The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Credivera – Dan Giurescu, Founder & CEO Interview At Collision Conference 2022

Episode Date: June 23, 2022

Credivera - Dan Giurescu, Founder & CEO Interview At Collision Conference 2022 Credivera.com

You wanted the best. You've got the best podcast, the hottest podcast in the world. The Chris Voss Show, the preeminent podcast with guests so smart you may experience serious brain bleed. Get ready, get ready, strap yourself in. Keep your hands, arms and legs inside the vehicle at all times. Because you're about to go on a monster education roller coaster with your brain. Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. Hi, folks. This is Voss here from thechrisvossshow.com. The Chris Voss Show.com.

Hey, we're coming to you with another great podcast. We certainly appreciate you guys tuning in. Hey, we're doing a specialized coverage of interviews of different booths and people displaying at Collision Conference 2022. And so we've got some people we've been talking to. You've been seeing some of our past episodes. We should have some later on today as well. So be sure to check those out. Today we have Dan Jurescu on the show.

He's the founder and CEO of Credivera, which is showing there at Collision Conference. He is the co-founder and CEO of Credivera, a pioneering technology space. His vision for Credivera is to empower people in the ways in which they manage, share, and control their digital information for work and life. Dan creates forward-thinking and innovative business models. His previous work changed North American regulations by introducing new digital technology for the sustainable and transport shipping of dangerous goods. Welcome to the show, Dan. How are you? Hey, I'm doing fantastic. Thanks for having me on the show, and what a great intro.

There you go. The intro is phenomenal. Thank you. Well, we've done it once or twice before so welcome this show give us your dot com or whatever the dot uh the dot is for the website so people would check it out absolutely so just credivera.com uh that's where you can check us out uh go to our about us page and and you'll get to learn everything you need to know about these guys. There you go. Credivera.com

There'll be a link on the Chris Foss show. So give us an overview of what Credivera is. Sure. So we're a tech company. We're headquartered in Calgary, Alberta with now offices in Toronto and expanding our operations into the U.S. in

this coming year. We focus on verifiable credentials, which is a new term for a lot of folks in the industry. And it's a new way to manage, control your own personal data. So we sell to employers our platform that launches digital wallets for the employees of that employer. And when an individual creates their profile and says, I've done my designation, my engineering designation is good standing from this accreditation body, or that I have my health and safety training certifications, or that I have my, say, my CA or CFA designation. So what we do is we actually verify this information at source. We use smart contracts as part of our management of information.

And this ultimately allows the employer, the employee, and the association, or the issuing body, to work off of a single source of truth. So if somebody says, I've got a PNG and I'm still in good standing today, the employer knows that, the association says that, and we're basically changing the game by allowing associations to, for the first time, actually own the status of a credential. So if somebody doesn't pay their dues, if somebody doesn't do their, say, 30 hours of continuous learning, they can actually go in and suspend the status of that credential. It will automatically update into the person's wallet, and the wallet will then update everywhere the person's ever shared it. So you shared it on LinkedIn,

you shared it in somebody's, say, workday, HRIS system, it will automatically notify all bodies of that change. So nobody will ever show up to work not qualified, certified, and competent to do that job. Chris, I think I lost some audio. Sorry, Chris. No, we're good. I'm sorry, man.

I muted my mic so we could get a good feed from you. So I can't lie about... Okay, there we go. I'm back on. There you go. So I can't lie about my certifications anymore. I can't tell people I'm certified in gynecology anymore or Windows 95. Well, listen, you might have been certified once, and that's also okay to state. So it's okay to say I have the certification at this point in time.

But you can't claim it today as something that is still in good standing, especially when Windows 95 also – Wait, Windows 95 ended? What? I'm still running it on my computer now, actually. So this is pretty interesting. I know real estate agents have to do annual certifications. They have to do annual ethics tests.

I think every two years you have to do something as well. So this might fit into what they do too as well? 100%. Actually, the applicability is incredibly broad so you can go anywhere from like our space we differentiate ourselves by working a lot in

what we call a high risk profile workforce where people have 10, 15, 20, 30 patients but we actually are starting to talk to the real estate industry financial industry to make sure that people

that say I can broker this deal or that I can make this trade or I can actually access a specific room, like say a data center room, you can do that by using our digital credential wallet. So we've partnered with Microsoft in a few different ways. We're working with them as a digital identity provider, where we're now adding on top of the authenticator, the ability for people to actually scan in into a room fundamentally to say, I can be in this data center to do this job

because of this, the accommodations I have. But for the real estate groups, 100%, massive change when now as a consumer, I get to see, because the real estate agent has control over the data, they can share with me the relevant information that I need to know that, one, they're a true brokered real estate agent. Two, they've actually done a bunch of deals that have been successful,

and their clients complimented them on those deals. But three, they're an individual that's actually still in good standing, whether it's with their ethics courses, whether it's with their continuous learning, or whether they actually still even have a license to operate. So now all of this can be verifiable directly through our engine. And is it built on the blockchain? Is it built on the blockchain? Yeah, so we're actually using permissioned blockchain as part of our...

