Verilogy Update #2

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Verilogy — Humanizing Privacy

8 min readAug 2, 2021

Greetings from Verilogy!

Its been a while since the last update, and it was a long and tough journey with lot’s of ups and downs, i.e. being stranded in Estonia and a military service during the pandemic :)

I just wanted to thank everyone who stood with us since the beginning of our journey and give you a little overview.

İşBank Workup Incubator

In Verilogy Update, I had mentioned that Verilogy was accepted to Işbank Workup early-stage startup incubator. This was a great opportunity for us, as it is the best incubator for early-stage startups in Turkey, as it offers something different from other programs.

A culture and community.

As per my experiences for the last three years, this is much more valuable than providing little cash incentives, cloud credit, etc. as in the long run if you are planning to build an “infinite business” as Simon Sinek puts it.

All you need is like-minded people at your side, and culture and values to fuel the team.

The workup team from Isbank, Kolektif House, and Ömer abi have managed to accomplish this with flying stars. As we have started the program I was still working part-time in Verilogy as I was working as a lawyer with Benan İlhanli doing data protection, M&As, and living the dream of a young lawyer feeling like I was Ron Laflamme from Pied Piper.

However as Workup really helped us become a startup rather than a side project, I had to say farewell to the beloved law firm and went in full time to become a legal tech entrepreneur.

The people I met during the program are the people I spend the most time with for more than a year now, we even go to family dinners together.

Therefore it was a big stepping stone for our success to bring us closer with people who are going through the same journey. This community is known as #startupkardesligi (#startupfellowship) consists of founders and like-minded people who are working together and helping each other out whenever someone needs a helping hand.

In December 2019, we graduated from the program with an epic demo day which took place in İş Kule, the headquarters of Isbank with an opening speech by Adnan Bali. It was a great event, where you can watch the youtube clip from here, we had a chance to meet with the biggest enterprises and investors in Turkey to scale our product.

BAKER AND MCKENZIE LEGALTECH STARTUP CHALLENGE

Just before our graduation from the Workup program, we had a chance to participate in the Legaltech Startup Challenge by Baker and Mckenzie, Esin Attorney Partnership, Hackquarters and Reinvent Law.

This was a great opportunity for us to cooperate with some of the best in the legal landscape. We won 2nd place in the challenge and our prize was to attend Tech Crunch Disrupt Berlin.

The names behind the event say it all, Baker and Mckenzie, Esin Attorney Partnership, and Reinvent Law. These are the people that every tech entrepreneur trying to disrupt the legal landscape should definitely meet. The things we experienced during and after the challenge were mind-blowing for the Verilogy team.

After the challenge, we had a chance to do some follow-up meetings with Esin lawyers, plus we have introduced the privacy hero Lother Determann, and also the people for Reinvent Law from Germany gave us really good feedback on our technical and business roadmap that helped us get ready for the harsh meetings that were awaiting us with the law firms in Europe.

TECHCRUNCH DISRUPT 2019

Techcrunch was a great experience, the prospects that we have met there helped us increase our MRR, and the many great founders that we have met really broadened our horizon.

After just 3 months following the Legal Tech Challenge and participating in TechCrunch Disrupt, we have received our first term sheet from a global investor.

IAPP — INTERNATIONAL ASSOCIATION OF PRIVACY PROFESSIONALS

As we were targeting law firms and our legal team consisted of young lawyers, we knew that the law firms that we are targeting would be testing our skills and know-how in privacy. So to get more involved with the global privacy landscape, we obtained a CIPP/E license back in 2018 and become part of the most prestigious privacy community in the world, the International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP).

Last year, I also started my role as the first-ever “Young Privacy Pro” of the Turkish chapter of IAPP and helped out our amazing chapter chairs. This was a great opportunity that allowed us to get more acquainted with the best privacy lawyers and get more connected within the global IAPP network.

