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Privacy, Ad Tech, and AI: Julia Shullman, GC and Chief Privacy Officer, Telly
101 Plays1 year ago
New technologies are advancing faster than ever. How can we rely on our experience to solve unforeseen privacy issues as our personal data makes its way to places we never imagined it could end up?
Julia Shullman, Telly’s GC and Chief Privacy Officer, has spent nearly two decades advocating for privacy in the complex ecosystem of advertising technology. She has learned that one of the most important things a Chief Privacy Officer can do is acknowledge what they don’t know and rely on the expertise of other teams to build smart products that protect user data.
Join Julia as she reveals her thoughts on where these essential consumer safeguards are headed as we enter into an era of AI and business-first thinking.
Read detailed summary: https://www.spotdraft.com/podcast/episode-16
Topics:
Introduction: 0:18
Blending hardware, software, and privacy at Telly: 1:00
Finding your way from M&A to privacy law: 4:16
Transitioning into ad tech at AppNexus: 6:37
Identifying the necessary attitude to be successful in privacy: 10:42
Overseeing the transformation from AppNexus to Xandr at AT&T: 13:10
Taking on a GC role at TripleLift: 15:45
Building trust with executive team and partners at Vista Equity Partners: 22:07
Stepping away to found a privacy and policy consulting firm: 25:57
Advice to lawyers searching for their next GC role: 32:12
Considering the future of the chief privacy officer role: 33:24
Speculating on the future of privacy and AI: 36:17
Book recommendations: 41:34
Connect with us:
Julia Shullman: https://www.linkedin.com/in/julia-shullman/
Tyler Finn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/tylerhfinn
SpotDraft - https://www.linkedin.com/company/spotdraft
SpotDraft is a leading CLM platform that solves your end-to-end contract management issues. Visit https://www.spotdraft.com to learn more.
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Transcript
Role of Chief Privacy Officers
00:00:03
Speaker
So I see some companies where CPOs are just kind of throwing up their hands because they're almost like being shunted to the side and just like shoved into a very compliance and legal role and the business is running.
Breaking into Privacy Field
00:00:18
Speaker
How do you break into privacy? This is a question I've heard time and time again, from law school students, firm lawyers, commercial counsel, even a salesperson or two. AI may be driving today's news cycle, but privacy is still really hot and folks want in.
Introduction to Julia Schulman
00:00:36
Speaker
Today, I'm here with my friend Julia Schulman, the GC and Chief Privacy Officer at Telly.
00:00:42
Speaker
Julia is kind of a legend in the ad tech world and privacy world as well. And we're going to chat all things privacy today. Hi, Tyler. Thanks for having me. Thanks for being on the abstract with me. This is pretty fun. We get to do it together here in New York at the Spot Draft Summit. I'm so glad you agreed to sit down. You just joined Tele, which is a pretty cool company. Can you tell us a little bit about the product before we start talking career and privacy and all that sort of
Telly's Smart TV and Privacy Transparency
00:01:08
Speaker
thing? Sure.
00:01:09
Speaker
Tele is a company that was founded by Ilya Pozen, who was sort of the first person to come up with a free ad-supported streaming model. And he took it to the next step and said, well, if we have a free ad-supported streaming model, why don't we just create a device that is a free ad-supported device? And so we're actually going all the way down to the manufacturing level, and we're manufacturing a new smart TV that is fully powered by advertising and
00:01:36
Speaker
Not surprisingly, from our world, I have joined them at a very early stage to really think about how to ensure that that transparent exchange between the consumer and us is incredibly transparent and understood by the user, and that they know exactly what we're doing with their data, and they agree
Telly's Beta Phase and User Feedback
00:01:53
Speaker
to it.
00:01:53
Speaker
If I wanted to get a tele, how would I go about getting one? Is that even possible these days? We're in a limited beta. So these are new devices. There's a lot of things to iron out. We want to make sure the user experience is good. So you can certainly go to our app, download it, sign up. We'd love any feedback that you've got on sort of our disclosures and workflow, and you'll
Managing Privacy at Telly
00:02:15
Speaker
be on the wait list. And then as soon as we have a device that's available in your market, we'll let you know and ask if you want to come off the wait list and start testing with us.
00:02:22
Speaker
but everyone right now is a real tester. So we're getting feedback, constantly really good feedback around the features, around content that we have on it, et cetera, et cetera.
00:02:32
Speaker
Moving to New York next year and shipping my TV cross country sounds challenging. I may add myself to that wait list. Yeah, add yourself.
Privacy Priorities and Global Policies
00:02:39
Speaker
Before we roll back the clock a little bit and talk about how you broke into privacy yourself, I think working at Telly is particularly interesting because you're dealing with both software and hardware and data and all of those sorts of privacy questions. What's top of mind for you these days from a privacy perspective?
