The last two years have been a rollercoaster ride for Matt Oczkowski. On the night of the 2016 presidential election, he sat inside then-candidate Donald Trump's San Antonio campaign headquarters, where he led a team of anxious data scientists crunching numbers throughout the day before an unexpected victory party at a local bar much later that night. The former Scott Walker aide spent the following year speaking to the press and at conferences around the world about the Trump team's winning strategy. But that professional peak soon descended into months of fending off accusations about the company he worked for while on the campaign: Cambridge Analytica.

"When I first joined there, I legitimately believed in the offering and what they were trying to do," Oczkowski says. "It’s unfortunate that some actions by a few actors at the senior level of the company reflected poorly on the entire company."

In the wake of a data privacy debacle involving the misappropriation of as many as 87 million Facebook users' personal data, Cambridge Analytica has since ceased operations and become the subject of international investigations. Though Oczkowski left the company in April 2017, long before the scandal broke, he now joins hundreds of former employees trying to start over in a world that has, almost overnight, begun looking at the field of data science not as novel and innovative, but as intrusive and inescapable.

'We’re trying to figure out what shapes your worldview.' Matt Oczkowski, Data Propria

For Oczkowski, that new beginning means starting a data company called Data Propria. The firm officially launched earlier this year, and has already begun working with corporate clients and politicians, including Illinois governor Bruce Rauner's reelection campaign. It's owned by a parent company called CloudCommerce, which also recently acquired the digital marketing firm belonging to Brad Parscale, Trump's current campaign manager and the 2016 campaign's former digital director. Now, working out of Data Propria's San Antonio headquarters with some of his colleagues from that 2016 run, Oczkowski hopes to continue the data analytics work he started back then.

But that work comes at a time when the very idea of data-driven advertising has become the subject of international scrutiny and regulation. Facebook, one of the biggest data collectors in the world, has been called before international lawmakers to testify about its data practices. And just last week, the European Union's new data privacy regulations went into effect, giving consumers more ownership over their data and requiring businesses to get users' explicit consent to use and collect their data.

These changes will necessarily inform the way Data Propria and other data analytics firms operate. Still, Oczkowski acknowledges there will be plenty of "overlap" with Cambridge Analytica. Like that company, Data Propria will focus on behavioral data science, which is essentially the practice of using data to target people with ads and marketing based on, as Oczkowski puts it, people's "motivational behavioral triggers."

"We’re trying to figure out what shapes your worldview," he says. To that end, Data Propria will conduct its own research and polling for clients, develop its own targeting models based on what it learns from those polls and other datasets, and work with a creative team to help them develop ads that are most likely to appeal to people based on those models. The firm will especially focus, Oczkowski says, on middle America. Oczkowski believes the work he did helping sell a candidate in those states easily translates to helping commercial clients sell products.

"There are few people who understand middle America like we do," Oczkowski says of himself and Parscale. He also plans on building out products similar to the ones Cambridge Analytica's team built for the campaign. One in particular used data to determine what cities then-candidate Trump should visit based on local support in that place. Oczkowski argues the same tool could help businesses determine where to expand.