Theresia Gouw
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Ketch raises another $20M as demand grows for its privacy data control platform
Six months after securing a $23 million Series A round, Ketch, a startup providing online privacy regulation and data compliance, brought in an additional $20 million in A1 funding, this time led by Acrew Capital.
Returning with Acrew for the second round are CRV, super{set} (the startup studio founded by Ketch’s co-founders CEO Tom Chavez and CTO Vivek Vaidya), Ridge Ventures and Silicon Valley Bank. The new investment gives Ketch a total of $43 million raised since the company came out of stealth earlier this year.
In 2020, Ketch introduced its data control platform for programmatic privacy, governance and security. The platform automates data control and consent management so that consumers’ privacy preferences are honored and implemented.
Enterprises are looking for a way to meet consumer needs and accommodate their rights and consents. At the same time, companies want data to fuel their growth and gain the trust of consumers, Chavez told TechCrunch.
There is also a matter of security, with much effort going into ransomware and malware, but Chavez feels a big opportunity is to bring security to the data wherever it lies. Once the infrastructure is in place for data control it needs to be at the level of individual cells and rows, he said.
“If someone wants to be deleted, there is a challenge in finding your specific row of data,” he added. “That is an exercise in data control.”
Ketch’s customer base grew by more than 300% since its March Series A announcement, and the new funding will go toward expanding its sales and go-to-market teams, Chavez said.
Ketch app. Image Credits: Ketch
This year, the company launched Ketch OTC, a free-to-use privacy tool that streamlines all aspects of privacy so that enterprise compliance programs build trust and reduce friction. Customer growth through OTC increased five times in six months. More recently, Qonsent, which developing a consent user experience, is using Ketch’s APIs and infrastructure, Chavez said.
When looking for strategic partners, Chavez and Vaidya wanted to have people around the table who have a deep context on what they were doing and could provide advice as they built out their products. They found that in Acrew founding partner Theresia Gouw, whom Chavez referred to as “the OG of privacy and security.”
Gouw has been investing in security and privacy for over 20 years and says Ketch is flipping the data privacy and security model on its head by putting it in the hands of developers. When she saw more people working from home and more data breaches, she saw an opportunity to increase and double down on Acrew’s initial investment.
She explained that Ketch is differentiating itself from competitors by taking data privacy and security and tying it to the data itself to empower software developers. With the OTC tool, similar to putting locks and cameras on a home, developers can download the API and attach rules to all of a user’s data.
“The magic of Ketch is that you can take the security and governance rules and embed them with the software and the piece of data,” Gouw added.
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My big jump: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy’s CEO journey
After listening to others pitch me a few different job opportunities while still at Google in 2008, it became clear to me that I would make a better decision if I could fully explore the larger landscape of new companies emerging in Silicon Valley.
I had spent the last several years focusing on Google’s business outside the U.S., and I honestly felt out of touch with the startup world. Beyond my goal of becoming a CEO of my own company, I had two other ambitions: I wanted to help build a great consumer service that would delight people (potentially in e-commerce) and I wanted to build further wealth for myself and my family.
To better evaluate my options, I made the decision to quit Google first and find a way to study the wider ecosystem of companies before choosing where to go. Resolved to give myself a “blank slate” before making a final choice, I left Google when I was three months pregnant and joined Accel Partners, a top Silicon Valley venture capital firm and an investor in my previous startup, in a temporary role as CEO-in-residence.
In the months that followed, I helped Accel evaluate investment opportunities across a wide variety of digital sectors, with a particular focus on e-commerce, taking the opportunity to study those companies I might join or think of starting from scratch.
On Thursday, August 19 at 2 p.m. PDT/5 p.m. EDT/9 p.m. UTC
Managing Editor Danny Crichton will interview Sukhinder Singh Cassidy, author of “Choose Possibility,” on Twitter Spaces.
One of Accel’s key partners, Theresia Gouw, helped me brainstorm, joining my cadre of professional priests. We had known one another for over a decade (I originally met her as a young founder at Yodlee) and were at similar stages of our careers, so I knew she could identify personally with my career quandaries. Like me, Theresia was pregnant with her next child and at a similar life stage — yet another commonality.
