From One Tweet to One Million $
Who wouldn’t want to be in Stacey Ferreira’s place? She responded to Richard Branson tweet, then met him with her brother in Miami and after a couple months the billionaire invested in their project. I talked to Stacey Ferreira, the co-founder of MySocialCloud about their product, security, history and future plans.
Ula Lachowicz: Do you check your Twitter account regularly now? :)
Stacey Ferreira: I’m on Twitter everyday. Now I have it linked to my cell phone too, so even when I’m not at my computer, I’m always on Twitter.
UL: MySocialCloud.com is a young start-up, but it was already funded by Richard Branson and Jerry Murdock with nearly $1 million. And later by Alex Welch (Photobucket co-founder). How did it happen?
SF: Long story short, Sir Richard Branson sent out a tweet for people to meet him in Miami to support a charity. I responded to the tweet and my brother and I flew to Miami two days later. While we were there, we were fortunate enough to talk to Sir Richard and talk a little bit about our idea. After a couple months of keeping in touch, Jerry and Sir Richard invested in MySocialCloud.
UL: Besides the fact that your business received funding, what else did you get from the cooperation with these investors?
SF: All of our investors do share lots of advice and knowledge with. We’re fortunate to have investors that really care about our progress and send us inspirational emails or articles that they think will help us grow depending on what challenges we’re facing.
UL: Is MySocialCloud a tool for data storage in the cloud or a kind of password manager? Or does it work differently?
SF: MySocialCloud allows you to organize any online content that you love (articles, photos, videos, etc) into lists to easily revisit and share, and if you wish, MySocialCloud also stores usernames and passwords for auto-login to any website online.
UL: Is MySocialCloud for everyone? Can I store there my private data as well as company can store corporate data?
SF: MySocialCloud is for anyone that uses the Internet on a regular basis and either 1) forgets usernames and passwords or 2) wants a place to store all online content that they may want to revisit or share with their friends.
MySocialCloud does allow you to store both your personal data as well as corporate. With our “Vault” you can store usernames and passwords to any website that has a URL associated it. And with our “Cloud It” bookmarklet, you can organize any and all websites into “Lists” on your profile. So, for example, you could have Lists related to work and personal interests.
UL: People are interested in their data security. You write on your website “From day one, it has been our goal to provide the best security on the web. While we don’t expose how we keep MySocialCloud secure (if we told you, it would be unsecured!), we do ensure that not even our employees are able to see any of your sensitive data.” Do you think it will convince Internet users?
SF: We don’t think this is sufficient for the long term. As we’re undergoing security audits, this is something we’re working on rewording and revising with updated, more in depth information.
UL: And what about sensitive data, for example my credit card data? Can I store them too in MySocialCloud?
SF: Right now, you cannot store credit card data on MySocialCloud. You can only save websites by organizing them in specific lists and securely store usernames and passwords to other websites.
UL: If someone gets access to my account on MySocialCloud, I could lose important information (logins and passwords). How are my data protected against hacker attacks?
SF: On our end, we take all of the necessary precautions to make sure that your information is secure and not vulnerable. From a user perspective, we do ask all of our users to create safe passwords for their MySocialCloud account (ones that friends could not easily guess and that are not as simple as “Password1”). If they practice safety online, coupled with our security practices, their accounts are not vulnerable.
To be more specific: We store all passwords in our database with a special encrypting mechanism that can only be decrypted with a unique key. That unique key is the user’s password that is used to login mysocialcloud.com, which is never sent or stored on our servers, hence worst case scenario a user’s passwords are safe as only they can decrypt them.
UL: Now MySocialCloud is in beta version. What is your next step and future plans?
SF: Over the next couple of weeks and months, we’ll be launching some really big updates for MySocialCloud. In the future, we’ll also be coming out with a mobile app so that our users can access everything on the go!
UL: Do you plan to continue education at the university or is running your own business more interesting?
SF: Next year I’ll be taking a leave of absence from New York University. I’m not quite sure yet what will happen with my education at the University, but for now, the business is definitely much more of a learning experience.
