Securetech BLOG
In our latest Securetech newsletter, we gave you a list of the top 5 doses of 2021, specifically for security startups. In case you missed it, here’s the list.
A channel sales strategy is crucial to scaling a startup. However, most startups fail to launch and execute a successful channel sales program. Securetech Managing Director, Mel Shakir, brought Evan Blair to the Dreamit Dose to share his experience leading global channel sales and partner programs at ZeroFox, Accuvant, and Ciphent over the past decade.
Mel Shakir, Securetech Managing Director with over 15 years of experience in bringing innovative cybersecurity solutions to market, is back to give his tips on product management.
Mel Shakir, Securetech Managing Director, talks to CISOs every day in his role at Dreamit. He coaches companies to get them ready to sell to a CISO. However, he also coaches them on what to avoid. In this Dreamit Dose, Mel gives you 5 reasons a CISO may NOT buy your product.
Most founders consider two possibilities when thinking about their exit strategy: IPO or acquisition. The process of startup M&A likely remains shrouded in mystery for founders who have never seen it first-hand. We invited Amit Yoran, CEO of Tenable, and Mike Viscuso, Co-Founder of Carbon Black, on #DreamitLive to answer these questions and more. We pulled out 5 key lessons from the discussion to shed some light on M&A and help you navigate what can either be an extremely rewarding or painful process.
To keep an organization safe, a CISO depends on as many as 50 to 100 different products. This presents a huge opportunity for startups. However, this means that a CISO sees a LOT of pitches in their role. In this Dreamit Dose, Mel tells you the five ways to get a CISO to buy your product.
Early-stage investors will probably ask you about your exit strategy. Don’t fall into the traps of thinking small or leaving the party too early. You’re building the right venture for the right reasons so use exit as an opportunity to let that shine.
Getting investors excited about your product is a critical part of raising capital. But founders are often so consumed with talking metrics, milestones achieved, or the capital they need that they sometimes forget to talk about their overarching vision for their startups. In this article, we provide some strategies for selling investors on your vision for your startup.
In our most recent episode of DreamitLive, Managing Partner Steve Barsh spoke with Ron Gula, President and Co-Founder of Gula Tech Adventures. In the episode, Steve asked Ron about his “five slide pitch deck.” Ron has the investor perspective as the President of Gula Tech Adventures, but also can empathize with the founder as former founder of his own company, Tenable. Read to see what the five slides include.
In this #DreamitLive, Ron Gula, president of Gula Tech Ventures, joins Steve Barsh to talk about the 5 most common mistakes cyber entrepreneurs make and how to avoid them. They discuss the top mistakes Ron and many other prominent cyber investors see cyber startups making and what these startups need to focus on to not only get investment but to build a market-dominating company.
RaySecur (Dreamit Securetech Spring 2019) closed a $3M seed funding round. The startup’s mission is to be the first line of defense to safely detect suspicious powders and liquids, as well as conventional mail threats.
In this #DreamitLive, Dan Costantino, CISO at Penn Medicine, one of the largest academic medical institutions in the US, speaks with Steve Barsh to talk about the chatter in the CISO community on how cyber startups are dropping the ball and missing huge opportunities.
Fundraising is hard, and it’s critical to have a game-plan and process for raising capital. In this episode, Steve Barsh discusses some strategies that founders can use to close a new round of funding. He talks about how to create momentum, revenue metrics you’ll need to show for seed and Series A funding, what a typical timeline looks like, how to determine the amount of capital you need to raise, and more.
Read about 5 game-changing cybersecurity companies re-shaping the way companies stay secure.
In this DreamitLive, Securetech Managing Director Bob Stasio speaks with ForMotiv Partner Bill Conners about the complex problem of insider threats.
Dreamit alum Jose ‘Caya’ Cayasso from Slidebean discusses 5 big lessons he learned about raising capital and startup funding.
When pitching to VCs, one of the most frequent errors founders make is incorrectly presenting their total addressable market, or TAM for short. Perhaps because this number is hypothetical and dependent on so many different factors, some founders do not give it the time it deserves. In this post, we offer some tips on how to impress investors when presenting your TAM.
Under lean startup methodology, founders attempt to eliminate as much uncertainty as possible to create some order out of the chaos involved in starting a company. Failures are inevitable; but, great founders know how to fail quickly and cheaply, rather than trying to take on boatloads of venture capital funding to solve a problem with an approach that doesn’t scale or, even worse, to solve a problem that does not exist or is not that painful. Read more about strategies you can use to identify and de-risk key assumptions.
Health systems and hospitals face unprecedented cybersecurity challenges—chief among them is the threat to their connected medical devices. Providers use connected medical to improve patient care. But, by connecting these products to the Internet, they open themselves up to many security risks. To protect these providers and the patients they serve, several startups have focused on securing connected medical devices. This piece will look at the most innovative companies in this space.
Read about how a fast-growing physical security startup achieved a $540 million valuation in three years, how one company is revamping its security procedures after Russian interference in the 2016 elections, and more pressing cybersecurity news in this week’s SecureTech News Roundup.
We are thrilled to announce the newest Dreamit cohort, selected from a field of nearly 2,000 pre-Series A startups.
Our friends at Jerusalem Venture Partners (JVP), in partnership with the City of New York, are looking for cybersecurity startups to compete in the Cybersecurity Moonshot Challenge, a competition to win a $1 million investment from Jerusalem Venture Partners and the chance to join Hub.NYC.
Earlier this week, the team at Strategic Cyber Ventures released a report on the state of the cybersecurity venture market. Venture investors poured $5.3 billion into cybersecurity startups in 2018. This is a 20% increase from 2017, which saw about $4.4 billion in venture capital investment in the cybersecurity space.
Dreamit is designed to help pre-Series A startups with a market-ready product and traction acquire new enterprise customers and raise their next institutional round of funding. Learn more about the day-to-day structure of the program and how it allows founders to scale their companies in a flexible way.
Raising money for your cybersecurity or physical security startup? We compiled a list of 101 venture capital firms that focus on investing in security startups to help make the process of closing your next round as easy as possible.
Dreamit SecureTech and SOSA are teaming up to host a night of networking, learning, and startup demos with founders and venture investors from the New York cybersecurity community. We’re looking for 10 pre-”Series A” startups to pitch their products to investors at the event.
Ever since we started CYR3CON, we are continually surprised at the hype cycle surrounding the application of machine learning. Many marketers opportunistically see it as another angle to entice buyers — and in talking to CSO’s — their frustration with the hype, equivocation, and machine learning marketing charlatans is palpable.
Dreamit SecureTech startup CYR3CON, which helps companies predict and prevent cyber attacks using artificial intelligence, announced a $1.5 million seed round led by Scout Ventures, with participation from Michael Sutton (former CISO, Zscaler), Aleksandr Yampolskiy (CEO, SecurityScorecard), Steven Witt (former CEO, Onyara and Partner/Co-Founder of DataTribe), and Steve Hassell, (former CIO, Emerson).
Earlier this month, our team at Dreamit kicked off our Fall 2018 SecureTech cohort, the inaugural group of security-focused startups in our new program led by Bob Stasio. After evaluating hundreds of potential startups for entry into the program, several trends emerged that point to how security technology will evolve in the coming years. We wanted to share some of those insights with you.
Seven startups were accepted into the inaugural program, led by Managing Director Bob Stasio