Students compete in challenge to build cybersecurity ventures 

Teams of higher-education students from across Idaho will compete for more than $30,000 in the inaugural Cybersecurity Entrepreneurship Challenge (CEC) in October, dubbed Cybersecurity Awareness Month.

Participants in the challenge will choose a problem statement provided by industry partners to Boise State University’s Institute for Pervasive Cybersecurity (IPC) and Venture College. Those partners include Micron, Idaho Central Credit Union, HERE.com and PlexTrac.

The teams will compete for the cash as they develop solutions to critical cybersecurity issues faced by industry. While doing so, they will be building a viable venture for themselves. They will refine their solutions into ventures, using research, customer discovery and validation of their ideas.

Edward Vasko, director of the Institute for Pervasive Cybersecurity, said those skills are enhanced through the IPC program.

The CEC will help participants start focusing on how to solve a problem around which a business can be established, said Dan DeCloss, founder and CEO of PlexTrac. “It helps bring more awareness to the cybersecurity business as a whole and to the importance of cybersecurity in everyday life and everyday business.”

Students will enter either as whole teams or be matched into interdisciplinary teams comprised of computer scientists, engineers, marketers and many other disciplines. Venture College will guide participants through a weeklong program to test, validate and launch their venture and pitch. Along the way, students will be making connections with mentors and leaders in industry while building their own ventures. The program runs Oct. 11-18.

The challenge culminates in the pitch competition. Student entrepreneurs will have 3-4 minutes to address the problem and explain their solution; what progress was made during the competition; the target market; revenue model and next steps. Following the presentation, the students will have 3-5 minutes to field questions from the judging panel, comprised of industry experts, entrepreneurs and investors.

That panel will choose the top four teams, making its decisions based on how well team solutions will solve the problems, the likelihood of industry professionals adopting these solutions, whether the entrepreneur team can execute the idea and how much progress the teams made.

The top teams will then pitch for cash prizes during Boise Entrepreneur Week, Oct. 18-21. The prizes include:

• First place: The Micron Cybersecurity Entrepreneur Challenge wins $12,000
• Second Place: The President’s Award of $8,000
• Two runners-up: The Venture College Award for $5,000 and the Institute for Pervasive Cybersecurity Award for $5,000

“We decided to host these competition (formats) used last year for Hacking for Homebuilding,” said Nic Miller, executive director of Venture College. “This would be a fun way to get our industry partners here engaged with our students, give our students a chance to work on real-life problems and help them gain some entrepreneurial skills.”

Hacking for Homebuilding, another entrepreneurial challenge for Venture College students, as well as the general public, is in its second year.

“The (cybersecurity) challenge came about as a result of the Venture College and IPC collaborating on ways we could help students around Idaho realize that there are significant opportunities for entrepreneurship in cybersecurity,” said Vasko. “As we discussed the work Venture College was doing around enabling entrepreneurship in other areas of the university, we realized that we had this great opportunity to work together and build upon some of the fantastic cybersecurity entrepreneurship that’s already happening in Boise.”

As a cybersecurity entrepreneur himself, DeCloss said his firm is happy to see Boise grow as a tech and entrepreneurship hub.

PlexTrac helps cybersecurity teams with workflow and automation, and tracking and remediate findings of high risks in their environment to reduce those risks. The firm initially launched in 2019, but DeCloss, who calls himself a security practitioner, said he started it as a side project/company in 2016.

Vasko said IPC also wants to help build a robust cybersecurity industry in Idaho.

“There are over 450,000 unfilled cybersecurity jobs around the nation,” Vasko said. “The need for cybersecurity companies, technologies and workforce is larger than ever, so let’s take a leadership position through serving the nation.” Doing that, he said, could enable large-scale economic development for Idaho.

DeCloss agreed.

“There’s a huge need,” he said. “It’s still a young industry as a whole, and there’s a lot of problems and challenges facing us, without a lot of people. There’s always going to be a talent shortage.”

Rural communities face challenges in finding general technology support, let alone qualified cybersecurity professionals.

“We can help through our student workers to reduce cyber risks to rural and remote residents and their communities,” he said.