How Altostrat Started

In mid-2024, I made the decision that I needed to move on from my beloved MikroCloud. When I wrote the first line of code for it back in 2019, I managed to sell the solution to 8 customers. Fast forward to 2024, the software that I created with a team of three people had made its way to over 4,000 deployments, some in countries I didn't even know existed.

So why was it time to move on? It came down to the size of the problem. I had grown increasingly frustrated by the fact that our impact wasn’t going to be big enough. The business was too niche. After significant investment, the board of the company wasn’t ready for a pivot, and the sense of urgency I felt around this had consumed me.

It woke me up more times than my newborn daughter did. By May, around my 35th birthday, I decided that I will leave MikroCloud. I had done reasonably well in two other businesses in which I held a stake, so whether or not I had a salary was of little consequence.

A few weeks later, I hopped on a plane with my partner and our little new born and took a month-long holiday in Bali, Indonesia. While there I had decided that I would not get involved with or start another business until I could answer a question to myself:

I have been gifted with time and skills, what’s my responsibility?

Money is irrelevant to this question. I am good at what I do, so it doesn’t matter where I go; I’ll get paid.

I have this sense of urgency that is worse than a house fire, and it stems from a simple fact: if I lose money, I can make it again, but if I lose time, it’s forever lost. Holidays feel like torture to me. I love spending time with my girls, but that sense of urgency is just always there, like a trapped coal miner. It’s do or die. Will I make my mark or fail?

There is one theme that’s followed me throughout my life: I gravitate toward problems, and I try solve them. I believe that is why I’m here. My responsibility is to pick a problem and get up every morning to solve it.

From August through October, I decided to buy folks lunch. Anyone with a perspective who was willing to give me their time. Many of those people had never met me. I sent countless LinkedIn messages along the lines of… "I’d like to learn something from you, I can pay you with coffee, can we set up a meeting, I’ll come to you?" It worked surprisingly well, although I am sure it gave off ample stalker vibes too!

There was one question that I asked everyone intentionally:

To my surprise, the answers oscillated between slow business growth, compliance risk, and cyber risk.

I had my last lunch meeting on a Tuesday afternoon in October, around the 20th if I recall. I met up with two guys I'd met a few years prior: Brian and Ryan. They run a great B2B ISP operation across Australia. We had lunch near their offices and ended up talking for 5 hours.

I decided the next morning. My responsibility is to solve problems where cybersecurity intersects compliance and AI.

I incorporated Altostrat the following Monday, October 28th.

To everyone who gave me their time over those three months (including folks in South Africa, the Netherlands, and Austria, who completed my survey), I’m forever grateful because I know very well that an hour spent is forever lost.

We’re building a cybersecurity platform that is AI-powered and compliance-aware. Let’s go 🚀