On the first part of the journey
When I had the creative spark for DataRight at the start of 2020, I knew enough about consumer privacy to know it was broken.
Like any day one founder, you start talking by to people smarter than you, gathering their insights, and refining the idea in your head. I quickly found that not only was my network happy to give feedback, but many of them also wanted to come along on the journey.
The next thing you know, you have a team, and it’s on you as the founder to start the crafting and shaping of a company. We all agreed that the balance of power around consumer data didn’t seem right. By bringing together our unique skills — privacy law, software development, web marketing — we knew that we could tip the balance of those scales and create something new and innovative.
We didn’t think it would be fast. We didn’t think it would be easy. But we knew that if we helped regular people understand their privacy rights and gave them a way to exercise those rights together, we could bring about a disruptive shift in their favor.
Privacy laws were evolving as quickly as DataRight. California’s attorney general was releasing new revised regulations every few months, and other state legislatures were voting on privacy bills. Brazil passed the LGPD and Californians were voting on replacing CCPA with CPRA. This gave us a moving target, but also a sense of being on the bleeding edge.
So what was the big idea? Lots of companies talked about empowerment and monetization around consumer data. How would we be different? That big idea became aggregation. Millions of Americans pulling on single rope to get a fair deal. We didn’t really think Americans wanted to opt out of the data economy en masse. I remember the days before ad-supported software like Gmail. I remember paying for desktop email software (may Eudora rest in peace). What was the equilibrium that could keep individuals using free services like Gmail and Facebook while not feeling taken advantage of?
Like any founder in year one of a new business, I don’t have all the answers. But we’ve framed interesting questions and have crafted a vision of the answers. What will we get right? What will we get wrong? Finding out is half the fun.
