soul's song back to us when we've lost the melody. So, our soul has, our spirit has a song. So, they're kind of, hey, what were we made to do? Why were we here? Kind of, what are we called to? And in the dark of the night, super pressure, like we can lose the plot. Like we lose the melody. We are so consumed and stressed and being pulled in so many directions and to have someone come back and kind of sing our song back to us, to bring us back like, you're right. It's going to be what it's going to be. And then we're going to go in, and if it all fails, it's going to suck and it's going to hurt and I'm going to be embarrassed, and you're still going to love me and there's still a plan and we'll continue forward. Fortunately, they said, it's great. We love it. We want to continue forward. My investors said they wanted to go forward. I went out to CES first week in January. Again, this is now three weeks later. And I met up with my friend who now works over at this other fingerprint company and we start talking and very quickly turned to a very strategic conversation. And that's where this other bid came in from. And so now I have to go back and tell Alibaba, I was like, I need you to wait a few weeks. Like, what do you mean wait a few weeks? I was like, well, I had a strategic approach us and we have to talk to them. And the goal is we were hoping that they would kind of say, well, we would like- we're okay looking at an investment as well. And initially it got crazy pissed. They're like, you're making a huge mistake, and hang up the phone. I'm like, oh man, did I just really screw this up? And again, the board knew what was going on. So, it was in full support of the board as we're doing this. And they called back the next day, like, hey, I met with the investment committee. We would like to also have a conversation about an acquisition. So basically, those two got in a bidding war. We signed a term sheet to sell Eye Verify on February 13th. December 9th, I'm not sure if I have a company. December 13th, I have a term sheet to sell the company for over a hundred million dollars. So, it was just crazy. I mean, that's the rollercoaster. So, when people look at the headlines of what happened and like, oh, look at that. He pulled technology out of a university, raised $10 million, and four years later sold it for a hundred. Wow. That seemed like a really easy ride. No idea.
Eric Jorgenson: That you're like on a knife's edge on a weekly basis there. Man, and that's a...
Toby Rush: Not for the faint of heart.
Eric Jorgenson: No, and what an interesting version of that story where, I think the outside version of like, oh, there's a bidding war is like, oh, we had interest and then we had more interest, not that you had to throw away the first indication of interest in order to like have that come back the right way. So, I mean, what a- it's not really a bluff call, but like you had to jump off that cliff and like hope somebody caught you.
Toby Rush: Yes. It was not a bluff. It was real. That'd been idiotic to bluff that, but it was a risk. So, you're kind of risking things. But... if I've learned anything over time, and relationships and just being authentic, being credible, being trustworthy, it's incalculable in its value.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Well, and what an interesting- I mean, that is an interesting story as a precursor to seeing what you are doing now with Ideem for sure. It's one of those like everything makes sense in the rearview mirror kind of stories. And seeing Eye Verify, Eye Verify is sort of an iconic like Kansas City tech story. Like, ecosystems don't have like many nine figure exits. And so it was, I remember like everyone in the city was excited for you, to see like a global stage startup getting like built and sold in Kansas City. And I think, I'm sure Ideem is well on the way to being another one. But it's been a, yeah, it's a very cool thing. And the timing of it all, like I really- as an investor, I'm always trying to find, see the charts, looking back at the iPod, looking back at the iPhone, you can understand what are the inputs to that. What are the battery density and scale? What are the screens? What is the storage? And like you could chart out when something like the iPod or the iPhone could become theoretically possible. You could chart out, and it sounds like you had an intuition for this. I'd be curious how methodical it was, like of the intersection between computer vision, camera quality, camera prevalence, and the software necessary to like identify those things. You could have like charted that all out and been like, yes, this will become possible in the coming year or three.
Toby Rush: Honestly, there was a bit, there was actually quite a bit of that. Like, there's some things I do well, some of the things I don’t well. This particular one I got pretty right because the thesis going in was cameras are going to be upgraded on, like, it was like an every nine month cycle. Like it was crazy how fast camera... and we would, as consumers, we were upgrading every 12, 18 months.
