Let’s get Personal: Meet Brad

Today, meet Brad, who leads GTM for Persona’s Marketplace vertical, partnering with trust & safety, product, and compliance leaders at gig economy superapps, peer-to-peer platforms, and online seller marketplaces. He is originally from Louisiana, lives in Brooklyn, New York, and spends an unreasonable (his words, not mine!) amount of his free time rewatching Eras Tour videos.

He shares what a typical day looks like for him, advice for someone joining at Persona, and more in this Q&A:

What does your typical day look like at Persona?

On any day, I might be dissecting the latest GenAI-powered fraud vector with a customer’s trust and safety team then coaching someone on my team through their first big expansion conversation. There’s a throughline of “the threat landscape just changed again and here’s what we’re doing about it” that makes the work genuinely fun. Sprinkle in customer visits, a lot of Slack, and the occasional existential debate about what synthetic identity fraud will look like next year.

What drew you to Persona, and what made you say yes to joining the team?

My background is a crossover between tech and foreign policy, so I came into Persona with a genuine interest in how regulation and identity intersect, from data sovereignty and eID frameworks to the emergence of mobile driver’s licenses as a credentialing standard. Persona sits exactly at that crossroads, where the private sector is building the infrastructure that governments and platforms are increasingly depending on to solve those problems at scale. That’s a rare thing to find in a single role, and it made saying yes pretty easy.

Tell us something unexpected about you—a hidden talent, unique hobby, or surprising fact.

I studied Mandarin for six years, including time spent living and studying in Beijing and Nanjing, and somewhere along the way developed a genuine obsession with Sichuan food — the kind where you’re actively disappointed by anything under a level 8 spice.

Who has influenced or inspired you most during your time at Persona, and why?

Tory Peterson, a lead on our deployments team. She’s a brilliant technical mind who can explain complex identity infrastructure in a way that actually makes sense, which has made me sharper at my own job. She has a remarkably grounding presence, and somehow balances all of that with pottery, cheesemaking, and what I can only describe as an impressive roster of Minnesota winter activities. She’s a consistent reminder that I need more hobbies.

What’s one piece of advice you’d give to someone joining Persona today?

The fastest way to learn here is to stretch outside your role’s core expectations. Sit in on an engineering discussion, dig into the infrastructure, ask how the product actually works under the hood. You’ll understand the customer’s problems at a completely different level, and that’s what separates good from great.

What’s something about Persona’s culture or mission that really resonates with you?

I studied government trust and institutional legitimacy in my master’s program, and the throughline to what Persona does is more direct than people expect. Identity verification touches every person who has ever created an account, applied for something online, or tried to prove who they are digitally, and the stakes of getting that wrong for the individual, platform, and regulators are real. Being part of the company building the infrastructure to get it right, at the scale it needs to work, is something I find genuinely motivating.

If you could have coffee (virtual or IRL) with anyone, past or present, who would it be and why?

Oscar Niemeyer, a Brazilian architect. I’m a big fan of Brazilian modernism and furniture design. I actually traveled to São Paulo earlier this year for a customer visit and got pulled deeper into his work. He designed an entire capital city, Brasília, from scratch and lived to 104. I’d want to hear what he’d actually change if he could do it again!

What’s your current favorite way to unwind after work?

Taking the ferry home from work and walking along the Greenpoint waterfront before heading back to my apartment. Something about being next to the water with the Manhattan skyline at that hour reminds me how lucky I am to call this place my home.

Share a book, podcast, or show you’ve been into lately. What do you love about it?

Silo on Apple TV+ is one of the best-built dystopian worlds on television right now, and what I love is that it’s fundamentally a political drama underneath the sci-fi surface: information control, institutional legitimacy, who gets to govern and why. It scratches the same itch as The West Wing or Succession but with a bunker and a lot more existential dread.

What’s a place (restaurant, coffee shop, park, city) that feels special to you, and what would you recommend there?

I’m biased, but I genuinely think New Orleans, where I grew up, is one of the best tourist destinations in America. The seafood is incredible, the architecture is unlike anywhere else in the country, and the French and Spanish colonial influence is visible on basically every block.

If you were building a personal bucket list today, what’s the first thing you’d add?

Chasing all four Grand Slams in person! Roland Garros and the US Open are done. Wimbledon and the Australian Open are still on my list. In the meantime, I’ve been picking off 1000s along the way — Miami this year and Indian Wells next. I’m also trying to talk a group of friends into doing the Shanghai Masters with me, mostly as an excuse to get back to China.