I have a consulting company now. It’s not something I meant to do, and I’ve learned something important from it: creating a company for its own sake is a lot less likely to succeed than creating a company because it helps you do something else that you really wanted to do.
In my case, that’s to work full-time on countering automated and semi-automated influence operations, whether that’s through a 20-hour-a-week contract helping to create the Global Disinformation Index as part of the forever pushback on misinformation-based fraud (“fake news” sites etc), or working on practical solutions, e.g. writing a how-to book and working on infosec-style architectural frameworks for misinformation responses, so as I put it in a talk yesterday we can “actually play the game, instead of standing on the field wondering what’s going on whilst the other team is running round us with gameplays and rulebooks”.
I still have much paperwork and website filling to go before I ‘hard launch’ BLightI, as I’ve started affectionally calling the company (and buying the namespace for, before you get any ideas, fellow hackers…). I also have quite a lot of work to do (more soon). In the meantime, if you’re interested in what it and I are doing, watch this space and @bodaceacat for updates.