Security playbook for startup & scaleup CTOs

Congratulations. The funding has landed, the roadmap is ambitious, and the pressure is on. You’ve built something technically impressive, fast. Clients are interested. Momentum is growing.

But now the due diligence starts.

And with it, a reality check.

Requests for security documentation. Risk registers. Compliance evidence. Questions you weren’t expecting to answer this early. It’s not that you’ve ignored security. It just hasn’t been your focus. Like many technical founders and CTOs, you’ve prioritised building a great product, not writing policies.

This is the point where many high-growth startups stall. Not because the tech doesn’t work, but because the business isn’t ready for scrutiny.

Growth outpaced your governance. Now what?

The investor wants your access policy. Procurement is chasing proof of controls. The client asks where their data lives. And your team is scrambling.

Not because you didn’t care about security. Because you didn’t think it would matter yet.

Now it’s a bottleneck. Possibly even a deal-breaker.

The real risk isn’t an attack. It’s a delay.

Security vendors love to sell fear: breach statistics, ransomware headlines, zero-day exploits.

But the real threat to a growing business is losing time.

• Time lost answering awkward questions from clients or regulators
• Time lost fixing problems you could have prevented
• Time lost chasing certifications or scrambling for documentation
• Time lost cleaning up tools you bought too early

Good security doesn’t just protect your data. It protects your momentum.

Why Governance, Risk and Compliance (GRC) should lead

GRC is often misunderstood. It sounds like the domain of large enterprises and paperwork.

But done right, it gives you control.

It helps you identify what matters. It surfaces risk before someone else does. And it builds the bridge between what you’ve built and how you’ll scale it safely.

What you need now is a system.

One that brings structure to your business security. Not piecemeal. Not reactive. Not built from LinkedIn scare posts or ChatGPT policy templates. A real foundation that stands up to investor questions, procurement forms, and customer trust.

Build your security foundation in five steps

At its core, GRC is about structure. And the good news is you don’t need enterprise tools to get started. Here’s how you can stitch together a solid foundation in a few hours, without spending anything:

Step 1: Write a security charter

Decide who’s responsible for security and give them the authority to act. Document the who, what, and why in one page. You now have an information security policy.

Step 2: List your critical systems and data

Map the systems that keep the business running, where sensitive data lives, and what protections are already in place. This is the beginning of a Business Impact Analysis.

Step 3: Identify your biggest risks

Ask: What could go wrong? Where is the exposure? What would stop the business operating? Think breaches, outages, or no one knowing what to do in an incident.

Step 4: Prioritise those risks

Sort them by impact:

• High — Critical threats like customer data exposure
• Medium — Serious but survivable issues
• Low — Inconvenient but manageable problems

Step 5: Create a simple action plan

Start small. One fix per week is progress.

• Week 1: Turn on MFA across all tools
• Week 2: Encrypt sensitive data
• Week 3: Write a basic incident response plan

That’s it. You’ve started.

You now have:

→  An information security policy

→ A Business Impact Analysis

→  A risk register and remediation plan

And you didn’t buy a single tool.

But, you don’t need to do it all yourself

You didn’t raise funds to spend your time writing password policies or mapping ISO 27001 clauses to internal processes.

You raised to build. To grow. To move fast.

That’s where we come in. At LeftBrain, we partner with fast-moving, technical teams to build security foundations that scale with the business. We move at your pace. We speak your language. And we make sure security supports growth, not slows it.

Let’s clear the security debt before it holds you back.