A person who fails a lot. Its me we’re talking about.

That’s right I don’t mind admitting it. I fail and I do it a lot. 

Exams? I fail them almost all the first time. Second time, almost, but I pass them with the bare minimum. I have always done that with most classes. No matter how hard I studied I always failed them the first time. 

Same with projects, I fail the first time. Then I have to fix something in order to make it work and I pass doing so. 

I failed at sports, always lacked motivation. I failed at keeping contact with my family from my dads side. I failed my own mother.
How did I manage that? I still live at home at the age of 25 almost 26 and haven;t had a part time job in years. I keep blaming the system, that I am too old for most part time jobs and then I’m almost done with college so there is no use in finding something.

And when I fail, I know what I failed at without looking at the end result. I just remember were I messed up. And how I should have done it differently. Why does this happen to me?

I cannot be the only person who has this feeling…

But most freighting of it all is how will I handle getting a job, having a job, living on my own feed?

Time will tell. 

Where To Start With Info Sec?

My opinion is that you should start when you are growing and growing fast.

Begin with making inventories of what you have now. What hardware etc., so start with Asset Management.
Look at your policies, agreements, contracts with employers and suppliers. Then start working on implementing because stuff that involve your current policies.

But in all fairness before you do this all look at what information security is, where it can help your business the most. After that slowly work towards implementing the rest of it as your business ad company grows. One information security specialist per 100 employees should be fine. It will be hard work initially but should fade to an 80% after year 2 or 3.

Oh what ever you do, dont name him CISO! It means bigger pay grade, something you should avoid till about 500 or more employees :)

When Do You Start Info Security?

As I am still in college finishing up my bachelor degree, which I’d much rather not do and just get a job, I got to think.

During my study they tell us information security is best started early on. But too early on is a waste of time, money and resources. Too late and it will become a burden. So when is the best time look into this and at what scale should you do it? 

This had me thinking. I am highly interested in Tech startups and I have even visited some to look at while I was in New York on vacation. I hope to either work of do my internship at one startup in the USA. But the question is: What company size is this best suited for? And what kind of company is this best suited for?

In theory companies of 15+ employees should look into this. In theory any kind of company in any industry should look into this. Some more than others. 

Example 1: Squarespace, they have about 60 employees now and are hiring at a high pace. So they should definitely be looking into it. And after my meeting with them they are. If you are a more experienced information security guy, keep an eye on their career section. 

Example 2: Skillshare way smaller team (15 or so at the moment), different focus than Squarespace and an easier manageable team when it comes to Information Security.

At a company like Squarespace an information security expert should have a good 80% of work. But at Skillshare it would be 20%. 

Some industries that need to have security by design are: 

  • Enterprise SaaS 
  • Enterprise mobile 
  • Online payments 
  • Mobile payments 
  • Gaming (if they take micro-payments) 
  • Personal financial startups 
  • Ad networks (often used to seed malware, need to combat click fraud) 
  • Companies that do their own CC billing (PCI)

I hope this helped. I will be posting more on this over time.

Laying in bed thinking about an email

While i was in New York i visited several startups. One of those startups contacted me fairly quick saying they were interested in information security but not from an intern standpoint but full time. Which is sad for me unless id take that offer up.

And that has been keeping me awake for a few days late at night. Thinking how would i handle it, school hasnt really taught us start to finish so to speak. But that is because information security really has no start to finish guidelines. Stuff is in place or isnt. So for this particular situation i was thinking about a strategy.

I would start with an inventory of three things: people, data and ‘hardware’.
After that come up with a focus and strategy for that with taking the business as a strong foundation.
Look at relevant industry guidelines, standards and regulations in order to comply with the law.
Then id get a focus group of the right people to get the right focus and commitment. This is important for it to work.
Then start creating, implementing and rolling out the changes, enhancements and improvements to the business, internally and maybe even help improve the external connections.
When all that is done a foundation has been laid and its time to work to advance all those implementations, get certified to which is relevant for the business, comply with all required regulations domestic as overseas. And enhance everything.

This is in a nutshell how i would do it. But i am a junior information security guy, not even an expert.


This blog post has been written from my mobile phone and may contain wrongly formed and or spelled words and or sentences.

Thanks for reading.

My 2011 highlights

These are my highlights in 2011 in short.

Passing my dutch exam
Launch a company with great friends and entrepreneurs.
See the company fail
Relaunch it under a different name
Pivot the idea before major steps have been taken
Go on vacation alone to city I always wanted to visit, New York
Took steps toward a solid future

What will 2012 bring?

A launched company with the name fusedin
Closer to graduating
Internship in america
Gained traction and grown fusedin
Learn to code again to help the business

Vacation photos including random shots.

