We’ve spent our careers in Internet endpoint security, and at our last company we saw every day how malware was consistently beating anti-malware and how stranded that leaves people.
So we heeded the call and lit out to build the FixMeStick. The principles underlying the FixMeStick are tried and true, and are no surprise to anyone in Internet security. The engineering challenge would be to get the principles to work on a mass scale for non-technical consumers.
Early in the first year of our startup journey we actually became disenchanted with the FixMeStick, and ditched the concept for several weeks. We were concerned that as an investment we were too outside of what was popular within the startup and venture-capital community (mobile, social, cloud).
During this period we constantly had to explain to friends and family, and other random people we would meet out and about, what we were “starting up.”
So we told our story and about how great startups are and how exciting it was to be in the ideation phase. We would list some of our newest “investment candidates” and also some of the ideas that we had decided NOT to do, i.e. the FixMeStick.
9 times out of 10 IF the person was NOT an industry insider, they would cut us off with “I love that FixMeStick idea, I need one of those”.
After hearing that about 30 times we decided to stop our search (and over-analysis), gear-down, and build the FixMeStick. We’ve put everything we’ve got into this product and, as a result, our startup journey filled with blood, sweat and tears has been the fun and rewarding kind that we originally set out after.
We hope you love the product!
Best,
Marty and Corey