Muslim Koser shares lessons from more than two decades in cybersecurity and from building Volon, a customer-focused threat-intelligence company. He explains why startup life resists rigid plans, why technical founders must remain close to the work, and how belief, persistence, and disciplined customer listening turn an idea into a useful product.
Muslim’s cybersecurity journey began in network engineering and developed through information security, professional services, vulnerability assessment, and work supporting national-level computer emergency response teams. Around 2009, he helped establish an India-based research team for iSIGHT Partners, which was later acquired by FireEye.
That work exposed him to threat intelligence when the discipline was still unfamiliar to many organisations in India. Customers sometimes regarded it as solely a law-enforcement function. After years in the field, Muslim saw an opportunity to create an Indian company that supplied focused, customer-specific intelligence instead of generic inputs. That idea became Volon.
Muslim’s goal was to address needs that established organisations were not serving effectively. For any startup, that distinction is crucial: a young company often competes against much larger businesses and needs a clear reason for a customer to choose it.
He therefore spends time examining where the company can create distinctive value and how it can compete through innovation. Customer questions and feedback feed directly into that work. An early-stage company may not have a separate support organisation, so founders handle these conversations themselves. The workload is demanding, but it reveals customer pain without layers of interpretation.
The first rule of a startup, in Muslim’s account, is that events will not follow the plan. Unexpected issues keep founders on their toes and teach them capabilities they did not know they needed. A typical day moves among customer feedback, product direction, the roadmap, and allocation of scarce people and money.
Resource constraints shape every decision. Startups cannot staff each function as a large company would, so the founder must optimise the team that exists. The challenge is to keep solving today’s problem while checking that the product has not drifted away from its intended direction.
For a technical product, Muslim believes a founder with technical knowledge must be prepared to use it. Large organisations can support layers of management and delegation. A small company may instead need its founder to troubleshoot a customer issue, examine implementation details, micromanage a critical delivery, or even write code.
This is not an argument for permanently controlling every task. It reflects the stage and available resources: vision is difficult to translate into a product if the founder cannot enter the details when the team needs help.
Muslim’s first lesson is belief without self-imposed conditions. Constantly asking whether an important task is outside one’s capabilities can create its own roadblock. The second is persistence. Entrepreneurship can be tense, tiring, and slow; progress depends on staying in the journey long enough to learn and improve.
His third lesson is to respect the customer. Founders can become attached to their own ideas and continue building while users move in another direction. Not every request can enter the roadmap, but customer feedback deserves serious evaluation because those users experience the problem every day.
Passion also needs structure. Muslim advises prospective founders to study the competitive landscape, target market, unmet need, differentiation, and path to success. If those answers are missing, the next step is more thought and strategy—not an impulsive launch.