The vacation summary

Home! Well I have been home since saturday morning, but the blog post I made didn’t save so I had to rewrite it. 

Anyway, both flights were great, not a lot of turbulence except for the last bit in Netherlands (apparently there was a storm earlier). Landed in New York on a Tuesday at 7.30 PM and beat everyone on the way down to customs. Tim told me to be quick otherwise i’d be stuck there for at least an hour waiting, so I got up as soon as possible to get out. When I was done I turned around and was happy I beat everyone because there was huge row of people! 

After that I grabbed a yellow cab to my hotel. Stayed for one night at the Hilton on Times Square. Such a great hotel, clean, good bed and so quiet despite sleeping on Times Square. I guess the 25th floor made some difference. 
The next morning I woke up early due to jet-lag , I think I was up at 6AM. Did some school related stuff, called my mom to say I arrived safely (called via Skype due to bad connection). After all that I checked out, grabbed a cab to Tim’s house and crashed completely. Woke up at 5PM after a long couch nap. 

Later that evening we went out to eat some pizza in the city with a colleague of Tim. That pizza was delicious and I experienced first hand why a) people make more money in Manhattan then the avg. person and b) why the economy is in such a bad shape ($8 for a beer WHAT?!)

Thursday I had an appointment with Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures to talk about possible internships at one of their portfolio companies and to name drop the startup I am working on, because you gotta do what you gotta do. Came up with some interesting companies that could benefit from the internship such as Etsy as they are working on something which might need that security attention. 
For my appointment I was late, it was my first time ever being late for more then 5 minutes to a meeting. I was so late I felt embarrassed. Reason for being late? I got lost. Apparently that is bound to happened when being in Manhattan for the first time. I learned big time from it and after that I was on time like I always have been. Still not the best first impression so to speak. Sorry for that Fred if you’d ever read this.

On friday Tim and I headed to 5th Ave to buy a watch for my younger brother and a book for my mom. It took us a good few hours getting there and heading back. You’d be surprised that even Tim gets lost while has been living there for two years now.
Saturday was a relaxing day, we worked on fused.in, discussed some strategies and changed our direction from social to eSport events (more about that later).

Sunday we went to Woodbury, this is a village with outlet stores from big brands such as Hugo Boss, Oakley, Tommy Hilfiger and more. Bought 2 sweaters, new shoes and a new pair of pants. I think if you look at the prices here in the Netherlands I should have bought more (no seriously I should have!). 

Monday and tuesday were day’s of appointments. I visited Sunshine, Squarespace, Skillshare and Vaynermedia. A blog post about that can be found here. 

Wednesday I went out to buy some christmas stuff and mainly relaxed a bit. Same goes for thursday. Reason I took it relaxed was because I picked up some huge blisters from walking everywhere, I barely took a cab or the subway. I think I walked over 3 hours every day to places within the city. 

One thing that I found interesting was the fact that no one cooks. Everyone orders or goes out for dinner. And a result of that is, long waiting hours in order to get a seating unless you order in advanced but still then you eat late. Almost every day I ate at 9PM. Which was odd and my body had to adjust to it really quick. 

Due to this culture I ate very different every day, a lot of things I would normally not eat such as foie gras. What places did I eat at? Fig and Olive, Paradou’s and some belgium restaurant I forgot the name off.
All the food was outstanding and delicious, but I think you have to be when you paid almost double the money you’d pay in the avg. place in europe.

I also thought that the city would be overwhelming because of the traffic and such, but nothing like that was the case. Yes it was busy with cars and yes there were more people, but I didn’t mind it. It didn’t bother me what so ever, I think I can adjust really quick to situations like that. 

I sadly did not visit the traditional tourism stuff, however I did visit Grand Central and saw the first building on the WTC building site. Which looked awesome! I hope to go back in the near future without a business agenda and visit the normal stuff anyone would visit but for now this had to be done first. And I think the jet-lag ruined some parts of it as I was up so early every day, I was tired a lot. 

I did not take a lot of photo’s as I am not really the photo taking kind of guy (it just feels weird). I tried to film some on my flight, but that just turned out to be bad.

So that was my 9 days or so in Manhattan. Thank you Tim for letting me crash on your couch. Looking forward to our adventure in trying to tackle the eSport industry with you and Kris.

Thank you Skillshare, Vaynermedia and Fred Wilson for the interviews/talks. I am looking forward to hearing from you all.  Thanks Squarespace for getting back to me so quick, to bad it didn’t work out. I will try and reconnected as often as possible to see whether it is still relevant at that time. 

Now it time for me celebrate my second christmas day with the family. Thanks for reading and see you all later! 

Visits done and wow!

Yesterday I finished up all my meetings with the startups and businesses here that I had planned. And wow am I amazed by how friendly, open en willing people are to help you. The Netherlands should learn big time from this. 

