The First 10 Security Controls for a Seed-Stage Team
Ten controls you can ship in weeks—not quarters—with clear owners and first steps.
Most Seed–Series A teams don’t need a 60-page policy binder. You need a short list of controls that reduce real risk, unblock deals, and won’t grind engineering to a halt.
Below are the first 10 controls I deploy with founder-led teams. Each has an Owner, Why, and First step. Pick three to start this week.
1) Name a security owner (+ a simple RACI)
Owner: CEO or COO (temporarily)
Why: Someone must be accountable; vendors and customers need a point person.
First step: Post a short doc: “Security decisions → Alice. Approvals → Bob. Incident commander → Michael.”
2) SSO everywhere + enforce Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA)
Owner: IT/DevOps
Why: Central offboarding, fewer passwords, stronger auth.
First step: Put priority apps behind your IdP; turn off legacy auth; require MFA for admins.
3) Device baseline via Mobile Device Management (MDM
Owner: IT
Why: Laptops are where incidents begin.
First step: Enroll all laptops; enforce disk encryption, screen lock, OS auto-updates, and EDR.
4) Password manager + secrets management
Owner: IT/Eng
Why: No more creds in Slack/docs; rotate safely.
First step: Roll out a company vault; move shared creds; add repo/CI secret scanning.
5) Production & admin access hardening
Owner: DevOps/SRE
Why: Compromised admin == big day.
First step: Per-user accounts, hardware keys for high-risk admins, just-in-time elevation.
6) Cloud baseline
Owner: DevOps/SRE
Why: Misconfig is the #1 cloud issue.
First step: Disable root keys; tag owners; turn on logging; run your provider’s CIS benchmark.
7) Backups + quarterly restore test
Owner: Eng
Why: Backups you can’t restore don’t count.
First step: Snapshot prod DB daily; store copies in an isolated account; schedule a 15-minute restore test.
8) Secure SDLC guardrails
Owner: Eng
Why: Catch issues in CI, not prod.
First step: Branch protection + required review; enable dependency & secret scanning in CI.
9) Incident response ready
Owner: Security owner
Why: Minutes matter.
First step: Contact tree; 60-minute tabletop; customer comms template in your notes.
10) Vendor risk intake (lightweight)
Owner: Ops
Why: You inherit vendor risk.
First step: 1-page checklist (data, auth, sub-processors); DPA template; assign a vendor owner.
What to do this week (90 minutes total)
Post the security owner note (10 min).
Enable MFA on your top 3 apps (30 min).
Investigate an MDM solution; make a plan to implement asap (20 min).
Turn on dependency & secret scanning in CI (15 min).
Book a 30-min tabletop for next week (5 min).
Download the full Startup Security Checklist and assign owners (10 min). → Get the checklist
Nerd corner (fast mapping):
SOC 2: CC6/CC7 → access control, logging/monitoring, change management.
ISO 27001: Annex A → device mgmt, backups, supplier security.
AI features: treat models/secrets as sensitive assets; add data-handling checks to CI.
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If you want a quick read-through or help sequencing these, grab a 30-min call: Book here.