Socure CEO and Founder Johnny Ayers says: Fuel Your Competitive Spirit—Have You Tried Underwater Hockey?

Welcome to Corporate Competitor, presented by Forbes Books, the podcast, where the world's greatest executives share how the lessons they learned playing sports shaped their leadership. After more than 200 episodes with CEOs and senior leaders like Chick-fil-A, Chairman Dan Kathy, Delta Airlines CEO Ed Bastion, Bank of America's CEO Ryan Moynihan, and former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, one thing is clear, whether they were inducted into their sports hall of fame or hung up their cleats after high school, sports has been a powerful, shared foundation or success. I'm your host, Don Yeager, and each week in partnership with Chief Executive Magazine, we bring you genuine, authentic, fireside chat-like conversations with influential leaders, so you can apply their insights to elevate your leadership. With me, for today's episode is Johnny Ayers, founder and CEO of SoCure, the world's most valuable identity verification company. SoCureSure's 3,000 customers globally representing 370 million unique identities. Since founding the company in 2012, Johnny has drawn on lessons from his days as a two-sport athlete at Boston College to guide his leadership. And under his direction, SoCure earned a spot on Inks Best Places to Worklist. He was named EY, Entrepreneur of the Year in 2022, and was recognized by Goldman Sachs as one of their most exceptional entrepreneurs. So I'm very excited to learn from him today. Remember to visit corporatecompetitorpodcast.com/notes for my favorite quotes and reflection questions to help you apply to days insights. Is Johnny going to get with a program or not? I thought I was hot stuff and our head coach really put the junior and senior leaders on me. They just started pushing me to be self-motivated. Sometimes that appealing process can be totally different for each of your individual players. Johnny has always wanted to pitch. Johnny, you can pitch this year if you come to all these winner workouts. Johnny, thanks for joining us. Thanks so much, John. You know, you grew up in your DC in the Virginia area. You played varsity sports, football, basketball, baseball, soccer, tennis. You had 12 letters in high school. Yes, right. I pushed you tail 14-year-old, playing with a bunch of 18-year-olds. Quite the challenge and quite the opportunity from near the days. And then you went on to Boston College where you balance both football and baseball and there's so many parents out there today. Hearing from coaches, no, limit your son or daughter, give us their full attention for a year in this sport because that's what's going to make them best in class. They'll get a chance to advance, but only if they focus, focus, focus. You were all over the place. Talk to me about what being so involved in all these sports did for you. From the life perspective, it provides balance, discipline, it provides time management to be very structured, very organized and really, really focused from a very young age. From a sports perspective, the dynamic nature of multiple sports allows body control, catching a football pass is very similar to going up on a layup in basketball and getting hit in the paint. Moving between really high velocity fastballs allows a football game or basketball game to actually slow down for you. Moving in and out of baseball and into football and basketball actually provided like a break for me or a preef, you know, up until the age of 23, I had never had a season off seven days a week. You have something that you're working towards. You have something that you're planning around. Some ways I didn't know any better because it started at the age of three. Flip side of that. If you had thrown yourself into one of these sports, yes, I'm going to go to every camp and I'm going to spend all my time. Do you regret that you could have maybe taking a sporting venture into a next level? We've been incredibly lucky. Unfortunately, with the success of SoCure, the economic outcome that parents hope with financial stability of their kids. On that side, certainly no regrets. It's been an amazing ride here last 12 years, building and developing and creating a lot of success for a lot of people at SoCure. Going back to high school, I sat down with probably two-thirds of major league baseball scouts and heads of recruiting as we're going into the draft. All district play of the year, all region player of the year, first team all met, Justin Upton, beat me out for state player of the year. Not bad. Yeah, I broke every record at our high school, where we'd been top 25 in the country, not enough of the scouts, the other scouts, not the regional scouts had seen me in the perfect game or in any of these summer programs. You were all playing other sports. I had football. I played football in summer basketball. I wasn't traveling around my baseball team. The challenge was that there just actually wasn't enough time for enough scouts to say, "Hey, we're going to take you in the second round or third round." Most of the scouts said, "We think you're like a third or fourth round guy, but to commit those types of dollars, we just haven't had enough scouts see you." Yeah, I mean, that took a very tangible piece of feedback that would speak to a parent and say, "Hey, your kids should play one sport." Just given the amount of time you need to be able to get in front of scouts to be able to play in a lot of these weakened games and showcases. There's definitely logic there. There's definitely tangible feedback that I received there. Is there any regret? Absolutely not. I had the opportunity to play quarterback. I played safety. I kicked. I punted. I returned punts. Kickoff return was my only playoff. You were Travis Hunter before Travis Hunter. I would dream of having Travis Hunter's athleticism speed hands. But yeah, I mean, maybe an aspiring Travis Hunter. For sure. But it was like, imagine playing football where you only get one playoff