E227 - Alvaro De Nicholas, Global Technology Officer, CEO of DNA Ventures
[00:00] Debbie Reynolds: The personal views expressed by our podcast guests are their own and are not legal advice or official statements by their organizations.
[00:12] Hello, my name is Debbie Reynolds. They call me the Data Diva. This is the Data Diva Talks privacy podcast where we discuss data privacy issues with industry leaders around the world with information that businesses need to know.
[00:25] Now I have a very special guest on the show all the way from Spain, Alvaro De Nicholas. He is the CEO of DNA Ventures. Welcome.
[00:37] Alvaro De Nicholas: Thank you for having me.
[00:39] Debbie Reynolds: Well, first of all, thank you so much for being on the show. We had a very interesting crossing of paths.
[00:48] I was in Spain, in Acorna, Spain. I was invited to speak at a conference called Ecosystem 2030.
[00:57] And Omar, who's the head of artificial intelligence at NASA, invited me to be there. And I didn't really realize until just now that you and Omar work together at NASA.
[01:07] But before we get into all that and so you and I, we were at this conference. The conference was phenomenal because they had leaders from different industries all over the world.
[01:18] And so it's very different. You know, I think sometimes you go to conferences and like everyone's like in the same industry and people are talking about the same things and this is like the opposite of that.
[01:28] And it was so mind blowing and beneficial to cross paths with so many different people. So we didn't get a chance to, to really connect as much in the conference, but we did connect afterwards.
[01:40] So I would love for you to tell your, tell your technology journey and your story. It's, to me it's fascinating the things you've been working on.
[01:50] Alvaro De Nicholas: So thank you, thank you very much. Because this one is quite different because you get to meet very high quality people and very high level, very high positions in government, in administration, in institutions and in industry.
[02:05] I mean, last year when you were there, it was all female cast, but I was who is who of any industry that you could think of.
[02:13] It was quite the clueless to be there. And then you spend two or three days together for the meals as well. So you have a lot of chance to interact and exchange ideas, which is what makes it fantastic, I think, for the speakers and also for the audience that attend.
[02:30] So I started well, I come from a small city in the middle of Spain called Violet. It's about half a million people. I studied telecommunications engineering there and then when I finished, I basically went to the south of France to work for Accenture.
[02:48] At the time I'm a consultant and I worked as a management consultant. But not your typical management consultant because it was very technical. Basically a lot of companies around the world were giving cable services, TV and TV on demand with cable, but it was analog cable and you could only have so many channels.
[03:07] And basically one of the partners at Accenture in the south of France, Sydney, told the client that we could move them to digital, although nobody had done it ever in the world.
[03:19] The client said yes, I was pretty well awareness in the uk and they said, fantastic, can you please do it for us? And then he hired 10 PhDs and then he told us ali go and figure out how to do it, which eventually we did.
[03:31] And then we did that for a lot of chemical companies around the world, including Comcast in the US and Liberty Media and some of the very big names today.
[03:41] And basically we were managing all of the adverts that you can see. The people from Madison Avenue, the mad men they were coming up with and then, you know, putting them into the radio television advertising holdings and then managing or measuring the impact that that had on how many people saw it.
[04:00] Because you cannot tell, you know, in terms of things, but how many people saw it. Which is one of the first, I guess, findings that I had with, with privacy, because it was very private at that time because it was all just an estimation.
[04:14] And the body that was making those estimates in Spain was funded by the media advertising companies because of course they had to have some level of credibility. So they said this independent, although we pay for it, it's going to tell us how many people have watched this advert in television or in radio.
[04:36] We basically did a sample across in that time, Spain and France, and out of 10,000 people we could sell that. 20 million people had seen that algorithm how? Well, the algorithms were very secret.
[04:51] I was never quite sure that they were not inclusive numbers. But in any case, nobody knew whether you watch it or you didn't like we have nowadays in. And at that time there was no behavioral targeting obviously because it was impossible to see who was watching what.
[05:09] But we had a division called Avas Media Digital which was started to work on digital advertising. And we started to work with Google at the time and Yahoo, which were small growing infants.
[05:23] But we saw the potential and the game is always, you know, the advertisers want to pay as little as possible and for the get as much money as possible for the spaces and the ones that are the clients, the big Potter and Gambles or Rocket and Kisser or Coca Cola, they want to pay the minimum for that level of exposure.
