A writeup and post mortem of the OWASP Glue project

This post talks about some recent updates around my businesses and a quick update around entreteam.

Entreteam Update

In 2018 and 2019, I had tried to organize several accountability groups to help entrepreneurs like myself brainstorm, stay in the game and help each other. Although the groups were largely successful, in terms of having active attendance and participation, they dwindled when we moved to a new office space and it became tricker to easily meet because we didn’t have a space with easy access and parking. I also found myself extremely busy trying to bootstrap our new SaaS business securityprogram.io.

Lee Blaylock typically moderates Dallas Startup Grind events and while we were preparing for my fireside chat April 23 he provided some ideas around questions he wanted to ask. I thought answering a few of them in a blog post would make a fun and useful way to prepare. I want to thank and acknolwedge Helena Krusec for doing the actual questionning and moderating. Not to mention the other folks at the Capital Factory who helped with setting up, promoting and cleaning up.

I started Jemurai 7 years ago. It seems fitting to write a reflective post about what has worked well, what has not worked so well and how it felt along the way. I hope it is interesting.

In the beginning

Honestly, when I started Jemurai there were three main reasons.

1. My family’s work-life balance had gotten out of whack.
2. My day job, though interesting, had gotten repetitive. I didn’t feel I was growing fast enough.
3. I thought I could do something really unique and different.

Let’s take those briefly in order.

In this post, I talk about the first Accountability Group meeting.

Finding People

First off, it is helpful to keep a running list of people that might be interested in the group. Its like having a backlog of features. That way, you can figure out when you have enough people to start the group.

Having done that, I have some people in mind at any point in time to talk about being an entrepreneur and I have been really surprised and happy about how interested people are. So far, the groups I have been part of are somewhere between “organic”, meaning they just naturally formed, and planned - where we were pretty careful about who was included and how. The most deliberate I have been is in recruiting people from different backgrounds and with different businesses.

I have found it extremely helpful to seek out and cultivate working peer groups to encourage cross functional learning, accountability and more objective reflection on the course of a business.

In this post, I lay out a bit of history and talk about how I see them working and what I’m doing now to build these in some new spaces.

Backstory: The Small Business Summit

When I started Jemurai, it was actually against the better judgment of a small group of advisors. Well, more like I didn’t do it the way they thought I should. We called ourselves the “Small Business Summit” and we have a Slack community to this day where we bounce ideas.

Thoughts about OWASP as I step down from the board.

Discussion about the tools we are adopting for our startup.

Standardizing offerings makes them scale.

How we recruit adn what we think about…