The Making of The Power of Digital Identity: A Candid Interview with Rakesh Soni
In this candid interview, LoginRadius CEO Rakesh Soni reflects on his startup journey, the evolution of customer identity, and what inspired his Amazon best-selling book, 'The Power of Digital Identity'
In this honest conversation, the founder of LoginRadius looks back on his journey of 12 years of building identity solutions and the story behind his first book.
It all started with a simple lingering question: Why is identity on the fence after all these years?
For Rakesh Soni, Founder & CEO of LoginRadius, it wasn’t just a technical curiosity - it was personal. After over a decade in the trenches, he’s seen companies repeatedly stumble over the same identity pitfalls: fragmented systems, frustrating logins, and costly security gaps.
Determined to change that, he built one of the world’s most scalable identity platforms and has since helped global brands reimagine how they secure and engage their customers. In fact, Soni has lived through the evolution of digital identity, long before it became a boardroom priority.
Now, with the release of his new book, The Power of Digital Identity, Soni distills years of hard-won lessons into one powerful idea: if companies continue to treat identity as a backend function instead of a strategic advantage, they’ll be left behind.
In this candid interview, he opens up about what drove him to write the book, how his entrepreneurial journey shaped his thinking, and what every product builder, CIO, and growth leader should know about the future of digital identity.
Q1. What first sparked your interest in digital identity?
Soni: It actually started with a completely different idea. Back in 2011, I was building a web app and, like most early-stage teams, wanted to keep things lean. But then came the registration form: name, email, password, confirm password... the usual. We realized how much friction we were asking users to go through just to get started. It didn’t feel right.
So we tried something different. We added social login, let users sign up with their Gmail or Facebook instead. And instantly, we saw the impact. Higher conversions, fewer drop-offs, better user experience.
That’s when the spark lit. We weren’t just fixing a form—we were rethinking how people connect with digital services.
The more we explored, the more we realized how broken the login experience was across the board. Every site was building it from scratch, users were juggling passwords, security was often an afterthought and use privacy was ignored. We saw an opportunity to solve a deeper problem.
That’s really where the idea for LoginRadius came from—a desire to make logins easier and safer for everyone.
Q2. What were your early struggles as a founder? How did those experiences shape your leadership and product vision?
Soni: Back then, I was just an engineer trying to solve a problem that even large enterprises hadn’t figured out yet. In the beginning, we were targeting small websites, offering a simple social login plugin. That’s where the traction started. But as we looked to scale, we realized we needed to pivot from a tool to a full platform.
What made it harder was credibility. Identity is a trust game, and I was just a developer saying, “Hey, let us manage your logins.” Naturally, enterprises were skeptical.
Then came the funding journey. I knocked on a lot of doors and heard a lot of no’s. We weren’t in Silicon Valley. We didn’t have the pedigree or the playbook. But we had a vision and a growing user base. Eventually, we raised $1.3M in seed funding, enough to build out our infrastructure, move beyond plugins, and start winning bigger customers.
That period taught me everything about resilience and customer obsession. We didn’t have fancy sales decks. We had to listen hard, build fast, and keep earning trust—one feature, one conversation at a time.
Those experiences still shape how I lead today. I care deeply about solving real problems, not just shipping products. And I always remind our team: we’re not just writing code—we’re building trust.
Q3. What gap do you see in the IAM space that others are missing?
Soni: Most IAM platforms today are still designed with a workforce-first mindset. They were built to manage internal employees—not customers, not partners. So when businesses try to use those systems for B2C or B2B scenarios, they start hitting friction. The user experience is rigid, the concept of privacy is non-existence, and scaling to millions of users becomes a real challenge.
That’s the gap we saw early at LoginRadius—and it still exists. Even now, many enterprises are retrofitting workforce IAM tools to serve customer identities or partner organizations. But the requirements are completely different. You're dealing with external users, complex onboarding flows, brand personalization needs, privacy regulations, and performance expectations at a global scale. It's not just a different use case—it's a fundamentally different architecture.
Another gap is in the B2B side of IAM, which is still underserved. Most customer IAM platforms do well with individual users, but fall short when it comes to managing entire partner organizations, which includes multi-tenancy, delegated administration, or federation across business entities. We’ve made that a focus at LoginRadius—offering flexible APIs, out-of-the-box federation, and tooling that lets our customers manage both B2C and B2B users from a single platform.
IAM should never be one-size-fits-all. Yet many vendors are still offering exactly that.
Q4. What inspired you to write The Power of Digital Identity? Who did you write this book for?
Soni: It wasn’t one moment of inspiration—it was years of patterns. I kept seeing the same issues show up in different forms: companies spending months building login flows from scratch, struggling to manage customer data securely, or underestimating how identity impacts user experience and business growth.
That’s really what pushed me to write this book. I wanted to capture what I’ve learned after two decades in this space—what’s working, what’s broken, and what the future demands of us. This book is my way of saying: *hey, here’s the playbook, here’s what I wish someone had handed me when I was starting out. *
I wrote it for people building digital products—executives, product managers, CIOs, Customer Relationship executives—anyone who’s responsible for shaping user experience or protecting customer data. Because identity touches all of it. If you get it right, it becomes a growth driver. If you ignore it, it becomes your weakest link.