00:02:59
Speaker
three things that are top of mind for me. First and foremost, as I've just joined, is making sure I understand what we're doing. I've been spending a lot of time embedded, and we'll get into this later, embedded with our product team, our engineering team, and then our user experience team, and really looking through not only the user-facing disclosures that we have in the policies, but the back-end on what we're actually doing and making sure that we're
00:03:22
Speaker
doing what we say we do and then thinking through the future. That takes me to the second thing that we're thinking about and is really top of mind for me and has always been top of mind is where is the advertising industry going in terms of data use, access and sharing. It's really pulling back that was driven by GDPR and all the US regulations.
Julia Schulman's Career Transition
00:03:43
Speaker
We're seeing this rise of privacy-enhancing technologies, everything from clean rooms to the larger platforms, pulling back on signal and replacing it with some more privacy-focused signals. So we're thinking about how we fit within that ecosystem. Then I think the last thing is really just keeping an eye on a lot of the policy movement in the US, of course, because we're US-focused. But I always keep an eye across the world, because anything that hits in Europe generally comes to the US, eventually in some flavor.
00:04:11
Speaker
They are good at exporting regulation there, I think. We'll circle back to the present day, but I want to go actually back to sort of the early days when you were at a firm as a lawyer. You didn't actually start as a privacy guru. Not at all. Yeah, no. You built out a pretty successful niche for yourself early on as an M&A attorney. Tell us how you did that, because that is difficult in and of itself.
00:04:36
Speaker
Yeah, you know what? Right place at the right time. I am one of the believers that it's just I didn't plan out my career.
Initial Exposure to Ad Tech and Privacy
00:04:43
Speaker
Crazy enough, I thought I wanted to be a tax lawyer. Really? Yep. Joined a firm, Latham and Watkins here in New York that fortunately lets their early associates kind of be unassigned and so you get to test a number of different things out. Very quickly realized I did not want to be a tax lawyer and I really liked
00:04:59
Speaker
not just the folks within the M&A group, but working on deals that were so core to the strategy of the clients that we were representing. And you really had to understand at a big picture level how the company operated, what their strategy was, what they were planning on doing, and get to work with experts across all the different big buckets of legal issues, including intellectual property and privacy, which was a real up and coming issue back when I was starting out in 2006, 2007.
00:05:28
Speaker
When you first went in-house, tell us a little bit about your first company and the early stages of being in-house. What were you focused on at that point in time? So I had done M&A for a number of years at Latham, sort of across public, private, and more traditional, just run-of-the-mill M&A-type activity. But when I went in-house first, I went to a British public media and events company.
00:05:53
Speaker
And I was hired in for my M&A experience. I really was hired onto the M&A team. And they had said, well, you'll spend probably 50%, 75% of your time doing M&A. We're constantly acquiring and divesting companies. But you'll get to spend that other percentage of time on more generalist, internal legal matters, since you're going to be able to get to cut your teeth as a generalist, which was so critical to me. And it's why I made that jump, because I was able to
00:06:17
Speaker
take my M&A experience, use that, and parlay it into an in-house experience, but not just sit on an
Julia's Role at AppNexus
00:06:23
Speaker
M&A team. And I got to do everything from commercial, some product work, labor and employment, you name it. It's actually the first place I saw an ad server deal and kind of questioned, what is this whole ad tech space and what are they doing? Interesting. You made a leap to AppNexus. I think it was an inflection point for you, both in terms of moving into ad tech and then we'll talk about in a second, moving into privacy.
00:06:46
Speaker
The term ad tech, advertising technology, means something to us, but it may not actually mean anything to a lot of the people who are listening. Could you tell us a little bit about what ad tech is, what it does for the internet and for the world? How would you summarize what ad tech means? At its core, it is the
00:07:06
Speaker
Interrelated web of technology, there's probably thousands of vendors that participate in it that enable you to access either free content online or pretty heavily subsidized content. So when you open up a website on your computer or you open up an app on your phone or nowadays, right, when you open up your smart TV, there's a web of technology vendors behind the scenes that are helping decide what ad to show you when and who gets to show that ad.
00:07:36
Speaker
Once you were at AdNexus, you started in a commercial role. It was actually the departure of, I think, a mutual friend, David Weinberg, that led to your first full-time privacy role. Tell us that story of transitioning into privacy. And I'm also really curious, you know, did you think it was a great idea at the time? Were you a little bit nervous? What was it like? Because privacy then meant something, I think, a little bit different even than what privacy means today.
00:07:58
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So it's wild that that happened so long ago at this point. So I was hired in, as you said, as a commercial and product counsel. And so for I think at least three years, I was purely focused on running the legal team supporting our publisher technology group over at AppNexus, which was our ad server, SSP, and a whole host of others. We launched header bidding into the market, you name it.
