On the Record with Patricia Thaine, CEO at Private AI
Patricia Thaine, Founder & CEO of Private AI
Hometown: Montreal, Canada
Hobbies: Reading, Video Games, painting, very long walks, biking
Three words to describe Patricia: Driven, compassionate, funny
Private AI has created a range of cutting-edge AI models that quickly and cost-effectively redact large datasets (text, image, video, audio) to provide privacy without the use of 3rd party cloud providers or new infrastructure. All it takes is 3 lines of code integrated into your existing workflows (on-premise, mobile, web, you name it).
How would your parents describe you as a kid?
I wasn’t a particularly well-behaved kid, ha-ha. Quite the danger-prone mischief-maker, but also very caring.
My parents would also mention my obsession over patterns. I've been fascinated by patterns since I first learned what that word meant when I was 6 years old. Which later on led to my interest in the ability to combine Linguistics with Computer Science (i.e., Computational Linguistics) to automate pattern matching.
What was your relationship like with your family?
We are very close. My dad is a mathematician, so he taught me math early on and insisted that I get good grades in the subject. Both my parents always encouraged reading. A staple from my childhood which I brought with me to adulthood is bookshelves overflowing with books with a regular need to buy one more bookshelf.
My parents were immigrants from Brazil and Bolivia. That aspect gave me perspective to be sensitive to other cultures and their varied norms of etiquette. It also made me realize, especially once I started dating my now-husband who is half English Canadian and half French Canadian, that it’s hard for a person to truly get exposure to a culture unless you have a close relationship with someone who has experienced that culture from very early on. We exposed each other to a whole range of new foods: I have never had turnips before and he didn't know how to cut open a mango!
Do you have siblings?
My brother is 9 years older than me and I have an older sister who is 17 years older. My brother is an electrical engineer turned software engineer. He started coding when he was 9 years old. He showed me the ropes when I was very young, but I got interested in coding when I was in university. And I remember my sister teaching me French and always encouraging exercise.
What was it like growing up aspiring to be a woman in tech?
I went to an all-girls high school, so I think that took away a lot of the societal biases around what men could do vs. what women could do.
One of the earliest memories I have of gender bias is a janitor asking me whether I prefer French class or math class. I said math class because I was better at it. He responded, “that’s strange, normally girls are better at languages and boys are better at math.” I was seven and didn’t really care. I just knew I was really good at it.
But normally, comments like that didn’t happen in Montreal. One other instance I remember is going through my brother's engineering graduation book for McGill, there were about two women in his graduating class of 100 something.
So you’re great at math & programming, why did you want to become a founder?
I love learning a lot about a lot and I love cross-disciplinary problem solving and thinking about how to improve the world at scale.
What is your biggest strength?
Bringing in information from multiple disciplines into decision-making and conversations.
The one thing I have noticed working with you, is you’re able to absorb information & knowledge like a sponge. Someone will explain something to you and you’ll come back a week later with the task at hand brilliantly accomplished.
Well, we have a great team too and supporters like Differential so that helps a lot.
Life lessons you run your company by?
One of the life lessons I’ve actually had came from something someone scribbled on the back of a bathroom stall in McGill which was “you teach people how to treat you.”
I really like that.
Right, isn’t that such wisdom to get from a bathroom stall? It is so important to communicate boundaries and push for your team to create boundaries. Setting boundaries early on is very important. It seems simple to do, but is actually difficult to make a habit of. Also, having honest conversations when you don’t appreciate something that has happened. It made me very aware that not everyone knows how to do so. I keep that in mind in all interactions and try to ensure respect goes both ways.
Anything else you want to talk about?
One of the most shaping experiences of my life was the Liberal Arts program at John Abbott college. In Quebec there are CEGEPs. CEGEPs are amazing. Everywhere should have CEGEPS. I keep telling people in the hope that the program will be implemented everywhere. Basically, the program fits in between high school and university -- you have one less year of highschool and one less year of university. You have a choice between a pre-university program (liberal arts, sciences, business, creative arts, etc.) or a trade (airplane mechanics, piloting, nursing, etc.). I took the pre-university route. I got taught history, art history, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and so many other subjects by PhDs whose sole focus is teaching and not research.
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Patricia Thaine is a Computer Science PhD Candidate at the University of Toronto and a Postgraduate Affiliate at the Vector Institute doing research on privacy-preserving natural language processing, with a focus on applied cryptography. Her research interests also include computational methods for lost language decipherment.
She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Private AI, a Toronto- and Berlin-based startup creating a suite of privacy tools that make it easy to comply with data protection regulations, mitigate cybersecurity threats, and maintain customer trust.
Patricia is a recipient of the NSERC Postgraduate Scholarship, the RBC Graduate Fellowship, the Beatrice “Trixie” Worsley Graduate Scholarship in Computer Science, and the Ontario Graduate Scholarship. She has nine years of research and software development experience, including at the McGill Language Development Lab, the University of Toronto's Computational Linguistics Lab, the University of Toronto's Department of Linguistics, and the Public Health Agency of Canada.
She is also a member of the Board of Directors of Equity Showcase, one of Canada's oldest not-for-profit charitable organizations.
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