Why I Left the Operating Room to Build a Cybersecurity Company

Marine Corps veteran. Former surgical technologist. Now I run a cybersecurity and web intelligence company out of a small town in Mississippi.

That's not a typical path. I get that.

The Thread

I joined the Marines at 18. After that I spent years in operating rooms as a surgical tech — handing instruments, counting sponges, watching surgeons work through problems in real time under pressure.

Both jobs had the same requirement: you cannot miss the thing that matters. In a surgical suite, a missed sponge count is a patient with a retained foreign object. In a security context, a missed open port is a dental practice with 3,000 patient records exposed.

The stakes are different. The discipline is the same. You build the habit of paying attention to what other people skip, or you don't.

I built the habit.

Why Small Businesses

When I started looking at the security landscape, the gap that stood out wasn't at the enterprise level. Enterprises have security teams, compliance budgets, and vendors competing for their business.

Small businesses have none of that. A three-person dental practice. A regional law firm. A contractor who built a website on GoDaddy four years ago and hasn't thought about it since. These are the businesses getting hit — not because they're careless, but because they're resourced differently and nobody is watching out for them.

The tools that give real answers were priced for enterprise budgets or buried in subscriptions nobody needs.

What near0 Is

near0 does three things: background checks, business verification, and website security audits. One-time payment, real findings, no subscription. You don't need an account and you don't need to talk to a salesperson.

I also take on a small number of direct projects each month — fixing the problems the reports find, rebuilding sites that need it, and doing ongoing monitoring for businesses that want someone they can actually call.

I'm based in Marietta, Mississippi. I work with small businesses only. If you have a problem, you talk to me.

near0.co · (662) 594-0399

near0 runs background checks, business verification, and site security audits. One-time payment, no account required.