Getting to Know: Eliza-May Austin

She hustles as hard as anyone, and she pulls zero punches…Co-founder and CEO of th4ts3cur1ty.company, Eliza-May Austin, is a force to be reckoned with. Eleanor Dallaway invites her to put all her cards on the table and tell her brilliant story

“Eliza-May Austin? She’s punchy on social, isn’t she? What’s she like in real life?” These words (or thereabouts) have fallen out of almost every person’s mouth when I declared Eliza-May my next profile interview.

It’s a question I feel well-equipped to answer after spending two hours with the woman who is undoubtedly punchy but that I’d also describe as a hustler, hilarious, a powerhouse, and the ultimate grafter.

Eliza-May shows up at the hotel bar in Hoxton with a hug, plonking down a lovely gift from Fortnum & Mason and asking, “Can you give me five minutes to put on some makeup? Because right now, I look like Ken Dodd.” Ladies and gents, I present Eliza-May.

Eliza-May Austin has thick skin. So when her ‘punchiness’ online is sometimes received with backlash, it just rolls off. She knows she’s funny, she calls herself weird, she knows she can be blunt and sometimes even controversial, and “I genuinely do not care what people think of me. You’ll always get shitheads, but Christ, if you’re running a company and you can’t handle [the criticism], get another job and stay off the internet!”

“There’s a lot of people that can’t handle backlash and find it distressing, and I feel for them. Well, no, I don’t actually,” she corrects herself. “I’m saying I feel for them because it’s the right thing to say, but the truth is, I don’t.”

Have you always been thick-skinned? Is it something you’ve inherited from your parents, I ask? “I’ve been like it since I was a child, although both my parents were incredibly sensitive. My maternal grandad was wonderful but very cynical, so maybe I got it from him. I also got his figure, thanks Grandad!” she rolls her eyes, and I roar with laughter, not for the first or last time during our time together.

If you’ve ever met Eliza-May, you’ll likely be familiar with her laugh and more than likely assume her an extrovert. Technically speaking, though, Eliza-May considers herself an introvert. “I recharge my batteries in private,” she says. “You’ll see me at an industry event, talking to 100 people, making connections, catching up over drinks and genuinely enjoying myself,” she pauses. “But then it will take me days to get over it. I won’t be customer-facing and will lick my wounds for three days sitting with my dog in my house, eating a packet of ham.”

“I bared my teeth like a dog”

Apologies, though, because I’m getting carried away without formally introducing Eliza-May. She’s the co-founder and CEO of th4ts3cur1ty.company, a “no-nonsense” cybersecurity company that now employs between 20 and 30 people. That’s now, but let’s rewind a few decades to South Yorkshire (Doncaster, to be precise) and meet schoolgirl Eliza-May, who was nothing but “a nightmare,” she pauses, “no, a complete nightmare. I wasn’t academic, and I didn’t like school.

“I don’t have many memories from primary school, but I do recall a deep, visceral argument where I bared my teeth like a dog in primary school. In my reception year, I was told that two plus two equals four when I believed it should equal 22.”

On reflection, “I had a really good point,” she laughs. “I did have friends, though; I wasn’t an outcast weirdo or any of those usual cyber stories. I just didn’t find school remotely interesting.”

Did she excel at tech, science, or any subjects that typically feed the cyber industry? “Nah, I just liked art.”

So how did a kid who wasn’t academically gifted but had a penchant for art and left school at 16 go on to craft a career and entrepreneurship in cybersecurity?

“You know those people that come out of the womb with a computer and say they only ever wanted to work in cyber? Yeah, I’m not that person.” The only reason Eliza-May pursued a technical degree (computer science with forensics at Sheffield Hallam) is that “I was sick of doing dead-end jobs. I wanted a seemingly unlimited career with the potential to keep getting bigger, so I looked at it pragmatically. I’d done a bit of IT training, so I landed on cyber.”

Her reflections on her experience at University are remarkably similar to those of her earlier school days. “I didn’t enjoy it at all and wouldn’t recommend anybody go and get into that amount of debt for that,” she reflects candidly. To supplement her learning at University (“Which was arguably not very much at all”), Eliza arranged holiday internships at various tech companies. “If they told me they don’t run internship programmes, I’d tell them to create one. They’d give me a chance, and it evolved from there.”

At this point, I first call Eliza-May a hustler. She grins. “What a compliment! I was also working in a hotel at night doing receptionist work; although I got fired, I wasn’t very good,” she admits with a grin.

She accumulated a lot of experience through internships during her first year at Uni, “and then getting a full-time job during my second year. I don’t do anything by halves, and I was just in the mentality of ‘let’s fucking do this.’”

