You can't hire a $250k CISO yet — but customers, investors, and attackers don't grade on a curve.
SECURITY, FOR STARTUPS THAT AREN'T BIG ENOUGH FOR A CISO
You own security now. You're not a CISO. That's fine.
StartupCISO is the weekly operating system for the founder, first engineer, or ops lead who got handed security. Real decisions, plain language, no enterprise theater. Free.
Security showed up before the budget did.
The advice out there is the wrong size — written for enterprises with a SOC, or it's a vendor selling you something.
The cost of getting it wrong is asymmetric — one leaked key, one ignored disclosure email, one bad questionnaire answer can cost a deal or a reputation.
One issue a week. One decision closer to "handled."
A decision, not a lecture. Each issue takes one real thing you have to figure out — vendor questionnaires, your first VDP, what to actually log — and gives you the practitioner's answer.
Checklists you can ship today. Copy-paste policy language, security.txt, the five-minute version of "are we okay?"
Translation, both ways. What investors and enterprise buyers are really asking for — and how to give it to them without becoming a security company.
Built for the accidental security owner.
- Founders who keep getting security questionnaires and don't know which answers matter.
- First security hires who need leverage, not another framework PDF.
- Eng & ops leads who inherited "security" along with everything else.
ON THE ROADMAP
Tools, not just reading.
Subscribers will get hands-on tools as they ship — labeled clearly, no overpromising.
Security Grade — an instant, externally-observable letter grade for your domain. (coming soon)
AI Startup CISO — ask the questions you'd ask a CISO, answered in your context. (coming soon)
Policy packs — VDP, security.txt, and the boring docs investors ask for, generated. (coming soon)
Why trust this
Built by people who spent two decades at the center of how the world finds, reports, and fixes vulnerabilities — the founders behind Bugcrowd and disclose.io. We've seen what trips startups up, because we've been on every side of it.