Tag: Entrustet

Three News Articles

Category : Personal Thoughts
Posted on October 19, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

I was featured in three different news articles this week for three different ideas and I thought I’d share.

Dealing with digital Afterlife – Financial Times

Emma Thomas interviewed me for an article about people with interesting jobs, focusing on the digital death space. My favorite part where I talk about the impact that working with digital death had on my outlook on working and living. It makes no sense to me to be working on things that don’t really matter, like an iphone app for fart noises or other fairly useless ideas. If you have the ability and drive to do a startup, do something that matters.

The Most Interesting Entrepreneurs in Chile

An article talking about different people in the Chilean entrepreneurial ecosystem. There are clearly better homegrown Chilean entrepreneurs than me, but it’s fun to be on the list.

La Condonería: Condones y educación sexual a un click de distancia

This article in PulsoSocial (spanish) talks about one of my new projects, an ecommerce site that allows people to buy condoms online in Chile. I’m really enjoying this project mostly because of the blog and chat we have. Most people didn’t have a well developed sex education course in high school or college, so we answer basic questions that we get via our chat in blog post form. It’s been one of our biggest successes so far and makes selling a product much more interesting and rewarding.

Google Follows Entrustet with Inactive Account Manager

Category : Entrustet
Posted on April 15, 2013 by Nathan Lustig

Last week Google announced Inactive Account Manager, a way to decide what happens to your Google accounts when you die. Google is the first major company to create a viable, real service to actually help their users plan for their death. Four and a half years after Jesse and I started Entrustet in a library at the University of Wisconsin, we’re finally seeing the first real, concrete step from a major company to address this massive problem.

Google’s system allows you to choose whether your accounts are deleted or transferred to a trusted third party when your accounts become inactive. You set the inactivity period, between 3-12 months, and then Google will send you a text message to make sure you’re actually inactive (read:dead) before taking any action. I’d prefer a third verification step, like contacting a nominated third party (our digital executor concept) to verify you’re actually dead, as I believe google will end up deleting or transferring accounts of people who are still living. These “deathswitches” are not fool proof and I think one extra layer of protection is a good compromise.

All in all, it’s great to see. It’s an incredible first step. We started Entrustet in November 2008 after reading about US Marine Justin Ellsworth’s family’s efforts to gain access to his Yahoo account after he was killed in Iraq. We created Entrustet to make sure that nobody would ever have to go to court to get access to their loved one’s digital information and to make sure that people could control what happened.

When we first talked to Google, Facebook and other major companies in 2009 and 2010, they were interested but made it very clear they weren’t interested in doing anything about the problem yet. Over the past four and a half years, we, along with our competitors, we featured in just about every single newspaper and major internet publication in the world, bringing massive attention to the problem. Our acquisition brought even more PR. More and more people had personal experiences with people who passed away, leaving their digital lives a mess for their survivors. Some states even have started to change their laws.

I expect other companies to follow Google’s lead and create a digital inheritance manager. There’s an opportunity for a startup to create a 3rd party SaaS app that any company can plug into, but it will be hard sledding. It’s a massive market, but a hard one to crack. There are at least 3m people who die on Facebook each year and Google’s numbers are likely the same. Every online service has a similar problem. So do offline services.

Alternatively, Google (or Facebook), could become the central hub of death verification online and sell access to their API for anyone, including governments, insurance companies and any online service to use, under the assumption that if someone’s dead on google, you can trace their online profiles based on Google connections, email accounts and personal data. Google could do it if they wanted and become the arbiters of life and death online. I believe this is at least a $100m per year business, maybe more.

It’s been fun seeing how this has evolved since we came up with the idea in 2008. It will be interesting to see what happens. Stay tuned, there is going to be massive innovation in this morbid, yet necessary industry.

2.89m Facebook Users Will Die in 2012, 580,000 in the USA

Category : Entrustet
Posted on June 6, 2012 by Nathan Lustig

While we were running Entrustet we became famous for calculating how many Facebook users would die in a given year. Morbid, I know. Jesse and I originally calculated this stat in March 2010 on the eve of our launch at South By Southwest using user data provided by Facebook and death rates by the Centers for Disease Control. Since then, our estimate has been published in just about every media outlet imagineable. Since we were acquired by SecureSafe, we continue to receive media requests, including one from a large media outlet who asked if I could update the numbers.