Eric Jorgenson: It was like the thing that phones competed on.
Toby Rush: The upgrades were massive like between phones. Like today, eh, okay. There's not all that much new going from one iPhone 15 to 16 to 17. I mean, when you're on the iPhone 5 to the 6, 6 to the 7, like those were huge. And so, there was a bet of these cameras are going to get better every cycle. They're going to get faster every cycle. And every time they get better, we're going to do more things on them. We're going to do more payments. We're going to do more banking. We're going to do healthcare. We're going to do business. And so, there was a concerting strategy of consumers are going to pay for the hardware themselves because they're going to upgrade. Every time they upgrade, people are going to want to do more sophisticated things on them and going to require better authentication. And authentication is going to get harder and harder trying to thumb in your passcode or your password. And so yeah, that actually was a very specific strategy of, can we make the right wave at the right time. But I’ll tell you where it didn't work. So, Eye Verify worked well. The company is a company called Redeem which is the blockchain company, and so the thesis there was I am still fascinated by NFTs as utility. In fact, verified credentials, we talked a little bit earlier about verified credentials, that's a type of NFT where you have a digital thing that you can tie back that authorizes you. We have you can turn your driver's license into an NFT, they call it verified credential. You can have a title, your house, your- I mean, all sorts of things that if it were digital, it’d be a much, much better user experience. And these are all NFTs. And so, the assumption was, we're going to have all sorts of NFT utility use cases, not stupid monkeys or just create cryptocurrencies, but really valuable things in the digital world, but you’re going to have to have a digital wallet. And the way that we were telling people to manage digital wallets was absolutely absurd. Like you got to have this 16 mnemonic phrase and don't tell anyone, and if you lose your keys, you're done. I'm like, that's never going to fly. Like I've done enough in this space, like web 2 users moving to web 3 need to have an easy button. And so, it's like if you can hold your phone, you can hold your keys. So, we're going to build infrastructure and scaffolding around your phone tied to your phone number, and most of the wallets need read access. Like if you need to prove that you have an NFT to gain access to something, you only need read access. So, I didn't have to be the wallet. I could connect to MetaMask and Coinbase and name- Rainbow and I’m forgetting half their- Phantom, all these wallets that used to be so big. If you would sign a message one time, I can read NFTs in those wallets and more easily grant you access both in the physical and digital world. And so, the idea is, hey, we're going to make this seamless, frictionless flow for two additional Web 2 users to use Web 3 things and not have to worry about managing all these separate wallets. The challenge was there's no Web 2 users that moved to Web 3. So, I had bet on this big, massive wave and a lot of folks did. So I was not alone in this, so thinking Web 3 was going to be a bigger wave, and FTX happened and just a lot of grit, graft and a lot of bad stuff. We got way ahead of where the technology was at. And so, I built a really beautiful product that had the same premise, same thesis. So, I laid some things out that I thought were credible but were five years out. That's when I went back to the investors and like thesis was right. We're way too way too early.
Eric Jorgenson: Well, I think that 2021 to 2023 kind of like crypto era, COVID just like changed so many trends so dramatically and so many people stuck at home. It was so hot, NFTs were so big, the coins were skyrocketing. It felt like Web3 was going to happen in 36 months. And as soon as sort of like normal life resumed-ish, it was like, oh yeah, no, this is just like a long arc of adoption of technology cycle. Like, it's weird to think about that we're still in the first 30 years of the consumer internet. We're still in the first 15, 20 years of like smartphones. Like these are not mature technologies in the way that like electricity is. So, there's a lot of interesting stuff like left to get built. And I have no doubt that like I think a lot of the things that you have articulated and a lot of people articulate about the use cases of NFTs and crypto and digital wallets and digital identity verification are all going to happen over the coming... 10 years.
Toby Rush: Here's what we won't do. We won't call them NFT. I don't think we'll call them web 3. Like, stop, stop with the techno babble.
Eric Jorgenson: The NFTs are probably dead as a brand. Web 3 maybe not. We'll see.
