When it comes to building a company, many founders become obsessed with NDAs, cap tables, and perfectly structured data rooms. They debate option pools for hours, fine-tune legal clauses, and carefully control who sees their financial model. And then, the same day, they join an investor Zoom call from café Wi-Fi, store their pitch deck in a personal Google Drive or share a Notion link set to “anyone with the link”.
In this article, we've gathered what actually matters when it comes to protecting your business, yourself, and how to fix the real risks without turning into a security nerd.
Most founders think of cybersecurity as a future problem - something for when the company is bigger, has a security team, has something worth stealing. This is the first mistake.
The early stage is actually when you're most vulnerable. You're moving fast, using personal devices, working from anywhere, and sharing sensitive information with a growing circle of investors, advisors, and contractors many of whom you've known for less than six months.
The threats that matter most at this stage aren't sophisticated nation-state attacks. They're mundane, preventable, and surprisingly common:
Intercepted communications on public networks
Open Wi-Fi at cafes, airports, and co-working spaces is trivially easy to monitor. Anyone on the same network can potentially capture unencrypted traffic. That investor call, that term sheet you're reviewing, that product roadmap you're scrolling through - all of it can be exposed.
Credential theft
Reusing passwords across services is still one of the most common security failures among founders. A single breach on any platform where you've reused a password can cascade into access to your email, your cloud storage, your banking.
Accidental data exposure
"Anyone with the link" settings on Notion pages, Google Docs, and Loom videos are the digital equivalent of leaving your office unlocked. You share something with one person and forget that the link has no access controls whatsoever.
Search and browse data
What you search for reveals a lot: what markets you're exploring, what competitors you're monitoring, what legal or financial questions you're quietly researching. Default search engines log all of it.
Device-level tracking
Background trackers on websites, browser fingerprinting, and behavioral analytics follow founders the same way they follow consumers across sessions, across devices, across time.
The typical founder response to security concerns is to install a VPN and consider the problem solved. A VPN is a reasonable starting point - it encrypts your internet traffic and masks your IP address from the websites you visit. But it's one layer of protection, not a complete solution.
Here's what a VPN doesn't protect in the majority of cases: your browser still fingerprints your device and passes behavioral data to third parties. Your search engine still logs your queries and builds an advertising profile from them. DNS leaks can still expose which domains you're visiting to your internet providers, and background trackers continue to follow you across the web regardless of whether your traffic is encrypted. The founders who take security seriously usually end up assembling a stack of tools: a VPN, a privacy-focused browser, a different search engine, and an ad blocker. Each one is configured separately, updated independently, and occasionally breaks in ways that are hard to diagnose. It works, but it's fragile, and it requires ongoing attention that most founders don't have time for.
Protect your network connection
Use a trusted VPN every time you're on a network you don't control. This is non-negotiable for investor calls, legal conversations, and anything involving financial information. The key word is "trusted", not every VPN provider is equally credible, and some have questionable data practices of their own.
Switch your search engine
Move away from legacy search engines when handling sensitive information. Privacy-first alternatives like Brave Search, DuckDuckGo don't log queries or build profiles. This is a five-minute change with meaningful long-term impact.
Use a browser that defaults to privacy
Firefox with appropriate settings, Brave, Tor or other privacy-oriented browsers reduce the amount of data you passively leak while browsing. This matters most on devices you use for both personal and business activity.
Block trackers and ads at the network level
Browser extensions like uBlock Origin catch most advertising and tracking scripts. For more comprehensive protection, DNS-level blocking stops trackers before they even load.
Audit your sharing settings
Once a month, review what documents and pages you've shared with open link access. This takes fifteen minutes and regularly surfaces things you've forgotten about.
Use unique, strong passwords and a password manager
1Password, Bitwarden, and similar tools eliminate credential reuse. Enable two-factor authentication on everything that holds sensitive information: email, cloud storage, banking, domain registrars.
Be deliberate about what you share and where
Before sharing a document, ask whether the access controls match the sensitivity of the content. Pitch decks sent to new contacts should never be set to "anyone with the link."
The challenge with security is that the right setup involves multiple tools, multiple settings, and multiple things that can quietly stop working without obvious symptoms. Most founders can't realistically maintain that kind of setup consistently. This is exactly the problem that VPN Toolkit was built to solve. Rather than managing a scattered stack of privacy tools separately, VPN Toolkit brings everything into one place: selected VPN providers, privacy-focused search engines, secure browsers, and ad-blocking tools - all organized in a single hub you can actually keep track of.
The goal isn't to replace your judgment but to reduce the operational overhead of staying protected, so security becomes something you maintain consistently rather than something you periodically revisit when something goes wrong. For founders working across public networks, handling sensitive investor conversations, or simply tired of being tracked across the web, having a clear view of what's active and what's not makes a real difference.
The most important insight: digital security isn't a one-time setup. It's an ongoing practice, like reviewing your financials or updating your investor updates. The threats evolve, the tools evolve, and the shape of your company's sensitive information changes as you grow.
Pro advice: You don't need to become a security expert. You need to build habits that cover the most likely failure points, and use tools that make those habits easy to maintain.
Take control of your digital privacy without the complexity. VPN Toolkit is already available on Google Play!
.svg)
