Dan Gericke

Small and mid-sized companies shouldn’t need enterprise teams to run secure, well-managed IT. Yet most end up juggling spreadsheets, tickets, and too many disconnected tools just to stay afloat.

I’m building ShiftControl to change that. The goal is simple: give growing teams enterprise-grade orchestration, automation, and visibility over their SaaS, access, and security without enterprise complexity. One place to manage users, apps, onboarding, offboarding, and security controls in a way that actually scales.

This work is informed by years of building and scaling security-first platforms, including a chapter as CTO of ExpressVPN. That experience shaped a strong belief: good security and good operations should be defaults, not luxuries reserved for large companies.

If you’re a founder or tech leader and feel like IT and SaaS management is getting messier faster than it should, you’re not alone. We’re focused on fixing that problem, properly.

Co-Founder

ShiftControl offers a seamless platform for purchasing, configuring, and securing all your SaaS services in one spot, tailored for small businesses and startups. Effortlessly manage users, invoices, and security. Get ready to experience SaaS management like never before.

Somewhere during the workweek, I disappear into an ice bath ❄️

Ice bath. Sauna 🔥 Back to the ice.

It’s uncomfortable. No mystery there.

But it’s also the only time all week where my mind fully switches off 🧠

Running a company means there’s always something spinning in the background. Even when I step away, my brain usually doesn’t.
That’s impossible to do when you’re sitting in freezing water focusing on your next breath 😅

For a few minutes ⏱️ there’s no work, no planning, no noise. Just cold and breathing.

I walk out with more energy, a clearer head, and a calmer reset for the rest of the week.

Not chasing discipline points or wellness trends.
Just doing something uncomfortable on purpose, then getting back to work.
 
Three minutes in the cold. The business survives just fine.

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Today I wrote a personality.md file… for my coding agent. 😅

Yesterday, I posted that my AI agent was constantly telling me that I'm always "absolutely right". That kind of sycophant behavior feels weird to me, and I don't really enjoy the agent sucking up to me! 

I don’t want a motivational speaker.
I want a peer coder.

I mused if providing a personality.md file would actually work, so I tried it out!

I created the file with some rules:
🧠 Be direct, not flattering
🛑 Ban the “great question / you’re spot on” autopilot
🧰 Show the fix fast, explain briefly
🙃 Allow tiny human reactions like: “Oops, yep, that’s on me. Fixing it.”
👀 Push back when my plan is risky or dumb

It worked and it instantly feels more productive!
Less ceremony. More signal. More “ship it.” ✅

Screenshot below is part of the file. Put "personality" in the comments  and I'll send you the whole file!

#AI #DeveloperExperience #Coding #Productivity #PromptEngineering

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Most offboarding stress is not about process. It is about uncertainty.

Knowing what exists and what will be touched makes decisions much easier.

dng-partners

shiftcontrol-io

Accredited Director

EGN Singapore Member

ACMP

BCNE

BCNP

CCDA

CCDP

CCIE #41750 - Security

CCNA

CCNA-S

CCNP

CCNP-S

CISSP

ITIL 2011 Foundation

OSCE

OSCP

Six Sigma Green Belt

Co-Founder @ ShiftControl | CXO, Veteran | Security, Software Development, Leadership | I'm on a mission to help small businesses and startups take control of their digital workspace.

Visionary Technology Leader & Entrepreneur with over two decades of hands-on experience in cyber security, scaling startups, and technological innovation. As the former CTO of ExpressVPN, I played a pivotal role in guiding the company from its early growth stages to becoming an industry leader, culminating in a landmark US$1 billion exit. My journey in the tech world has been driven by a passion for creating robust engineering cultures where trust, collaboration, continuous learning, and celebration of success are paramount. This ethos has consistently enabled my teams to deliver cutting-edge products that make the internet a safer and more accessible space for all.

Co-Founder of ShiftControl, I am now leveraging my extensive experience in cyber security, operations, and product development to address a critical gap in the market for small businesses. ShiftControl is focused on revolutionizing IT and Productivity Suite Security, invoicing, and configuration management, empowering small businesses to take control of their technological infrastructure with unprecedented ease and efficiency. This new venture underscores my commitment to driving innovation and supporting the backbone of the economy—small businesses—by providing them with tools previously accessible only to larger corporations.

With a unique blend of cyber security expertise, deep-tech innovation, and strategic vision, I have successfully managed multifaceted projects and large international teams. My career evolution from managing complex defense operations to pioneering consumer-centric technology solutions and now to empowering small businesses reflects a diverse skill set and an unyielding drive to break new ground in the tech world.

