← Founder's Story
Founder's Story
AI Scams Are Ruining Lives – Now We’re Fighting Back | Ep. 200 with Ricardo Amper CEO of Incode
00:21:32
Loading summary
Transcript30 lines
- [00:00]
Advertiser
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job post seen on other job sites with Indeed sponsored jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podkatz12 just go to Indeed.com podkatz12 right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Hiring Indeed is all you need. Americans love using their credit cards, the most secure and hassle free way to pay. But D.C. politicians want to change that with the Durbin Marshall credit card bill. This bill lets corporate megastores pick how your credit card is processed, allowing them to use untested payment networks that jeopardize your data security and rewards. Corporate megastores will make more money and you pay the price. Tell Congress to guard your card because Americans lose when politicians choose. Learn more at guard your card.com hey.
- [01:29]
Daniel
Everyone, welcome back to Founder Story. Today we have Ricardo Amper, the CEO and founder of Incode. And this is going to be a very interesting topic today because it's something that we've been discussing in other episodes, but we never found a company who's really solving this issue. So that's why I am stoked to have you, Ricardo. But you are reinventing identity verification power trust worldwide, which is what we need. So before we dive into all those things, because this is going to be so critical, I'd like to understand how did you even get started in this field in this industry and why are you solving this problem?
- [02:09]
Ricardo Amper
Well, thank you Daniel. Thank you for inviting me here. It's a long story. I learned entrepreneurship from my dad and then when I was in College back in 99, it's a long time ago, I wanted Internet to be more fun. That was like pre Facebook and I started a company called the Bubble and it was the same concept as Facebook years before that. But I learned a hard lesson which is that timing is very important because I started late 99 incorporated April 2000 when was.com crashed, raised a little bit of money and then I couldn't raise more money and so my first experience was actually that failure that taught me to always be Humble and, and how, you know, there's a matter of, of timing and chance in, in everything that you do. So you, you need to be able to be incredibly resilient. Then after that, I, I started a beverage company that I sold to, to a CPG company, the biggest bread company in the world. And then a turnaround of a personal story where my dad passed away. I, I had to quit business school, go and do a turnaround of his company that I eventually sold to a big public chemical multinational. And then years, you know, after, I was able to pursue my passion, which was in technology. And we started encode, but we started with a very different thing. We, we were in. Back in 2015, we were sharing photos with facial recognition. So we had an app that you would take pictures with your friends and they would automatically be shared, or photos that you never shared were shared based on facial recognition, which I think was a terrible idea. But the, the one thing that was a very good idea was that we built an amazing team of engineers. We were solving things in a way that nobody was was doing that meaning doing AI on the phone before it was a thing. And then we got a little bit lucky. Apple kind of made facial recognition okay. Then we pivoted into doing something more interesting, which is how do you verify someone's identity? By scanning their document and doing biometrics. And eventually it became big deal when Covid came and banks, governments, doctors needed to verify people digitally. You needed to find a way that was secure. And our whole industry took off. And so we, we were at the, at the right moment and the right time.
- [04:52]
Daniel
So let's go back to these exits. As a founder, as someone who, you know, stepped in and became, you know, the C suite. What do you think it takes for a company to get to the viability of when another company would want to acquire it?
- [05:10]
Ricardo Amper
Well, I think it has to do with the original problem you're solving. It has to be a problem that's interesting enough and a solution that's significantly better. And honestly, I think founders have an inherent advantage and potentially a disadvantage, which is the lack of knowledge. So when you go to an industry and you understand and you see something that should exist but doesn't exist, it's much easier to see it if you don't have that context. And I think in my life, both, you know, when I did the social network, the beverage company, or encode, it was exactly the same. For example, in Incode, people thought that it was impossible for AI to be better at understanding, understanding whether a document is doctored, whether you're you, whether you're actually live streaming. And it's not a deep fake because you know, everybody thought that having a human reviewing it is better. And to me it didn't make sense. And we just went and, and, and, and used our skills that we're doing, you know, the photo sharing app and we ended up solving it with the beverage company. I thought powered beverages back in Latin America were not very good and all of a sudden you, you drank something that you couldn't even figure out that was a powder beverage. And, and so I think that's, that's a benefit of, of having zero context.
