[This transcript has been automatically generated by a digital software and will therefore  contain errors and typos. Please kindly take note of this and only rely on the digital transcript for reference.]

00:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is Ted, your friend and host speaking now Are you someone who is very concerned about the protection of your personal data? Or have you ever wondered about what it is like to crowdfund for your company? If you said yes to either of these questions, then this episode is for you. Today, we have Mr. Mike Adi, who’s the CEO and founder of TT, a company that he started to address the fundamental issues in how our personal data is collected, used, and monetized with his expertise in bringing data driven, b2c and b2b products to the market. Mike is now leaving TV to provide its users with a system that is transparent and user centric that allows them to decide what do you want to do without personal data. With a simple user interface, Tiki aims to provide its users with the decision to not share their personal data at all, or to share anonymize an encrypted version of the data while making money at the same time, as Mike shares. His aim is to empower the individual user and democratize the protection of their personal data. Now, this is a particularly interesting topic because Mike shared in the conversation itself, that in the dark web, you can actually buy a US citizen social security number for about $4 only. That’s a shocking fact for me. And I definitely think that more can be done for the protection of personal data. Now on top of that, Tiki is also currently going a crowdfunding round. And we actually follow certain papers to the SEC, so I should got Mike to share the process of what it is like and the benefits of doing the same. So guys, if you’d like to support the show in the best we can do this is to subscribe, leave a review and to share with somebody who find it useful as well. Now it’s a way to say thank you to you guys. If you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts by the end of September, you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. one lucky winner will be chosen at random. And now guys, let’s dive right in. Hey, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s so good to have you here.

 

01:45

Good to be here.

 

01:46

Mike. Let’s have a very simple icebreaker. Could you share with us so we can all get to know you a bit better? Who is Mike? Adi, when it isn’t working?

 

01:54

I am I ever not working? might be the real question. I mean, these days it’s working. Yeah. So Mike is certainly workaholic. I don’t think of it the same way. Like, yes, it’s work. But my passion has always been in creating things. I think of it more like if you’re a musician or an artist, like you’re kind of always creating things and thinking of things and building things and starting stuff self into the crowd. Yeah. And so that’s it’s really much more like that starting a business, I think of as much more creative than tactical, because it’s all about coming up with something from scratch and then building, you know, the whole thing around the idea, as opposed to you know, just coding something, for example.

 

02:42

I’m very cool. Now, Mike, could you share with us a little bit about your latest business venture, which is called Tiki? Could you explain in your own words, what is Tiki about?

 

02:50

All right, so Tiki was started out of one real simple problem that we all face. Our data is a disaster. We all know it right? It’s being it’s used to manipulate us and controls. But maybe you’ve seen the social dilemma. We’ve all just faced this problem, right? Like we’re insidious ads follow us all over the internet, you never know who has your data. Good luck reading. I mean, least you’re a lawyer, you can read those giant privacy policies, but the rest of us are going through it. Like I don’t know what this is right, like. So that’s the problem. And so we wanted to fix that specific problem around data. And we believe that the problem can’t be solved. From the business side of things. It can only be solved from the user side of things, because the data belongs to the users. It’s your data. I mean, there are laws all over the world that state quite clearly that is the case. Yet you have no right of real ownership. There’s no way to exercise those rights. There’s no way to decide who can use your data, how they can use it, if they sell your data, why don’t you get paid for it? All of these things that we associate with ownership are not applied to data, I often joke would be like if you bought a car and the car company started loaning your car out on the weekends, and collecting money on that, and then didn’t even pay you. And you’d be like what’s going on here, guys, but that is what happens to your data. And so we wanted to flip the whole paradigm on its head and just let people choose.

 

04:14

Mike, before we speak a little bit more about a democratization of data protection with the users as offered by Tiki, could you explain to us in a little bit more about the dangers of poor data protection?

 

04:25

I mean, it depends on you as a person, but data breaches and leaks are so prevalent today that I don’t even think they make the news anymore. Right? Like, it wasn’t even that big of a deal news wise, you know, when Facebook leaked 530 million people information, right. All right, like we’re just we’re just so numb was getting so common these days that people would think twice about it anymore. Yeah, I mean, the number that blows my mind is you can buy social security numbers in the United States. That’s your like, legal identifying number that’s tied to your credit card. And your bank accounts and everything social security number. And you could buy one of those on the dark web for about $4. It’s gotten that bad. That’s how little it costs to buy someone’s identity.

 

05:13

Oh, my gosh, just $4 $4. So Mike, could you explain to ask the solution that he’s actually providing?

 

05:20

Yeah, it’s a very simple app, you just download the app, you can link your accounts, whatever accounts and we’re building out more and more integrations as we speak, but you link your accounts to it, and you get really, very simple features, you can see what data companies collect on you, you can choose how they use that data by swiping left or right on it, you know, some people joke, it’s almost like Tinder for your data, you just swipe left or swipe right, and make choices. And then the third piece is if you want to, you can opt in to monetize your data, your data is worth money, businesses will pay you for it. And we actually do a full analyzation of all of your data on your phone at the edge level. So we never have any of it and will allow you to monetize it. So you can choose which companies can buy your data, how they can use it, what they can do with it all in a safe and secure manner. So they don’t know who you are, they can’t accidentally leak your data, right? It’s safe for the business, it’s safe for the user. It’s a true, you know, transparent market where the users decide, hey, I’m cool with this company, but not so cool with that company, because I don’t trust them, or I don’t like them or whatever. So we allow you to make all those choices about your data, just rights of ownership.

 

06:30

So if I understand this correctly, if I swipe left, then I’m going to say no, I’m not going to share my data by swipe right. I will be sharing my data and I’m going to be paid for it on the basis test anonymized Is that right?

 

06:41

Yeah, pretty much. A great example is, you can one of the first things we’ve been building is, so you can turn off facial recognition tracking and Facebook, most people don’t know that you can turn this off, it’s on for default. In most countries in the world, you can just disable it, there’s a setting. But good luck finding that setting, figure out how to turn it off. It’s not labeled, it’s like you know, something confusing.

 

07:03

Your company says you make it so hard for us to choose to protect our own personal data, because frankly, they need our data to make money.

 

07:10

Exactly. There’s no motivation for them. In fact, there’s a decent device for it, right, Facebook wants access to your facial right to your your image. So that way they can train facial recognition technology, which they can use to monetize all sorts of different things like more targeted ads, and Instagram ads is a very common use case of what Facebook does with your data. So but you’re allowed to turn it off, like that setting exists in your Facebook, but it’s buried way deep down. And so we just make that easy, we put a nice, pretty card up that says, hey, this is what they’re doing, swipe left to turn it off. Or if you’re cool, you can talk swipe right and keep it off. That’s it, you don’t have to like go digging around, we take care of it, we prioritize all these issues for you. So you know, the goal is to get people in maybe make five choices a week for you know, 30 seconds, you can spend 30 seconds a week, swipe left on a few cards, you’re done right? After a couple months, your data is all wrangled in, you’ve got great control over what’s going on with your your identity. You know,

 

08:06

in fact, in the current state of affairs, users don’t even have the choice to monetize their own data, even though the companies are collecting it. So I guess Tiki is actually giving the power back to the people by allowing them to make that choice.