GREY AREAS PRIVACY PODCAST

With beloved privacy pro Burak Özdemir, we have kick-started one of the most anticipated privacy podcasts in Turkey with the help of Lawpodcast. Rather than a dull and boring legal news discussion, we created a fun and engaging way to dive into recent developments in privacy from recent decisions from privacy watchdogs to privacy tech. You can listen to the published episodes on Spotify.

STARTUP WISE GUYS

After joining the SWG Bootcamp in Riga, we have been selected for the cybersecurity and Defense AI program, Cybernorth II accelerator. SWG brings in the best investors in Europe, the best mentors, and the amazing SWG team that really inspired us to think much bigger and gave us the first experience in becoming a business on a global scale. Therefore in March 2020, we moved to Tallinn to start our European expansion.

Estonia startup ecosystem is a great place to be if you are a tech entrepreneur. A startup community is there, you get a lot of help from other founders and mentors, even enterprises are really looking for ways to cooperate with you and find ways to create value together.

Tallinn is a magical city to live in, our plan is to move the team when things get back to normal, thanks to the special Startup Visa program.

A special thanks to Farid and Darja that really put in the effort to help us scale our business. They were always there for us and help us to get through the pandemic with their sincerity and supportive attitude.

CYBERNORTH II

The Cybernorth II program really helped us become what we are at the moment. More agile, more focused, metric oriented, and aiming to build a purposeful business. Our batch was the second batch of the cybersecurity and defense program of SWG, you can meet with our fellow batchmates from here.

This helped us to get really inside the state of art technologies in cybersecurity and meet with hundreds of investors, mentors, academicians, and even people who worked in the cybersecurity scripts behind Mr. Robot.

We had learned what is required to become a disruptive startup not only in Turkey but in Europe and helped us to reshape our vision and our products.

So for the last few months, with every learning and mistakes we have made we decided to forge a new path, which quite frankly is the one that really excites us the most.

Privacy Horror Stories

We have completed the first privacy community gathering around the “Privacy Horror Stories” theme, where we have taken a glimpse into the dark side of data privacy and the dangers lurking in the shadows of technology.

Aim of the event was to improve the awareness of university students from countries such Netherlands, Germany and Turkey by introducing them the scary side of surveillance capitalism and data protection.

Legal Design Summit Turkey — Verilogy Privacy UX Jams Session

Legal Hackers Turkey and Atolye collaborated on the first legal design summit of Turkey.

As there are not many concrete examples around Privacy UX, we wanted to examine the current privacy practices of the competitive esports platform Gamer Arena to demonstrate how we can improve the user journey around privacy and user experience with participation from the attendees, and even made real-time designs on Sketch. You can watch the workshop recording from here.

A special thanks to Yağız Soymen, Ahmet Kılıçaslan, Gülbüke Kınay, Enis Bubik, Pelin Bilgin, Fatih Saruhan and Bilgesu Sümer for their energy and amazing work during the jam session.

The workshop was received with great enthusiasm from the attendance, we collaborated with Sherpa with the inputs of the workshop on their Privacy UX report which you can access from here.

WHAT’S NEXT?

Our team has experience building privacy tech tools for the last few years for different segments such as law firms and SMBs.

This turns into an opportunity where we have a great deal of experience in understanding what works and what doesn’t in different markets.

We observed that being compliant with the minimum requirements of privacy laws is not enough anymore, the market is changing. Consumers are becoming more aware of their rights, so companies must aim to go “beyond compliance”.

Therefore, we help SaaS businesses update and augment their privacy policies to smart legal design documents for continuous privacy compliance monitoring while attracting users who care about privacy.

We provide an easy way to get an audit to identify major privacy issues on your website and legal texts.

We help you generate your privacy policies based on the actual data flows of your website, and also help you augment your existing legal texts into smart legal documents that update themselves based on the real-time website data.

Set periodic scans for your website and privacy policies so we can notify you when a new data collection, third-party tool, tracker, or cookie is detected which are not mentioned in your privacy policy.