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The First Steps
Life at a cybersecurity start-up certainly is full of challenges. They could be of various types, such as financial, organizational, relational, and more.
Dectar was started in Dublin, Ireland. This birthplace constituted an excellent opportunity as well as presented obstacles that caused some hard times to the founders and first employees alike.
The First Struggles
Dublin represented (and still represents nowadays) a great incubator for new IT ventures and entrepreneurs.
The city and country provide new businesses with good funding opportunities, including from private venture capitalists and governmental organizations. Irish cities also have an amount of cool, shared offices where the first few employees can take their first steps from.
Even though the founders were already residents, they had to bring the first employees in. This caused issues: Dublin, and Ireland in general, are costly places to live in. This represents a challenge for newcomers trying to set up a business there.
Dectar was fortunate to find prospective employees who were already highly committed to cybersecurity and had evident shared values with the founders, the company and its mission.
With Ireland in a housing crisis, nobody knew where to (physically) place the recruits!
The struggles of early stages’ start-ups are notorious and Dectar’s could not be underestimated. A major challenge came when folks had to find a place to stay to work closely with the CEO who lives in Dublin but, in Dublin’s real estate market, with the salaries of an early stages’ start-up, that was unaffordable. Impossible even!
The Comfort of Sleeping Bags in a Garage
The current Chief Research and Development Officer, Domenico Chirabino, was one of those who received a helping hand by the company’s CEO, who brokered advantageous rental prices at some friends’ places, as they accepted to be paid much less than the average market’s prices, as a favor to Stefan himself.
Some also accepted, for they believed in the project with all their selves, not to perceive a salary for a period of time in order to keep the company going, before it could receive more consistent funding and the founders could repay them.
Well, this time at least they did not need to use sleeping bags and share the humidity of a garage cooking marshmallows from a stick on a portable stove, unlike you might have seen on some movies or read on some bizarre start-up stories’ articles.
Struggles were bread and butter for Dectar, too. And its founders and employees overcame them by teaming up, with the conviction of creating something special, for which their efforts were worthwhile.
You can hear Dectar’s CEO, Stefan Uygur, speak about the start up experience on the Money Never Sleeps podcast he was a guest on in 2019.