Welcome to the inaugural episode of "160 Characters" the podcast that explores groundbreaking technological advancements and the brilliant minds behind them. In this exciting premiere, we are thrilled to host Alexander Haque, the visionary founder of Clerk Chat, a trailblazing player in the telecom space. Join us as we embark on a journey into the realm of cutting-edge messaging platforms, innovation in Silicon Valley, and the crucial topic of messaging security.
Join us as we sit down with Alexander Haque to unpack the fascinating journey of Clerk Chat and its remarkable impact on the telecom sector. Whether you're a tech enthusiast, an entrepreneur, or simply curious about the future of communication, this episode promises to be an enlightening and engaging exploration of innovation and security in the digital age.
➟ Alex Haque's Common Thread of Tech & Innovation: Alex shares his background, centered around his fascination for technology, which started at a young age. This passion led him to his current venture: Clerk Chat, a modern-day telco.
➟ The Future of Communication: Clerk Chat enables businesses to seamlessly communicate across various channels. Alex emphasizes the unique approach of owning the communication stack, including building a mobile network, which sets Clerk apart from other companies in the industry.
➟ Origin Story & How Clerk has Changed: Alex shares the inspirational story behind the inception of Clerk Chat, challenges he and his co-founders have faced, and pivotal moments that paved the way for their success.
➟ Corporate vs. Startup Mentalities: Learn more about Silicon Valley. Alex shares his philosophy on people over process.
➟ Automation, AI, & Data Security: We just couldn't skip the buzzwords. Alex introduces a feature called "workflows" which enables businesses to automate SMS and related functionalities. He also emphasizes the value of maintaining a balance between automation and human interaction. Additionally, Alex discusses the importance of rising to the challenge of data security, privacy, and compliance.
Catch us on Social:
Alex Haque ↴
Twitter: @AlexanderHaque
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alexanderhaque
Clerk Chat ↴
Twitter: @clerkchat
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/clerk-chat/
Jill Berkowitz ↴
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jill-berkowitz
Threads: jill.berko
Twitter: @JLBerko
Welcome to 160 characters.
I'm Jill. Host of the 160 characters podcast and for our inaugural episode, joining us today is Alex Haque, CEO and co-founder of Clerk Chat. Nice to see you.
Alex:
Hey, good to see you, Jill. Thanks for having me on.
Jill:
I love that we get to chat this way. So let's break down a few things. In your previous life, you worked at Netflix and Samsung Next in business and tech roles. You helped organize meetups in the non-gaming virtual reality space and led Retinad, a tech company to be acquired by Lumiere VR, a company that specializes in bringing virtual reality to the real world.
I know that there were several other professional experiences since then, before that, we're gonna pause there. Like you, I've had career shifts, I've had pivots, and I've always strongly believed that there's a common thread that leads you to where you are present day. So for me, it was writing. That's how I landed here at Clerk in content and marketing for you, you're currently founder, co-founder, and CEO of Clerk Chat. So what do you think has been your common thread?
1:39 - Common Threads of Technology & Innovation
Alex:
Yeah. No, and thank you for the, for the intro and, and the due diligence there on, on my past. Uh, the common thread is, is really, you know, technology. It might sound like a, a pretty obvious answer, but what has interwoven my experience between, with Retinad which was a virtual reality company back in 2015 that we, we built and, and scaled and sold to Netflix, which was, you know, what we call big tech and, and Samsung, even bigger tech potentially, and in the corporate life, what, what is interwoven at all of it has been this passion for, for technology and that really started when I was, you know, a kid when my, probably like many, many folks, they had a parent or sibling or somebody in their life that brought them their first computer, right?
We've all had that, that first computer moment where we. My father wheeled in a PC with I think Windows 95. And it was a foreign object. And you can imagine there was like a keyboard and it was like, okay, well the alphabet's all out of order, right? That first moment of like, what the hell is this turning on a screen?
