At SBK, we work with start-ups that are moving quickly. They are shipping fast, breaking things, fixing things, and most times pushing security aside until something breaks. This is not failure. It is simply how early-stage building has always worked.
Here is the shift we are asking you to make:
You do not need a CISO or a huge budget to treat security as part of your craft. You do not need a team of experts before you start building a security culture. The best time to begin is before your first SOC2 audit.
Founding teams often believe the sequence goes like this: build the product, get customers, scale, and only later hire someone to manage security. By then, insecurity has already been baked into your codebase, your cloud settings, and your habits. That becomes technical debt and cultural debt.
No one wants to be the start-up with admin credentials in GitHub. No one wants to expose customer data through a misconfigured dashboard. No one wants to pitch to an enterprise buyer and then fail the security questionnaire. We have seen it happen.
We have also seen something better. Small teams with no security hire building cultures of care. They do it by treating security as part of how they work, not as something to spend a pretty penny on.
A Shared Responsibility: What We Have Learned at SBK
Make security part of the conversation early
You do not need a playbook to start. Begin by asking better questions. Make it normal to bring up security in product reviews, stand-ups, and onboarding. Once it becomes part of the conversation, it naturally flows into decisions.
Automate the guardrails
Security should not depend on memory. Systems should do the heavy lifting. Use GitHub secret scanners. Turn on MFA and password policies. Keep IAM roles least-privilege by default. And stop copy-pasting credentials in Slack.
Keep learning light
People switch off when they are handed a 45-minute video once a year. What works better is short Slack drops. Questions that spark curiosity. Learning that feels like a puzzle, not a punishment.
Celebrate security wins
Culture is shaped by what we celebrate. Give credit to the engineer who flags a suspicious pattern. Openly appreciate the PM who adds an extra layer of access control. Thank the marketer who spots a phishing attempt. When people see that care is valued, they copy it.
How SBK Helps
We do not stand outside and preach best practices. We step inside your workflow.
Our Slack prompts are not quizzes. They are conversations.
Our Montessori-inspired content encourages curiosity instead of memorisation.
Our tooling sits inside the tools you already use. We meet you where you are.
We help you build instincts and infrastructure for a security-first company, even if you are still pre-Series A. You do not need to wait for a $200k hire. You need habits, shared language, and a little support. This is how SBK fits into your company.
Security is Cultural
The truth is simple. Some of the most secure start-ups we know have no in-house security team. What they have is curiosity, commitment, and clarity. Security culture is not something you outsource. It is something you grow.
If you start now, your future team will thank you. Your customers will thank you. Your investors will thank you too.
