Keep Pushing, Because It’s Too Important

Part 3 of the PrivID Story

Looking back, the pandemic stripped away illusions. The investors who weren’t, the clients who collapsed, the security professionals who just wanted check-boxes, all of it forced me to see the difference between talking about disruption and actually building it. Most people will always choose inertia over risk, even if the status quo is broken.

So we keep going. We rewrote the code. We pivoted markets. I sold what I had to sell and worked nights to keep the lights on. That’s not the story investors want to hear, but it’s the truth. Disruption isn’t clean or glamorous, it’s slow, lonely, and more expensive than I could have imagined. But if you believe in it enough, which I do, you pay anyway. And once you’ve paid enough, you stop asking whether it’s worth it. You just keep moving forward.

A Peek Behind the Curtain

Where did all of this put us? To be blunt, it put us in a precarious position. Everyone one of us, me, my business partner, the original employees all made sacrifices. I had a blunt conversation with everyone. Laid out the position we were in, and the options everyone has. No one was forced to make a decision. The state of PrivID was laid out and decisions had to be made by each person. No hard feelings, regardless of choice.

Side Note: This is not being written for any other reason but information on who we are, and what we believe as an organisation. We are small. We are quiet, largely. But, our values as an organisation are what carry us forward. They will not go away, regardless of the size of the organisation.

The time frame we are in was 2022/23. We started, heavily, looking at the options we had in the EU. We were already bidding on NATO RFP’s via DIANA, we had connections in the Czech Republic, all of which impacted our decision to pivot to the European market. Factor in that they have laws that are more inline with PrivID’s perspective on privacy, ok, some of that may be coming under fire currently, but it doesn’t mean that they don’t respect individual privacy and rights online, as many Big Tech (largely US based) have discovered with massive fines under GPDR.

We also, as it turned out, had the options of inroads into Africa, via Morocco.

In the interim we were busy improving the code, improving the time to encryption, and the viability of FHE and ZKP working under different conditions. As well, during that time we were introduced to a couple of organisations that assessed our code, reviewed our demos, and read our papers. They agreed that it was viable and had true potential in a variety of circumstances. We also agreed that while it was a great move forward, in order for it to really work, we had to consider moving our organisation to Europe.

What Else Was Happening?

While we were tightening the code and weighing our options in Europe, things were going on. Privacy laws in the EU were cutting deeper into Big Tech’s margins. Regulators were getting bolder, and the fines were stacking up. Canada, by comparison, was still dragging its feet, talking about modernising frameworks that were already twenty years out of date. They were still debating how to update PIPEDA while the EU was already drafting and enforcing NIS2 and the Digital Services Act. That gap told me everything I needed to know about where the future was going to be written.

At the same time, Morocco opened an unexpected door. It wasn’t a market anyone would have called “strategic” on paper, but it had something Europe and North America had lost: hunger. Infrastructure there was still maturing, which meant people weren’t clinging to old systems. They were willing to leapfrog, but that still takes time. That made it a real proving ground, not just for the tech, but for our ability to work outside the comfortable bubbles of North America and Europe.

Inside PrivID, the grind was relentless. I was still juggling a second job to keep the lights on, while the devs pushed the new Rust codebase further than I thought possible. We worked across time zones, patched code at odd hours, and talked over details most people would never see. But the work was paying off. Encryption times improved. Our FHE and ZKP stack started to show it could hold up under different, messier conditions.

And then the validation came. A handful of organisations, not the kind that waste time on shiny demos, sat down with our code, reviewed our papers, and told us flat out: “This is viable.” That mattered more than any investor cheque that never showed up. It was proof we weren’t just building in a vacuum. We weren’t crazy. The thing worked.

We were still small, still fragile, still bootstrapped to the bone. But by then, we weren’t just surviving anymore. We were building something real, even if almost nobody could see it yet. And that was enough to keep moving forward.