00:08:22
Speaker
And when David left, who had been running privacy at the time, we'd obviously partnered very closely because privacy is so fundamental to building an ad tech product into selling that negotiating deals. We had a real big gap. I mean, he's huge in the industry and newest stuff and was really able to step up and handle most
Embracing a Privacy Leadership Role
00:08:41
Speaker
of that. And so as soon as he left, we really, we ran a search to try to replace him. And honestly, we just weren't finding the right person in market. And I think you know this, you kind of either find people who are
00:08:52
Speaker
Great policy wonks but sort of really struggle to apply that to the real world and understand how to apply it to very complex technology or They're technologists, but they can't kind of do the whole other side of things and so I kind of stepped into that role Because it was fundamental to our continued go-to-market efforts never thinking I was going to take it on I was part of your you have a live with outside counsel at the time and
00:09:17
Speaker
And then we just got pulled into some regulatory matters with existing customers, and GDPR was coming, and we had to really put a strategy together, and the time just kept ticking down. And I think finally, our general counsel at the time, Nithya Das and CEO Brian O'Kelley, who's well-known in the ad tech space,
00:09:36
Speaker
asked me if I wanted to take on the role. And to your question of what did I think about at the time, I thought it was insane. Because I had worked with David Weinbergs of the world and the Noga Rosenthal's who we're going to talk to you later, who've been doing this for so long and are just
00:09:51
Speaker
I mean, amazing in my eyes and I was not that and I never thought I could get up to speed and really get it. Nithya and Brian just said, you know, the product, you know, the services, you've got relationships internally.
Skills for Privacy Success
00:10:02
Speaker
You've basically been doing that. It's like, just step up and do it. So I said no originally. They came back around and asked me.
00:10:08
Speaker
And I kind of just did it because I really felt strongly that the business needed someone in the role. And they said, you can do it for a short amount of time, and if you don't like it, it's fine. We'll keep looking for someone. And I eventually loved it and actually handed off my commercial and product role, which I did for a while. I did the two roles for a bit, and it just became too much.
00:10:28
Speaker
You talked a little bit about how finding the right fit for privacy can be hard. To me, a lot of that is communication skills, actually. I think that it's particularly important in this sort of role. Do you have a perspective on that? Can you share a perspective on what you need to bring to the table to be successful in that sort of privacy job? I think at any company now, any company that has a big data aspect to the product and their services and is fundamental to
00:10:55
Speaker
either selling it to consumers or other businesses has a probably complex interrelated web of data ecosystems.
Integration of AppNexus into AT&T
00:11:05
Speaker
And so number one, to your point, you have to be really good at communicating, but you also have to be
00:11:10
Speaker
Frankly, really good at admitting what you don't know and rolling up your sleeves and asking the right questions. The last thing would be context switching because you have to be supporting and partnering with all different teams across the business and they all operate differently. They all think about things differently. They actually speak different languages.
00:11:30
Speaker
There's a quote of engineers are from Mars and lawyers are from Venus or something. And you need to put things in front of them and explain things differently. So I think it's that communication layer. And then it's the layer of being able to go really under the hood and get very, very technical. And you don't need to be an engineer. You just need to ask a lot of detailed questions and be willing to just keep asking them until you figure out what you need to know and maybe what you don't need to know. And I think lawyers sometimes are not predisposed to
00:12:00
Speaker
comfortable admitting that they don't know something or they're not like the expert in the room. I love the idea of admitting what you don't know. I know early on when I was sort of ramping up on privacy myself, I had a poor product manager who I'm we're
00:12:17
Speaker
rolling out an SDK-related feature, and I didn't understand the data flows, and I made him walk me through the same PowerPoint presentation three times in a row. We went through it the first time, and I said, I did not get any of that. We have to go through it again. And after the second time, I said, I'm about 75%, 80% there, but I really want us to do it one more time, so I actually understand how data is going from A to B, right? Actually, I think it may have been more complex than that.
00:12:41
Speaker
But it's unsurprising to you, right? But I wanted to double click on that because I think that that is so important is being willing to say, I should explain this again to me, right? I really need to understand it so that way I can give you good advice. Yeah. I mean, one other thing I would add to that, and I'm sure you agree with this, is
00:12:57
Speaker
being very comfortable in the gray. We're in an emerging area, as you said, when we kick this off. And there's no perfect answers, especially for the companies that we supported and worked with in the ad space. So you have to be comfortable translating laws that were not drafted for
00:13:15
Speaker
our ecosystem and thinking about how to apply them fast to your technology, not just in a way that only works for your company, but taking into account the sort of interrelated mass and web of the ecosystem that you're operating within because you can't do stuff inside Lowe's.
Strategic Privacy at Triplelift
00:13:32
Speaker
So that's just like another wrinkle that gets added on there and that I think people struggle with when I see them having challenges.
00:13:38
Speaker
I totally agree. There were a lot of amazing legal leaders at AppNexus. I'd almost describe you maybe as part of an AppNexus mafia of sorts. People who have now spread out to lots of other companies and done really interesting things. There was a big transaction that happened while you were there. AppNexus became Zander, which was a part of AT&T or is rebranded as Zander as it was sold to AT&T.
00:14:02
Speaker
You know, that's a huge trend. It was a huge transaction. What were the days of trying to integrate with AT&T like or bring, you know, Abnexis' approach to privacy to AT&T? Talk us through that period. Yeah, there were two big buckets of work that we were working through. I think number one was
00:14:21
Speaker
educating the AT&T team and the WarnerMedia team, by the way. When we were acquired by AT&T back in 2018, we were part of the larger WarnerMedia strategies. We're going through the very public antitrust litigation. As soon as they were able to get approvals on that, our deal went through. We were going to be the technology that was powering the content and data play combination of Warner and AT&T.
