Kumar Ritesh, chairman and CEO of Cyfirma, discusses the thinking behind a cybersecurity company built around predictive intelligence. The conversation covers the market gap that prompted the venture, the way he divides tactical and strategic work, and why conviction, talented colleagues, and care for people’s wellbeing matter when a company is growing.
At the time of the interview, Ritesh described Cyfirma as a four-year-old cybersecurity company specialising in threat discovery and cyber intelligence. It had offices in Singapore, Tokyo, India, and the United States, with a team of 55 and backing from Goldman Sachs, Zodius Capital, and Z3Partners. Its customers included Fortune 500 businesses and government agencies across sectors such as manufacturing, finance, critical infrastructure, food, and brokerage.
The company built a SaaS platform called DeCYFIR. Rather than concentrating only on how an attack might happen, Ritesh wanted to help customers understand who may target them, why the organisation is attractive, what an adversary wants, and when an attack could occur.
When assessing the market in 2017, Ritesh saw many security products addressing the mechanics of an attack but a gap around the wider intelligence questions. Cyfirma set out to provide an external view of an organisation’s threat landscape and explain how attractive it might appear to cybercriminals.
That intelligence needs to be specific enough to support decisions. Ritesh describes tailoring insights to a customer’s industry, technology, and geography, while combining attack-surface visibility, vulnerability intelligence, brand intelligence, situational awareness, and digital risk. The objective is not generic reporting but a forward-looking picture relevant to one organisation.
Ritesh separates his responsibilities into tactical and strategic categories. Tactical work asks what can be done today to move the business forward. It may involve a people issue, a product challenge, or adapting the platform to a new environment. He also plans in weekly increments, identifying three or four actions that move the company closer to its objectives and tracking those near-term aspirations.
Strategic time is reserved for the longer horizon: entering a new market, sustaining innovation, improving the product, and building the right culture. He deliberately allocates hours to these priorities even though the day of an entrepreneur rarely follows a fixed plan.
Ritesh’s first lesson for a founder is not to abandon a sound idea merely because other people doubt the product or market. Conviction must begin with the founder before it can guide an organisation. His second lesson is to surround that conviction with capable people. No founder can master every discipline, so assembling complementary talent is essential.
His third lesson concerns difficulty. An easy option may produce a quick result, while the more demanding path can produce the experience and story that shape a durable company. He advises founders not to treat struggle as evidence that the journey is wrong.
Ritesh agrees that alternative plans are valuable, but he cautions that some events sit outside every scenario. During the pandemic, priorities changed from expansion and shareholder value toward keeping the team intact and supporting people’s mental wellbeing. Plans remained useful, but leadership required an immediate response to circumstances no one had predicted.
This shift reinforces a broader point: business plans should guide action without preventing leaders from recognising what the organisation most needs now.
