EP 142: Yotam Segev (CEO, Cyera) on Growing One of the Fastest Security Startups on the Planet | The Logan Bartlett Show

One of the sales guys who was already doing well was telling me that he's going to close a deal for 3 million a year.

Come on.

If you close it for a million dollars, I'll build an altar with your picture in the office.

Exactly.

Keep this picture in my wallet alongside my wife and kids.

Two years ago, how many people were you guys?

100 people.

And now?

550.

What would you tell people about growing that fast?

Many things don't scale, but values actually scale really well.

The fact that you ended up landing on this problem set.

I have data personally that I would like to remain my own.

Yeah, your browsing history maybe?

I'm not there.

Let's not be specific here.

Welcome to The Logan Bartlett Show.

On this episode.

What you're going to hear is a conversation I had with Yotam Segev, the co-founder and CEO of Sayura, one of the fastest growing cybersecurity companies in the world right now.

We cover a lot of ground in this conversation, including what it takes to operate at a breakneck pace.

Tom also talks about facing a tough first year after raising a big round of capital from Sequoia, and what ultimately helped turn Syera around and become a breakout business.

We also get into the state of the cybersecurity market, particularly after the acquisition of Wiz by Google.

We discuss what opportunities are emerging, how buyer behavior is shifting and why this may be a defining moment for the industry.

A really great conversation that you're here with you, Tom, now.

Yo, Tom, thanks for doing this.

Thank you, Logan.

I'm glad we got this on the calendar.

I appreciate you coming into the apartment, too.

We mix up studios sometimes.

The home studio is a fun one.

I like the home studio.

Last time I was at the home studio, it was at Josh's place.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Well, I'm glad we were able to get this on the calendar.

So it's been a wild ride.

So for people that probably don't know, so we invested in Saira in June-ish of 23, coming up on two years ago.

Is that right?

Yeah.

It's been a wild ride.

So how many people two years ago, how many people were you guys?

Two years ago, we were 100 people.

100 people.

And last year, 12 months ago?

250.

And now?

550.

And so that journey of growing like that, I guess, can you just take me through like...

It's unnatural in a lot of ways to grow that quickly.

And there's only a handful of businesses that have ever done that, one of which was just acquired by Google.

So I'll ask you about that in a bit.

But I'm curious, just keeping the train running and on the tracks when you're growing that quickly?

What have you learned?

What would you tell people about growing that fast?

Wow.

So I think that when you grow that fast, you really go back to the fundamentals in sense of values.

What are our values?

What are the people that we want?

What is the attitude that we want?

And values scale.

Like many things don't scale, but values actually scale really well.

And if you have a core team that's bought in on the values and bought in on the identity that you want the company to have, who are our people?

How do our people act?

How do our people operate?

How do our people think?

And if you have a clear like value proposition around that.

That scales really well and allows people to recruit and choose the right people into their teams, into their organizations and scale the organization with some cohesion.

Was that something that was purposeful from the start or did you figure that out along the way?

That values was going to be something that enabled you to scale.

I think when we started, we didn't view it as values.

We viewed it more as who do we love working with?

What are the people that we're excited to wake up every morning and spend the majority of our fruitful hours in the day if not all of our fruitful hours in the day working with and it was more out of passion and attraction, I would say, than like a concrete framework of thought around.

Who are the people that are going to do well here?

But as we started to scale, we realized that we have to formulate it, we have to be able to talk about it and we have to be able to really make sure that it scales into the decision-making that many people across the company make every day.

Because I'm not the one hiring all of these people.

Many people are hiring all of these people.

So what should they be thinking about when they're doing that?

And what is your articulation of the values today?

Like, how do you describe what Sayara is or what a Sayara person is?

Smart, humble, hungry.

Smart home.

Simple.

Very simple.

And so at some point along the way, was that at 100 people or 50 people?

At what point did you sort of codify?

That's what you're looking for.

I think it was in the past year that we started to really codify it and talk about...

Who are the people and what are the characteristics that are most important to us as a company and as individuals?

And if we can get those characteristics in 500 people and then 1000 people and then 5000 people, then that's special.

To give a little bit of background.

So can you give me your like how you ended up in cybersecurity?

How did how did you start Sierra and kind of go down this path?

So cybersecurity, for me, happened through the Israeli military.

Tamar, my co-founder, and I.

Yonatan, our VP engineering Gishai, our first team leader in the engineering department.

We all served together in Tal Piot, which is Israel's elite technological leadership academy.

It's a program that sends leaders into every technological core area of the IDF, from ballistic missile defense to submarine warfare.

And we were the cybersecurity generation 15 years ago.

It was the hottest topic.

Today, of course, it's all about AI, right?

Everybody wants to go into those types of positions.

But in our days, cyber was the hot thing.

And many of us, if not all of us, got posted in cybersecurity leadership positions across the IDF.

That was what essentially... brought us into cyber.

Obviously it was a choice.

We had a lot of influence on this decision.

And for me cyber was super attractive because there was something about it that was very technological but also very operational.

At the end of the day, my role was called cyber operations.

That's what I did for my career in the military.

And there was a part of it that was very deep in tech.

There was a part of it that was very deep in operations.

I enjoyed that very much.

And so you were in the military for how long?

We spent a decade in the military.

So from 18 or 19 to 28?

2010 to 2020.

And the impetus to leave was to start a company?

My impetus to leave was because Tamar, back in the day, COVID was hitting.

Tamar finished his service a bit before me.

He took less vacation.

And he was supposed to go do the Pacific Crest Trail.

It's like a 4,000, 5,000 mile trek in the US and COVID hit and closed the trail down.

And the day that he got the notice that the trail isn't opening this year and his plans are ruined, he called me and told me quit, we're starting.

And that's exactly what I did.

And so when you left, how many people were you managing?

In the military, I was managing about 50 people when I left.

And so 50 people and of all ages, backgrounds.

Relatively young.

It was mostly a young group.

The Israeli military works on conscription.

So you get incredible talent.

Because nobody can choose to go to MIT or Cornell or Caltech and, you know, miss out on the fun of protecting your country.

It's a mandatory service.

So it's based mostly on very young people that embody the core of the military.

And so how did you, how did you get looped into the venture ecosystem and actually come up with an idea?

I think people are especially now in light of the So Wiz Acquisition and I think a lot of the success you guys have had, as well as other companies that have come out of 8200 or Topiot as well.

It's become a popular thing for venture folks like myself to invest in.

But I'm curious before it was a little bit more mainstream how do you actually find your way into the venture community?

How do you come up with an idea?

Yeah.

So Talpiot, which at the time had about 1000 alumni in its history, in its 40-year history at the time, is a pretty small community that has had an unproportional impact on Israeli technology ecosystem.

One of the founders of Checkpoint was a Talpiot alumni.

Three of the four Wiz founders are Talpiot alumni.

Wiz Palo Alto?

No, Nir was not.

But you know, it's a very small group of people that have had success in those circles, started startups, grew them, some of them.

So it was definitely something that for us seemed natural to go into that path of starting a company, founding a company and building something.

I think we had no relationship to the venture ecosystem when we started.

We actually spent the first nine months of the company's life.

It was just Tamar and me doing it, sitting in Tamar's living room.

But we studied the market.

We studied, okay, what is a commercial company?

What is a startup?

Why are some startups do really well?

Why do others fail?

What does it mean to fail?

What results do they need to deliver?

Why are customers buying cybersecurity products?

What do they think they're paying for?

What are they actually getting?

What's the difference between what it says on the big companies' marketing pages that pretty much proclaim they do everything on the planet and what customers actually do with these products?

So we had a lot of studying up to do.

And at a literal level, how do you do that?

