CyGO Entrepreneurs playbook, Glev Illustrated

Hello, Cyber Builders 🖖

I’m closing out our July series on application security with a story that doesn’t follow the usual startup script. No Hollywood launch. No founder fairy tale. Just the real, step-by-step process of building Glev inside CyGO Entrepreneurs—brick by brick.

Here’s the big idea I want you to walk away with: building a cybersecurity company is both art and science. It’s a process, not a spark—a long, deliberate, boots-on-the-ground process.

In this post, I will focus on four key principles. We have a process and plenty of tools, but I suppose it’s more interesting for you to understand the key elements.

Every great product starts with empathy. It is a very overlooked step by cybersecurity founders. Cybersecurity is often a deep tech play, with new technologies enabling more detection, analytics, or protection. I wrote about how cybersecurity must follow both playbooks in the article below: the SaaS one and the Deep Tech one.

Selling Cybersecurity: The SaaS Approach to Deep Tech Challenges

Building a new product requires empathy with its users, and this isn’t optional. It’s foundational.

We built Glev with one conviction: you can’t improve application security if you don’t live a day in the life of those who do it. I’ve shared this on Cyber Builders publications several times over the past two years.

That meant getting out of the building. Meeting with real practitioners—CTOs, AppSec engineers, security leads. We spend time with them. Interviewed them. These conversations were intense and vivid. We asked some uncomfortable but straightforward questions:

We learnt how they use their current set of tools (SAST scanners, DAST, Secret Leakage).

We had a window into daily pains: A chronic overload of triage. Constant context-switching. Compliance requests to support the business. Time lost to tools that made things more complicated, not easier.

And that shaped our conviction: you can’t improve software security (or product security) without improving the productivity of AppSec engineers.

In 2025, no one will deploy a tool that doesn’t save time. Period.

Building brick by brick is a virtuous approach: it ensures you’re solving real market problems—not just the ones you want to solve—and it keeps you from missing critical blind spots. A great product without the right go-to-market is wasted. Methodical assembly lays the foundation for long-term success.

Eric & Rodolphe, Glev Founders

Once we had a clear, testable concept—a concrete idea, as Andrew Ng coined it —worth exploring, we revisited our early interviewees. The goal was to share our ideas, our building plan, and our convictions.

Many contacts were confused and sent back to us polite congratulations, but without actionable next steps.

And sometimes something clicked. Several of those AppSec teams didn’t just say “sounds cool.” They said, “We are ready to help.”

That’s gold. Those are design partners.

These practitioners—AppSec Engineers, CISO, CTO, Engineering Managers, and Software Developers—understood the value of co-building. It might sound crazy, but they opened up their environments, giving us access (via VPN and API token) to their GitHub or GitLab repositories, CI/CD, and tickets.

They tested early ideas. Challenged us on what made sense. And gave us the kind of in-the-field feedback that product teams dream of.

They weren’t customers yet. They were co-builders.

This is the power of design partnerships: you don’t build for users—you build with them.

Glev didn’t grow in isolation. At CyGO Entrepreneurs, we build with a community.

The Club by CyGO is our inner circle. It’s a curated group of security-minded individuals who play an active role in shaping the ventures we launch. That includes CISOs, security engineers, compliance leaders, MSSPs, consulting, and early-stage founders. They’re not “users” in the traditional sense—they’re co-creators, design partners, early testers, and hard truth-tellers.

Inside the Club:

• We share early product ideas and get brutally honest feedback.

• We co-design and validate features in real environments.

• We host workshops, debriefs, and test sessions to stay connected to real-world pain points.

• We open up private betas for members who want early access and influence.

Members join because they believe in building more innovative, faster, more practical cybersecurity companies—and because they want a front-row seat (and a voice) in shaping what comes next.

CyGO Entrepreneurs is all about feedback and intensity.

We tapped into that ecosystem to stay grounded. To stay relevant. To never get too abstract. And it gave us the continuous loop we needed to evolve Glev, week by week, insight by insight.

It’s not a mailing list. It’s a builder community.

And here’s the final piece of the story, the one that is the most disturbing. The team did not meet at a hackathon. They were not former colleagues or college friends.

We bound them.

This started two years ago. We examined trends, including anticipating the EU Cyber Resiliency Act. We thought about inflection points, new ideas (like the “We are all software liable”).

That’s when we met Eric.

Eric was the CTO of a cybersecurity company. But he wanted more. He joined us to explore ideas and also to create his startup. He helped run the first interviews. He turned feedback into convictions. And he started designing Glev for AppSec Engineers, not just on a slide deck.

Then, through the CyGO Entrepreneurs founder network, Eric met Rodolphe. A seasoned SaaS sales entrepreneur with 12+ years in the B2B trenches. The timing was right. The energy aligned.

And just like that—or rather, after months of work—the founding team was in place.

It is not magic or a Brownian process of people turning into entrepreneurs or having overnight ideas. This is work. The Glev team and company were built. Block by block. Step by step.

Let me repeat it: Cyber success doesn’t come from ideas—it comes from building.

Don’t have to wait for a perfect idea.

You need a method and energy. A willingness to get your hands dirty. A team to work alongside you. A community to challenge you. And the patience to put each brick down in the proper order.

That’s what we did with Glev. We are committed to doing this every day on our projects.

Want to contribute? Want to test? Want to challenge? Want to build?

I’m here for it. Let’s keep building.

Laurent 💚