As a speaker at major conferences and a member of industry leadership groups, I am dedicated to sharing insights and forging connections within the global tech community. Based in Singapore, my mission continues to be pushing technological boundaries and creating impactful solutions for users worldwide.

Key Licenses & Certifications:

Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) #41750 - Security
Project Management Professional (PMP)
Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP)
Offensive Security Certified Expert (OSCE)
Offensive Security Certified Professional (OSCP)
Six Sigma Green Belt

𝗔𝗜 𝗺𝗮𝗸𝗲𝘀 𝗶𝘁 𝗲𝗮𝘀𝘆 𝘁𝗼 𝗺𝗼𝘃𝗲 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁. 𝗦𝗼𝗺𝗲𝘁𝗶𝗺𝗲𝘀 𝘁𝗼𝗼 𝗳𝗮𝘀𝘁.

There is a lot of noise right now about AI driven security. Internally, we kept coming back to a simpler thought. AI accelerates decisions, but it often does so by trading away accuracy and certainty.

If your identity data is messy, AI does not clean it up. It just helps you make mistakes at scale.

In my opinion, the next winners will focus less on flashy intelligence and more on boring correctness. Clean inputs, clear ownership, and reliable signals still matter.

Smart systems are fast, but resilient systems are honest about their data.

#SaaSSecurity #IdentityManagement #FutureOfWork #SaaSManagement

Every IT veteran knows this phenomenon, but nobody talks about it enough.

You walk over to a computer that's been misbehaving for hours.

The user swears it's a disaster. Nothing works. It's hopeless.

You stand there. Maybe you touch the mouse. Maybe you just look at the screen.

And suddenly, everything fixes itself.

Websites load. Passwords work. Glitches vanish.

My wife says it's magic. At work, people say I'm "intimidating" the computers.

But lately, I've discovered a new level: I don't even have to touch anything. I just glance at my wife's laptop from across the room and the device straightens up like a kid caught with their hand in the cookie jar.

If you've spent years in tech, you know the feeling. Computers misbehave right up until the exact second you show up.

I'm convinced I've trained them to be afraid of me. Or maybe they just don't want me opening the terminal again.

Either way, there's real power in being The Fixer. And I won't waste it by telling anyone my real secret: I usually have no idea why it suddenly starts working.

Is it tech mastery, intimidation, or pure luck? I'm not asking.
 
I'm just enjoying my Sunday, making sure every device in sight remembers who's boss.

I'd like my feed to stop mentioning OpenClaw now... I'm aware it's a clown show, we can move on!  Thanks!

The amount of times I'm being told that I'm "absolutely right" in a day is insane!

𝗪𝗵𝗮𝘁 𝗶𝗳 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗰𝗼𝘂𝗹𝗱 𝘀𝗲𝗲 𝘁𝗵𝗲 𝗶𝗺𝗽𝗮𝗰𝘁 𝗼𝗳 𝗮 𝗰𝗵𝗮𝗻𝗴𝗲 𝗯𝗲𝗳𝗼𝗿𝗲 𝘆𝗼𝘂 𝗵𝗶𝘁 𝘀𝗮𝘃𝗲? 👀

We spent time this week looking at how admins discover issues versus how they actually fix them. Detection was fast. Action sometimes stalled.

Not because it was complex. Because it was uncertain.

People want to understand the consequences before clicking. What changes. Who is affected. What stays the same.

For example:
👉 Moving someone to the Sales team
📦 Adds access to HubSpot and Notion
👥 Removes them from the Engineering groups
💸 Increases monthly SaaS spend by $84

So we are shifting the flow to lead with impact, not configuration screens. Settings come second. Confidence comes first.

This is something we are actively building in ShiftControl, and it has already changed how we think about admin UX.

It sounds obvious, but clarity changes behavior.

🛠️ Understanding comes before action.

#ProductBuilding #UXDesign #SaaSManagement #StartupLife

ShiftControl

Follow-up on last week’s ice bath post ❄️

Honestly, I didn’t expect much reaction at all. It was just a snapshot of something I do to switch my brain off for a few minutes.

The responses were... interesting.

One friend messaged me to say she couldn’t “dare” like the post because I didn’t have a shirt on in the AI generated cartoon image 😅
Meanwhile, two other people reached out and we ended up doing a session together this week, that was cool!

From a pure LinkedIn-nerd angle, the post also did some weird things:
🧠 29 profile views in a week, way above my normal
👀 Much higher impressions than my usual posts

Same content style. Same account. Same audience. Different outcome.

No big lesson here, other than:
• People react to authenticity more than polish
• Discomfort seems to spark curiosity
• It seems LinkedIn probably doesn't care what I'm an "expert" in
• The LinkedIn algorithm does whatever it wants

Three minutes in the cold.
Apparently the algorithm survives too.