Are you just cold emailing people?

Hey, I was at Talpiot and now I'm interested in why you buy the cybersecurity solution?

Or were you networking through the folks that you had from 8200?

So both and a lot of just reading.

We just spend a lot of time reading up on spaces.

Data security was one of the spaces we looked at initially.

We also looked at several other spaces.

What's the history of these spaces?

Where did they come from?

What's the problem they're trying to solve?

How well have they solved it?

How big are the companies that are doing it?

Are they on the way up?

Are they on the way down?

What is that?

We tried to start to learn what is a market?

What is a product market fit?

I think for me, a lot of it was brand new.

And, you know, we were...

We're pretty good learners, so we just focused on learning.

A lot of it came from people in our network that were willing to spend time with us and teach us or share their experiences with us.

But a lot of it was just sitting our asses down and reading.

Do you think having no um prior pre uh uh predisposition to like how the market existed in some ways, was that um advantageous and sort of looking clear-eyed at the problem, or is that just sounds like a good narrative and probably you still had to learn all the stuff?

What a wonderful question.

I have no idea.

Listen, it seems to have worked out.

Yeah, I think I would say that there were other spaces that we considered entering.

And for me, one of the reasons that I... we chose data security was more of an emotional reason.

I couldn't feel it with the other spaces.

I knew there was a problem.

The problem was logical.

Customers validated that there's a pain and a problem, but I couldn't feel it in my gut that this really really, really hurts me.

I think that here we are almost five years later, and when I ask one of our champions in a very big account, we're walking in.

You know, you've got so many problems.

Why are you spending time with Sierra?

Why are you looking at solving data security?

It tells me your time.

You know, what's the worst thing that can happen in my company?

When you get a question mark email from the CEO. on something that happens.

And when there's data incidents and data leakage events, that happens all the time.

And I want to eliminate that.

I want that to not happen.

I want to solve this problem for the company.

It matters enough that the CEO cares about it personally.

And that was back then.

It was more of an emotional thing empathic, kind of understanding that it was facts.

We didn't have the facts.

This market was very early.

The fact that you ended up landing on this problem set, what drew you to it?

What was that emotional sort of element that appealed?

So I was literally thinking about what it means to... lose your data for your data to be stolen?

What does it mean on a personal level?

Do I as a person, do I have information?

Do I have data that I would not like others to have and then I would not like to be publicized on some website on the internet?

Yeah, the answer is yes.

How much would I not like that?

A lot.

I had like some of my military... Depends what data.

Yeah, no, but I'm saying I have data personally that I would like to remain my own.

Yeah, your browsing history maybe?

I'm not there.

Let's not be specific here.

Some pictures back from the military days and stuff like that.

For me, it's college.

For you, it's military.

Those things need to stay where they belong.

And that's on the personal level.

And then you think about it on the organizational level.

You think about.

Okay, is there information in the organization that I really care that It's not gonna be public?

Yeah.

Is there information in the organization that I really care that every employee in the organization won't be able to see?

Yeah.

And that then ties to regulation and requirements from the world and banking regulations and healthcare regulations and many other things that have come to institutionalize this.

But if you think about it, it's a very, very natural human thing.

We want to be able to protect some information about ourselves, about our business, about what we do and what we don't do.

And organizations share that sentiment and they share it in a very primal way.

And so you landed on this problem set.

You got looped in with folks over at CyberStarts, Lior and Gilly, and then Sequoia ended up coming in as well.

So maybe take me through, how did you get to those folks?

And then take me through the initial, this is sort of peak Zerp fundraising, right?

So maybe give the early fundraising story.

So I think you know it all started tomorrow night was still you know.

We didn't even have a legal entity and we got preempted with a term sheet by another firm.

And that essentially plunged us into a seed funding round.

We met with Gili and with Lior, and we clicked.

And we chose to go with them, a choice that was very, very, very meaningful.

And we didn't even know how meaningful when we made it back then.

But their coaching and their mentorship was critical to the company's success, to our success as founders and being able to get this rocket ship to take off from the ground.

I normally don't allow commercials for other venture capital firms on this show.

I normally bleep it out, but...

I guess I'll go into that a little bit.

I'll make an exception here.

What did they uniquely do well for you in the early days and sort of help you refine what Sayura is?

So I think they had product market fit of their own, in the sense that they've built an engine to take founders like Tamar and me, which are ex-engineers, engineering leaders from the Israeli ecosystem, which was very much not commercial and, in a very orchestrated, managed but quick way, commercialize you, turn you into a commercial founder for a commercial company that needs to sell, needs to conduct business in the market.

And you know, in a year's time we moved from being clueless to raising an A round from Sequoia Capital with Doug Leone and being able to convince Doug and Bogomil and the Sequoia team that we know something about the world enough that they chose to invest.

So that transition, being able to go through that transition in a year was, I think, the foundational value proposition for us, teaching us how to talk to customers, how to find pain in customer interactions, how to tie that pain to a commercial engagement, how to iterate on the product, how to bring a product to market in the early days when what you have to offer the customers is quite limited.

And really how to build that initial traction and initial engagement in the market that allowed us to start to go.

Yeah.

And so they did, I guess, I think it's technically pre-seed round or the seed round of it.

And then Sequoia, I think nominally...

I think we call it the seed round, but it was a big seed round.

It was an A round.

Those folks came in when?

How long after CyberStarts?

It was a year.

A year.

Okay.

So there was a year in there.

And then it was a little bit of a different selling market for the first year of the journey.

So maybe give me that.

So you're coming hot out the gates.

You have the most venerable firm in Israel investing, one of the most venerable firms in Silicon Valley history and one of their best investors ever joining the board.

And then Excel, another fantastic firm following very shortly thereafter.

And so...

Off to the races, no problems.

And then what happens?

Then we had a terrible year.

I moved to the States.

We went through like a go-to-market transition.

We tried to hire a team.

It wasn't the right fit for where the company was in terms of stage and product market fit.

What was that, by the way?

I've never actually asked.

I mean, I know the numbers of that year, but what was it that was off for those 12 months?

I think we did something like 1.5 million that year.

Which is amazing if you're grading on a curve of almost every company.

It was a very good year, but you guys had raised a very expensive set of rounds and, I think, had far more ambitions.

It did not feel amazing to us, I will tell you that.

I think we expected to do much better that year and we expected to progress in the market better, and it was very very, very hard.

I think acclimating to the market and being able to create that initial pipeline and initial engagement and drive the product forward and attract talent in the US and really get the company off the ground in terms of go to market.

That year was a very difficult year for us.

What did you learn?

I guess, if you were to impart a lesson or two lessons from that year to someone that's listening and maybe trying to figure out how to reach a scale of growth like you guys had.

Obviously a wind at your back in terms of some of the themes, but you had to catch the wave, so to speak, and get on it.

And so I guess, what did you learn about that?

So I think the first lesson that might sound very trivial but for me was not trivial back then is that in the early days of a product, of a market, a VP sales is not gonna solve the problem for you.

You hire a VP sales and they hire a team, but it's still your problem as a founder and it's still your responsibility as a founder to go and drive the go-to market in every aspect.

And in those early days, you don't even have enough at-bats to actually let the team take a swing.

Like you have to be in every call because you know you don't have enough opportunities that you can let somebody who joined the company four weeks ago take a call with the customer.

And, you know, if it works out well, it works out well.

If it's not, So you have to really make magic happen in every EDBD of pipeline that you have.

And those customers that do have the problem and are interested and are willing to partner with you, even though you're very early stage.

You have to make the magic happen and it takes one call to ruin an enterprise, customer interaction and maybe 40 calls or meetings to make it happen.

They have to see you in person.