a game. What fun to them go be the starting point guard, scored over a thousand points by let our team and every category but rebounds. And then to be the switch hitting shortstop, lead off hitter, break every record at your high school. Who gets an opportunity to do that? Going back to some of the program elements was actually kind of more where my head goes versus like an individual athletic feat. It was more the development of the team and our leadership group. Our sophomore year, we went 29 and 0. We were the only undefeated team in the country. We just had an unbelievable collection of athletes. No one in that senior group went to play major D1 sports. This is a big public high school, thousands of kids in public high school. And no like real elite standout individual players. Just an unbelievable group in the end of athletes. It played well together. Played incredibly well together. It was just really well-rounded, fast, could jump, could run, defense, could scrap out hits. The ability for the combination of some really good dynamic athletes coming together around a program built on what it meant to be a warhawk, a culture of winning, a culture of doing things the right way. Having had perspective across different sports, across different coaches, really stuck with me. How did that help you build the team you've built at Soaker? What are you doing differently? Maybe then you thought you might have done as you start looking at the team you're building there? The importance of fit. I know in your great team's book, one of the examples you gave in the opener was looking around Coach Kay Duke and the importance of fit and getting a Duke guy. It's not about Coach Kay. It's not about Johnny as the CEO. While we set the initial direction, it then becomes the team to kind of follow it through. They have to own it. They have to own it. And that program that we built at James Madison 20 years ago was led by the seniors. The seniors set the culture, the seniors set the direction. They were more of the leaders than the coaches were in many regards. Trying to bring this type of ethos in and really testing for fit, really testing for cultural integration has been a huge thing that I've taken away over many, many years. Testing for fit. That's really powerful because that's a difficult thing to do. You have to know what you stand for before you can test for it. How do you test for fit? At SoCure. I actually wrote down a number of core principles that I have. Things that every single person at SoCure should possess. Intellectual curiosity and never ending thirst for new knowledge. We created a principle around never stop learning. Don, teach me something new you've learned recently. I love that. Don, what books are you reading? Don, what podcasts can you recommend for me? I've recently been reading Hit Refest from Sauti Nadella thinking about the Renaissance moment moving from kind of Steve Balmer into the Sauti Nadella moment. I've read great teams now by the way three times. Thank you. So this desire to learn, you can kind of teach through some of those interview questions. Compete to win. I have no desire, Don, to be number two or number three and obviously nothing worse than that either. Walk me through a time in your life where you like ran through a brick wall, trying to do whatever is required. The perseverance, the grit, the desire to win. Walk me through a story where you became the best and your team in your region and the country in the world at something. Anything. It could be anything. Making grilled cheeses, a 5K, something that just shows that intensity to be the best. So we have eight principles to have a number of questions and prompts that try to suss out. Is this person going to fit in at their core? Right. Tell me about a book you recently read that made a difference for you. I love the way that you did that because you're saying, tell me about they can't just, well, I love to read. Too often the questions are far too generic. They don't get a chance to truly test the real answer being offered by the potential. Absolutely. And then I think digging a couple of layers deeper. I see the Walter Peyton, Jersey. There's this unbelievable Walter Peyton's story. He's not the biggest. He's not the strongest. He's not the fastest, but he's the best growing up. Man, the biggest, the fastest, the strongest. But if he's none of those things, how is he the best? His answer was because I want it more than anyone else. Every day, every morning, every run, every sprint, every workout, I want it more than anyone else does. How do you see that in your leadership today? How do others see in you that you want it more than anyone else without also overwhelming them? Tough balance, Don. Look, if you're the US Olympic team representing America's best 12 NBA players in the world, it's 12 of you. You have different motivations. I mean, we're close to 500 person organization trying to accordion or flex that intensity and drive. It's different of where you're engaging in the organization. With the leadership team, leadership team has to all be on the same pace. They have to have this drive, this intensity can't just be the top of the house. It has to radiate and permeate throughout your leadership team. If you went and interviewed my team, they would say I'm intense, very competitive, relentlessly focused on driving high standards and the outcomes that we desire, which are totally outsized. I speak a lot about with our leadership team. Adon, are we in agreement that we want to be a top 10% performing company in the world? Are we in agreement? Because we're not in agreement there. Okay, let's have a conversation about it. Maybe we want to be a top core top company. But if we're in agreement, which we are, that we want to be a top 10% performing company. Are those behaviors in a line? Are we willing to do the things that are going to be required to be a top 10% company? This is something that I think Nick Saban talked about in one of his interviews. Most people are born