And then the concept of a mouse and feeling that feeling of immersion, right? Like, oh, wherever I move my hand, this, this cursor will, will move it with it as well. And so that really developed my, my love of of technology. And so yeah, just kind of springing forward into VR, Netflix and Samsung. The thread there a little bit more specific than just technology was innovation.
So this feeling of how do we take business idea, a monetizable idea or, or a business model, and then think about what the future of that would be. So how do you create a new line of business or how do you expand the current business by, but by adding a DNA of of innovation on top of it. And so really that that's the common theme that has brought me to where I am and why I'm excited to be building Clerk.
3:23 - The Future of Communication
Jill:
That's awesome.
So let's talk a little bit about Clerk Chat. So anybody who's watching or listening can have a quick little background. When I describe Clerk to either friends or anyone in my network, I always explain the company as a modern day telco that superpowers communication. So I said, Hey, let me look up superpower on ChatGPT, because why not?
Here's what the AI told me. I wanna read this to you. "Superpower is an extraordinary or exceptional ability or capability, often granting powers or skills beyond those that are ordinary." And then it goes on to say "superpowers can vary widely and include ability such as superhuman strengths, speed, agility, durability, flight, telepathy, telekinesis, shape shifting, and visibility." And many others.
So can you tell us a little bit about Clerk and what its superpowers are? Also, I guess another way I could phrase that is, how do you think Clerk differentiates itself from other traditional telcos or other communication platforms?
Alex:
Yeah. Well, I love the, the, uh, the due diligence with the using ChatGPT.
That's pretty meta and pretty cool that you went and did that. And, you know, I don't think we have, we've come as far as telepathy or telekinesis that you mentioned in that laundry list of what ChatGPT spit out, uh, in terms of superpower. But I do love that question. And so, at its foundation, you're absolutely right.
We are building the future of telecommunication and what does that mean? So the, what we can do today, is the same way that you as a consumer, when you get a new phone, you can immediately start texting. You can integrate if you're on Apple, uh, Apple's ecosystem, you have iMessage. If you're on the Android ecosystem, you have what's called RCS right there, equivalent of iMessage, which they've been disputing over for, for years and trying to make it interoperable.
And there's WhatsApp, right? There's, there's this plethora of communication channels that are SMS or text capable. And as a consumer, it's really easy to enable those. It just, it's based off of your phone number. But as a business, it's not so easy to do that. Businesses are not as easily able to pick up their phones and just allow you to start texting them from whatever channel you prefer.
So what we're able to do is allow any business to receive text messages across any of those channels and allow a business to also send messages from any of those channels as well. There's lots of communication companies or companies that claim to be omni-channel or multi-channel, but they don't own the backend part, right?
They don't have that vertical integration of the phone number, so they sit on top of these carriers like, uh, Twilio. What we're trying to do is own the entire stack. We built our own mobile cellular network. By having those direct connections, we can provide the service like nobody else can. You then have the magic or the ability to have more magic to build whatever you want.
And it comes down to owning to enabling the phone number. So you're not dealing effectively with middlemen or middle people. You're really going to the source because of that plugin, that direct integration and being vertically integrated, we can offer that to our pass that benefit onto our end customers, which is, I think is, is just really cool.
And it's something that I haven't really seen or we have not seen other companies being able to achieve.
6:51 - Background Anecdote
Jill:
How you guys crafted this and created this is wild to me, especially somebody who doesn't come from a tech background. We can get more into it at another time. It's so cool to know that any business who's on the receiving end of this technology can take their company light years ahead as far as the way they communicate with others.
So that's really awesome what Clerk is doing.
Alex:
Oh, thank you. Oh, thank you. Yeah, it's been a labor of love. Funny story is that we, we started this as a kind of like internal hackathon project. Igor and I, who's one of the other co-founders and, and Will, we started this actually in the summer of 2019, just kind of conspiring around ideas that would, you know, be a side hustle and bring a side revenue.