 

08:18

That’s the whole point, give the power back to the users, your data is hyper valuable. And it really all started because we started thinking about this problem, right? Like, you can’t just live in a world where you just take away all of company’s data, right? Like, all that’s gonna happen is they’re gonna do weird, shady things, to figure out how to get to data, right? Like the report came out that p&g invested $100 million into a research center in China to figure out ways to get around Apple’s privacy changes, right? That’s like that’s what companies will do, because they care about your data that much. So you have to build a model where they can still get access to data, but it’s on the user’s terms where the users decide, and the users are compensated fairly for

 

09:01

1. So Mike, here’s my question. How do you think the bigger data companies are going to react to this? So there was a bit of an upheaval of you said, when Apple first introduces new data protection updates for his users? How do you think the bigger companies will react to Tiki?

 

09:15

Well, I think some of them are going to be ecstatic about it. And I think others are going to be very concerned and upset. You know, companies like Apple, I actually would guess they’re gonna rally behind this, this kind of concept, because it’s very much in line with how they build a lot of their stuff. Right. It’s privacy first, and it’s encrypted. It’s Yeah, it’s about the users making their choices, right. It’s building technology for people not building technology for businesses, right. And so it’s much more in line with how Apple thinks of the world. So I think that they’ll probably get behind some semblance of this or develop a similar kind of concept. Then you have other companies like Google, right or Facebook, and they’re entire business model is based on the monetization of data in a smarter way. Yeah, it’s like you’re heading down a path. And it’s so hard to steer the ship in a different direction, right? Like you, they can’t turn it around and go a different way. Right? So whether, yeah, people there believe in privacy and transparency is almost irrelevant. You’ve got 10,000 people all going in one direction, and you want to turn it around and go in a different direction, right?

 

10:26

It’s gonna be hot, it’s very hard. So Mike, you shared earlier that the users data is never stored with Tiki servers or cloud. And if I understand correctly, the data is only stored on the user’s individual phones or mobile devices. So the way I understand it is you chose to structure TV this way, to not only be in compliance with the different data privacy protection laws around the world, but you also ensure that the points of failure in terms of the protection of the data is really minimized to only beyond the user’s phone itself. Am I right?

 

10:57

Yeah, exactly. There’s this concept in data security, where, for a long time companies, and spent countless millions of dollars and engineers trying to secure every little piece, like secure this server and that database, and inevitably, you fail, because you’ve got too many points of attack. And recent, you know, there’s a whole other approach that you can take, just secure the data itself, right. If you encrypt the data, it doesn’t matter what server it goes on, it doesn’t matter where it goes, you’ve secured the piece, that’s important. You can hack into the server, but you can’t get the data. And so the idea is simply secure the data itself, not the device, not the network, not the database is none of these other things. And so, where the data lives already, it’s already on your phone. So where it is on your phone right now in your pocket is the most secure place it’s gonna be. So we, we encrypt it there, we anonymize it there, all of our processing happens on the phone. And then if you do decide to sell your data, that anonymization happens on your phone, so when it leaves your phone, it can’t ever get traced back to you no matter what happens. And so that cool, yeah, then it doesn’t really matter if you get hacked, right? Because they can hack, like you can hack our server, we don’t have any. Yeah. It’s, there’s nothing you can get,

 

12:16

I see this a very smart way to approach it. So Mike, let’s circle back to how you structured the user interface for Tiki itself. So you’ve spoken about how you’ve adopted this swipe left swipe right function that is very familiar in dating applications? What were the considerations that went into the design of Tiki itself? And how did you want to make it as user friendly as possible? Yeah, it

 

12:38

was about user friendliness. But it we wanted to make, like data doesn’t have to be complicated, right? these choices, like if you, you can make a decision about data complicated by using fancy words like facial recognition, tracking, and, you know, audience profiling all these terms. Or you could just make it simple Facebook is tracking your face. This is why do you want this or not right? For something to to reach a broad audience of people, you can’t expect them to come in with an engineering degree. And understand, right, you need to make that you need to make presenting information in a way that anyone can make a choice. In a couple seconds, we all make 1000s of decisions every day throughout our lives. They don’t have to be complicated data never needed to be as complicated as made it. So our job is not to actually all of our basically the entire job of Tiki is just to make the information presentable to a user, or anybody can understand it in a couple seconds. We’re not gonna people aren’t going to spend minutes or hours you could do all of the things we do right now, if you want to spend, you know, dozens of hours every week turning off settings and aggregating your data and selling on a plot like you could do all the things that we’re doing. It’s not like we created some new thing.

 

13:56

This frees me in a way that doesn’t make it easy. Yeah. But because you had to jump through hoops to fire really just make it happen.

 

14:02

I’m not going to spend 1215 hours a week trying to turn off settings, right? Like that’s crazy.

 

14:08

Yeah, no one wants to do that. So let’s talk about the pineapple mascot for Tiki. It’s super cute. Let me just say that. But what are the considerations that were behind the design? My guess is that it’s back to the point of helping to make data protection, a topic that may not be the most interesting into something that’s easily digestible for you know, just the common user as well.

 

14:28

Yeah. It’s not everything needs to be scary and difficult and, or boring, right? Like every, every tech company like hat looks and feels the same. They say the same things. They they all look the same, right? And they all got the same blue and the same little icon, right? Yeah, the whole point was we are not like other tech companies, okay. And data doesn’t have to be some scary thing that you need to be an engineer. So we didn’t want to look engineering like we didn’t want to look like a They’re tech companies. And so we picked bright poppy colors. We picked a fun pineapple that dances around and waves at chia, right? Like the it, it was to go against the grain it was to make it a little bit fun. You know, people’s eyes tend to glaze over when you start talking about data and security, right? So cache pineapple. Yeah, it was making it a little, just not everything needs to be like the sky is falling, right? Like nobody wants to open up an app every day and be like, ah, the world is ending, right?

 

15:29

So guys, I think a great lesson that Mike is sharing is about making your user interface as smooth as possible for the users. You know, where Mike started adopting the swipe left swipe right function does very familiar to dating apps immediately, my first reaction or thought was that Tiki will be a very easy app for the users to use as well and makes use of the pineapple mascot, which is very cute as I shared, go check it out actually makes the topic of data protection a lot more palatable and easier to digest, or relatable for the average user. So if your business model or your user interface is not as smooth or as intuitive as you can be for your users, it may be a good idea to see if you can make any changes that could actually help your users appreciate the service that you’re offering a little bit better. Now, Mike, even though I understand that he is an app development, there has been a huge number of people who have actually signed up and expressed an interest to use the app. Can you share with us how you achieve this feat?

 

16:21

Yeah, it’s been crazy and exciting. I mean, we started the company, January, effectively, right? We incorporated December of last year. So we’ve been, we only have a whole year as a company yet, right? Like we’re brand new. And because we wanted to build something that was so different, and against the grain, and so for the users, what we did was we started by just putting the idea on the internet, not like we didn’t write some code and build some app, we didn’t raise any money, we just put the idea out there to see if people would care about it. And 1000s and 1000s of people signed up so many people that our waitlist is now 120,000 people 100,000 It’s a log waitlist.

 

17:01

That’s crazy. Yeah, shows that people really want this service.

