A couple of months ago, we were struggling to recruit. For any tech start-up, getting the right development team on board is vital, and finding those people was hard. We had some good external help, some good internal referrals and, frankly, some luck. Start-ups need luck, and we’ve had some good fortune around our (great) new employees.
We’re now in the position where we’ve managed to assemble a really strong team – our final development team member (for now…) joins in the middle of February – plus a project/sprint/product manager, and a brilliant executive assistant. The change has already been striking: development is forging ahead, we’re able to track what we’re doing, manage the increasing involvement from the open source community around Enarx, and offload some of the day-to-day running of the company to our admin support.
This leaves me and Nathaniel, Profian’s founders, with more time to focus on the important next steps:
- finalising and documenting the design of the products and services Enarx will enable Profian to make available to our customers;
- planning the roadmap – both on the open source and commercial side – and ensuring that we have mechanisms and measures to track our progress against it;
- firming up not only how Profian’s products and services will look and function, but also how to present (market) and sell them to our potential customers.
These may seem like obvious things to be doing, but it’s easy to lose track of them or allow them to slide from your focus as you’re trying to ensure that you have enough people to build what you need, are paying your bills, following your accountants’ and lawyers’ advice, keeping your investors happy and all the rest of running a start-up.
So, what can you expect to see next? Well, the next externally obvious event should be a new release of Enarx. This is one of the key roadmap milestones, and is going to allow those interested in TEEs to start playing with them much more easily, and to create applications which can actually do useful things. It’s not what we’re calling “Minimum Viable Project” yet, but we’re hoping that anyone with a technical bent will be able to pick up the project and get it running easily, writing and running applications which will allow everyone to see the exciting possibilities that the project brings to enterprise security. Keep your eyes peeled, and we should have an announcement soon!