Some Novelty Wears Off…

First off, I write this post happily. So don’t be deceived by the name.

Why am I happy? Because I realize some of the time consuming assumptions I had before no longer hold true. For example, do I need to go to meetups every week and walk through a sea of people whom all want to start companies? Do I need to find a co-founder?

The great news: No.

Missing a number of meetups isn’t the end of the world. Most of it is socializing anyways. The connections may or may not be beneficial.

Even better? I don’t need a cofounder. Connections, advisors and friends are all being the needed business connections we require. And it’s absolutely beautiful.

Moreso, we are progressing while these are regressing. I’ve met a number of very influential people who love our idea. They want to see where it goes and they want to test us out, so they can invest.

We also have a timeline. We’ve decided when our Launch page will be up and when our product will begin beta development.

This is scatterbrained, but so are my thoughts right now. The best thing of all is we are progressing, we are gaining interest and happily chugging along. I couldn’t ask for more.

We even have Twitter followers. WHOAAAAA.

To Build or Not to Build

One of my most exciting current prospects for advisors has been so helpful I can barely contain myself. He has customers, advice, background, VC connections, and a ton of product ideas. I love every second of it.

I told him we were going to spend a little time (due to my developer being busy with his day-job for now)  building a GOOD launch page that doesn’t look like canned crap. One that incorporates a little of our business idea with a standard great looking launch page. Since it’s gamified, maybe a little security game on there somehow. We’ll see.

Either way, his suggestion is to not waste time on it and use a canned launch page and BEGIN DEVELOPMENT! Well. We agree, but we’re trying to get our customer development done first, and plan out our ideas completely. That doesn’t mean we can’t begin, but we can’t at the minute. It sounds like an excuse, but a launch page that looks great and is attention getting, is a  great start, especially showing some of our ‘idea’. More importantly, it’s kind of all my developer/co-founder can handle for now. He’s too busy and out of country. Which sucks, but it is what it is.

It got me thinking though. The advisor(soon to be investor) might be disappointed with that, because we can’t go go go.

On that same note, do we need to? I know startups are start fast, fail fast… but we’re an enterprise targetting startup. We need to develop a great product for the initial beta customers. No enterprise wants crap. Also, it won’t be a quick process… ever. Too much sales cycle to simply just  ’quick and dirty’

It got me thinking about advice, and how I need to understand it, and not just ‘go with it’. Also, while doing that, I need to go with it. Mainly to please the advisor/investor. It’s a rough situation. I need to learn to balance and not get flustered. I am the CEO. The chief decision maker. It’s my interpretation more than his. But I want his help more than he even knows.

 

In other news, I met with a small security startup in the SF area. They are pretty newb, for lack of a better word. They have a cool idea, and have the canned startup knowledge (ie… Google it, answer comes up, it’s gold), but I think they are going to encounter a ton of problems with what they are doing. Essentially their startup is a high level version of my day job… so I know the caveats and problems they will see. They simply aren’t prepared appropriately from an ‘idea’ perspective. $1M in funding… I hope they can clean it up a bit.

The Good, the Bad and the Awesome

It’s been a little while!

Well. I have good news for you, loyal followers.

We’ve landed another great advisor. One who will basically be hooking us up with our future customers. Not only that, he’s also a former startup founder and now works in the enterprise as a CISO. Could it get any better? We have a person with the background we need to start a startup, the background from an enterprise for 7+ years, and he also happens to know just about everyone.

Nothing is set in stone as far as his advisement goes, but he is very into the idea and wants to help. Not to mention, he knows VCs and my current boss. That’s bad thing number one. I have to quit eventually, and I have taken one of my boss’ best friends as an advisor/part of the startup. The good out of that? $10 says my boss is not only into acting as a distribution channel for my startup, but also will become an investor.

We have a meeting a really great security startup next week as well – pretty excellent, considering they have about 10 investors and are having great success.

I have a lot of good ideas now. We have our plan. We have our approach.
My developer/co-founder is to begin work on a prototype soon, to be complete within a few months.
In the meantime, I’m doing customer development until my fingers fall off.

I have so much to say, I wish all my blog readers would just give me a call so I could explain it easier.

BTW, someone found our blog and figured out what our secret startup was. But the big reveal is not yet.

