Improving Security Effectiveness
For the last few months, I’ve been working full time and talking with colleagues about a new way for security executives to measure the effectiveness of security programs. In very important ways, the ideas are new and non-obvious, and at the same time, they’re an evolution of the ideas that Andrew and I wrote about in the New School book that inspired this blog.
I’m super-excited by what I’ve learned. I’m looking to grow the team and talk with security executives at large organizations, and so I’m saying a little more, but not “launching” or sharing a lot of details. This is less about ‘stealth mode’ and more about my desire to say factual and interesting things.
I’m familiar with Chris Dixon’s argument that “you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret,” along with Tren Griffin’s “12 Things I Learned from Chris Dixon about Startups.” There’s also a bit of advice from The Lean Startup:
In fact, I have often given entrepreneurs fearful of this issue the following assignment: take one of your ideas (one of your lesser insights, perhaps), find the name of the relevant product manager at an established company who has responsibility for that area, and try to get that company to steal your idea. Call them up, write them a memo, send them a press release—go ahead, try it. The truth is that most managers in most companies are already overwhelmed with good ideas. Their challenge lies in prioritization and execution, and it is those challenges that give a startup hope of surviving.
So why I am I keeping this quiet? Startup L Jackson said it best:
Their big issue was that they were Silicon Valley famous before product-market fit, which meant the failure was public and the hype cycle inescapable. That may have been their fault, may not have been. Journalists can sort that out. Other founders: don’t ever do this.
So I’d like to avoid a hype cycle, and so what I’ve been doing and plan to continue doing is spending time with customers, refining a product plan, building a team to deliver on that plan, and really delivering it before spending time on marketing or press. When we can say “our customers use our products to …” seems like a good time to say a lot more.
In the meanwhile, if you’re interested in building a high-scale service to gather and analyze data to deliver actionable advice building on a new set of models, I’d love to talk to you.
If you’d like to stay informed, the best way is to sign up for my very low volume “Adam Shostack’s New Thing” mail list.