J Cromack, chief growth officer, Edit Agency

Describe your career to date

I would call it an eclectic one! I worked for marketing services agency Option One in the early 1990s and worked on accounts like Orange and UCI Cinemas, before setting up my own business which provided production and data services to several clients, including Virgin Mobile, AOL and BAA. 

I was also involved in a dotcom start-up called TripleArc that acquired my business in 2000 and we floated TripleArc on the stock market in 2001, making me one of the youngest CEOs on the London Stock Market.

Following a successful sale of TripleArc plc, Nick Dixon (my business partner at Edit) approached me to join Lateral Group as CEO. Lateral owned Data Lateral and this completely reignited my data passion. We later sold Lateral Group to a financial services business called DST Systems, a mutual fund record-keeping business. I was a member of the leadership team that established a big data division in Kansas City, called DST Applied Analytics, which helped DST’s clients extract value from many years’ worth of data held on old mainframe systems using then-new data science and machine learning techniques.

Reading a book on holiday in 2014 called "The Circle" by Dave Eggers, I became obsessed with how companies were collecting data on individuals and how strong governance was needed to ensure the collection and use of this data was transparent and how citizens should be empowered to control how organisations use their personal information.

This was a pivotal moment for me, and I joined a team of fellow data geeks in Bath, and we founded MyLife Digital, a purpose-oriented business which rebalanced the trust in personal data between an organisation and the individuals it serves and connects individuals with their data, providing greater transparency and control. The MyLife Digital platform is now owned by DataGuard, a successful privacy tech business based out of Munich. 

I’m now back with Nick Dixon, who recently acquired Edit Agency through an investment company called The Salocin Group. Edit – and its media agency Join the Dots - is a data, tech, CRM and media consultancy that optimises customer connections by helping organisations supercharge their first-party data in an ethical and privacy first way, and I’m absolutely loving it.