Mydex was invited to present to Doug Richards’ School for Startups at the Good Deals social-investment conference. The challenge: to outline what the “personal data store” is, why the world needs it, what Mydex does and why it is a social enterprise, all in under three minutes.
Here’s what we did:
(New window; you need to scroll down and click on the seventh feature).
The panel was Julie Devonshire (“One water”), Wilfred Emmanuel-Jones (the black farmer”) and Doug Richards. The 12-minute discussion took some intriguing turns. Wilfred thought we were ahead of our time. Julie did not yet worry enough about her personal data to feel compelled to act.
But Doug showed a visceral personal enthusiasm for the proposition as well as the instincts of a red-blooded VC scenting a hot high-tech startup: “You could be just the coolest company I’ve heard of this year; …You’ve created a corporate structure that is about trust; you haven’t created a corporate structure that is about return on investment, therefore you are inherently trustworthy.” The problem Mydex addresses is one he experiences personally: “I should be hugging you right now.”
He countered the point that Mydex might be ahead of its time: “No technology startup has succeeded unless it was ahead of its time…You’re right at that ‘crossing the chasm’ moment.”
Doug puts Mydex in the broad context of loss of control and privacy, of managing our passwords and compromising our personal security and identity. He recalls his own “lost Sunday” dealing with customer services, telling them his mother’s maiden name and arguing about his own date of birth: “Mydex: where were you?
“I could immediately regain control of my goddamn identity…It seems to me that the only organisation we can afford to trust is a social enterprise.
“I think you’re onto something huge…there are a lot of people in this world who’d like to see something like this roll. You don’t need to be more commercial; you need to be more of an understandable social movement, so people understand what you actually stand for. And I think you stand for something very important.”
Thanks Doug! All points noted carefully.
