Internet advertising was born of the idea that a host of services and information would be available free in return for the ability to collect data from consumers in order to serve them better ads or search results. Yet that ideal “contract” with consumers has, in many cases, turned into a “faustian bargain” at the cost of personal privacy.
Data, provided by consumers most often without their informed consent, is at the heart of the staggering rise in Internet Advertising. Digital advertising spending worldwide amounted to $521.02 billion in 2021 and is projected to reach $876 billion by 2026, according to Statista, with marketers spending more on digital platforms than any other media format.
Caden Founder and CEO John Roa.
Privacy legislation like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) have attempted to even the playing field to provide consumers more control over their personal information. Both have yet to meaningfully change the dynamics of the marketplace where billions in market cap in companies like Amazon, Netflix, Alphabet, Meta and The Trade Desk are at stake.
One startup hoping to change that dynamic is Caden. Founded in 2021 by John Roa, the New York City-based company provides an open data platform that enables users to control and monetize their personal data. Caden allows users to securely access data from various brands and add it to their secure “Vault” that they own and control. Users who agree to share their data for advertising purposes can earn a portion of the revenue generated by the app.
The idea is not entirely new, but the Caden concept is backed by internet luminaries including Jerry Yang of Yahoo! founding fame and Wenda Harris Millard of MediaLink, along with business leaders like Barry Sternlicht of Starwood Capital. Its founder is serial entrepreneur John Roa who broke his vow to never go through the pain and stress of a startup again, but did so to build Caden. This founder’s journey is based on my interview with Roa.
“I actually had written a very rough business plan for Caden back then in 2015 [When Roa was at salesforce.com]. And so I've been thinking about the idea for a very long time. And so in 2021, I was talking to a buddy that comes from the martech, ad tech world, and I showed him this business plan. He was the first one to tell me this is a really good idea and that I should pursue this and figure out if this is worth doing. And my first reaction was like, ‘No way, not doing this, again. I’m not starting from scratch again,” says Roa.
Roa’s reticence was based on the exhaustion and depression that came about with the stress of building and selling his Chicago-based digital agency AKTA to Salesforce in 2015. While the sales made him a wealthy man, it also left him spiritually hollow and subject to alcohol and substance abuse with thoughts of suicide. A friend encouraged him to write about his experience, which then became a memoir that was turned into a book A Practical Way to Get Rich and Die Trying published by Penguin in Roa’s effort to “promote honesty and transparency instead of the toxic superhero complex that we kind of exist in as entrepreneurs,” says Roa.
But the idea for Caden began to take on a life of its own when Roa’s plans to spend time in New York to promote his book were shelved because of the Covid-19 Pandemic. Then his adtech friend brought together a number of influential people like Bill Gray, the former CEO of Ogilvy, Jerry Yang, Wenda Millard and Barry Sternlicht to have a discussion about the business plan. “And all of a sudden, there's a great group of people in front of me and somewhat against my will, I was like, ‘I don't want to do this, I don't want to talk about this’. I figured they would just tell me why it could never work and this is not a good idea. And it was quite the opposite. And people like Jerry Yang, who helped create the industry, said there's been a problem with internet advertising privacy for 30 years, and he wants to be a part of the solution now. And I kind of went, ‘Holy crap, really?’ And all of these very influential people said, ‘Not only should you do this, but if you do it, we'll back it, and we'll invest it, and we will put our weight behind the success of this’,” says Roa.
From that moment till now, Roa and his team of 25 or so employees have been fast at work to launch their app. A beta version is now available. With the Caden app, users can choose to have their personal data from online services like Amazon, Netflix or Uber Eats automatically collected into their Caden account, where they can selectively choose to share it and earn cash back. According to Roa, users can expect to earn between $5 and $50 a month by sharing their data.
“So now all of that really valuable first party data, I can now grab, which is my legal right, and pull it down into a secure Caden vault, basically, digital wallets that we provide for the user. And that wallet is encrypted and owned by the user. We're just giving them the ability to pull it all together. Once it's in there, we transform it into a knowledge graph, which is by far the most technically challenging thing that we do,” says Roa.
With $9.4 million in funding to date , Caden is just beginning its journey. Its most recent Seed round for $6 million was led by Streamlined Ventures at the beginning of January 2023.
Roa grew up in Grosse Pointe, a suburb of Detroit, Michigan. His father came to Michigan to go to school in the U.S. from Venezuela before Roa was born. “I grew up in kind of an immigrant, low-income-household at the border of Detroit. And it's funny because I think people that hear my story must assume my parents were like, computer scientists, and I was exposed to computers by them at an early age,” says Roa. His dad only brought a computer home when he was 11 because it was given to him as a leftover they were going to trash from the Chrysler assembly plant where his father worked.
‘I just fell in love with the thing. What's funny is that my parents thought I was nuts. They thought I had a problem. I was just obsessed. But there was no technology in my household prior to that. There was no entrepreneurship. There was none of that. So for whatever reason that I went down this path is a little bit unknown,” says Roa.
His obsession would lead him on a path of technology business building and wealth creation. He describes himself as the typical outcast techie nerd, building websites for the school and hacking the school systems for fun. He started his first business at 14. At 18 he started a video game business, moved to Los Angeles and then sold the business to William Morris. That exit was followed by Roa creating SocialCrunch, a psychographics analytics company, which was then acquired by Tastebud. He then moved to Chicago and started a digital agency called AKTA that he sold to Salesforce in 2015 before founding Caden in 2021. “I've had three very classic failures and three exits,” says Roa of his extraordinary entrepreneurial journey.
As for the future? Whether or not Caden succeeds in changing the balance of data ownership back to consumers remains to be seen. “We’re building something that is extremely complicated, is very challenging, has all the trimmings of the hardest way to build a tech company, but if it works, will fundamentally change the future of the internet. And that's an exciting proposition,” concludes Roa.