00:14:45
Speaker
I spent most of my time meeting with the, not just the privacy and compliance teams at both Warner and AT&T, but then also sitting in rooms and working together with the data teams and the identity teams because we had to kind of bring all of the compliance and policy work together plus all of our different data infrastructures and make sure that we could actually power the strategy that made sense for all of those deals. And they were great teams and really wanted to learn.
00:15:15
Speaker
I'm not always convinced they fully appreciated what they had bought in us. Adtech is complex and they're incredible technologists and have great technology on the AT&T side. And then the Warner side, gosh, the creativity in the content was just second to none. But when you add adtech into that, it's a really interesting dynamic. I spent just a lot of time educating folks and trying to explain the strategy behind the interplay between adtech and privacy and competition. Interesting.
00:15:45
Speaker
As you move from Zander to Triplelift, it was to move into a bigger role, your first GC role. Tell us a little bit about that transition. You had commercial and M&A experience before, so it wasn't like you were stepping into it without a corporate background. But you had the Chief Privacy Officer Title II, and you're moving from being Chief Privacy Counsel to being the GC. What do you think that signaled about the importance of privacy to the business?
00:16:10
Speaker
It was, you know, taking a step back. So the founders, there were three founders of Triple Left. We're all former AppNexus guys. We had not over, so speaking about AppNexus Mafia, although we hadn't overlapped. They had been at AppNexus before me and had left and founded Triple Left well before I started over at AppNexus. But they, you know, Eric, the CEO, had knocked on my door and said, hey, we see how important privacy is in the industry. And we really want to bring someone like you in who understands that interplay
00:16:39
Speaker
between privacy and strategy. We're not just looking for a compliance lawyer. We're looking for someone to come in and look at what we're doing as a business and our growth model and ensure, number one, that we sort of don't miss the boat and actually tie our hands or lock ourselves out of the market going forward. But number two is really think about, is there a strategic edge or a strategic play that we can make? So we're hiring you in because you've kind of got the network and you understand the technology and you can help us think about that strategic
00:17:08
Speaker
Oh, and by the way, you're also a lawyer. We're going to bring you in as a GC because we are in a huge growth phase and we know we're probably going to exit soon and you have a corporate background. Let's get you in to clean up our legal team and what we've been doing. Honestly, he did a great job because he was a lawyer.
00:17:24
Speaker
Let's get you in to help us think about what we need to be mindful of as we think about an exit strategy.
Building a Privacy Team at Triplelift
00:17:30
Speaker
And then let's get you in to help us think about at least protecting our current business from a privacy perspective, but also think about potential strategic opportunities in the future. And I was super excited about all of that.
00:17:41
Speaker
I had been thinking about taking on a GC role as I was looking for a new role coming out of AT&T. I'm not a big company person. It was an awesome thing, but I was ready to go back into startup mode and I had talked to a number of companies outside of the ad space. When Eric came knocking, it just made total sense because it was a great move to be able to stay in the industry and the tech that I knew and so be in my comfort zone, but also take on a larger role.
00:18:08
Speaker
That's the most fun opportunity I think someone can be given, which is to say, look at and cover off on these risks for us. But also, you really need to work with our product team and you need to help us set the strategy. How are we going to take this to market? Where's the market headed? What role does privacy play in that? I think that's the most fun thing to be asked potentially for someone who's a little bit of a privacy nerd.
00:18:31
Speaker
It was amazing. And to be clear, I couldn't do that all on my own. So I very quickly built out an amazing legal team. And my deputy has since taken on the GC rule over there and is crushing it. And then I brought in some huge hitters on the privacy product side from others in the industry who are just amazing and really built an awesome product over there.
00:18:51
Speaker
Do you have any good privacy stories you'd be willing to share with us from your time at TripleLift? Yeah, I was thinking about this one. It's very public, so we can talk about sort of the acquisition of TripleLift by Vista, but sort of post-acquisition.
00:19:06
Speaker
They're great. They let us have a free open strategy and they had the cash and the wherewithal to help us do this. So we really looked at potential M&A targets on the triple upside and thought about, well, here's where the industry is going. Here's where we think we could have a strategic edge and enhance our product.
00:19:28
Speaker
And it's probably going to take us too long to build that ourselves. So let's go out and look at companies in the market that have this technology that we could acquire or partner with. And so we went out and we did like a build by partner analysis and looked at a number of different companies and ended up acquiring this awesome Swiss company publisher DMP, Party Data DMP 1 plus X. And that was sort of one of the last big things I worked on before I left to pursue other opportunities.
00:19:54
Speaker
So we closed on that deal, I want to say back in March of 22. And they've since rejiggered the product and gone out to market with a great product.
