Five years ago today, on March 9, 2015, I remember waking up and having no idea what I was doing. I mean I had a broad vision of what we were building at Curricula, an education company that will change the way people learn about cyber security.
Our initial focus was with utilities in North America to help protect our nation’s critical infrastructure. That idea soon turned into something much bigger than I expected. I started Curricula after near a decade working at NERC, the agency responsible for securing our nation’s power grid in North America.
As a cyber security advisor, I saw the problems because I experienced them firsthand in my advisory and audit visits. When I look back over the past 5 years of my life, it’s pretty impressive to see how far our founding team has come both personally and professionally.
The biggest advice I can say to anyone going on a similar journey is to listen and be resourceful. We work tirelessly for our customers and it shows in everything we do.
Over the years there were plenty of ups and downs. I even kept a personal blog which I hope to share with everyone years from now. Hey, who knows maybe we will land a movie deal down the road!
All I can say is that without the incredible team we have, Curricula would never be what it is today. These past several years have been the most powerful years for us to learn about our customers, our industry, and ourselves. It made us better. It made Curricula better.
We built a brand that people love and a service bigger than all of us. I’ll get random emails from customers and employees every month saying how much they love our episodes and that makes it all worth the journey. Sure, it took us a lot longer to get here as a bootstrapped company, but I wouldn’t change that for the world.
We accomplished so much over the past 5 years. Our security awareness training program is used by companies and employees across the world. We made a fun tool for helping train employees to lock their computers. We made our phishing simulator powered by a 5-year old villain hacker DeeDee. And we continued to build upon the most exciting approach to security awareness this industry has ever seen.
What’s next for Curricula?
Always remember that a business doesn’t exist without its customers. We always had a strong focus on our customers. We listen to their stories and their struggles. We learn from them and do our best to make their lives better.
When Curricula closed our $3M Series A deal several months ago, I finally realized what to look for in our equity partner. RCP Equity is the reason that Curricula is leveling up to be a global fun security awareness brand. We can’t wait to share what’s coming next. A year ago today, Curricula was 4 full-time employees. Now we are approaching 20 ‘Curriculoos’ and growing each month.
We invested a lot of time with our brand and our people. It’s the one thing that cannot be replicated and has resonated with so many employees across the globe. Sure, competitors will try to copy our software, our approach, our design, and everything in between. Heck, they may even try to be fun at some point!
But they can’t be us. They can’t care as much as us. They can’t have the same insight into the problem as us. They will never be Curricula. We have seen competitors raise more money than the GDP of a small country, and we have seen competitors literally give their product away for free. I enjoy it because without choices, without pressure, this industry will never progress.
Over the next several years our team is going to be working on solving problems that this industry is in desperate need of answers. We are going to continue to build towards the future of where we need to be in security awareness and not where it was.
We have to move towards a future that we all want to be in. We have to realize as a security community that the threat of an uneducated workforce is global.
Hackers aren’t going to wait for budgets, or compliance dates, or policies to get signed. They are going to strike when it’s convenient. And guess what: it’s convenient to strike your employees 24 hours a day.
Curricula’s mission is to fix boring security awareness programs across the world. You have my promise that the entire Curricula team will work as hard as we can towards making your company and employees’ lives safer. We are working towards a completely unique security awareness approach that employees will grow on their educational journey with us.
I ask that you make that same promise to work just as hard for security awareness in your organization. Take the same commitment and we will all start moving forward, together.
Thank you to everyone that continues to support us.
-Nick
Enjoy Learning.
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