 

17:05

Yeah, people really care about their data, right? Like, you know, we all pretend like Ah, you know, the world did start data, they’re taking it, but people care, we all care, you know, we’d rather not be exploited then be exploited, right? And so we care about it. And we’re only going to care about it more, right? And I think if it like data is the currency of the future, right? We’ve, for the last 100 years, maybe 200 years, we cared about, you know, gold and silver and money. But going forward, as we become more and more digital natives. It’s all about data, who’s got data on what and so, you know, if you don’t care about it, now, you’re sure gonna care about it in the near future. And I want that power to be in people’s hands, not company’s hands. So we put that message out there, and people signed up. And so we went to work, you know, now we’re building an app, we raised a little bit of money, we just opened a crowdfunding campaign on start engine, Fast Start edge, comm slash Tiki to raise some more money, because we want to raise money from the users to fund this thing for the users. But yeah, it’s been a whirlwind, that’s for sure. It’s a long waitlist and a lot of people to fill.

 

18:09

So Mike, as I understand it, TV is coming looking to crowdfund about $1.07 million on start engine COMM And in order to do so you actually had to file an offering memorandum with the SEC. So could you explain to us why did you choose to take this approach and actually go for a crowdfunding round? Why do you not choose to go to a venture capital firm for a dark investment instead?

 

18:28

Yeah. Because of the users, right, like the whole point of cheeky is to build something for the users. You know, one of the biggest problems which I’ve faced in the past, raising money is when you raise money from investors, obligations, and expectations are very become very different. Second, that happens. It’s about you know, revenue, it’s about profitability. It’s often about short term gains, it’s not always necessarily about the longest term process. It’s not about the values necessarily, right, you just different, right, it becomes very different very quickly. And we were early, we are early, and we want to stay user focused. And so a way to guarantee user centricity and focus on the user is to make the users your investors, right, because then they’ll never let you do something that’s going to negatively affect them. The shareholders in your company are saying, No, you can’t do this, we don’t want to do this, this is gonna This is gonna negatively affect me as a user of your product. And so that was that was the motivation was put, make the users the investors.

 

19:30

So guys a great point. And Mike just shared is the strategic alignment that you want to have within your company and with your investors. So when your company is looking to fundraise, please have a very good think about who you’re going to be inviting into your company as shareholders, because their interests and their strategy goals would definitely have an impact as to your short term, medium term and long term goals and how you want to grow your company. What are your thoughts on this, Mike?

 

19:52

Yeah, they’re gonna have a very strong voice and it’s hard to do, right? And I get it. I like, Ben, there’s so many times when you’ve got a payroll to make, and you’re running out of money, and you’re like, Well, you know, it’s either we go out of business or we take money from this other person who, you know, they seem okay, but I don’t really know them. Right. That’s how it’s a trap. Everybody falls into it, it’s a almost impossible trap to avoid. So, you know, yes, you have to start early and identify who and why and be aware. But early, the earlier the investor, the more say they’re going to have. It’s just how it goes right there. They’re going to have a lot of say a lot of weight, they’re going to be in there with you on a very regular basis, giving you advice expecting you to take that advice, it’s often they may have a board seat, and so it can quickly spiral.

 

20:47

So Mike, could you share with us the process of the filing of the offering memorandum with the SEC, what kind of issues and compliance did you have to meet before the document could actually properly go online?

 

20:56

Yeah, it was a lot longer than we had hoped for, or thought it was going to be it took us about three months in total prepare, maybe closer for. And so you need to know, like, you have to have the normal things like CPA audited financials, right. And like, that’s a no brainer. But then you also have to have like risk declarations, you have to have all your like, paperwork for startups is usually iffy, right at best. Like, you’ve seen this before, I’m sure right there, you got some paperwork kind of, right? He that doesn’t fly, right? You have to have all your safe notes perfectly documented, you have to have all your IP assignment agreements, you have to have your NDA is you got to have your incorporation documents, they got to be like stamped, not just like some people signed, like, so you need all of that stuff. And then there’s just a lot of additional paperwork you got to get through terms of how are you going to spend the money? What are you going to use it for? Why are you raising the capital, who’s involved in the company, bad actor checks, they’re just a lot of these little things. And it can be a bit tricky, because the way the words you pick mean a whole lot when you’re filing with the SEC, not so much when you’re talking one on one, or you’re raising money privately, like you can have projections for next year. And they can just be projections. And if you don’t hit them, find your startup. It doesn’t fly when you’re filing with the SEC. You can’t be like, oh, here’s our revenue projections for next year. And that’s why the value of the company is the value it is today. And then just not even hit it right. You can it opens up all sorts of potential lawsuits. So going through compliance is a pain. a funny story I’ll share is it took us like three weeks to solve this one problem with everyone getting through this. We have our we have like a world class data privacy lawyer on our team. His name is Peter MacLaughlin is like world class. And he’s our outside counsel. And so we had listed on our page, because you know, it’s really amazing to have somebody like that as part of the team. Right, especially in the data privacy space. So we listed Peter as our counsel as our data privacy counsel. And they’re like, Well, does it work for you? How does he work for you? His LinkedIn profile doesn’t show that he works for you like, Well, yeah, he works for another firm, but he’s our counsel. And so we went three weeks and what they made me do all we had to do was put one word in front of it outside counsel on data privacy, as opposed to Council on data. privacy, took us three weeks to insert that one word, right. But that’s the kind of stuff that that’s the kind of things that come up when you’re filing for the SEC, because it matters, right? You know, you don’t want to misrepresent it doesn’t directly work for us.

 

23:35

So that’s the issue on the choice of word really matters. Oh, no, my you had an earlier project called acoustic stream there understand you. So when for crowdfunding, how do you experience this back then affect your current approach with Tiki?

 

23:47

Yeah, that was Yeah, we did a Kickstarter? Wow, probably almost almost 10 years ago. Now, very early on in Kickstarter. Early on in my career, we did a Kickstarter, and it went well. It did very well, at the time. It turned into a whole other mess of EA and talk about some other day around how that turned into the business that became blue stream that turned into a whole world of data. But the things we learned from it was people, you have to put your money, you have to put yourself in the mindset of somebody who knows nothing about what you’re doing and what they care about. Little things that I would never have thought they cared a lot about. They care. Like what is the T shirt look like? Right? Like you’re giving away a free t shirt if they really care. I like things that you’re like, That doesn’t matter. Like we’re worried on like trying to hit timelines on you know, injection molding and they’re like, Yeah, but that’s a T shirt look like what materials are made out of. So that that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, that sort of stuff. Right? They don’t know they, they rarely coming at it from the mindset of they’ve built a company, right? Like they’re just people are interested in your idea. So you have to you have to bring them with You through the whole process, you have to show them what you’re doing, why you’re doing it explain your mindset playing, why you’re thinking is ask them for their input, get their feedback, right? You have to engage them with no expectations, which is hard if you’re deep in the startup world, right? Like, everybody I talked to as started, like, two or three companies, and they’re like thinking about it and do, it’s just, but when you go on, you know, Kickstarter or start engine, they don’t have that experience. So you have to, if the walk them through the journey.

 

25:32

So Mike, could you talk to us a little bit more about the talented people that you’ve attracted to join you on your journey with Tiki?

