When Cory Siskind finished school, she was dropped into a high-stakes job helping large multinational corporations manage their operational security in Mexico City, with almost no relevant lived experience. Eventually, she realized that this was more or less par for the course in the corporate security field, which lagged behind other mission-critical enterprise services, like information security.
The industry still relied on recent grads doing manual work like combing through blogs and local news reports, and on security industry veterans with contacts on the ground to build a sort of “whisper network” of ground truth. Those things are obviously still valuable, but advancements in technology mean that there are many, many more sources of information that can provide valuable insight into the security situation in any particular country, region or even neighborhood, and machine learning has progressed to the point where it can do a lot of the legwork involved in helping analysts parse the data.
Cory tells us all about how she came to the conclusion that Base Operations needed to be built to bring modern tech to bear on the capabilities gap she saw in how companies manage their global security footprint, and how she set out getting the skills needed to build her startup as a sole founder. We talk about the challenges of fundraising in an area where most traditional VCs likely feel out of their depth, and building a sales operation that can handle big clients even very early on in her startup’s life.
We loved our time chatting with Cory, and we hope you love yours listening to the episode. And of course, we’d love if you can subscribe to Found in Apple Podcasts, on Spotify, on Google Podcasts or in your podcast app of choice. Please leave us a review and let us know what you think, or send us direct feedback either on Twitter or via email at found@prod22.techcrunch.com. And please join us again next week for our next featured founder.