Toby Rush: I'll tell you, actually the first call it web 3 or blockchain use case that's going to go, that is going mainstream is stable coins. Like that is a hundred percent legit, great use case of the technology, it's already exploding and that will be the first mainstream web 3 blockchain use case, but consumers won't even know what they are.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, it's being adopted by Stripe and like a ton of the other sort of, yeah, the internet plumbing providers.
Toby Rush: Yeah, infrastructure, it’s a great infrastructure play. That’s exactly what it is.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. But if you're not paying attention to the crypto headlines, which most people aren't anymore, you would have no idea that like it's marching forward and a lot of that stuff is making progress. Was there a similar, I don't know, what are the curves or sort of trends that you see pushing Ideem in this?
Toby Rush: Yeah, I do think it is people want frictionless flow, especially emerging markets. So emerging markets are still, we're so spoiled in the US, we all have credit cards. Like digital payments and moving away from cash is still a massive trend in emerging markets. And because they have instant payment, the regulatory risk and regulatory requirements for authentication is just really high, tons of friction. And so, the thesis is really, again, that is probably the most important magical moment in the e-commerce journey is that buy. And so, we know that if you can remove even a little bit of friction, increase authorization, I didn't notice this one coming in, but I think again, things make a lot more sense in a review mirror, I think these verified credentials could be absolutely as big. Now again, that's a couple of years in the making because we need to prove we have these verified credentials in a way that's really seamless to the user, both in the physical and digital world. And so again, being able to uniquely tie this device to this user, to these other things I think will be really important. So yeah, people hate friction and they hate fraud. And it is an amazing amount of fraud in the world right now that causes a lot of friction.
Eric Jorgenson: Yes. It's a really- you can almost, if you picture what's happened in your own pockets or purse over the last like 10 years, it's like you used to have a big wallet and your phone was small and separate, and now like... things just keep like porting into the phone and into the phone.
Toby Rush: It is. It's my car keys. It's my wallet. Like... Way over 99% of my purchases are credit card and even most of them Apple pay just because it is easy.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. So, you go from wallet and phone separate to like one credit card on the back of your phone and that- But even that, it like starts to go away and... now it's my phone and my driver's license, because like what if I get pulled over? Driver's license will go digital. Insurance is already digital. Yeah, it's all just going to get like sucked up into the phone. And the utility has to come with that for all these different use cases.
Toby Rush: Yeah. So, it is an interesting trend line of our phones. Well, but then again, if you were to talk to Zuckerberg or a lot of the folks, like the glasses, when do glasses... I don't think glasses replace phones. I think you have your phone in your pocket. I don't think you're going to be like, I'm not going to have my phone. It's just your glasses augment your phones. You'd still have your phone.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, the culture of different wearables is super interesting... Yeah, it's so much more of a personal decision on like what you want to show up with, and having like that level of camera presence, you want enough compute too. Especially if we all want like local LLMs, you're probably going to want something like phone scale to have enough chip power with you. Yeah, it's a very, very interesting thing, though. What has the build process been like, I mean, doing a global, like truly global startup from middle America?
Toby Rush: It's a lot of early morning calls and a lot of late night calls. I was in Singapore in November. I did a Indonesia, Singapore, Malaysia, Philippines trip in February. Next week I'm going to Turkey. Another one of my guys was in Bangkok two weeks ago. Probably am going to have to get down to South America this summer. So it is challenging getting all over the world. It's funny, I have very few customers in the US. Just because Visa and MasterCard, we all pay 3% every time we use our credit cards, but we're so used to it, we don't think about it. US and Europe are unique in that we are credit card heavy users. The rest of the world is not.
Eric Jorgenson: What are the transaction costs for them?