Adaptability in Remote Deal-Making
00:20:05
Speaker
And you mentioned the acquisition by Vista Equity. You helped them sell. Vista Equity is a private equity fund, by the way. You helped them sell a little bit outside of the privacy realm. But I'm curious what it takes to get a deal done with a PE fund. I'm actually a little bit surprised, given the sort of market conditions that we have not seen more exits like that.
00:20:24
Speaker
Part of me thinks that maybe we'll see not an investment banker, but we might see more in the next couple of years. What does it take to get that sort of deal done? So I mean, it was an interesting time. So I joined Triplelift in January of 2020. So right before the world fell apart, I was in the office for just a little under three months with the team as a new member of the team. And then we all went fully remote and ran our entire sale process over Zoom.
00:20:53
Speaker
I think the guys maybe met one or two of the buyers, the bidders that participated in our sale process, but otherwise we prepared the full sale process, our deck, worked at the bankers, ran a full auction with multiple bidders involved, negotiated the whole deal, signed it, and closed it, all completely remote.
00:21:16
Speaker
And the first time we all saw each other post COVID was the night before we closed the deal, which was funny. And our CEO and I kind of laughed because we thought it was maybe bad luck. And I was still like frantically on my phone and he was too, like trying to finalize documents and clear up last minute stuff. But it was pretty wild that we all did that fully over Zoom.
00:21:37
Speaker
That is kind of crazy, actually. There's a parallel here, interestingly, in that I was a factual and we closed a deal with Foursquare and we announced the deal in March of 2020, about two weeks after the world had shut down and then proceeded to have to integrate two businesses entirely over Zoom and Google Hangouts.
00:21:58
Speaker
One was a Zoom shop, one was Google Hangouts shop. I won't tell you which one was which. At that point in time, that was a more contentious issue than it probably should have been. Oh my gosh. How did you build trust? Did you have a really strong relationship with the rest of the exec team? How did you build trust with partners at Vista Equity?
00:22:20
Speaker
I know how hard it is, just by observation, I would say, right, to be convinced that all the other parties in a deal have your interest in mind or are doing the right thing. How did you navigate that? Yeah. On the triple upside, I think the management team came together
00:22:38
Speaker
into a really tight-knit group during the early days of COVID. I would assume any company and managing team that was going through that, I mean, it was like we were going through war. It was an awful time. And so we were meeting daily standups in a way that we never would have had we been in the office during normal times. We'd maybe be once a week.
00:22:54
Speaker
So we're on the phone. Interestingly, also, we were a VC-backed company, but a very different profile from most VC-backed companies out there. I mean, Eric Berry, your CEO, is just a brilliant guy. And we hadn't taken money. We hadn't raised in five years. We were running at a profit. So we didn't have a work chest of cash to burn down. And so we very quickly and early COVID days had to really look and prepare for the worst. And so we had to run.
00:23:22
Speaker
You know, a real exercise and cost cutting and all of that early days. So it was just a very, it was a moment that brought the team really close together. So that for the management team perspective, I don't feel fortunate that we had to go through that, but it was a good way to get together. The rest of the employee base, it was a bit harder. You know, it's, it was, it was odd to be at a company, to be honest, where I'd maybe never met.
00:23:43
Speaker
some of the employees in person ever before i left the company three years later and that's you know that's i don't love that but it's the reality of having been fully remote during covid you know with the advisors and bankers and the potential buyers that participated in our sale process we had a pretty tight knit relationship with our bankers because we talk to them all the time.
00:24:03
Speaker
I had a tight-knit relationship with our attorneys. We had sort of our day-to-day corporate guys, and then we had the Goodwin shop that I had worked with back at UpNexus. I knew John Egan really well, and it was amazing. But in terms of VISTA, the world was starting to open up just as we completed that deal. So we did sit with them. They brought back in-person board meetings, and they would be up in New York every once in a while. So I didn't find it that hard to create the right relationships there. And honestly,
00:24:31
Speaker
They're not getting in the weeds on privacy and ad tech. They're kind of like, you got it. We're not going to blow up your legal stuff. They were mostly focused on the traditional things that they usually focus on, which is the sales process. And are there ways to optimize our technology practice? And how else can they help?
00:24:48
Speaker
kind of improved business process and operations. And I think it's great to see how they operate. And then they've got a playbook that obviously works pretty well. So it was really interesting and I'm very grateful that I was able to sort of understand that playbook and learn from them.
00:25:04
Speaker
Super interesting experience. Maybe one that others will have in the coming years. Yeah, a tier point on private equity. I think especially for growth investments, private equity sometimes gets a bad name. There's very different types of private equity shops out there. Most of them that we have dealt with are really looking for growth opportunities. They're not sort of like that, the old traditional model of someone coming in and cutting all costs.
00:25:32
Speaker
How many Zoom licenses do we have? Honestly, like wreaking havoc. That's not the way these companies operate. They're really coming in to just help enhance your operations and help you get to the next level, whether it's through cash or just help in thinking through strategy.
Transition to Privacy Consulting
00:25:46
Speaker
So I'm lucky that I got to be on it from the in-house perspective as opposed to sort of working my early days as an M&A attorney for private equity firms looking at acquisitions and completing those.