- [06:35]
Daniel
I'm curious about the timing. So we've heard this from billionaires, from super successful people like yourself, that timing could be the most important thing to the success of their organization. So I'm curious when the, the timing of encode, I know you had a certain problem you're solving and now it's transformed into, into what it is today. Did the explosion of ChatGPT and all, you know, image creation apps and obviously deepfake of where it's at right now, did all of these things the last few years really exponentially create momentum for encode?
- [07:11]
Ricardo Amper
Absolutely. I think as I learned as it was impossible to succeed back when the dot com bursted. Right. Even if we had a good idea, you know, timing is a defining feature, but you don't control it. It's luck or blessing. And what you control is two things. First thing is you need to be solving a problem that's important and that hasn't been solved. And the second thing is you have to have an amazing team. And, and so those two things I think you control and if you're persevering enough, maybe you're lucky to be in those things. And so we had I think three things that change our company. Apple doing facial recognition, everybody feeling comfortable with that number two, Covid and digitalizing. And the three is the Geni revolution that is making our industry much more important. And we don't control it. But at least what you control is, is the two things that I mentioned.
- [08:14]
Daniel
I've heard a scenario where a C suite got a phone call and then transferred a large sum of money to what they thought was another C suite, but it turns out it was deep fake. And I, you know, that's just obviously one of, I'm sure many sad opportunities that are coming up because of AI and people take advantage of that. So how important is it what you're doing at encode?
- [08:38]
Ricardo Amper
I mean that's a, that's a real story. And the interesting thing is it happened a year and a half ago to us where our treasurer was almost tricked to sending money to fund the escrow account for an M and A. And it was very credible. And then we started seeing a lot of our customers being attacked with deep fakes. You saw in the news how MGM and Caesars were shut down for two weeks because someone successfully through a deep fake pretended to be a system admin and they took control of the whole Vegas for two weeks. And so certainly it's a big problem. And, and yesterday in cnbc there was news about how many interviews. I think they quoted 40, about 40% of interviews are fraudulent. Now that you're, you're, you're interviewing someone who is not who you think they are, it's maybe even chatgpt in the back. And so you can imagine this is a problem that is worth tackling.
- [09:36]
Daniel
So let's, let's talk more. I know ENCODE just was called a top company in your field, top visionary, which is incredible award that you were just given. Very few companies receive this recognition. So talk to me about what it's like for you as the founder and then your amazing team as you get this recognition because you're solving such a huge problem and you're one of the few.
- [10:02]
Ricardo Amper
I mean it's wonderful, it's great to get that recognition. But I think the best recognition we get is the trust of our customers. Some of our customers are like Citibank, Chime, Amazon. We're one of the few customers who's being used in the national election in the US and we have many other thousands of customers like that. And well, we feel it's a huge sense of responsibility because if we do our job well, which is verifying users identity, we help lower fraud but most importantly we help them grow. We help them acquire customers that are, that are real and they're going to do good for their business. And the second thing is I think there's a more of a societal effect. If you think about everything that you do, whether you go out into a bus, open a bank account, going to a doctor, there's an act of identity underlying. And so if those acts are trustworthy, the rest is trustworthy. There's an incredible example in India 15 years ago it was one of the lowest trusting societies in the world. Only 8% of Indians trusted each other to transact. And then they did something great which is they said we'll never go into paper IDs, we'll just do a digital biometric system. And in 15 years, it's now the highest trusting society in the world. More than Switzerland and Sweden, certainly more than the US and, and it change is changing people's lives because now, you know, interest rates go down, you trust voting more, which is something that should happen around the world. You can go to stadiums and feel safer. So it is a big deal. And so we think both the responsibility to our customers, but also the responsibility to, to our mission, which what we, we think is the most important.
