Melanie Rieback, founder of Radically Open Security, shares a contrarian blueprint for founders who want growth without compromising product integrity or customer trust.
Incentives typically reward short-term extraction, eg subscription pressure -> feature bloat, VC growth targets -> selling to the wrong customers, upsell models -> misaligned incentives. Can you prioritize long-term trust over short-term gain? Melanie thought so.
You’ll learn how Radically Open Security’s approach to the challenge affected hiring, pricing, clients and growth. We’ll dig into the tradeoffs required to achieve this. You will get practical frameworks and ideas to align profit, customer outcomes and societal benefit while building durable, respected companies.
Melanie Rieback
CEO of Radically Open Security
Dr Melanie Rieback is CEO of Radically Open Security, the company she founded that donates 90% of profit to charity.
She designed and teaches the Post Growth Entrepreneurship’ class at the University of Amsterdam, is a Cybersecurity lecturer at Singularity University, and former Assistant Professor of Computer Science at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.
She founded Non-Extractive Capital in 2025 to address the challenge of encouraging entrepreneurs to pursue alternative business models.