The Blockchain Six
As part of its ‘Blockchain Six’ feature story, the Portland Business Journal highlighted Portland-based Concord as one of six startups participating in the Oregon Enterprise Blockchain Venture Studio — a public/private program designed to support startups developing blockchain products for businesses. The studio is operated by R/GA Ventures, which selected Concord as one of six companies out of 1,000+ applicants to join the program.
As part of the story, reporter Joseph Galligan spoke with Concord CEO Dash Lavine and CTO Paul Lawbaugh.
"We've been in analytics and big data for a lot of years. We were basically helping large companies grab as much data about people as they could without people knowing," Lavine said. "That didn't quite sit correctly with all of us over the years."
Lavine explained how Concord came to fruition:
"The goal was to basically create a way for people to actually have more control, ownership, and transparency around data use. Also, to benefit the brands that they choose to work with and make it easier for brands to get better data that actually benefits them," Lavine said. "It would also give the right level of control transparency and ownership to people to really solving this data crisis that gave us Cambridge Analytica, and the data breaches you seeing on both sides, this mistrust of the system."
"There's a lot of junk data out there — 50%,” said Lawbaugh. "If people are forced to enter something, they offer bad data. And, because people aren't involved in the scenario where data is being collected, and they're not validating any of this, there's no real consent today. Businesses behave like stalkers to get data."
"And now, U.S. companies have to start worrying about some key requirements such as, if a user asks you to see a copy of their data, you have to give them a copy of all of the data. And that's all of your data that you have across multiple disparate systems. Usually, if you're a large brand, you're probably working with 50 to 100 different data vendors.”
Concord’s platform helps companies ensure compliance with the latest data privacy regulations while building trust and loyalty with their users to drive higher engagement and more opt-ins. Concord provides a secure and scalable data processing engine and a user-facing privacy center that public and private organizations can easily implement without code expertise, enabling privacy protected data collection, sharing/preference controls, and regulation-ready compliance feeds. One platform for compliance and privacy-first data collection that drives better data, user loyalty, and security & protection.