In my last blog (Week 1 – VC Rejected), I promised to cover how what I recommended applies to LMNTRIX. So here it is.
The first issue when starting a business is to decide whether to raise seed capital upfront or minimize your dilution and delay raising funds until a later stage. I would choose the latter every time.
I don’t know about you, but I am personally very uncomfortable in taking other people’s money and having the pressure of delivering against a specific timeline and return on the investors’ money. I am fortunate to be able to afford to start LMNTRIX without requiring any external funding. This, of course, was not the case with my first business (earthwave) where I only invested $30k in the business and nothing more. That was hard work, but it was all worth it in the end. In that case, I was dependent on my family to support me, and we lived like peasants for many years.
Now I am in a different position, where I am investing $3m and planning to get an exponentially greater return than I did with earthwave. I have been funding LMNTRIX for over twelve months now. I can continue doing this for the foreseeable future until the company is profitable. I’ve had a talented team on my payroll for over 10 months. Not something any bootstrap startup can afford to do.
We have been busy researching, building, developing and beta testing our platform which we refer to as the LMNTRIX Active Defense.
This brings me to the second point, differentiation. Like earthwave I’m building a company that has a real differentiation strategy and intellectual capital that is difficult for others to replicate. In LMNTRIX’s case that would be Active Defense and our validated architecture. This is an integrated system that has intellectual property (IP) flowing right across it from the level of integration across the 6 core service elements to the platform development and automation we have achieved to help scale the business; then our global relevance and ability to replicate across multiple AWS regions; then expertise in our team who are seasoned intrusion analysts and threat hunters (very difficult to recruit, train and retain); and finally our global channel partnerships and go-to-market.
Together all of these serve as our intellectual capital, and our IP development plan extends well into 2022 with the ultimate goal of helping our clients eliminate their security blind spots by protecting their business, their reputation, and their data. We do this by detecting, responding and stopping more breaches, more accurately, with lower false positives and at a lower price than anyone else.
LMNTRIX has a one-to-many model meaning it is built once and sold many times. In our case it is a platform and a service delivered centrally to a global audience through strategic global channel partnerships.
Finally, it has an inherent network effect where the more people use it, the better it gets. More of this will be revealed over coming months, so stay with me on this journey as we make more announcements over the coming year. It’s an exciting time, and I hope the insights we share here will support you in whatever ventures you pursue.
On 2017-05-11
