Committed: Startup Survival Tips and Uncommon Sense for First-Time Tech Founders

Does your tech startup have – in you – what it takes to survive and thrive?

Great tech simply isn’t enough, and many first-time technical founders don’t know what they don’t know. Books on business strategy are abundant, but candid, practical advice is hard to find from technical founders who have “walked the path” and received an MBA from the “School of Hard Knocks." To the first-time technical startup founder, most business books focused on startup strategies might seem inaccessible, outdated, and off-topic.

To that end, Eldon Sprickerhoff, cofounder of cybersecurity firm eSentire, has assembled a list of everything he didn’t know as a first-time technical startup founder before his firm rocketed to a valuation of over $1 billion, including: finding product-market fit, raising early- stage capital, competing against bigger and better-funded competitors, building resilience, pushing through failure―and dealing with success.

In Committed, Sprickerhoff offers readers “survival strategies” that encourage technical founders to embrace their new title, the one that matters most: Chief Survival Officer.

ELDON SPRICKERHOFF is an acclaimed entrepreneur, advisor, mentor, investor and board member working at the intersection of information security, computer science, machine learning, SaaS, and finance. He is best known for cofounding eSentire, a leading global cybersecurity Managed Detection and Response company. He has a Bachelor of Mathematics (Major: Computer Science, Minor: Economics) from the University of Waterloo, and in 2019 was awarded their J.W. Graham Medal in Computing and Innovation for his groundbreaking and entrepreneurial achievements in cybersecurity.  In 2024 he was inducted into the Waterloo Region Entrepreneur Hall of Fame. He currently works as a Strategic Advisor at Caledon Ventures.