Recently I was talking to an entrepreneur and we were discussing the importance of data control in business applications. Now, this is control in the sense of which application dictates who gets access to the data as opposed to which company owns the data (the customer always owns the data). During the conversation it occurred to me that there’s the Golden Data Rule just like there are the two common Golden Rules.
Golden Rule A: do to others what you would have them do to you.
Golden Rule B: he who owns the gold, makes the rules.
Golden Data Rule: he who controls the data, makes the rules.
This comes into play when considering business ideas and strategies that involve other application data (whether accessed through a plug-in, an API, or some other means). Big risks here include being a sharecropper on someone else’s land (they can take away access), “borrowing” the most successful features from your product and incorporating them into their product, or charging increasingly higher fees to access the data (taxes to access SaaS systems are more common than people realize).
At the end of the day, never forget the Golden Data Rule when building your company.
What else? What are your thoughts on the Golden Data Rule?
David Cummings on Startups 
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