00:25:57
Speaker
Before joining Telly, you took a little bit of time away from a full-time GC role. I know you had a privacy policy, everything that those two terms encompass, AI, right? Consulting firm. You also did a little bit of work. I would almost describe it as like productizing privacy advice. Tell us what it was like to start something new and go at it on your own, what you learned from that process.
00:26:22
Speaker
I had been between AppNexus and Triplelift. I had been frankly in the same role, the same type of company for about a decade. So once we sold to Vista and it sort of became clear that we were going to do this acquisition and it was going to be fairly steady state for a while, I was a bit bored because I am that crazy person who gets bored in an easy job. So I left and decided that it was a ripe opportunity. I know privacy is huge. It's very misunderstood.
00:26:49
Speaker
To your point, AI popped up after I had left, and I recognized that there were a lot of different companies out there that needed help across the board, and that's everything from thinking through how to set up their teams, how to think about setting up a compliance program, to maybe the more exciting stuff of thinking about what is privacy going to do to their product and their strategy, and what should they think about from a defensive and offensive.
00:27:15
Speaker
Position and that was you know some ad tech companies but honestly mostly companies sort of outside of that space and media companies and brands and Retail media and just other new companies that were really early stage and thinking about building a product truly privacy by design it from an early stage and how to get it right and
00:27:32
Speaker
I mean, it's interesting. You sort of did the same thing, right? It's challenging to go out and do your own thing. You don't even think about half the stuff that when you're at a company, you're not running billing and customer management and marketing and having to sell yourself or even just managing through across a couple of different clients.
Limitations of External Consulting
00:27:50
Speaker
So that was interesting and fun, and I'm still doing that. I think the part that I
00:27:55
Speaker
I missed, and I'm curious to hear from you, is really being embedded with a team. You can only be so embedded when you're an external advisor, even if you sort of bill yourself as that advisor who isn't billing by the hour, is more of a strategic advisor. I tend to think, unless you're really on the ground and embedded with the team, you are sort of hovering above the fold and you're never totally getting all the information you need to be
00:28:21
Speaker
as strategic as you can be. So I do still love working with some of my existing clients and, you know, doing higher level kind of product advice or training and consulting, but I think I'm realizing I am that person who likes to be like deeply about it with the companies or at least for the time being.
00:28:40
Speaker
It's a good point and it's interesting. I like the advisory or coaching aspect of it, but I think the thing that you start to miss is you can't run a cross-functional process from the outside yourself because you probably are not going to have the opportunity to build the level of trust that you need to execute on that. It becomes much more about how do I empower and coach
00:29:04
Speaker
this champion internally, who's going to carry this forward on behalf of the business and the advice that I'm giving and as opposed to you being able to actually go and drive that sort of sometimes kind of tough for thorny cross functional process yourself, which can also be fun.
00:29:20
Speaker
Yeah, I don't even see sometimes tougher thorny. Definitely. And I started working with Telly sort of as an outside advisor and it is like now that I'm in there and I'm peeling the onion and really like rolling up the sleeves. You just can't do some of this super complex stuff from the outside. It is really hard. And so I, I don't know what you hear. I mean, I think we tend to hear people sometimes being negative on outside counsel or even being negative on, you know, folks aren't necessarily, they're giving legal advice, but are trying to help help as a consultant. And I would say like,
00:29:50
Speaker
They're trying their best for the most part usually, but they're not necessarily being given the rope to go in and ask the questions or really get embedded. And it is this tension between keeping rates and bills down or just not creating too much havoc internally. And I'm not sure anyone's found a really good middle ground yet for how to operate as an external consultant or counsel or you name it.
Collaborative Approach with Counsel
00:30:14
Speaker
I don't know if I said this on a previous podcast episode. Hopefully people aren't paying that much attention to what I'm saying, but someone gave me very good advice early on when I was starting to work with and learning to work with outside counsel, which is lawyers are not vending machines. You don't go to them and press a button and get an output, right?
00:30:32
Speaker
That doesn't mean, by the way, don't push back on outside counsel or your consultant if you think they are missing something or they aren't being practical or they don't understand your risk profile. It's not to say that you shouldn't have an open dialogue with those folks, but you can't go to them and say, please give me the solution to this problem. I'm going to pick D3.
00:30:54
Speaker
Here's my candy bar. It's a perfect way to describe it because it is a process of getting them up to speed and having them understand nuance and your risk profile and kind of piece it all together. There's just a lot of complexity to it and if they miss one piece or.
00:31:10
Speaker
You know, they weren't read in on something or they didn't know enough to even ask a certain question. Sure. You're not going to get the right response, but it's your responsibility to make sure that they have the right information to access. It is an absolute two-way street. And I think people who are not used to that dynamic.