- [11:48]
Daniel
I mean, trust. Without trust, the world will fall apart. Right? Like you said, it's, it's a global place. We do business with people not only from our neighboring cities, but all the way around the world. And if we can't trust who those people are, we can't operate. I mean, this is to me, I might be sometimes pessimistic with AI, although I am, you know, I love AI and I use it all the time, but I am sometimes fearful if we don't solve these problems in the future. So how do you see, you know, how do you see the future of this going in the next few years?
- [12:21]
Ricardo Amper
AI is just going to make everything exponential, the good and the bad. And so the question, as you're saying, is what percentage of interactions are trustful?
- [12:29]
Daniel
Right?
- [12:30]
Ricardo Amper
And so as much as it's going to allow everybody to increase their productivity, grow their businesses, all of that, which is great, it's also going to make frusters more prevalent. You're going to have agentic AI doing things on your behalf, but it's also going to have n. It's going to exponentially multiply what frustrates do. And the problem is, how are you going to authenticate those agents? How are you going to make sure that that's an agent that Daniel commissioned? I would say first, is it an agent or is it Daniel himself? Then if you commission that, and the question is at the very beginning of saying, yes, I'm Daniel to that agent, the question is, who determined your identity, what type of instrument you did? And unfortunately, we're having a 2025 technology relying on a piece of paper that was invented 3,000 years ago by Egyptians. So the whole system actually as sophisticated as it, as it, as it looks like it is based on a very old technology that hasn't modernized much. And so our job, our mission is to take that kind of very weak link and take it to the 2025.
- [13:50]
Daniel
I would imagine that you'd be inundated with companies that need your help, people that need Your help. I mean just thinking about what you said, where agentic AI, we're going to have these AI agents doing like everything, whether it's business, it's life, could be, you know, the next travel, vacation, I mean it's setting everything up that we're going to do. This is going to be a very interesting time. When you talk to companies though, around what you're doing, what's, what is the pulse of how they feel about it? What are they saying?
- [14:21]
Ricardo Amper
Look, the companies that, that suffer the most right now are companies that you would imagine from financial services, governments, trying to make voting, you know, better, all the way to regulated industries like gambling, adult entertainment, social media. Those are the ones that right now they have an existential threat on their business to make sure that they can guarantee that interactions are genuine. But what's interesting is that for the first time companies that were not in that category, you know, from telcos to energy companies, are actually realizing that it only takes a fake person, it takes a fake interaction to portray as a customer or as an employee to get access to their systems. And it can be a massively, it can be a massive event that can destroy the company with reputation. It is actually mind blowing that that is a reality. And so what we're seeing is everybody's now asking how can I make sure that my interactions with the world, agentic and human, are genoine?
- [15:33]
Daniel
I mean it, like you said, it only takes one thing now to go viral on social media to, you know, destroy the stock of a company in one hour. Like it, it, you know, things could just spread like wildfire and it takes only one thing. You know, perception is very hard to create a good perception in my opinion. But it's very easy to get a bad perception from people nowadays from what it seems. So if a company, when they start working with you, I could, the more we talk, the more I understand how big this problem is, I could see why you're solving it.
- [16:09]
Ricardo Amper
Yeah.
- [16:10]
Daniel
So when a company starts to work with you, can you walk me through the process of that?
