The Future Is Now: Locke Brown Of NuID On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech Scene

An Interview With Fotis Georgiadis

Not only do we believe the verification incentive is a good strategy, the rollout of the token itself is a way to get NuID into the hands of individuals globally.

As a part of our series on cutting-edge technological breakthroughs, I had the pleasure of interviewing Locke Brown, CEO and Founder of NuID.

Locke’s passion has always been pursuing greater efficiency in society’s most elemental interaction: exchange. It’s what drove him headfirst into mining Bitcoin in 2013, and to join the trading desk at Bill Gates’ private investment office, BMGI, in 2014.

While obtaining a B.A. in Mathematics and Economics and an M.A. in Finance from Claremont McKenna College, Locke developed software at Google and served countless roles at a multi-asset class-emerging market fund in Mongolia. He went on to co-found the blockchain working group internal to BMGI, which ultimately led him to recognize digital identity as the key area for foundational improvement necessary to usher in the next paradigm of global exchange.

Locke’s founding and leadership role at NuID has earned him board positions at a number of early and mid-stage startups in biotechnology, healthcare, and higher education. His earnest drive for efficient exchange extends to knowledge transfer and experience sharing across organizational boundaries, which he finds the key to effective exchange of the most valuable resource of all: time.

Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My pleasure. There’s definitely not a single defining story that led me here — it was the culmination of many things including my interests and focus in math, finance, technology, and probably spending too much time in the crypto world in its early days. A lot of armchair philosophizing as well. But the most relevant story I guess, and I’ll keep this short, was serendipitously meeting Nolan Smith in Seattle when hiking one day. He was college friends with a high school friend of mine who came out to visit and ended up bringing us together. The rest is history. I was working at Bill Gates’ family office. He was at Microsoft. We ended up going down countless rabbit holes multiple days a week to the point we built out my basement and acquired four or five whiteboards — that’s where the magic happened, no question. That’s where the vision was born: in the cave, as we called it. Not sure if the best stories are PG though.

Can you share the most interesting story that’s happened to you since you began your career?

Definitely not… I’m joking. But really there are so many crazy things that have happened in the 5.5 years since NuID began and even more going back further. I can share some of the stories from my time in Mongolia at another point because those are probably the most interesting. Honestly though, this is a tough one because something interesting happens in my life almost every day (ask anyone I work with!).

Can you tell us about the cutting-edge technological breakthroughs that you are working on? How do you think that will help people?

So our core innovation/technology, “the NuID protocol”, provides what we call “zero knowledge authentication”. But I should back up for a second and give a tiny bit of context: our goal is to return data ownership to the individual by providing the tools for ordinary people to use cryptography in such a way that is easy and allows them to control their information online. We’re effectively a digital identity company, paving a way for people to have a self-owned — or sovereign — single digital representation of themselves that’s portable from service to service and allows them to control what and with whom anything is shared. Now this comes in many steps but our core tech (or secret sauce) is our approach from the authentication vector. If I could authenticate myself as someone else online, then that digital representation is useless because it can be compromised. So in solving digital identity, we first have to fix the way individuals are authenticated, which is what our core tech accomplishes.

The solution generates user-owned web credentials by converting authentication credentials into public ZKP parameters and persisting them using a blockchain. The solution is so-called “zero-knowledge” because no one, not even NuID, has the ability to see people’s login credentials: they never leave the user’s device. We’ll get into the broader implications of the solution, but people stand to benefit as it creates a portable and user-owned identity platform. We’ll talk a lot more about this in a few minutes. We’ve got a couple of whitepapers on our site that go into the detail, the code in our repo, and if you’re really curious you can look up our patents to see how it all works.

How do you think this might change the world?

I know it’s bold to say but the core of what we are trying to do will upend so many aspects of life: not just for industries but it will fundamentally change the way everyone interacts with the internet and digital services. At the most basic level: say goodbye to “forgot my password” sloggery and the chance of getting that cringeworthy email “SO AND SO HAS HAD A DATA BREACH AND YOUR DATA IS COMPROMISED”. Imagine having a handful or less of secure passwords that you know aren’t sitting out there somewhere waiting to be compromised, and being able to use them for everything.

