Authenticity Capital is a planned early stage venture firm. Its mission is to help qualify prospective licensees - entrepreneurs - of The Authenticity Institute and to seek investors and board members for the Authenticity Enterprises that the licensees will launch.
Authenticity Capital may itself be considered an Authenticity Enterprise.
About The Authenticity Institute
The Authenticity Institute is a combination of incubator and business licensor. While its offerings are legally considered to be certification programs rather than franchises, we use franchise methods and procedures to ensure that our licensees have what they need in order to successfully bring Authenticity to their chosen markets and audiences.
Members of our team have built and managed effective and secure online meeting places for magazine publishers, Fortune 50 computer firms, and others. Our clients enjoy the security that comes from confidence in the identities of those who touch their valuable digital assets and processes.
The Authenticity Infrastructure
Our Authenticity Infrastructure is a complete technology, standards, and business platform, bringing intellectual property licensing and support services to member companies of the Authenticity Alliance. Member companies of the Alliance are able to build upon enrollment services, public key certification services and other capabilities to ensure that the identities of individuals are sufficiently reliable for the purposes of the parties that rely upon them. The Authenticity Infrastructure is one of three parts of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.
The Authenticity Alliance
The tools of the Authenticity Infrastructure are available to qualified entrepreneurs who want to bring Authenticity to their target audiences and markets. Members of the Authenticity Alliance are independent enterprises and noncommercial organizations.
Our History
had its beginnings as The Village Group, formed in the late '90's to address the need for reliable digital identities. Its first project was the development of the VIVOS Enrollment Workstation. Designed to be used by notaries with minimal training, VIVOS binds biometrics of subjects to digital identity certificates.
Digital identity certificates imply PKI. In the process of writing a book about about a hypothetical world public key infrastructure built upon reliable identity certificates, our CIO was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union that was attempting to implement a world PKI that was similar to the one he envisioned. In 2002 The Village Group became a charter signatory to the International Telecommunication Union's World e-Trust Initiative. The company is now a Sector Member of the ITU.
At the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure meeting at ITU headquarters in Geneva on March 7, 2005, representatives of the ITU, the International Union of the Latin Notariat, and the media were presented with our vision of the component of QEI that has to do with certification by duly constituted public authority. The group wrote the first draft of the charter of an online World City Hall, using the authority of the ITU, which would serve as certification authority to the world.
In 2007 our founding entrepreneur was appointed to one of the five Individual Experts positions in the High Level Experts Group of the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda. http://www.itu.int/osg/csd/cybersecurity/gca/hleg/
Management Team
The mission of The Authenticity Institute and Authenticity Capital is to incubate enterprises that are built upon, and which help to deploy, the Authenticity Infrastructure. Necessarily that means we not only wear many hats, but we change hats frequently. Partly for that reason, and partly because it reflects our view of what's needed to prevail in the age of agile, flattened organizations, each of us carries the same title: Entrepreneur.
Wes Kussmaul
Wes Kussmaul
Wes was the sole founder in 1981 of Delphi Internet Services Corporation, "The Company That Popularized The Internet." At the time it was sold to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation in 1993, Delphi had been profitable for years and was among the four largest online services, along with AOL, CompuServe and Prodigy.
In 1986, while CEO of Delphi, Wes launched a spinoff, Global Villages, Incorporated to serve magazine publishers and business clients with their own private-label online services. During the next twelve years Global provided business planning, design, engineering, hosting, management and promotion services for Digital Equipment Corporation, William F. Buckley's National Review, BioTechniques, Hardcopy, International Business, Business Digest, and many other companies and magazines. Global's hosting business was sold in 1998 to NTT Verio.
Wes then turned the attention of his new team to the need for reliable identities of individuals on the Internet, starting with the development of the VIVOS Enrollment Workstation. Designed to be used by notaries with minimal training, VIVOS binds biometrics of the enrollee to digital identity certificates.
While developing VIVOS, Wes began collecting source material for a book about a hypothetical world public key infrastructure, built upon certificates representing reliable identities, that would bring authenticity to online interactions and privacy to individuals. As the book began to take shape Wes was introduced to a group at the International Telecommunication Union that was attempting to implement a world PKI that was similar to the one he envisioned. In 2002 the predecessor of , The Village Group, became a charter signatory to the International Telecommunication Union's World e-Trust Initiative and is now a Sector Member of the ITU. Wes is a member of the High Level Experts Group at the ITU's Global Cybersecurity Agenda. In an address in 2008 to the United Nations World Summit on Information Society in Geneva, Wes introduced the City of Osmio, which applies the global public authority of the ITU to the process of identity certification and to other digital certificates.
Wes received his BS in physics in 1971 from the University of Central Missouri while serving nearby in the U.S. Air Force. Upon graduation and discharge he became a systems analyst at Liberty Mutual Insurance Company, developing mainframe database applications for the next four years. Subsequent positions in sales and sales management at Gould Incorporated, Benson SA, and Tektronix, Inc. brought him in contact with the pioneers of the pre-Web Internet.
Wes is an individual adherent of the International Union of Latin Notaries and has been appointed a Notary Ambassador by the National Notary Association.
Peter Hadley
Dr. Hadley is responsible for develoment of the software components of The Authenticity Infrastructure and the InDoors Infrastructure portions of the Quiet Enjoyment Infrastructure.
As a software engineer at Amazon.com Peter developed a new email generating system and gift certificate customer acquisition application. Prior to his Amazon.com experience he had responsibility for all email systems at PlanetAll.com including automated generation and response. Prior to that he was CTO at InfoDeal.com.
He has taught engineering (MATLAB, C Programming, Civil Engineering and wave propagation) as a faculty member at Northeastern University and at Bogazici Universitesi in Istanbul, Turkey.
Peter has done volunteer work for Habitat for Humanity and has served as an advisor to Sigma Chi Fraternity at MIT. He recently survived teaching high school level Sunday School in Hazelwood, Missouri.
Peter received his Ph.D. and A.M. from Princeton University, M.S. from Northeastern University, and S.B. from Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