And his, it was actually his sister who's an audiologist that, you know, gave us the idea really that said, Hey, I'm using Slack as a communication channel. I can't, I'm using two or three other applications for my business. So we have internal communication using Slack, and then there's three other applications that we use to text or to email or to use WhatsApp for our customers at this audiology clinic.
Can you guys just consolidate everything? I'm really tired of. And so we built that. And, and launch it on the Slack App store and Product Hunt, which is a place where you can launch products, uh, early, very early stage products or new products for a community of early adopters. And we very. Lucky that we got our first, I think, $10 into the company at that time in January, 2020, pre Covid.
And, um, yeah, we've been able to, to really manifest that side hustle idea, you know, into a full blown company now and, uh, you know, really proud of what we've been able to achieve.
Jill:
So I've run into so many people in my LinkedIn world, to be honest, who call themselves solopreneurs. And I get that now, so many of them have said that that venture started as a passion project. Do you think in some way, Clerk Chat started as a passion project for you guys?
Alex:
Totally. I mean, again, we, we, going back to your first question around, you know, what common theme did I have with my, with my career path? And it sounds like, you know, for yours as well is, you know, and, and Will and Igor, who are the other two co-founders?
It is, it, it was. Definitely a passion project of us just wanting to tinker on something and just this vision of, hey, what do Igor's wife, I think called it like latte profitable. So it's like if we, if we could take her and our spouse's out for a latte on somebody else's dime, like, you know, corporate dime, then that was already a success.
So I think that latte profitable. I mean, in startups they always call it ramen profitable, but for, for us being in the Bay Area, it was, it was latte or matcha latte, uh, profitable. So, yeah, that you're absolutely right.
9:42 - Corporate vs. Startup Worlds
Jill:
Okay, so let's now talk about. The switch from corporate to startup, because that's a pretty huge pivot.
You know, we both worked in corporate before I worked in publishing and then education you worked in big tech, Samsung, where the culture was very hierarchical and rigid from my perspective, although maybe it's changed since, Netflix, which was known to be a more modern startup in Silicon Valley and has reinvented itself over the years, and I know Netflix from the very early days where I would put movies in my queue and wait for them to come in the mail. So it's kind of been really awesome watching that technology change. You know, now I just click something on my tv, but I can't help but be curious. You've had all these experiences and now you're at the helm of a startup, which is a totally different world.
As you reflect on these past experiences, what key lessons or practices are you carrying forward to our company culture at Clerk. And on the flip side, are there any aspects you've consciously chosen to leave behind?
Alex:
Yeah, that's, it's interesting as you, you know, juxtapose or you put the two companies that I have a lot of, you know, more experience at after my startup life.
Um, against each other 'cause they're so, they're so fundamentally different. Um, and then there's so much likeness to them as well, which was, which was fascinating. So, starting with, you know, Samsung, which was my real, my first real adventure, I'd say outside of, uh, the, the Retinad and startup world, what I learned working for a South Korean based company, which fascinatingly, I think 25 at the time, 25% of the entire South Korean GDP was Samsung or is Samsung.
So when you learning that lesson of. How inherently tied it is to the government and how much of a machine that hardware company is and, and all their lines of business was just fascinating. So the culture there being based in Silicon Valley, however, there's Silicon Valley office and being part of Samsung Next, which was the, or is the innovation arm is now more of a venture capital arm.
It's an investment arm, but was acquiring companies and then trying to roll them up into products within the broader organization is figuring out Yeah. How does, how does osmosis or absorption of entrepreneurs like ourselves, right? Imagine we get acquired by a big tech company and it's like, how do you, how do you take the DNA of of Jill, Alex, Will, Igor everybody on the team and then roll that into a machine that has a lot of processes and for us, hopefully you feel this way, that there's not very many processes, and that's something that I learned from Netflix, which is:
they talk about this and Reed Hastings has the book No Rules Rules that a lot of people talk about, I guess not only in the Valley but but globally, which is it's people over process. So that means, and we have this allergy to the word process and people would make fun of it because it's like, well, we've scaled, we should probably get some process.