Q5. What’s one idea from the book that you think every reader should act on today?
Soni: If there’s one takeaway, it’s this: don’t treat digital identity as infrastructure—treat it as a growth engine.
Too many teams still see identity as a login box or a compliance checklist. But when you zoom out, it’s the backbone of user trust, personalization, and scale. The companies that win are the ones designing identity into their product from day one. Not patching it in later.
This means thinking beyond passwords and provisioning. It’s about building identity workflows that reduce friction, adapt to risk, and give your teams the data they need to make smarter decisions. Identity can increase conversion, improve security, and power new revenue streams—if you elevate it from the backend to the business layer.
That shift in mindset is what this book is really about. It’s time identity moved out of the shadows.
Q6. You speak about identity as more than just access. What do you mean by that?
Soni: For a long time, identity was seen purely as a gatekeeper—something that says yes or no when someone tries to log in. But that’s a very narrow view.
Today, identity is the connective tissue between your users and every digital experience you offer. It’s how you recognize them, personalize their journey, secure their data, and build long-term trust.
Think about it: when someone signs up, how much do you really know about them? How do you progressively learn more without annoying them? How do you protect their data without creating friction? Identity solves for all of that when it’s done right.
So, identity isn’t just about access. It’s about insight. It’s about relationships. And when you start treating it that way, it becomes a strategic advantage—not just a technical one.
Q7. What’s your advice to developers building authentication into their products?
Soni: Don’t treat authentication like just another feature, it’s the foundation of everything else your users will do. I’ve seen too many products try to duct-tape login flows late in the build process, only to hit a wall with scale, security, or compliance. That’s a costly mistake.
Start by asking: who’s logging in? What kind of experience do they expect? And how do you ensure it’s secure without making them jump through hoops?
If you're building for consumers, friction is your enemy. Think passwordless, social login, progressive profiling, anything that reduces drop-off and feels invisible. If you’re building for partners or enterprise customers, you’re in a different world: think multi-tenant, fine-grained access, SSO, federation.
Today, you also have to think beyond just humans. Machine-to-machine auth is growing fast. APIs, bots, AI agents and they all need identity. If your system doesn’t account for them from day one, you’ll end up rewriting a lot of code.
The market is also shifting toward zero trust and adaptive security. So bake in flexibility. Maybe you start with basic 2FA, but can your system support passkeys later? Can it trigger step-up auth if the user logs in from a new country?
One last thing—don’t try to reinvent the wheel. There are good CIAM platforms like LoginRadius that already solve these problems. Use them. Focus your time on building what makes your product unique, not on chasing the latest security patch.
Q8. What role do you see AI playing in the future of identity?
Soni: Over the next decade, I see CIAM platforms evolving from static rule-based engines to dynamic, AI-native ecosystems. In customer identity, that shift means not just reacting to risk signals, but predicting intent, adapting in real-time, and enabling trust without friction.
We’re talking about AI-powered identity flows that continuously evaluate a user’s behavior, context, and risk profile to deliver personalized access and protection. For example, if a returning customer logs in from an unfamiliar location but exhibits typical clickstream patterns, the system might silently prompt for passive authentication instead of blocking access—balancing security with experience.
AI will also play a pivotal role in fraud prevention. Rather than relying solely on static rules like rate limits or device checks, intelligent CIAM systems will analyze user journeys, transaction behaviors, and cross-session signals to flag account takeover attempts, bot activity, or synthetic identities, before any damage is done.
Another major shift will be in dynamic consent and privacy orchestration. AI can help determine what data should be collected, stored, or shared based on jurisdiction, user profile, and contextual need. This makes compliance more adaptive and reduces the burden on engineering teams.
Finally, personalization will be redefined. Today’s identity personalization is often limited to name or preference data. With AI, CIAM will deliver identity-aware experiences, serving content, recommendations, or UX flows that reflect a user’s trust level, historical behavior, and privacy preferences.
CIAM isn’t just about logins anymore. With AI, it becomes a living, breathing layer of digital trust.
Q9: What do you hope readers feel after finishing your book?
Soni: I hope they walk away with clarity and urgency. *Clarity *about what’s broken in today’s identity strategies, and urgency to treat digital identity as a board-level priority, not a backend function.
This book isn’t a technical manual. It’s a playbook for enterprise leaders who are navigating complex ecosystems and looking for sustainable ways to scale securely, build trust, and improve conversion.
Over the years, I’ve seen far too many large companies invest heavily in fragmented IAM tools, only to end up with disjointed experiences, compliance risks, and ballooning costs. My goal is to help them reframe how they think about identity.
If a reader finishes the book and feels more equipped to challenge the status quo, ask better questions, and push their teams toward smarter, more unified identity strategies—then I’ve done my job.
Q10: Where can people connect with you?
Soni: . I’m always up for a good conversation. You’ll find me on LinkedIn or X. I’m fairly active there and try to reply personally whenever I can. If you’d like to chat more directly, feel free to drop me a note at rakesh.soni@loginradius.com. Always happy to connect.