Image Credits: Sukhinder Singh Cassidy
While at Accel, I spent a disproportionate amount of time testing my macro thesis that online shopping was about to explode in new ways. I had seen the rise of e-tailers at Google (many of these companies, such as eBay and Amazon, were Google’s largest advertisers at the time), but many of the leading e-commerce sites like Amazon and Zappos still had a utilitarian feel to them.
Meanwhile, new fashion and décor e-commerce sites such as Rent the Runway, Gilt, Houzz, Wayfair and One Kings Lane were popping up everywhere and growing rapidly. These sites sought to tap into a more aspirational and entertainment-oriented kind of shopping experience and move it online.
Expert investors like Accel and others were funding them, and my own observations suggested that this area would yield another big wave of online consumer growth. These lifestyle categories of shopping also appealed to me personally; I was the target customer for many of them.
I started to work on an idea for a new e-commerce service, a luxury version of eBay, while listening to the pitches of every e-commerce company that was looking for funding and talking to several that needed early-stage CEOs. I continued to listen to non-e-commerce pitches as well, simply to give myself a point of reference for evaluating online shopping opportunities.
At Yodlee and Google, I had been lucky enough to work with incredibly smart and talented people who shared my values, and I wanted to do the same at my next venture.
I wanted to work with great investors, too, and fortunately I had the ability either to work with Accel-funded companies, start my own or leverage other investor relationships I’d developed. I spent time with multiple company founders to try to discern who they were as leaders, in addition to what they were working on.
By this point in my career, I had a pretty clear idea of my own superpowers and values, so I looked to find companies that could make the most of my unique gifts and whose founders or senior leaders had strengths complementary to mine.
Specifically, I hoped to join a company with a very strong engineering and product management culture that needed a CEO with strategy, vision, business development, fundraising and team-building expertise. Applying these criteria, I turned down several opportunities at companies whose founders had skill sets too similar to mine, reasoning that this overlap might lead to conflict if I ever became CEO.
Finally, I used my time at Accel to think long and hard about the risks I would take in becoming a startup CEO and whether I could afford to fail. My biggest risk by far was ego- and reputation-related. Mindful of how precarious early-stage startups are, I feared that I would leave a successful role as a global executive only to suffer a very large and visible failure. But the more I thought about this, I faced this ego risk head-on and concluded that my reputation as an executive from Google would hopefully be strong enough to survive one failure if it came to that.
The personal risks of taking on a startup CEO role felt different but not greater than those associated with my job at Google. While I knew that serving as a first-time CEO while having another newborn at home (my son Kieran) would be immensely stressful, I would likely benefit from no longer traveling around the world for days and weeks on end and working across multiple time zones, as I had previously.
Last, I evaluated the financial risks of potential moves. Although my startup equity would have uncertain value for a long time, I judged this a risk worth taking, given how excited I’d feel to have more impact and responsibility as CEO. While I lost a large financial package in choosing to leave Google and switching to a startup salary, I could pay the bills at home while digging into my savings only slightly. Under these conditions, I was prepared to make the leap.
In early 2010, almost a year after I left Google, I finally found the right opportunity and decided to join fashion technology startup Polyvore as its full-time CEO. A precursor to Pinterest, Polyvore was based on the idea that women could “clip” online images to create fashion and décor idea boards digitally that were instantly “shoppable.”
Millions of young women (including influencers) were already using the service and loved it. The founding team was led by a rock star engineer, Pasha Sadri, along with three other product and technology folks he recruited from the likes of Yahoo and Google.
Pasha was known for his intelligence, and we had connected informally over the years for coffee, each time having great discussions about business strategy. In fact, Polyvore twice before had tried to recruit me to become its CEO, once when I was at Google and again when I departed that company in 2008. Back then, I’d spent a productive afternoon with the founding team, helping them think through their business model. I also knew Peter Fenton, one of Silicon Valley’s most successful investors and a leading funder of the company. Peter was the one who first introduced me to Polyvore and who continued afterward to passively court me.
Having spent so much time exploring my options from multiple angles, I was now poised to make a great decision. I felt convinced that e-commerce was starting its next wave of growth, and felt excited to be part of it.
