Privado welcomes Nishant Bhajaria

Why Nishant joined Privado in his own words 

After a great run at companies like Google, Uber and Meta, it is time to try something different. I am joining Vaibhav Antil, Jasdeep Cheema, Prashant Mahajan and the team at Privado to build their Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence org.

Every time you make a decision in life, be it personal or professional, there are two guiding factors: replica and remedy.

Ideally, you want your decision to offer continuity on things that are working well; this speaks to replicating the past. You also want to use decisions as inflection points to fill gaps in your life. Over the last decade plus, I have walked into difficult situations at large companies with enormous scale often freighted by sloppy data protection practices. These companies offered me great opportunities to learn, build teams and programs, and demonstrate that privacy and data protection could be a value-add, not an incurable risk or a compliance checkbox. 

Netflix taught me the skills it takes to inculcate privacy into a bottom-up culture fueled by “freedom and responsibility.” Uber was the role of a lifetime where we changed our cultural values and built a privacy team that built trust with the community. I will never forget the positive headlines the “Privacy Center” got for the company. My time at Meta showed, yet again, how engineers and attorneys can solve complex privacy problems without creating unnecessary burdens that hurt customer engagement.

All of this begs the questions: 

• Why not help the next generation of companies (plural intended) do it right from the get-go?
• Why not create a platform that helps engineers build it right and helps legal/compliance teams build their requirements into the code?
• Why not help the industry as a whole “shift left” by discovering risk real-time in the code rather than trying to discover it in data after-the-fact?

I can leverage my vast experience, insights as a customer and sensibilities as a consumer to help companies get the most out of their engineers. My courses hosted by LinkedIn and my book Data Privacy: A runbook for engineers have offered me a ton of visibility into the challenges ahead. Several off-the-record “Chatham House Rules” events to sell my book revealed the same thing: leaders want privacy but not at the expense of efficiency.

Privado is building privacy solutions that add to efficiency. This small and nimble operation is building tools that detect risks in code before they multiply by way of data, and the risks grow exponentially by way of sharing with vendors and feeding into LLMs. 

Just as good literature contains both poetry and prose, good privacy needs both message and metrics.

So, what do we mean by “Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence?”

At the Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence, Privado will help leaders understand their risks, shape their mitigation strategies, messaging, and metrics to build allies with teams like security, data platform, and marketing and formulate strategies to influence the C-suite all the way through. 

We will offer a safe space to companies to ask questions and build products and processes that are right for them, without the false starts of building or buying the wrong tool. This will create multiple concentric circles all centered on efficiency and privacy. Our code-scanning solutions will help our customers while their use cases will help improve our solutions. This will help ensure not just good privacy outcomes for our customers, but also help shape a broader consensus in the industry on privacy that will empower innovators and protect customers in this age of GenAI.

As part of the run-up to the Privacy Engineering Center of Excellence, Privado has hosted public panels, roundtable discussions and 1:1 coaching sessions for privacy and governance professionals. We are often asked why this was free, i.e. “What's the catch?”. Candidly speaking, yes, we do hope for these sessions to eventually lead to customers. In the near term though, we are hoping to elevate privacy awareness and upskill privacy professionals for the high payoff of privacy automation. As these professionals become tech-savvy and gain influence within their companies, the overall community and market will grow. For Privado, this is about growing the pie rather than just sealing the deal.

Simply put, Privado and I are about the long game.

Finally, and this is personal, it will be refreshing to work for a small company “Where Everybody Knows Your Name,” as Gary Portnoy sang in the title song of my favorite show “Cheers.” I have missed this feeling of intimacy and informality. With lots of memories of days gone by and even more possibilities in the days to come, we are excited about this new chapter.