Toby Rush: Oh, tiny basis points. So, for those, a half a percent, a quarter of a percent. Yeah, it's almost free. Well, actually here's another fascinating one, it's called open banking. So open banking, massive in India and Brazil. So, in India, it's called UPI, in Brazil, it's called PIX. It's free. Government mandated free. So, you effectively now can do any kind of payment for free, mandated by the government right now. It's going to be a while before we get there in the US, but you can imagine it's also instant payment and so the authentication requirements in those are just also off the charts. And so, helping kind of those- it's called open banking kind of more broadly. So open banking initiatives that a lot of emerging markets are moving to because they look at Egypt, I'm sorry, Brazil and India and it has been wildly successful.
Eric Jorgenson: That's super interesting. I mean, if you- Like from that point of view, seeing that work, watching a duopoly take 3% of all of the economy, all of the transactions in an economy is fucking wild.
Toby Rush: It is crazy. I remember Ben Milne. He started Dwolla. He's now got a Brale. I see him get up on stages a long time ago. Dude, that guy was just fire and brimstone when he got up on the stage, he was so fun to watch.
Eric Jorgenson: He's an incredible speaker.
Toby Rush: He would just rail on Visa and MasterCard. Like we're devaluing the money every time we move it. This is ridiculous. There may be, there's a point in time that is valuable. There is no way we should have a 3% tax on every time I want to do digital payment. That was kind of what Dwolla was trying to solve. And now as I really spent so much time working internationally, it's like, you're right. Like they're doing it for effectively free. But they got- Visa and MasterCard have us on a kickback scheme of we like the points. Because we like the points, we want to use our card. Because we want to use the card, the merchant is going to do whatever we want because they want to please the consumer and you get kind of this lock in effect of- but you do see Visa and Mastercard, they know the writings on the wall. They're diversifying. They're doing all sorts of other interesting things. Stable coins as an example. They've got a lot of other business units they are spinning up just because they know you just can't keep charging 3% forever.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I really surprised an investor friend of mine. I was probably too early on this, but I think like five years ago, early crypto, I was like, I'd be short Visa over a 10 year timeframe, just like imagining like Stripe coming from one side, crypto coming from the other, government coming from the bottom. Just very, it's hard to imagine that like that they managed to hold on to the juiciness of the profits that they've had for the last little bit because it is crazy. It's good for us as Americans, I think, to like look over the fence at what India is doing and be like, oh, maybe, maybe we're done. We didn't know. Maybe the airport lounges weren't worth it.
Toby Rush: No kidding. Or we started with all the landlines. It was like, we had landlines forever. Like these other countries just jumped straight to cellular. And so, there's a disadvantage of being first sometimes. And we were first, and again, I would much rather have that overhang, and okay, let's figure out how to redo it. But a lot of these countries jumped straight to digital. And that's for stable coins as well. So stable coins are transferring money digitally with very low cost in real time. And so, you will see stable coins continue to take a huge bite out of the traditional payment rails.
Eric Jorgenson: And that's awesome. I mean, the speed that you get out of the economy when like you don't have that 3% drag and the slow ACH and credit card... Yeah. The settlement time and the cut both like really slow things down. And I remember being at Money 2020 and Vinod Khosla was like on stage, like issuing a challenge. He's like, the finance sector is too big. Where are the entrepreneurs? Shrink this. We should not have a finance sector being 15% of our country's economy. Like this is not healthy, do something. And I was like, this is- that really stuck with me. And I thought this is a very interesting- is an interesting era for that whole industry. And it's cool to like look around the world and see who's doing things better than us.
Toby Rush: One of the things that I do like about this particular sector, so my last three companies have all been in kind of this payments and financial services space of like, that is the one use case that every single country has, period, full stop. So, I do kind of like it. Like this is a global use case. It looks different. They'd have different solutions. They have different problems. But being steeped deeply into the payments world and how money moves and how people pay, it's a good place to be.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. It’s hard to think of a more enduring and universal use case. Do you get like cultural whiplash flying around? Like I imagine your customers are very different, dealing with very different things, very different people, driven by very different...
