Taking Data Privacy by Storm - Meet the Founders of Aircloak

Data is everywhere and is used more than ever to discern trends, back up facts and make new discoveries. But have you ever thought about how much data is collected on a daily basis? Well we had the same question and according to an article by IBM, we “create 2.5 quintillion bytes of data” every day - excuse me?!

To make sure some of this data being created and collected remains private, Felix Bauer and Sebastian Probst Eide founded Aircloak with a mission to “protect user data but also provide valuable insights to enterprises” says Felix.

In the beginning

But let’s back up a little, these two Cambridge graduates didn’t necessarily know they were going to be founding a data privacy startup when they met on their first day of university. They did know that they got along and over a 7 year period became better friends, roommates, colleagues at the Max Planck Institute and eventually founders in 2012. Did they always consider themselves entrepreneurial? Well Sebastian previously worked as a freelance web developer and created an iPhone Finance Tracker app app in China that ended up being quite successful. Felix’s entrepreneurial side was influenced by his mom who ran a business where nurses came to your home, kind of like nurses on the go - he helped manage the business and learned more about team management and all the nitty gritty paperwork and budgeting that it takes to run a startup.

Remote teams are so hot right now

Along with their diverse experience, they’ve employed an international team residing across Europe. Sebastian hails from the great city of Oslo, Norway and Felix from beautiful Munich, Germany. And the rest of the team comes from Croatia, Poland, Romania and a smaller town in Germany called Kaiserslautern. It was interesting to hear that such a growing startup employs a remote team (apart from Sebastian and Felix working together of course)! How does it work so well? Well first off there is a lot of trust, freedom and transparency among the team and secondly they use a program called Sqwiggle (note: Sqwiggle will go offline on May 6th) which let’s you visually see the team and easily communicate via various platforms such as Slack or Skype. Felix mentioned that by having remote offices they can save costs on office space and spend it on bi- yearly team retreats - the last one was in Mallorca (me gusta).

Rome wasn’t built in a day and neither are startups

Although Aircloak has already experienced a lot of successes (i.e.featured in Forbes and part of the Cisco Entrepreneurs in Residence program) as a startup they’ve also had a lot of challenges. The most prominent one is the mismatch between enterprises and startups. Felix said “what’s killing you is not the company saying no, it’s the slow yeses.” And this is a problem faced by many startups likely working with big corporations. But to circumvent this roadblock they continue to find the right partners and right people to work with to help push things through.

Your data is getting safer

Aircloak focuses on big data and privacy and turns the archaic approach of managing this on its head by “streamlining the way to share and monetize data”, mentions Felix.  And essentially they “cloak” or protect data so that enterprises can use it but also protect the privacy of the data subjects at the same time. Don’t ask us about the anonymizing procedure, you’ll have to check out the website for more information.

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