At Negative PID, we have just celebrated our first year in business. Saying it’s been a wild ride would be reductive. It’s been a lot of hard work, surprises, but most of all, a big learning curve. In this post, our founder, Simona, summarizes what it’s been like to create a company from the ground up and get it running.
How did it all start?
When I left Europe for North America, I had 15 years of freelancing experience. Overall, working as someone’s employee was a relatively short chapter in my career, but it was necessary to build stability, especially when moving to a different continent. When you’re out of your element, you need to take a few steps back, start re-learning how to do things, and hope to meet good teachers. I have been fortunate with my jobs in Canada. I had the chance to work in different roles and learn about business practices and mindsets. I also had the opportunity to work on exciting projects. This made the tradeoff more pleasant.
If you ever wonder what an anthropology background gives you, my best answer is a coping mechanism for cultural changes. It’s called “participant observation.” This research method involves actively participating in the social group you’re studying while observing and recording the behaviours, interactions, and experiences. And this is what I do whenever I’m in a foreign context. At some point, however, the observation must stop. You must test your learning, validate your knowledge, and pick up where you left off with new lenses to look at the world.
The Negative PID concept was born a bit at a time, and it’s been a process of integrating the old me with an environment that I’m still in the process of decoding.
Creating an identity
Initially, I spent some time envisioning what Negative PID would be like. I knew why I had taken this road, but I had to figure out how. The vision, the values, the core of the business, and the environment I wanted to create were the easy part. Building our website was an excellent exercise to refine them. It took several iterations of thinking, writing, reading, scraping, and re-writing. But the truth is that you can’t do it alone.
You need other people’s ideas and views, be open-minded, and be ready to say, “Your idea is better,” and backtrack. When I started working with Micheal and Frank, they shaped my ideas into something I had imagined entirely different. And I loved it. Now, looking back, what we did together was build a brand. Even if we have not started marketing ourselves, we have a distinguishable voice that people are drawn to. I don’t regret spending the time we did on this.
Building the services
Building the services was another essential piece of that process. It was the most fun of all. The tricky part was trying not to feel pressured to deliver something we needed more time to prepare. Whenever you have something good, you immediately want to put it to work and start collecting money and feedback. However, we decided to take a different (surely longer and more expensive) approach and go with rounds of alpha and beta testing to selected audiences. Whenever I presented something, I was told that “it doesn’t need to be perfect; just get yourself out there.” That may be true for some types of services. But when it comes to security, intelligence, and forensics, you must get it right. Perfect doesn’t get things done. However, being hasty does you no good either.
Cybersecurity, in particular, is quickly becoming an oversaturated market with global players and fierce competition. Thinking out of the box sometimes means saying no to low-hanging fruits or working silently while everybody is loud. In the end, people are coming to us, and they’re giving us surprisingly good feedback. So, we feel that our patience is paying off.
Our people
In January, we started to hire people for our teams. The response to our job postings was overwhelming. Speaking to so many people was motivating and an authentic learning experience. Our interviews were very atypical. We wanted a meaningful conversation rather than a sales pitch on both ends. Skills can be built, but first of all, we want to connect with people who share our vision.
And by doing so, we found some truly inspiring people now with us. I’m so very proud of the diversity of experiences and backgrounds that we have and the curiosity they bring that sparkles conversation. Now and then, someone pops me a message about a random topic – a documentary on Netflix, spam, a place for vacation – and from there, we get other people involved. And thinking about those conversations later gives me a ton of ideas.
And how can I forget about our unofficial crew? My husband and our three cats have lived and breathed Negative PID before it even started. Each in their own way, they have helped me to carry on and get things done.
The challenges
If I’ve learned something about this first year at Negative PID, it is that we are resilient. Luckily, working in IT gives you a lot of patience and a troubleshooting mindset. Solving technical issues is not an issue. For example, we planned an entire pipeline on our R server and later discovered we had no available versions for M processors. It isn’t ideal having to redo things from scratch, but when you re-make it better, you’ve learned a valuable lesson, and it’s all worth it.
I enjoyed way less dealing with the political dullness of Quebec – where I have lived for more than seven years. When Bill 96 came into effect last year, it put a lot of our projects to a halt, with a domino effect, including hiring, federal registration, crediting with the Government, and so on. I had never accounted for francophone laws to have such a significant impact on a business. Our services were never designed to be in French. It was very frustrating. In the end, it gave us the motivation to sell everything we had in Quebec and move to Ontario. These days, we are packing and looking forward to settling into a more stable environment for doing business.
Another unpleasant surprise, amongst others, was discovering that someone was trying to trademark our name right here in Quebec. After so much effort in building our identity and brand, the thought that someone could snatch it away from us was a bit of a shock. We had to rush to file a petition to the trademark office, and today, Negative PID is our registered trademark.
Lessons learnt
I’m sure that the surprises won’t be over. The North American market is brutal and exhilarating at the same time. And coming with business experience from Europe, I always feel like we are playing on a soccer field without knowing the game’s rules. Sometimes, you learn the hard way. But it doesn’t need to be that way. We have found people willing to help and lend us their two cents. We keep asking questions and steer away from people who get offended by them. We are cultivating our own concept of business partnership, where not all is about money. We prioritize clear agreements and loyalty. We engage in initiatives and throw seeds that may or may not grow. In doubt, why not?
Despite the tough image that our industry projects, every business has challenges. As in life, nobody has it all together or figured it out. So perhaps we can solve a problem for you, and you can solve one for us. It all comes down to how you treat others.
What I take from it all is that being transparent and keeping it simple goes a long way in building relationships with customers, partners, and our people. We communicate issues openly and honestly. There are issues we don’t have an immediate answer to. And people do understand, and they trust us. And this is what you can expect from us.
What's next?
We have so much in store for this coming Fall: new services, new partnerships, everything we couldn’t move forward in Quebec, and new job openings.
But most of all, we’ll try to keep work fun. People often tell me that I smile a lot – it must be because I’m Italian. It’s kind of true. We do smile more. The fun thing is that it’s always a bit contagious. People come to our meetings with a straight face but tend to mirror our attitude as the conversation goes on. So, smiling starts subtly rubbing off. That’s my grand plan.
I’m sure life will throw some more curveballs at us. We’ve reached the end of year one, and that’s a good reason for smiling. Happy first birthday, Negative PID!
One Response
i would like some more information please
this seems like an incredible service.