Every day Jacqui Nelson, CEO of cybersecurity start-up Dekko Secure, thinks of a gem she heard on a trip to Israel last year: “Go as fast as you can. Then slowly, go faster.” Considering Dekko’s rapid growth since launching in May 2018, the mantra seems a good fit. Jacqui’s own path to Dekko, however, was much more incremental.
When Jacqui began her career on equity trading floors in the early 1990s, heading a company wasn’t part of her plan. “I never thought, ‘Okay, I’m going to be CEO of a company’. I was more, ‘If it works out along the way, if I’ve got the right skills and I’m the best person for the job, then…’” And she certainly wasn’t striving to break any glass ceilings. “That’s not my style,” she shrugs. “I’ve just kind of grown into it.”
Jacqui first encountered Dekko in 2016 when her investment consortium took on the small start-up as a seed venture. Dekko’s co-founders Dmytro Bablinyuk and Jay Haybatov were developing a cloud-based encryption platform when Jacqui, then a business expert – and a complete tech novice ¬– met the pair. “My kids still laugh at the fact that I work in IT yet struggle to change channels on the TV on a good day! But like many people, I was worried about global privacy. I was worried about our personal freedoms being under threat, about losing control of who has access to our data and how they use it.”
One of her concerns was that Google, Dropbox and other platforms could decrypt user data at will because the companies’ administrators manage users’ encryption keys. Dmytro and Jay had another idea: Dekko would generate user-only access keys, so that even the start-up’s own engineers would be unable to decrypt data exchanged on the platform. This way, they could take human-guaranteed privacy – then considered the apex of data protection – and replace it with system-ensured security…Click here to read full article.
