ID.me Inc., an identity security company that opened a second office in Tampa earlier this year, has added a heavy hitter to its C-suite.
After working at Amazon, AOL and Apple, Stephen Benedict joined the Virginia-based company as its chief product officer.
It was not Benedict's end game to leap to the startup world, but Benedict felt it was the right fit with ID.me's focus on secure digital identity verification.
"Two reasons led me to make the jump," he said. "The first is the increasing importance identity will be playing in the next wave of technology and second is the mission-driven focus [of the company]."
ID.me expanded to Tampa in May and has hired more than 500 Tampa Bay employees. The company's Tampa office spans 103,000 square feet across three floors at an undisclosed location due to safety reasons.
Benedict also has Florida ties — he grew up in Miami and attended Tallahassee-based Florida A&M University.
He plans to take his experiences from working at the California-based tech giants and deploy those same lessons to ID.me — his artificial intelligence e-commerce experience at Amazon, building multiple aspects on top of a platform at AOL, and building a product people love at Apple.
"Technology is everywhere in our day-to-day lives, and our identity is crucial to how the technology interacts," he said. "Today, there is a lot of friction around proving identity, facilitating trust and providing people with control over the data, which is leading to inefficiencies. The more I learned about ID.me, I was super energized, and I was super excited about joining the team."
He's one of a growing number of heavy hitters joining companies with Tampa Bay ties. In March, Tampa-based Nickelytics hired Shama Keskar after she worked as an engineering leader at Google and Amazon. Blockspaces, a local blockchain-focused organization, hired a former blockchain adviser for IBM.
"My goal is to use technology to make people's lives better; in terms of helping to solve problems better and help people find things they need and just help them have better day-to-day lives overall," he said. "So my trajectory is more focused on being able to align my experience with products, business and technology to build products and experiences to make peoples' lives better."