 

25:38

Yeah, we have a really, really cool team. We want to we want to go start this idea originally was me and a guy named Brian gakken. Is sits on our board. See inside director. His background is actually he’s he’s used to be the try and get his title, right. Don’t hold me to this. But it was I believe he was the head of global systems engineering for Western Digital. I know they have giant titles. He was a big wake over Western Digital figuring out where do you put petabytes of data. So he came, he came out of the data space. And I came out of the data space building software for these big companies. And so you had two engineers, right? Thinking about this problem. This is a this is a person problem. It’s a problem that impacts people not technology. And so we went out and found people to add to the team who are connected to people. Alright, so we added two people, as co founders, woman named Anna, who is our CPO, and she’s an expert in how do you present information in digestible ways for people? Right? How do you take data and present it away? She’s the one who came up with the pineapple who dances around right like, She’s right. So that kind of that’s, yeah. And so and then we brought on Shane Faria, who’s, who comes out of the customer experience world. So he built a bunch of customer experience platforms in the meal prep space, originally. And then he was a teacher of students and attract coach, and he’s, he’s very like, like touchy feely coach type of person who’s like, he connects with humans at a very, like, emotional level, not at like, technical engineering level. And so we added them to the team to help us figure out like, how do we present this to people. And then the last person we added, his name is Barry O’Connor. And he comes out of the data monetization space. So he’s unlike all the rest of us, as he jokes is, if you caught me in two, I would be pure commercial. All he cares about is like, how do I make money? How do I how does this become a business? How do I sell this data? Right? Like, that’s how he thinks about the problem. And it’s important to have different people who represent different stakeholders at the table. And so he comes out of the CME space, he was one of the very early people who was like trying to sell telecom data back to like Apple for like figuring out when they needed to repair phones and otaa phones, right? He comes out of mana, he’s been selling, he’s been selling monetizing data for like 20 or 30 years, right, like, so he he outranks all of us when it comes to that. So we brought someone in who knows that space? And how do you like, really? What do you like? How are companies buying data today? Because they don’t buy data like you think they buy data?

 

28:19

Yeah, it sounds like you’re very good mix of the different talents that you have in your team, you have a mix of the engineers and the commercial guys. And I can see you as you went about trying to have a very well rounded team.

 

28:29

Yeah, you want to build a rounded team? I mean, there are clearly holes that we need to fill, and we will continue. But yeah, that’s the idea is you don’t want a company of a bunch of people that are just like you, you want people who represent a very diverse background and skill set and bring different things to the table. Right. At the end of the day, we’re building something for the people of the world, not just, you know, engineers like myself, right, like, so you need people who understand and represent them at the table. Hmm.

 

28:59

So Mike, can we actually circle back on to the topic of crowdfunding? What advice would you have for an entrepreneur who’s thinking of taking a similar path

 

29:06

like you? Well, plan, it’s gonna take a lot longer than you hoped. But I actually really strongly recommended. It’s been good to us so far. We raised a lot of money very quickly already. But most importantly, it’s extraordinarily founder friendly. And I think that’s really important early on, right? Like, it’s why we saw a big push with safe notes for pre seed type of raises, because they’re a little more founder friendly. Well, this is way even more founder friendly, right? early on when you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing. The most important thing is, learn from your users build a community around it. Well, that community can help fuel the investment, and it can all kind of come together without all this other noise that comes right. It’s important at some point to have people holding you accountable to hitting revenue goals. But that shouldn’t be Like, you know, the first six months of your company, right? You haven’t even built your product yet, like you’ve, you’re still trying to figure out what you’re going to be what you’re going to do, how’s it going to work, right. And so it’s a amazing funding vehicle. for that. I don’t know if I would do it if I was a b2b company, to be honest. But if you’re a b2c company like us, not only is it very hard to raise money in the b2c space, you’re already by default, you have to build an audience, you have to go out and get people to care about what you’re doing. And those people are the perfect audience to raise money from. So the way I think of it is, if we raise all of the million, it’ll probably come from close to 1000 different investors, which is crazy to have 1000 different investors, but all of those investors are now advocates of your product.

 

30:49

So your investors become your advocates as well. Yeah, cuz

 

30:52

they’re like, it’s in their best interest to try to get all their friends to install the app. Right? So you’re, you’re mobilizing an entire community of people out there promoting your stuff. They gave you money to promote your company. So it’s, it’s fantastic alignment. Yeah. So I strongly recommend it, even with all the pain, it’s just going to get easier and easier. Shout out to the guys over at gust, right? They helped us get all this stuff set up very early on with all the documentation and setup. It just, there are tools out there that make it easier to get these things. And it started. And people were fantastic, right? Like, yes, it was a pain to get it up and running. But they have their own in house crowdfunding, like compliance team that helps you set all the stuff and make sure you don’t step in it with the SEC. So I would recommend giving it a very strong Look, if you’re, if you’ve got any kind of real user engagement around your product. It’s it’s a very exciting opportunity.

 

31:54

So Mike, what do you hope to see in the data protection space moving forward?

 

31:57

Well, there’s what I wish and what I think is realistic, right? Like, I wish that people were anonymous, and that they had ultimate control over what’s going on. Right. I wish companies knew how to properly stored secure data, I wish, you know, people spent the money required to make sure these things were properly taken care of that they properly valued data. I think a big problem is companies don’t value data. And so they view it as a cost center. And so costs get cut. And that’s how you end up with breaches. But I’d settle for users being able to consciously make a choice. That’s it like not asking for a lot. I just get rid of these stupid 40 page privacy policies. And just make it easy where like, you can just tick a box and say, Yes, I want to do this. No, I don’t want to do that. Right. Like I don’t, let’s just start there. Like let’s make let’s allow people to be informed and choose And out of that will build all the rest of this stuff.

 

32:57

fully agree. So Mike, if the listeners only remember one thing for today’s conversation, would you like it to be

 

33:03

my Tiki calm, Tiki data, your data, your decisions, start engine comm slash Tiki invest in us would be cool. But honestly, just your support. And knowing that some people are out here trying to build some technology that could hopefully fix this mess, right? Like we’re doing our best to make something for y’all. And we love your support. So like, that’s it right? Just check us out. Take a look at what we’re doing. Tell your friends, right, this normal promotional things, you can find us we’re on the internet. We have every social channel, you could imagine, come talk to us, right? Like, we just we really are trying to figure out how to solve this mess.

 

33:45

So Mike, how can listeners get in contact with view? If they want to speak to you about Tiki?

 

33:50

Yeah, so you can email me at Mike mit.com. You can also if you go to my Tiki calm at the bottom, there’s all of our social channels. You can dm us, you can find us I’m on Twitter, you know, I’m I’m all over the internet, if you can easily find me. And if you really care about we’re doing go invest at start engine. It’s like the like, invest in then you can talk to me all you want about all the great plans we got coming up.

 

34:17

Okay, Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been such a pleasure having you here. Thanks, Dad. This is wonderful. guys. Thank you for joining Mike and I on today’s conversation. I hope you’ve learned a little bit about a crowdfunding process for companies and the data protection industry in general. So guys, if you enjoyed today’s episode, and you’d like to show your support, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this with somebody who will find it useful as well. And as a way to say thank you to you guys. you subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts by the end of September, then you may stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. one lucky winner will be chosen at the end of the month. That’s all for me today. I’ll see you next time.

[This transcript has been automatically generated by a digital software and will therefore  contain errors and typos. Please kindly take note of this and only rely on the digital transcript for reference.]

