I’ve got a real passion for data protection and privacy and am a tech enthusiast through and through. I’ve been lucky enough to align my interests with my work and I’ve been a qualified solicitor for over seven years, spending most of that time in the tech and data protection space.

My journey started at an international law firm where I dealt with complex regulatory matters across various industries. After that, I made the switch in-house and have had a number of roles at market-leading tech companies. In those roles, I have had the opportunity to build and manage their data protection programs. Currently, I’m leading the data protection team at Trustpilot.

My tech experience has given me a front-row seat to the different challenges faced by both scale-up and publicly traded organisations when it comes to data protection, especially around prioritisation and resource allocation. But it was a conversation with a friend who was a solo lawyer at a startup that opened my eyes to the extra struggles faced by startups, where resources can be particularly tight.

This got me thinking: What really matters for startups and scaleups in the world of data protection? And at what point do they need to focus on it?

As I thought about this and looked at what was out there, it became clear to me that there was a need for a practical guide to GDPR and data protection law, specifically tailored for those responsible for data protection in startups and scale-ups. These are people who might not be familiar with legal jargon, are short on time, and just want a straightforward explanation of what the law says, and ideas about what they should do. GDPR for Startups and Scaleups is the result of two years of hard work aimed at providing exactly that.