(Other) lessons for security product founders (from the Wright brothers) – Thinkst Thoughts

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(Other) lessons for security product founders (from the Wright brothers)

Publish DateJuly 29, 2026 haroon meer

I’ve long tried to convince hacker friends to start security product companies. It’s obvious (to me) that the world needs more great security products (there are so many awful ones), and I think hackers are very well placed to make them. This view stands on two legs: the firm belief that great hackers love building, and the equally firm conviction that "building a good company is mostly a series of hacks".

For me, the first leg is almost self-evident: From companies, to products or security tooling. Every great hacker I’ve known has built stuff.

The second leg points out that building a company is just another kind of hacking; when challenges arise in company building, great hackers will work around them like they would security boundaries.

Deeply entwined was my view that the product is absolutely central to the long term health of the company (almost to the exclusion of everything else).

Reading the (excellent) Wright brothers biography by David McCullough recently, I was reminded of a bunch of things that people (me!) overlook when giving simple advice like “just start a company”, or “just focus on the product”. There are factors of the necessary-but-not-sufficient kind which I gloss over, but are visible in the Wright brothers’ story.

So, for founders, here’s what the Wright brothers can tell us about starting a company in 2026. I’m going to summarise sections of the book and pull out my favourite lessons as we go. Join me.

There’s always “skeeters”

Before the brothers had anything close to a prototype, they decided they needed a location with consistent wind and sand beaches to test their mini experiments. They mailed the US Weather Bureau and, based on a letter from the government meteorologist stationed there, decided on Kitty Hawk, some 700 miles from home in Dayton, Ohio.

You might think the lesson is about “going to where the wind is”; i.e. that the geographic location is of utmost importance and, for tech companies, that means go to the Bay Area. But no, I don’t think that’s the lesson. We built Thinkst Canary while sitting for the most part in South Africa. The most interesting thing was seeing what the brothers had to put up with when they got to Kitty Hawk.

Kitty Hawk was pretty barren and there wasn’t much around. They lived in a tent, which housed them, their tools, and their supplies. They had to catch their own fish to eat, and their diet was monotonous consisting mainly of “eggs, tomatoes and hot biscuits [made without milk]”.

Their second expedition to Kitty Hawk when they were starting work on the glider was almost abandoned due to an immense seasonal swarm of mosquitoes (aka “skeeters”). The book makes it clear this was an awful experience:

“It was by far the worst experience of his life, he would tell Katherine”

“The agonies of typhoid fever were ‘as nothing’ by comparison”

“Such was the torture of the night the followed, Orville vowed that come morning they would head for home”

They (temporarily) put down their prototyping tools to instead construct mosquito nets and defences.

Founders who’ve been put through the mill recognise that "there’s always skeeters” and, while distracting, they can’t be ignored. It’s the burst pipe above your server room (if you have one these days) or the tax ordinance you never heard about or the heap of other little things that are death by a thousand cuts (or mosquito bites). One of the ideal founder characteristics is the ability to build the mosquito nets you didn’t think you’d need, and move on to focus on the actual mission.

You build more than the product along the way

Any experienced woodworker knows the value of building jigs. You spend a bunch of time building the things that help you build your things. Building software is similar: You spend a bunch of time building the pipelines and infrastructure that allow you to reliably build, test, and run your product. Goodness knows how much internal code we have that customers never interact with, but it’s loads. There’s more testing code written for our honeypot, than there is in the honeypot.

After the brothers had completed their famous first flight, they returned to Ohio to work on their next prototype. However the consistent winds for which they picked Kitty Hawk were not to be found in Ohio. So they quickly hacked up a catapult-launch system that could get them airborne without the Kitty Hawk winds.

When they figured out control surfaces on their glider, they planned to simply add an engine, except none of the...