00:00

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. This is Ted, your friend and host speaking now Are you someone who is very concerned about the protection of your personal data? Or have you ever wondered about what it is like to crowdfund for your company? If you said yes to either of these questions, then this episode is for you. Today, we have Mr. Mike Adi, who’s the CEO and founder of TT, a company that he started to address the fundamental issues in how our personal data is collected, used, and monetized with his expertise in bringing data driven, b2c and b2b products to the market. Mike is now leaving TV to provide its users with a system that is transparent and user centric that allows them to decide what do you want to do without personal data. With a simple user interface, Tiki aims to provide its users with the decision to not share their personal data at all, or to share anonymize an encrypted version of the data while making money at the same time, as Mike shares. His aim is to empower the individual user and democratize the protection of their personal data. Now, this is a particularly interesting topic because Mike shared in the conversation itself, that in the dark web, you can actually buy a US citizen social security number for about $4 only. That’s a shocking fact for me. And I definitely think that more can be done for the protection of personal data. Now on top of that, Tiki is also currently going a crowdfunding round. And we actually follow certain papers to the SEC, so I should got Mike to share the process of what it is like and the benefits of doing the same. So guys, if you’d like to support the show in the best we can do this is to subscribe, leave a review and to share with somebody who find it useful as well. Now it’s a way to say thank you to you guys. If you actually do subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts by the end of September, you stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. one lucky winner will be chosen at random. And now guys, let’s dive right in. Hey, Mike, thank you so much for joining me today. It’s so good to have you here.

 

01:45

Good to be here.

 

01:46

Mike. Let’s have a very simple icebreaker. Could you share with us so we can all get to know you a bit better? Who is Mike? Adi, when it isn’t working?

 

01:54

I am I ever not working? might be the real question. I mean, these days it’s working. Yeah. So Mike is certainly workaholic. I don’t think of it the same way. Like, yes, it’s work. But my passion has always been in creating things. I think of it more like if you’re a musician or an artist, like you’re kind of always creating things and thinking of things and building things and starting stuff self into the crowd. Yeah. And so that’s it’s really much more like that starting a business, I think of as much more creative than tactical, because it’s all about coming up with something from scratch and then building, you know, the whole thing around the idea, as opposed to you know, just coding something, for example.

 

02:42

I’m very cool. Now, Mike, could you share with us a little bit about your latest business venture, which is called Tiki? Could you explain in your own words, what is Tiki about?

 

02:50

All right, so Tiki was started out of one real simple problem that we all face. Our data is a disaster. We all know it right? It’s being it’s used to manipulate us and controls. But maybe you’ve seen the social dilemma. We’ve all just faced this problem, right? Like we’re insidious ads follow us all over the internet, you never know who has your data. Good luck reading. I mean, least you’re a lawyer, you can read those giant privacy policies, but the rest of us are going through it. Like I don’t know what this is right, like. So that’s the problem. And so we wanted to fix that specific problem around data. And we believe that the problem can’t be solved. From the business side of things. It can only be solved from the user side of things, because the data belongs to the users. It’s your data. I mean, there are laws all over the world that state quite clearly that is the case. Yet you have no right of real ownership. There’s no way to exercise those rights. There’s no way to decide who can use your data, how they can use it, if they sell your data, why don’t you get paid for it? All of these things that we associate with ownership are not applied to data, I often joke would be like if you bought a car and the car company started loaning your car out on the weekends, and collecting money on that, and then didn’t even pay you. And you’d be like what’s going on here, guys, but that is what happens to your data. And so we wanted to flip the whole paradigm on its head and just let people choose.

 

04:14

Mike, before we speak a little bit more about a democratization of data protection with the users as offered by Tiki, could you explain to us in a little bit more about the dangers of poor data protection?

 

04:25

I mean, it depends on you as a person, but data breaches and leaks are so prevalent today that I don’t even think they make the news anymore. Right? Like, it wasn’t even that big of a deal news wise, you know, when Facebook leaked 530 million people information, right. All right, like we’re just we’re just so numb was getting so common these days that people would think twice about it anymore. Yeah, I mean, the number that blows my mind is you can buy social security numbers in the United States. That’s your like, legal identifying number that’s tied to your credit card. And your bank accounts and everything social security number. And you could buy one of those on the dark web for about $4. It’s gotten that bad. That’s how little it costs to buy someone’s identity.

 

05:13

Oh, my gosh, just $4 $4. So Mike, could you explain to ask the solution that he’s actually providing?

 

05:20

Yeah, it’s a very simple app, you just download the app, you can link your accounts, whatever accounts and we’re building out more and more integrations as we speak, but you link your accounts to it, and you get really, very simple features, you can see what data companies collect on you, you can choose how they use that data by swiping left or right on it, you know, some people joke, it’s almost like Tinder for your data, you just swipe left or swipe right, and make choices. And then the third piece is if you want to, you can opt in to monetize your data, your data is worth money, businesses will pay you for it. And we actually do a full analyzation of all of your data on your phone at the edge level. So we never have any of it and will allow you to monetize it. So you can choose which companies can buy your data, how they can use it, what they can do with it all in a safe and secure manner. So they don’t know who you are, they can’t accidentally leak your data, right? It’s safe for the business, it’s safe for the user. It’s a true, you know, transparent market where the users decide, hey, I’m cool with this company, but not so cool with that company, because I don’t trust them, or I don’t like them or whatever. So we allow you to make all those choices about your data, just rights of ownership.

 

06:30

So if I understand this correctly, if I swipe left, then I’m going to say no, I’m not going to share my data by swipe right. I will be sharing my data and I’m going to be paid for it on the basis test anonymized Is that right?

 

06:41

Yeah, pretty much. A great example is, you can one of the first things we’ve been building is, so you can turn off facial recognition tracking and Facebook, most people don’t know that you can turn this off, it’s on for default. In most countries in the world, you can just disable it, there’s a setting. But good luck finding that setting, figure out how to turn it off. It’s not labeled, it’s like you know, something confusing.

 

07:03

Your company says you make it so hard for us to choose to protect our own personal data, because frankly, they need our data to make money.

 

07:10

Exactly. There’s no motivation for them. In fact, there’s a decent device for it, right, Facebook wants access to your facial right to your your image. So that way they can train facial recognition technology, which they can use to monetize all sorts of different things like more targeted ads, and Instagram ads is a very common use case of what Facebook does with your data. So but you’re allowed to turn it off, like that setting exists in your Facebook, but it’s buried way deep down. And so we just make that easy, we put a nice, pretty card up that says, hey, this is what they’re doing, swipe left to turn it off. Or if you’re cool, you can talk swipe right and keep it off. That’s it, you don’t have to like go digging around, we take care of it, we prioritize all these issues for you. So you know, the goal is to get people in maybe make five choices a week for you know, 30 seconds, you can spend 30 seconds a week, swipe left on a few cards, you’re done right? After a couple months, your data is all wrangled in, you’ve got great control over what’s going on with your your identity. You know,

 

08:06

in fact, in the current state of affairs, users don’t even have the choice to monetize their own data, even though the companies are collecting it. So I guess Tiki is actually giving the power back to the people by allowing them to make that choice.

