Sara Sebti, ShareID
[FH]: What moved you to found ShareID?
[SS]: ShareID was born from a frustration I had in 2020. I changed my phone number and lost access to all my accounts, especially my bank account and I couldn’t access it for 20 days, the time it took to validate me and make sure I was the owner of the account. I was very frustrated with the process and realized that even though we are in the 21st century, we are still using ancient ways to validate and confirm a person’s identity.
[FH]: What were the main adversities you encountered when establishing ShareID and how did you overcome them?
[SS]: My cofounder Sawsen Rezig holds a Ph.D. in Computer vision. So I had the perfect partner to launch an AI-based solution. The first adversity we faced was finding a dataset of fake and authentic ID documents to train our AI for document authenticity detection. It took us almost a year to sign our partnership with the military police and access their database.
We also struggled with regulations. Most of our use cases are subject to regulatory requirements.
[FH]: How do you find the balance between privacy protection and user experience?
[FC]: The reasoning in the market today is that for a company to protect their customers’ data, they have to compromise their user experience. But that is not true. Businesses can still create a great user experience without all the friction by using a solution that streamlines the process, is secure and unhackable, and provides the customers with peace of mind that their data is protected and will not be compromised.
[FH]: How do you see the company changing in the next five years?
[SS]: Today final users use solutions like “Google Connect” or “Facebook Connect” to automatically fill out forms online and share some of their personal information. At ShareID, we aim To become the “google connect” with an official Identity. Five years from now, ShareID will be used by individuals and businesses to validate the user’s identity or authenticate their shared personal data.
[FH]: What advice would you give to someone trying to establish a startup?
[SS]: To be resilient! A successful startup has a conversion ratio of 30%. It means that 7 out of 10 people you talk to will not be interested in your solution. Having this in mind, resilience is an important quality.