Rick Song is co-founder and chief executive of Persona, the San Francisco identity platform companies use to verify and manage users across onboarding and later risk events. He spent about five years as an engineer at Square focused on identity, then started Persona in 2018 with roommate Charles Yeh after seeing how every Square product needed a different proof of who someone was.
Education and Square
He graduated from Rice University in 2013 with degrees in computer science, mathematics, and economics, and spent time as a Kleiner Perkins engineering fellow. At Square he worked on identity while the company grew from merchant payments into lending, payroll, Cash App, and other products. He has said the same merchant might need a light check to take card payments and a much deeper one for a large loan, and that Square was building lifelong relationships rather than one-time KYC events.
Founding Persona
Those two ideas, flexible verification by use case and identity as an ongoing relationship, became Persona's founding brief. The company raised a seed from First Round Capital, then rounds with Coatue, Index Ventures, and Founders Fund. Song has repeatedly argued there is no silver bullet for identity and that low-risk users should submit less data while higher-risk moments collect more.
"At Persona, we really took a step back: how do we build a platform that would be universal, that would work for any use case and not just that one-time transaction, but rather ensuring that there's this level of trust between the user and the organization across their entire relationship," he told the Fintech One-on-One podcast in 2022.
He has also repeated advice he heard from Jack Dorsey when leaving Square: investors are employees you can never fire, so choose them carefully. Persona has publicly worked with clients including Square, Robinhood, and others on onboarding, PPP-era loan checks, and continuous monitoring.