Entrepreneurship was genuinely one of the last places I expected to find myself as a cybersecurity student. I came into CYSE 494 expecting a crash course in business mechanics. What I got instead was something more valuable: a deeper understanding of what it actually takes to think entrepreneurially, and the realization that those skills translate directly into how I approach problems in my career every day.
The course built progressively from studying the entrepreneurial journeys of others to eventually developing my own. Analyzing George Kurtz and CrowdStrike’s rise showed me what innovation looks like when someone recognizes a shift in an industry before anyone else does. Studying McAfee’s failures was equally instructive, illustrating how losing sight of your core product in pursuit of rapid growth can quietly erode everything you built. Both of these cases shaped how I approached the work that followed.
From there, the course pushed me to turn ideas into something tangible. I developed two original cybersecurity business concepts before narrowing in on the one with the most potential: DigiServe Forensics, an on-demand digital forensics platform designed specifically for small-to-medium sized businesses that experience a cyber incident but don’t have the resources for an in-house forensics team or the budget for a traditional firm on retainer. The idea came directly from a real gap I witnessed working in managed IT services, and building it into a full business plan, complete with market analysis, organizational structure, a funding request, and a pricing model, challenged me to think beyond the technical problem and consider every dimension of what makes a solution viable in the real world.
Alongside the business plan, I also developed my personal leadership philosophy during this course. Thinking critically about how I lead, where my confidence struggles, and what kind of entrepreneur I actually want to be was just as important as any assignment. It reinforced that entrepreneurship is as much about self-awareness as it is about strategy.
The biggest shift this class gave me was in how I think about risk and failure. Both are inevitable, but neither is final. That mindset is one I carry directly into my work as an SRE in cloud security and operations, where adapting quickly and solving problems without a perfect roadmap is just part of the job.
Work Samples
DCaplinger-Entrepreneur-Paper-1McAfee-Business-Failures-Paper
DCaplinger-Cyber-Ideas-Assessment
Personal-Leadership-Philosophy
DigiServe-Forensics-Business-Plan
Entrepreneurship-Self-Evaluation