JetLib News

You must be the most is one of the big storiesworking at the time. And I was reading articles that were basically now No, that term, I think, was not used so much at that time. And I thought there was something wrong in the state of Denmark that, you know, in the blink of an eye somebody could just tattoo you forever in a way that was unfair or inaccurate or libelous or alternately just invade your privacy and exposed the personal information about you on the internet in a way that was very invasive.

And I realized that the entire, kind of, momentum of the internet was, was facilitating, and I couldn’t get the n this country, you put up or you shut up. So I started this company.

Two questions. Firstly, what were you doing in Louisville, Kentucky? And secondly, you’re a graduate of Harvard did you study this whole issue of privacy and reputation at Law School?

I was clerking for the Chief Judge of the 6th Circuit Court of Appealsn Kentucky wne of these quizzes yourself, it’s kinda hard.

No, I didn’t study this at.privacy but not realow and who are big voices, t was not focused on this. I just stumbled into the topic, and it turned out to be a, you know, a foreshadowing of what we now know is important.

The Wall Street Journal has said that this is a hot new area of privacy. But it, it’s always seemthere was going to be a need to protect people’s privacy on the internet.

Well, I think there has been a low level anxiety about privacy for a long time. When it comes to the Internet, it has been surging in prominence recently because the, the invasion has become more obvious and the consequences are now becoming more obvious. And, just a few days ago the FTC approved the launch of a, of a company that is doing manual searches for social media information about you and is gonna be using that information for background checks for.

Which company is that?

It’s called Social Intelligence. And, there are a lot of companies that are lining up to try to do that. And the Wallstreet Journal reported last year that, just last year, that, that insurance companies are mining social media data for information about you, presumably to assess premium levels and so forth.

So, the consequences are just coming into focus and the scope of the problem is coming into focus. But, a number of people have predicted that privacy would be some kind of topic for at least some time, though privacy is a phrase that covers all matters of sins and it’s kind offrustratingly non specificthere ‘s a lot of topics, there’s a lot of received wisdom in Silicon Valley.

There’s a lot of acerbic and confident received wisdom in Silicon Valley and so for a while we have had to lean against the acerbic conventional commercial interests and venture guys who are trying to get into the field. art people building interesting products and interesting companies to lean against the entire infrastructure of the internet.

Which is something free, which again is based on getting people using it free, collecting t

Thansk for that. So, we are…

Thanks for what?

The questions. For asking questions. The seed round was led by Mike Maples, who now goes by Floodgate. I think you’ve interviewed him, right? And then our B was led by Kleiner Perkins, it was tenchline at Kleiner, and David Cowen, Bessemer Venture Partners. They did it together, our B. And then our C round that we did last year was led by Jafco.

Nick Sturiale at Jafco.

What kind of number can you…

Yeah, so it’s public information that we’ve raised about twenty-five million dollars, to date.

And was that a struggle? Particularly at the beginning do you
You are going Easy so far, you know, we have been lucky in the sense that we oughly break even from the most of the history of the company and so we never had to take money quote on quote. So our business model is a, so we are able to get deals that wereeasonably, you know, reasonably nice thankfully.

Our business models are consumer subscriptions or prosumer subscription business models so you pay us yearare in a free economyand it was interesting, it’s really expanded our funnel. We’ve learned a lot about what works, what doesn’t work, with different kind of demographics and psycho graphics of customers and we’re considering even giving away more stuff free, because, because our technology has gotten more complicated and more deep of the last four or five years.

Our ability to start giving away somethings free is getting easier because we built up You asked about the Tech Presshe way any other Silicon Valley person is. Sust curious. But aleven among technology journalist has sort of a notion that we can becomeThis new, hot company, XYZ, whind hyped. And it turns out that it’s not important to anybody outside of the Silicon Valley buzz scenkind of the hat your productsnot really wellThen the high can make you, but can also kill you.

And so we just not, I just never been sure Tech Press get you customer. I think TechPress can get you some TechPress. Not always get you customer. Some people have great experience but we never persue it.

I presume you’ve been getting some great press in Time magazine and The Wall Street Journal. You seem to be quoted every week on privacy and on the reputation economy. I’m assuming that quite effective in term building good client base?

