Founders at Work: Stories of Startups' Early Days

by Jessica Livingston

The really complicated part is figuring out the risk. The financial industry people understood the risk, but they weren't willing to do the sort of stuff we did, where they would basically say, "Bad guys over here. Let's get all the bad guys out." There are tools to just say, "Give me your social security number, give me your address and your mother's maiden name, and we send you a physical piece of paper and you sign it and send it back to us." By the time that's all accomplished, you are a very safe user. But by then you are also not a user, because for every step you have to take, the dropoff rate is probably 30 percent. If you take ten steps, and each time you lose one-third of the users, you'll have no users by the time you're done with the fourth step.