Her enthusiasm, on reflection, often crossed the line, she reflects. “I would turn up to meetings I wasn’t even invited to and ask if I could sit in. They’d be too polite to say no, so I’d share my opinions, be delegated a job, and before you knew it, I was given project work and a pay rise because I was mixing with the right people and doing the right stuff.” While she credits herself for carving her own path and making her own moves, she also recognises that she was “a nightmare. Now, as a business owner and people manager, I can empathise with my previous managers.”

From waitressing at 14, Eliza-May made systematic changes to processes to improve workflow. ” Managers would tell me they were earning more money because of me. I always had the business’ bottom line at the forefront of my mind.” Realising that she was making these financial improvements while earning minimum wage herself “meant that I’d get disenfranchised, so I’d move on to the next place.”

It’s clear now that she exhibited an entrepreneurial flair from a young age, so it’s perhaps less surprising that she transitioned from an information security intern at EA to CEO and founder in just four years. It’s less surprising but still just as impressive.

“I was a bull in a china shop”

A proud Northerner, Eliza-May has spent most of her life up North, growing up in Doncaster, studying in Sheffield, and now residing in Bawtry, but she did venture South in between for around a decade in the Big Smoke. Although not a direct quote, she describes those years in London as lost years, bouncing from job to job, never quite finding a role that felt like home. She worked in incident response and SOCs and continued to graft.

During this period, Eliza-May founded the world’s first technical hacking society for women (Ladies of London Hacking Society). “I’d been going to conferences where I’d be the only woman and would have weird experiences like getting followed home on the tube, or the events themselves were not technical.” So she launched and grew LLHS, and by the time she handed over the baton, it had five chapters and 22 volunteers. “It was a great precursor to starting a business because I learnt and made many mistakes.” Her reason for stepping back? “There are two,” she considers. “I no longer had the time to dedicate to it, but also the women that wanted to keep it technical were in the minority.”

While dipping in and out of jobs, Eliza-May met Stephen Ridgway, who would one day become her co-founder of th4ts3cur1ty.company. “At the time, he was my boss’ boss, director of cybersecurity, and he hired me as a senior engineer with a private mission – to shake up a stagnant workplace. I was like, ‘This is so me!’”

She describes going in “like a bull in a china shop, getting stuff done and causing a shit storm in the process. I didn’t care if people didn’t like me; I had a mission, and I did it. Stephen saw me as someone he could go into business with, and we had regular conversations which turned into rants and eventually into a business partnership.” Soon, th4ts3cur1ty.company was born, and the rest, as they say, is history.

“I was in my pyjamas, scratching my head with a coat hanger”

It might be a cool idea to name your cybersecurity business like a password, but it is also the one thing Eliza-May is sure she would have done differently. “It’s a ridiculous name. What was I thinking?

“It’s hard to remember, the Google algorithm hates it, and we’ve had to spend a shit load of money on SEO as a result.” What was essentially a drunk decision to buy the domain has cost us, admits Eliza-May.

It’s complicated further by the brand and subsidiary service underneath, ‘PocketSIEM’, which is often mistaken as a different company. “We made that decision because we wanted to be the affordable option for SIEM and SOC and are happy to be the pound shop of cyber defence in that space, but without cheapening the th4ts3cur1ty.company brand.

“We’ve got a hell of a lot of big household names under the PocketSIEM umbrella, so it’s unfortunate that we’re called PocketSIEM because it still implies that we’re small. There are loads of things I’d do differently if I had to start again,” she admits candidly, “and that brand exercise is probably one of them.”

As regrets go, it’s not insignificant, but it’s also not something that has maimed business.

She describes their growth as organic and gradual. COVID happened just as they were finding their feet and put an abrupt stop to the office they would sign for, which changed the company’s direction to become entirely remote. “We’ve got people from the South Coast up to Glasgow.” Despite the geographical distance, Eliza-May describes a tight-knit culture with “people who genuinely like each other” and a culture where fun and weirdness are embraced. “One of our lead engineers said the interview he did with us was the weirdest he’d ever had. When I asked why, he reminded me that I was on the call, in my pyjamas, scratching my head with a coat hanger,” she burst into laughter.

One of the things that Eliza-May is passionate about is creating opportunities for their staff – and even those that aren’t. They have an intern programme (definite full-circle moment for the queen of internships!), which she admits delivers minimal business benefit, often distracting from the bottom line rather than adding to it, but that is a worthy social project.

Then there’s the in-house programme where management invites all employees to submit their entrepreneurial ideas. “All they need is an idea and a business justification for the spend it would take to develop.” Dracoeye, a security analyser tool for browsers, is a product of this, the brainchild of their director of technology, Rich. “He took the idea to our lead developer, they built a business case around it, and I couldn’t argue with it – it was brilliant!”

