Agile Musicology Improvisation in Startups

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I sat down to finally start writing-putting down words on the page-the prospectus of this book. Upon opening my computer, I find an email that informs me that my startup, Predictive Cyber Protection, received $75, 000 in non-dilutive capital from the United States Air Force. Following the Lean Startup methodology taught in the defense-adjacent incubator out of which the startup grew, we were to validate the market and applicability of a cybersecurity diagnostics system that we've been working on alongside the Army Research Lab. I drop my plans for drafting the prospectus, alongside the bootstrappy plans for market validation, and set about building out the infrastructure for receiving the funds and, perhaps more crucially, starting to look for the best ways to deploy them. This moment, and the subsequent weeks, forced me to internalize that carefully crafted plans do not allow for disruptions and must be abandoned in order to seize opportunities. I needed to embrace change and accept the new set of (advantageous) conditions, I needed to gather and judge feedback from my environment and the people around me, and I needed to make decisions and enact them-in short, I needed to improvise. This sense of improvisatory action continued to manifest in a variety of ways throughout this process of market validation. Initially my co-founder, Jonathan Ford (no relation), and I thought that the market opportunity would lie in financial services or healthcare-sectors in whichcybersecurity is critical-yet, over many interactions with would-be customers, we learned that these industries are limited in their appetite for working with small companies like Predictive and are tied down by stringent regulation. New information gathered from frequent unvalidated hypotheses suchas these forced reorientations toward new possibilities, which had to be rigorously tested and, upon eventually finding an avenue forward. After numerous failures, learnings, and pivots, we eventually settled on two segments: cybersecurity insurance and defense. Throughout this customer discovery.