What Building Perpetua Has Taught Me About Being a Founder

By Jacqueline Deprey, Co-Founder and CEO of Perpetua

I didn't set out to be an entrepreneur. As the daughter of an immigrant mother, I grew up learning to prioritize stability and find work at the intersection of what I enjoyed doing, what I was good at, and what paid well.

I initially found that intersection as a software engineer. Although I'm not sure if I ever loved coding itself, I loved learning how technology could improve people's lives and I wanted to build systems that made a positive impact on those around me.

At Dropbox, that meant spending time on a question most people rarely considered: what happens to your data after you are gone. I led a cross-functional team spanning Legal, IT, and Platform Engineering to tackle data retention and disposition for departed employees. This process included investigating how the company could retain information relevant to the product and services we were building while protecting the privacy of the individuals who had since left the company.

When my family experienced our own loss though, the absence of this corporate solution for data retention for families became impossible to ignore. This problem became my personal mission: how could I apply my corporate learnings to help individuals take control of their digital legacies and reduce the administrative burden on families during their time of grief.

Because that is what being a founder is all about: combining a problem you are passionate about solving, with your unique skillset, to something that people are willing to pay for.

For anyone considering this career path, first consider problems you are passionate about solving.

You will spend far more time with this problem than you expect. You will think about it beyond normal working hours and progress towards its solution won't always match the effort you put in.

Caring about the problem you serve and the people it impacts becomes a powerful motivator when progress is slow. It also makes it easier to separate yourself from any initial solution ideas.

While a solution might feel intuitive to you, it can still miss what other people need or are ready to adopt. By staying curious about their pain points and experiences, it can be easier to stay objective and pivot approaches when the evidence calls for it.

At Perpetua, we spent a year speaking with estate executors, estate attorneys, surrogate court clerks, professional fiduciaries, and hospice workers to understand what made the existing estate settlement process so difficult. As our interviewees described their current processes, we sensed feelings of anxiety even in the most prepared individuals we spoke to. Further conversations revealed that the core problem was the ongoing worry: "is there anything still out there?"

Second, think about problems you are uniquely qualified to solve.

These skills are often referred to in the entrepreneurial world as "earned insights": knowledge developed through working directly on a problem or experiencing it yourself. In this post-AI world, anyone can build anything in a matter of time. When investors decide to fund a company or consumers decide to buy a product, they aren't just taking a bet on the solution — the early stakeholders are taking a bet on you as an individual. What about your background sets you apart from a similar competitor?

For us at Perpetua, working on privacy and data systems at Apple and Dropbox taught us to carefully consider what information a product needs and who should have access to it, so we could earn the trust of our customers that their identities would be protected when using our systems in their time of need. Having seen our own families go through the estate settlement process also gave us direct insight into the pain points we were solving.

Third, understand what people are willing to pay for.

Someone can care about your problem and like your idea without becoming a customer. Understanding how they manage today, what that difficulty costs them, and what would make trying a new approach worthwhile is essential. Listen for the difference between what people find frustrating and what they are actually ready to spend money to address. Successful companies need a way to bring in revenue that offsets the cost of offering the product or service.

Thinking back to how I was raised, I still value stability. Leaving an established career to build a company means accepting uncertainty around my income and whether the business will succeed. But I keep thinking about the families spending their evenings piecing together what their loved ones left behind. Building Perpetua gives me a way to apply my earned insights to ease that burden, and our early customers give me reason to believe the effort is worth it. For me, the opportunity to make this administrative process easier for families in their time of grief is worth the uncertainty.

Learn more about Perpetua at withperpetua.com.