Yeah, so we use permissioned blockchain under our architecture. So we use Hyperledger Fabric as our framework. And so therefore, there's no cryptocurrency involvement, which is fantastic. But it allows all the parties to work off of a single source of truth. Nice. So who are your clients mostly? Yeah. Who are your clients mostly?

So we have a variety of clients from construction companies, manufacturing companies, unions. We also now have a number of recruiters that are coming in to start using our platform because our employers that we service are asking the recruiters to verify the employee they're about to send me as a proposed candidate, that they actually have the qualifications that they need ahead of time. So I shouldn't be interviewing people that I ultimately cannot take and put directly into a seat to perform their job.

I should be able to kind of bring them in and through all that process, if I like them, and they need to be upskilled to be able to perform that job, why don't we just do that simultaneously? So we've got a good variety of clients. That makes sense, though. I mean, especially for recruiters, and you're about to hit a huge recruiting sort of arena right now with layoffs and of course people trying to find other jobs and of course it's really hot market here in America too if you guys get down here. Are you guys just servicing Canada right now and eventually moving to America or where are you? No, we're actually servicing Canada and the United States.

We have a few clients that have actually dripped us directly into the U.S. from their Canadian operations. But what we find really powerful is there's massive infrastructure bills that are being passed that are allowing individuals to want to use this tool and puts them in a position where they can highlight themselves versus everybody else and say, hey, by the way, if you want me to start work tomorrow, I'm ready to go tomorrow because you don't need to retrain me on my CPR certification. I can just go.

And you can trust me because my data comes verified from source that I'm the right candidate to do that job today. So we completely open up this, how quickly can you put a body in a seat or a body ends on tools in the construction or manufacturing industry or transportation industry. We can just kind of go in and get it done. That makes sense.

So you might see in the future a whole lot of recruiters using this. Everyone will have one kind of as their own little sort of verified thing on their skills. I can see how that would stand out. You're like, well, we can verify this guy, but we can't verify that guy's licensing or whatever he has. This could work in a lot of different formats.

I've had friends that have hired contractors that said they were licensed. Yeah. Turns out they weren't, and they stole their money. There's a lot of different things for this. So I think it's definitely pretty amazing. Anything more we want to touch on before we go out? Yeah, I think the important component is to know that the technology is built on all the regulatory foundations that are needed to make sure

that the people truly control and manage their own information. But what we do is we also empower the employers to make sure that they don't hold any liability of personal data of an individual once the individual leaves. And that's a critical component for employers. You think about GDPR compliances in Europe, California state laws for data privacy. In Canada, we have the equivalent that's coming up called Bill C-27, which replaces PIPEDA. And basically, the employers can rest assured that, one, the information is with the individual. Two, whatever data they need to own once the person decouples

or leaves the company, they don't own. And three, when it comes down to a lot of the frameworks that are important to people today, like ESG frameworks or core audit frameworks, these individuals can now be verified and you can make sure that you have a qualified workforce. You can prove competencies. You can prove upskilling, reskilling. So from a social governance side as well, as you can imagine from a hiring perspective, you can do non-biased hiring as well. And you can prove it and you can stand behind it. So lots of great ways for both employers and employees to benefit,

while issuers can, for the first time in their life, actually control who can say what about having from them. Yeah, that makes all the difference in the world. And, yeah, I mean, it eliminates a lot of people who are maybe just lying about their certifications and stuff like that. Well, thank you very much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it, man.

Give us your.com so that people can look it up here on the internet, Stan. Absolutely. So if you head to creativeera.com, we can find all the information about us, our company, our history, and the 25 awesome people that are part of this amazing journey.

Sounds good. Thanks for coming on and continue to have a great show, man. Perfect. Thanks a lot. Appreciate the time. Thank you. And thanks, Manish, for tuning in. Be sure to check us all out

in our future coverage in the next day or so on Collision Conference 2022. Thanks for tuning in.