Cybersecurity · Decision brief 01

Six decisions your executive team is making right now — and what the evidence says about each.

Written for the executive team at a cybersecurity vendor, deciding about their own company. Each decision names the seat that owns it and the seat that contests it, carries sourced evidence, and states what would have to be true for the answer to flip.

Nine pages · Evidence as of October 20, 2026 · PDF

Platform vendors grew 21–34% last quarter. Single-category vendors grew −2% to +11%.

Same window, from company filings. Rapid7 is guiding to −3%. The brief also gives the counter-case, which is real: the largest enterprises put only 25% of security budget into platforms, and cyber funding just hit a record.

What is in it

Platform or point solutionDomain 3 · CPO, contested with CEO on category entry and CFO on the investment case.
Price AI capability, or bundle itDomain 2 · CRO, contested with CFO on margin and CPO on packaging. Microsoft published a price for AI security and then gave it away — and a regulator has now taken a position on that.
Acquire, sell, or stay independentDomain 11 · CEO, contested with CFO on valuation. Wiz sold at roughly 46× ARR; Varonis sold at 8.4× five days ago.
Direct, or through the MSSP channelDomain 4 · CRO, contested with CEO on sequencing. 92% of security spend moves through the channel while channel share of all IT spend falls.
Where buyers now discover vendorsDomain 12 · CRO, contested with CEO on public stance. Primary measurement run for this brief: 100 calls across two AI platforms and twenty categories.
Concentration after consolidationDomain 9 · Risk, contested with CFO. An exposure the whole category carries and none of it discloses.

It closes with the executive decision matrix — CEO, CFO, CRO, CPO, Legal and Risk — each with something specific to do, not a generic lens. Legal's entry is a deadline four weeks out.

$495One brief · PDF · delivered on payment

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For comparison: Profound Growth is $399 a month billed annually — $4,788 committed up front. Peec Advanced is $495 a month. This is one month of the tooling you are deciding whether to fund, to find out what the decision actually turns on.

What it is not

Not a vendor ranking. It measures decisions and evidence, not which product is better.
Not a forecast. Where something is an observation of one window, it says so.
Not a market-size report. It will not tell you what any of this is worth to you in revenue.
Not padded. Nine pages because that is what the evidence filled.

How the evidence is handled

Every figure is sourced. Where a number could not be sourced, the brief says so and gives none — there is no channel-margin figure in it, because no security vendor publishes one. Where two sources disagree on direction, it says that rather than picking the flattering one. Where a widely quoted statistic comes from a party with a commercial position, it is flagged, including on both sides of the platform debate.

The decision-maker and all six decisions were fixed before any source was read, and were not revised to fit what came back.

Licensing. A brief is sold for use inside the buying organization — read it, quote it internally, build on it in your own planning. It may not be resold, published in full, or redistributed outside your organization. Quoting a figure externally is fine with attribution to CULT+MATH and the as-of date, which is the part that makes the figure meaningful.