When Werner Vogels sparked Tanker’s reinvention
How the world’s most respected cloud-guru empowered us when many people believed we were delusional on in-app privacy and data protection.
Privacy and data protection are on every lip today. However, the offer for applications with the highest level of privacy and data protection is still very poor. Enterprises can only afford it by buying complex security layers built on top of existing applications — implemented by security experts — that will have massive impacts on IT, development team, and the application end-user experience.
So why are privacy and data protection not part of every app, by design?
Well, because privacy is still super hard to implement, and several painful elements make the return on time and energy invested very poor: technical complexity, very demanding skill-sets, and short-term product arbitrage.
At Tanker, we focus on addressing this issue, by providing developers with the complete toolbox to easily build privacy-first applications without impacting their user experience. Taking care of their privacy issues enables them to focus their value to their product.
France is a MESS (Math and Engineering Super-Structure), an unknown wonderland to support a 3-year R&D effort. Still, our vision proved to be too radical, as the market was not ready for this type of value proposition. So to get the ball rolling, we became our first customer and built a suite of secure applications for Dropbox, Office 365 and GDrive, on top of our developer SDK.
A trigger named Werner Vogels
Then things started to twist in October 2016.
Back in these days, Lawyer and venture guru Ed Zimmerman gave us the opportunity to set foot in the New York ecosystem through VentureCrush, his prominent accelerator program, network, and events.
Our Venture Crush experience’s milestone was the closing-speech of Werner Vogels, Amazon’s super-star CTO. About 60 startups from every industry were in the room that day, and Mr. Vogels gave a memorable 45-minute speech.
Vogels then spent a full 30 minutes describing the main concern for all the startups in the room.
It was beyond funding, beyond recruiting, beyond product-market fit. It was about user data and security, and how it will become a significant live-or-die concern for any software company in the years to come.
Every bit of data must be encrypted and building the tools to make security and privacy part of every app is the biggest challenge today. According to Vogels, it is or at least should be the industry’s primary focus for the next few years, including Amazon’s.
This moment was groundbreaking. After spending 12 months pitching and demo-ing our vision to a substantial amount of people who believed we were delusional, we felt liberated, we felt empowered.
When the world’s most respected cloud-guru claimed this approach would be the next big thing, we knew we had to make it happen.
Opting for the boldest vision, refocusing Tanker’s team.
Back in France, we’ve taken a few months to think about it. We had the chance to get backed by top VCs, and we decided to make the hard decision to go for the boldest vision.
We threw away the application roadmap, froze client deployments at the PoC-stage, and completely refocused the team. We got back to the drawing board, and 12 months later, we released Tanker as a PaaS (Platform-as-a-Service) for developers in private beta, in May 2018.
In 2019 more than ever, privacy and data protection should be the backbone of every app, and users’ trust is nowadays a company’s most precious asset.
After nine months working with direct touch customers, we just released Tanker in general availability, and our SDKs are all open source. You can start building privacy-first applications right here, right now.
And a special kudos to Ed and the Venture Crush team: you changed our path and gave us the confidence to push it forward.
