OneTrust CEO Kabir Barday Talks Data and Privacy at IE University

OneTrust CEO and Co-Founder Kabir Barday joined IE School of Science and Technology Dean Ikhlaq Sidhu in a conversation about data privacy amid the evolving technical landscape.

IE Sci-Tech School’s Impact Xcelerator invited Barday to share his insights from building a leading platform for privacy management solutions with students at the IE Tower. The talk fits into the long list of successful tech entrepreneurs invited to share their experiences with students.

The CEO generously held forth on venture building and managing tech businesses, as well as how AI is transforming the data industry and trust, security, and compliance is playing a major role.

Helping companies operationalize compliance with privacy regulations, Barday explained how society’s increasing awareness of data privacy as well as new regulations grew the demand for OneTrust’s products.

“Societally, newer generations are more sophisticated and aware of the risks and harms of this [data privacy], and there's new regulations coming that are going to drive this,” Barday said. “You had companies that didn't believe in it [compliance to privacy regulations], but it didn't matter because there was a law that passed that said you have to do it anyway.”

However, the challenge lay in dominating the market – software companies can’t be second or third place in the sector, according to the CEO.

“I would say building a software company is harder than being an Olympic athlete because there's a second place in the Olympics and you get paid,” he highlighted. “You don't get paid in software, you win or you die.”

When Sidhu asked about AI and its effects on the industry, Barday first explained a conflict present across all companies working with data.

“You have teams like marketing and engineering teams who want to use data fast and collect as much of it as they can – and their jobs are on the line for that,” he said. “Then you have all of these risk teams, like security, privacy, ethics, and governance who want to support that initiative, but they know their job is on the line if they slow down the business too much, or if they make a mistake they get blamed for it.”

Artificial intelligence amplifies this dilemma to a critical point, as Barday pointed out. 

“Let me give you a very simple example, I was talking to a customer last week, they are deploying a chatbot for their sales and support teams to use to be able to do enablement for them,” he explained. “That requires that company to feed a lot of data into that, so they’re going to be looking at all the support cases, they might be looking at emails - are you allowed to put all that data into these algorithms?”

When asked about his concerns for OneTrust, given the varying definition of privacy across different countries, Barday said that fast market shifts worry him more.

“Things are moving so fast. The minute we stop paying attention, we are dead. I’ve seen these shifts happen so quickly where a new competitor comes up, they figure out this new angle and this new persona and this new technology trend, and they raise $300 million in their first year,” Barday stated. “These big fundamental shifts in the market that you think happen once a decade, it's happened three times in the last six years.”

Formerly an employee at AirWatch, Barday stressed the importance of educating oneself to pave the way for success.

“I immersed myself in educating myself. Coming from an immigrant family, it’s ingrained in you that education is freedom,” he brought up. “I read constantly, I actually started taking college classes when I was thirteen years old, I would go to community colleges, anybody could sign up for them.”

An entrepreneurial, rigorous polytechnic, IE School of Science and Technology regularly invites industry icons to speak, encouraging its students to develop an entrepreneurial and sustainable way of thinking. Previously, the Impact Xcelerator has invited renowned investor and venture capitalist Michael Marks, tech entrepreneur Edo Segal of Touchcast and Caleb Boyd of Molten Industries– to name a few.

“The whole talk has been super interesting, very genuine, honest, really insightful. I have no doubt that I can find ten more hours to talk,” Sidhu said.