The hard-fought lessons in the promise of Sir Tim’s new memoir

If you haven’t had the pleasure of reading Tim’s book yet, you should. It’s wry, accessible, inspiring, and uncompromising in its pursuit of a web that benefits us all. Just like Tim. It’s an achievement in its own right, on top of the lifetime of accomplishment it describes.

In it, I get to be described as “endearingly blunt.” I think that’s a polite reference to all the times we’ve tussled over the years. Thank you, Tim. 

We don’t argue about much of anything that he wrote in the book, of course. That’s a brilliant encapsulation of the “why” behind Solid. It’s the same vision that got me to co-found Inrupt with him seven years ago, and I’m thrilled so many new people will get to experience it now. 

The occasional tussles — call them healthy disagreements — have been about the “how.” The mechanics of how we, with Inrupt, a small team and tiny when compared to the vast economy of the web, can best move the world toward his vision.

Tim highlights a number of our successes in the book, and rallies us to continue “carrying the torch for serious commercial implementations of Solid.” But he rightfully spares his reader from details of the hard-fought lessons Inrupt has learned about commercializing such a game-changing technology. Those lessons are likely much more relevant and interesting to my audience here.

So, against the backdrop of Tim’s vision for Solid and his clarity around how individuals will soon experience AI and the web, let me humbly hold the torch to another part of the story: the role that businesses have in bringing about these new experiences, and what’s motivating their leaders to lean into the change.

Vision and realization
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Here are a few relevant, key passages from Tim’s book describing the initial concepts of Solid and the value it unlocks:

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"As we conceived it, you should be able to collect all of [your] data and store it in the [Solid] pods. Rather than writing your credit card transactions to some CSV in a corporate database, your bank would write it directly to your pod. You would then be free to link this data to whichever tax calculator you were using, or whatever budget app you preferred. And everything could go in your pod! Your phone records, your Facebook relationships, your comment history on YouTube, etc. Rather than have all this stuff siloed off with different providers across the web, you’d be able to store your entire digital information trail in a single private repository.

…Solid, like HTML before it, would be an open protocol which app developers and businesses could access through custom software. The Solid layer would accomplish two things simultaneously. First, it would restore the privacy of the individual on the web, who would no longer have to worry what data was being generated about them, or who was looking at it. Second, it would unlock all manner of new functionality, by connecting data that had previously been stored in separate containers. 

… a world where people have all their data in pods is overall a more valuable system to be in – and people will gravitate towards systems where they see more value! Sure, Solid was something of a moonshot, but if it worked, it would unlock a huge amount of value.”

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When Tim and I talk to the C-suite of Fortune 500 companies, or cabinet ministers of various governments, their eyes light up at these ideas. After all, executives and ministers are web users too. Just like you and me, they want to live in the world we describe, and soon. They want their family and friends to enjoy it too.

Then we start to talk about their role as leaders of organizations, and that brings up some interesting questions.”What role does a company like mine play in this? Do we give pods (or as Inrupt likes to call them, “Data Wallets”) to my customers? What do we put in them for our customers, and what can they add? How does our business model change? What can this do to help with our strategic goals?” 

I could go on.

The questions are all appropriate ones, and can be challenging. (Which is why I often talk to corporate leaders about how to adopt an entrepreneur’s mindset for innovation.) But it’s important we help answer them. After all, in order to fully achieve Tim’s vision, our data needs to get in our Solid Data Wallets. And who’s going to put it there? Well, it in no small part has to be the businesses and developers that generate the data through their apps and websites.

Every business is different, of course, so the answers to these kinds of questions vary. But after working and speaking with dozens of organizations since launching Inrupt, I’ve identified a few common themes that have helped corporate leaders figure out their plans to get advantage from this new era of the web.

Three starting points, one movement
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When I sit down with enterprise executives to discuss Solid, many are motivated to by a similar mix of pressures, concerns and opportunities. Consumers that have both higher expectations for a better customer experience and a heightened sensitivity to their personal data. Privacy regulations and compliance burdens that slow things down. Siloed data and cumbersome infrastructures that are increasingly costly and yet inefficient. And of course, the amazing speed with which the AI companies are scrambling the incentives and economic structure of the internet. Every business or agency will be profoundly effected.

Depending on the priority each organization puts on these various concerns, they tend to find a different starting place in their adoption of Solid. 

1. The Backend-ers
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Key motivations: 

• Compliance with data privacy & use regulations
• Breaking down internal data silos

How they use Inrupt:

• User-centric storage integrated into existing data infrastructure
• Customers may not even know about pods, wallets or Solid – they’re just safer and better known

The impact they’ll have on the future of the web:

• Establish the foundational trust layer that makes user-controlled data possible at scale
• Create the secure infrastructure that enables seamless data portability across services
• Set new industry standards for privacy-preserving data architectures that others will follow
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2. The CX-ers
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Key motivations: 

• Providing better customer experiences based on better personal data
• Enabling safe, seamless sharing of customer data across partners or subsidiaries

How they use Inrupt:

• Integrate Data Wallet capabilities into existing user apps & websites
• Combine transactional data with public web data and consented, private user data

The impact they’ll have on the future of the web:

• Drive mainstream adoption by delivering tangible user benefits through enhanced personalization
• Break down the walled gardens by enabling data interoperability across previously siloed services
• Transform customer expectations about data ownership and control through intuitive wallet experiences

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3. The AI-ers

Key motivations: 

• Delivering safe and personal AI experiences to customers
• Maintaining direct customer relationships in the face disintermediation from AI-native players

How they use Inrupt:

• Use Inrupt’s LLM-connectors to inform AI systems with consented personal data from Agentic Wallets
• Deploy a fully private architecture leveraging Trusted Execution Environments to ensure data protection from AI vendors

The impact they’ll have on the future of the web:

• Pioneer the model for ethical AI that respects user consent and data sovereignty
• Prevent platform monopolization by ensuring direct brand-to-customer AI relationships
• Accelerate innovation by enabling AI agents to work with rich, consented personal data while maintaining privacy

These three approaches and the motivations behind them — regulatory compliance, AI competitiveness, and direct customer relationships — aren't separate concerns. They're interconnected aspects of a larger shift in how businesses must think about data and customer relationships.

The companies that understand this aren't waiting. They're building the infrastructure, partnerships, and customer experiences that will define the next era of the web. Because while Tim's vision in the book is compelling, it’ll need businesses that put data into wallets and build services around them that will go a long way to making it a reality.

The question isn't whether this shift will happen — it's whether your organization will help lead it or be left behind by it. 

As Tim notes, we're at an inflection point. The choices businesses make today about data architecture and customer relationships will determine their relevance in the AI-powered, user-centric world of tomorrow.