NYA FOUNDER SPOTLIGHT ‒ JOHNNY AYERS, SOCURE CEO & FOUNDER
Socure CEO & and Founder Johnny Ayers started the company after he had just turned 26 because he was driven by his deep belief in building the future of identity verification on the internet. Over ten years later, the company’s mission remains the same: to verify 100% of good identities in real-time and completely eliminate identity fraud on the internet. Johnny shares how New York Angels first invested in his crazy idea and introduced Socure to key customers. Johnny also gives tips to both founders and early-stage investors on why grit and perseverance are critical for success.
How did you first meet New York Angels?
Alessandro Piol was a seed investor in one of Socure’s original convertible notes – in the days before SAFEs. A decade ago, Alessandro invited us to present at the New York Angels investment breakfast. That opportunity allowed us to share our vision and get valuable feedback. New York City’s ecosystem was thriving at the time – especially in the enterprise space. We were fortunate to attract support from the best angel groups, including New York Angels, alongside other great partners like FFVC (the series was led by John Frankel), RTP, Founder Collective, Two Sigma and Empire Angels.
What were you looking for in investors when you were fundraising, and why did you choose to work with New York Angels?
In the early stages, investors are primarily betting on the team. As an early-stage founder, we were also betting on the relationships that we were developing with some of our early investors. I had a great relationship with Alessandro, and we appreciated the trust and belief New York Angels placed in us.
What was the process like for you when you were fundraising?
Tough! When we were first fundraising, we had a lot of “no’s” because we were in the trial and error phase and building machine learning models that may or may not work. Those early days were challenging, and it took years before we truly found product-market fit. We raised four convertible notes and ran out of money four separate times. Then FFVC actually wrote us a check in the Series A, so we could make payroll and close the round. The support and introductions from New York Angels played a significant role in helping us navigate uncertain times.
What have you enjoyed most about working with New York Angels?
New York Angels were extremely helpful in making customer introductions. For an early-stage enterprise company, those introductions can be transformative. New York Angels helped us tap into their networks in the New York ecosystem – early Fintechs, banks, and enterprises, which was pivotal in building our momentum in the early days. They helped make introductions to J.P. Morgan, Bank of America, and American Express. Those connections led to significant early wins with companies like Stash when they were getting launched with Kickstarter and Venmo.
What advice would you give other founders who are looking to fundraise?
I think that in the early days people invest in people, and investors are making a long-term bet on you - develop relationships early and often. In the Friends and Family rounds, there isn’t the same level of diligence as when you raise a price round when people are putting in larger checks. If they are sizeable investors, they also secure a board seat. These people that wrote checks for us 10 years ago are people I still work with, so you need to think about the long-term relationship, not just the short-term check. Sometimes founders make the mistake of just looking for money.
Investors also offer a tremendous number of resources beyond financial investment, seek out those with theses in and around your problem set. For example, most of the large early-stage venture funds have built beautiful 8-12 slide decks that are incredibly helpful to simplify your story, use them. Be clear on what is the problem you are solving? Who are your core target customers? What is the size of the market? What is unique about you and the team’s ability to execute? What is your right to win? Socure has been told many times we have a top 1% diligence room because we make it really easy for investors to seek and find the answers that we know they will ask, anticipate their needs and make saying yes easy.
Research your investors, just like your investors research you. Identify the 10-12 funds that you want to spend a block of time with, respect their time, and hopefully in return they’ll respect your time, and provide a much higher probability to close. We did a lot of work to determine which investors would have the highest probability of writing us a term sheet, before speaking to them. If there was a low probability or we couldn’t find the right partner in their organization, we weren’t going to dedicate time to them - time is your greatest asset, use it wisely.
What advice would you give other early-stage investors who are looking to invest in companies?
Look for grit and perseverance in their background. Entrepreneurs need a relentless drive and an ability to stay focused on solving problems for the long haul. In Bill Walsh’s The Score Takes Care of Itself, he talks about people being comfortable with repetition to become great at something, having the grit to perfect something. Entrepreneurs need to be really comfortable with doing something over and over and over again.