 

 

The Excitement I Can’t Contain

Seriously, I don’t even know where to begin. We’ve made some great progress… just from speaking with people. Maybe I’m getting too excited. Maybe I’m looking too far ahead.
Here’s a recap:

1. Spoke with an angel investor. He loved the idea, hands down. He didn’t like our marketing plan, tried to suggest one completely different, in every aspect. My team and I mulled it over for a solid 4 hours total or pure discussion among us. Came to the conclusion, a few parts of it make sense on a very small scale, but overall, our business model and our targets for sales do not fit the type of marketing model he insisted on. So, we wrote back with our thoughts/rebuttals, but told him we’d like to hear his feedback. I thought, at first conversation, he was literally 3-5 steps away from making an angel investment. Then, I sent that email and assumed MAYBE he’d stick around and be a good connection. Man was I wrong… in a good way. He responded back applauding us for coming up with great ideas and putting so much thought into our rebuttals. He wants to keep talking. Wow/yay.

2. Spoke with an entrepreneur of a security startup, with 2 successful exits in his past as well. He told us the idea was great, and he’d love to stay connected and offer advice and other info as needed. Awesome to have more positive feedback.

And then.. after all that awesome stuff, the best thing I’d heard yet…

3. A CISO of a large entertainment startup is a friend of mine through my day job… I wanted to pitch our idea to him. He’s a smart guy, he had a startup in his late teens which failed, but he’s always kept up on that from a business side and continues to be extremely technical as well. Involved in community, keeps GREAT connections and always is involved. So, I gave him a call. We talked. I found out for the past 3-4 months he’d been thinking of almost exactly the same ideas as us. BUT. He can’t implement it himself, and the person with whom he was coming up with the idea with (my boss) doesn’t have the time to continue on it. But they BOTH loved the idea of gamified security awareness/security training. Bingo. He said my boss and himself wanted to invest  in a company that would do it, and they would use my boss’ company as a liaison to sell to Fortune 100 companies, whom are the clients of my current day job(confusing, I know). Anyways. The CISO also did market research from other large companies that use security awareness training. They all bought into his idea almost immediately and WANTED to spend the money. Can you believe this? I couldn’t. I talked to a guy who had the same idea, but can’t execute it currently. He wanted to invest in the idea, has a means of distributing the product to a large number of high profile clients, and totally loved the fact WE were doing it. The best part? He probably wants in. He wants to meet with us to discuss our vision, and how he can help. Potential third co-founder? Advisor? I’m not sure but I love it.

This could literally change the entire game for us. I have a list of a million things I want to get done, and I’m slowly knocking them out while working on a very important report for my day job.

More details to follow. But wow.

A Fundamental Change

I spoke with the first person whom I would consider an expert on the topic of security startups, today.

He was impressive, eloquent and a wonderful guy to talk to. Not to mention, he was an angel investor.
His first impression was the company and the idea were the tops, he loved every bit of it. He thought it was a great idea and could be profitable quite easily. Does he want to be OUR angel investor? I hope so. We’ll see. He sure sounded like it. (I know, I know.. they all sound that way initially).

One large bit of advice he brought to the table was a marketing strategy – fundamentally and entirely different than ours. I was blown away initially, then confused, and now trying to discern whether or not it was great, good or mediocre advice. My gut says to listen to him, he’s the expert. But at the same time, his particular knowledge may be different from our current situation.

Either way you look at it, he wants us to go free. He wants us to give away the ‘retail’ version of the software, which would allow the average Twitter/Facebook/Insertsocialmediaoutlethere user to understand and act more securely in their day-to-day dealings. Then, offer a premium version with pay modules, for enterprise customers.

I’m not sure it could work. Can it? Can we get a bunch of users to love to use our retail software which will help them be more secure? Do people care? It’s a game, so can we make it FUN enough? The content won’t matter as much as long as they’re having a blast. Will it work?

I’m not sure. I need to discuss it with my team.

2 more meetings with entrepreneurs this weekend, then a few corporations next week.

Either way, today completely made me overly excited. Woot.

 

PS – I have a ‘money’ candle. A candle that is supposed to bring luck – my girlfriend told me it’s purpose. I’ve been lighting it while working on my startup. So far, so good. Weird.

I take it back…

Our first call with an investor and entrepreneur is in an hour.

Wish us luck.

We Remove Some Wraps…

Not quite here yet though.

I realized yesterday, that it was time to get moving. There was a SANS post about gamifying security awareness training. Not that it was being done, but that it was a good idea to do so.
I’m glad you think so, SANS. I will get right on that.

As you should know, that IS our startup, gamified information security awareness. And we’ve never been more excited to have that sort of reinforcement in our ideas. On top of that, I hope the VCs in the the near future see it that way as well.
Due to that kick in the pants, I started a company blog to let people know a little about us, what we’re doing, where we’re headed, and why they should know us.

An excerpt is here:

One day, in a land not so far away, our team got together and started talking, discussing and debating. We came to the conclusion that security awareness training in corporations today… sucks! We wanted to understand why, after all the billions of dollars we spent on security training, do breaches and security incidents still occur. People have a huge number of resources at their disposal, and their respective employers spend a bunch of money every year on security awareness training, so why the lapse in return on investment?

