Writing from Eudai on positioning, category design, and go-to-market for security, risk, and resilience companies. Practical frameworks, no gated PDFs.
Six developments from one week in August, and the through-line connecting them: AI moved from recommendation into execution, from software into physical systems, and from contained testing into environments nobody authorized.
How to position your cybersecurity startup to investors.
Investors are not buying your product. They are buying a claim about a market and evidence that you are the team who gets to own it. The sequence for building that narrative before a raise.
The B2B cybersecurity demand gen playbook.
Security buying committees do not behave like the funnel your CRM was built for. How to architect the system, score the committee instead of the lead, sequence content to the decision, and report numbers a board will accept.
Choosing an audience by accident.
The most expensive marketing mistake is not a bad campaign. It is a target that was ill defined. Here is how the audience decision gets made by accident, and what it costs your business.
Founder voice and brand voice do different jobs.
Two accounts, two jobs. What belongs on the founder profile, what belongs on the company page, and the sentence where a good post quietly turns into an ad.
Start with 40 names.
When the numbers look worse every month, the fix is usually a shorter list and the relationships already on it.
Stop Spreading Yourself Thin: A Framework for Channel Selection
Most channel decisions get made by imitation, bias, or by whoever is selling to you. How to choose deliberately.
Ranking for your own name is not distribution.
If your site only shows up when someone searches your company name, you have a directory listing. A plain-language guide to fixing that, for founders and operators who are not marketers.
Conference season starts three weeks before the conference.
What decides the return is the outreach before it, the rooms you are in instead of a booth, and the ten days after.
An embarrassment of opportunity.
A trusted advisor asked whether my portfolio was indecision or an embarrassment of opportunity. The question was worth writing about.
Founder intuition is a hypothesis. Test it before you fund it.
Early-stage teams say they want an evidence-driven business, then open the first marketing conversation with a feeling. Here is how to keep the instinct and still earn the spend.
Always be launching.
Launch is the one thing about marketing even well-resourced companies do badly. The fix is not a bigger moment, it's a habit the whole company knows how to run — with customers in it.
Your AI Notetaker Has Receipts
A printable reference with the 16 decisions and the guidance behind each — plus three things the legal guidance leaves out.
AI Needs a North Star, Not a Scarlet Letter
LinkedIn normalized AI-assisted writing, then decided to suppress the outcome we all saw coming. Where policy doesn't help, only a North Star strategy will.
Automating outbound without automating yourself into the spam folder.
AI agents in marketing: what works?
Agents work when the job has clear inputs, observable outputs and a way to tell whether the work is good. A working list of what works in the wild, and what gives your customers mediocre marketing.
How do I use AI to scale my business?
Find the constraint on growth, then apply AI there — with the authority levels and oversight that keep it defensible. Nine places it creates real leverage today.
Building your AI bench.
Not one assistant you ask everything. A small system of agents with defined responsibilities, real context, and clear approval levels — an operating layer that accumulates intelligence instead of reconstructing it.
The myth of the lead machine.
Companies build funnels, scoring models and dashboards, then diagnose the shortfall as volume. The machine does not create the momentum. The momentum makes the machine possible.
We named microsimulations. The community made it a movement.
A category name that gets adopted stops belonging to you \u2014 and starts drifting toward the change that needs to happen. How to tell when it is time for a second category journey.
Getting an analyst to say your category name out loud.
Briefing analysts is the easy part. Getting your term into their language, in a document you did not write, is a sequence \u2014 and most companies run it backwards.
Hugging Face got breached and wrote the language everyone else is using.
A first-of-its-kind AI attack hit the company. Five days later its language was the industry's. The crisis-comms lesson is the category-design lesson.
Danger positioning is a loan with high interest.
Telling the market your technology is dangerously capable buys attention today and sends the bill later. Two recent incidents show who collects and how quickly.
Agentic dev tools are the new shadow IT \u2014 with a bigger blast radius.
This month\u2019s agentic-tooling incidents expose a class of exposure the old shadow-IT playbook was never built to catch. It lands on the teams shipping software and the vendors selling the guardrails.
Category design for security startups: a playbook.
Category creation is an operating discipline that plays out over quarters. What it takes to make a market call you the thing you say you are.
How to tell a real fractional CMO from a consultant with a deck.
The title gets attached to freelancers, advisors, and consultants who hand over a strategy deck and vanish. The real thing is narrower — and the handoff is the entire point.
Marketing for investors: de-risking a security bet and readying a company to raise or exit.
Positioning does not stop at the company. For funds and the founders they back, the same discipline that wins customers makes a business legible to capital.
Your voluntary framework is now a liability.
In June the U.S. made frontier-model review optional. Whether you build security software or buy it, the bar just moved to someone new.
The government read Anthropic's positioning and believed it.
An export ban on two frontier models leaned on a story the company had told for years. Whoever writes the positioning and whoever reads it should both take the lesson.
The EU AI Act deadline is a go-to-market moment.
The EU AI Act's high-risk rules bite on August 2. It is a deadline for the companies in scope and an opening for the vendors who serve them.
Agentic AI crossed from deployment risk to production liability.
In three weeks a dozen unrelated groups said the same thing about AI agents. It matters whether you build the controls or depend on them.
AI security riders are rewriting 'reasonable security.'
Cyber insurers are starting to require AI-specific controls before they pay a claim. It reaches the company buying coverage and the vendor selling the safeguards.
Hiring for AI governance is outrunning the ability to do it.
AI-governance titles grew 17% last year while the programs behind them barely moved. Read it whether you hold the title or sell to it.
When the HVAC is the attack surface.
Researchers made data-center cooling and power hackable in June. It lands on the teams defending the building and the vendors selling the defense.
Third-party access is still the front door.
Another month, another run of breaches through a supplier. The lesson runs both ways: to the company exposed and the vendor selling the fix.
One global message no longer survives the AI market.
State laws diverge, the U.S. tries to preempt them, other countries set their own clocks. The single global message is done, whether you send it or receive it.
Naming a category that doesn't exist yet.
Naming-by-committee is how good categories die. Here is a four-step alternative that actually ships.
Marketing that already speaks your category.
Domain fluency, senior judgment, and the speed to turn both into work that lands — a website in as little as a week instead of two months.
5 tips for wannabe CMOs: marketing with clarity.
Paula joins Crono to share five lessons for first-time and aspiring CMOs — on positioning, clarity, and building a marketing function that lasts.
Microsimulations: why risk programs are converging on play.
The risk teams pulling ahead have replaced the annual tabletop with continuous, scenario-driven microsimulations — and they market them like product.
The fractional CMO problem.
Why most fractional engagements stall at month four — and the engagement model that holds up.
Selling to the GRC buyer in 2026.
The GRC buyer has lived through twenty years of vendor pattern-matching. Here's what cuts through.
Don't build it. Validate it first.
A four-week market-readiness program for founders deciding whether to build the next thing — or pivot the current one.
Resilience documentation that nobody reads (and how to fix it).
The documentation problem is a positioning problem in disguise. Three patterns from working with regulated industries.
When founder-led marketing runs out.
The signs that say it's time to bring in senior marketing leadership — and the ones that say wait, or hire something else entirely.
The AI governance room is open. Who's in it?
AI governance is forming a buying committee. Mapping the room — security, legal, risk, product — and who was there first.
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Positioning, category design, GRC and AI governance — and the operating craft behind them.