I don’t know exactly what investors should look for in a founder’s background that determines grit and perseverance because it can come in many different forms, e.g. music or theater, science or physics, mathematics, gaming, and so much more, but somewhere where they really had to work hard at a goal to achieve it, ideally over a long extended period of time, which is what will be required in company building. For me, I was very intense about sports, and executed at a very high level of excellence. Furthermore, the rest of the core team should also have a similar level of grit, intensity, intellect, and drive as the founder.
Finally, look for people beyond the typical MBA, particularly those with a PSD Degree. The PSD Degree was coined by Bear Stearns, and it referred to people who were poor, smart, and had a deep desire to become rich - not that this is a perfect representation but its directionally what you’re looking for - hunger, drive, intensity, something to prove. For founders, the deep desire doesn’t need to be about wealth, but they need to have the drive and deep desire to achieve their goals, and absorb setbacks, no’s, and potentially a lot of them, and then just continue on. I came from a very middle-class family: my dad worked for the government and my mom was a high school teacher. A person’s background is core to who they are and how they operate, and how they will adapt or react to setbacks and difficult situations. A few of my core guiding principles are: never stop learning, compete to win and have relentlessly high standards.
What has driven Socure’s success? What does the future look like for your company?
A relentless pursuit of perfection, and continuous improvement across everything we do. Our mission is to become the first to verify 100% of good identities and completely eliminate fraud, this is a very hard, if not impossible goal. While perfection is unattainable, striving for it has kept us focused. We’ve worked hard to build the best product in the world for verifying identities, and are known for our continuous, rapid innovation toward being and extending our lead as the best. I often refer to the Vince Lombardi quote, “Perfection is not attainable, but if we chase perfection, we can catch excellence.”
I think so many companies fail because they never become the best in the world at anything. They spread themselves so wide that they have no right to win. Socure’s right to win is: We help companies say “yes” to more good customers with the least amount of fraud, with the most amount of automation, with the least amount of operational burden. That focus has driven our growth and allowed us to work with some of the largest enterprises across financial services, fintech, marketplaces, government, gaming, telco, insurance and more. Looking ahead, we’re excited to continue scaling globally, solving critical problems for our customers, and expanding our positive societal impact.
If there are opportunities or introductions where you think we can help solve problems, we’re always available. Socure currently services clients in 22 verticals and 190 countries, and we’d love to explore how we can bring value to more organizations. Thank you again for all of the support from New York Angels!
Photos: Here
About Johnny Ayers
Johnny Ayers is founder and CEO of Socure. He is a frequent expert speaker on fraud, authentication, and KYC/AML, and has been quoted in publications such as the WSJ, Forbes, Bloomberg, Thomson Reuters, Cheddar, PYMNTS.com, and more. He won the Tech Leadership honor for software and service providers in the 2023 Banking Tech awards. In 2022 he was also awarded Ernst & Young’s Entrepreneur of the Year, Finovate Executive of the Year, and has been named by Goldman Sachs as one of the Top 100 Entrepreneurs of 2021-24. Outside of Socure, Johnny is an investor in and an advisor to companies including; Acorns, BillGo, Borderless, Chipper Cash, Coast, Curve, MoCaFi, Public, Rillet, Sydecar, Treasury Prime, Ulys, and more and is an LP in Commerce Ventures, Scale Ventures, Lytical Ventures, Goanna Capital, Cambrian Ventures, Work-Bench Ventures and Deciens.
Socure is proud to have been named to the Forbes Top 50 Fintechs, CNBC World’s Top Fintech Companies, Inc.'s Best Places to Work, Inc. 5000 Fastest Growing Private Companies, Leader Gartner® Magic Quadrant™ for Identity Verification, CB Insights 250 Top Fintechs, and Forbes Cloud 100 Top Private Cloud Companies in the world.
