Tag Archives: resilience

Steering Regional Resilience: Reflections on Two Years Supporting DSIT’s Cyber Local Programme

Leave a Reply

As Chair of the West Midlands Cyber Working Group, I’ve helped lead DSIT’s Cyber Local steering group for the region over the past two years. Working alongside regional experts, I’ve supported the selection of projects that strengthen cyber resilience on the ground, including Aston University’s powerful work on cyber violence against women and girls. This experience has reinforced just how critical locally informed funding is to building practical, inclusive, and impactful cyber capability.

Continue reading →

Scaling Cyber: A Startup Founder’s Journey from Idea to Exit

Leave a Reply

This virtual book is a guide to the entrepreneurial journey, drawn from real-world experiences in cyber startups. It distils insights from my time on the NCSC for Startups accelerator (cohort 13, 2023), the DSIT Cyber Runway Scale programme (2024/2025), and my mentoring on DSIT’s Cyber ASAP programme. It’s a collection of lessons, reflections, and hard-earned knowledge from the founders, investors, and industry leaders I’ve met along the way. Thanks to Marcel Duchamp you can think of it as a “ready made”, a curated work built from my blog articles, assembled to help you navigate the path from startup to scale, and beyond.

Continue reading →

The Ides of March: Reflections on Cyber, Startups, and Scaling Innovation

Leave a Reply

The Ides of March is a fitting time to reflect on betrayal, resilience, and the realities of UK cybersecurity. In the past two weeks, I’ve balanced DSIT’s Cyber Local funding process, chaired the West Midlands Cyber Working Group (WM CWG), led two funding bids, scaled one startup in a brutal funding climate, and booted up a second from scratch. Along the way, I’ve won the Pitch Battle at Cyber Runway Live, launched the UK’s first dedicated universal cyber risk score and comparison site, and tackled everything from weaponised AI threats to Kafka-powered scalability, all while navigating the messy, unpredictable, and often painful journey of building something that lasts.

Continue reading →

From Founder to CEO: Lessons in Leadership, Growth, and Resilience

Leave a Reply

For any startup founder, the journey from idea to execution is filled with challenges. However, the biggest transformation isn’t just in scaling a business, it’s in evolving from a founder into a CEO.

Continue reading →

The Lifelong Bond Between Oliver Sacks and Leonard Shengold: A Journey of Healing and Transformation

Leave a Reply

The lifelong relationship between neurologist Oliver Sacks and psychoanalyst Leonard Shengold bridged the fields of neurology and psychoanalysis, blending Sacks’ focus on neurological disorders with Shengold’s exploration of trauma. Their five-decade-long therapeutic bond profoundly shaped Sacks’ work, emphasizing the interplay between identity, resilience, and human experience, and illustrating the value of interdisciplinary collaboration in understanding the mind.

Continue reading →

Myth of the West: Failed Utopia

Leave a Reply

This article, the culmination of my reflections on the myth of the West, deconstructs the utopian dream of the Western frontier, exploring its evolution from Manifest Destiny to Silicon Valley. Through historical analysis, literary critiques, and a look at Hollywood’s portrayal of the West, it examines how the promise of freedom and opportunity often fell short, revealing the complexities of the Western ideal. For me, this myth resonates deeply, intertwined with personal influences like Celtic romanticism, family legacies, and cross-cultural inspirations from Kurosawa.

Continue reading →