to be average. Obviously, at below average, you have not good. But then you have excellent. And then you have elite. And he's like, a lot of people can be excellent with God-given talent, but very few, very, very few have the talent and the willingness to truly do the things to make the sacrifices that are required to be elite. Hopefully, I built a leadership team that were all in agreement on this and are working to drive this level of focus, this level of competitiveness, this level of desire to win throughout the organization. So, in my prep, to be with you, I was highly focused on you playing two sports at Boston College, 12 letters in high school. But one of the things that stands out to me is that that didn't end in college. You can continue to find new and creative ways to exercise your physical body and stimulate your mind, including underwater hockey. I'm a sports junkie. I've watched ESPN Ocho how many times I have no idea. I've never seen an underwater hockey match. How do you find, just tell me something about it. We've had the luxury, as we were talking about earlier, to live up in the beautiful Lake Tahoe region. There is a lot of athletic and outdoor and active aficionados. There's been a group up here, some folks from South Africa, some folks from actually the New Zealand underwater national team that have built a league up here. There's practices four or five days a week. I still know at the time to do that, unfortunately. But I get to make a couple of the intermediate practices each week. It is the most physically demanding thing that I have found. You got all those letters. You played two sports at college and you have found the physically most demanding thing ever. They talk about being in basketball shape, which to me was always like the best of your life. Run and suicides. Your defense is 10 out of 10 and you just don't get tired. This is swimming. It's diving. It's expanding your lungs. It is like this totally different cardiovascular experience. I scored a goal last week, right as I had this massive cramp in my calf. Then I immediately had my right leg up on the edge of the pool, making sure I can get my head out of the water and breathe while my right leg is just totally seized up in a cramp. Look at 39. There's just not that many things that can give this like full body and tense workout. And it's also just meditative. So how long can you stay underwater? Want me through? How many players? How big a pool? Give me a little bit. We typically buy six on six. So there's 12 people under the water at the same time. Yes. So there's a couple of different formations you can use. There's a regulated length of an underwater hockey pool. It's a different type of surface at the bottom that allows the puck to move. There's a seven foot depth and a 10 foot depth. We play at seven foot depths. Look, you have a padded glove under right hand. And then you probably have about an eight inch stick to push the puck. You have big hard dives down into the water. So you use gravitational pull a little bit to try to create pressure down. You dive down and then you almost are like treading to stay down at the bottom of the pool. No weights. Most folks are trying to move as fast as you possibly can through the water. And it's less about holding your breath for a very long extended time as much as it is controlling your breath. I don't know if you have a cold plunge, but a lot of it is just almost like box breathing to like calm, reduce your heart rate. So a lot of it is really about bringing relaxation to your movements, well playing hockey. That's why it's really important. It's about the calm, and the smooth, right? It's like smooth as fast, fast as smooth, calm. Obviously, it can be intense. You and I can collide. There is some pretty good physical contact. But a lot of that is about maintaining your cool. Similarly, where if you get caught under a big wave while surfing, you do not fight the wave. It is really about remaining calm and controlling your breath, not hyperventilating. And the pros are like unbelievably good. In any sport, you just have this like next level of speed, of aggression, of quality as you kind of move through the different rankings. But certainly for those of us that are sitting at a desk every day, it is an amazing reprieve. It's been so much fun to see them bring out young folks, getting people into the game, whereas as you said in America, this is not a sport anyone is used to. But it's just this amazing dynamic, swimming, breath work, cardiovascular workout that's super unique. ESPN Ocho. We just had ESPN CEO Jimmy Pataro on the podcast. So I have to send Jimmy a note and say, look, you're missing an entire followership that could come. We got to bring them up to Tahoe. It's going to be a special get the underwater hockey Tahoe League. There's a group here in Encline. There's a group in Truckee. It could be a fun special. That's awesome. So was there a leadership moment you saw high school college in these amazing sporting events you've been part of from a coach that you still continue to hold on to that maybe the way they led or taught you has helped you lead or teach your team. Freshman year. You're 14 years old. You're playing with a bunch of seniors. They're trying to figure out if you're going to be a good fit for the organization or not. And I was a bit of a punk, a bit of a troubled youth at the age of 14. I thought I was hot stuff and could do my own thing. And our head coach really put the junior and senior leaders on me to figure out is Johnny going to get with a program or not. So in workouts, in runs, in batting practice, they just started pushing me, pushing me, pushing me, pushing me, challenging me. And I'm very competitive. So they were finding these angles to get me to be self motivated. In some ways, I was rejecting some of the cultural norms. What I wasn't rejecting is like the individual drive and competitiveness. The want to be the first, the want to be the best. So they would kind of reframe the problem. You