- [16:14]
Ricardo Amper
Yeah. So when we talk to a company, we tell them that there's three things that we, that we excel at first. One is We've been doing AI for 10 years. There's a lot of companies that put AI into their business right nowadays, but we've been doing that for 10 years kind of with a conviction that there's certain problems in the world that AI is going to solve them a lot better than what humans can. The second thing is the most interesting part which is that there's going to be so much fraud in the next three years that I think, you know, the world is going to come together and collaborate because it doesn't matter how good your AI is, you have to talk to each other. Governments and private companies have massive amounts of data. You have DMVs who give you a driver's license. We have the pictures, your information and you have all these private companies that if only companies talk to each other and would say, hey, look Daniel, with these type of device, IP is actually genuine. If just companies talked, this problem would be solved. The second thing we're doing besides doing the AI is we're building a private network, starting with the dnvs and then all the way to the companies and build this massive interconnected network that will eventually make very difficult for fraudsters to defraud. But in order to get to the level of critical mass needed, unfortunately it's going to get bad. So the second thing we're doing is all these network and companies generally are very excited about that because it's not only solving their business case.
- [17:56]
Daniel
April is Earth Month, a time to reflect on the impact of our choices. Sustainability starts at home and especially in the bedroom. Did you know most mattresses end up in landfills within a decade? That's why I love Avocado Green mattress. Made with certified organic materials like latex, cotton and wool, Avocado mattresses aren't just built for comfort, they're built to last. And lasting quality means fewer replacements, less waste and a healthier planet. Every Avocado mattress is crafted ethically, climate neutral, certified and made in their own zero waste factory, diverting 85% of waste from landfills this earth moon. Choose sleep with purpose. Choose sustainability. Head to avocado mattress.com today and save up to 10% on certified organic mattresses. Dream of better for you and the planet. Ever wanted to explore the world of online trading but haven't dared try? The futures market is more active now than ever and Plus500 futures is the perfect place to start. Plus500 gives you access to a wide range of instruments. 500, NASDAQ, Bitcoin, gas and much more. Explore equity indices, energy, metals, forex, crypto and beyond. With a simple and intuitive platform, you can trade from anywhere, right from your phone, deposit with a minimum of a hundred dollars and experience the fast accessible futures trading you've been waiting for. See a trading opportunity. You will be able to trade it in just two clicks once your account is open. Not sure if you're ready. Not a problem plus 500 gives you an unlimited risk free demo account with charts and analytic tools for you to practice on. With over 20 years of experience, Plus500 is your gateway to the markets. Visit us.+500.com to learn more. Trading in futures involves the risk of loss and is not suitable for everyone. Not all applicants will qualify. Plus 500 it's trading with a plus starting your business should be simple. That's why I love what Northwest Registered Agent is doing. You can build your entire business identity in just 10 clicks and 10 minutes. Seriously, whether you're launching your first company or your fifth, you get more when you start with Northwest. More privacy, more guidance and more freedom to run your business from anywhere. They've helped businesses grow for nearly 30 years and they've got your back. For just $39 plus state fees, Northwest will form your business, create a custom website and set up a local presence anywhere you need it. Want more? They'll protect your identity by using their address on your formation documents and their premium mail forwarding gives you a real business address that keeps your home info private which I have used this service for many years. Don't wait, protect your privacy, build your brand and set up your business in just 10 clicks. In 10 minutes, visit northwestregistered agent.com founders and start building something amazing. Get more with Northwest registered agent@northwest registered agent.com founders while they're participating on solving.
- [21:13]
Ricardo Amper
The business case, they're actually helping others be safer. And unfortunately the, the people who are more affected are the people who have the least. Because if all of a sudden you have a newer entrance, a young person or an immigrant for example, who doesn't have a lot of information on the credit bureaus and all of a sudden all these fraud starts, they are the ones that are going to not have access to credits or they're going to have high interest rates. And so in my view these two things are critical. And the third thing is you have to have a partner that is innovative and goes with you hand on hand. So, so, so I, I think companies are very excited about participating in this, in this network.
- [21:57]
Daniel
To me it sounds like what you're saying is we are going into the era of collaboration. We came out of the era of competition and now we're going into the era of collaboration, which I'm, I'm very excited. I'm, I went from being pessimistic to being very optimistic. So thank you so much. I mean I'm, I'm super appreciative of what you're Sharing outside of what you're working on and outside of what you've been talking about, looking at the other problems that AI is solving, whether it's in health or wealth or a variety of things, what are you excited about for the future in terms of what AI could solve?
