Dan DeCloss of PlexTrac
An exclusive Tech Tribune Q&A with Dan DeCloss, the founder and CEO of PlexTrac, which was honored in our:
Tell us the origin story of PlexTrac – what problem were you trying to solve and why?
I had been in the security industry for a long time and when conducting penetration tests, I hated the reporting process. It wasn’t so much the actual writing, but the spending of way too much time getting the formatting correct, the screenshots to fit to the page, etc. I wasted too much time just getting a report polished for delivery. And then after all of that work, you realize that the recipient usually just copies and pastes the report data to another system when they actually need to start working on the issues, so the report becomes somewhat obsolete in a matter of weeks. We would often find that we would come back a year later only to find the same issues as the previous year. There was no feedback loop or clean way to collaborate with the people charged with fixing the problems we had found.
With PlexTrac, I wanted to solve the problem of making the report writing process better and having a way to not just write the report, but also deliver it and collaborate throughout the remediation process. I’m very focused on getting the important work done, and PlexTrac spawned to ensure that more findings from security assessments would actually get addressed.
What was the biggest hurdle you encountered in your journey?
I chose to bootstrap the company at first, and thus the biggest hurdle was managing a day job while building the initial version of the platform and balancing life with my family. Time is a resource of which we never have enough, so the hurdles of balancing everything was probably the biggest early challenge.
What does the future hold for PlexTrac?
We’re excited about where we’re headed. We have a plan to grow the platform to truly serve as a central focus for every cybersecurity program. Our focus is to facilitate the collaboration between all stakeholders and activities conducted within a program, so that security posture can be observed in real time and everyone understands what the prioritized risks are that need to be addressed.
What are your thoughts on the local tech startup scene in Boise?
It’s exciting to see the tech startup scene growing in Boise. The city is embracing startups and the community is thriving. It’s fun to be in a place where exciting innovation is taking place. For a long time, the tech scene in Boise was centered around a few companies, but now there are a lot of new companies with fresh ideas that then spark more new ideas, creating an ecosystem that supports the growth of new startups. Leaders in the community are passionate about seeing startups grow and thrive in Boise, and we’re excited to play a part in the story.
What’s your best advice for aspiring entrepreneurs?
It’s cliché, but stay resilient. Finding product-market fit and commercializing is not easy and takes a continued sense of staying the course. Resilience does not mean blind pursuit of your original vision; it means that you learn and grow at every opportunity. You have to tweak things at every stage to ensure that you’re moving forward. If someone gives you feedback or flat out rejects your idea, you have to evaluate that compared with what you feel you need to do to be successful. Sometimes, that may mean a big pivot, and other times it means small tweaks, and then other times you ignore it altogether. We hear it a lot to “never give up”, but I like to clarify that with the term resilience, you recognize the long road ahead and are willing to adapt as needed to keep making progress.