 

08:18

That’s the whole point, give the power back to the users, your data is hyper valuable. And it really all started because we started thinking about this problem, right? Like, you can’t just live in a world where you just take away all of company’s data, right? Like, all that’s gonna happen is they’re gonna do weird, shady things, to figure out how to get to data, right? Like the report came out that p&g invested $100 million into a research center in China to figure out ways to get around Apple’s privacy changes, right? That’s like that’s what companies will do, because they care about your data that much. So you have to build a model where they can still get access to data, but it’s on the user’s terms where the users decide, and the users are compensated fairly for

 

09:01

1. So Mike, here’s my question. How do you think the bigger data companies are going to react to this? So there was a bit of an upheaval of you said, when Apple first introduces new data protection updates for his users? How do you think the bigger companies will react to Tiki?

 

09:15

Well, I think some of them are going to be ecstatic about it. And I think others are going to be very concerned and upset. You know, companies like Apple, I actually would guess they’re gonna rally behind this, this kind of concept, because it’s very much in line with how they build a lot of their stuff. Right. It’s privacy first, and it’s encrypted. It’s Yeah, it’s about the users making their choices, right. It’s building technology for people not building technology for businesses, right. And so it’s much more in line with how Apple thinks of the world. So I think that they’ll probably get behind some semblance of this or develop a similar kind of concept. Then you have other companies like Google, right or Facebook, and they’re entire business model is based on the monetization of data in a smarter way. Yeah, it’s like you’re heading down a path. And it’s so hard to steer the ship in a different direction, right? Like you, they can’t turn it around and go a different way. Right? So whether, yeah, people there believe in privacy and transparency is almost irrelevant. You’ve got 10,000 people all going in one direction, and you want to turn it around and go in a different direction, right?

 

10:26

It’s gonna be hot, it’s very hard. So Mike, you shared earlier that the users data is never stored with Tiki servers or cloud. And if I understand correctly, the data is only stored on the user’s individual phones or mobile devices. So the way I understand it is you chose to structure TV this way, to not only be in compliance with the different data privacy protection laws around the world, but you also ensure that the points of failure in terms of the protection of the data is really minimized to only beyond the user’s phone itself. Am I right?

 

10:57

Yeah, exactly. There’s this concept in data security, where, for a long time companies, and spent countless millions of dollars and engineers trying to secure every little piece, like secure this server and that database, and inevitably, you fail, because you’ve got too many points of attack. And recent, you know, there’s a whole other approach that you can take, just secure the data itself, right. If you encrypt the data, it doesn’t matter what server it goes on, it doesn’t matter where it goes, you’ve secured the piece, that’s important. You can hack into the server, but you can’t get the data. And so the idea is simply secure the data itself, not the device, not the network, not the database is none of these other things. And so, where the data lives already, it’s already on your phone. So where it is on your phone right now in your pocket is the most secure place it’s gonna be. So we, we encrypt it there, we anonymize it there, all of our processing happens on the phone. And then if you do decide to sell your data, that anonymization happens on your phone, so when it leaves your phone, it can’t ever get traced back to you no matter what happens. And so that cool, yeah, then it doesn’t really matter if you get hacked, right? Because they can hack, like you can hack our server, we don’t have any. Yeah. It’s, there’s nothing you can get,

 

12:16

I see this a very smart way to approach it. So Mike, let’s circle back to how you structured the user interface for Tiki itself. So you’ve spoken about how you’ve adopted this swipe left swipe right function that is very familiar in dating applications? What were the considerations that went into the design of Tiki itself? And how did you want to make it as user friendly as possible? Yeah, it

 

12:38

was about user friendliness. But it we wanted to make, like data doesn’t have to be complicated, right? these choices, like if you, you can make a decision about data complicated by using fancy words like facial recognition, tracking, and, you know, audience profiling all these terms. Or you could just make it simple Facebook is tracking your face. This is why do you want this or not right? For something to to reach a broad audience of people, you can’t expect them to come in with an engineering degree. And understand, right, you need to make that you need to make presenting information in a way that anyone can make a choice. In a couple seconds, we all make 1000s of decisions every day throughout our lives. They don’t have to be complicated data never needed to be as complicated as made it. So our job is not to actually all of our basically the entire job of Tiki is just to make the information presentable to a user, or anybody can understand it in a couple seconds. We’re not gonna people aren’t going to spend minutes or hours you could do all of the things we do right now, if you want to spend, you know, dozens of hours every week turning off settings and aggregating your data and selling on a plot like you could do all the things that we’re doing. It’s not like we created some new thing.

 

13:56

This frees me in a way that doesn’t make it easy. Yeah. But because you had to jump through hoops to fire really just make it happen.

 

14:02

I’m not going to spend 1215 hours a week trying to turn off settings, right? Like that’s crazy.

 

14:08

Yeah, no one wants to do that. So let’s talk about the pineapple mascot for Tiki. It’s super cute. Let me just say that. But what are the considerations that were behind the design? My guess is that it’s back to the point of helping to make data protection, a topic that may not be the most interesting into something that’s easily digestible for you know, just the common user as well.

 

14:28

Yeah. It’s not everything needs to be scary and difficult and, or boring, right? Like every, every tech company like hat looks and feels the same. They say the same things. They they all look the same, right? And they all got the same blue and the same little icon, right? Yeah, the whole point was we are not like other tech companies, okay. And data doesn’t have to be some scary thing that you need to be an engineer. So we didn’t want to look engineering like we didn’t want to look like a They’re tech companies. And so we picked bright poppy colors. We picked a fun pineapple that dances around and waves at chia, right? Like the it, it was to go against the grain it was to make it a little bit fun. You know, people’s eyes tend to glaze over when you start talking about data and security, right? So cache pineapple. Yeah, it was making it a little, just not everything needs to be like the sky is falling, right? Like nobody wants to open up an app every day and be like, ah, the world is ending, right?

 

15:29

So guys, I think a great lesson that Mike is sharing is about making your user interface as smooth as possible for the users. You know, where Mike started adopting the swipe left swipe right function does very familiar to dating apps immediately, my first reaction or thought was that Tiki will be a very easy app for the users to use as well and makes use of the pineapple mascot, which is very cute as I shared, go check it out actually makes the topic of data protection a lot more palatable and easier to digest, or relatable for the average user. So if your business model or your user interface is not as smooth or as intuitive as you can be for your users, it may be a good idea to see if you can make any changes that could actually help your users appreciate the service that you’re offering a little bit better. Now, Mike, even though I understand that he is an app development, there has been a huge number of people who have actually signed up and expressed an interest to use the app. Can you share with us how you achieve this feat?

 

16:21

Yeah, it’s been crazy and exciting. I mean, we started the company, January, effectively, right? We incorporated December of last year. So we’ve been, we only have a whole year as a company yet, right? Like we’re brand new. And because we wanted to build something that was so different, and against the grain, and so for the users, what we did was we started by just putting the idea on the internet, not like we didn’t write some code and build some app, we didn’t raise any money, we just put the idea out there to see if people would care about it. And 1000s and 1000s of people signed up so many people that our waitlist is now 120,000 people 100,000 It’s a log waitlist.

 

17:01

That’s crazy. Yeah, shows that people really want this service.

