THE CEO INTERVIEW www.ceotodaymagazine.com 25 We did a bit of research and noticed your company is also involved in probono activities – what is the Bright Initiative? The Bright Initiative is our special organisation and programme that is focused on making our company’s technology and yearslong expertise available on a pro bono basis to universities, non-profits, NGOs, global policymakers, charities and more. The COVID-19 pandemic was the catalyst for the realisation that this now extremely active organisation was in urgent need. We made our web data platform available for researchers at the time and found out that the demand was so great that we decided to build a pro bono organisation. Today, The Bright Initiative includes over 500 organisations. Among them, you will find over 170 universities, 96 non-profits, NGOs and public sector bodies – all aimed at using public web data to drive positive change in the world. The organisation is led today by Keren Pakes (a former journalist) and includes 7 full-time team members that provide everything from support to expertise to educational sessions and more. For example, on a monthly basis, we run 6 educational sessions involving top academic institutions or nonprofit organisations. Our partners work to tackle critical needs like combatting climate change or fighting social injustice such as human trafficking. We Sounds like you guys are growing rapidly. Any chance you can throw some numbers at us? Yes, absolutely. The last couple of years have been incredibly interesting, and we’ve grown exponentially. To put it in numbers, in addition to partnering with the largest e-commerce sites, we are also working with 2 of the top 5 banks in the US. In addition, we’ve recently reached the 400-employee mark and are still growing rapidly. In 2021, we announced that we surpassed the US$100 million mark in revenue and acquired 3 new companies. The data domain is a domain like no other these days. I like to say that data is like the new water – it is essential to keeping any kind of business and our market alive. And our most recent numbers are proof to that. What have been the biggest challenges in growing the company? Any company that is growing at such a rapid pace finds it challenging to ensure that all employees keep up with the company rhythm. It takes quite an effort to train such large numbers of employees and manage those new teams. As we are a company that takes pride in anticipating current and future data needs, we move fast and innovate even faster, so keeping this rapid pace as well as recruiting at this pace is a big challenge, one we have had to learn to overcome. are also active participants in and support the UK Government’s National Data Strategy (NDS) by providing the required public web data to assess, for example, data skillsets on a national level or sharing our extensive expertise in the data domain. After all, we’ve been around for 8 years and that is a long time in the data domain. This industry sounds complex – surely there’s regulatory frameworks in place and regulations, right? Well, not really. Besides the regulatory framework that GDPR and CCPA provide to deal with data privacy, which we are very happy about, there is no real framework that guides operators with web data collection. For this reason, we are now involved in several committees and inquiries dealing with AI and web-data collection ethics. As a company, we are self-regulated and take pride in our transparent, compliancedriven procedures and practices. This is unprecedented in our industry, and I encourage all other companies and operators in this space to follow our lead. When you look at this domain from any direction, you quickly find out that a regulation framework actually makes you a better company and most likely a better innovator. After all, customers out there want to know that they are safe in the hands of trustworthy hands… Trusting your data starts with trusting your data provider and that is a commitment every data provider must follow.
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