On verification

What we mean by verification, and the four checks that aren’t a checkbox.

Verification, in software, usually means a checkbox. A phone number confirmed. An email address clicked. A face matched to an ID. In our category, none of those things matter. A member of a top-100 club has all of them. So does a thirteen-year-old with a credit card and a vintage Footjoy from eBay.

What we verify is harder to phrase. We verify that a member has been welcomed into a place where the wrong kind of welcome would not have come. We verify that another member, who we already trust, has staked their reputation on the introduction. We verify that the person on the other end has spent enough time in the world we describe that they don't need it explained to them.

This is impossible to automate. It is also the only kind of verification that means anything for what we are building.

The four checks, in order:

One — a member already in good standing has invited you. Their reputation is on the line.

The invitation is the foundational check. It is not a referral link with a points reward. It is a member, who we already trust, deciding to spend a small amount of their own social capital on you. The invitation costs them something. That cost is the entire point. A member who would not stake their reputation on you is a member whose invitation we should not be honoring.

Two — your club affiliation can be confirmed by us, quietly, with the club itself.

We do not publish club rosters. We do not ask for screenshots of membership cards. We have, instead, quiet relationships with the membership offices at a small number of partner clubs, who confirm or decline a single name on a single call. The call takes ninety seconds. It happens once per applicant. It is the only conversation about the applicant the club is asked to have.

Three — your record is your record.

We do a light background check. Not the kind that requires a private investigator. The kind that catches the small number of people who, if admitted, would damage the network for the others. The check looks at three things: a criminal record relevant to other members' safety, a publicly documented pattern of behavior that would embarrass the network, and a basic identity confirmation. The check fails fewer than one applicant in two hundred. The applicants it does fail, it fails for reasons our members would agree with if they saw the file.

Four — the small things.

The last check is the one most companies don't do because it doesn't scale. A human being, on our team, reads your application. They look at the things a human notices: how the application is written, what other names are referenced, whether the inviting member's description of you matches what the application itself communicates. They flag the small number of cases where something is off. Most of those flags resolve in the applicant's favor after one phone call. A small number do not.

The first three checks — member-of-member vouching, club affiliation, light background — are how we operationalize a thing that's fundamentally judgment-based. None of them, alone, would be sufficient. Together they get us most of the way to a network that holds its character.

The fourth check is the work of staying small enough that judgment scales with us.

We are not building a database of verified golfers. We are building a network of members who have each agreed to vouch for each other, on terms that hold.

That is the entire posture. The brand depends on it.

The Journal Staff writes for The Journal.

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