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Security - Friday, June 15, 2007

Kleiner Due Diligence On Disgraced Lifelock Founder: He Seemed Like Such A Good Guy

A couple months after Kleiner Perkins and other VCs invested in Phoenix-based personal ID protection startup Lifelock, the company's founder Robert Maynard has been forced to resign. Maynard was driven out by a story in the Phoenix Times. This local, free paper dug up several deal killers on Maynard.

1. A credit-repair company founded by Maynard was shut down by authorities in the early 1990s for false advertising and deceptive practices. Such forced closure means that a federal court order has banned Maynard from working in the credit-repair industry for life. The Times says they came across this data in a few minutes with a Google search.

2. The story about how Lifelock was founded turns out to have been a lie. Maynard has been telling the press that he founded the Lifelock after he was falsely arrested as a victim of identify theft. It turns out Maynard was arrested in Las Vegas and spent a week in jail in 2003 because of an unpaid $16K casino marker at the Mirage.

3. Most damning is that Maynard may actually be an ID thief himself. The victim may well be his own dad - Phoenix eye surgeon Dr. Robert J. Maynard Sr. This issue is in the courts but it may be that Maynard spent $175K on an AMEX card that Maynard Jr. was issued using his father's social security number.

Maynard is known around town for his lavish spending

Lifelock recently closed $6.9M in Series B at a $40M+ valuation. It raised $2M in seed funding, and another $5M from Bessemer Ventures prior to this round of funding. The start-up, which is said to be profitable is a competitor to TrustedID, Truston and Intersections.The company, which has about 150K paying customers, is not a real technology company but is more of a marketer - it spends freely on Howard Stern's and Rush Limbaugh's radio programs and elsewhere to sell users on its subscription ID theft prevention service.

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