trust
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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
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Mentoring Junior Sales Engineers
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2 min read
Junior sales engineers rarely fail because nobody shows them how all the moving parts fit together under real pressure. Throwing them into demos and hoping confidence appears is not mentoring. They need to understand the product story before the product detail. Why the company exists? What problem it actually solves? Who buys and who blocks?
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Cybersecurity teams are busy, distributed, and often misaligned without realising it. Everyone is working hard. Everyone is solving fires. Yet ask two teams what the company’s priority is this quarter and you often get two different answers. That is where internal newsletters quietly earn their keep. Not the corporate kind filled with applause emojis and
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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
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A few years back, a zero day hit WordPress. Not a quiet one. A loud, messy one. Every unpatched site started redirecting visitors to Chinese gambling pages. Overnight. Millions of them. Guess what our site ran on? It was just a landing page. No customer data. No production systems. Still, none of that mattered at
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Freemium in the Enterprise World
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3 min read
Freemium works great when you’re selling calendars or CRM to startups. But in enterprise cybersecurity or infrastructure? Enterprises do not hate free. They hate uncertainty. When freemium is designed to reduce uncertainty rather than dodge procurement, it becomes a serious growth lever. The mistake is treating freemium as a discount strategy. In enterprise, freemium is
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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
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A slide deck can open the door. A sharp executive summary can earn a coffee. But the full business plan is still what investors read when they decide whether to wire money or ghost you. It is the dossier that must survive partner meetings, analyst reviews and late night “prove it” Slack threads. Here is
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Small-Team OKRs: Avoiding the Spreadsheet Graveyard
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2 min read
Most small-team OKRs die in a spreadsheet. Buried in tabs, forgotten by mid-quarter, reviewed once a year if you’re lucky. They didn’t fail because OKRs don’t work. They failed because they weren’t designed to live. OKRs — Objectives and Key Results — are supposed to focus effort, align teams, and drive outcomes. In big firms,