 We're here at theCUBE on Cloud Startup Showcase brought to you by AWS. And right now we're going to explore the next frontier for privacy. You know, security, privacy and compliance, they're often lumped together and they're often lumped on as an afterthought, bolted on to infrastructure, data and applications. But, you know, while they're certainly related, they're different disciplines and they require a specific domain knowledge and expertise to really solve the challenges of today. One thing they all share is successful implementations must be comprehensive and designed in at the start. And with me, to discuss going beyond compliance and designing privacy protections into products and services is Justin Antoni Pallee, who's the founder and CEO of WireWheel. Justin, awesome having you on the AWS Startup Showcase. Thanks for being here. Dave, thanks so much for having me. It's a real honor and I appreciate it to look forward to the discussion. So I always love to ask founders, take us back, why did you start this company? Where did your inspiration come from? So Dave, I was very lucky. I had the honor of serving in President Obama's second term as an acting undersecretary for economic affairs. So I ran the part of the government that includes the US Census Bureau and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. So core economic statistical bureaus but I helped lead a lot of the Obama administration's outreach and negotiations on data privacy around the world including on something called the EU US privacy shield. So at the time, the two jobs I had really aligned with what our discussion is here today. The first part of it was, I could see that all around the world in the US and around the world, data privacy and protecting privacy had become a human rights issue. It was a trade issue. You could see it was a national security issue and companies all around the world were just struggling with how to get legal, how to make sure that I do it right and how I make sure that I'm treating my customer's data in the right way. But when I was also leading the agency, a lot of what we were trying to do was to help our US citizens, our folks here around the country solve big public problems by ethically and responsibly using government data to do it. And I can talk about what that meant in a little while. So the inspiration behind wire wheel was, we need better, more technically driven ways to help companies get compliant, to show their customers that they're protecting privacy and to put customers, our customers, onto a path where they can start using the customer data better, faster and stronger, but most importantly, ethically. And that's really what we try to tackle at wire wheel. Right, excellent. Thank you for that. I mean, yeah, in the early days of social media, people kind of fluffed it off and no, there is no privacy in the internet, blah, blah, blah. And then, wow, it became a huge social issue and public policy really needed to step in. But also technology needs to help solve this problem. So let's try to paint a picture for people as to really dig into the problem that you solve and why it's so complicated. We actually have a graphic. It's a map of the US that we want to pull up here. Explain this. Yeah, I mean, what you're saying here is that every one of our viewers today is going to be looking at privacy laws moving across the country, Dave, but there's a lot of different ones. If you're a company that's launching and building your product that you might be helping your customers, your consumer facing, and let's assume you want to do the right thing. You want to treat that customer data responsibly and protect it. When you look at a map like this and you can see three states have already passed different privacy laws, but look at the number of different states all across the country that are considering their own privacy laws. It really could be overwhelming. And Virginia, as you can see, is just about to pass its next privacy law, but there's something like 23, 24 states that are moving them through. The other thing, Dave, that's really important about this is these are not just breach laws. I think years ago, we were all looking at these kinds of laws spreading across the country and you would be saying, oh, okay, that's just a breach law. These laws are very comprehensive. They have a lot to them. So what we have been really helping companies with is to enable you to get compliant with a lot of these very quickly. And that's really what we've tried to take on because if you're trying to do the right thing, there should be a way to do it. Got it. I can't even imagine what the, I mean, so many permutations and complexities. Imagine if this were a globe we were looking at, it gets out of control. No doubt about it. Okay. You guys, why will you use a term called a phrase beyond compliance? What do we mean by that? There are a couple of things. So I'd say almost every company taking a product to market right now, whether you're B to C or B to B, you wanna make sure you can answer the customer question and say, yes, I'm compliant. And usually that means if you're a B to C company, it means that your customers can come to your site. Your site is compliant with all of the laws out there. You can take consents and preferences. You can get their data back to them. All of these are legal requirements. If you're a B to B company, you're also looking at making sure you can create some critical compliance records. That's it, right? But when we think beyond compliance, we think of a couple of basic things. Number one, do you tell the story about all the trust and protection you put around your data in a way that your customers wanna do business with you? I mean, Dave, if you went to CES the last couple of years and you were walking into the center or looking at a virtual version of it, on every billboard, the top five, top 10 global companies advertise that they take care of your data. And they're onto something. They're onto something. You can actually build a winning strategy by solving a customer's problem and also showing them that you care and that they're trustworthy because there are too many products out there that aren't. The second thing, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, please, carry on. No, I mean, the second thing, and then I think I'd say is going beyond compliance also means that you're thinking about how you can use that data for your customer to solve all of their problems. And Dave, what I'd say here is imagine a world right now in which you trusted that the data that you gave to companies or to the government was protected and that if you changed your mind and you wanted it back that they would delete it or give it back to you. Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have solved getting a COVID vaccine? Can you imagine how much data would have been available to pharmaceutical companies to actually develop a vaccine? Can you imagine how much more quickly we would have opened the economy? The thing is companies can't solve every problem that they could for a customer because customers don't trust that the data is going to be used correctly and companies don't know how to use it in that way and ethically. And that's what we're talking about when we say getting beyond compliance which is we want to enable our customers to use the data in the best way and most ethical way to solve all of their customers' problems. Okay, so I got to ask you the elephant in the room question. If you ask most businesses about personal information where it's stored, you know, who has access to it? The fact is that most people can't answer it. And so when they're confronted with these uncomfortable questions, you know, they'll document some policies, they'll maybe check some boxes. Why is that not a good idea? I mean, there's an expense to going beyond that. So why is that not just a good idea to check it off? Well, look, a lot of companies do need to just check it off. And when I mean get it right, make sure you're legal. And the way we thought about this is that when you're building on a backbone like AWS, it does give you the ability to buy a lot of services quickly and scale with your company. But it also gives us an ability to comply faster by leveraging that infrastructure to get compliant faster. So if you think about it, 20 years ago, whenever I wanted to buy storage or if I wanted to buy servers, and look, we're a company that built in the cloud, Dave, it would have been very difficult for us to buy the right storage and the processing we needed, given that we were started. But I was able to buy very small amounts of it until our customer profile grew. But that also means my data moved out of a single hard drive and out of a single set of servers into other places that are hosted in the cloud. So the entire tech stack that all of our customers are building on means they're distributing personal data into the cloud, into SaaS platforms. And there's been a really big move through integration platforms as a service to allow you to spread the personal data quickly. But that same infrastructure can be used to also get you compliant faster. And that's the differentiation. So we built a platform that enables a company to inventory their systems, to track what they're doing in those systems and to both create a compliance record faster by tracking what they're doing inside the cloud and in SaaS systems. And that's the different way we've been thinking about it as we've been going to market. So, okay, so what actually do you sell? You sell a service? Is it a subscription? And AWS is underneath that? Maybe you could put a picture for us. Sure, we're a cloud hosted software as a service. We have two core offerings. One is the Wirewheel Trust Access Consent Solution. So if you go to a number of major brands and you go to their website, when they tell you here's the data we're collecting about you, when they collect your consents and preferences, when they collect a request for data correction or deletion of the data, all the way from the request to delivery back to the consumer, we have an end-to-end system that our customers use with their customers, completely cloud hostable in a subscription. So it enables even very small startups to build that experience into their website and into their products from the very beginning at a cost-efficient point. So if you wanna stand up a compliant website or you wanna build into your product that Trust Access Consent Solution, we have a SaaS platform and we have developer tools in our developer portal to let you do it quickly. The second thing we do is we have a Privacy Operations Manager. So this is almost a security center but for privacy operations. It helps you inventory your systems, actually create data flow maps and most critically create compliance records that you need to comply with the European law, the Brazilian law and that whole spectrum of US privacy laws that you showed a few minutes ago. And those are the two core offerings we have. I love it. I mean, it's the cloud story, right? One is you don't have to spend a millions of dollars on hardware and software. And the second is when you launch, you enable small companies, not just the biggest companies, you give them essentially the same services. So that's a great story. Who do you sell to, Justin? I mean, what does a typical customer engagement look like? Yeah, we, in many of our customers and in the AWS, a startup environment, you often don't have companies that have like a privacy officer. They often don't even have a general counsel. So we sell a package that will often go to whoever's responsible at the company for privacy compliance. And interestingly, Dave, in some startups that might be a marketing officer. It might be a COO, it might be the CTO. So in startups and sort of growing companies, we've put out a lot of guidance and our core wire wheel developer portal is meant to give even a startup all they need to stand that experience and get it going so that when you get that procurement, imagine you're about to go sell your product and they ask you, are you compliant that you have that document ready to provide? We also do provide this core infrastructure for enormous enterprises. So think telecoms, think