Nic McKinley Podcast Transcript
Nic McKinley joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of the Digital Executive Podcast.
[00:00:12] Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is Nic McKinley. Nic McKinley is an entrepreneur, former military special operator and ex-CIA operative who founded and led two-multimillion-dollar tech companies. A pioneer in building technical solutions to protect society from predators, Nic is passionate about solving society’s most pressing issues through cost effective technical solutions.
Nic grew up in Montana but left to join the U. S. military special operations as a U. S. Air Force pararescue man. After more than a decade in pararescue, Nic worked in private intelligence startups before being recruited into a specialized unit at the Central Intelligence Agency that provided unique capabilities and expertise in response to the critical operational needs of the intelligence community.
With 30 combat deployments under his belt in both Special Operations and the CIA, Nic experienced the power of technology during the Global War on Terror and set out to use his skills and training with that expertise to combat modern slavery.
Well, good afternoon, Nic. Welcome to the show.
[00:01:13] Nic McKinley: Well, thanks for having me. I appreciate you having me on.
[00:01:16] Brian Thomas: Absolutely. This is the favorite part of my day is when I’m doing a podcast. I typically do one just about every day, that gets me out of bed. But You Nic being out of the Montana area, love that been up there many, many times, but I appreciate you making the time we can’t always make times easy for everybody across the globe. But again, I appreciate that.
[00:01:34] Nic McKinley: I’m happy to do it.
[00:01:36] Brian Thomas: Nick, let’s just jump right into your questions. We want to get your story out there to our audience.
You’ve got quite the career in the service to our country. Again, thank you for your service as an Air Force pararescue working with the Department of State, CIA, you’re an entrepreneur and now the founder and CEO of DeliverFund. Could you share with our audience the secret to your career growth and what inspires you?
[00:01:58] Nic McKinley: So, the secret to my career growth was in many ways I’m either too dumb or too stubborn to quit. I think it depends on who you talk to. But I always just, whether it was in the Air Force or going to the CIA or undergrad at Harvard, it was always what is the top level that I can see doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the top level, but what is the top level I can see?
And I’m going to go try for that. And so, I think that that leads to over time a lot of what appears to be success on paper, but people need to understand that. I didn’t make it my first time trying to get through the Air Force the entirety of the schools. And so, I actually had to repeat one of those schools.
When I first got picked up for the Central Intelligence Agency, I applied for one job, and they asked me to go to another one. It was just constantly just deciding what it was I wanted to do it and then just not stopping until I had accomplished that goal.
[00:02:54] Brian Thomas: Thank you. And it just goes to show and you’re right on, paper, your resume, it looks phenomenal, but I know you just didn’t walk into that wake up one day and all of a sudden, you’ve accomplished all these things.
But I appreciate you sharing knowing that pushing yourself, getting out of your comfort zone to do those higher goals certainly makes us a better person. So, thank you.
Nick, we want to talk you to you today about your program, your nonprofit called DeliverFund. Could you highlight your company’s mission and some of the accomplishments to date?
[00:03:23] Nic McKinley: Yes. So, Deliver Fund, we are a nonprofit organization that builds tech and collects data against really societal predators. We’re focused primarily on the human trafficking market and protecting children and then adults as well from human traffickers We’ve been doing that for eight years.
We started primarily working with law enforcement. So, we actually have analysts that are working directly with law enforcement embedded in their operations. And helping them to target human traffickers so they can arrest the human trafficker and free the victim and get the victim the services that they need.
And then we started, I would say it was about 5 years ago. We really started looking at building our own datasets because after surveying the market and spending over 6 figures on other datasets. We just found that they weren’t sufficient. So, we started building datasets and then creating technologies and really our strategy in protecting society from human traffickers is to equip, train and advise law enforcement industry.
And then the public, and we do that in different ways, but our work with law enforcement is primarily to create a de-confliction platform and train those law enforcement officers and then make sure they have access to the data they need to be able to find human traffickers, to be able to equip industry with data so that they can deny services to human traffickers, which increases the friction and risk within the human trafficking market For the human traffickers and then to equip the public with data so that they can actually screen human traffickers out of primarily focused on parents.
They can screen human traffickers out of their child’s network and not just human traffickers, really anybody who’s associated with the criminal commercial sex industry.