00:31:28
Speaker
Some lawyers, frankly, but a lot of business people really struggle with that and they wonder why they get, you know, misinformed advice back, maybe bad advice or otherwise. Totally impractical, right? Yeah. And look, sometimes I'm not saying like every lawyer out there is phenomenal. And even if you really try to tee up all this information, they're not always going to give you what you're looking for. But that's why there's a lot of good folks out there and you kind of need to shop around and find the person that really works well for you and is the best person for your company and your style.
Networking for Consulting Opportunities
00:31:56
Speaker
On privacy, Julia has great advice on the types of folks that you want to turn to. We've all been fortunate enough to work with really good folks. Yes, we absolutely have. Folks who are much smarter than me on a wide variety of topics. Me too.
00:32:12
Speaker
There's a lot of people who are in transition right now, I think, and the transitions are longer maybe than they would have been a few years ago, six months. It wasn't the reason that you sort of set off on your own path, but if someone was out there and came to you and said, hey, look, I'm waiting six months for my next GC job, I think I wanna like stand up a little bit of income, do a little bit of consulting work, any key sort of lessons or pieces of advice that you would offer someone in that position.
00:32:41
Speaker
I mean, I am very fortunate, I think you are too, that we just have tight-knit relationships with folks in the industry and beyond. And so it wasn't, I kind of just started like poking around behind the scenes and stuff like, I'm out on my own and people are like, awesome, we got projects and too many projects. My advice is, I mean, if you're in-house now, like,
00:32:59
Speaker
keep your networking going because those are your future customers. And then if you're out on your own, start reconnecting with folks that you've worked with across the industry, former people that you worked with internally. You just never know who needs help or who's landed somewhere that they're just really desperate for someone to come in and partner with them
Evolving Role of CPOs
00:33:19
Speaker
on things. I'm surprised at who knocked on my door and kind of asked me to work on stuff.
00:33:24
Speaker
I felt the same. As we start to wrap up a few kind of hopefully fun questions for you, where do you think the sort of chief privacy officer role is headed?
00:33:34
Speaker
I think it's headed in two directions. One that I'm really excited about and one that makes me a little bit sad, but I think it's the reality. The one that makes me a bit sad, to be frank, is as privacy in kind of the digital media and ad space has gotten bigger and bigger, more and more business folks and kind of non-lawyers are muscling to the table. And I don't mean folks like you who sort of sat across policy and legal and strategy, but folks who truly are on the strategic side.
00:34:02
Speaker
And I think they're sort of grabbing privacy, rightfully, because it's super fundamental and important to their strategy. But I do think it's sometimes happening in a way that downplays the knowledge and experience and assistance that someone who kind of comes in with a CPO mindset can bring to the table. You need that healthy,
00:34:24
Speaker
dynamic between someone really looking out for the best interest of the company and knowing the requirements versus someone who is just trying to use privacy for marketing or to create some buzzy product without acknowledging the literal requirements and reason that they're being pushed in that direction in the first place. I see some companies where CPOs are just throwing up their hands because they're almost like,
00:34:47
Speaker
being shunted to the side and just shoved into a very compliance and legal role and the business is running and frankly running in the wrong direction. So I hope that that doesn't happen, but it is happening and you need to really have a backbone and be more strategic and figure out that strategy.
Balancing Compliance and Strategy
00:35:03
Speaker
The more exciting
00:35:04
Speaker
We that I think it's playing out and you see this with some companies is roles that maybe you and I both had at companies where the company understands that privacy is fundamental and really interesting and important to their strategy. And you get to come to the table as a senior leader and partner with other senior leaders across the business to, of course, get compliance and requirements managed, but also open their eyes to a whole bunch of other strategic opportunities in the right way.
00:35:33
Speaker
Yes. So they don't footfall and go out and build, I don't know, some crazy identity product or some crazy data product that they like to call privacy compliant, but isn't. Or they don't go out and rebuild an entire back end in a way that's not going to work in two years because one of the bigger platforms is about to remove signal.
00:35:50
Speaker
So those two dynamics are playing out and I just,
Privacy in AI
00:35:53
Speaker
I'm here. I'm always happy to talk to people who maybe feel like they're getting shunted down that path. And I know you're probably always happy to talk with folks too about some strategies for making sure you're really like a strategic partner at the table. And I don't mean that in a BS way. I mean like a very fundamental way. People should take you up on that opportunity. I hope your LinkedIn inbox either does or doesn't blow up when this drops.
00:36:17
Speaker
We're at the Spot Draft Summit. Today's all about AI. There's a lot of focus on AI everywhere. I'm curious what you think the right role for privacy leaders is when counseling on AI issues. And there's kind of like an underlying question here too, which is, is privacy going to subsume AI? Is AI going to subsume privacy? Is it neither of those things? Where do you see AI fitting in?
00:36:45
Speaker
You are, I think you were referring to this healthy tension that we've seen in the privacy community and outside the privacy community where there are some folks who just say like people who've done privacy should be the one solving this problem. And then there are other people saying, no, no, no, no, no, privacy folks like have their framework and way of thinking and we should
00:37:04
Speaker
blow that up and think about a different way of operating when it comes to AI. I think there's a healthy middle in shocking news where folks who have been in the privacy community for a small amount of time or a larger amount of time know how to think in frameworks and they know how to think about operationally how to put together processes, procedures, policies, how to bring cross-functional teams together to think about really gnarly issues around data.