Eliza-May knows that the type of people joining start-ups often do so because they have entrepreneurial ambitions but don’t always have the desire, ability or opportunity to do it themselves. “I can give them the experience of entrepreneurship without the risk.”

“I’ve had to forcibly calm myself down”

What kind of entrepreneur are you, Eliza-May? “One that didn’t take a holiday for five years. It’s a cliché, but the truth is, I was just too mission-orientated.” Until recently, she admits to existing on four hours of sleep a night, too. “I was so driven by the goal that it genuinely wasn’t a negative. Now, with a senior leadership team to support her, “If I sat up at 2AM working, I’d be actively trying to find things to do. It would be a choice, not a necessity.”

Her tunnel vision played havoc with her natural spontaneity, causing an internal conflict between nature and nurture. “Yes, I want to be spontaneous, have a good time and live my life, but at the same time, the overpowering mission is my business, making sure it works and getting it into a position to be self-sufficient. These days, letting loose means going to a pencil museum in Derby!” she roars.

But yes, she contends, she is inherently spontaneous, “but have forcibly had to calm myself down running a business. When other people’s livelihoods are at stake, you must wait to tick off the things on your bucket list.” That said, she recently allowed herself a foray into spontaneity with an around-Europe train trip vacation where she visited 19 different places in a handful of countries in ten days. “It was crazy hectic, just brilliant!” she gushes.

“It went from being my baby to the noose around my neck”

Almost six years into their journey, Eliza-May reflects on how her personal relationship with her business has evolved to take on many different forms. It went from being my baby to the noose around my neck to my ball and chain, to now being a complementary part of me, my best friend.” To enable this evolution, she had to gradually let go of various departments, which although tough, she considers “really healthy.”

At one point during our time together, I ask her if she thinks she has been lucky. “I’m by no means ever the smartest or most talented person in the room, but I will work anybody under the table, so all this is not luck,” she says with conviction. “In cybersecurity, a lot of people are doing the opposite – dedicating their time to looking busy and successful rather than actually hustling and achieving their goals. They’re fucking annoying,” she laments, “even more so when it’s women because that means women like you or me have to produce even more to receive even equal prospects to a man.”

While she considers herself very positive, she thinks her team would disagree. “I can look at things negatively sometimes, but can’t we all?” The one thing she welcomes or insists upon is being challenged by her team. “Anyone in business that surrounds themselves with yes people are incredibly stupid and naïve. Having people around you that challenge you is incredibly helpful.”

Her team is her answer when I ask her what she’s most proud of. “I’ve proven to myself that I have good instincts when hiring, so I’m proud of myself for that. I’m good with people, and that’s a skill.

“We always wanted to be that company on a CV that future employers say, ‘Oh, you worked there, you must be good,’” and we’ve got that reputation. “I had a phone call from an old lecturer of mine a while ago. He told me his students all wanted to work at th4ts3cur1ty.company for their work experience, which was a career highlight for me.”

“I want to wear colours and patterns that clash and read obscure books”

Beyond the confines of the business, I want to know what makes Eliza-May happy. It’s something she hasn’t volunteered. She’s transparent and candid in some ways yet somehow guarded and private in others. She considers her answer and settles on: “Hiking, nature, isolation, and spending time with my emotionally fragile dog, Maud, and my partner.”

Happiness also looks like her home in Abruzzo, Italy, where she spends “a good chunk of the year.” She fell in love with it when she worked there as a teenager, and like she’s done in other parts of her life, manifested it into reality. “It’s sleepy, quiet, and I just get to wear floaty dresses and fart about drinking coffee, pretending I’ve got it all sorted.”

I fire another big question at her: what’s your unfulfilled ambition? “If you’d have asked me five years ago, I’d have said making the business a success. Five years before that I’d have said owning a business, and as a kid, I’d have said stomping around in heels telling people what to do. So arguably, I’ve made those dreams come true.”

Now, her dream looks more like “lots of land, 50 million rescue dogs in the countryside surrounded by trees and squirrels.”

But I’ll leave you with the more explicit and niche dream she shares with me. It somehow epitomises this force to be reckoned with, colouring in her personality with all the shades it deserves: “My ultimate goal is to be one of those older women that wears colours and patterns that clash, reads obscure, rare books, and says things like ‘Oh I don’t know, Darling’ at dinner parties while wearing a headscarf and big earrings.” As I laugh, able to picture it perfectly, she doubles down: “Yep, that’s it, that’s going to be me.” With every other dream she’s had to date signed, sealed and delivered, I have no doubt that this will be, too. And with hustle as relentless as hers, she deserves no less.