Well, thankfully we have become, I think, the spokes people on the topic of reputation and privacy. On the topic reputation and privacy in your romantic life, in professional life, your economic life and professional life is clearly growing. People are trying to measure influence, trying to measure reputation, trying to measure your privacy and vulnebility.

That ‘s also interesting economic models to be built with on top of data about you. How do you compare to your peers? How you compare to everybody who went to your college or your You grcan touch so many different kinds of stories in the mainstream press, consumer press, financial press, and we’ve been lucky that we’ve been part of that and in a lot of those t

For you it cost a lot and let me tell you why.

Right!

It cost a lot because you’re very prominent on the internet. So, the advantage that you have, is also sort of your disadvantage. The advantage is that Andrew Keen has a very large microphone or megaphone. Right, you’re on TechCrunch, you’re a writer, you’re a blogger, you ‘re at conferences, you a series of publications that you control.

And so, in a lot of ways, if people want to learn more about you, they can look to your content and if you get into a tussle with someone on the web, you can easily with your giant microphone respond to the criticism if you so choose, right? 99.999% of people either don’t have that microphone or can’t be bothered, or don’t want one.

Right? Or can’t generate one if they don’t want one.

But they’re also a lot more vulnerable.

Exactly. So, I don’t think that it’s fair to hold the average person to the same standards.

Well, let’s deal with me first. Let me go on to this, the so-called average person. What would it cost if I wanted to clean up my reputation?

I didn’t come prepared with this, with a deep dive of your results, but…

What are we talking about? Fifty dollars a month, five hundred dollars a month, a one time fee?

No. It would be for you many thousands of dollars.

Serious?

Yes, over an extended, extended field. So what would it actually look like? So, you are someone who, you know, may when people look you up on the web, people will find your content. Then people find content that is part of your cut and thrust kind of content. And actually kind of knowing you well enough to really guess, you kind of like that, you kind of Yes, my brain.

Yeah, iyou know, really not about your work, or about your point of view. Even if they didn’t, you know, not calling you, wrong and dumb. They’re just saying, that this is something about personally that they have exposed.

Right.

That might transgress. And, I don’t know why that would have to be the third or second or first thing that people see about you, when they, when they look you up, right? Because youintellectual, probably is what they’d call you now. And you want to be judged on the merits or the demerits of your opinion and you evidence, not how you live your life.

Well lets talk aboutthe bread and butter of your business, the non public person. The person who has to be online and may have a facebook account.work is forcing them to be in the reputation economy. And when you google them, something comes up they don’t like. And they wost of our users use free products.

Let me tell you what they are. So, it, om Facebook. And, so you can post to your heart’s content. Nobody can ever see them, unless you permission them into the individual post or phofree , no credit card, nothing. You just use itlike this, thankfully. And we laun a delete button for Facebook, so that if you want every post you ever make to be encrypted even from your friends, one month or one year after you posted.

So that you don’t have any kind of detritus, or smoking gun behind you, for whatever reason. You can’t be judged, you can’t be evaluated. Your interactions can’t be put into a machine of tool that’s for you, you can go to our free engine at reputation.com. We set up free engines that allow on the webFree tools.

Then if you want to remove your personal information from databases and start to control what personal information is out there from different databases on the web. And also make sure that the mail that you receive at your house, the physical mails are the stuff you want to receive, and you want to block cookies that follow you around the web, you can use our privacy product, My Privacy, that very simply 80 bucks a year, 75 bucks a year depending on which landing page you go to.

We’ll block all that.

Is that the core of your business?

It ‘s probably the fastest selling product in our business. And then if you want to control your reputation, if you want to move from privacy to reputation, and then either establish a reputation on the internet for your professional life - which a lot of professional people do. Or you got a problem on the web and someone’s demeaning you or someone’s publishing new things that’s very personal about you that doesn’t belong on the internet or doesn’t belong to the – it’s the first or second thing that people see.

You don’t want that to define you. Then for between hundreds of dollars and thousands of dollars, we would push that stuff down the search engines so it’s just harder to find it. It doesn’t disappear. ut it no longer defines you because it’s not the first, second or third thing that you will see.

Athere is one component butrofile or