Rick Song started Persona in 2018 with a specific expectation: it would probably fail. He will tell you this plainly. There is something almost perversely useful about founding a company you think is doomed - it forces you to ask, constantly and urgently, why your approach might be wrong. For Song, that skepticism became the edge.
The kernel of Persona grew out of five years at Square, where Song was building the systems that decide whether a merchant is who they say they are. The work was unglamorous infrastructure - fraud modeling, underwriting rules, identity pipelines - but it gave him a view that most founders never get: the full lifecycle of how digital trust breaks down.
What he kept seeing was the same pattern. Companies treated identity verification as a one-time checkpoint - scan a document, check a box, move on. The relationship between a business and its users was more complicated than that, and the existing tools weren't built for complexity. They were built for speed and cheapness.
He met Charles Yeh, his future CTO, during a summer internship in 2012. They were roommates. Six years later, they co-founded Persona together - two engineers who had been thinking about the same problem from different angles, finally building the solution they wished had existed at Square.