Creating the Spreadsheet for Sensitive Personal Data
By: Stefan Stefansson
Tags: Privacy, First Post, Spreadsheets, Startup, Gdpr Compliance

It all started when I met Aleks at KTH Royal Institute of Technology — where we were both working on our masters in Entrepreneurship and Innovation Management. Right away, we realized how similar, but also different we were from one another. Before KTH, I studied business back home in Iceland; this led me to take on marketing and product development roles within both startups and established corporations. On the other hand, Aleks grew up in Russia where he was surrounded by coders. He created his first program when he was 10, and now, he is a full-stack developer who has experience developing complex software and managing software teams. Despite this, we noticed what made us so alike was our shared curiosity for learning and innovation. Our separate, yet compatible skills, along with our matched entrepreneurial mindset pushed us to dive into our first venture together.

Young Aleks, our CTO, created his first program at 10. All males in his family are coders.

Some say people are born to be great entrepreneurs; for example, many think the great entrepreneurial success stories of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk originated from their innate callings to become businessmen. Quite opposite to that, I’ve always believed a person mainly needs a growth mindset; individuals can achieve anything they set their minds to — only if they have the passion and the perseverance to follow through.

Eagerly, Aleks and I, alongside our friends, worked to create a platform that would help aspiring entrepreneurs increase their likelihood of success. We named this solution Strywe; it examined users based on 12 personality traits found to be key to entrepreneurial success. It gave users information on how and where to improve their strengths and weaknesses, and then, it tailored educational content to help them conquer their entrepreneurial potential.

We saw the market for this opportunity to be quite large. Considering the fact most startups fail, we believed many aspiring entrepreneurs would be looking for some support to increase their likelihood of success. In order for our vision to become a noteworthy success story, we only needed entrepreneurs looking to improve their skills. Easy enough, right?

Four months later, we realized it wasn’t that simple. Strywe was not problem-focused — it originated from my master’s thesis and not as someone’s real problem. We decided to keep the service online for free, but we put a halt to moving forward. Although we weren’t able to successfully create value for a lot of people, we were able to better understand entrepreneurship and the overall journey of creating a venture. Some of our key takeaways involved learning the power of:

Interpersonal communication The build-measure-learn feedback loop Don't get caught up in features, solve a problem Interacting with potential customers as soon as possible Cleverness in regards to agreements and paperwork Knowing how to gather and utilize all possible resources

With this information, we were ready for our next venture together — one that would actually help solve a real-life problem. This problem was brought to our attention by Hannes Olauson, a medical doctor and a researcher with 10+ years of experience in clinical research.

According to Hannes, many clinical researchers manage sensitive personal data (data concerning the health condition of their research subjects) on software that is not made for this purpose. This lack of optimization results in inefficiency that takes time away from actual research. Also, many systems are not compliant with the new European data privacy regulation — GDPR.

For Aleks and I, Hannes was the missing puzzle piece. We had found someone who was able to distinguish a large-scale, real problem. Hannes was aware of the lack of a high-quality management system for sensitive personal data, and he saw the lack of efficiency in his own work and the work of others around him. To solve this problem, he looked for people who would be able to assist him. He found Aleks and me — people who had the ability to make this vision a reality.

From there, the three of us created Sensivo. A cloud-based, privacy-first solution that allows clinical researchers to store sensitive personal data within a flexible, collaborative spreadsheet built from the ground up around GDPR.

Storage of sensitive personal data for clinical researchers made simple, collaborative, and GDPR-compliant.

Sensivo’s spreadsheet interface

With Hannes deep understanding of the technical and legal demands for handling sensitive clinical research data, Aleks’s coding skills, my expertise in business, and our combined knowledge around entrepreneurship and innovation, we were ready to take on the challenge. Through Sensivo, we believe we can make clinical research data-management more efficient for everyone involved.