CEO Summit

Building a cybersecurity startup isn't just about having a good idea or great technology, it's about thinking clearly in a highly complex, fast-moving, and crowded environment. In this talk, we'll explore the mental models and first-principle thinking frameworks cybersecurity founders can use to make strategic decisions, identify real opportunities, and avoid common pitfalls.

We'll examine how to think about market structure, buyer psychology, product wedge, and long-term defensibility through reusable lenses that apply across different segments of the industry. Rather than focusing on trends or one-off tactics, this session is about how to reason from fundamentals - how to choose what to build, how to position it, and how to design a company the market rewards.

Whether you're early in your journey or already scaling, this session will help you replace guesswork with clarity and pattern recognition. You'll walk away with strategic models that can be applied to navigate pricing, product-market fit, ecosystem dynamics, and go-to-market choices more effectively.

Key Takeaways
- Gain 10+ mental models that can be used to think through product, market, and strategy decisions as a cybersecurity CEO
- Learn how to apply first-principle thinking to complex go-to-market and product development choices, especially in crowded categories
- Understand how to identify high-leverage opportunities using concepts like data gravity, control points, and ecosystem positioning
- Discover how to avoid common traps by seeing the invisible incentives driving buyers, partners, and competitors

We talk to CISOs, but practitioners decide whether your product wins. In this fast, framework-first session, Nick Muy breaks down the real people in cybersecurity—SOC analysts, SecOps, AppSec, GRC, vuln management, threat intel—and shows how their goals, pain, and daily workflows differ across industries (FSI vs. SaaS vs. retail/CPG). We’ll map who buys, who uses, and who champions, then connect it to how boards and audit committees actually see security. You’ll learn why standards and regulatory pressure (think PCI DSS and its ripple effects) create urgency, how to align messaging with the right operator persona, and where value creation really starts. Expect vivid “from the trenches” vignettes, simple visuals you can steal, and a clear path to refine ICP, packaging, and sales motions...so you stop pitching to a monolith and start winning real deals with the humans who matter.