Examining the Relationship Between Cybersecurity and Scaling Value for New Companies

Abstract

We explore the cybersecurity-scaling relationship in the context of scaling new company value rapidly. The relationship between the management of what a new company does to protect against the malicious or unauthorized use of electronic data, and the management of what a new company does to scale company value rapidly is important, but not well understood. We use a topic modelling technique to identify the eight topics that best describe a corpus comprised of 137 assertions about what new companies do to scale company value rapidly, manually examine the stability of the topics extracted from the dataset, and describe the relationship between 17 assertions about how to manage cybersecurity in new companies, and the six topics found to be stable. The six stable topics are labelled Fundraise, Enable, Position, Communicate, Innovate, and Complement. We find that of the 17 cybersecurity assertions, seven are related to Position, two to Innovate, one to Fundraise and, one to Complement. Six cybersecurity assertions were not found to be strongly related to any of the eight topics. This paper contributes to our understanding of cybersecurity in the context of a new company that scales its value rapidly, an application of topic modelling to perform small-scale data analysis, and a manual approach to examine the stability of the topics extracted by the topic modelling technique. We expect this paper to be relevant to new companies’ top management teams, members of the networks upon which new companies depend for to scale company value, accelerators and incubators, as well as academics teaching or carrying out research in entrepreneurship.

Keywords

• cybersecurity
• scaling company value
• scaling initiatives
• topic model stability