Five Questions
TechnologyJamil Alhidiq on privacy work, and what people outside it miss
The Privatus founder on a day of calls and product work, the route in from IT and networking, and the advice he gives people starting out.
Jamil Alhidiq founded Privatus, a Chicago company that builds privacy and security tools. He came to it from IT and networking, which is a common route into the field and a revealing one: the people who have spent years keeping other people's systems running tend to arrive at security through maintenance rather than through theory.
The company is a few years old. Alhidiq's own areas are privacy, cybersecurity and networking, and his description of the founder's job is the one most founders of small technical companies would recognise, which is that it is several jobs held at once and none of them finished.
The questions below are about the ordinary shape of that work rather than the pitch: what the day consists of, what he did before, what outsiders misread about the field, and what has his attention now. The last of those is worth watching in his case, because the two things he names sit on the consumer side of security rather than the corporate one, and that is the side with the least attention paid to it.
He answers briefly. We have printed the answers as he gave them, edited only for length and clarity, and left the framing to ourselves.
Question: Founder covers very different days depending on the company. What does a normal day actually involve?
Calls, product work and partnerships.
Question: A lot of people building security products arrive from somewhere adjacent rather than from security itself. What were you doing before this?
IT and networking.
Question: In public use the word privacy has narrowed almost to a single service, which is getting records deleted from data brokers. What do people outside your field get wrong about it?
Privacy is more than data removal.
Question: Attention is the scarce resource in this field, and most of it goes to whatever is loudest. What are you paying attention to right now?
AI scams and personal data exposure.
Question: Founder advice tends to get repeated until it stops carrying meaning. What do you actually tell people starting out?
Talk to customers early.
About Jamil Alhidiq
Jamil Alhidiq
Jamil Alhidiq is a go-to-market operator working between Chicago and Los Angeles and growth marketer. He has run marketing for luxury real estate agencies and agents in Beverly Hills, built paid and outbound acquisition programs, and produces video and ad creative himself. He is GTM lead at Privatus.