 

17:05

Yeah, people really care about their data, right? Like, you know, we all pretend like Ah, you know, the world did start data, they’re taking it, but people care, we all care, you know, we’d rather not be exploited then be exploited, right? And so we care about it. And we’re only going to care about it more, right? And I think if it like data is the currency of the future, right? We’ve, for the last 100 years, maybe 200 years, we cared about, you know, gold and silver and money. But going forward, as we become more and more digital natives. It’s all about data, who’s got data on what and so, you know, if you don’t care about it, now, you’re sure gonna care about it in the near future. And I want that power to be in people’s hands, not company’s hands. So we put that message out there, and people signed up. And so we went to work, you know, now we’re building an app, we raised a little bit of money, we just opened a crowdfunding campaign on start engine, Fast Start edge, comm slash Tiki to raise some more money, because we want to raise money from the users to fund this thing for the users. But yeah, it’s been a whirlwind, that’s for sure. It’s a long waitlist and a lot of people to fill.

 

18:09

So Mike, as I understand it, TV is coming looking to crowdfund about $1.07 million on start engine COMM And in order to do so you actually had to file an offering memorandum with the SEC. So could you explain to us why did you choose to take this approach and actually go for a crowdfunding round? Why do you not choose to go to a venture capital firm for a dark investment instead?

 

18:28

Yeah. Because of the users, right, like the whole point of cheeky is to build something for the users. You know, one of the biggest problems which I’ve faced in the past, raising money is when you raise money from investors, obligations, and expectations are very become very different. Second, that happens. It’s about you know, revenue, it’s about profitability. It’s often about short term gains, it’s not always necessarily about the longest term process. It’s not about the values necessarily, right, you just different, right, it becomes very different very quickly. And we were early, we are early, and we want to stay user focused. And so a way to guarantee user centricity and focus on the user is to make the users your investors, right, because then they’ll never let you do something that’s going to negatively affect them. The shareholders in your company are saying, No, you can’t do this, we don’t want to do this, this is gonna This is gonna negatively affect me as a user of your product. And so that was that was the motivation was put, make the users the investors.

 

19:30

So guys a great point. And Mike just shared is the strategic alignment that you want to have within your company and with your investors. So when your company is looking to fundraise, please have a very good think about who you’re going to be inviting into your company as shareholders, because their interests and their strategy goals would definitely have an impact as to your short term, medium term and long term goals and how you want to grow your company. What are your thoughts on this, Mike?

 

19:52

Yeah, they’re gonna have a very strong voice and it’s hard to do, right? And I get it. I like, Ben, there’s so many times when you’ve got a payroll to make, and you’re running out of money, and you’re like, Well, you know, it’s either we go out of business or we take money from this other person who, you know, they seem okay, but I don’t really know them. Right. That’s how it’s a trap. Everybody falls into it, it’s a almost impossible trap to avoid. So, you know, yes, you have to start early and identify who and why and be aware. But early, the earlier the investor, the more say they’re going to have. It’s just how it goes right there. They’re going to have a lot of say a lot of weight, they’re going to be in there with you on a very regular basis, giving you advice expecting you to take that advice, it’s often they may have a board seat, and so it can quickly spiral.

 

20:47

So Mike, could you share with us the process of the filing of the offering memorandum with the SEC, what kind of issues and compliance did you have to meet before the document could actually properly go online?

 

20:56

Yeah, it was a lot longer than we had hoped for, or thought it was going to be it took us about three months in total prepare, maybe closer for. And so you need to know, like, you have to have the normal things like CPA audited financials, right. And like, that’s a no brainer. But then you also have to have like risk declarations, you have to have all your like, paperwork for startups is usually iffy, right at best. Like, you’ve seen this before, I’m sure right there, you got some paperwork kind of, right? He that doesn’t fly, right? You have to have all your safe notes perfectly documented, you have to have all your IP assignment agreements, you have to have your NDA is you got to have your incorporation documents, they got to be like stamped, not just like some people signed, like, so you need all of that stuff. And then there’s just a lot of additional paperwork you got to get through terms of how are you going to spend the money? What are you going to use it for? Why are you raising the capital, who’s involved in the company, bad actor checks, they’re just a lot of these little things. And it can be a bit tricky, because the way the words you pick mean a whole lot when you’re filing with the SEC, not so much when you’re talking one on one, or you’re raising money privately, like you can have projections for next year. And they can just be projections. And if you don’t hit them, find your startup. It doesn’t fly when you’re filing with the SEC. You can’t be like, oh, here’s our revenue projections for next year. And that’s why the value of the company is the value it is today. And then just not even hit it right. You can it opens up all sorts of potential lawsuits. So going through compliance is a pain. a funny story I’ll share is it took us like three weeks to solve this one problem with everyone getting through this. We have our we have like a world class data privacy lawyer on our team. His name is Peter MacLaughlin is like world class. And he’s our outside counsel. And so we had listed on our page, because you know, it’s really amazing to have somebody like that as part of the team. Right, especially in the data privacy space. So we listed Peter as our counsel as our data privacy counsel. And they’re like, Well, does it work for you? How does he work for you? His LinkedIn profile doesn’t show that he works for you like, Well, yeah, he works for another firm, but he’s our counsel. And so we went three weeks and what they made me do all we had to do was put one word in front of it outside counsel on data privacy, as opposed to Council on data. privacy, took us three weeks to insert that one word, right. But that’s the kind of stuff that that’s the kind of things that come up when you’re filing for the SEC, because it matters, right? You know, you don’t want to misrepresent it doesn’t directly work for us.

 

23:35

So that’s the issue on the choice of word really matters. Oh, no, my you had an earlier project called acoustic stream there understand you. So when for crowdfunding, how do you experience this back then affect your current approach with Tiki?

 

23:47

Yeah, that was Yeah, we did a Kickstarter? Wow, probably almost almost 10 years ago. Now, very early on in Kickstarter. Early on in my career, we did a Kickstarter, and it went well. It did very well, at the time. It turned into a whole other mess of EA and talk about some other day around how that turned into the business that became blue stream that turned into a whole world of data. But the things we learned from it was people, you have to put your money, you have to put yourself in the mindset of somebody who knows nothing about what you’re doing and what they care about. Little things that I would never have thought they cared a lot about. They care. Like what is the T shirt look like? Right? Like you’re giving away a free t shirt if they really care. I like things that you’re like, That doesn’t matter. Like we’re worried on like trying to hit timelines on you know, injection molding and they’re like, Yeah, but that’s a T shirt look like what materials are made out of. So that that kind of stuff. Yeah, yeah, that sort of stuff. Right? They don’t know they, they rarely coming at it from the mindset of they’ve built a company, right? Like they’re just people are interested in your idea. So you have to you have to bring them with You through the whole process, you have to show them what you’re doing, why you’re doing it explain your mindset playing, why you’re thinking is ask them for their input, get their feedback, right? You have to engage them with no expectations, which is hard if you’re deep in the startup world, right? Like, everybody I talked to as started, like, two or three companies, and they’re like thinking about it and do, it’s just, but when you go on, you know, Kickstarter or start engine, they don’t have that experience. So you have to, if the walk them through the journey.

 

25:32

So Mike, could you talk to us a little bit more about the talented people that you’ve attracted to join you on your journey with Tiki?