Remember I contacted the companies with a very narrow time frame, mostly via email and I got responses within 1 work day. Had an open conversation, looked at their office and I noticed 1 big thing, no cubicles. But to me something even better, open spaces. Everyone is one big area, open to conversations with each other. 

I also loved how the meeting places looked like. At Vaynermedia the people got a budget, and were free to decorate a space anyway they liked to do so. The spaces at Union Square Ventures were divided by glass windows/doors. And at Skillshare and Squarespace it was like I said one open space. 

I could see my self working in spaces like this. It beats any office space I have worked in by 100x. It had a personal touch to it, which appealed to me. 

My meeting with Squarespace was good. Got the conversation rolling about an internship and hopefully get the opportunity to talk with them before I leave in two days. They seemed interested in Information Security and that is a good thing. 

My meeting with Skillshare was different, because their employee database was smaller and easier manageable on a scale where information security would be irrelevant. But Danya helped me figure out which startups would be relevant which is awesome. Another thing the Netherlands should learn from. When you cannot provide a place, help figure out alternative solutions. 

My meeting with Vaynermedia was the same as Squarespace. They are looking at Information Security as they are growing and growing fast. Yet they are still young and it is the perfect time to start thinking about it and start acting towards it.

So all I can do now is keep in touch with them and hope for the best. 

Today and tomorrow are the days I will most likely be spending on some school stuff and relaxing giving the feet some rest. But also have to buy some stuff for the family and hope I can find what I have in mind! 

Enjoy your holiday’s.
Thanks for the companies who gave me the opportunity to talk.
And thanks to those who made my stay here enjoyable.

Hopefully I will see Manhattan quicker than I hope it would :-)

First few days in Manhattan, NYC

TERRIBLE! Just kidding. 

It is awesome here, living in a big city in the Netherlands helped a lot though. Only certain places are overwhelming busy, the rest it is just “normal” traffic considering the size of the city. 

On wednesday I did nothing at all. I was up really early, did some stuff for school and then packed my suitcase to grab a cab to Tim’s house. The evening before I got the key from him so I could enter when he was gone. After putting my self on the couch and look at the view I passed out hard. Woke up 4 hours later in the dark. 

Thursday I had an appointment with Fred Wilson from Union Square Ventures. We talked about possible internship projects at their portfolio companies. It was a really interesting conversation and I am interested to see what is the end result of it. 
To bad I arrived late, like big time. I left 1 hour before the appointment and walked there. It was suppose to be a 30 minute walk, but I go lost. Something that barely happens to me because I like to prepare myself. I guess it was the annoying way the roads are layout etc. The buildings sometimes even have a few of the same numbers on the same street but depend on the side street. But I have that figured out now.

I also picked up huge blisters, as I had my shoes repaired before I left. And as of typing this, it is not a pleasure. So I hope they will go away soon, I will just keep bursting them (IEUW!)

Thursday night, we went out to dinner with a few friends/colleagues of Tim. We went to a belgium restaurant, which was surprisingly good. I had some beef stew called “Stoofvlees” in dutch. And it was good. Had a great time. 

Today (Friday), Tim had the day off so we went to Grand Central, which is huge. The new Apple store was busy and packed, but looked really good from downstairs. Great location. 

After going to grand central we went to the Fossil store to hook my younger brother up with a watch he asked me to buy. I got myself a new one also which is for the special occasions. And I bought my mom the latest Tom Clancy book which I hope she will like.

As of typing this, I am relaxing to get rid of these annoying blisters. Haha.

Next week I will be visiting 4 more startups to see whether it is possible to do an internship and to see what is possible. So i’ll be typing another post up next week.

For now, good evening (or morning) and onwards to next week! 

I arrived!

So after 7.30 hours of flying I arrived.

The flight was awesome, not a lot of turbulence and sat next to an elderly and recent retired couple who went to visit their daughter in NYC. To bad there was an asshole in front of me who collapsed his chair back in sleep mode 10 minutes after we took off and nearly wrecked my laptop. So I kindly forced him to sit straight again. 

But thats now the point, I arrived! The city isn’t as busy as I thought it would be. Yes, alright big buildings, lots of traffic but not a whole lot of people. Slept at the Hilton on Time Square on the 25th floor facing the Empire state building… well all i saw was its tip. And I was expecting a lot of noise, but no, I slept like a baby (well almost, woke up several times due to time difference). I guess not facing time square helps a lot and the 25th floor thing also. 

The upcoming 2 weeks I will be spending some time here, looking for an internship, connect with startups and people around that. It will be interesting. 

Today I hope to grab some lunch with the cofounder of Minus and hopefully get to see their office. 

More blog posts to come!