They have to see you in person a few times.

They have to believe in you.

They have to believe in your mission.

And I think that I was naive.

Like in the first go around, I thought like, oh, okay, we sold a few deals.

We have a few customers.

They're starting to use the product.

Now somebody who knows how to sell will come in and sell it.

And that didn't really work.

And I think that the whole notion of it wasn't completely calibrated to reality.

And I think that I've learned that I'm personally involved, together with my co-founder with Tamar, in the business in every aspect.

That's what I do most of my time.

I spend with customers.

Obviously, as the company progressed, I spent my time more and more with strategic customers, but I spend my time with customers all the time.

And I'm always happy to get on a call with a customer of any size and get to know them and get to know why they're looking at us, what they're trying to solve.

It's also my way of steering the company in terms of product.

I'm very, very much attuned to what the customers are thinking about the product, how they're thinking about the problem statements and I validate that on five to 10 customer calls a day.

So I have a very, very clear picture of why people are choosing us, what they're doing with our product, what they want to be doing with our product.

And according to that, I steal a lot of the efforts in the company.

Was the product in the market there and it was purely like a sales execution thing, or was the market not quite ready for the product?

Not quite ready.

The market was definitely not quite ready for it yet.

I think we were coming out with this DSPM positioning, which was new to the market.

It's not like these types of problems haven't been addressed before by other companies.

Maybe give people a little bit of history of DSPM and what that actually means, as you did the studying, and what the space looked like.

We were entering the data security space.

The data security space, if you look at it from a zoom out lens, probably has billions and billions of dollars of existing spend.

The primary spend has been on DLP, data loss prevention.

These are like controls that are trying to stop the data from getting outside of the enterprise into the wrong hands.

Yeah.

But those programs, those DLP programs, were quite painful for many of our customers, for many of the enterprises in the market, because the false positive rates were super high, because the total cost of ownership of this program was up.

And to give an example, I'm at a big bank.

This actually had this at one point.

I'm trying to send a file externally to myself or something.

And maybe I just need it for... Maybe it's a personal file or something, but it's over...

10 megs and so they flag it.

Now someone needs to look at it and approve.

Okay actually, logo was just sending something stupid and so all the false positives of that stuff.

Picture trying to upload it to a google drive or dropbox or dealing with all the different controls and these challenges at the scale of 50 000 100 000 employees.

Boom, all right, like it's.

It's a nightmare, yeah.

So, and we tried to understand what was changing in the data security space, as in that time, the impetus, like the big change, was the move to the cloud.

So, if you think about it, these organizations would tell us look, we never knew exactly what data we have or where it resides, but it was all in our garage.

And that's a pretty good feeling.

And today it was much simpler.

When you could, you could look at some of the stuff as it went to the cloud because hey, it was within our drives.

If I was at Morgan Stanley and it's at my drive and now something's going to the cloud and like OK, let's look at that.

But now when it's cloud to cloud, like what do you do about that stuff?

And the move to the cloud essentially created a loss of control over the data.

Like it's no longer in my data center.

I don't have a network.

I don't have the ability to inspect it and choke it through the network, because it's sitting in somebody else's cloud, whether that's in SAS or in IaaS.

And that was the event that was happening back then.

And what we did is we plugged on into that event and we told them okay, the cloud has many dangers, many risks in terms of security, but it also has many advantages.

And we can actually turn the fact that the data is in the cloud into an advantage and we can use the way the cloud is built in order to connect to the underlying cloud provider and, from that position, in an agentless manner, show you all the data you have there and assure that the data is secured as it should be secured.

That was the initial.

That's where the company started doing that, doing it at scale, doing it fast.

And our first version was AWS only.

So we could pretty much just light up the data in the AWS.

Luckily enough for us, there were enough customers in the world that had that specific problem and it was an urgent enough problem that they took a bet on us.

There were many customers that didn't care at all.

They're like no, we don't have AWS, or we don't have anything important in AWS, or we have so many other environments.

If you can only take care of AWS, talk to us in a couple of years.

But there were some customers that were in that position where they cared enough about that specific problem that they gave us a shot.

Yeah, that was actually... When we invested...

And, by the way, I don't know causation or correlation, but the business has.

You didn't have any bad years after we invested.

Not even a bad quarter.

Everything's been up and to the right.

So I don't know who's to take credit for this.

But I will say it was actually a pretty simple thesis of like data volumes just keep going up.

Cloud is like an accelerant of that, and more stuff is going to the cloud, and then security is increasingly important.

And we sort of those are like the three sort of simple primitives of it.

And we think this team's best to execute on it.

And then and we'll talk a little bit more about this but then AI could be an accelerant for all of these things in some way.

And I think that's proving out, but it was actually pretty simple.

It wasn't like we didn't spend a ton of time thinking about like, is this going to be the case?

I think the question then becomes how big can it be if all these things happen, which is always a question in our jobs?

But

Yeah.

So I think it can be very big.

So that was the premise behind it.

So fast forward today.

So it was an initial tough year, and then things were off into the races.

And maybe give the journey through that point.

Yeah.

So I think...

Steve Rorg joined as our sales leader and managed to start to attract talent.

And he managed to do something that when we started, we never imagined we'd have.

He managed to create excellence in go-to-market.

He started bringing on people who are very proficient, account representative, sellers.

They were very smart.

They were very curious.

They were humble, smart, and hungry.

And they started delivering results.

I think Tamar and I stayed very close to the sales, very close to the customers, in every stage of the process.

And we still are today.

But we gradually saw that these people are ramping.

As people tell you, in the model that sales reps are supposed to ramp.

They come in, they learn the ropes, they learn the talk track, they learn the QA with the customer, they learn the product, they learn the value proposition of the product and then they start running off on their own and making magic happen.

And, you know, when the magic starts to happen at the beginning, you don't believe it, right?

Like, you know, a customer you never met signs a deal.

You're like, nah, must have been like, it's probably somebody's cousin, right?

You added a zero here.

This must be $30,000, not $300,000.

And then, you know, one of the sales guys who was already doing well, was telling me that he's going to close a deal for 3 million a year.

And with a company that's not regulated, I'm like...

Come on.

If you close it for a million dollars, I'm like I'll build an altar with your picture in the office.

Three million dollars.

Come on.

And now that altar's up there and you pray for it.

Keep his picture in my wallet alongside with my wife and kids.

It hangs from your car as you drive.

I'm curious on the recruiting side, what do you think Steve did uniquely well to bring in those talented people?

Obviously, product market fit and all that stuff.

But there was a nexus of early talent density.

Is there anything that you guys think you uniquely nailed?

Yeah, I think he knew.

He knew what a great salesperson looked like.

And he knew that at this point in our journey, only great salespeople will actually succeed.

Like the market was too early, the product was too early.

It wasn't easy to sell it.

It was possible to sell it, and you can even sell it for substantial dollars, but you needed people who really, really really cared about the customer and were able to do the work.

It wasn't like you're just shipping CDs and you need somebody to fulfill the demand.

You had to do the work with the customers to understand what they're trying to achieve, how the product can help them achieve that and be able to drive the project in.

And he knew what great looks like.

And he was very, very, very determined to go after greatness and bring it in.

And he started to do that.

And we started seeing things pick up And I think that all of us together, as a team, came together around the opportunity to start to launch this company into a much more meaningful growth trajectory.

So, you know, it was a small, intimate company.

People were already in it.

They liked it.

They liked us.

They believed in it.

And Tamar and I pretty much rallied the team around the opportunity to blow it out of the park.

And I think that that was a big part to make everybody feel like they're a part of the company's ability to succeed and become an outlier.

And we were very clear about what it requires to become an outlier.

