Dreamit 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.

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.

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.