In January 2011, we estimated that 408k US Facebook users would pass away in 2011 and 1.78m worldwide. Since then, Facebook has added ~300m new users for a grand total of 901m active users. After running the numbers, it’s quite clear the problem is getting bigger and accelerating quickly. As Facebook adds more users and its current user base greys, 580,000 US based Facebook users will pass away in 2012 and 2.89m will die worldwide.

It’s a growing number and a growing problem that both Facebook and its users will have to deal with now and increasingly in the future. One way to deal with it is via SecureSafe, a service where you can make a list of your digital assets and decide what happens to them when you pass away. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers keep accelerating as Facebook continues to grow and adds its users continue to get older.

Entrustet Acquired by SecureSafe

Category : Entrustet
Posted on April 16, 2012 by Nathan Lustig

I’m excited to announce that Entrustet has been acquired by SecureSafe, the market leader in secure storage of digital information and digital inheritance. Since Jesse and I started Entrustet in a spare classroom at the University of Wisconsin, we’ve had one vision: to build a system to help you to create a plan for your digital assets that you can be assured will be carried out when you pass away.

We’ve done everything in our power to make our vision reality. We’ve created a product that works and helped people in over 20 countries protect their digital assets. We’ve helped families of the recently deceased find, access, transfer and delete online accounts and computer files. We’ve shed light on the entire topic of digital estate planning to the general population. We’ve worked with attorneys and legislators to help carve out some legal clarity in an evolving area of estate law.

Over the past three years, we’ve gotten to know the SecureSafe team very well. They are based in Zurich, Switzerland and their service is used by various Swiss Banks. We’ve gotten to know a great team with massive experience, and a very similar vision. As we worked together, we realized that SecureSafe had everything that we wanted in a partner. Their service is top notch and has more features, all backed by the Swiss banking privacy and security they are known for.

It’s a clear win-win: they share our vision of helping you securely store your online accounts and computer files, making them securely accessible anywhere in the world and enabling you to transfer or delete them when you pass away. Jesse and I will be continuing to work with the SecureSafe team to make sure everything goes smoothly. We’re both excited to see what our next steps are in our professional lives.

Looking back, Entrustet has been an incredible experience. I owe so much to Jesse for being an amazing partner. We have very complimentary skill sets and see the world through a different lens, but at the end of the day we share the most important things in common. His relentless optimism and ability to take a step back from situations and analyize them have taught me so much.

I still remember the day he pitched me Entrustet in the Wisconsin Business School library with a very rough powerpoint. I jumped in and we spent the next three years becoming amazing friends. I really couldn’t ask for anything more in a cofounder, and as Jesse put it, I’ll remember our times outside of the office even more than inside. What an incredible three years.

Helping start an industry and becoming thought leaders in the space. Seeing users actually benefit from our service, including helping families access and transfer online accounts after someone passed away. Getting more press than we could ever imagine and meeting tons of incredible people.

Entrustet changed my life. I learned so much from every part of running the business, but especially from Jesse. Entrustet took me to New York, San Francsico, Chicago, LA and Austin. It led me to Chile as part of the beta round of Startup Chile where I met amazing people and discovered a beautiful country. I got to speak at South By Southwest and even gave a speech in Spanish to Chile’s president at their equivilent of the White House. Entrustet led me to start Capital Entrepreneurs, Forward Technology Conference and to making tons of new friends.

But we didn’t do it alone. There are so many people and organizations who helped us get to this point. We owe so much to our investors, our advisers, Joseph Boucher, Tom Juszczyk, Allan Stern & Adaptive Engineering, Merlin Mentors, our 2010 intern class, Nathan Dosch and so many more. I couldn’t do this without the support of my parents who’ve always told me “do what you think is interesting and makes you happy, just as long as you don’t ask us to pay your bills!” Thanks to my friends who have put up with digital death talk for the past three years and those who were there with me through the ups and downs of startup life. It’s easy to take risks with family and friends who supports you. It’s been a great ride and I can’t wait to see what happens next!