But the leaders, what I've learned and trying to really reinforce here is that it's not that there's no process, it's that there's just so some order to the chaos. You know, if you need something and you feel strongly about something, you should just go do it. You shouldn't have to ask, you know, 14 people with different levels of permission to, to kind of control these different aspects of, of the decision making process.
The decision making process. And something, again, again, I learned from, from Netflix is this, uh, idea of informed captaincy. So each person is an owner of some part of their department, they are the ones that are, are tasked with making really difficult decisions and so they, they farm for dissent. They write a memo in typical Netflix fashion.
So you write your ideas down to also give you an opportunity to synthesize 'em so you're not just showing up and kind of being an ideas factory. You write them down. And you socialize them and, and the idea is that you receive feedback. And often what you're looking for is who's dissenting. Like why is this not necessarily a bad idea, but like what are the flaws involved with this idea to then strengthen it?
And the same thing that we're trying to do, you know, we use Notion, we don't use like Google Docs for memos, but I think you've seen right? We, we try to like socialize these ideas and often ask like, well, If you never wanna be the king with no clothing or the queen with no clothing, you wanna, you know, know, like what I'm an informed captain, sure, but like, what am I, what am I not doing well?
So that's, I'd say that that's very like. Taking from Samsung, which was really cool to see the process work because they were so rigid in terms of what they were focused on versus Netflix, which was less rigid, but still very intentional around focus. You know, that culture has been, has been really instrumental in the way I think, and I don't know, hopefully it turns out to be, you know, it, it turns out to be the right type of company culture.
We're built building here and I'm bringing, uh, just an aspect of that, uh, to Clerk Chat.
14:35 - Clerk's Evolution Since Slack's Virtual Hackathon of 2020
Jill:
You've done a lot in just a few years. Speaking of which Clerk is, I guess, about three and a half years old, right?
Alex:
Yes. Yeah.
Jill:
And when I first started working with you all about a year ago, last summer, it was a very pivotal moment for me and I had to do a lot of research to better understand the company and the tech world and the telecom space, VoIP, everything, you name it. So I did some digging and I landed on your blog and I stumbled upon what I guess might have been the very first blog post that you guys had posted, um, that tells about the story of how you participated in Slack's virtual hackathon over the course of a week, um, built the Slack bot and ultimately Clerk was voted the best custom app for Slack.
It was such a cool story to learn, to read, to find out. And so that was 2020 ish. Now we're in 2023. How has Clerk evolved since that moment?
Alex:
That blog post, dear me, you're kicking back some good old school memories, which is crazy to think. I mean, everybody that makes this joke, right? The comment, the, the common sentiment of like the time, the like black hole of time that Covid was just like, it was 2019 and now it's, now we're halfway through 2023, and it's like, what happened?
Um, That's how I feel about the product as well. And you have to remember, I was also working full-time during that time as well with doing that five to nine trying to get out and the way the product and the company have evolved have been really monumental. So yeah, being thought of as a, as a side hustle type of application into this larger vision of understanding the telecommunication ecosystem and thinking, understanding what I just mentioned, how the ecosystem works and how it's all, a lot of it is built today and figuring out is there an o, is there a bigger opportunity for us? So are we going to be an integration into Slack and actually getting feedback. You mentioned customers, but even talking to venture capitalists to, so we could accelerate the business, they were like, well, you guys are a wedged app, and we're, what?
What the hell do you mean by wedged app? Right? And so they would say, well, You are building on top of somebody else's real estate, you know, within Slack. How is this gonna become, you know, a real company? Meaning if Slack ever decides to compete with you or shut you down, then your company's basically dead.
So how do you move forward? How do you get out of there? And that was a really pivotal, pivotal moment for us, I think, you know, end of 2020, 2021, beginning of 2021, and we started to look into asking deeper questions like, well, what are people, what are our customers coming to us for? What do they actually need? Who are our typical customers and you know, what systems are they using now? Are they happy with those systems, like their telephony in general, right? Where SMS is generally like the peanut butter or the jelly to the peanut butter jelly sandwich of calling, right? If you have a phone number and you're coming to Clerk and you're enabling SMS or you're grabbing a number from us, it generally we start to, we have this initial thesis actually taking a step back that people would grab a new number and then start texting.