[05:46] And I joined a company that had one of the bases in France, was an American company called SeaChange, and it was based in Boston, Massachusetts, and they were doing video on demand servers, moving from hardware to software and services.
[06:01] So I was leading the professional services outside of the US and created teams in England, France, Italy, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands. Then that went very well. We started to monetize those teams and say, well, go do it the same in Asia.
[06:18] So because we have clients in Singapore Telecom, Malaysia Telecom.
[06:24] So I was looking, you know, what to do and what could I find that would be closer to home? And luckily, a colleague from. Colleague from Accenture, she called me.
[06:34] She was CIO at British Telecom, the telecommunications company in the uk. So she called me to see if I could help with basically a problem that I had with one of the video platforms.
[06:44] I started working on this video platform, but it was 2012 and the Olympics were happening in London and everybody was working at Big Pics because it was obviously a big event.
[06:55] So I got a call from tui, a travel tour operator in, well, German tour operator operating all over the world. And basically they had what is called a bed bank.
[07:07] That is a company that when you go to XV or booking and you book a Hotel from the 20th 30th of August in Hong Kong, then they will go, experience will go to thousands of deadlines who have the contract with the hotels, and whoever responds the fastest with the best price then gets the same.
[07:28] So that was the operation, but through that small thing, their revenue was around 2 billion. I brought in some people at 1, and we got to start working on moving our platform to Cloud in 2016, which was very early for most companies, and it was our core platform, which was doing 10,000 requests per second when I arrived.
[07:52] And then two years later, we're doing about a million per second.
[07:58] And eventually, then when I was completed and I went on to look for more challenges and I landed in a company that's like an Airbnb but managed. So I was there for two years because on the personal side, my wife got diagnosed with breast cancer, so I had to come back home and be with her.
[08:19] She's okay now since she got all clear.
[08:22] I very much enjoy entrepreneurs because I think you guys are the salt of the earth and nothing happens without the ideas and the strength that you have. When Elon Musk says that, you know, having a company is like eating glass and looking at the abyss all the time is true.
[08:40] It's a tough job, but I really, really get a lot of the energy from. From that. Then I've been lately in the financial industry, which I had Tried to avoid all my life because there's a lot to do, a lot to think, a lot of things on the technology side to improve.
[08:56] But there's a lot of money, I still make a lot of money and not much interest on, you know, changing anything because you're regulated as well and therefore they are always behind the curve.
[09:05] But some people convinced me that we were going to build a bank of the future and change, you know, that, that tone. And I went to Lloyds bank in the UK, the largest bank in the UK, 35 million accounts.
[09:18] And there I was moving from, you know, dealing with mainframes and this type of systems and trying to move them into Google Cloud and, and so on. So we did that for three years and managed to close a lot of the applications that were on the platform replacement for modern ones and some of the oldest, probably the oldest data center in the world, which had like almost 80 years.
[09:44] You know, we were worried that the pipes were not burst for the water, for the air conditioning.
[09:49] So we managed to close that one and, and then the last thing that I've done is with Zurich Insurance, so yet another, you know, financial industry. I wanted to go, you know, to work in a company that sells a product that everybody wants to buy but nobody wants to use, you know, like the life insurance.
[10:10] So that's where, that's how I ended up in Zurich.
[10:15] Debbie Reynolds: Tell me a little bit about how you met Omar.
[10:17] Alvaro De Nicholas: So when I was in this in Mallorca, I went to San Francisco for one of the, I think it was the Oracle conference. In one of the lectures, I had this guy next to me that looked pretty bored and now I was a little bit too.
[10:32] So I thought, why don't we go for a coffee? So we got talking and it turns out he was the Chief Innovation Officer of NASA, the Space Administration. And which was very interesting to me because I knew nothing about it.
[10:45] And we got talking about hardware, it was an engineer and the administration was going to change and probably lower the budget if we know the numbers now with SpaceX and stuff.
[10:56] But at the time it was, you know, they were going to cut the budgets and therefore, you know, they had to figure out how they could still continue to operate with less money.
[11:05] And I was asking, well, why is it so expensive? Why is it so difficult to do experiments in space? We had to prepare them three years in advance, et cetera.