I look at what we’ve built as a foundational protocol fit for giants to stand on. It’s a utility, much like your water or power providers in that it will work, you can rely on it, and you won’t have to think about or worry if it is going to be there for you in the morning. Even the way it’s designed is such that if for whatever reason NuID as a company disappears, the technology and credentials by it will persist.

Now it also has the wonderful benefit of unlocking so many other efficiencies: it’s really the missing piece (trusted user owned and portable identity) for so many other things: think digitized real estate titles (sorry, title search companies!), digital voting, and it’s the solution to the regulatory issue of the moment in the crypto world: NuID provides a solution for privacy-preserving accountability and audibility. Think KYC for decentralized exchanges and the like. This is a long answer but I’ll stop there for now.

Keeping “Black Mirror” in mind, can you see any potential drawbacks of this technology that people should think more deeply about?

For sure. And really that’s why I’ve dedicated the last almost six years and as much of my future as it takes to it: it’s to ensure this is done the right way. It’s past the point of no return that we are moving to have all the operational processes of life supported in some manner by digitization. That’s just happening. And ultimately someone, or government, or many of them, are going to be enacting solutions — quick fixes or not. But ultimately what we don’t want is it done wrong. If it is done quickly in a way that leaves open the possibility not just for compromisation or unintended consequences, what we don’t want is inequality baked in. The beauty of the decentralized method is the ability to be transparent, community driven, and fair. And that is at our core ethos. We don’t even have to be trusted. Don’t want to use our API for authentication? Fine, you can re-roll it yourself. Fuckery is amok and I want to put an end to that growing any further, particularly when it comes to my individual rights to information, sovereignty and so forth. What it’s really all about though is ACCOUNTABILITY FOR ACTIONS. Accountability for regulators, for people, for businesses, for overseers, and the like. But not sacrificing privacy to do so.

But aside from that, my biggest worry on this front is GROUPTHINK. Now I don’t have time to go into the depths of this here today, but ultimately the biggest risk I see is that some false “truth” is upheld by certain influencers, let’s say, and other people just go along and perpetuate it. This could cause the widespread upholding of something not really wanted. Anyway, I’d elaborate but that’s happening now already and I think — I know — this is a better solution than we’ve got. So we’ll take it a step at a time.

Was there a “tipping point” that led you to this breakthrough? Can you tell us that story?

I think there have been many. The first tipping point to going all in was meeting Nolan Smith. The second was having our idea deemed feasible by one of the world’s greatest cryptographers. Really there have been so many tipping points. One of them was probably when the IRS told me my birthday was a day different than it is and wouldn’t accept my tax return. And they are still happening: every single time I get locked out of something and can’t get back in. Or when I need TWO forms of ID to do something at the bank (But I am me: why do I need to have all of this?!). Or when the bank deposits my cash into a different William Brown’s account despite providing two forms of ID. I guess I’ll say it’s been a super-long drawn-out tipping point and I’m trying not to be fully inverted at this point.

What do you need to lead this technology to widespread adoption?

Education, buy-in, understanding… it’s all coming. And people are feeling the pains of the issue more and more. While we have been around since early 2017, we haven’t been ready to bring it to the world until just recently. That’s because unlike a commonly held mantra of “fail fast”, with authentication you can’t fail. It isn’t an option. And so we were meticulous. We were thoughtful. And we want to do things right. Like I’ve said: we want to offer a foundation for giants to stand on. And so now we’re here. And anyone that has looked for and tried to follow me on social media and things like that: you probably didn’t find much. So it’s interviews like these, it’s the launch of our five-years-in-the-making crypto token Kii coming in late September, and the identity-optimized ledger the KiiChain thereafter, that’ll help propel this into greater adoption. Couple that with the scaling out of our developer portal, our planned channel partnership initiative, and next year enterprise authentication sales: we will be bridging not only the web2 to web3 gap, but the traditional enterprise to crypto individualist to regulatory gap as well.

What have you been doing to publicize this idea? Have you been using any innovative marketing strategies?