Like, what are the results we all need to make happen together?

And it was very clear that those results were not to be trivialized, right?

Like there were no guarantees that we were going to be able to do that.

But the team came together, everybody put in 150 and then we managed to start to create that flywheel of momentum that has really continued since you invested Logan.

I know, I know.

Besides me investing, if you look back, Is there a moment that you reflect on and you're like yeah, that was really when it shifted from maybe rowing against the current in a boat to now the current was sort of helping accelerate you in a meaningful way.

Is there a deal that you look back on, or a hire or something that it really sort of felt like it tipped?

There were many moments like that.

I'm sure every time.

It's not easy, I know.

Yeah, I don't think it tips, I think.

But there's many moments where you're like, wow.

Like, I never expected... to see this.

And then it becomes normal and you get used to it and you move on.

But it's like I always joke.

I tell my wife that we're kind of doomed in this position where I'm always uncomfortable because that's my job to to make myself and to make the company very much uncomfortable.

Yeah.

Well, I mean, some of the, some of the, I guess that's a good point.

Some of the growth that you guys have had on the headcount side, on the revenue ambition side.

All of this it makes me, as an investor, at different times, uncomfortable.

Uh, just because I think you're you're defying um gravity or physics in some ways with how fast you want to go.

Why do you feel a pressure or an insatiable desire to go at the pace that you're executing on?

Wow, there's a few reasons for that.

I think the first one in my mind, and you might not like to hear it as an investor, but for the people that work for the company, my job is to create a return on investment, which is a return on time.

So you know, you invested the dollars, but they're investing time and my job is to create an incredible return for them on their time.

They're giving me some of the best years of their careers and much of the best hours and years of their life.

They're giving it to the company and I want to create an amazing return for them.

So time matters a lot.

I think the second thing is what Frank told us in the last board meeting you think it's hard to go fast.

It's much easier to go fast than it is to go slow.

It allows you to differentiate more from your competitors.

It allows you to excite the market.

It allows you to continue to garner support from the venture capital community.

So going fast.

While it's very very, very scary, in many aspects it actually helps you avoid friction.

It helps you lower the friction and it helps you win.

For people that don't know, Frank Sloopman, I think the iconic name in software CEO and certainly sales and execution and all that.

I mean, it makes sense.

How do you think about the throttle of how aggressive to go on this?

What is the breaking point of how you set goals for people internally, of like hey, this feels super ambitious but potentially attainable, versus is it like 50 confidence?

Is it 25?

Is it 75?

How do you think about goals?

So...

Maybe as a third-generation Holocaust survivor, that's how I think about many things in the world.

I risk manage.

I think that at this point in the company's life, private company, we don't report to Wall Street.

We report to the board and it's a pretty intimate group.

That is very much in the details of what's going on.

So, as much as everybody loves the beat and raise beat and raise narrative, I think we do have the ability to hold a little bit of a more intricate narrative within our board structure and within our oversight structure.

I like to put the goals for us at this stage at a place that, first of all, makes me uncomfortable.

Like I'm saying, wow, it's going to be really hard to do that.

At the same time, I have a high level of confidence that we're going to be able to at least do 80 of that.

I also risk manage from a financial perspective.

What does the company look like if I only do 80 of the goal?

Did I mess up the company?

Did I do something that puts us in a bad position?

And I want to make sure that even if we only do 80 of the goal that I'm setting for all of us, then we're still in an exquisite position.

We're still in a wonderful position.

So I want the goal to make us all stretch into it and make us feel like we're leaning out of our skis.

And at the same time you have to risk manage that if you're doing that and something doesn't come your way and you end up doing a little less, you're still very happy about the financial structure that you created.

And does that mean 100% confidence of 80% the number?

Or do you think 80% confidence?

100% confidence, right?

Like is reserved for fools.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

But still, I mean, when you're thinking about like 80, the number, you're trying to have some high confidence.

I'm saying like a very high confidence.

Yeah, 95%.

Very high confidence in 80% of the goal and confidence in the ability to do the goal.

Does that trickle into other parts of the organization as well?

Do you guys set goals like that within I don't know EPD or marketing, and that these are very ambitious goals and that

We're going to strive for 100%.

I think that mentality does trickle down.

Generally, I think it's positive.

Generally, I think that...

Building a great plan and achieving even almost all of the plan is a pretty good tactic for most of the business units.

If we're going to zoom out a little bit on cyber security of the market, one of the things that I think has historically been said about cyber is it's really there's a lot of paths to exiting for a couple hundred million bucks.

And it's a good place to build point solutions.

It's a really hard place to build. five, $10 billion plus companies.

And the number maybe we can come up with as we talk here.

But there's, I don't know, probably three to five companies that are over.

$20 billion in the last 10 years, maybe, which is big in terms of the absolute numbers.

I'm thinking CrowdStrike.

I'm thinking Palo Alto Networks.

I'm thinking Zscaler.

I'm thinking... We can come up with the names.

But...

I'm curious, how do you think about the cyber landscape today?

Do you think the question I had asked you a few years ago, or maybe a year ago, was like how many 10 billion companies do you think there will be in cyber in five years time?

Do you think that's a few?

Do you think it's dozens?

Like, how do you sort of think about the rate of opportunity there is for cyber?

I'm a very big believer in cyber for several reasons.

So it starts, in my mind, with the foundational paradigm of cyber.

In most of the things we do in our lives, as companies, as individuals, we get measured on how well we do, on average.

In cyber, we get measured on our weakest link.

That's a very different paradigm.

And that's the fundamental paradigm that creates an endless opportunity in cyber.

So while a mature enterprise today might already be an average of eight out of 10 on the cybersecurity program, it's enough that there's one weak link, that is, a two or a three, and they're very much exposed.

So that's something that is fundamentally different in the paradigm of how cyber affects or how it comes into friction with the world, compared to many other topics, many other things we're doing where the average is what matters.

I think that that fundamentally creates a huge opportunity for entrepreneurship and innovation, because companies and organizations get measured on the weakest link.

Does that lend itself to best-of-breed solutions being worth more and more?

It does.

It mostly lends itself to say that if I have a big enough problem like if I have a problem that is a two or a three and I think it's a real problem, then I have to find a solution for it.

And if the big providers will only solve it in three years, then it's three years of exposure that I have right now.

And that's probably going to mean a breach.

So you know it's a cat and mouse game between the defenders and the attackers and time like time, multiplies everything.

So you know, In many topics I would say oh, my HR system will be.

You know, there's a niche AI company here that is doing something amazing for HR, that could have such efficiencies for me.

But my bigger HR provider will probably take care of it in two years from now.

Okay, so that's two years of less efficiency.

It's not two years where you're exposed to a breach that could potentially damage your company substantially.

So there's a fundamental difference in why cyber is so appealing for innovation.

It's not just because of the exit plan.

It's mostly because the CISOs think that way.

Well, and I've thought that cyber is a weird one where there's a two by two kind of matrix.

And for people listening, I'm doing it with my hands.

But basically most industries.

If you need to be on the cutting edge of something, you won't get fired for picking something that's innovative.

Right.

And so, hey, we're going to buy a new AISDR tool.

And if it goes wrong, you might fire off a few emails that you don't like, and you're not going to get fired for it.

You shut it down.

And it's like, okay, we're not going to do that.

We tried it.

It was interesting.

Whatever.

It didn't exactly work.

Or...

You could get fired for it, but you don't need to be on the leading edge of it.

And so it's like, hey, we're implementing a new payroll system.

And it's like we're not going to go test the new payroll system out there because if this goes wrong I'm probably losing my job for it.

Cyber's a weird one, where you both need to be at the leading edge of innovation and you can get fired if it goes wrong, which I think leads itself to a lot of things you're talking about.

