‘Eating Glass and Staring into the Abyss’: Grant de Leeuw on His Journey with DataMasque

In 2021, Grant de Leeuw left the relative safety of sales and business development roles to establish Auckland, New Zealand-based data security company, DataMasque.

Prior to DataMasque, De Leeuw spent around 20 years at the likes of Telecom New Zealand, AAPT in Australia, TALKINGTECH in Europe and more recently financial software provider, illion.

He says the experience of building a business often feels like “eating glass and staring into the abyss”, an analogy borrowed from Tesla’s Elon Musk to describe the challenges of entrepreneurship.

DataMasque helps organisations de-identify and mask customer data before it moves into development and testing. This is useful when organisations are developing and testing software, particularly AI models, and want to eliminate security and compliance risks.

“All of us here really believe in the problem we solve. Having worked [for] a few of these companies [which are] obviously large data companies, we’ve seen how badly organisations can…