Do startups need to worry about the provenance behind sources of funding

Whether you’re a C-Suite employee, a founder or just a freelancer working for a startup, we all know the excitement caused by a raise, when x millions of Dollars or Euros flood into the coffers of the company, enabling fresh research, further marketing and much-needed product development. You can all breathe a sigh of relief knowing that your runway has been extended for another year or so, until another investor comes along, or dare you imagine, you start producing revenue from paying customers.

It’s odd though, how money can change people’s mindsets. Many startup founders begin with lofty principles. There’s no way, they say, that they would accept funding from any organization that didn’t have absolutely impeccable environmental credentials. Nor would they be happy considering investment from anyone who didn’t actively support LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) rights.

But a couple of months away from the abyss of bankruptcy, and along comes an investor from the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a regime criticized the world over for its questionable human rights record and treatment of its female citizens as second class. And don’t even imagine what can happen to Saudi citizens if they’re not heterosexual. All of a sudden, that $25m looks very tempting, and of course, the rich man proffering the cash would never have anything to do with throwing a Western tourist in jail for possessing a couple of Codeine painkillers and a bottle of wine.

A question of sport.

In short, money talks, and when it’s the difference between going out of business or taking ‘questionably sourced’ cash, many entrepreneurs will choose the latter in a heartbeat. This issue is currently a hot topic in the world of sport, where Saudi investment is currently sweeping through football clubs, F1 car racing, golf and cricket sponsorship. Everyone’s loving the Saudi dollar, and not many people on the receiving end of that cash are questioning the possible unsavory practices of that regime on the international stage.

But let’s assume for a moment that the substantial funding a startup receives is from an environmentally friendly group of entrepreneurs with impeccable socially acceptable credentials. All the better. Straight away, the burgeoning company is the subject of many business news articles. It’s all over Crunchbase and the financial press. With this sudden exposure, there will be activists, hackers, journalists and dozens of others wanting to find out everything about your startup and if it has any dodgy little secrets. That’s when any employees, clients or contractors of the company should protect their online connected devices by using a 1Click VPN (virtual private network) to safeguard their internet activity from prying eyes.

Industrial espionage is little reported, but if a competitor gets wind of another company doing anything vaguely untoward, the story will get leaked to the business press faster than you can say Enron, Madoff or Ponzi! That’s why internet security in any organization is so important; with exposure comes scrutiny. Using a VPN is one way to keep all an organization’s business activities confidential, even if their record is spotless.

Other advantages of VPNs.

A VPN creates an encrypted tunnel to a ‘middleman’ server, so that any connection the VPN user makes to the internet is anonymous and secure, rather than that connection being directly through their 4G phone provider or regular internet service provider (ISP). This makes it much more difficult for hackers to access confidential activities such as e-mails and web browsing history; simply because they don’t know who the connection belongs to or indeed where they are based at the time.

Assuming that startup entrepreneurs and their colleagues take a lot of international trips, accessing facilities from other countries can be tough if content is geo-restricted. For example, there are stories of UK-based entrepreneurs trying to access the National Health Service website to order medication or make a clinician’s appointment, but the NHS portal cannot be accessed from outside the UK. In this instance, choosing a VPN with UK-based servers can solve this problem in a couple of minutes.

When back at home, if an employee of a startup, say in the marketing department, is creating many marketing videos and uploading them to the web, that’s a whole lot of data traffic; some ISPs throttle heavy data users (i.e. slow their data connections to a crawl to discourage heavy data use) and again, using a VPN can prevent this from happening. An ISP can’t throttle a user if they don’t know who they are or where they’re based. They could be in Russia or Rwanda, for all anyone knows.

Dynamic pricing – a questionable tactic. 

Also, if one or more startup employees are making lots of travel arrangements and hotel stopovers, there is the concept of dynamic pricing to avoid. This is where some online travel retailers’ websites look up the IP (internet protocol) address of the customer, and if they ‘think’ the area from where the visitor is accessing the site is a wealthy one, the displayed prices increase. Try it for yourself, if you live in, say, New York City, use a VPN to place yourself in San Salvador and watch those hotel room prices tumble!

In summary, whatever stage your startup business is at, online security for all involved is paramount. The many advantages of using a VPN make it an obvious choice to install. Keep your online connections secure and the internet baddies don’t come snooping around.