Cyber in general is a very volatile workplace and it's very hard to be a CISO.

These people deal with so much challenges internally in their organizations a changing attack landscape, a changing IT ecosystem they have to protect.

It's a very, very, very challenging job for any person to have.

To secure these organizations is a challenge.

The people that do it well within your customer base, besides buying Syera, like what...

What traits do those people have that lends themselves to being good at their job?

I think that usually I see a lot of people who have first principles thinking.

They try to choose relatively simple principles that they believe are core principles to securing the enterprise and scale them very well and keep their principles relatively simple.

Right, like they find a way to take this very complex space that is cyber and turn it into something relatively simple that their teams can understand, rally around and just execute on in a very very, very meaningful way, scale it to every part of the enterprise which, in the big enterprise, is very hard.

And again, it comes from that same topic that you get tested on your weakest link.

So you can have the most sophisticated plan of defense ever, but if it doesn't actually extend to your entire enterprise, you're still gonna leave exposures out there that they're going to be taken advantage of.

So the best CISOs in my mind are kind of like first principles thinkers.

They take very simple principles and they scale them.

When you're thinking about the opportunity for Sierra and therefore the opportunity for other cybersecurity companies?

What we said earlier about best of breed, how do you think about adjacencies to potentially go into?

Where to stop, where it's no longer a core competency of what you're doing necessarily, and you don't fall victim to the platform issue.

Uh, fallacy of you know i'll get to it in three years yeah, so it's a great question and i'm not sure i have the answer today.

I'd like.

I think we're still so much on the expansion part of the story that i'm not sure i know where we stop or uh, or where the line should be drawn, but It is very important for us to keep two things as our principles while we're expanding.

And those two things are, first of all, like a platform approach.

And what I mean by that, I mean, one plus one equals three.

If we're developing a new product and it's one plus one equals two, then it's probably not the right investment for us.

Like if there's no additive value meaningful additive value from having these two capabilities integrated in one platform.

It's probably better to leave it for somebody else.

So that's the biggest question Tamar and I ask ourselves on every new investment that we're making as a company are we going to create a one plus one equals three situation for our customers here?

And do you know that intuitively or do you hear that from them or is it both?

I think that in every type of product decision, product strategy decision, we always defer to the customers as our sanity check.

That's been our method from the get-go, starting in the space, to be able to really ask the customers the hard questions and get to the truth from them.

And that has always been a very honest compass for us to steer the ship around.

I think that as Sayera as a company becomes more complex, we do need to make it accessible for them.

We do need to ask them, okay, to show them the Sayera perspective on this.

Sometimes... they wouldn't be able to comprehend the one plus one equals three out of the box.

We'd have to explain like why we think there's going to be a one plus one equals three.

Situation here

And they'll tell us, that sounds really good.

I'd love that.

Or you're full of shit.

Like those things don't really go together.

Like it's a nice story, but it's not going to work in my world.

And let me tell you why.

So they're very good at keeping us grounded to the facts.

And they're also very good at centering us on the core value proposition of Sayera.

So whenever we bring our advisory board, our customer advisory board, together to review the roadmap and review the planning sessions, the message that is always portrayed most loudly is expanding the platform is important.

It's wonderful.

We want you to solve more problems.

But the most important thing is that you will continue to solve the problem we bought you for in the first place amazingly well.

And you will find more and more ways to do that better for us.

So that is always the message from the customers.

Sure, expand, grow, but double down on the call.

I mean, one of the things that you had to fight in the early days is I think you need to.

You want to establish yourself as a platform or a best of breed solution faster than the incumbents can try to box you in to being a point solution, uh and and trying to frame the market as like no, this isn't best of breed.

We do this in selling against that.

Um, How have you guys been able to successfully sell against that?

To get to the point now that it's pretty clear you are a platform.

I think that goes back to the speed.

The ability to create momentum, the ability to create speed, velocity.

That's what allows you to start to set yourself apart.

We acquired a company last year for $162 million.

If you would have told me that when Sierra will be three years old, we will acquire a company for 162 million, I would have told you you're drunk.

I wouldn't have believed it.

But I think that The reason we did that is because it was an accelerator.

It allowed us to grow the momentum.

It allows us to grow our speed.

It allows us to expand faster and in a way that doesn't eat up from the core resources.

So you know That is us acting in what I see as extreme ways in order to create velocity and continue to drive forward at speed.

The incumbents have no way to compete with that.

They're fundamentally like.

Their position in the market is much more established and it's much slower.

It's much harder for them to create momentum where it didn't exist before.

It's like anything, companies growth doesn't usually go up.

As the company scales and becomes bigger, the growth goes down, so does the velocity.

So we are definitely leveraging our advantage and our position in the market to use that and emphasize on speed and double down on speed and use it as a way to completely change the market in a sense.

I want to ask about that point a little bit more.

But as we're sort of thinking about the broad-based market today, one of your, I guess, shared background.

Wiz is an example of a business that also.

They were Talpiot, they were CyberStarts, they were Doug and Boga Mill as well.

So a lot of shared lineage between that.

Obviously, The news came out earlier this week, they're being acquired for $32 billion.

I'm curious, like, one, what's your reaction to something like that when you hear it?

And what do you think about implications for the cybersecurity world?

I think it's amazing.

First of all, I'm super, super happy for them.

I think they've rocked the cybersecurity market in an incredible way.

And I think that it's extremely exciting to see such validation that excellence commands a premium in the world.

I like that being able to do something that is extraordinary and gets rewarded with a premium in the sense of this acquisition.

And for us at Sayera, I think that's something we definitely believe in as well that doing something extraordinary is worth much more than doing something ordinary.

And I think that for the cybersecurity market, it's honestly, it's a bummer.

Wiz was a rising star that many customers looked at as the next great platform in cyber.

And for their reasons, they chose to partner with Google and become part of that.

And I think that the market is not going to be all too thrilled about it. for many reasons.

Who do you think Wiz got super right?

If you were to pick a thing that they nailed and led to the level of success.

I know there's a lot of them.

I think there's really many things that they did amazingly well.

One of them is velocity, creating momentum and driving it forward at an extreme pace.

And another one that is a bit more core to the way their product operates and the way it's implemented in these enterprises is that they managed to democratize the risk, which is something that we're doing also for the data security aspect, but they managed to create a platform in which the developers, which actually need to solve the problems, fix the problems that their platform identified.

So the developers are able to do that within their ecosystem and they like doing that within their ecosystem.

And that allows the security team to put this product in place and enable the business, the application owners, the developers in our world, the data owners, to go and take ownership and responsibility for the risks under their purview and solve those risks through the platform.

So I think that that is one of the most core elements to their success in the market, and something that we believe in as well.

And we believe that it's the only way to actually scale security in the enterprise.

It's something people talk about.

I'm curious when we spoke, like, I don't know.

You know the joke about AI nowadays with the teenagers?

No.

The AI is the same as sex is for teenagers.

Everybody's talking about it.

Very few people are doing it.

And the ones that are doing it are doing it wrong.

I hadn't heard that.

I uh i, when i, when i had asked you about it, i don't know six, maybe a year ago, and i was like you know, but typical vc uh, bullshit maybe i was like well, we should, we should glom on to some of this like marketing and get ourselves out there as an ai first vendor uh, and i think at the time you're like listen, by the people we're selling into, more often than not they.

The old adage is like it's, it's called ai when it doesn't work, and then it because it's machine learning, when it does, and then when it becomes invisible, it's an algorithm or something uh, and so i don't know if that's where people were in the cycle of time, but i'm curious as you look at it today like uh, What is the risk of AI?

The opportunity for AI?