But what we realized is people would come to us and say, Hey, I want to enable my existing phone number on like a RingCentral, which is, uh, a calling company or like my Skype or whatever it may be for my business. My current VoIP VoIP provider. Can you, I hate their texting capabilities or they don't have a good texting capability.
Can you just take this existing number? Make it SMS capable without taking over my phone calling capabilities. 'cause you guys can't do that and I just don't wanna touch that 'cause I have all sorts of other intricate details with my telephony. And so yeah, I mean that's how it started to evolve is, well if they're so unsatisfied or there's no other option, you know, can we, how, what do we do for SMS?
And then people started asking about WhatsApp and all these other different channels and we started to dig more and more. Based on, you know, based on what I just told you around, you know, well actually how does this whole, how is the sausage made? And, and realizing that, well, it's a layer on top of a layer on top of a layer, but it all goes back to the original builders, what's it called?
The American Telephony, like AT&T and then Verizon. Right? So they were the ones who like built the original, like physical copper wires underneath. Then our nation right under, like literally underneath our streets and roads and how all of that plumbing actually works is a fascinating beast. Like how you make a phone call or even how you and I are talking in real time right now is just a fascinating how all of this plumbing works. We just figured out that there is an opportunity for us to go direct to these carriers, which is the vision now, as I just mentioned, and that it's radically different from being a lightweight SMS application just for Slack and really becoming our own. Our own type of carrier and providing a whole suite of services to, to businesses moving forward.
So, and I, it's a much, it's a much larger opportunity, which is great. And it's, it's definitely, um, answers that question of how are you no longer wedged? Because we did, we launched our own web application, we launched on Teams which is, again, it's wedged, but, uh, launching our own web application and not just being embedded into Slack was another pivotal moment back in last year, 20 or 18 months ago when we launched that.
And having customers then starting to use it and almost effectively going back to square one, which is what we did with Product Hunt on Slack, relaunching that on Product Hunt again, and then getting the first customers and then using that as a feedback loop. So it's been, it's been a journey, that's for sure to get to where we are today.
Jill:
I would've liked to be a fly on the wall when you guys had all those conversations. I'm thinking like so many higher level thinking questions, really analytical, maybe some not, but probably had a lot of really interesting questions that you guys asked one another and the thought process.
Alex:
Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Igor, who lives in Marin on the other side of, of the San Francisco Golden Gate, we would, you know, take the ferry to him every Friday and, and hang out and, and crank as, as Igor calls it, there's war grind on Clerk and a lot of those, a lot of it was not any of this, you know, war room that you'd think of, of like whiteboarding as you'd expect.
There's a lot of just fundamental human things, right? Just walk around and walk around the beautiful area in, in California and, and just throw ideas out and just figure out why they would work or wouldn't work. And then, and then coming back to the whiteboard. So there's a lot of walking, which we should probably get back to those roots.
21:10 - Automation in the Telecom Industry
Jill:
We have mentioned a lot of buzzwords along the way, like AI automation. I don't think we use the word workflow yet, but I'm using it now. Um, I actually learned something new the other day 'cause I did research because that's what I do. And according to the internet, the word automation originated around 1945 or 1950 as a combination of the words automatic and operation.
It makes sense. I did a further dig and I found some examples from dictionaries, you know, where they used the word in a sentence and I thought that the examples would have dated back to that time, but they didn't. They brought them a lot more current and current day. So here's one example. "Google Cloud will provide advice and tools for customers to harness AI to identify trends, summarize information, boost automation, and generate content.
And then another example I found "On the first part, briefly, for 20 years of tech automation, people have predicted all kinds of jobs would go away. So do you have any strong feelings about the word automation as it relates to the telecom industry and the direction it's headed?