 

25:38

Yeah, we have a really, really cool team. We want to we want to go start this idea originally was me and a guy named Brian gakken. Is sits on our board. See inside director. His background is actually he’s he’s used to be the try and get his title, right. Don’t hold me to this. But it was I believe he was the head of global systems engineering for Western Digital. I know they have giant titles. He was a big wake over Western Digital figuring out where do you put petabytes of data. So he came, he came out of the data space. And I came out of the data space building software for these big companies. And so you had two engineers, right? Thinking about this problem. This is a this is a person problem. It’s a problem that impacts people not technology. And so we went out and found people to add to the team who are connected to people. Alright, so we added two people, as co founders, woman named Anna, who is our CPO, and she’s an expert in how do you present information in digestible ways for people? Right? How do you take data and present it away? She’s the one who came up with the pineapple who dances around right like, She’s right. So that kind of that’s, yeah. And so and then we brought on Shane Faria, who’s, who comes out of the customer experience world. So he built a bunch of customer experience platforms in the meal prep space, originally. And then he was a teacher of students and attract coach, and he’s, he’s very like, like touchy feely coach type of person who’s like, he connects with humans at a very, like, emotional level, not at like, technical engineering level. And so we added them to the team to help us figure out like, how do we present this to people. And then the last person we added, his name is Barry O’Connor. And he comes out of the data monetization space. So he’s unlike all the rest of us, as he jokes is, if you caught me in two, I would be pure commercial. All he cares about is like, how do I make money? How do I how does this become a business? How do I sell this data? Right? Like, that’s how he thinks about the problem. And it’s important to have different people who represent different stakeholders at the table. And so he comes out of the CME space, he was one of the very early people who was like trying to sell telecom data back to like Apple for like figuring out when they needed to repair phones and otaa phones, right? He comes out of mana, he’s been selling, he’s been selling monetizing data for like 20 or 30 years, right, like, so he he outranks all of us when it comes to that. So we brought someone in who knows that space? And how do you like, really? What do you like? How are companies buying data today? Because they don’t buy data like you think they buy data?

 

28:19

Yeah, it sounds like you’re very good mix of the different talents that you have in your team, you have a mix of the engineers and the commercial guys. And I can see you as you went about trying to have a very well rounded team.

 

28:29

Yeah, you want to build a rounded team? I mean, there are clearly holes that we need to fill, and we will continue. But yeah, that’s the idea is you don’t want a company of a bunch of people that are just like you, you want people who represent a very diverse background and skill set and bring different things to the table. Right. At the end of the day, we’re building something for the people of the world, not just, you know, engineers like myself, right, like, so you need people who understand and represent them at the table. Hmm.

 

28:59

So Mike, can we actually circle back on to the topic of crowdfunding? What advice would you have for an entrepreneur who’s thinking of taking a similar path

 

29:06

like you? Well, plan, it’s gonna take a lot longer than you hoped. But I actually really strongly recommended. It’s been good to us so far. We raised a lot of money very quickly already. But most importantly, it’s extraordinarily founder friendly. And I think that’s really important early on, right? Like, it’s why we saw a big push with safe notes for pre seed type of raises, because they’re a little more founder friendly. Well, this is way even more founder friendly, right? early on when you’re trying to figure out what you’re doing. The most important thing is, learn from your users build a community around it. Well, that community can help fuel the investment, and it can all kind of come together without all this other noise that comes right. It’s important at some point to have people holding you accountable to hitting revenue goals. But that shouldn’t be Like, you know, the first six months of your company, right? You haven’t even built your product yet, like you’ve, you’re still trying to figure out what you’re going to be what you’re going to do, how’s it going to work, right. And so it’s a amazing funding vehicle. for that. I don’t know if I would do it if I was a b2b company, to be honest. But if you’re a b2c company like us, not only is it very hard to raise money in the b2c space, you’re already by default, you have to build an audience, you have to go out and get people to care about what you’re doing. And those people are the perfect audience to raise money from. So the way I think of it is, if we raise all of the million, it’ll probably come from close to 1000 different investors, which is crazy to have 1000 different investors, but all of those investors are now advocates of your product.

 

30:49

So your investors become your advocates as well. Yeah, cuz

 

30:52

they’re like, it’s in their best interest to try to get all their friends to install the app. Right? So you’re, you’re mobilizing an entire community of people out there promoting your stuff. They gave you money to promote your company. So it’s, it’s fantastic alignment. Yeah. So I strongly recommend it, even with all the pain, it’s just going to get easier and easier. Shout out to the guys over at gust, right? They helped us get all this stuff set up very early on with all the documentation and setup. It just, there are tools out there that make it easier to get these things. And it started. And people were fantastic, right? Like, yes, it was a pain to get it up and running. But they have their own in house crowdfunding, like compliance team that helps you set all the stuff and make sure you don’t step in it with the SEC. So I would recommend giving it a very strong Look, if you’re, if you’ve got any kind of real user engagement around your product. It’s it’s a very exciting opportunity.

 

31:54

So Mike, what do you hope to see in the data protection space moving forward?

 

31:57

Well, there’s what I wish and what I think is realistic, right? Like, I wish that people were anonymous, and that they had ultimate control over what’s going on. Right. I wish companies knew how to properly stored secure data, I wish, you know, people spent the money required to make sure these things were properly taken care of that they properly valued data. I think a big problem is companies don’t value data. And so they view it as a cost center. And so costs get cut. And that’s how you end up with breaches. But I’d settle for users being able to consciously make a choice. That’s it like not asking for a lot. I just get rid of these stupid 40 page privacy policies. And just make it easy where like, you can just tick a box and say, Yes, I want to do this. No, I don’t want to do that. Right. Like I don’t, let’s just start there. Like let’s make let’s allow people to be informed and choose And out of that will build all the rest of this stuff.

 

32:57

fully agree. So Mike, if the listeners only remember one thing for today’s conversation, would you like it to be

 

33:03

my Tiki calm, Tiki data, your data, your decisions, start engine comm slash Tiki invest in us would be cool. But honestly, just your support. And knowing that some people are out here trying to build some technology that could hopefully fix this mess, right? Like we’re doing our best to make something for y’all. And we love your support. So like, that’s it right? Just check us out. Take a look at what we’re doing. Tell your friends, right, this normal promotional things, you can find us we’re on the internet. We have every social channel, you could imagine, come talk to us, right? Like, we just we really are trying to figure out how to solve this mess.

 

33:45

So Mike, how can listeners get in contact with view? If they want to speak to you about Tiki?

 

33:50

Yeah, so you can email me at Mike mit.com. You can also if you go to my Tiki calm at the bottom, there’s all of our social channels. You can dm us, you can find us I’m on Twitter, you know, I’m I’m all over the internet, if you can easily find me. And if you really care about we’re doing go invest at start engine. It’s like the like, invest in then you can talk to me all you want about all the great plans we got coming up.

 

34:17

Okay, Mike, thank you so much for joining us today. It’s been such a pleasure having you here. Thanks, Dad. This is wonderful. guys. Thank you for joining Mike and I on today’s conversation. I hope you’ve learned a little bit about a crowdfunding process for companies and the data protection industry in general. So guys, if you enjoyed today’s episode, and you’d like to show your support, and don’t forget to subscribe, leave a review and share this with somebody who will find it useful as well. And as a way to say thank you to you guys. you subscribe and leave a review on Apple podcasts by the end of September, then you may stand a chance to win $50 worth of gift vouchers from Amazon. one lucky winner will be chosen at the end of the month. That’s all for me today. I’ll see you next time.