What's going on with AI in security?

So in security in general, you know, so many things.

I think, in our world.

Specifically, it's for us the ability for CISOs to support the adoption of AI in the enterprise and to make it into a responsible and secure process.

That is the core business driver for our success nowadays, the reason we're getting the budgets we're getting from these enterprises, the reasons they're investing in this topic.

It's just that to be able to support the adoption of AI in the enterprise in a secure and responsible way.

And when I view it or when I think about it, people are not going to slow down.

Security is not going to block AI in any way.

AI is happening and it's going to happen big.

But if we can, as a security industry, help it happen securely and responsibly, that's our most important mission in the world right now.

That's internal to the, I wanna talk about the external AI, but this is internal right now.

Is it just making sure that the data and the systems are all in place for people to then be able to take more generative actions on top of the data?

Yeah, let me take a step back even, okay?

We're sitting here in New York City.

You look around at these buildings and all of this civilization, if you will, and it looks so stable.

It looks so solid.

The buildings are made of stone and the institutions are strong.

You know the?

There's a credit swiss building in the city that looks like a fortress.

You know which one i'm talking about?

Yeah sure, literally looks like a medieval fortress.

Sure, and i'm saying, like that is so symbolic, because that's what you want a bank to represent.

Yeah, but where is credit swiss?

It's not a fortress.

Yeah, it's done, it's dead.

And how fast did that happen?

Like that.

An institution that we looked at, that wanted to portray to all of us that it's a fortress that is robust, that is sturdy, that is reliable, disappeared off the face of the planet in what felt to me like two days.

Yeah.

So that is the hard reality that people do not want to face about the modern world we live in.

It's not as robust and not as sturdy as we don't like everybody to believe.

And, within that, the ability to trust in these institutions, to trust when you're putting your information into whatever system it is whether it's a healthcare system or a finance system or a retail system and that that information gets treated with some level of decency security being a big world here but that it's not being sold to online marketers and it's not being sold.

The ability to trust is not to be taken for granted in society.

And I think that, if you look at it from a macro trend, the introduction of AI into the world is going to challenge that in a very, very big way.

If I no longer know if I'm interacting with an AI engine or a human being on the other side, that does something to my trust.

Maybe I'm getting a better service from the AI agent than I did from the person that was answering that phone two years ago.

I'm not saying you're not, but it still changes something about the foundational trust that we have in each other and in the institutions.

So when I look at the job, like the role of cybersecurity, data security in the next few years, it's making sure that this transition doesn't crumble the digital trust that exists in the world today.

I don't want my kids to live in a world where you cannot trust institutions.

That's a crazy world and it can happen quite quickly.

I like it's the line is not that thick.

Very quickly we go from a world where these institutions are trustworthy reliable dependable, to a world where they're not.

From a values perspective, from a mission perspective that's what Sierra is about in the world.

It's about enabling this modernization to happen, because it's going to happen anyhow, but enabling it to happen in a secure and responsible way.

And so the extrapolation of that point, then, I mean, it makes sense.

And I think institutions are far less trusted than they've ever been, either rightly right rightly in a lot of cases, and wrongly and some others.

But um, Your role in that and how you think about it is what.

Sayera's role?

Sayera's role is in allowing enterprises to put the right controls around data, which is pretty much AI's favorite meal, to make sure that the adoption of AI that is happening doesn't make the data exposed in ways that it shouldn't be exposed.

You have a big healthcare provider that wants to put the PHI into their internal LLM engine.

That's supposed to accelerate their ability to service the customers.

If the result of that is now that every employee of the 100000 employees that work for that healthcare provider can now access every person's PHI, that's some price we're not willing to pay as society.

I don't want every employee at my healthcare provider to be able to find out all of my medical conditions, and you don't want it either.

So, while we do want AI to modernize our experience, to improve it, to enhance the service we're getting, we're not willing to compromise the integrity of our data and the privacy and security of our data.

And that's where we're coming and saying there shouldn't be a trade-off.

It's not one or the other.

You can adopt AI, you can modernize, you can move to the cloud, and you can do it while having the best and the right controls around that data.

And why don't the data systems themselves, or the models themselves in the case of AI?

Why can't they solve this problem?

So there's two reasons for that.

Fundamentally, first of all, security is always an afterthought.

You first of all wanna do something, then you wanna secure it.

So security within the enterprise is used to playing catch up.

The business does something and then we chase them to secure it.

Sometimes we have mature enough processes in place to catch it before it's happening.

But with AI, that's definitely going to be the situation.

It's already making its way into the enterprise, and security teams are trying to play catch up to secure it and to make sure that it doesn't end up as the enterprise's downfall.

So that's one fundamental reason that it's just hard.

It's hard to do all things for all people.

The second is that, when you look at the enterprise lens of things, They're not using just one data platform or one AI model or one system, right?

The enterprise reality is that they have everything.

You know, a CISO friend of mine once told me like he was doing a deal with Microsoft and he got Microsoft for most of his environment.

So I told him, ah, so you're all set now.

It's like, you're dumb.

I'm not all set.

What are you talking about?

I have a soup sandwich.

You try to pick it up, it melts in your hand.

We have everything and everything here.

And that's the reality for every enterprise.

So even if the providers give you some tools to do security in their system or their model or whatnot, it doesn't solve the enterprise issue of having to deal with hundreds of those models, hundreds of those systems, hundreds of environments.

And that's where platforms like Sayera come in and are saying wherever your data resides, whether it's in the cloud, whether it's in data lakes, whether it's on premise, whether it's in systems we don't even know the name of yet and will come up tomorrow.

We're going to be there to make sure that you're getting a uniform level of security, that you have the right controls, that you have the right access governance, that you can report to your auditors about what you're doing, that you're reducing risk, managing risk, and For the enterprise, that's crucial.

It doesn't help them if they solve the problem in a tiny niche of it.

They have to be able to cover the full gambit.

What's something about the industry that you believe will be true in a couple years' time?

That's maybe not commonly appreciated today?

I have a hope.

I don't know if I believe that that hope will happen.

But cybersecurity today is a market where it's very hard to partner because of the competitive nature, because it's ever evolving.

It seems like everybody's competing with everybody all the time.

And I think that that has a limit.

And I think that the next wave of success that is going to come into cyber.

Obviously, AI is going to make it a lot more effective.

But I think the next wave is going to come from meaningful partnerships between providers, between vendors, that come to actually serve the cause better.

I think that when those partnerships start to become more meaningful, that will allow enterprises to improve their security quite substantially without increasing the total cost of ownership that they already invested.

One thing I'm curious for you to share, and I know we've talked about this, but October of 23, there's a horrible attack on Israel.

And I think I told you this.

I was like – I texted you guys, and I thought –

I thought like maybe Saira, you know, everyone was going to have to go to war.

And we have a company in Israel and having to deal with all of the implications of that stuff.

But at a human level, I just couldn't even imagine the position you guys were in.

Leading through that time.

Can you just take me through the emotions of I forget how many people we ended up either on active or reserve as employees.

Can you just give a little bit of background on that?

Yeah, so I think October 7th was an earth-shattering event for the Israeli community, and maybe broader than that in some senses.

Yeah, the world in some ways, yeah.

And I think, for us at Sayera.

You know, obviously we're a company with very, very deep roots in Israel.

Almost half of our employees are in Israel.

And you're probably at that time three years out of service?

Something like that, yeah.

So I think on the personal front, my first feeling was guilt that I'm not still in the service.

Tamar, who's always more rational and smarter, slapped it out of me and told me it would have helped.

Shut up and do what you can, which is to continue to succeed with Sierra.

I think for the team...

Not that it's over.