Alex:
There is definitely, as you mentioned at the top, there's a lot of buzzwords in the industry at the moment. You know, AI is the word of 2023 and probably beyond, and I didn't know about automation operation. That, that's really cool. And, and thank you for teaching me. I appreciate it. You got your teacher roots still, still going strong. Um, So when I think about the telecommunication space and automation, and actually the, the answer's not gonna come from me, it comes from from customers, which is again, a big part of our vision, which is we have feature called workflows at Clerk, and it allows you as a, as a company, to automate, you know, like, oh, you can build a, a text like greeting message or in the industry, like there's a lot of SMS marketing tools that have something called like a sequence.
So I'm sure if you've like ever registered with any of your favorite like e-commerce brands, it says like, Hey Jill, thanks for buying, you know, shoes or whatever it is, right, that you've purchased. And then it sends you like a code for 10% off every couple months or whatever it is. It says, Hey, like, why don't you, you know, I don't know, come back to our website or something to try to increase the revenue and that's.
That automation, what we realize if you distill it is, is really just a, a kind of transactional communication. When you think about telco, it's not human. It doesn't feel, it's kind of just feels like an ad, like what people like, kind of what people don't love. It's a top of the awareness funnel. So you're like, oh yeah, I remember I interacted with this brand.
It's cool because now it's in my SMS inbox or email inbox, whatever. But telco is, uh, gonna be SMS. And what we realized from customers is that while they love those tools, they lost the conversational aspect. Like they don't really even know who their customers are. Like they're, you know, what's, Are they thinking?
And you know, the frontline staff, like the sales associates, that kind of like white glove concierge service that we actually started to attract a lot of, uh, because we, we actually lacked automation as a tool for up until recently we realized that companies, at first we had this idea like maybe the telco industry, there's, it's really one or the other, but it's really both.
You ha there's a place for automation and getting everyone's attention, but then you really, companies really do love. Having people answer, like if, if everybody's had an experience, like you call, I don't know, airline is probably one of the first things that comes to mind. Or like car rental shop. And then as soon as you actually need to the app or whatever they've set up to field 90% of the questions that 10%, which matters for, you know, that core experience where you're like, look, something's gone wrong and this damn bot is in my way.
Like we've, now, we live in that era of. Holy shit, how do I just get to a human right? Like I'm pressing zero. I don't know about you on like that menu. I'm just like, zero. I don't even care what you have to say. Just like, get me as fast as possible to a person. So yeah, companies have created all these barriers to, to actually talking to a person and, and I feel very passionately around AI and automation, making that first experience feel more human and more elegant.
But at the end of the day, There's just something that even being in the tech industry, you just cannot replace the, the human touch and the feeling of security and comfort when somebody does pick up a phone, even if they might not know anything, and it can, that can be a whole frustrating experience. Is that still your interaction with a brand and, and hopefully there's competent people on the other side.
That's, I think a really, there's a marriage between those two worlds, um, that I think is, is happening and I, I don't see, I don't see people. Pundits will say it's a replacement of one or the other, and we want to completely automate out this workforce. And I think that's the wrong approach. And the vision now is really to, to blend those two worlds.
Just make things a little bit more elegant, um, and a little more seamless before you do have that, that one-on-one interaction.
26:10 - Data Security and Compliance for Telecommunications
Jill:
Alright, so we were just talking about SMS and automation. What comes to mind directly from that is security. I know a lot of companies have that top of mind as a question and a concern, especially in the, especially in the digitalization of data.
I actually recently read an article in Forbes written by Chuck Brooks, who's a global thought leader in cybersecurity and emerging tech, and I'd love to share a quote with you from the article. "The emerging digital ecosystem is treacherous in our current digital environment. Every company is now a reachable target, and every company, large or small has operations, brand reputation, and revenue pipelines that are potentially at risk from a breach."
What are your thoughts related to the potential risks and vulnerabilities associated with business messaging SMS, for instance, in terms of data security?
