Structuring Data for Security and Efficiency

Insights from UnicornForms CEO Patrick Waldo's appearance on The Geek in Review podcast

In a recent interview on The Geek in Review podcast, our CEO Patrick Waldo shared his vision for transforming how businesses handle documents and data. After 15 years building regulatory intelligence platforms for major food, beverage, and pharmaceutical companies, Patrick has firsthand experience with the limitations of PDFs and static documents. This interview highlights why we're passionate about moving beyond PDFs to create more secure, efficient, and interoperable document solutions.

"At UnicornForms, we're building a post-PDF future—where documents behave more like modern software: structured, and API-friendly from day one." - Patrick Waldo

The PDF Problem: A 30-Year-Old Technology Stretched Beyond its Limits

"UnicornForms is a data company that happens to live in an eight-and-a-half by eleven world," Patrick explained during the interview. This encapsulates our fundamental approach: documents should be about the data they contain, not just their visual presentation.

Let's rewind: PDFs were invented in 1993—yes, 30+ years ago!—to solve two specific problems:

1. Format printed documents to look the same everywhere
2. Archive documents into digital files

Since then, PDFs have been stretched WAY beyond their original purpose. Now they handle forms, editing, and even JavaScript (which is how someone made Doom run inside a PDF 🤯). But this technology was never designed for today's data-driven, API-connected world.  As Patrick notes from his experience with two patents in document NLP: "trying to reverse-engineer structure out of a flat file is like trying to unscramble eggs."

The problems with PDFs are numerous and significant:

1. Trapped Data: PDFs lock valuable information in unstructured formats that can't be easily integrated with other systems. All data gets flattened like Photoshop layers, making it expensive and error-prone to extract. Without true data fields, extracting meaningful information requires costly manual retyping or imperfect AI extraction.
2. Limited Functionality: Even "fillable" PDFs have restricted functionality. Creating dropdown menus, validation rules, or conditional logic requires advanced technical knowledge most users don't have.
3. Duplication of Effort: Government agencies and businesses often create PDFs that users must fill out, only to require the same information to be manually entered into online systems. This redundancy wastes time and introduces errors.
4. Security Vulnerabilities: Standard PDFs are a security nightmare. You can bypass protections just by "Printing to PDF." Password protection is weak or stored insecurely. Hidden scripts and files can even harbor malware inside a PDF. Many users unknowingly share sensitive information like social security numbers or credit card details via email attachments without proper encryption or controls.
5. Poor Interoperability: With no standardized field naming or data structures, PDFs can't easily exchange information with other systems. What's labeled "Last Name" in one form might be "Family Name" or "Surname" in another.

The Security Blind Spot

Many professionals don't understand the security implications of their document practices.

"There's a surprising number of spaces that use PDFs for sensitive information and it's really not compliant at all," Patrick noted. "When we talk about in transit with documents, it means both HTTPS, which is the protocol that encrypts our web transactions, but it also means attachment via email, which is highly insecure."

At UnicornForms, we recognize different levels of security and trust:

• Low Security: Basic agreements (handshakes, emails)
• Medium Security: Standard e-signatures (which many current solutions provide)
• High Security: Advanced electronic signatures with cryptographic verification, hashing, and timestamp authorities

Many e-signature solutions fall short of providing court-admissible, tamper-proof documentation. Our platform incorporates multiple security layers, including encryption in transit and at rest, document hashing, and timestamp authorities to create truly secure, legally binding documents.

The Interoperability Challenge

One of the most significant barriers to efficiency is the lack of standardized data structures in traditional documents. Patrick shared how his experience building ontologies in regulatory compliance revealed the complexity of seemingly simple fields:

"When you talk about last name, family name, surname, these are all synonyms for the same field. You can have full name versus first name and last name... or addresses can be displayed in a variety of different ways."

This lack of standardization creates enormous inefficiencies:

• Organizations waste resources manually transferring data between systems
• Errors and inconsistencies multiply through rekeying
• Integration between platforms becomes nearly impossible
• Analytics and reporting become challenging

At UnicornForms, we've applied years of ontology-building experience to create human-readable, system-compatible data structures. This approach has delivered remarkable results - in one case, reducing a client's review and approval process from 30 days to same-day processing.

Transforming Document Workflows: A Post-PDF Future

The solution isn't just better PDFs—it's rethinking documents as structured data with visual presentation layers. At UnicornForms, we're building a post-PDF future where documents behave more like modern software: structured and API-friendly from day one.

Our alternative is built with compliance and security from the ground up, offering an easier and more cost-effective solution for legal tech, healthcare, education, government, and nonprofit sectors. UnicornForms achieves this through:

1. Field-Driven Design: Creating documents around data fields rather than static layouts
2. Unified Experience: Making document creation and form input part of a single, integrated process
3. Familiar Interfaces: Providing intuitive drag-and-drop tools that feel like familiar e-sign solutions
4. System Integration: Enabling connections with tools like Calendly, Stripe, and enterprise systems
5. Data Standardization: Building consistent ontologies that make information interoperable

Real-World Impact

Our approach is already making a difference. The Houston Film Commission uses UnicornForms to register all film, TV, and music video productions, tracking their impact on the local creative economy. What appears as a simple form on their website generates structured documents on the backend, complete with electronic signatures and secure data handling.

Looking Forward

As Patrick reflected on the future of document technology, he emphasized that the fundamentals of data engineering remain critical regardless of AI advancements:

"The data engineering is often the hardest part of any AI projects... if you don't get the data engineering right, the AI is simply inaccurate."

At UnicornForms, we're committed to getting that foundation right. By focusing on structured data within familiar document interfaces, we're building a bridge between the traditional "eight-and-a-half by eleven world" and the integrated, secure, and efficient digital workflows of tomorrow.

Ready to move beyond PDFs? Contact us to learn how UnicornForms can transform your document-driven processes and listen to the full interview.

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