Why?

Since our (royal ‘we’, because we are so great) PhD work is taking more time than we expected, our funding at University is running out, but we strongly feel that we are on to something important with our current research direction.

This is why we are founding Groundry as a means to further pursue that research direction, while increasing the impact of our work by working directly with a select number of clients and other partners.

Terms

Specifically, we offer consulting to a small set of clients (five or less depending on other sources of funding) for a

monthly retainer fee of € 2400 for ~17 hours per month (4 hours per week).

Clients pay this fee no matter if they have work for us that week or not. Any time that is not directly consumed by clients is invested in our research, the results of which are made available to both our clients and the public. Ideally, we want clients to be happy no matter how much help they needed in a given week.

We use the Nix ecosystem as an open reference that we upstream our work to and expect to make different arrangements for non-profit partners and directly contributing to open source.

Our Clients

We envision our clients as

  • large organizations with strategic interest in software supply chain security or exceptional supply chain security needs,
  • interested in extending your own cloud build system to meet your own supply chain security needs, or
  • want to better meet your own, or your customer’s supply chain security needs, as an organization, which is already invested in the Nix ecosystem.

At the same time we don’t expect to spend consulting time only on bleeding edge supply chain security issues, but are happy to meet clients where they are, and make realistic improvements from there.

The output from our research represents a pooling of resources among our clients and partners.

How we might help

We want to help clients strategically through tasks like

  • researching new and existing solutions to your problems,
  • verifying the supply chain security properties of proposed solutions,
  • offering guidance on various topics like hiring for relevant roles, and
  • efficient and effective knowledge transfer, or simply
  • giving a different perspective.

We do not want to do significant amounts of implementation work behind closed doors, mostly for impact and efficiency reasons, but we will happily sit down and figure out the technical details.

What’s in it for us?

We are grateful to our employer Johannes Kepler University Linz for their support so far, and our advisor Prof. René Mayrhofer for their continued support. As a traditionally employed, “let’s get this right, and applied” PhD student, we feel like are living life in a holding pattern, which delays whatever comes next in life until we have obtained our PhD. Groundry offers us a way to take charge of our own future instead, and at the same time continue to do the kind of work we want to do. As we are starting up this venture we are curious to learn what it would take for your organization to work with us and open to talking about other opportunities and modes of compensation.

What’s next?

If you are curious about the ideas we are pursuing, take a look at our recent paper at SCORED ‘24, which is the basis of our ongoing work and an upcoming blogpost. We also have other ideas we would like to discuss on here or with you in person.

We are kind of launching this silently for now through word of mouth, 🤫 and will adapt the contents here both as we go, and as we try to address a broader audience.