Draft:Simon Wijckmans

• Comment: LinkedIn is not a reliable source. Please see WP:GNG and demonstrate notability accordingly. Hitro talk 18:10, 16 November 2024 (UTC)

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Simon Wijckmans

Simon Wijckmans
Simon Wijckmans age 27 in 2024
Born	Zemst
Citizenship	Belgium
Education	Self-educated
Occupation(s)	Founder and CEO c/side
Years active	2016 -
Website	https://www.simonwijckmans.com/
Notes
Previously worked at Microsoft, Cloudflare and Vercel

Simon Wijckmans is a Belgian entrepreneur living London, United Kingdom. He is the Founder and CEO of US-based c/side, a cyber security company focussed on the client-side security space.

Youth and education..

Wijckmans grew up in Zemst, near Mechelen, Belgium. At the age of fifteen he, in collaboration with his parents, made the decision to pursue self-directed learning. The traditional school environment with multiple daily classes and other students was deemed unsuitable for his learning needs.

In Belgium, attending a curriculum in school is not mandatory. However, "learning" until the age of eighteen and meeting specific milestones is required. This system includes the option to take exams through the Examination Committee of the Flemish Government

He worked with tutors to prepare for specific exam subjects, spending 2-4 hours per day to focused study. The rest of his time was spent exploring various topics online or taking on contractor work. For many years, a single unnamed tutor—a master in mathematics with a strong background and passion for history—guided him across a wide range of subjects. However, as the final round of exams approached, he decided to increase the pace of his preparation by bringing in additional tutors located closer to home.

He passed the Examination Committee and graduated at the age of eighteen in 2016.

Career

During his studies as a teenager, he experimented with several businesses, including a network consultancy firm specializing in home-based SMBs, event rentals for Kinect consoles, videography and website development. On Saturdays, he worked at the international technology store chain Mediamarkt.

Microsoft

Around the age of seventeen, he started working at Microsoft as a contractor. After graduating, he transitioned to full-time employee. He relocated to Dublin, as he moved in to the role of Azure Solution Sales Specialist.

Cloudflare

In May 2020, he took the position of Solutions Engineer at Cloudflare, focussing on POC's to customer across the EMEA region. Throughout the years, he went through different positions, ultimately becoming a Product Manager. He inherited the Page Shield product, introducing him to the problems faced in client-side security. It would later become the focus of his company c/side.

Side project Jo The Fish

During this time, he experimented further with entrepreneurship, launching a side-project called Jo The Fish. Jo The Fish was a Chrome browser plugin, aimed at identifying businesses with ties to objectively harmful activities, such as acts of violence against civilians or minorities, support for terrorism, war crimes, involvement with wanted criminals, or violations of U.S. sanctions.

The aim was to avoid political debates and focus solely on universally condemned actions, like genocide, gay conversion therapy, or funding terrorist organizations. The project sought to reduce revenue to such entities, encouraging accountability and improvement by cutting financial support for these harmful practices.

Besides a one-time $1000 grant from Mozilla, the project was self-funded by Wijckmans and other collaborators. As the user base grew, they could not find a feasible way to run the service in a cost-efficient way while remaining a side project. Jo The Fish had over 1000 daily active users at its peak, but was ultimately deprecated two years later.

Vercel

In July 2022, he moved to technology scale-up Vercel taking the position of Senior Product Manager, now managing multiple products, mostly focussing on the security-side product. Wijckmans' LinkedIn page mentions Identity and Access management, VPN based backend connectivity and other subjects.

Founding c/side

After a brief spell at Hydra, a DuckDB-Powered Postgres for real-time apps and analytics, the time came to become a full-time entrepreneur. With both his experience at Cloudflare Page Shield and Jo The Fish, client-side security remained a problem he wanted to solve.

c/side - standing for client-side - was founded the 2nd of January 2024. Relying on his previous experiencing, and hiring an engineer from Cloudflare who worked on the Page Shield product at Cloudflare, pre-seed funding was raised simultaneously. Both Scribble Ventures and Roar Ventures put in a sum of $1.7 million. With the support of multiple Angel investors, notably:

• Kathy Korevec - Director of Product at Google.
• Jason Warner - CEO at Poolside, previously CTO at GitHub.
• Dan Scheinman - Angel investor, known for early investments in Zoom (also a board member), Sentinel One and others.
• Mike Taylor - CFO at Gusto, previously VP Finance at Tesla and CFO at GitHub.

After the summer of 2024, a seed funding round of an additional $6 million was announced. Besides further investment by previously mentioned funds, Uncork Capital, PrimeSet and Mantis Ventures - famous for its founders Alex Pall and Drew Taggart from popular music producer duo The Chainsmokers - completed the fund raising.