Robert Maynard (born 1962) is an American businessman. He has co-founded companies such as LifeLock, Internet America, Dotsafe, Kandoo, and SurchX. Both Internet America and LifeLock went public and SurchX was sold to the financial technology company Interpayments in 2020.
Maynard was diagnosed with bipolar disorder in 2001 after exhibiting symptoms equivalent to it. Since then, he has served as an advocate for fellow patients, lecturing and writing about his experience with the disorder.[1]
Early life
Maynard was born in 1962 in Phoenix, Arizona, and enlisted in the US Marine Corps in 1981, where he served until 1985. He then took a commission as a Second Lieutenant in the US Army Reserve. He served as an officer in the Army's 12th Special Forces Group for nine years.[citation needed]
From 1985 to 1987, he attended Northern Arizona University, where he graduated with honors, received the Wall Street Journal Award, and was named a Distinguished Military Scholar. He was also inducted into the Beta Gamma Sigma honor society and nominated for the Truman Scholarship for excellence in leadership and academics.[citation needed]
Career
In the late 1990s, Maynard co-founded, from his home, the ISP Internet America, which within four years grew to over 145,000 subscribers.[citation needed] The company went public in 1998.
After departing Internet America, Maynard founded Dotsafe, a provider of Internet filtering for educational sites.[2] In 2005, he co-founded LifeLock[3][4] with Todd Davis, which provides identity theft protection software. In 2008, after moving with his family to Oahu,Hawaii, he started the water sports business Kandoo.[citation needed] Maynard also registered the website iValidate.me, which he thought might become an online consumer-direct credit bureau when fully launched.[5]
After registering iValidate.me, he and a team of friends and former employees in Phoenix, Arizona founded SurchX, an enterprise SaaS (Software-as-a-service) company that allows merchants to recover their credit card processing fees through surcharging, which is now legal in 44 states. [citation needed]
After the sale of SurchX to Interpayments in 2020, Maynard became debilitated by his illness for four years. He subsequently recovered and in January 2025 launched The Secret Agent, an AI business automation and security platform.[citation needed]
Personal life
In the late 1990s, while the Chief Executive Officer of Dotsafe, Maynard began to suffer from an undiagnosed illness affecting various aspects of his life and work, which eventually led to his divorce. After Dotsafe folded during the dotcom bust in 2001, he finally sought medical advice and was eventually diagnosed with bipolar disorder. [6]
Seeking a cure, he underwent Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). He claimed on his website that the treatment affected his memory, and thus was the reason for many of the confusing statements he would later make about his past.[7]
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