GDPR is the greatest Internet innovation since the browser: Leggo!
In May 2018, most companies adopted a new change in data handling. This change, resented by many of the giants represents a bigger opportunity for startups & new cos than AWS, GCP, or Facebook’s API platform.
Before we delve into this new opportunity, let’s discuss a brief history of the Internet and how we got here.
80s-90s: Knowledge blooms.
In the early days of the Internet, folks would often visit domains directly or thru directories. There was a thriving competitive landscape for content: from Xanga, LiveJournal, and Open Diary, all the way to gimmicky discovery sites such as the Million Dollar Homepage. Interestingly, one of the biggest challenges Jeff Bezos had during his first million dollar round was convincing early Amazon investors that the Internet would be a thing. During this time, time was very distributed on the Internet.
90s-2000s: Land grabs, and the greats.
The 2000s were filled with firsts. The first billion user products. New inputs: touch, location. New speeds: 4G, LTE. Dopamine fueled loops. Infrastructure for the masses. Network effects and exposure greater than anything oil barrons ever had. When all of the dust settled, we were left with a few companies that now own user time: Facebook for content, Amazon for commerce, and Google for search and discovery.
Everyone spoke about how land grabbing would eventually lead to dollar spend, and we’re now seeing the fruits of that labor: nearly forty cents of every VC dollar raised today goes back to four companies: Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google either for infrastructure or ads. More data has been created in the last four years than in the entire history of humanity. With that growth comes leaks, hackers, and monopolistic tendencies. The problem is Congress has no idea how to deal or regulate tech companies.
2010s: The beginning of building on the shoulders of giants, and Blockchain, the “savior”.
Oh what a beautiful story. Blockchain is what the web should have been. The greats have gained too much power: let’s rebase and decentralize everything — payments, infrastructure, API servers so no individuals have this power. It’s a beautiful story, but many of the individuals running these Blockchain services are more corrupt than those running centralized products. 80% of ICOs are scams. AND TBH, I read white papers and I think I’m a fucking moron because I don’t understand a single one. So, how will these new services gain adoption?
The 2010s were also filled with infrastructure to make the hard things easy: GCP and AWS. Forget the worries of scaling or infrastructure: spin up an AppEngine instance and start autoscaling to billions of users. Really, companies like Snapchat still do this to date. This enabled developers to build on the shoulders of giants and focus on products.
2018: GDPR
The problem is while it was easy to build new services using AWS and GCP, a majority of the dopamine-fueled loops that created a plethora of data were still owned by the giants. So while GCP and AWS enabled developers to build with the infrastructure and APIs of giants, the giants still had a huge moat: data. Using this data, they could build services that had 10x better experiences.
GDPR is a result of ten years of unchecked growth and lack of regulation in a space regulators didn’t really understand: big co’s fucked up in a big way with handling security and data, and because of it, this new regulation will fuel a plethora of services. GDPR’s data portability prevents monopolistic tendencies more than any company break up ever could by enabling data transportability: users can move data from service to service making lockups much more difficult.
This regulation could not have come at a better time: the age of AI. AI products which are data driven have thus far been owned by the giants (Amazon Alexa, Google Home, Microsoft Cortana). Here are some opportunities we think folks should tackle with GDPR:
- Data understanding (What’s in your data, Market insights, User Insights).
- Data transferability & infrastructure (Moving data from one service to another, backups, wiping myself out).
- Data monetization (Enabling users to earn $$ from their own data)
- Consumer AI (i.e. Use existing data from users to build a chatbot for themselves)
- New decisions using new parameters: small business loans, trust.
