How Caryn Seidman-Becker built CLEAR into a $4.5 billion IPO
Caryn Seidman Becker, Co-founder and CEO, CLEAR
Today’s modern consumer enjoys unprecedented convenience, with same-day deliveries and one-click shopping. Digital experiences are at our fingertips, streamed by the terabyte. The whole world arrives at our doorstep or is piped into our devices so seamlessly that, at times, it truly feels as though we’re living in a sci-fi future.
But eventually, you have to leave the comfort of your home and get on a plane or renew your driver’s license, and you remember just how clunky modern life can be. There are delays and hiccups that prevent you from doing what you want to do and going where you want to go. A lot of that friction results from the cumbersome requirements of pulling card-after-card from your wallet to prove that you are, without a doubt, you.
In today’s COVID-19 world, organizations of all shapes and sizes must now confirm not only your identity, but also information about your vaccine status, proof of a negative COVID-19 test, or other important public health information. However, performing this kind of identity verification at scale, without compromising your privacy, is no simple task.
CLEAR is one company that’s taken on this challenge. With a market cap of more than $6 billion, CLEAR was the travel industry’s biggest IPO last year. The company’s mission is to make travel and other experiences frictionless, safe, and secure through its biometric identification platform. Using the biometric indicators you already carry on your person at all times, CLEAR is able to help verify your identity without a bunch of cumbersome forms of identification or documentation.
CLEAR CEO, Co-Founder, and Chairman Caryn Seidman-Becker joined Scarlet Fu, Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake host, for an online conversation on Friday, January 28, 2022, as part of the Cornell Tech @ Bloomberg Speaker Series. She shared the story of how she and her co-founder resurrected CLEAR, transforming it into one of the biggest players in the identity space.
Watch the full discussion:
From auction to IPO
Verified Identity Pass, the company now known as CLEAR, was founded by Steven Brill in 2003 in an attempt to shorten the historically long lines at airports after the September 11th terrorist attacks.
The company attracted an enthusiastic user base over the next five years. But, in 2008, Verified Identity Pass declared bankruptcy and ceased operations the following year.
However, that wasn’t the end of CLEAR’s story.
Investor Seidman-Becker’s journey with CLEAR began the following year when she and co-founder Ken Cornick bought Verified Identity Pass at a bankruptcy sale and subsequently relaunched it. Seidman-Becker had a vision to roll out biometrics at a scale the U.S. had not yet seen.
In buying Verified Identity Pass, Seidman-Becker acquired some hardware and existing profiles of 190,000 prior members. But perhaps most importantly, they acquired a strong brand that customers genuinely appreciated. The challenge was to build a new company around that goodwill.
Seidman-Becker in conversation with Scarlet Fu of Bloomberg Television and Bloomberg QuickTake
Beyond travel
Think about all the times you have to pull your driver’s license — or now, your vaccination card — out of your wallet. It seems that anywhere groups of people gather, there will be a need to verify some form of ID.
As Caryn and Ken started to rebuild the CLEAR platform from the ground up – they communicated a pledge to all the grandfathered members that the company would do right by them. CLEAR now operates out of more than 40 airports, 26 sports and entertainment venues, and boasts over 55 million verifications across 5 million members.
CLEAR’s early investors included Delta Air Lines and United Airlines. These relationships helped CLEAR better integrate with the airlines’ various verification points, from check-in to boarding to airport lounges. They’ve also partnered with Uber to help travelers optimize their journey to the airport to catch their flight, and will soon partner with the TSA to bring pre-check services to flyers. In late 2021, CLEAR made its first acquisition – purchasing Argentinian virtual queuing company Whyline.
But CLEAR doesn’t want to only provide amazing travel experiences — they want to make your whole life seamless. The company launched its Health Pass in March of 2021. This platform gives event attendees and employees a way to seamlessly submit their vaccination status, proof of a negative COVID-19 test, or other health-related information. CLEAR’s Health Pass is just one more step in its mission to unlock your biometric data as your universal ID.
Protecting privacy in a frictionless world
There are a lot of ways that this scale of biometric data collection and transmission can go wrong, but “protecting our members’ privacy is job one at CLEAR,” says Seidman-Becker. “We are obsessed with our member experience. When a customer has a bad experience, they can email me directly. We put our emails out there. I’ll get back to them myself — or our member services team will — quickly. That could be Saturday at 2:00 PM when I’m at my son’s soccer game.”
CLEAR pledges not to rent or sell or share your data — you remain in control of your information and can delete it at any time. Seidman-Becker emphasizes the company’s commitment to privacy and the importance of communicating its privacy policies in clear human language.
“It takes a really long time to build a track record, and that can be very easily destroyed,” says Seidman-Becker. “And so, it’s a day-by-day action — words are cheap. It’s the actions that you take. It’s the partners that you partner with and the consistency, and then it’s driving that culture throughout the organization.”
The vision
Seidman-Becker envisions a world where a rideshare service picks you up because it knows you and the driver is already vaccinated or recently tested negative. Your favorite coffee is delivered just as you arrive at your desk. Later that day, you have a telehealth appointment with your doctor where sensitive medical information is discussed. After work, you enter a stadium with no queue to watch a sporting event, and your beer is served to you at your seat without needing to confirm that you’re of age, fumble to find a card to prove your age, or hand over cash. At every step of the way, CLEAR is used — sometimes without you even realizing it — to skip past the drudgery of life — waiting in lines, pulling out ID cards, typing in passwords, and signing forms.
“That really is frictionless and delightful in person,” she says. “You get your time back and spend it instead with your family, doing what you love doing.”
This article was originally published by Tech at Bloomberg.
