Are you working with Proper Tools yet?
If you are, it’s probably because you’re dealing with complex, long-lived risks that don’t fit neatly into one discipline.
Hacker-literate, policy-aware: our work sits at the boundary of engineering, governance, security, and economic reality. We translate across these domains so critical decisions are made with fewer blind spots, less panic, and a clearer understanding of limits.
We work with technical teams, institutions, and decision-makers facing complex, long-lived risks — where failures don’t come from a lack of expertise, but from misalignment between disciplines.
Based in Brussels. Founded by Trey Darley. Reach out.
Why Proper Tools exists
Some infrastructure risks build slowly and fail abruptly. Embedded timing dependencies. Rollover events. Cross-sector coupling. These are quiet failure modes that rarely appear in quarterly dashboards — until they surface as crises.
Proper Tools exists to make these risks legible early enough to change outcomes.
Proper Tools is not about appearances or rhetoric, but about work that yields good fruit over time.
What we do
- Executive & board briefings focused on long-horizon infrastructure and rollover risks.
- Fractional advisory — ongoing support for leadership teams navigating continuity risk without adding headcount.
- Standards & policy alignment — FIRST, ITU-T, NIS2, the Cyber Resilience Act (CRA), DORA, and related efforts.
- Research partnerships toward a future Proper Tools Observatory.
Typical engagements range from executive briefings to 2–4 days/month of fractional advisory.
Signals we're watching
- 2038-class rollover coordination gaps across standards bodies and regulators.
- Legacy NTP dependencies and unexamined clock assumptions in critical infrastructure.
- NIS2, CRA, and DORA reframing timing as a regulated systemic risk.
- Lifecycle mismatch between embedded devices and cyber-policy horizons.