Within that vision, Polyvore was among the companies best positioned to succeed, and I knew I could contribute in significant ways to building a service that would delight millions. I was impressed with the strengths of Polyvore’s founder and investors and anticipated that I would be able to complement their efforts nicely. Recognizing that my success as a startup CEO hinged on my relationships with the founder and board, I had also invested time to get to know them.
Meanwhile, I had faced my fear demons, taking financial risk but negotiating my offer aggressively to account for downside scenarios I imagined, and coming to grips with my ego risk. With all this work in place, I finally jumped.
After managing a multibillion-dollar profit and loss and leading a 2,000-person team at Google, I became the newly minted CEO of a 10-person fashion startup in February 2010.
As we tee up the bigger choices in our careers, we all face critical moments of decision. No choice we make will be perfect, and all the frameworks in the world won’t eliminate risk entirely. But we don’t need perfection or freedom from risk. We just need to take the next step.
By choosing thoughtfully, using all the tools at our disposal to maximize our upside and anticipate our downside, we can grasp the opportunities available to us while equipping ourselves to handle whatever challenges reality throws our way.
Excerpted from “Choose Possibility: Take Risks and Thrive (Even When You Fail)’ by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Copyright © 2021 by Sukhinder Singh Cassidy. Published and reprinted by permission of Mariner Books/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. All rights reserved.
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Theresia Gouw and Ann Miura-Ko are coming to Disrupt
For a very long time, the venture industry was stubbornly resistant to change. The same people sat back in their chairs on Sand Hill Road while nervous founders made the rounds, hoping one of these firms would champion their cause.
No longer. Since roughly the advent of Y Combinator, the landscape has seemed to shift by the year, with more startups raising capital every year, more people becoming VCs, more Medium posts, more newsletters, more events, more great founders, more bad behavior, more congestion, and more money from all over the world finding its way to Silicon Valley and a growing number of smaller but fast-growing hubs.
How to make sense of it all? At Disrupt, we do our best to answer that question by sitting down each year with top venture capitalists who tell us what they are seeing. In 2015, for example, we talked with VCs about why you can start, but not always scale, a company from anywhere. In 2016, the discussion turned to why VCs were gathering up so much capital when the IPO market was (at the time) all but closed to new tech issuers. In 2017, we examined how then-new U.S. President Donald Trump might impact the venture and startup industry. By last year, we were talking about Softbank, mega rounds, and whether Silicon Valley is losing its gravitational pull.
This year, we’re again going to be taking stock of what trends have so far defined 2019 — and what may be around the corner — and we’re thrilled to announce the VCs who will help us to answer some of these questions: Ann Miura-Ko, a cofounder of the seed- and early-stage venture firm Floodgate, and Theresia Gouw, a cofounder of the early-stage venture firm Aspect Ventures.
Both of these longtime investors bring a lot of deep insights to any venture discussion. Miura-Ko has been in the industry since before the last major tech boom, starting in the late ’90s. Then a McKinsey analyst who was focused on wireless technologies, she went on to become an analyst at the venture firm CRV before cofounding with partner Mike Maples the venture firm Floodgate in 2008. Since joining forces, Floodgate has backed a long list of powerful companies, including Twitch, Sonos, Chegg, AdRoll, BazaarVoice, and Lyft, where Miura-Ko remains on the board of directors. She has seen plenty of ups and downs, within both Floodgate’s portfolio and the broader startup industry.
Gouw, meanwhile, also has a perspective on the industry that many newer investors don’t enjoy, having worked as a VP at a Bay Area startup during the dot.com run-up, then joining the venture firm Accel in 1999, just a year before the industry imploded. It could have been a short-lived stint. Instead, she helping the firm sift through the wreckage and right itself before leaving in 2014 to start her own firm — Aspect — with partner and former DFJ partner Jennifer Fonstad. Since then, the firm has backed a wide variety of companies, from The RealReal to Exabeam, HotelTonight to Forescout. Put another way, Gouw also knows what the deal is.
We can’t wait to sit down with both of these top investors to talk about the trends shaping the industry right now, from the growing secondary market to IPO trends, from what excites them the most to what their biggest concerns are for their firms and their portfolio companies as we sail toward 2020.
It’s a conversation you will not want to miss if you want a better understanding of what’s happening on the ground right now. Join us at Disrupt SF, which runs October 2 to 4 at the Moscone Center. Tickets are available here.
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