[11:13] And I told him, well, you know, I got a friend who was working in, in one of the oil companies and the output is very large. They carry the oil from one country to another.
[11:23] And of course, they are mostly automated because they don't want to have crew. So they can take as much space as possible for the crew because it's very expensive to move it around for the oil.
[11:33] And therefore there's only one or two people in the boat. And the boat is mostly going on its own. So they could run into some reefs or some whales or something that could damage the hull of the ship.
[11:47] So they had bought these big predator drones that were used in the wars to go around every single ship and then check that the hull was intact. While they were moving from one country to another, which was 1 million or $2 million each, one of those drones, they decided, they realized at some point that they could do it with smaller drones that had eight propellers.
[12:10] And when the big ship passed near a harbor, they would just go with the drone and around and then come back to the harbor. And that was like almost 50 times or 100 times cheaper than using the pedal drones.
[12:23] So I said, yeah, but, you know, how is that useful for me? I mean, I don't know why you tell me this story, man. And then he called me one year later and he said, you know, we did what we discussed.
[12:33] How did you. So we took a phone and then we put some solar panels and give it electricity. And then we told the guys in the space shuttle to just throw them out the window when they were in space.
[12:46] And then the phone will connect to each other and create a network and then we can run some experiments so you can learn from one industry to the other. And they said, do you think that if we can invite people from different places, they would come?
[12:59] You're NASA, you're in Houston, can easily say something. Who's going to say no? So we started like that. And then we were inviting people that were working at Marvel, Google, X chefs.
[13:11] I mean, many people from different trades. Also some of the people were looking at designers, some of the best designers in the world for cars and other things. And it was just incredible.
[13:21] And then we were all talking about, how do you innovate and do you do. So I was doing innovation by stealth. So without telling anybody, just try to within the company to try to get new things done, like with blockchain and stuff.
[13:34] Other people were. They were doing open innovation. They were working with the masses already to try to get ideas from many people. And out of that, that evolved. We did that for four years.
[13:45] Once a year we were meeting in for a week or a bit less, and they would all be together all the time like we were in the same hotel, beers together and then the camaraderie that you were generating at that time was such that you could then talk to these people forever.
[14:04] And it was very useful as a network, but also as a source of creativity. And then when the pandemic came, we decided to write a book, a manifesto of sorts, where we got all these people that had gone through the program, which was almost 200 at times.
[14:19] And basically we wrote that you can find on the web. We're trying to advise governments and citizens about what to do to come back to normality. After Covid and I really still, from time to time we were talking about previously actually one of the things about data privacy and our right to own our own data.
[14:40] So among other things, turning to the ecosystems 2030, that is where we met.
[14:45] Debbie Reynolds: You posed an interesting question and I think it's fascinating and I want to talk a little bit more about this. The question you posed was, is privacy the privilege of those who can afford it?
[14:56] I want your thoughts on it. And I have my thoughts as well.
[14:59] Alvaro De Nicholas: I mean, nowadays we are constantly giving data and willingly or not, I mean, I think I said one of the posts in LinkedIn that I've rejected so many cookies that the Cookie Monster and Santa Cross right there will have trouble trying to eat them all.
[15:17] But still you're still giving Data with your IoT devices, your, your phone, your many things that even if you still sign the terms and conditions, you're not, I think, really aware of how much you're giving away.
[15:35] It becomes such that it becomes personal. So you're giving away who you are as a person, your personality, in which moment you are in your life. You could be up and down because of circumstances or your family or anything.
[15:51] And they know absolutely everything to the second, you know, on that. And they know because I've been in finance industry needs a lot of data or uses a lot of data to make decision.
[16:02] And the people that are, you know, very well off, they can afford not to have a phone because they will have a secretary that come and calls them when somebody calls them.
[16:11] So therefore there's one of the one less problems. They can afford to be isolated in their private network, as it were, all the time that reaches to the Internet with their own private connections.
[16:24] And therefore there's no way to access that information.
[16:29] And they're pretty private, they've always been, but now the difference is even larger. And I'm worried that because we have more and more now it's AI and machine learning but algorithms that will make decisions, that will help companies make decisions.
[16:45] In the case of banks for a loan, in the case of insurance for life insurance, and the fact that we know a lot about some people and nothing about others, then it means that there's no equality anymore, there's no fairness, which is one of the pillars of democracy, I think.
