Virtually you
By Margie Wylie
Staff Writer, CNET NEWS.COM

In many ways, Stratton Sclavos is just your average suburbanite father.

The son of second-generation Greek-American parents, the Silicon Valley executive spends his weekends shuttling kids to soccer practice or catching a quick game of pickup basketball. His neighbors would never guess that on Monday, he captains a company that could change their lives as much as the invention of the telephone or the automatic teller machine.

Sclavos's VeriSign is in the business of digital IDs, virtual drivers licenses for the Internet. In a medium known for its anonymity, VeriSign's digital ID certificates make it possible for both consumers and merchants to prove they are who they claim to be. (You don't send your credit card number to a scammer instead of L.L. Bean; L.L. Bean doesn't accept your stolen credit card number from someone else; everybody's happy.) It's a big business that's bound to get bigger. Already VeriSign has issued about 400,000 individual digital IDs and 10,000 business IDs, with nary a competitor in sight.

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As a result, VeriSign has scooped up deals to issue Netscape users IDs and to partner with Visa on a secure credit card for Internet users. Not quite two-years old itself, the company recently funded its own startup in Japan. Yet, the self-deprecating Sclavos doesn't let it go to his head. A Silicon Valley veteran of 15 years and four start-ups, Sclavos seems to keep his distance from Valley culture, whether it's the unrelenting pace or the excesses of some of its leading citizens. "I've lived a very fast and hard kind of education growing up here in the Valley," he says. "I would always prefer to be remembered as a better basketball player than engineer."

We chatted with Sclavos in his Mountain View offices about being digital, the death of anonymity, the feds, and why he does what he does.

NEWS.COM: What does VeriSign do?
Sclavos: Today, when you cash a check, sign a contract, or buy a house, you're asked to show a form of identification so that the business party with which you're doing the transaction knows that it's really you, that you have the authority or rights to purchase this house, or execute this credit card transaction, or the like. Very simply, we are moving that into the digital world and specifically to the Internet. We're giving you a digital ID that identifies who you are, or in the case of some work we're doing with Visa, a digital credit card that allows you to charge things over the Internet securely. In the case of some banks or brokerages, [we're giving you] the ability make stock trades or move funds around by identifying who you are and what privileges you have for that given relationship with the bank or a brokerage, or potentially, even the government.

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