Helm CEO & Cofounder Giri Sreenivas
What is Helm? Helm is a personal server that lets you keep your emails entirely in your control. If an email service is free, then your data is being sold. Helm server makes sure only you have access to your emails.
How did you come up with Helm? My co-founder and I didn’t put our trust in companies like Google and Dropbox. We were already running our own services. It became clear after the Edward Snowden revelations that there are a lot of consequences when you put your data in the cloud. If you have your data in the cloud you’ve already been hacked.
What’s it like to run a hardware company? Not easy. My last company was an enterprise SAAS company. Building a hardware company is exponentially more difficult. Operations, logistics, manufacturing, testing – there is quite a bit of effort that is involved.
Privacy first mentality: We designed the product in such a way that we don’t have anything we can hand over to the NSA or any other organization. The data is on the server. It is not with us. The data that can come back to us is encrypted with keys that only you have.
The tailwind for Helm: Facebook’s mistakes around privacy. This has motivated people to uninstall the app. Engagement in the US is way down. People are more aware of the lack of privacy now.
A great reason to buy Helm: Support founders who are trying to reverse the huge mistake we made of giving large corporations our data.