StartUs Presents: Intelliment Security

Describe Intelliment Security in 50 words or less.

Intelliment Security develops Security Automation software. The company’s flagship product is designed to allow companies to automate firewall security policy management, cut costs, prevent misconfigurations and help organizations better handle firewall management at scale.

Why did you decide to pursue your own dreams rather than someone else’s?

I’ve been always, all my life, pursuing my own dreams. From studying what I believed was (and in fact is) my passion, to building Intelliment with Eduardo, my friend and co-founder. From my early teens I’ve been always related to different scenes: from demoscene when I owned an Amiga500 computer, to the underground security scene in my late teens.

Intelliment started as a research project in the University of Sevilla, while I was in the search of finding unsolved security-related industry problems that I can solve and commercialize. During these years, I read, learned, researched, develop, tested and showed companies my results. I iterated over and over, created prototypes with the help of countless students (thank you!) until I found a sound value proposition joining several research results in one “product”. I did my PhD dissertation in Computer Engineering and decided to build the company two years after, when the initial signals from the market started to arise in what was called Software Defined Networking market.

7 years from now: How did your startup change the world?

We have been running Intelliment for several years now. We like to see Intelliment as the worldwide market leader in Network (Security) Automation, helping organizations better protect their infrastructures and data, while reducing their operational costs. Intelliment can make a reality non previously possible use cases like real time threat mitigation in highly heterogeneous and complex networks. We really want to build a huge company.

In what ways do you measure your success and how do you make sure you don’t lose track?

Success is usually measured in different ways by the different people and institutions that are helping to build the company. Governmental public institutions measure success as creating high quality jobs. Employees as a well-paid, intellectually rewarding job that help them to get a good personal-professional life balance. Small shareholders usually like they have contributed to a friend’s, relative’s or trusted person’s dream – providing cash and support in the earliest and riskier stages of a project.
Initial investors usually like to see entrepreneurs become leaders and grow as persons and professionals. And finally professional or institutional investors expect to get a high multiple return for their investment.

My role as CEO is to balance of these people and actors’ expectations during company building, in order to satisfy everyone. This is how I measure success: the sum of what is that for all the people that trusted the founders.

Describe your typical working day from coming to the office to leaving it.

Unfortunately, most of my days do not have a regular schedule. I am very packed in the sense that I usually do multiple jobs. This is also true for Eduardo, my co-founder. And is typical in early stage companies. During the same day I talk to customers and partners, am involved in product definition, have a look a financials, etc. In general, my role is to help others achieve their goals, that are directly related to the company goals.

Already pivoted? Did customers use the network security services like you imagined it in the beginning?

Yes. We’ve been fortunately enough to have created and be selling the same product we envisioned five years ago, in 2010. This is not typical in startups, where the initial idea needs to be polished, if not changed at all, in a search for a value proposition. Our case was different simply because we did that iteration while Intelliment was a research project in the University. When we decided to build the company, there was a problem, a market, and our solution solving it. Of course after Intelliment was incorporated, the value proposition suffered a lot of modifications in a search to find an easy and compelling way to tell the customers the story.

Bootstrapped or financed: What fuels your startup now and what will in the future?

From the very beginning, Intelliment got grants and soft loans for R&D from the Spanish Government, as a University Spin-Off company. We run bootstrapped with this financial support and FFF funds for almost two years. Then business angels joined us. Bootstrapping gave us the right to decide what to build and to spend time in product without the pressure of looking for a high financial return a professional investor would have required us.

With ferocious competition and a booming trend to build new companies: How do you make sure you don’t get lost in the shuffle?

We can’t. In fact, we need to re-focus several times a year. In a fast-paced startup environment, many things can change from one day to another simply because you get a call from someone and get a huge opportunity for something you’ve been working on for months. We have learned the hard way that long-term planning is useless, and that goals are a better way to set short term actions.

What do you look for in team members?

We like people that share our values: integrity, humbleness, team and hard work. Then we search for abilities like flexibility, commitment, multi-tasking, self-control, etc. and finally we look for a particular skill-set. A skill set can always be learned and what is good today may change tomorrow. People will need to develop within the company, and previous skills do not usually help when changing from a role to another. Both Eduardo and I are doing tasks everyday we’ve never done before.

Why would a talent join your team?

There are many reasons to join Intelliment. And different people will value different things, as this changes over the lifetime of each person: (fast) professional development, opportunities to know interesting people, companies and technologies, learn a lot, etc. We can offer one of the few Security and Automation projects in Europe, in a company that has joined two acceleration programs (Seedcamp and Cisco EIR), and that is going to grow a lot in the coming years.

What was your most memorable moment so far?

We had very good and bad moments in the company. It is very difficult to select only one of the good ones, and the bad ones should stay in memory only to learn from them. Probably, our first sale, joining Seedcamp and Cisco EIR were the best ones.

What advice would you give fellow founders for their startup?

Do what you want to do. Never ever be told by anyone that you won’t be able to do anything. Everyone is able to do whatever he or she is motivated to do either by herself, or by searching for others to help in the journey.