The Infrastructure Ownership Gap That's Costing You Sleep
You're three weeks from closing your funding round when your investor asks: "Who controls your AWS account if your CTO leaves tomorrow?"
Silence.
It's a question most early-stage founders can't answer confidently. And it's exactly the kind of preventable risk that kills deals and companies.
Why This Matters More Than You Think
Here's what we've learned working with early-stage startups: 89% of departed employees retain access to company systems. That contractor who built your MVP 18 months ago? Still has your GitHub admin access. Your former CTO? Their personal Gmail still controls your domain registrar.
Infrastructure downtime costs startups €125-390 per minute. But the real cost isn't the downtime itself. It's discovering you can't access your own systems when you need them most.
One startup lost everything when someone gained access to their AWS control panel. Customer data, backups, seven years of operations gone in 12 hours. The company shut down permanently. More recently, a developer lost 10 years of work when AWS terminated his account over a payment dispute with a contractor who controlled the billing.
These stories aren't outliers. They're warnings.
Three Risks Hiding in Your Current Setup
1. The single admin problem
Only one person knows your AWS root password. Your domain is registered to someone's personal Gmail. When that person becomes unavailable (vacation, illness, departure, dispute), your entire operation can grind to a halt.
Think of it like a coffee shop with one barista. Great for 10 customers, catastrophic when 500 show up at once.
2. Contractor access that never expires
You hired freelancers to build your MVP. They delivered, moved on to other projects. But their access didn't move on with them. GitHub admin rights? Active. AWS keys? Valid. Your infrastructure? Vulnerable.
GitHub explicitly requires minimum two organization owners as best practice. Most early-stage startups either have just one, or aren't using GitHub organizations at all.
3. Personal accounts controlling business assets
Your Stripe account uses someone's personal email. So does your domain registrar. Your SSL certificates. Your DNS management.
When that person leaves (and everyone eventually does), you discover you have no legal right to access your own systems. Recovery takes an average of 292-328 days, if recovery is possible at all.
How We Fix This in Three Months
You don't need to become a DevOps expert. You need a systematic approach that protects your investment without derailing your momentum.
Month 1: Know what you own
We map your entire technical landscape. Every AWS account, GitHub repository, domain, payment processor, and SaaS tool. We identify every single point of failure and every access that shouldn't exist anymore.
This is the Safe Room assessment. Most founders discover multiple critical vulnerabilities they didn't know existed.
Month 2: Transfer control to your company
We migrate everything to proper corporate ownership. Multiple administrators on every critical system. MFA everywhere it matters. Domains transferred from personal accounts to your company entity. Password management that works for your team.
This is technical work, but we handle the migrations while you focus on your business. You stay in the driver's seat for decisions, we execute the details.
Month 3: Build your insurance policy
The Safe Room itself: secure, encrypted backups of all code and infrastructure. Ownership verification across every critical system. 24-hour emergency restore capability. Monthly validation that everything remains accessible and controlled by your company.
After Month 3: Stay protected
Monthly Safe Room validation ensures nothing slips back into chaos. Optional fractional CTO hours available as you scale and new infrastructure questions emerge.
The Real Cost of Waiting
60% of small businesses close within six months of a major security incident. The math is brutal: most incidents are preventable with basic infrastructure ownership practices.
For angel investors, this is portfolio protection. Technical implementation problems are a significant cause of startup failures. Every startup in your portfolio without proper infrastructure ownership is carrying hidden execution risk.
For founders, this is about sleep. Knowing that if your technical co-founder gets hit by a bus tomorrow, your company doesn't die with them. Knowing that your next funding round won't get derailed by a question you can't answer.
You're building a company that could be worth millions. Don't let an €18/month password manager subscription or a weekend of proper account setup be the thing that destroys it.
Your Next Step
Our 3-month stabilization program removes this risk completely. We audit your current setup, transfer ownership to your company, implement proper workflows, and deploy your Safe Room. This gives you secure backups with ownership verification that ensure no one person can ever hold your technology hostage.
Most founders discover they're closer to a crisis than they realized. The assessment shows you exactly where you stand.
