If Gather Wins, The Internet Wins
Cross posted from P&G Signal360 and Searchblog
A few weeks ago I was genuinely thunderstruck. My co-editor at P&G Signal (thanks Stan!) introduced me to a new company — one that promised to give consumers control over their personal data in new and innovative ways. At first I was skeptical — I’d seen quite a few “personal data lockers” come and go over the past decade or so. I even invested in one way back in 2012. Alas, that didn’t work out.
For as long as I can remember, I’ve been writing — over and over and over — about how the Internet’s central problem is the lack of leverage that consumers have over the data they co-create with the hundreds of apps, sites, and platforms they use. But data lockers never got any traction — most were confusing to install and run, and they all suffered from a lack of tangible consumer benefits. Sure, having a copy of all my personal data sounds great, but in the end, what can it do for me? Up till now, the answer was not much.
It was with all those caveats — and honestly pretty low expectations — that I took a meeting with Sumit Agarwal and his team at Palo Alto, CA-based Gather, an early stage startup still in its first year of operation. Fifteen minutes later I was hooked — here was a company that was addressing the “what can my data do for me” problem by building out a generative AI agent that…
