Aseem Jakhar joins LeaderSpeak to explain how a small security meetup in Pune grew into communities, conferences, a consultancy, and security products. Calling himself an “accidental entrepreneur,” he presents the journey not as a single startup plan, but as a series of responses to problems encountered while building and testing real systems.
Aseem specialises in IoT, embedded and hardware security, mobile security, secure development, and training. He co-founded Payatu, null, nullcon, and hardwear.io, and created the open-source EXPLIoT framework. Before becoming an entrepreneur, he worked at IBM on Proventia intrusion-prevention and unified-threat-management products.
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While at IBM, Aseem and colleagues noticed that India had active technology user groups but few consistently active places for security practitioners to meet and share knowledge. They started null in Pune with a simple purpose: learn and exchange what they knew. Interest spread to Bangalore and then other cities.
The growing community inspired nullcon in 2009, an international conference intended to connect local practitioners with researchers from elsewhere. The first event had only about 117 attendees, including staff and camera crew. Running it alongside full-time jobs proved unsustainable, so the founders left their employers, planned to fund the conference through consulting, and formed Payatu.
Consulting demand grew through community relationships. Organisations asked for help with firewalls, source-code reviews, networks, and products. As the workload increased, the founders separated responsibilities: one concentrated on nullcon while Aseem and another co-founder developed the consulting practice.
When considering international expansion, they decided that reproducing nullcon in a crowded conference market would add little. Their growing IoT and embedded-security work revealed a clearer gap: dedicated hardware-security events. That led to hardwear.io in the Netherlands, supported in its first year by the local municipal government.
Testing an IoT ecosystem involves many interfaces and often requires custom scripts because suitable enterprise tools are scarce. Aseem began EXPLIoT to automate that work. The implementation changed as he learned about language and hardware-module constraints, but the underlying testing need remained.
Payatu’s vulnerability-research team encountered another scaling problem: laptop-based fuzzing limited how many instances they could run. An internal cloud project provided more compute and faster results. The team then recognised that enterprises faced the same problem, creating the basis for CloudFuzz. Aseem subsequently moved his focus toward product development for CloudFuzz and IoT Auditor.
Aseem’s day spans product calls, consulting concerns, customer communication, deadlines, and pro bono work. During the pandemic, team health became another daily concern. His first question is often whether the team has made progress since the previous day and whether any commitment is likely to slip.
His advice centres on three Ps: passion, patience, and perseverance. Passion sustains the work; patience recognises that success does not arrive overnight; perseverance keeps a worthwhile idea moving despite setbacks. He prefers adapting and pivoting a strongly held plan over diluting attention across many fallback plans.