[00:05:11] Brian Thomas: Thank you for sharing that, breaking that down for us. As you know, what you’re doing is incredible work. Sometimes it gets really dangerous, obviously, but we want to help spread the word.
As you know, you got a ton of supporters out there, and then you got people that say, ah, this isn’t really happening. And it’s unfortunate that people are so blind to it, but thank you for sharing, and we’re going to absolutely make sure that your platform gets the recognition that it deserves so we can help these folks.
[00:05:36] Nic McKinley: Well, thank you.
[00:05:37] Brian Thomas: You bet. Nick, you’re doing so much to help those less fortunate. We talked about that. What made you decide to start your program and what can we do to help you?
[00:05:46] Nic McKinley: So, I started the program. It really goes all the way back into the early two thousand, but both when I was in military special operations and at the CIA, I was on the
pointier end of the spear, if you will my work was not behind a computer. My work was on the streets, carrying guns and anger on behalf of the taxpayer in, very, very dangerous places. And so, I would see human trafficking happening and I always just assumed that there was another version of me somewhere that was doing something about the human trafficking problem because I was primarily focused on a counter terrorism mission.
And it wasn’t until I was working with a counterpart in the Joint Special Operations Command where we had some intelligence around human trafficking and we were trying to figure out where do we send this intelligence and we couldn’t find a place and that really made me curious and, to really shorten a story.
It was after a period of study after that, that I realized that dollar for dollar, the largest human trafficking market is the United States of America. And that the major majority of human trafficking that happens in America is not, American children being abducted and taken overseas or people coming in across the southern border or something like that.
It’s primarily American women, girls and women being. trafficked or sold to American men. And that was really the epiphany where I said, well, wait a minute. I’ve been fighting terrorism and trying to protect the country overseas all these years, yet predators are lurking within society while we’re gone.
And so, I decided that was a problem that I could solve and decided to go about solving it.
[00:07:16] Brian Thomas: That’s awesome. And thank you for sharing that. I think there’s a lot of really some unknowns around this business, this trafficking business that nobody really knows or understands. And again, you explaining some of that helps us better understand and better support your mission.
So again, thank you. Nick, we are a technology platform podcast. I’m a technologist, have been a CIO CTO for many years, and we like to ask all of our guests if you’re obviously leveraging some of that new and emerging technologies in your business, is there anything you might be able to share with us today?
[00:07:50] Nic McKinley: Yes, so we are also a technology company. While we provide analysis and target packages on human traffickers to law enforcement, the way that we’re able to do so much with so little is because we are a technology company. So, we have the one technology stack that we call the platform for the analysis and targeting of human traffickers, which is a centralized technology stack that helps law enforcement deconflict their cases across the United States.
So, if you have a human trafficking detective in Nebraska and a human trafficking detective in Florida and one in Houston, and they all have commonality within their cases, they won’t necessarily know each other, but the AI back bone of the technology stack that we use, we’ll be able to help them figure that out and now start to coordinate.
So that essentially uses technology to create a de facto permissionless Federal task force for fighting human trafficking. And then the second way that we use technology is we harvest a vast amount of data from the internet. When you look at human trafficking in America, this is not, predominantly forced labor as in making rugs or bricks or something like that, it’s predominantly commercial sex in nature.
And so, there’s a lot of data there that law enforcement and industry and civilian partners need. And so, we focus on harvesting that data and cleaning it up to the best of our ability and then making it available to not only law enforcement, but also industry and the public. And then we believe in empowering parents with the information that they need in order to screen societal predators, people who are connected to the criminal commercial sex underground market. And so we have an app that’s available on the app store. You can just go on to the apple app store and search H. T. Safeguard or search Deliver Fund and you’ll come up with our app and for a very small monthly subscription, you can get access to a portion of our data, which allows you to screen.
Phone numbers and email addresses for connections to the commercial sex underworld of which a large majority of it is human trafficking. So those are the different ways that we’re using technology right now for both the public industry and law enforcement.
[00:10:04] Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate you diving into that a little bit and the fact that we can help you and be a subscriber, download the app is certainly awesome to hear that we can all in our audience provide some sort of support to you and your company and help these victims. So thank you.
Nick, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
[00:10:23] Nic McKinley: Hey, thanks, Brian. Appreciate you having me on.
[00:10:25] Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Nic McKinley Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
