Amar Singh, co-founder of Cyber Management Alliance, joins LeaderSpeak for a candid discussion about passion, delegation, customer understanding, and the inevitability of failure. His account of entrepreneurship focuses less on polished success stories and more on the attitude and discipline needed to keep building.
Amar is a CEO, CISO, cyber-crisis and incident-response practitioner, and public speaker. He came from a business family and had a deeply technical background before starting his own venture with co-founder Bal Rai. Cyber Management Alliance provides services including trusted advice, crisis management, and tabletop exercises.
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Amar’s family background gave him an early connection to business, while his technical career created a desire to build in cybersecurity. Traditional employment did not always provide enough freedom to create, choose an approach, or help clients in the way he believed was most effective. Meeting a compatible co-founder helped turn that inclination into a practical business.
He places passion at the centre of the decision. Starting a company is too demanding to sustain through financial motivation alone. When the work reflects a genuine interest, the long hours feel connected to a purpose rather than merely an obligation.
Cybersecurity and crisis response do not fit neatly into office hours. Amar describes the work as 24x7: the company must listen when clients need help, while also managing an online operation, service delivery, staff, and the development of new offerings. There is always another task, so the day can feel as though it never fully ends.
That makes delegation essential. A founder eventually reaches a point where personally doing everything is impossible. Amar looks for people with the right skills, attitude, and passion, explains the outcome, and gives them room to deliver it. He sees micromanagement as a major obstacle, particularly in a startup.
Delegation only works when people understand what the founder is asking them to achieve. Amar identifies clear communication as one of the hard parts of leadership. A young company also needs to resist trying to “boil the ocean.” Large organisations may have the resources to pursue many directions, but a small team should remain honest about what it can accomplish today.
The same realism applies to cash flow and failure. Not every business succeeds, and setbacks can be deeply discouraging. Amar treats failures as lessons and advises new founders to expect to fall, recover, and continue rather than interpreting failure as proof they should never have tried.
Technical expertise is not enough if a business cannot understand its clients. Amar warns against becoming so attached to a solution that the company keeps promoting it after a customer has asked for something else. His analogy is a seller praising a magnificent elephant to someone who needs a goat.
Removing unnecessary technical language and listening carefully can prevent that disconnect. The objective is not to demonstrate how advanced a service is, but to solve the problem the client actually has.