Our core authentication protocol is applicable to so many different services and fields. We face a chicken and egg dilemma: the more services use it for authenticating users, the more valuable it becomes to users — and more users relying on it will make it more valuable for services. The goal right now is to get as many people as possible to register a NuID credential and to have an attestation associated with it representing that they have verified their identity. (To make it clear here: I could authenticate using my NuID credential with service ABC and they could go through the process of verifying my identity. But instead of then having to go through that process everywhere else a service requires my ID to be verified, service ABC could issue an attestation claiming Locke is Locke based on these factors on this date and so forth. Then when I go to service XYZ, instead of me having to provide them with all my sensitive information to go through the process again (and they face cost and liability to do this), they could request that I authenticate the attestation from service ABC, and if XYZ trusts the process of ABC, accept that — this is the essence of the portable identity).

So anyhow, we need folks to want to have a verified NuID credential. One unique way we are approaching this currently is by offering an incentive for folks to verify their identity in the form of 10 free Kii. As I briefly mentioned, we are in the midst of launching our long-awaited token Kii and built into the token itself is an allocation whereby the first 10 million people to verify their identity and receive an attestation for it will have 10 Kii issued directly to their NuID credential (which I hadn’t mentioned but has the happy benefit of serving as a crypto wallet since it is built on PKI and your auth secret is the private key to the public identifier being the public key. You can learn more about all this at kiichain.org where you’ll find a Kii-specific paper and other resources).

Not only do we believe the verification incentive is a good strategy, the rollout of the token itself is a way to get NuID into the hands of individuals globally.

On the authentication service side, we’ll be rolling out a channel partner program where developers and contractors will be able to earn up to 20% of the cost of the service for any of their clients they deploy NuID with. But more on that to come early next year.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Nolan Smith. After I had dragged him from Seattle to SF to NYC to Alabama at the start of this year, he has taken some time for himself but he deserves as much credit as I and has been my biggest inspiration. I want to also just mention Sam Meadows who was one of our biggest champions and a large motivator for me who recently passed.

How have you used your success to bring goodness to the world?

Haha, well I would say I’m in the process of having that “success” and true success will be bringing this all, which I think is good, to the world.

What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started” and why?

There’s really nothing anyone could have told me to prepare me for this journey. Not that I would have necessarily done anything differently as I tend to find myself learning lessons for myself anyway (that’s half a joke). But in all reality, the few things I do wish someone had told me before I started are not things I’m going to share here — and I don’t want to not be candid.

You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. 🙂

It’s all Nu baby! I’m not trying to influence people. I’m just trying to help alleviate the biggest inefficiency and informational asymmetry I feel exists in the digital space right now. People will want what we are building because it is going to help them remove at least some of the frustrations they face over and over again. The internet should be a tool for us as humans, to organize processes and heighten our experience in the real world and through our relationships.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

I have two: one is by Alan Watts: “Planning for the future is only useful for those who live in the moment” and the other is “Be stubborn on vision and flexible on the journey” — it’s unclear who to attribute this to. The first one helped me find the balance between living in the now and constantly trying to plan for my future self. The second one is core to how I approach NuID and has a place in my mind whenever I’m making a tough decision that others may not understand. It’s easy to get caught in the immediacy, especially in this day and age. But it’s important to keep the true goal in mind and understand the sunk cost fallacy: just because we’ve been doing something doesn’t mean it’s the optimal thing to continue doing if a better path forward has presented itself.

Some very well-known VCs read this column. If you had 60 seconds to make a pitch to a VC, what would you say? He or she might just see this if we tag them 🙂

I’d say to reach out and ask me about the “development fund roundtable” I’m launching.

How can our readers follow you on social media?

I personally have spent probably less than a day engaged on social media in the last 10 years or so, but at NuID we’re active on Twitter and Discord: https://twitter.com/_NuID and https://discord.gg/akhBbEc8. Though I’ll probably refresh and begin posting some content on my website toward the end of this year at lockebrown.com

Thank you so much for joining us. This was very inspirational.


The Future Is Now: Locke Brown Of NuID On How Their Technological Innovation Will Shake Up The Tech… was originally published in Authority Magazine on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

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