Toby Rush: Yeah, it is. I mean, that was actually a great learning. When I was with Alibaba, I had a team in Beijing, Singapore, San Francisco, and Kansas City, and really had to learn culture, motivation, incentive models, time zones. So, I think I learned- it was super hard, by far the hardest leadership job I've ever had, but oftentimes it's the case, also where I learned the most. And so definitely learned a lot there. So, I've kind of gotten used to it and enjoy it. I mean, I like enjoying, like I'm going into, again, I think I mentioned I’m going to Turkey next week. I'm kind of excited. I’m going to Istanbul, and I've never been to Turkey. I like going to Southeast Asia. I like just different experiences, different people. It's such a far cry. I grew up on a small farm in Northeast Kansas. And so this little farm kid from Kansas, I’m like, what in the world am I doing in Istanbul, Turkey, but I love it.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Selling software, like a global software salesman from a farm. Love it. This is the story of our generation, I think.
Toby Rush: It is. I am absolutely a part of the American dream. Like, I grew up on assisted school lunches, and I was adopted when I was six and had a rough childhood. But I was able to make it and I'm able to continue to kind of live this American dream. And actually, one of the coolest things for me is when people who used to work for me go out and do their own. It's kind of like coaching tree, like that is one of the coolest experiences, the coolest senses of gratitude, just feeling gratified, like, hey, I made a difference. Not just, hey, we did well, we built this company, solved a problem, but you kind of inspired the next generation to jump out and take the leap themselves.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. Especially in, I mentioned some of that is happening in Kansas City and especially in a city like this where there are not an abundance of like people who have done what you've done. And so, I imagine like, the cultures that you can build in the companies and showing people how to operate at speed on a global scale and deliver huge value is massive and the downstream effects in the startups that come from that, the rush effect, we're going to call it, is huge.
Toby Rush: We’ve got to find a better name than that. But it is fun. And I love doing- what's cool is that I love doing it. I don't do it for those reasons, but as a those reasons are very motivating. And it's still super hard. Like Ideem is still hard. Like I still- the nos still hurt. Like you get- I still get far more nos than I get yeses, and those aren't easy days. And you get some days, it's three steps backwards and one step forward. And sometimes you get those for multiple days in a row. So just because I'd done it before, it's still super hard. But I do enjoy it and kind of seeing others around me being willing to take that. Like even just like literally this afternoon, I had a guy who's in a pipeline, it's a entrepreneurial program here in town, called him and was like, hey, I've been trying to- I think my product might work kind of at banks, can you give me some thoughts? And I'm like, okay, don't sell the A, B, and C, there's no way, like you're so small, that’s going to be a waste of time. However, community banks love this kind of a thing, and it would be a great play. And it's like, well, [?], like, I know like three. So send me a note and I'll connect you. And I mean, for me, it was 20 minutes, like really very little out of my day. But for him, it was huge. I'm going to be looking at transferring my trust with some of my friends at these local community banks to him and he’s going to be able to move a lot faster. But that feels good.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah, that's huge. And I really enjoy talking to people who are in the stage of life where they're playing it for the love of the game and you know it and they know it. And that's, I feel like you can bring a calm and an energy and an excitement to it that like, when you know you're there because you're having fun doing it and you want to see the outcome, you can bring everybody along the journey with you.
Toby Rush: And for me, part of what's fun, again, I love that you're kind of working on Scribe and you're kind of in now and you kind of got that CEO hat on of its fun doing it with others. Because there is something where it is a unique game, and you can't just read about it. You're not going to go figure this out as an MBA. And so those who are kind of on the sojourn I love just hanging out with. I get super encouraged. I think I encourage them. And like there's definitely a synergy of being in it together on the journey that makes it a lot more fun.
Eric Jorgenson: Yeah. I love it. Well, that is a fantastic place to leave it. But where should people get more of you who want more of you?
Toby Rush: The website useideem.com. You can check us out there, on Twitter and LinkedIn. I'm Tobias Rush. Come check me out. Always happy to help. Eric, thanks for doing these podcasts as well. These are fun. These are great. Keep building them.
Eric Jorgenson: Thank you. Thank you for sharing what you know. I appreciate you taking the time.