know, they started to create competition out of like 100 yard sprints. They started to create competition of like how many people could put 10 batting practice balls in the backside gap, little micro competitions that got deeper and deeper and deeper engagement into the team. So trying to figure out how to appeal to that individual's motivations. And sometimes that appealing process can be totally different for each of your individual players. And for some of your top people, some of your top leaders, some of your type high performers, you may need to do something totally different. I saw it in our senior year at Boston College, we had an unbelievable safety, very good friend of mine, Walt Blackman played in the NFL 12 years, 13 years. And we had Matt Ryan as our quarterback and Will was an amazing secondary defensive back. And they gave him an opportunity to play wide receiver. And you just saw this like spark in him, a spark in the team, a spark in obviously giving our offense this unbelievable asset. And they did something similar to me in baseball. They knew in order to get me to fully dive in to winner workouts, they were like, Johnny has always wanted to pitch. There's these little leadership coaching decisions where you can motivate an individual to an outcome that the team needs to achieve by like appealing to an individual motivation with the individual. I saw this through college, unbelievable assets. We had 17, 18 guys that went and played in the NFL. You kind of saw this like weeding of the great athletes, but that weren't the right fit for the program. They weren't buying in to what we were trying to achieve as an organization. I have that poor memory, if you will, from that interaction that I had. It's certainly subsequent conversations talking about these moments. What stands out is that if you really didn't give a hoot about pitching, dangling that out there doesn't do anything for you. So you have to know what that individual motivation is, leadership lesson one, second, you have to create a pathway. So they don't embarrass themselves, but at the same time you have to know they're probably reasonably capable if the opportunity comes that way. Absolutely. Yeah, the leadership principles that have stood the test of time trying to figure out how to take great young talent and stretch them and expand them for the greater good of the organization. I love these micro competitions. Are there micro competitions that you have figured out how to run within your sales team, for example? This is one of the most difficult challenges that I've found in corporate America a little bit as someone that is deeply competitive. I love scoreboards. They tell us if we're winning or losing? I love to put the score on the board. It's just not an individual sport. So many of these micro competitions are teams. So while my head initially goes to like an individual sales rep against a quota, which we very much do, we have tried to evolve that into some of the pod structures that we've created. We have a public sector pod. We have a Fentech and Payments pod. We have a large financial services pod. We have a gaming and marketplaces pod. We've tried to create scoreboards across each of those to inspire a little bit of competitive energy amongst the team, but not so much where it becomes dangerous or cancerous or toxic in an organization because look, marketing is a shared resource. Product is a shared resource. The leadership team is a shared resource. So it's been a difficult balance to find the right things to put the scoreboard on with some of the leaders have taken more liberty with saying, Hey, look, your product is only delivering this 30% percentage growth or 30% revenue growth. Whereas this product's delivered 75, there's definitely been some micro competition there. I like it. But it's been more difficult than I would have thought because some of these are like such team endeavors. It's like trying to find a right balance between motivating teamwork while also incentivizing that individual outcome. You know, you're not just a great athlete. We've established that, but you're also an incredible entrepreneur. You've been recognized thus by EY and others. Oh, great entrepreneurs are trying to patch a hole in the universe. What hole in the universe were you setting out to solve? And how did you recognize that hole? The hole that we set out to solve in retrospect is a gigantic one. We wanted to be the first to be able to verify 100% of good identities in real time and completely eliminate identity fraud on the internet. The traditional mechanisms of how identities were verified, how fraud was stopped were woefully inadequate. We did a tremendous amount of research understanding the gaps in the market. There just is not a lot of information available on you. Getting your first credit card is like a very difficult medical exam. My co-founder had been an immigrant where he experienced a lot of the same challenges. It should be really easy to seamlessly authenticate yourself, verify yourself in any application on the internet. And in many cases for us, you had to get asked, Don, which of these was the color of your first car, Don, which of these is your great aunt that you haven't talked to in 20 years? Which of these streets did you grow up on? This is just a preposterous way to verify I am who I say I am. And when we looked at a lot of the fraud prevention controls, heavily rule-based, very little machine learning, I'd studied finance at BC. I did a masters in finance as well. Two-sport athlete Anne was a double legal. We had an early thesis that could create the future of how identities are verified on the internet. We had a hunch that the physical world was going digital. And that as digital grew, the internet growth opportunity was going to be much larger than people anticipated. And the move from the physical to the digital world required identities to be verified in a much larger scale than many folks believed. So our thesis was we could verify new to country, hard