Vikram Mehta discusses leaving an enterprise security leadership role to found a cloud security product company. He explains how years of conversations with CISOs exposed a recurring problem, why an early-stage founder must keep returning to strategy, and how focus, delegation, and team ownership make the work sustainable.
Before becoming an entrepreneur, Vikram spent a significant part of his career in enterprise security, including serving as a CISO within the MakeMyTrip group. His teams had already been building internal security platforms, which strengthened his interest in product development. At the same time, organizations were rapidly adopting cloud services, while many security practices still reflected on-premises assumptions.
That gap shaped the company’s objective: make cloud security easier, more comprehensive, and sustainable. Vikram does not describe the concept as a uniquely original idea. Its value came from addressing a real and sufficiently large problem, then validating that problem through conversations with security leaders.
Leaving a strong role at an established organization was not easy. Vikram had already considered another concept that someone close to him challenged forcefully. Rather than treating rejection as the end of entrepreneurship, he used it as a reality check and kept examining which security problems were both genuine and commercially meaningful.
His platform-building experience supplied confidence, but validation remained essential. A founder must ask whether the problem is large enough and urgent enough that the resulting product can find a market, not merely whether the team can build it.
In the early stage, Vikram devoted at least half his time to product questions: whether the team was building the right capabilities and solving problems that mattered. The rest went to market reach, customer conversations, customer success, and running a lean organization.
Urgency can easily pull a startup away from its purpose. Vikram therefore pauses periodically to compare daily actions with the long-term vision. If the goal is a scalable, sustainable security product, short-term choices should support rather than undermine it.
Founders initially handle accounts, contracts, compliance, hiring, and many other functions. Vikram’s answer is not to retain every task forever. Work such as HR compliance can move to specialist providers when it is no longer the best use of the core team’s time. Delegation preserves attention for product and customer problems without pretending that operational responsibilities do not exist.
For Vikram, an organization is made by its people. Team members need meaningful ownership, not merely a list of tasks. Interesting technology alone will not retain talent if people feel disconnected from the outcome or unable to influence it—especially in a competitive hiring market.
He also challenges the idea that startup commitment means permanent overwork. A serious company takes years to build. Short bursts may be necessary, but repeatable progress requires rest, health, family time, and breaks before exhaustion damages judgment.
Enterprise product experience did not answer every startup question. Vikram had to consider co-founders, fundraising, timing, go-to-market strategy, and marketing. He highlights entrepreneurship resources from Wingify founder Paras Chopra and Ankur Warikoo as useful introductions to these wider decisions.
