Sunrise Methodology
Since its inception in 2018, Cyberstarts has been focused on funding, launching, and supporting early-stage cybersecurity companies and entrepreneurs. With its entrepreneur-backed model, Cyberstarts’ investors and limited partners (LPs) comprise the industry’s most prominent leaders. These investors provide strategic counsel to portfolio companies and entrepreneurs, from guidance on product-market fit to talent recruitment and everything in between.
This journey has already seen many great companies born through our sunrise process, of which our CISO community is a key part. It takes time and a lot of work to build great companies, and we are so proud of what we have been able to help our founders build and achieve so far. In the last five years, Cyberstarts has helped build companies that have redefined how we protect against cyber threats, including many Unicorns. This puts us at the top of the early-stage Venture Capital firms list.
Cyberstarts Sunrise program
Cyberstarts operates in a unique model, dubbed “Sunrise” working closely with the founding teams in which it invests, from the early days of the company’s inception, to focus on the most important pain points within the broad area in which the team is exploring. Cyberstarts has built a playbook that develops and becomes sturdier over time, helping build companies that resolve significant market problems.
CISO community
Cyberstarts’ inside perspective and meaningful relationships from deep within the cybersecurity industry are woven into the core of our unique Sunrise program.
Highly engaged CISOs and close collaboration with the cyber industry’s most successful entrepreneurs help shape our companies from their first steps of product ideation and product-market fit.
CISO participation program
The Cyberstarts CISO participation program is a compensation plan allocated to CISOs for engagement in product feedback solely, as Cyberstarts invests in companies in the phase of early ideation, and there is no generally available product.
The compensation plan is based on participation points allocated to members annually based on engagement in providing market insights and product feedback. Cyberstarts allocate points per fund, which amount to 4% of carry (profits) from the fund. No points are ever given for purchasing a product.
Cyberstarts expects CISOs to manage their conflict of interest and encourage them to seek pre-approval from their companies to keep the process fully transparent and compliant.
Each of the CISOs engaged with Cyberstarts receives the following message annually:
“As a reminder, the compensation is completely optional. If you wish not to receive compensation or cannot take compensation, please let us know, and we will revoke the points and compensation.”