[16:59] And that's what, you know, one of the things in my head that I wanted to mention here, because I think we're in danger of, you know, just, just lose. Contraining all of the AI models on everything that is available, whether it's copyrighted or not is also the healthy way to go about it.
[17:18] Debbie Reynolds: I agree with that. I think that we're, what we're creating is like a new digital cast system where people can afford to opt out or not have their data tracked in the same way that other people are.
[17:31] And then also trying to make, you know, broad decisions about people when they, you know, have no agency or no control over the data. And, you know, not, not all data is correct or not all data is good data.
[17:43] Right. So to try to put them into these systems and then assuming that is correct, and then how can a person like someone who isn't wealthy or isn't connected, how can they correct that?
[17:58] Because it may be something like algorithm used in a school. Maybe they decide that this kid based on something they had done on their schoolwork. We're going to put them on like a lesser path.
[18:11] Right. So maybe they can never get off that path because it's written in the algorithm somewhere or in some data set that they don't know about that's like, made a decision like, you'll never be a doctor, so we're going to like, make you be this other person.
[18:25] So that's definitely a challenge. And I think it's interesting that you say that, because I always thought when in the US people were like, well, why isn't privacy in, like the Constitution?
[18:39] Why is it like a constitutional right? And I, I said, because I thought the founding Fathers had, like, as much privacy as they could possibly want. Right. So privacy was not a problem for them.
[18:52] Right. But I think for us as regular citizens in the world, as we're seeing more data being pulled in data systems and some people being to either have more ability to change or even like, not even put their data in those systems, I think is a problem.
[19:09] Alvaro De Nicholas: There's also, like you said, you talked about the wrong data as well. My sister has been working a lot. She works in NGOs, so she's been with several children and the Red Cross and quite a few others.
[19:22] Always in the field against hunger. Like something else I can't remember, but always in the field. Analysis lately, working a lot with transgender people, transgender population. And one of the problems that they have is that there's no transgender gender.
[19:39] So they are mostly misrepresented in all of the statistics. And that generates health problems for them because they cannot access the right care at the right time. There's almost 1 million people in the US that are in that situation.
[19:55] And then you have the other side, which is like in El Salvador, they will publish exactly who they are, and then the Maras will go after them and they have to emigrate to Europe or Australia or other places, which is also a problem because there's too much exposure to the data.
[20:13] So, like this, there's many combinations in similar situation.
[20:18] Debbie Reynolds: I want to talk a little bit about IoT Internet of Things. So this is something that I work on really closely because I felt like this was an area that there's just so.
[20:30] First of all, there's so many innovations that use devices that collect data. And I call IoT devices like a computer without a screen. So people don't really know what these devices are collecting what they're doing.
[20:42] And it does create, you know, privacy and security challenges because there aren't any good standards right now around how to really wrangle in that data data and how to give people transparency.
[20:54] But I want your thoughts on that.
[20:56] Alvaro De Nicholas: So I think more and more, because people are more aware of their. The privacy or what they're giving away when they're in front of a computer, like you said, or the phone.
[21:06] But then we have a, you know, a ring or, you know, or a smartwatch. You don't think about it. And these ones are correct. Collecting even more the histology, because it's not about your.
[21:18] Your senses, your heart, your heart rate, your health, which is pretty personal level of information.
[21:30] And there's even more now with mascots and pets. The moment in insurance, we were given an insurance. I don't know if I should say the evaluate. We're already there.
[21:40] We give it insurance to a mascot based on the postcode of the owner and then the age of the element. Not even one like the age of the element. So, you know, very little information.
[21:52] So there's a huge margin for improvement there. But also the market for pets is growing exponentially. So it's growing 30% per year, which is why private equity is getting into it.
[22:04] And some of the funds and stuff Both in the US and in Europe, obviously, then a little bit less in Asia and Africa because they have different concern. But then those pets will have collapse.
[22:17] That will be given by the insurance industry because they want to track that pet.
[22:23] And then they will tell you you have to go to the doctor to prevent claims later because the animal has got a serious illness or has died. But then the pet talkers take care of the animals.
[22:35] They're not regulated, so they can check whatever prices they want. You know, the food for everyone is not regulated. So nothing is regulated in the industry. So then you're basically opening the door to a huge amount of money that are going to come in through that.
