Pragmatic Security for Non-Security Founders: A Recap
If you’ve been following along the last month or so, I’ve been laying down the practical standards for keeping a startup from getting wiped out by preventable tech failures.
Security usually feels like homework until someone's inbox gets hijacked or a vendor risk assessment threatens to derail a deal. But you don't need a million-dollar Security Operations Center (SOC) or a hundred-page policy document to protect your business. Just practice basic digital hygiene.
Here is a quick recap of the core security fundamentals covered, along with direct links to dive deeper:
The Core Baseline
The No-BS Security Starter Kit for Small Business: A practical framework for fixing your access layer, enforcing simple device/data policies, and building baseline operational resilience so you survive when something inevitably breaks.
Infrastructure Identity
Kill the @gmail: Why Free Email Is Wrecking Your Business: Why running actual business operations out of a consumer @gmail.com address is an operational liability that wrecks deliverability, kills access control, and trades your privacy for a zero-dollar line item.
Authentication & Access Control
Passwords Are a Liability: Why Your Business Needs to Ditch the Text Boxes: Why human-generated passwords cause fatigue and breaches, and how modern asymmetric passkeys (FIDO2/WebAuthn) eliminate phishing risk at the protocol level.
Passkeys Aren’t Ready for Your Stack? Here’s the Stopgap That Keeps You Safe: What to do when legacy vendors won't support WebAuthn, and how to evaluate reputable business password managers (1Password, Bitwarden, Keeper, Dashlane) as a practical bridge.
Catch the Full Session at West Slope Startup Week!
If you're building a company in Colorado, or anywhere else, taking these concepts from blog posts to operational reality is what we'll talking about in the session.
I’ll be speaking at West Slope Startup Week on Tech Risk Management for Startups. Here are the goodies you can review and download.
We’ll cut through vendor hype and dive into real-world scenarios how to insulate your early-stage business against catastrophic operational downtime without slowing your product development to a crawl.
Whether you're bootstrapping your first app or scaling a local service business, swing by the session, bring your real-world architecture questions, and let's talk about building systems that actually hold up.