#founderlife #buildinginpublic #coldexposure #leadership #workandlife

We spent more time than expected this week debating something deeply unglamorous.

Group defaults.

Not for individual users joining a company, but for companies onboarding into ShiftControl that often have no real SaaS or Google Workspace structure at all.

No groups.
No group rules.
No shared understanding of who should have access to what, or why.

They’ve usually made it work so far, but only just.

It sounds basic until you realise how many downstream things depend on it:
🧩 App access
🔐 Permissions
🛡️ Security posture
💸 Invoices that quietly drift over time

The interesting part wasn’t the technical solution.

It was aligning product, support, and security around a single mental model of what a sensible, small-business-ready workspace should look like. Once that clicked, the solution became obvious.

This is the kind of work customers rarely see directly, but absolutely feel later.
Fewer surprises. Cleaner SaaS management. Less painful cleanup when the team hits 30 or 50 people.

Opinion, but a strong one: good onboarding isn’t just about connecting tools. It’s about helping companies understand that these foundations matter, and giving them practical defaults when they don’t yet know what “good” looks like.

#BuildingInPublic #ProductWork #SaaSOps #Onboarding #GoogleWorkspace

A customer told us they needed “limited email access before the start date” for a new hire.

Wait, what? 🤨

It turns out these are future employees in long notice periods or on gardening leave who are already expected to read, review, or prepare. Access is quietly granted early, usually through manual Google Groups 📄.

This isn’t sloppy. It’s intentional.

But it is a bit odd.

What’s really happening is pre-boarding. Work starts before day one, but the tooling hasn’t caught up. So teams rely on sticky notes 🗒️, calendar reminders 📆, and Slack messages like “don’t forget to clean this up later.”

That’s where risk creeps in.

The problem isn’t early access. It’s undefined access. There’s rarely a clear answer to “what’s the minimum someone should see before they officially start” and almost never an automatic way to turn that into proper onboarding.

This is exactly where team or department-based workflows make sense. Put someone into a Finance pre-boarding team. Give access to just the handful of apps or docs they actually need. Set an expiry ⏳. Then on day one, move them into the real Finance department and sub-team and let full access happen automatically.

Sometimes the best features come from problems you didn’t even know you had 😅
 
#CustomerInsight #Onboarding #IdentityManagement #SmallBusiness #SaaSManagement

A customer told us their biggest stress was not setting up access. It was undoing it safely later.

That makes sense. Onboarding gets attention. Offboarding happens when people are busy or tired.

What helped them most was having a simple checklist backed by visibility. Nothing fancy. Just knowing what existed and what would be affected.

Confidence comes from seeing the whole picture, not memorizing steps.

🔍 Calm systems create calm teams.

#CustomerVoice #SaaSManagement #SmallBusinessSecurity #Operations

🗓️ Renewal time for a SaaS contract isn’t just about signing on another year—it’s a strategic moment to optimise spend, reassess value, and reset the relationship.
🔍 Use this checklist to make sure you’re covering all bases:
👉 Review actual usage and remove any dead licences
👉 Compare alternatives and renegotiate terms if the cost-value no longer aligns
👉 Ensure compliance, check auto-renewal clauses, and update renewal dates

Looking for a smarter way to manage this? Let me know if you’d like a walkthrough.

#SaaSManagement #ContractRenewal #CostControl #ITOps #SoftwareSpend

🛡️ A Managed Security Service Provider (MSSP) focuses entirely on cybersecurity. Unlike a traditional MSP that manages IT infrastructure, an MSSP handles continuous threat monitoring, detection, and response.

💡 Why organisations choose an MSSP:
⚙️ 24/7 monitoring through dedicated security operations centres
🚨 Rapid response to security incidents and breaches
🔍 Ongoing vulnerability assessments and compliance support

For many companies, partnering with an MSSP is the difference between reacting to attacks — and preventing them in the first place.

#CyberSecurity #MSSP #ThreatDetection #RiskManagement #SecurityOperations

Spent 90 minutes last week mapping out our billing architecture 🤯
Krishna Nanduri, Efrim Bartosik and I digging into a bunch of details. One of them was debating whether a “trial” is a subscription... or an entitlement.

Sounds philosophical? It isn’t.

Get this wrong and customers either can’t start a trial, or can’t convert to paid.
The difference between “ShiftControl Core” and “ShiftControl Trial Expired” isn’t just naming. It defines the entire user experience.

We’re building with Sequence for quotes and Stripe for payments 💳
But the real complexity lives in the state machine.

