Joining Gretel was the easiest decision in my career. John, Alex and I, as founders, have been in the security industry for almost two decades.  What has become clear to us is that every time there is a shift in a technology paradigm, there is a wave of new tools and companies to follow. It's as if you needed a new surfboard for every wave. We have taken a fundamentally different approach; developing tools that help build the fundamental building blocks of data privacy, so you can adapt and to evolve with new architectures and emerging technologies. At Gretel, we don’t want to solve for form-factors, we are creating tools that help build a foundation for data privacy.

To address fundamental data privacy issues, we believe the solution must be built into the development workflows. This means creating the right tools for the right jobs. Our tools are targeted for developers, engineers, scientists, and anyone who wants to work and build with data. Our privacy engineering tools address challenges that teams face at various maturity stages of their data journey. Gretel's simple APIs for privacy engineering let you leverage the knowledge and capabilities of the world's best privacy engineering teams, giving you superpowers. Gretel makes it easy for teams to tap into the power of thousands of privacy engineers, through just a few APIs.

We are working to make data safe, so everyone can build with it. Data privacy and compliance is already a difficult problem and as we transition more towards an immersive world where every signal from us can be collected, it's becoming orders of magnitude more complex. The technology problem is complicated, but the more complicated problem is how do you design a business model that aligns users and organizations to trust each other? As we transition further into this immersive world, we will expose our more vulnerable selves. The right to retain and use that data needs to come with trust. Companies hoarding and monetizing this data today have not earned our trust. At Gretel, we believe there is a better way, and we want to enable a world where any company can find, share, and publish safe synthetic data.

Most value will be created via interactions with data. The faster, easier and safer those interactions, the higher the advantage and value. Currently, teams have to deal with what we call the “two out of three problems.”  Teams can build fast (time), build safely (trust), or build with real data (accuracy), but they only get to pick two out of the three. Gretel enables teams to build using all three. This is at the core of what we call Privacy Engineering as a Service.

One element that became apparent to me over the last 12 years of building startups has been how you structure the team is paramount. Not just the quality of the team, but complementary skills, and an environment where individuals can truly trust each other. At Gretel, these qualities come through from every member of the team. Further, the team is passionately aligned on the problem we are trying to solve: making data safe. This trust and alignment is necessary for us at Gretel because of the magnitude of the problem we have chosen to tackle.  This enables our team to operate with more ownership and autonomy.  

This is a difficult problem we are dedicated to solving, and the largest challenges are still ahead of us. However, the opportunity is enormous and most of the innovations and fun are ahead of us. I am incredibly excited to go on this journey with the entire Gretel team and community, and if this is something that interests you drop us a line, as we would love for you to join us.