Technology for Trust
Summary
When I first met Neta and Rotem of Vault Platform, in a small caf\xe9 buried deep in Somerset House, their claim was not one I had heard before: we are going to use cryptographic datastores to solve sexual harassment.My initial reaction was basically: you are going to do what?We spent the next two hours going back and forth over what this claim actually meant and why it might or might not make sense.Over those hours and the weeks to follow Neta and Rotem convinced me that this approach actually did make sense, and together we pulled together a small initial round of some like-minded investors alongside Angular to give this pre-revenue, pre-product, pre-code, and pre-team company a shot.Im pleased to say now that several months into this journey its looking increasingly positive. So did recently Professor Frances Frei of Harvard Business School (who was hired in the past by Uber to fix their culture issues) (heres her TED talk on Trust). The idea is to create a secure and immutable logging and reporting system in which witnesses of misconduct (employees, partners, customers) can store their complaints, testimony, and evidence in a way that enables their own ownership of data, inaccessible by their employer or any third parties, and ensures the integrity of the record if and when submitted.. Despite resting on a foundation of distributed ledger technology, Vault is a traditional enterprise SaaS business with sales cycles and license revenue and ROI but no tokens or ICOs or DAOs or other buzzwords. (3) Finally, there is a broad trend towards democratization and self-regulation within the enterprise granting employees the power to control more and more of their destiny at the employee-level without having to run activities and decisions up the corporate chain of command.