[22:50] So you think that the UFO work and you know, for the animal, maybe they are because they are tracking their hearts, but you know, it's not for the good of their hearts.
[22:59] Debbie Reynolds: I want your thoughts about biometrics. So I work in this area as well, not because I love biometrics, but because I'm concerned about how people are using biometrics. Right. So we're seeing a lot more biometrics uses at things like airports and border crossings, which.
[23:21] Okay, I can understand that. Right. But I think one of the use cases I saw recently in a sports stadium, they want people to use biometrics to buy a beer or something.
[23:32] And so I think that's like off the rails.
[23:36] The benefit and the risks don't seem equal.
[23:39] Alvaro De Nicholas: My, my main problem with biometrics is, I mean, on one hand I love it because it's, as a technologist, you know, it's, it's very safe and secure. You have many points of comparison.
[23:50] But you know, if it gets hacked, it's with you forever. You cannot change it like a passport. So you, you know, they are immutable. So then what do you do?
[23:58] What's your recourse in that case? And like you say, they are coming to life in public spaces like airports. And if you mean hacked, somebody stole your biometrics, you can never fly.
[24:12] What's going to happen? And don't say we've covered all of those eventualities yet.
[24:18] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly. It's very interesting. And also biometrics, I find that's another example of kind of a caste system where, you know, again, a lot of people who can afford not to be in those systems aren't right.
[24:34] Or they can avoid void that type of capture of their data. And so other people can't do that. And that's concerning as well.
[24:42] Alvaro De Nicholas: The only thing that might be good about it is that if it becomes part of your ID or your passport, then we can train AI models with all of the data so they don't have bias like they do today.
[24:55] Debbie Reynolds: Exactly. I think that the example that I like to use is like, let's say you live in the city and maybe the north side of the city has more traffic cameras than the south side of the city.
[25:06] And so now people on one side of the city get more tickets and stuff and you can say, oh, these people on this side of the city drive worse. But actually you're not capturing the same data on the other side of the city.
[25:19] So how can you really make that judgment? And so that, that plays into insurance, that plays into the property values, all those things. And so, you know, if you're, if your area isn't tracked as much, you probably have higher property values than the areas that are more tracked.
[25:38] Alvaro De Nicholas: Do you think that's my design?
[25:40] Debbie Reynolds: Yes, I do.
[25:43] Alvaro De Nicholas: Fair enough.
[25:45] Debbie Reynolds: What's happening in the world right now in terms of like data technology or privacy that's concerning you?
[25:52] Alvaro De Nicholas: I think it's going to be interesting for us if I can just. I'm not going to talk about politics just in terms of my two cents on what I think this affects Europe, as you saw here.
[26:04] So I think there's two things that are interesting, you know, depending on how you look at them, but, or are scary.
[26:11] One is the, you know, living NATO, living the role of, you know, the, the policeman of the world that for many years the US has done and trying to keep us properly ruled and stuff.
[26:24] And if that role is not with the United States, then I don't think China is stepping up to the plate and Russia is busy with other things.
[26:35] So I think that's going to lead us to, because of this, to the end of globalization, probably. The other things that are also affecting that is, you know, bringing up all of them, the import taxes into the States.
[26:54] So that would mean that, you know, a lot more product from the rest of the world will come to you because they can, they don't want to pay those taxes and they will be flooded with, you know, electrical cars which are probably as good or better than Tesla.
[27:07] But, you know, Elon will be okay. And, but for, compared to the European Canada sectors, we have a problem which are also competitors. So that's very clever tactic. So for a while I think prices might get better for consumers in Europe, but eventually I think everybody will start looking after their own floor and imposing taxes as well to foreign products, which is going to predict maybe not the union as such, because of that monetary alliance, but everything else will be difficult to get through.
[27:41] So it's funny because I see the US at this point doing a lot like what happened at the beginning of the 20th century when it was already closed. And it's interesting how Ray Galio says that there are cycles in the economy and the world and you can see that happening.
[27:59] Debbie Reynolds: So trying to create those barriers I think is almost impossible to do. I guess you could try to do it, maybe it'll be hard to do it, but I think just for the flow of currency and for commerce and especially like the Internet and digital things.
