TheBridge profile: Justin Antonipillai

Name: Justin Antonipillai

Current city: Washington, DC

Current job: Founder and CEO of WireWheel

Past job: Led the American negotiating team in reaching the landmark EU-U.S. Privacy Shield Framework (GDRP) with Europe as Counselor to US Secretary of Commerce under President Obama.

Q. Favorite spot for a coffee meeting? Northside Social in Arlington, Virginia. Great local community restaurant with terrific food.

Q. Describe how a skill you learned in a previous job helped you in your current job. Running the Economic and Statistics Administration during the Obama Administration taught me the power of uniting a team around a mission, vision and strategy, and that has really helped as we started WireWheel.

Q. Job advice in three words? Be thoughtfully empathetic.

Q. How are you (or your company) currently bridging the gap between politics and innovation and regulation? We founded WireWheel to allow organizations to turn privacy requirements into a differentiator for their businesses. Our Privacy Management Platform starts with “Privacy Program in a Box,” so that a company has everything they need to stand up and manage their privacy programs. Then, our customers can not only automate privacy compliance on WireWheel, but also build trust with their employees, customers, and partners so that they can sell their products faster. In this way, our Platform combines technology with industry-leading understanding of the international regulatory environment to create a platform that helps companies build trust with their customers around personal information and data ethics.

Q. What can innovators teach regulators? The pressure of having to move fast, as long as you do it the right way, can have huge benefits to pursuing your mission.

Q. What can regulators teach innovators? Stepping back and seeing the bigger picture can really improve decision making, and that was part of virtually every policy development process.

Q. Do you have a favorite book or longform read you recommend? David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster.” Wallace took an assignment to cover the Maine Lobster Festival and wrote an incredibly thoughtful piece about consciousness. It’s not only funny, but really thought-provoking.

Q. TheBridge is looking forward to RSA Conference, congratulations to WireWheel on being a finalist in RSA’s Innovation Sandbox. What are you most looking forward to about the conference? RSA is one of the biggest cybersecurity conferences in the world, and it is real honor to be able to highlight what we have been doing at WireWheel as a finalist in the RSA Conference Innovation Sandbox. Privacy has become an important strategic issues for companies around the world, and we are excited to show how we can help companies build trust around these issues.

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