00:37:31
Speaker
collection, sharing, inputs, outputs, you name it. That sounds perfect for a lot of the AI issues we're thinking about. I think there's a great and important place for privacy professionals and folks who've worked in compliance to bring those frameworks to the table, and frankly, lessons learned.
00:37:47
Speaker
from operating in those frameworks, but not to just full scale lift those frameworks over into the AI space and force AI through them. So take the ways that they've been operating, think about how they work, or maybe how they have to be massaged for AI because it is complex and it is different from privacy. It's not just about personal data, there's intellectual property issues, there's confidentiality issues, there's a whole host of other ethical and other issues that maybe go above and beyond privacy. Take it though.
00:38:16
Speaker
see what works, see what doesn't work, have that healthy debate, and I think we're going to end up in a
Interdisciplinary Collaboration in AI
00:38:21
Speaker
good spot. So don't ignore those folks, but also don't just let them go run RepShud across the AI industry. I totally agree with that. And I think that if you take a more strategic view of what privacy is, right, just like you should take a strategic view of what counseling on AI issues is,
00:38:40
Speaker
there's opportunity for smart folks who may have a background in either to bring something to the table in either area. Now, I think it's really important. There are people who've been working, as we've heard today, on AI and ML-related issues for a long time. It's very buzzy right now, but some of this is actually not new. And so someone comes to the table with five or 10 years of experience working on bias and fairness issues around AI, maybe from a larger tech company. You might not want to
00:39:09
Speaker
discard that and assume that the privacy person with the slightly bigger title should step up and take it over. But I think that there's space at the table for people who are willing to think about either of these topics in a strategic sense and sort of bring their perspective to bear. Because there are also real questions around harms in the privacy landscape as well.
00:39:32
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, 100% of you, and it's not sort of everyone who's worked in the privacy seats, but I think many of us who've worked in ads have been that unfairness and bias and ML angle to it for a very long time. And so it has definitely gotten more complex with some of the new technology that's coming out on the AI side, but it's not that we haven't actually seen these issues. Maybe we were just focused on a more
00:39:54
Speaker
narrow slice of it. Then I also think there's a lot of us that play in the privacy space, but we also have a commercial and a product background. Some of those fairness issues we've all been thinking about for a decade, not just from a privacy perspective. I'm thinking about targeting parameters on some of the big ad platforms or how to build in back-end technical controls to make sure that
00:40:18
Speaker
certain data isn't being used to train optimization, you name it. This is all stuff that is playing out and being used for the next gen of AI that we're all talking about.
00:40:28
Speaker
And last, last thought on this, I guess, to your point much earlier on in our conversation about being willing to admit what you don't know. If you're an AI expert or a privacy expert or someone who's thought about, you know, harms that come with tech along with technology, maybe call up an intellectual property attorney or someone who's an expert on open source or right.
Book Recommendation: 'Chip Wars'
00:40:49
Speaker
Like there's a lot to learn from people who are in adjacent disciplines because
00:40:55
Speaker
There's not just privacy questions associated with new AI tech and Gen AI. Yeah, I mean, it's I'm a nerd. So as soon as stuff started blowing up, and I had clients like coming and asking me to work on that stuff, that's exactly what I did. I started reading up on all this stuff and attending webinars and trying to find the people who
00:41:14
Speaker
really knew what they were talking about and also just poking around people's policies. Like some of the companies that were well ahead of the curve, the GitHubs of the world and obviously OpenAI is one of them and everyone else out there, you just start looking at what people are doing and familiar yourself with this stuff.
00:41:30
Speaker
Last kind of fun question for you before we close this out. I'm a big reader. I'm always looking for new book suggestions. I actually try to order and get through at least some of the podcast guest recommendations. What's a good book that you've read this year? So because I just entered the hardware space, I read Chip Wars. Oh, I've read that. Okay, so you've already read it. No, no, that's okay. But for your listeners and folks who are watching this, it's an incredibly
00:41:59
Speaker
thoughtful, thought-provoking and really interesting read on what's going on behind the scenes in terms of how all of the chips that power all of our devices are built, manufactured, et cetera, and sort of the geopolitics behind it and where we might be in 10, 15, 40 years, given that the world just keeps getting more and more technologically advanced and we're so reliant on chips from both an environmental perspective and a geopolitical perspective.
Podcast Conclusion
00:42:28
Speaker
That is a really great recommendation. Thank you so much, Julia, for joining me. Thank you, Tyler. Appreciate having me on. Yeah. And to all of our listeners, thanks so much for listening to this episode of The Abstract and hope to see you next time. Take care.
00:42:47
Speaker
Thanks for tuning in today. Don't forget to subscribe so you can get notified as soon as we post a new episode. And if you liked this one, I'd really love to hear your thoughts, so please leave a rating or a comment. If you'd like to reach out to me or our guest, our LinkedIn profiles are in the description. See you all next week.