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Politics in a 12-Person Company—Yes, They Exist
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1 min read
At one point, I seen a company with just 12 people. Tight-knit, no middle managers, WhatsApp group culture. On paper, no room for politics. I could feel it. Product had “a favourite” in engineering. Sales talked in DMs instead of threads. Founders would workshop a plan in 1:1s, then present it like it came from…
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The Blind Spot in Your Zero-Trust Strategy 58% of ransomware attacks started with DNS-layer exploits—despite 92% of enterprises claiming full TLS encryption coverage (IDC, 2023). Encryption isn’t the silver bullet many CISOs hoped for. When every packet is wrapped in TLS, legacy DNS security tools see only the envelope, not the threat inside. Why This…
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Most junior SEs are smart, eager–and lost. (In start-ups) they land in a seat with no playbook, a half-written demo, and a vague mandate to “support sales.” Ramp takes forever. Confidence lags. Deals suffer. But it doesn’t have to be that way. With a focused 90-day mentoring plan, you can cut ramp time by nearly…
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At one vendor I worked with, it was remote-first. So maybe—very naturally—teams started blaming each other. “You don’t do anything, I’m drowning over here.” Tech blamed sales. Sales blamed tech. Accounting had no idea who to blame. I blamed accounting for that. But here’s the thing: everyone was working hard. I mean genuinely. No slackers. Just people…
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Why Silence is a Competitive Risk You’d think deep technical expertise would speak for itself. In cybersecurity, it often does—just not loud enough. Founders with domain depth get meetings. Period. I’ve seen enterprise buyers ignore polished decks and lean in because the founder dropped a line about DNS poisoning that actually made sense. But too many…
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Fundraising in cybersecurity sounds like a badge of honour. But the pitch room rarely looks like the press release. You show up thinking you’ve got traction. They show up with a checklist. Here’s the hard truth: for many early-stage cybersecurity investors, especially in Europe and the UK, you don’t really exist until you’re doing at…
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A few years back, a zero-day hit WordPress. Bad one. Real bad. Every unpatched site—millions of them—started redirecting to Chinese gambling pages overnight. Guess what our site ran on? We were just a cybersecurity vendor with a modest landing page. No login, no client portal. But by 9AM, inboxes were full, phones ringing, and one…
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Freemium works great when you’re selling calendars or CRM to startups. But in enterprise cybersecurity or infrastructure? It’s riskier. Users don’t always convert. Sales hates unqualified signups. And support ends up fielding questions from companies who’ll never pay. But freemium isn’t dead. You just need guardrails. And a few growth hacks to make sure it…
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If your board hears bad news from someone else first, you’ve already lost control of the narrative. Worse, you’ve damaged trust — the one thing you can’t rebuild on a slide deck. Founders don’t lose credibility for bad quarters. They lose it for surprises. So here’s how to deliver bad news — early, clearly, and…
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Security pricing is never simple. Seat-based + usage-based + storage + support tiers… Maybe regionally variable. Maybe with custom terms for every enterprise logo. And then someone says, “We need to automate quoting—let’s bring in CPQ.” Cue the pain. Configure Price Quote (CPQ) tools promise speed and consistency. But without a plan, they turn your…