[28:15] Alvaro De Nicholas: If you see the speech of the network that moving the network of the micro dollars and petrodollars, you know, that's, that's still going to happen, but then the flow of people, that's, you know, going to be a lot more difficult and merchandising.
[28:29] I was thinking, you know, when GDPR came about in Europe and I was thinking with the hope really of pushing this as an example to other countries and really trying to protect the individuals with the huge sanctions of 50% of your revenue.
[28:47] That hasn't quite been like that for anybody, but still there's been some examples and then that never happened.
[28:55] We just got to start with the GDPR and no one else did anything similar.
[29:00] The same thing with AI now with AI to protect the citizen, to protect the nobody's. They're going to. Yeah, you go do that. Yeah.
[29:09] Debbie Reynolds: Well, one thing I will say about that, I think the GDPR has been very influential in the US and so even though it has not created a lot of laws or regulation at a broad scale about that, but I think the impact that it's had is that it's change the way businesses think about data.
[29:33] So even companies that aren't in Europe or don't have customers in Europe, if they have any, like let's say they're a third party to a big company that does that, those companies are really pushing down those business requirements saying that you have to really align with kind of these data standards.
[29:50] And because the US doesn't really have that on a massive scale, I think the GDPR has been like a good roadmap sort of to think about that. And so I think to me that's one of the downsides in the US of US not having regulation, where we kind of have to rely on these other frameworks.
[30:10] Even if we aren't passing laws. I think they are having a significant impact on businesses in the way that they operate. So they can't say, well you have to comply with gdpr.
[30:22] They say, well, here are the kind of the principles, the foundational things that GDPR talks about. And this is the way that we, we have to manage our business. And as a result, we're going to push those requirements down.
[30:33] And so I think AI will be very similar where I don't see AI regulation happening in the US like it happened in Europe. But I do see that as being kind of a framework or a guide that companies will definitely look at.
[30:48] Because again, to me, this gets back into commerce again.
[30:53] So if you want to do business in Europe, you have to follow those rules. So are you going to have different rules for different countries? Maybe big companies can do that, maybe those smaller companies can't do that.
[31:04] And maybe it makes more sense to align with that just as a business.
[31:09] Alvaro De Nicholas: It's good value that you tell me that it has had some level of impact, at least to educate people and businesses. I think you're right. I think it's going to happen the same way.
[31:20] For me, when GDPR came about, I thought this is going to be the moment when we can have CIOs and CTOs in the boardroom because it's only like 1% in all the companies across the world.
[31:30] Maximum is 1% per capita. Because it's like the CFOs, because at some point the owners of the company, they saw the financial regulation and said, well, somebody has to go to jail.
[31:40] So you come here and then sit on the board with us. So if something happens, then you can go. So then we would be responsible for the GDPR breaches because it was so such a big financial risk that they will have us on the board.
[31:53] But no, it hasn't really had an effect either, right?
[31:56] Debbie Reynolds: I wish, I wish.
[31:58] So if it were Avaro, if it were the world according to you, and we did everything you said, what would be your wish for privacy or technology anywhere in the world, whether that be human behavior, regulation, or something like innovation or in technology?
[32:17] Alvaro De Nicholas: For me, it would be kind of a data passport that we would own ourselves and we could manage explicitly and essentially what data gets used or not. And then we could waive it and say, no, just take my data away.
[32:34] Which now is, like you said in another episode, it's impossible because it's everywhere. But for me, having that, that you know that, right? To really own your data, like one more part of your body or of your being at the existential level, as Satya would say, I think that is very important.
[32:58] I mean, it's your medical data, your biometrics, everything your digital footprint that you live everywhere be able to monetize it or, or give it away or whatever it is that you want to do but then you know it's a form of trade so then being able to control it I don't know how to do that.
[33:14] I don't have the answer but that would be my wish.
[33:18] Debbie Reynolds: I have that wish too right that people have agency to be able to control their data almost like a bank and then they choose how to broker that information. I would love that.
[33:26] Well thank you so much for this. This has been tremendous. I hope we get a chance to see each other again and in Spain because I had a great time there and so yeah let's continue the conversation and I, I love to find ways we can collaborate in the future.
[33:41] Alvaro De Nicholas: Perfect. Thank you. Thanks a lot. Yeah, take care.
[33:44] Debbie Reynolds: Take care. All right. It.
