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Hello Rownd Supporters!
2020 has been a year to remember. This year will be defined as the year of Covid-19. A year of loss, a year of working from home for many, a year of increased risk for many more. Front-line workers (and front-line heros) entered our vocabulary. With survival the focus for most businesses, and so many shutting their doors forever, we knew we had to focus on our mission, on our why.
We believe everyone deserves individual data privacy, ownership, and security.
Rownd’s Mission
“Everyone” is extremely ambitious, but “deserves” is what is truly revolutionary. The definition of Deserves is pretty straight forward: “do something or have or show qualities worthy of (reward or punishment) “. We believe everyone on this planet is worthy of the reward of data privacy, ownership, and security. What makes everyone worthy? Because we all exist. The act of living a life is enough to warrant reward. Why? Because personal data is an asset. It is worth a lot of money. Trillion dollar companies have built empires on Personal data, yet they hide the tools to actually manage it. Why? Because data privacy and data ownership take away their monopoly control of the data. This mindset must change. Rownd is creating a set of tools that allow businesses and organizations to build trust with their customers by recognizing this value. Rownd also decreases data-privacy liabilities and costs through the revolutionary Personal data privacy center.
Although 2020 slowed down our ambitions, we still grew, learned, and launched!
Highlights of 2020 (in no order):
- Lauded by the US Air Force as being “selectable” as a Data privacy solution for the military.
- Conducted a beta and soft-launched the Rownd Data Privacy and Ownership Platform
- Launched a new landing page (https://rownd.io).
- Conducted user tests, got a boatload of feedback, and iterated
- Launched Privacy Hunt, a crowd-sourced tool that makes finding data privacy forms a LOT easier.
- Launched New Logo and branding
- Dozens of awesome blog posts (year’s most popular: 1, 2, 3. )
- Raised pre-seed round and earned customers
- Grew our team and our vision
- Finalists in three business plan competitions!
Goals for 2021:
- Be selected by the USAF for Data Privacy R&D (the US Government will help us reach a lot of people).
- Launch the Rownd Data Privacy Platform to the world (a splash launch on Product Hunt, media, and beyond)
- Create new features and tools to make data privacy easier and more wide spread (plug and play forms, no-code tools, and more).
- Launch the “/Privacy” campaign. Privacy should not be hidden away, deep in a legal policy, it should be front and center and we will launch tools to make that easier.
- Launch new data proxies (data aliases) to obscure your actual Personal Data from 3rd parties to include our first B2C tools.
- Start to deliver on our mission, with a focus on: EVERYONE.
2020 was not the year we all thought it would be. For Rownd, the “global pause” gave us an opportunity to find our true north and really gain some momentum. 2021 is shaping up to be an exciting year. Thank you again for your continued support, for your feedback, for your commitment to a better world.
Best,
Robert Thelen, CEO, Rownd
P.S. A short video focused on current (anti-customer) privacy practices: