If you don’t want Google or Facebook to have your data, this startup offers an alternative

Roger Haenni, co-founder and CEO of Datum

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Roger Haenni is a serial entrepreneur and the co-founder and CEO of Datum, a distributed database governing the safe exchange and trade of data. Datum allows people to take ownership of their information and share it with businesses on their own terms.

Roger tells us more.

Tell us about your entrepreneurial background.

I dropped out of college to start a web design agency, which I ran for two or three years. Then, I quickly got into co-founding a financial information portal where investors could get real-time streaming quotes. I also co-founded an online PC and components store, which grew to be one of the largest independent ecommerce websites in Switzerland. After that, I focused on doing early mobile apps when phone browsers were just black and white.

Toward the end of 2013, I started looking into Bitcoin and other coins, which were starting to pop up. But frankly, I didn’t see much potential in Bitcoin at that time. What interested me was when the prices started moving up. But I got out of the space when the price went down and flatlined.

In the meantime, I did two other startups prior to starting Datum: a Fitbit for babies and a bluetooth mesh sensor network.

For the Fitbit for babies, we encountered a big pain point. We were collecting very sensitive medical data from babies. We tried selling this data, but the big question was: “Where does this data come from? Did the parents give their consent for this data to be sold?” Also, why isn’t there a solution where I, as a developer, would not have to take so much care about data? Why do I have to develop all this stuff myself?

That’s really how the idea for Datum developed.

Tell us about what Datum is all about.

We set out to build Datum last year around June, then we did a token sale to raise funds.

What we’re trying to achieve is to give anyone their own digital identity. We don’t think it’s right that large companies like Facebook and Google are basically controlling all the data. We felt that blockchain really presents a unique opportunity to actually provide a decentralized alternative.

Technically, Datum is really about two things. The first is being a decentralized data storage so you don’t have to store data on just Facebook or Google servers. The second is having a data trading protocol where we define how you attach value to your data and how you define it, and then make it easy among developers to exchange and share this data. All of this is controlled by the individual.

Companies can also cut you in on any profit made from your data.

What is the user experience like and how do you monetize data?

Basically, you can download our data map, which is just an MVP at the moment. But ultimately, this will be the app that you can use to manage your digital identity and the data attached to it.

Do advertisers pay Datum to access users’ data?

How do you address concerns around data security and privacy?

What do you hope to achieve with Datum in the coming years?