Alex:
I, I love this one. And I, uh, building this company has made me realize as a consumer, How, you know, sensitive data is you don't want, I mean, your, your messages to your loved ones or your spouse or whatever it may be, right?
Those are very sensitive pieces of information, especially now that they're, the rate of texting and, and messaging is overtaking the rate of, of phone calling and, you know, post pandemic. And so that being, becoming the main method of communication, everyone texting, imagine what it would be like if. A company or the government could listen into your calls, which, you know, theoretically, they, uh, in a lot of cases they can, but imagine if they could just read your entire transcript of, of your SMS.
And while, you know, legally there's a lot of protections in place is SMS. Short messaging service created in the 70s is a non-encrypted method of communication. So that means really, and this is what scares me, is that. A lot of, any mal actor or malicious actor could go to the nearest, their nearest cell phone tower and set up a relatively simple device that can intercept a lot of these messages, 'cause again, they're non-encrypted. So if they go to your local, like New Jersey cell phone tower close to you, they could intercept you and all of your neighbors as messages that are going back and forth and, and being beamed to that, to that tower. So SMS is a method of communication. I think a lot of the telcos are, uh, and you know, the big tech cos are aware of this, which is why Apple has iMessage.
Facebook invested in WhatsApp, you know, for $17 billion many, many years ago or whatever the amount was. I'm forgetting 'cause I think it was like 17 billion. Google has RCS, which is the next, you know, is an encrypted version of SMS, and then there's telegram, right? Which is being used for folks in war torn in, you know, areas across the world.
Telegrams at the forefront of the war in Ukraine right now. And, and people not, you know, masking information, even the government needing to use it to mask military positions, right? So it's this communication modality is, is so tantamount to it is, is just so important to have. Protections in place, and we take that so seriously.
So for, from a compliance perspective as well, we're, you know, helping encrypt that data as well. And we have a larger vision on the compliance side as well around, you know, decentralizing that so it's not owned by some big tech company, like Facebook owns WhatsApp and then they, they own that data at the end of the day, even though they can't read your messages, they still own the packets of data being sent and received between WhatsApp users.
And so our vision is, On the data and compliance side, could we decentralize that? So it's not owned by any specific tech company. How do you, Jill, own that data yourself? So that's, it's a, it's a scary ecosystem out there, but, uh, of, of data. Um, and we're, we're really trying to be at the forefront of, of also defining that landscape as a company.
Jill:
It's honestly something I've never really been concerned about, even though I probably should have been, you know, years prior. But now that I've been learning about it so much, I'm really curious to see how data security and compliance, especially in terms of something like SMS evolves and changes over time.
Alex:
Yeah, let's. I guess we'll see where it goes. There's a lot of federal regulation like the SEC with financial institutions as well. Right. You're not, A lot of people are texting their financial advisors, but it's going to their personal phone, so that's subject to audits and financial institutions are scrambling.
You know, the military, there's a Senate hearing as well for the, the United States government should no longer be using SMS protocol because that can be intercepted again, spending the biggest defense spending in the world. And then you're using an unencrypted method of comms, right? Just to text, like, that's, that's not good.
That's very, that's a big vulnerability. So yeah, there's, there's a lot being defined in this area and it's, it's kind of. What you said, you wouldn't think about it as the average consumer, it's quote unquote boring 'cause you're just like, well I just trust these companies to be handling my data properly.
But from a business perspective, I'd say that, that this more than the omnichannel stuff, like, you know, can I text from WhatsApp or iMessage? Really what the backbone of all of this is, is I don't want data leaks between my company and my customers. 'cause that's, If that's awful, then your company's in for a huge lawsuit.
So huge risk there. So we get a lot of compliance questions and, and compliance officers, you know, making sure that we are taking this seriously, so, which we do. So yeah.
Jill:
Thank you for that, Alex. I loved our chat. I learned a lot, as always.
Alex:
Likewise. Thank you, Jill.
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