I wrote my first check into ID.me in 2010. Blake Hall had a thesis that digital identity was broken, that Americans fundamentally couldn’t prove who they were online despite everything that technology made possible. He was a combat veteran with two Bronze Stars and the kind of clarity about hard problems that you only develop by actually solving them under pressure. I joined the board in 2010 and have been there every round since.
16 years. One founder. One problem. Every financing.
That is not a normal investor behavior pattern, and I want to be precise about why it happened, because “conviction investing” has become a phrase people use to sound thoughtful without saying anything. Real conviction is not a posture. It is a set of decisions you make when things are difficult, competitive, and uncertain, and where the easier path is to sit out the next round.
Kelly Perdew and Blake Hall at ID.me HQ in Tyson’s Corner, Virginia
Conviction Is Tested When the Story Gets Complicated
ID.me did not grow in a straight line. The company pivoted its go-to-market more than once…the competitive landscape shifted and then came the resistance: incumbents painting a new way of proving identity as unsafe.
ID.me lived through every version of it, and for stretches the press narrative was hostile enough that stepping back would have been easy. Bbut I did not, because the thesis had not changed. Blake was solving a real problem with increasing urgency. The more government services moved online, the more consequential the identity layer became. Every wave of digital fraud, every healthcare breach, every benefits-fraud scandal made the market larger and the need more acute. The opposition I saw during difficult periods was almost entirely from those who did not understand the infrastructure or mischaracterized how the product worked — frequently much larger competitors who were losing market share. When you have conviction built on deep diligence and a long relationship with a founder, you can distinguish noise from signal. That is a skill, and it is the whole game.
What 16 Years on the Same Board Actually Teaches You
Most early-stage investors operate on a four-to-seven-year fund cycle. They price a company, wait for an exit, return capital, and raise the next fund. That structure creates pressure to move on. I understand it. But I also think it systematically underweights what happens to great companies between year seven and year fifteen.
ID.me now has approximately 180+ million users, and nearly 100 million of those have identities verified to the federal standards. The company serves 20 federal agencies and 50 state agencies and completed a $340 million Series E at a valuation above $2 billion in September 2025. While ID.me bears almost no resemblance in scale to the one I first funded, Blake’s sophistication has continued to evolve. Watching that development from the inside, through every board meeting and difficult quarter and strategic inflection, gave me a kind of knowledge that is impossible to acquire any other way. I’m familiar with how Blake makes decisions under pressure. I know the organizational muscle the company has built. I know which competitive threats are real, and which are not. That knowledge compounds, and it is the reason I have been able to maintain high conviction even when outside observers were uncertain.
Long-duration board relationships are where pattern recognition becomes something richer. You stop guessing what a founder might do in a new situation and start knowing.
The Founder Variable Is the Only Variable That Compounds This Way
Every framework I use to evaluate early-stage investments points back to the same place: the person leading the company. Market size matters. Technology differentiation matters. But both of those things are dynamic. Markets shift. Technology advantages erode. What does not erode is the judgment, resilience, and relentlessness of an exceptional founder operating in a domain they understand completely.
Blake Hall is that kind of founder. His background as a combat arms officer gave him a specific relationship with accountability and mission that translates directly into how he runs a company. He does not manage around hard problems. He does not optimize for what makes the press cycle clean. He builds. That quality was visible in 2010 and it is visible today, and it is the single variable I have consistently weighted most heavily across all 135 companies Craig Cummings and I have backed at Moonshots Capital.
The market changes. The technology changes. The regulatory environment changes. The founder, if you have picked correctly, only gets better.
Kelly Perdew, Blake Hall, and Craig Cummings at Moonshots AGM in Austin, TX
Leadership Is the Long-Duration Asset
People ask me what I would tell a first-time investor trying to understand conviction. I tell them this: conviction is not about being certain. It is about knowing the difference between a thesis that has been invalidated and a thesis that is being tested. Most investors abandon positions during the second category because the discomfort feels the same.
ID.me was tested. It was tested by competition, by criticism, by regulatory scrutiny, and by every company on the planet suddenly deciding they needed an identity solution in the years after COVID accelerated digital services adoption. It is being tested again in this age of agentic identity. Through all of it, Blake Hall was still solving the same fundamental problem he identified in 2010, with greater resources and a larger team and more institutional credibility. My job was not to have certainty. My job was to stay close enough to know that the thesis remained intact.
16 years. 33 exits and 20 unicorns across the portfolio. The ID.me story is the clearest example I have of what happens when you find an extraordinary leader and simply refuse to leave.
Why This Matters Right Now
16 years in, the thesis I bet on in 2010 is reaching its most consequential moment. As the most capable AI models get treated as controlled technology, access is starting to hinge on a single question: is this a real, unique person? That turns identity from a convenience layer into the control plane for the AI frontier.
The encouraging part is that this is solvable, not theoretical. The standards already exist. The documents already exist. What’s been missing is an identity provider operating them at national scale, inclusively, without locking out the young, rural, low-income, and recently naturalized Americans who are hardest to verify through data matching alone. That last part is non-trivial, because verification cannot become exclusionary.
This is exactly the problem ID.me was built to solve, and exactly why Blake has spent 16 years building the infrastructure to solve it the right way.
If you’re working on agentic access or U.S.-person verification with or for frontier models and want to scope a pilot, DM me and I’ll connect you directly with Blake and the ID.me team.
Kelly Perdew is the Managing General Partner of Moonshots Capital, an early-stage venture firm he co-founded with Craig Cummings. He has been investing in startups since 2004 and has backed 133 companies with 33 exits and 20 unicorns including LinkedIn, Pandora, ID.me, Scopely, Apptronik and X.AI (SPCX). Moonshots Capital invests in extraordinary leaders building transformative technology.