Simple. It’s not being done correctly. People don’t want to learn from Sally and Bob’s experiences in a PDF. They don’t care about it after the mandatory week-long training is complete. The instructor was boring, they just came for the free food. There’s no incentive and no drive. They’re just not interested.

Is that how employees should feel when they’re being educated on how to prevent a 7.2 million dollar breach?¹ We don’t think so.

Thus came about our idea. Let’s start a company that does it correctly. Let’s take today’s most popular trends, combine them with solid and understandable security knowledge, give the people a fun learning environment and distribute it on an enterprise-friendly, easily adoptable platform.

We’re excited. We’re pumped. We also have some meetings with fellow entrepreneurs and corporate IT people. Not for sales, but for the learning process. We want to know more and gauge how we’re doing.

Seriously, I’m ecstatic at the moment.

You should expect us.

Why the Hell Am I an Entrepreneur?

I read a lot of articles/blogs/news everyday about startups. There are a lot of articles discussing the differences between corporate life, freelancing, lifestyle business, entrepreneurship, and startups. Many of the articles discuss the difference from a life altering perspective… ie “You have to be crazy to be a founder of a startup.” or “Corporate life is mundane.”

It got me thinking. Why do I do want to do this startup? Why am I doing it? What makes ME want to be this way versus any other way?
I have prepared a list. Please note, this is prior to actually HAVING a running startup, so maybe once it’s done… I should do a sequel to this blog.

1. I want to run the show.
- I want to be the boss, and run the show. Not just because it sounds cool (it does) but because I want to have my actions directly affect the way the company performs. If I slack one day, I fully expect the company to take some kind of hit. If I slack at a corporate job… I drink more water and eat more cookies than I normally do, and life goes on. I want to be the driving force behind my employees excitement and I want to make my own fate. Plain and simple. As an entrepreneur, you decide how deep your grave will be.

2. I am kind of crazy.
- I don’t 100% believe you need to be clinically insane to want to take this path. You just need to be slightly demented with a tinge of self-centered. The excitement of the fact that any day something new and horrible could go wrong… is just awesome. You know how some people like pain? It’s like that, except on paper. I like the risk.

3. I want to change the way things are.
-  How can you change the face of a scene, industry or business without having all the say? You simply can’t. Well maybe you can, but it won’t be nearly as easy. Instead of having to fight through tiers of management, you make the calls. On the same note, if you mess it up, you only have yourself to blame.

4. Money, honey.
-  Say what you want, everyone wants to retire before they’re 40. It’s no guarantee, but it’s the best chance we can make for ourselves.

5. I think people are exaggerating.
- It may not be as hard as they say. You know. They. How can I ever find out for myself without doing it? No opinion is really valid unless you make your own based on experiences.

6. I want to give people jobs.
- The power to help people accomplish what they want and to give them an opportunity they may not have had elsewhere… is a really cool feeling.

7. I want a culmination of my education.
- And I don’t necessarily mean school. I just want everything I’ve learned, to have a purpose. I can take all of knowledge and my skills, and apply them toward a bigger picture. Prove to myself that wasting time on the internet throughout high school totally was worth it.

8. I’m a geek.
- I like to know everything about everything. If I have any sense of innovation, intelligence or sophistication in my brain… this is how I can put it all to use.

9. I get bored.
- It’s true. I get bored. I get bored of my cars(a hobby), my jobs after I get on some mundane projects, my clothes, my electronics, my food, everything. Know what idea has never gotten stale in my head? Founding a business. Oh, and my lady, but that’s a different story.

10. I want to make a name.
- Seems kind of conceited… but once I die, how will people remember me? A loving, caring, giving entrepreneur/geek who changed the face of information security.

We’ll see how things change once we this is all said and done. Stay tuned.

Is It Okay?

I’ve been thinking long and hard about whether or not I should be working on my startup while working at my full-time consulting position. I honestly don’t have much of a choice, so it’s a risk i must take.

Technically, I’m not supposed to moonlight. But.. I haven’t made any money. I also don’t even HAVE a corporation. I just have an idea. My boss is aware I want to have a startup. Timing ang more information, however, he does not know. Am I doing anything wrong here? When should I tell him? How should I tell him? I don’t think he’ll even care when it comes down to it. Excited, is what I’m hoping for.

The type of work they do could also potentially benefit my startup, if they were interested in some sort of collaboration. That might be a longshot, though. And the type of work is certainly different.

I can’t quit too early, and I don’t want to get myself in trouble. I guess it’s kind of a predicament. One I will solve soon, I suppose.

Let’s Chat

Adopted Kik as our means to communicate between each other via mobile phone. Just a little plug for them.

Find us on there, find our secret.