to verify younger individuals with a different approach that combined this traditional offline data view, which is really how folks had verified identities historically, with digital breadcrumbs, your device data, email data, phone data, your digital footprint. And if we could combine that with machine learning, we could both verify the greatest number of good identities while doing this really societally important thing, which is keeping bad actors from laundering money, stealing money, committing scams. So it was both an intellectual problem that we thought was tremendously large, much larger than people were even thinking, and was a thing that we thought was societally really important, keeping bad actors off of these platforms, keeping these bad actors from stealing the identities and money from a lot of good consumers. Wow, I love it. So we don't get a chance to talk about Ball State very often on this podcast, my own mother, but your very first snap in college football was against the legendary Ball State Cardinals. I got to hear it. Well, Drake say you started from the bottom now or here. That was my first snap at Ball State. Having obviously come from a time where you know, played quarterback, played safety, kicked, hunted, returned punts, to go into punting in college was a psychological shift. You're not in the flow of the game. You maybe are going to punt three, four, five times, maybe six, seven in a busy game. I roll out on my very first snap at Ball State. Literally, my very first snap as a punter at college, as a freshman, very first game. And I'm looking up at the kick receiver, ball gets snapped. Perfect snap. I look down. Ball hits me square between the letters. I'm in our own in zone. Worst case scenario. Ball hits go to pick up a fumble. Absolutely demolished at the three-yard line. Come to the sideline. Tom O'Brien, coach OB, pops me on the helmet with his whistle. Junior, as they always call me, Junior said, Junior, can't get me worse than that. There you go. And yeah, that was my entry at Ball State. And that was my entry to college football. I assure you, I did not drop another snap for the remainder of my college career. It was a humbling moment. I'm sure for many Boston college fans, a terrifying moment. But yeah, I've fun to make that Matt connection. A unique entry to college sports. And look where you are now. Yes. Now very fortunate. And that response from OB, I took it as encouraging. Right. Hey, don't worry about it. It's only up from here. Look forward. We're moving forward. And don't do that again. But one a great leadership lesson because he didn't assume bad intent. He didn't say what an idiot. Why did you drop? You didn't want to drop the snap. It just happened. So by him handling it as you did, it set a standard for you to go out and become great. I love it. You know, Johnny, I've enjoyed every second of the conversation. I appreciate today you taking time to be a corporate competitor with us. Don, thank you so much. This is amazing. I love the podcast. I love the books. I love the work you're doing. And I hope to learn something from you beyond the reading. I'm excited for all the new storytelling content. I'm a humble fan and keep doing what you're doing. Great work. So thanks so much for having me done. I have to tell you, that was one impressive human being. Like that was so much fun. Two things as I was studying him and prepping for today that really stood out about his company is that they're on the best places to work list. But they're also among the in five thousand fastest growing companies list. As we know, it's hard sometimes to be rapidly growing and be highly recognized for your culture and for all that it takes to be a great place to work. The fact that he could do both really says a lot about the team and the people that Johnny Ayers has chosen to surround himself with. We talked about recruiting for the right fit. Here he was, his freshman kid got a lot of talent, but the coach who was highly recognized had a very player-led culture. And they wanted to make sure that this 14-year-old kid knew what it meant to be a war hawk. To be on that team. They were testing him. They were creating micro challenges, ways to test him, to push him, but to push him into being a member of the team's culture. And now it's so cure. He has built his eight core principles. And as they are recruiting, they're testing against those principles, recruiting for fit. I love that one of those principles is that desire to continuously learn. And he talked about all the different books that he read, less than one of them was mine. My second great takeaway was just I never heard of underwater hockey. But here he is at age 39, so competitive and so enjoys being active that he has sought out a sport like underwater hockey. Who would have guessed that the New Zealand national team practices in Lake Tahoe? But what a neat experience for him to go push himself and actually find some way to be completely exhausted. And then finally, he talked about the importance to appeal to each person's motivation. If you're really going to try to get the best out of your team, find opportunities to give them a chance to play into something that really motivates them. They may be really good over here, find them a little opportunity. He talked about his high school coach realizing that in order for him to get to win her workouts, they had to give him an opportunity to pitch. Now, the only reason that works is that they knew that he wanted to pitch. If you don't know the motivations of your team, it's hard for you to be able to dangle those as opportunities for them to get more invested and grow. So know the motivations of your teammates. And then if you get a chance, let them step outside of their space to do something special. Johnny Ayers fired me up today. I'm not ready to go play underwater hockey, but I can't wait for an opportunity to continue to learn and grow with him. I appreciate you. 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