Working at Elba - Empower Employees Against Cyber Threats

Since the pandemic, Cyber threats have exploded, specifically within SMBs. Most being not well-prepared to face cyber risks, they are increasingly remote, and as a result more vulnerable.

The idea behind Elba is to change the way SMBs approach employee-related cyber risk.

Founded in 2021 by Théo Rouer (ESSEC, former VC / Data analyst at Otium (now Frst), Plug and Play, Comet), Grégoire Ostian (ESSEC, former strategy consultant at Kea) and Antoine Berton (Stanford, built 2 companies and 1st software engineer at Cajoo), Elba wants to empower employees to better protect themselves and their companies in the face of cyber threats.

10 years ago, companies needed to be prohibitive to reduce employee-related cyber risk. It had two effects:

• It created a defiance climate inside companies and vs. IT teams,
• It undermined employee productivity.

Today cyber threats not only target big companies but also SMBs. And the cyber-chaos is total:

• For IT teams: multiplication of tools, the evolution toward a remote workforce, the multiplication of device etc increase the surface attack and make risk measure and incident response more and more difficult to assess.
• For employees: content is boring, transparency culture is king, and it’s always difficult to be aware of his own behaviour’s risk level.

The founding team at Elba shared with us their plans for the company's future, the type of culture they’re trying to build, their tech stack and more.

According to the team, “At Elba we want to shape the future of cybersecurity, empowering employees to protect their companies”. Elba is an automated-layer to manage human cyber risk. Elba reduces the risk, engages employees and makes IT teams more productive regarding their employee-related security operations.

Currently the team at Elba are working towards launching their MVP and signing their 50 first customers.

The team has big plans for the next year “We would like to raise an important Seed round, find our PMF, onboard our first 100 customers and build a 10 person A-player team”.

Tech stack

The team uses Typescript across the board:

Frontend: We are big fans of React and Next.js and have been thrilled to try one of the new features of Next.js, URL imports, you can learn more about it here.

API Layer: GraphQL for our API Layer, have you heard about Hasura? It sits on our Postgres DB providing awesomeness. We use it as our one and only data and permission layer, we use apollo and graphql-zeus for codegen providing type-safety everywhere.

Backend logic: We extend our hasura graphql API with serverless handlers on Node.js.

Deployment: If you’ve heard about Next.js and the awesome team behind it, it will come as no surprise that we’re using Vercel (same team) for deploying our frontend. We even deploy our server-less handlers using Vercel and enjoy out of the box preview-apps, dead-simple local dev flow, and other very cool features. We use hasura cloud for deploying our graphQL API so it’s fair to say that we have close to zero infrastructure to manage (our database is on AWS RDS and the only bottleneck we have to worry about when scaling to 100000s of users).

What type of culture are they looking to build?

At this stage at Elba we are "culture add" rather than "culture fit".

Why?

We’re just getting started on growing our team, a culture is a sum of individuals sharing the same values. Bring Your Own Values ! Why not learn from our team and participate collectively to what Elba’s culture is going to be?

But it still has to start somewhere ! Stronger roots, stronger trees, so for starters here are some values we strive for:

🍦 Kindness Kindness is a luxury we can all afford, so why not being kind to each other ? You can communicate with everyone being kind. It doesn’t have to be optional, having a bad day doesn’t grant you the right to ruin someone else’s day. You can strive for excellence, ask someone to do better, even fire someone, but still be kind in how you deliver the message.

🎯 Excellence We are in the cyber-security space, being on our A-Game is not an option. Our customers depend on us to run their business securely.

🚀 Ambition We are building something really tough. There’s a lot of ground to explore and cover in the cybersecurity space, we want to be the best in our field.

👷 Ownership We are distributed and remote, we do not have a working schedule, by keeping it simple, human, while trusting and being transparent with each-other, believing in ownership.

Interview process

A first introduction call with the CTO to touch-base on what Elba is, and answer any question you might have.

Is it a match? Yesss, then let’s proceed to the technical test, it is a small project you will have to work on during 2 hours, on your own. Then when you are ready we have a quick technical debrief together. We then do some ref-checks on our end, and proceed with the offer stage if all is
The entire process can be done in under 3 days!

Finally, we asked the team why someone should join Elba now.

And this is what they had to say:

• To participate in an early stage project backed by one of the most influential European investor eFounders, and Thibaud Elzière, who backed Aircall, Spendesk, Front, Algolia, etc.
• To be incentivized before the Seed Round and have a lot of potential financial upside.
• Cybersecurity’s momentum has definitely come, not two years ago, not in two years, but definitely NOW is the moment to jump on the train!

If this sounds like an exciting opportunity you should check out Elba's open roles and apply today!