The Ethics of Privacy with Cillian Kieran of Ethyca

Today I’m joined by Cillian Kieran, the CEO and co-founder of Ethyca, to talk about the privacy challenges that served as the impetus to found Ethyca. In our chat, he explains the overarching goals of the privacy engineering platform. We discuss the decision to begin Ethyca as an open source tool and why that was critical to the mission. Then we talk about the decision to move to a commercial product and how to decide which features to offer as paid versus free. Cillian reviews the differences in his process between his two start-ups, discusses lessons he learned from prior mistakes, and provides advice for aspiring founders of open source start-ups.

Highlights:

  • How Cillian decided to found Ethyca (00:50)

  • Awareness of developers and engineers around privacy issues (3:46)

  • Cillian talks about why he went the open source route (8:15)

  • Moving from open source to commercial product (14:02)

  • Privacy as a human right and how that influences development of features (16:32)

  • How Ethyca manages relationships between engineer and legal teams (19:40)

  • What Cillian did differently at his two start-ups (21:58)

  • We discuss open source start-up success and whether it’s necessary to have a larger world-changing vision (24:52)

  • Cillian discusses mistakes he has learned from (27:56)

  • Cillian offers advice to aspiring founders in the open source community (30:49)

Links:

  • Fides open source platform: fid.es

Cillian

Chris Hill