• When does a trial actually start?
• When does access really end?
• What happens in the awkward gray zone in between?

Building software is 10% features, 90% edge cases 🧠

#BuildInPublic #SaaS #StartupLife #ProductDevelopment

Had a fascinating debate about billing platforms this week 🤔
Sequence vs Lago vs Orb.

Here’s how it shook out:

🧩 Sequence is moving toward sales-led, more manual configuration
📊 Lago really owns usage-based billing
🏢 Orb targets enterprise well, but still lacks quoting

The gap? None of them are truly built for product-led growth companies that need both automated self-serve trials and custom enterprise deals with full subscription, consumption and entitlement mapping.
 
You end up stitching together multiple systems. Billing here, quoting there, entitlements somewhere else. It works, but it’s messy.

The billing infrastructure space feels oddly fragmented. Everyone is solving a slice of the problem, but no one is solving the whole thing. That usually means there’s a bigger opportunity hiding in plain sight 👀

That said, we’re all in on Sequence 🙌
They’ve been a great partner. They listen, they’re pragmatic, and they’re actively building the bridges we need between PLG and enterprise. Most importantly, they’ve been genuinely supportive as we scale.

Curious to see where this space goes over the next couple of years.

#SaaS #Billing #ProductLedGrowth #StartupThoughts #Infrastructure

Someone joked this week that every admin tool promises peace of mind and delivers a new tab.

We laughed because it is true. Tool sprawl often starts as a search for control.

The human part of this work is remembering that people want fewer things to think about, not more places to look.

Calm is a feature.

😌 Less noise is progress.

#StartupLife #ProductThinking #SaaSManagement #FounderNotes

🌍 Supporting a remote workforce means unlocking flexibility—but it also means widening your attack surface. Home networks, personal devices, collaboration tools and new access patterns all create fresh vulnerabilities that demand fresh focus.

🔐 To address those risks, ShiftControl helps teams by:
🖥️ Enforcing identity-based access and policy controls across devices and apps
📋 Automating provisioning so new hires are secure from day one and off-boarding happens instantly when someone leaves
🔧 Giving visibility into usage, app assignments and endpoint posture—so you’re not flying blind

#RemoteWork #CyberSecurity #WorkFromAnywhere #IdentityManagement #ITOpspany

One pattern stood out in recent usage. Teams that assign clear app ownership resolve access questions much faster than those that do not.

No surprise, but worth repeating. Ownership shortens every loop.

Speed follows clarity.

⏱️ Decide who owns what early.

#Operations #SaaSManagement #SmallBusinessSecurity #Leadership

🔍 A data breach can hit your business in more ways than one:
💸 Massive direct costs — forensic investigations, legal fees, customer notifications
📉 Long-term financial damage — loss of revenue, decreased valuation and increased insurance premiums
🤝 Reputation hit — customers and partners lose trust, and it takes time to rebuild

⚙️ ShiftControl supports organizations by helping them:
• Manage identity and access across cloud apps to reduce exposure
• Automate off-boarding and privilege removal so ex-employees don’t retain access
• Provide visibility into SaaS usage and device posture so you’re not blindsided when something goes wrong

#CyberSecurity #DataBreach #RiskManagement #IdentityManagement #ShiftContro

This was a great kickoff to another year with ITMA - IT Management Association (Singapore)! This was a great event and a fun evening exploring various types of Sake. I thought it was really cool that they brought a Sake brewer in from Japan to give a really insightful speech as well!

ITMA - IT Management Association (Singapore)

View company: ITMA - IT Management Association (Singapore)

Last evening, ITMA had the privilege of co-hosting an exclusive dinner with SUSE, Dell Technologies, and PTC System (S) Pte Ltd, bringing together 50 members for an evening of insights, networking, and sake appreciation.

As IT leaders navigate the shift from operational resilience to building future-ready, AI- and edge-enabled infrastructure, we explored how open and interoperable platforms can drive agility, cost efficiency, and security.

The session featured perspectives from industry leaders, with Gayathri Peria (SUSE) sharing how open infrastructure enables scalable, next-generation workloads, followed by Bekir Bayraktar (PTC System), who presented a case study on evolving from legacy systems to a unified cloud-native platform. Keith Low (Dell Technologies) concluded the evening with insights on resilient hardware architectures that support distributed computing from core to edge. Complemented by curated sake appreciation sessions, the evening fostered meaningful dialogue and peer exchange among the members.

Thank you to our partners SUSE, Dell Technologies, and PTC System, and to all ITMA members who joined us for the evening.

#ITMA #ITMAsg

Nelson Tan Stanley A. Geraldine Pang Alan Tan

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