- [22:36]
Ricardo Amper
I think one of the biggest impact of AI is on voting and democracy. We're seeing now a very interesting time in the world and you're seeing a lot of vote, a lot of voices putting opinions about tariffs. And that's why you have to understand how important it is for people to participate in elections, be able to have trusted methods. And so the thing that I am the most excited is not only that voting is going to be digital, I think, in 10 years, but all around the world. No more physical, no more paper. But not only that, it's going to get to a granular level where if you very quickly want to understand, hey, what about this topic? Do you want to vote for this specific topic that is a game changer. You're going to be able to do it at a very fast speed. You're going to be able to be cheaper than ever. And so I think AI is going to have a massive impact into how we make decisions, whether it's at the school board, all the way to how you choose a precedent. And it's going to change the U.S. certainly. But think about other economies and political systems around the world, how much impact that can have. And we have this example where we were hired by the state of Nevada to re verify votes that were contested and we were afraid. My board was against all of this. He said, Trump is going to tweet against encode and it's going to become dominion too. Right. But they knew what's important. We did it anyways. And both secretaries of state, Republican, Democrat, were incredibly happy with the fact that there was a much better technology than paper that would actually instill trust and trust in the process of Nevada and Nevada determined two elections ago the composition of the House. And so that blows my mind that you know, a company, we're, we're not unicorn, but we're, we're pretty small on the big, on the big new state of things and that we could have an impact.
- [24:45]
Daniel
Well, I mean, the era of collaboration, like you said, whether, you know, it's a bipartisan thing, it's. Yeah, I mean, I get to, I, you know, I have the honor of being able to travel and like you said, I get to see how other countries are, are just getting into this digital state. And you know, 10 years, we're going to be exponentially digital everywhere, which is going to open up incredible opportunities like you had just mentioned, which I'm very excited about. So I'm very appreciative that you're here today because you gave me some very good insights. I've been wondering how people are going to solve this problem. I stay up a nice sometimes thinking about this just because, you know, this type of fraud happened to me unfortunately. And I, you know, I think of like, you know, my parents who are in their, you know, 70s, 80s, like our grandparents who are 90s, up to 100, like how bad is it going to be for them? And they don't even understand a lot of the technology. So this is going to be incredibly needed for, you know, all generations. But Ricardo, if people want to get in touch with you, I'm sure there's tons of companies that need to or people just want to find out more information about you personally. How can they do so?
- [25:55]
Ricardo Amper
They could send me an email amperecode.com and I'm happy to talk to them or add Encode Technologies in Twitter.
- [26:05]
Daniel
Well, Ricardo Incode, thank you so much for joining us today on Founder Story.
- [26:10]
Ricardo Amper
Thank you for inviting me, Dan. Breaking News T Mobile Network outperforms expectations in all sectors because T Mobile helps keep you connected from the heart of Portland to right where you are on America's largest 5G network switch. Now keep your phone and T Mobile will pay it off at the $800 per line via prepaid card. Visit your local T Mobile location or learn more@t mobile.com keepandswitch up to 4 lines via virtual prepaid card. Allow 15 days qualified unlock device, credit service port in 90 days device and eligible carrier and timely redemption required card is no cash access and expires in six months.
- [26:46]
Advertiser
You just realized your business needed to hire someone yesterday. How can you find amazing candidates fast? Easy. Just use Indeed. Stop struggling to get your job posts seen on other job sites with Indeed sponsored Jobs. Your post jumps to the top of the page for your relevant candidates so you can reach the people you want faster. According to Indeed data, sponsored jobs posted directly on indeed have 45% more applications than non sponsored jobs. Don't wait any longer. Speed up your hiring right now with Indeed and listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to get your jobs more visibility@ Indeed.com podkatz13 just go to Indeed.com podkatz13 right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast terms and conditions apply. Hiring indeed is all you need.