top three global technology companies. So Dave, what we get excited about is we've built a core software platform, privacy infrastructure that is currently being used by some of the largest companies in the world. And our goal is to get that infrastructure at the right price point into every company in the world. We want to enable any company to spend and stand up the right system that's leveraging that same privacy infrastructure that the big folks have so that as they scale, they can continue to do the right thing. That's awesome. I mean, you mentioned a number of roles of marketing folks. I can even see a sales lead saying, okay, we got this deal in the table. How do we get through the procurement because we didn't check the box. All right, so let me ask you this. We talked a little bit about designing privacy in and it's clear you helped do that. How do you make it fundamental to customers' workloads? Do they have to be like an AWS customer to take advantage of that concept or how do they make it part of their workflow? Yeah, so there's a couple of critical things. How do you make it part of the workflow? The first thing is you go to any company's website right now, they have to be compliant with the California law. So a very straightforward thing we do is we can for both B2B and B2C companies stand up an entire customer experience that matches the scale of the company that enables it to be compliant. That means you have a trust center that shows the right information to your customers. It collects the consensus preferences and it stands up with a portal to request data. These are basics and for a company that's standing up the internal operations, we can get them up collecting that core record and create a compliance record very fast. With larger companies, Dave, you're right. I mean, when you're talking about understanding your entire infrastructure and understanding where you're storing and processing data, it could seem overwhelming. But the truth is the way we onboard our customers is we get you compliant on your product and website first. We focus on your product to get that compliance record done. We focus on your website so that you can sell your product and then we go through the rest of the major systems where you're handling personal information, your sales, your marketing. It's like a natural process. So larger enterprises, we have a pretty straightforward way that we get them up and running, but even small startups, we can get them to a point of getting them compliant and starting to think about other things very, very quickly. Nice. And so, Justin, you're in government, so you understand big, but talk about the secret ingredient that allows you to do this at scale and still handle all that diversity, like what we showed in that graphic, the different locations, different local laws, data sovereignty, et cetera. Yeah, there's a couple of things on the secret sauce. One is we have to think about our customers every day and we have to understand that companies will use whatever their infrastructure is to build. Like you've seen, even on AWS, there are so many different services you can use. So number one, we always think with an engineering point of view in mind, understand the tools, understand the infrastructure in a way that brings that kind of basic visibility to whoever it is that's handling privacy, that basic understanding. The second is we focused on core user experience for the non-technical user. It's really easy to get started. It's really easy to stand up your privacy page and your privacy policy. It's really easy to collect that and make that first record. The third is, and this is one of those key things. When I was in the government, I met with folks in the intelligence community at one point day and this always stuck with me. They were telling me that 20 years ago, to do the kind of innovation that you have going on now, you would have had to have had a defense contract. You would have had to have invested an enormous amount of money to buy the processing and the services and the team. But the ability for me as a startup founder to understand the big picture and understand that companies need to be compliant fast, get their website compliant fast, get their product compliant fast, but build on a cloud infrastructure that allowed me to scale was incredible because it allows us to do a lot with our customers that a company like ours would have been really challenged to do without that cloud backbone. Love this, the agility and the innovation. Last question, give us the company update, Justin. Where are you? What can you share with us? Fundraising, headcount, are you generating revenue? Oh yeah, we're excited, as I mentioned. We are already the privacy platform of choice of some of the larger brands in the world, which we're very excited about. And we help them solve both that trust, access, consent problem for their customers. And we help with the privacy operations management. We recently announced a new $20 million infusion of capital led by a terrific venture capital fund, Forge Point Capital. We've been lucky to have been supported by NEA, SANS Capital, Revolution Capital, Pritzker Capital, PSP. And so we have a terrific group of investors behind us. We are scaling and we've grown the company a lot in the last year. Obviously it's been an interesting and challenging year with COVID, but we are really focused on growing our sales team, our marketing team, and we're going to be offering some pretty exciting solutions here for the rest of the year. Your timing is unbelievable. And you had the cloud at your beck and call, you had the experience in government, you got your background as a lawyer, and it all came in and the legal coming to the forefront of public policy. Justin, congratulations on all your progress to date. We're really looking forward to seeing you guys rock it in the future. I really appreciate you coming on. Dave, thanks so much for having me. Really, really enjoyed it. And I look forward to seeing you soon. Great, and thank you for watching everybody. This is Dave Vellante for theCUBE on cloud startups. Keep it right there.