We're still in that, and it seems like even this week, things are escalating back.

But for the team it was an atrocious, atrocious time.

Israel is a small country.

These things affect people very close to home.

It's your cousin, it's your brother, it's your in-laws.

People feel it as if it's like, as if it's their family.

And you know, Right now, as we speak, we still have tens and tens of hostages in Gaza.

And these are our brothers and sisters that haven't returned home yet.

And we want them to return as soon as possible.

And we want this conflict to be resolved.

And so it was a very, very difficult moment for all of us, and it's continuing to be in our hearts every day.

I think as people living in this day and age, it kind of threw us back to our grandparents' days.

So there's something about that feeling where somebody could come into your home and murder your family.

As much as Israel has been in conflict during my years as a teenager and as a young man.

I've never felt that before.

I've never felt that feeling that your life is threatened by some external power that has issues with you, whether they're geopolitical or religious or ideological or whatnot.

And that sentiment is one that changes people, has changed me to.

To feel that way has changed me in a big way.

And uh, And I think it's changed the Israeli society and it's led us to fight back with force and with unity that I'm not sure the people who started that attack expected.

And I think Israel all in all is in a better geopolitical situation today than it was before, before that attack.

This has led us to take a much more proactive stance in protecting our people and protecting our country.

But at the same time, the prices could not be higher.

The many, many warriors that have fallen, the many, many families that have had, you know, men and women in the service for months and months, or even years, over the past two years.

And we're all experiencing it very close to home.

And I hope that we can find a resolution to this immediate conflict and make sure to deter any future aggressors from taking action like this again.

I'm sure there's really no way to compartmentalize when so many people at the business, probably at that time half the employee base, maybe probably more right.

We're in Israel at the time in October of 23.

So I'm curious, like as a leader of a company, not that I think people listening hopefully will never have to go through something like that.

But how do you encourage people to keep going about their jobs in some ways when there's this crisis, other thing that's so existential and so personal?

And I'm just curious, how do you try to help people through that to keep going?

So I think, for us, it's first of all to lead with empathy, and with empathy that is collective, but it's also personal, because while it's something that the collective is experiencing, it's also something that everybody is experiencing personally.

And, you know, the same thing can affect two different people very differently.

You have to respect that, and you have to have the room for that.

In general, in Sierra, we have a very, very committed and determined and motivated employee base.

And that's our assumption.

That's almost like the requirements in order to participate in this company.

So the level of trust with the employees is very high.

And you have to respect that everybody's going through their own thing.

And, you know, sometimes people have a day.

When they're not dialed in and they're not going to be in the places they need to be, and to be empathic to that and to respect that.

And as a collective, as a group, to remind everybody that this is something that all of us are experiencing and, wherever they need to do something about it or to be somewhere, we've got their back.

At the same time, our mission as a company and as Israelis in the company is to keep it going and to not slow down.

We have a unique opportunity to do something extraordinary in the world.

We have a unique opportunity to change our industry and to affect the way the world adopts AI.

We have to master our energies and to master our focus and resources for that mission, as we're capable of right.

And it's okay if the capability level drops.

That's the situation.

But whatever anybody can do, they should continue to do.

And what I've seen in the team is that people actually double down on their work in many cases.

Like, you know, the...

The world outside was not very fulfilling, not to say depressing.

And I think a lot of people in the company found a lot of solace and a lot of comfort at the workplace, where things were normal.

In a sense, we kept on selling, we kept on building, we kept on moving, we kept on recruiting people.

And that was the only place in people's life that was sane.

And I think that the team kept each other sane and held each other close in the bad days, gave each other space when people needed it, but stayed together, stuck together and stuck through it.

Honestly, when this started, I thought that the thorough put from Israel will probably stall completely.

And that wasn't the case.

Things kept going pretty much at the same pace that they were going before, in some areas even faster.

That's due to the resilience and determination of the team to keep it going.

Nobody made them.

We tried to give everybody the full support and space to do and be wherever they need to.

And people go hard.

I'm curious about motivations.

At this point, you guys have had a bunch of success.

I'm sure at different points in time there were opportunities to get off the ride and people sniffing around trying to buy the business or whatever it is.

I'm curious at this point, like...

What motivates you, keeps you going?

I think the first thing, which sounds so simple, but I think it's actually the most important one, is that I'm having a blast.

I love my job.

I love doing my job.

I love the people I work with.

I love what we're doing as a company.

So I'm having the best time of my life in a very, very big way.

And that sounds so simple, but that's, first of all, the most important thing.

There's no pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

The prize is the journey.

And the prize is being able to go through this, to build this together with the team, to see people in the company grow, take on more responsibility, solve hard problems, lead other people, you know.

That for me is the prize in all of this on the personal level.

And right now it's very, very easy to be in love with the company and to be in love with what we're doing.

I think on a personal level, you know, it's a feeling of fulfillment.

You're doing something in the world that is world-class.

You're doing something in the world that is extraordinary.

You challenged yourself as a leader, as an entrepreneur.

Every day, you have to get better.

You have to learn something you didn't know yesterday.

You have to challenge the business.

You have to challenge the team.

You have to challenge yourself all the time.

And that's something that I think I enjoy very much.

And I think Tamar enjoys very much.

And it's really a privilege to be able to do this.

So there's no rush to stop.

What's the most challenging part of the day-to-day right now?

Of the day-to-day?

Yeah.

Yeah, being the CEO of a hyper growth business.

I think the most challenging part is letting people down.

Like, you know, I'm a firstborn son first born grandchild on both sides.

I'm like a people pleaser in my nature, in my core.

And when you have 550 people that need things from you or want things from you, you don't get to all of it.

And you're letting a lot of people down all the time, in a sense.

And not to judge yourself for it, to accept it, to keep your head up and focus on the things that you need to focus on.

It's for me, it's a personal challenge to to be able to handle that balance, that you cannot be in all places all the time.

Today I got on a customer call in Europe with a very big enterprise in Europe and the team was on site in the office with the customers.

And you feel that little bitterness in your stomach.

Why am I not there on the ground?

I should have been there on the ground, in the office.

I would have loved it.

They would have loved it.

I would have loved being there with the team.

But you can't be in all the places in the way that you want all the time.

What would you go back and tell yourself five years ago, when you're starting Syera?

That you've learned along the way?

Go faster.

Do you think you didn't go fast enough in the early days or you just could have gone faster?

Not to say you didn't go fast enough, but in hindsight, you could have gone fast.

Is there something you've learned operationally that you feel is critical to if you were to run it back?

Like if you were to start another business at some point in the future.

You're like make sure to not make that mistake again.

Wow.

So many, so many things.

But maybe I'll give something that is not so trivial, but still quite applicable.

As the business becomes more complex, there becomes more of it.

More things are happening, different things are happening, more people are doing things.

It becomes a little hard to understand what's going on and to own it in a sense.

And there's a concept in software.

That is a very basic concept, but sometimes it doesn't get implemented all the way through in business.

That's the concept of an interface.

How do you interface with the world?

And something that I've recently realized is that some business units, some business functions, have a very clear interface, that everybody knows how to interface with them.

And some don't. and they need to declare an interface.

They need to say, this is how you interface with us.

This is how we accept requests.

This is how we work on them.

This is how we prioritize.

These are departments or peoples?

Yeah, within the company.

And some departments just have a very natural interface.

For example, sales are measured on a quarterly basis on the numbers they put up on the pipeline they have for the next quarter.

It's relatively.

The basic level of interface is much more clear than for some other departments that don't necessarily have a clear cadence or don't necessarily have a clear timeline for the things that they're doing or not doing.

They have to somehow teach the organization how to work with them.

And they don't always do that proactively.

