Footprint

While I don't want to gamify onboarding...I think it is amazing how quick and dynamic our new onboarding engine has become. In the video below, in under a minute you can create a full KYC with doc + synthetic step-up playbook. Pretty powerful!

I'm biased, but I think our sales team at Footprint is world-class. The seven person group includes: - 2 former founders - 2 people who were first biz hires at multiple startups by the time they graduated college - 1 former Olympic alternate - 1 Bachelor of Science in Aeronautics and Astronautics from Stanford University - 1 applied physics major from Colombia Our business is also growing quicker than ever. We doubled in H1 and are going to do it again in H2. To do so, we're hiring our second AE. 5 days a week in-person at our SoHo office. You'll step into a large pipeline, culture of drive, empathy, and curiosity, and a lot of fun. If you come inbound, I'm adding $1,000 to our sales offsite in October. If you refer someone, I'll send you on a vacation. Who are the best sales people in NYC? (Pictured, members of the sales team and eng team. Note to self to get pic of just sales team. Should not be difficult given we work together every day and now some of you may not believe me on that but oh well here we are!)

Going to be in Boston Tuesday visiting our customers! Who else should I meet? (I'm also aware there likely will be no snow in August up there but my prompt engineering did not account for this and out of respect to the environment I am choosing to not have gpt create an updated image).

I couldn't be more excited to officially launch the Footprint Onboarding Engine (OBE) to the world. We're on a mission to build the best onboarding platform, and this is our biggest engineering lift to date to do exactly that. Footprint now has a graphical view to handle incredibly complex onboarding scenarios in an intuitive UX. Some examples of how our customers are using OBE today. ➕ Modeling a multi-step-up flow (if flag for synthetic, step-up to doc scan) 🟰 Now in Footprint click a template for this scenario (30 seconds), or create a custom flow where you toggle on synthetic, auto-populate rules, and click add doc step-up (3-5 minutes). 🏦 Partner bank templates We’ve now mapped the CIPs of dozens of partner banks into Footprint. What’s unique is we can show the bank a more compliance-focused view (ie Lexis Nexis risk codes) whereas our customers can use Footprint in more plain text (ie fail if Lexis can not locate SSN). 🏧 Link KYC + BAL playbooks The vast majority of companies had to build internal logic to get their KYC + BAL flows to talk to each other. 💳 Call transaction monitoring platforms or other third party nodes from Footprint. This means Footprint can now talk to your other tools in the identity/fraud stack with relevant information still surfacing back in Footprint. If you'd like to learn more, please visit our website below and we'd love to talk!

I joined Footprint over two years ago. When I joined, we were about 9 people. 7 genius engineers, then Eli and I trying to carry our weight. The past two years have been a whirlwind, luckily with more ups than downs. However, I have never been more bullish on Footprint than I have been over the past two quarters. We strung together our two best quarters ever on the sales side and today we are thrilled to be launching our updated onboarding decision engine. Could not be more honored to be a part of this team and am excited to keep the momentum going!

Day 1,273 and we are proud to be launching our most significant product update yet! Introducing our Onboarding Decision Engine. Most onboarding stacks are a mess—one tool for fraud, another for KYC, a third for data security. Each with its own integration, contract, and siloed data. Footprint’s new onboarding decision engine brings everything into one place, so you can move faster without calling engineering. Reach out to learn more at the link below!

A major congratulations to the entire Yieldstreet team on their recent $77mm capital raise. It has been a pleasure working with you and we are excited to support you through this next phase of growth.

Keith Rabois introduces the concepts of Barrels and Ammunition in company building. Barrels are people who can drive projects or initiatives. Ammunition are how barrels drive the projects. Keith says at PayPal they maybe had 4-8 barrels; barrels are very rare! It's made me reflect on how many projects we are running, who is leading them, and the resources they have. I think the advice largely is to say even if you have a bunch of ICs without direction you're limited in how much you can do. I also think in an age of leaner companies, the reverse may be true. By that I mean we have barrels without enough ammo, which can also be a problem. Here, the barrels are spending too much time executing the task in an addition to leading it. Some fun friday food for fodder :)

Meet Dave Argoff, head of risk engineering at Footprint, and unofficial head of product. I had been trying to get in touch with Dave since before I even started the company. His profile seemed that perfect. Dave was a trained musician turned math major turned consultant turned risk analyst at Stripe who after some self-teaching...would help lead some of the largest initiatives there such as Link, Identity, and Fraud Intelligence. He was then an early employee at Sardine before joining Footprint. Put simply, Footprint would not be able to serve any of our customers were it not for Dave. We'd maybe be a pure play vaulting company? He build V1 of our orchestration a month after joining in October 2022, right in time for our first customers to go live. Over nearly three years, he's been critical to each vendor we've added across KYC, KYB, and fraud. Dave is an advocate for doing things the right way. There is always a fun dynamic at companies between sales and eng. In addition to being perhaps the best sales person here--always open to hopping on calls-- Dave is always voicing internally on behalf of customers to make sure we're adding the right tools to genuinely solve their issues. We have no PMs at Footprint. And we probably don't need one due to Dave. He led the management for our biggest build this year on our new onboarding engine. He thinks for product in terms of both today and our vision of tomorrow. He also has the best photo-shop skills on the team for producing laughs. Dave has gotten me several times on calls now by sending me fake Netflix documentaries about matters we were just discussing. Those hidden laughs are one of the best parts of the job. And if you think it is difficult to build cutting edge systems to catch fraud, I'll have you know Dave has completed several 100 mile ultra-marathons by now. If most people think something is impossible, it's likely on Dave's to-do list for next week. Pictured below was when Alex, Dave, and I went into an interactive exhibit at the Yayoi Kusama exhibit at the Boston Institute of Contemporary Art. The mirrors reflected something beautiful. I think what Dave has done at Footprint is even more awe-inspiring :)

🚨 What is SMS Pumping Fraud—and How Can You Prevent It? 📱💸 We saw a company get hit with SMS pumping over the weekend in Tanzania. If you’re seeing a spike in OTP sends or SMS charges, you might be the latest target of SMS pumping fraud. What is it? SMS pumping (also known as artificial inflation of traffic, or AIT) is a scheme where bad actors abuse online forms to trigger mass SMS OTP sends—often to numbers they control in expensive international regions. Why? Because they share revenue with shady telecom operators that charge you inflated fees per SMS. What does it look like? • 10x increase in OTP sends from the same IP or region • Surge in failed verifications from foreign numbers • Mysterious SMS line-item costs ballooning overnight How can you protect yourself? ✅ Rate-limit OTP requests ✅ Implement bot protection (e.g. CAPTCHA, fingerprinting) ✅ Use phone intelligence to flag suspicious numbers before sending ✅ Add user behavior checks to throttle high-risk flows ✅ Consider alternate auth flows (email magic links, passkeys) At Footprint, we help teams spot and stop abuse early—while keeping friction low for real users. If you’re seeing strange traffic or want help hardening your auth flows, let’s chat.