And I think oftentimes that creates frustration.

People are working hard, but nobody knows what they're working on and what they're not working on, and what they chose to prioritize and what they chose to not prioritize.

And that's just a lack of an interface, not such a hard problem to solve once you've defined it well.

Are there things that you do or tactics you've employed that enable you to maintain this perpetual motion and this ability to go fast?

First of all, I hope it's perpetual.

It seems like it so far.

It's a good statement to snag it in there.

But let's hope it's perpetual.

I think generally, we're in the software business.

We're building enterprise software today for cybersecurity buyers.

And that's...

Not the easiest thing, but it's also not rocket science.

The customers know their problems.

They know what they don't like about their existing solutions.

They know what they can spend on problems.

So the work with the customers is the foundational driver for a lot of the innovation and growth and continued growth for the company.

Keep talking to the customers.

Keep listening to what they're telling you about their needs, how their needs are evolving and changing, where they see you, where they want you and what are the gaps you need to close.

So once you actually get in, in the enterprise, it's a lot about being able to listen and execute.

But if you execute for the enterprise, they have many more problems they want you to solve.

You just need to be able to define those problems well based on the right sample size.

You need to be able to... plan great solutions for those problems.

You need to make sure that the additive value of getting that solution from you the one plus one equals three continues to exist.

You have a number of venerable investors around the table.

We've referenced some of them.

I'm curious, especially coming off of a very high-profile acquisition for Sequoia.

I'm curious working with Doug now for four years.

Three.

Three years.

What...

What's something he's imparted to you as a board member that you feel has been particularly helpful or additive to the organization?

You know it's a little embarrassing to say, but I think the biggest gift that Doug gave me is validation for my leadership, for Tamar's leadership.

And it wasn't given when he invested, but about a year and a half after he invested just about the time you invested he started telling us nice things about us.

And there's something about the way Doug handles himself in the world that makes you believe it when he says it, whether many other people might tell you nice things and you'll just discard them to the side.

And I think that that validation was empowering for us and allowed us to believe in ourselves and to dream bigger and think bigger.

I guess, as we sort of think about wrapping here fundraising, I think you're a I would call you a good fundraiser.

I don't know if you would consider yourself a good fundraiser, but I think the same characteristics that you do a great job of selling customers on the opportunity of Sire.

I think you also bring that to bear with the venture community.

What have you learned about fundraising, picking partners, investors?

And it matters a lot.

I think it's very easy to look at the valuation because it's numbers.

So it's easy to compare what the offer from X is, what the offer from Y is.

Because it's numbers, it's objective, it's easy to say what you prefer.

But investors in venture capital in our space, at our stage, in our world.

It's like getting married.

And I think for many reasons, you don't actually know the partner as much as you think before you get married.

And I think that.

Taking the time to get to know each other a bit to make sure that there's alignment of values, alignment of beliefs, alignment of expectations, the way we communicate and the way we work together, and what we're trying to achieve.

It's important that the fact that many firms are venture capital firms doesn't mean they're the same.

And there's big differences in how they approach it, how they approach the business and what they want from a company when they're making that investment.

I think that it's really important to look at it more like a decision about somebody you're bringing into the family than a strictly financial decision.

I feel like you did a good job of.

You've gotten a lot of like core people to organizations involved too.

I don't know if that's something that you were purposeful about.

But Philippe at Excel and Doug at Sequoia and, you know, on down the line, Dave and Lucas at KOTU, obviously, Gillian Lior at.

At CyberStars, you've sort of gotten the core people involved in it.

I guess there's something there too, as well, of like the stability.

All those people are very stable in their organizations, I would say.

And I don't know if that's something you intentionally did or thought about, but having people that are stable at the partner level within their firms, I assume, has been pretty helpful as well.

Yeah, I mean for us like working with reputable firms that in many senses venture capital have a lot of power over the company.

And in my aspect, in my perspective, what holds that power in check is the reputation.

The reputation is important because it's the defense mechanism, in the sense that the founders have, And great investors care only about one thing more than they care about the company's outcome.

It's about their reputation.

Yeah.

Because they plan to invest more and build more companies and reputation lasts a lifetime.

So, you know, having people who value their reputation is a critical thing.

There's a funny thing, too, where initially companies steal the brand from the venture capital firm.

And then ultimately, if you're successful, the venture capital firm steals the brand from the company.

It's like initially you put our logo up on the website, our general hour up on the website, and show it off.

And then at some point it shifts and we put your your, your up there and you get the tombstones when you come in and we show your picture.

And so there's this funny brand stealing thing that exists too, that is validating.

And as you know, it goes much bit, much further than that.

Right.

At the end of the day, you know, VCs rely on their founders in order to help them get deals and close deals.

So the relationship is definitely much more of a two-way, bidirectional relationship than it is initially portrayed.

Yes, that's right.

That's right.

Yeah.

Especially as you're successful, people want to call in favors from you.

I guess, if you're listening and interested in Syera, and either, I guess, as a customer, but probably more likely as an employee, where can they find you?

What are you hiring for?

What traits?

We talked about some of the cultural traits, but what type of person are you looking to bring on board for smart, humble and hungry?

That's the people that we're looking for.

And you know, to be very frank, as I tell all the employees in their interview process and on the welcome to Sierra call, we don't have anything against work-life balance, but it's just not what we offer.

This is a very, very intense workplace.

It's not intense because somebody makes you work hard.

It's intense because it's going to swallow you in and you're going to find yourself thinking about it in your dreams and in your vacations.

And it's just that kind of place.

It's contagious.

And people who love it, love it.

And people who don't, don't.

And I think it's important to know what you have to offer.

We have to offer an extremely thrilling, exciting, and distinguished ride.

We have to offer a drive for excellence that is uncompromising, but we don't have to offer is a great work-life balance that sadly, you know, to my wife's dismay, that sadly not part of the core value proposition that we have for employees today.

And it's important to know that.

There's other places you can find that.

Yeah, there's great places you can find that.

And again, people have people today have pretty long careers.

There's times to do different things in your career and there's times you want to go all in, and there's times you want something more balanced and that's that's a okay and it's uh.

You know, i hope i'm not gonna work this hard forever.

Yes, but uh, but right now i'm enjoying every minute of it and i want to work even more.

You won't be around forever if you keep working as hard as you do.

And hiring across all different functions, all different Hiring across every function, every region.

500 people?

Yeah.

So 100 to 250, 250 to 550, 550 to whatever that is, 1100 or so.

Yeah.

So there's lots of job opportunities out there if people are smart, hungry, and humble.

So yeah.

Well, thank you for doing this.

This was fun.

Thank you, Logan.

It was a pleasure.

[Scaling at Breakneck Speed: Insights from Syera CEO Yotam Segev]-[EP 142: Yotam Segev (CEO, Cyera) on Growing One of the Fastest Security Startups on the Planet]

📋 Summary

Scaling at Breakneck Speed: Lessons from Syera

The Power of Values in Scaling

The Reality of Hyper-Growth

Solving the Data Security Puzzle

The Strategic Role of Speed

Navigating Crisis and Global Trust

Looking Ahead: Partnerships and AI

🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

[Scaling at Breakneck Speed: Insights from Syera CEO Yotam Segev]-[EP 142: Yotam Segev (CEO, Cyera) on Growing One of the Fastest Security Startups on the Planet]

📋 Summary

Scaling at Breakneck Speed: Lessons from Syera

The Power of Values in Scaling

The Reality of Hyper-Growth

Solving the Data Security Puzzle

The Strategic Role of Speed

Navigating Crisis and Global Trust

Looking Ahead: Partnerships and AI

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🎯Key Sentences

📝Key Phrases

📖 Transcript

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