Kamal is co-founder and CTO at Andromeda, which is building an identity management solution to help companies better understand their identity footprint and manage excessive permissions across disparate platforms. Kamal uses the term "digital incarnation" which resonated with me given the number of accounts a single human may have across different platforms. Kamal worked as an engineer and engineering leader for two decades across Oracle, Ebay, and Paypal before starting Andromeda in 2023. In th...
Jun 17, 2025•44 min
This episode was recorded live at the Dreamit Cyber Founders Summit during RSA. Huge thanks to the Dreamit team for including me during their inaugural event! David Cass is the CISO at GSR, which is a cryptocurrency market maker. For the finance uninitiated, that basically means they buy and sell cryptocurrencies in large volumes to then buy and sell to other parties. As a result, David's role entails a lot more than the average CISO. As he will mention, it is his job to secure GSR's corporate I...
Jun 03, 2025•29 min
Rehan is CEO and founder of Securiti AI, which is providing a data command center to help organizations secure and enable their data for AI use cases. Rehan as an incredible track record which we discuss in more detail on the episode. He sold his first company for $180 million, and his second company for $280 million. Securiti AI has already raised $180 million to date from top tier investors, and they are geared up for an even bigger number. I was incredibly impressed with his track record iden...
May 20, 2025•37 min
Raj is CEO and co-founder of Blueflag, which helps ensure developers only have the access permissions needed for their roles, reducing risk of excess exposure. Raj started his career as an engineer and then in marketing at Adobe and VMware before taking on a COO role at Cloudknox, which they later sold to Microsoft. Raj took his lessons from working with identity at Cloudknox and applied them to designing Blueflag while paying attention to the nuanced differences for the development lifecycle. I...
May 06, 2025•51 min
Luke is Chief Product Officer and co-founder at Semgrep. Semgrep performs static application security testing, a form of code analysis, and has grown to become one of the mainstay application security tools on the market over the last eight years. Luke started Semgrep after three years at Palantir as a software engineer and product manager, and this episode really helped drive home the supportive community amongst former Palantir employees. In the discussion we cover his early entrepreneurial ef...
Apr 22, 2025•51 min
Recorded live at Blu Ventures’ Cyber Venture Forum! I got the chance to speak with Rick Howard, previously Chief Security Officer at Palo Alto Networks from 2013 to 2019. Rick has a wealth of cybersecurity industry experience, and he wrote a book called Cybersecurity First Principles and maintains the cybersecurity book hall of fame, called the Cybersecurity Canon. In this episode we discussed his perspective on the fundamental themes of cybersecurity with a lens to how entrepreneurs and investo...
Apr 08, 2025•46 min
This episode is a recording of a live interview held on stage at Blu Ventures' Cyber Venture Forum in February. A huge shoutout and thank you to the Blu Ventures team for putting together an awesome event. Bricklayer is building an AI-based agent to assist with security operations workflows. Before Bricklayer, Adam founded ThreatConnect which he led for over a decade. In the conversation we discuss his learnings from his experience at ThreatConnect, acquiring vs. building a new capability, and h...
Mar 25, 2025•47 min
Amir is co-founder and CEO at Vorlon Security, which provides visibility and monitoring for SaaS app connections within an enterprise. For example, Vorlon can detect what other applications are connected to your Salesforce instance along with what data is flowing between each relationship. This helps security teams detect data exfiltration, data leakage, improper configuration, and more. Before Vorlon, Amir worked his way from a software developer into progressively more customer-facing roles, m...
Mar 14, 2025•40 min
Josh Kamdjou is CEO and Founder of Sublime Security. Josh started Sublime after realizing just how easy it was for him to break into companies with phishing emails. He wanted to build a solution that better addressed the tailored environment of each organization such as historical data. Now the company has raised over $80 million from leading VCs such as IVP, Index Ventures, and Decibel. Before Sublime, Josh worked as a DoD hacker for 9 years. In the episode we discuss his emphasis on leveraging...
Feb 25, 2025•34 min
Jon is co-founder and CEO of Halcyon, which is building an endpoint solution fully focused on anti-ransomware. Halcyon recently raised at a $1B valuation in 2024. Jon started his career in cybersecurity consulting for a decade before joining Cylance in 2014 as Chief Research Officer. After his stint at Cylance, in 2017 Jon founded Boldend, which was building offensive cyber capabilities to be used by the US intelligence community for information gathering and electronic warfare. Boldend was acqu...
Feb 11, 2025•52 min
Tushar was the CEO of Attivo Networks for a decade before selling to SentinelOne for $600 million dollars in 2022. Attivo Networks built deception technology which would trick attackers into attacking fake infrastructure. A common form of deception is a honeypot, which is an intentionally vulnerable server so defenders can gather information about attackers such as their IP address or attack techniques. Attivo provided comprehensive deception solutions and served five of the Fortune 10. In the e...
Jan 28, 2025•47 min
Pete is CEO and co-founder of Realm Security, which is building a security data fabric to help companies manage their disparate log sources for monitoring tools. For companies spending millions of dollars every year on contracts with Splunk, Realm is the light at the end of the tunnel that can help them move to a cheaper SIEM tool. Pete started his career at Rapid7 after dropping out of college, and he worked his way through a variety of cybersecurity sales leadership roles since, including comp...
Jan 14, 2025•39 min
In the spirit of the end of the year, I decided to put together some highlights from a handful of episodes over the course of 2024. This episode will feature a select few snippets from five different episodes over the course of the year including Chris from RADICL and LogRhythm, Gil from Orca, Chris from Veracode, Andy from BreachRx, and Kabir from Leen. There will be a mix of stories of unique crossroads, general entrepreneurial advice, and cybersecurity-specific challenges. Thank you to all th...
Dec 31, 2024•43 min
Odysseas is co-founder and CEO of Phylax, a web3 security company building a security layer for blockchain-based protocols. Before Phylax, Odysseas worked at Nomad, a crypto exchange which suffered a $190M breach in August 2022. In the episode, we talk about his unique background as a developer relations manager, the approach law enforcement takes to recover funds in the wake of a crypto breach, the different attack surfaces for the web3 ecosystem, and more. If you are not a blockchain expert, d...
Dec 19, 2024•47 min
Maksym is CEO and founder of Mantis Analytics, providing holistic security awareness to organizations through a social media monitoring platform. The tool combs media channels to identify risks to a customer's business and escalates alerts accordingly. I thought this would be an interesting opportunity to look at the broader security world to understand some parallels with pure cybersecurity. Maksym worked in business intelligence and product management for two decades before the Ukraine war ins...
Dec 03, 2024•42 min
Ben is founder and CEO of watchTowr, building an external attack surface management tool (EASM) that performs automated penetration testing and red teaming activities. Before founding watchTowr in 2021, Ben worked as a security consultant for a decade focused largely on penetration testing. And as Ben describes in the episode, what started as a combination of cobbled together scripts from his previous experience has since grown into a comprehensive automation platform. Website: https://watchtowr...
Nov 05, 2024•35 min
Uri is co-founder and CEO of Refine Intelligence, which is focused on anti money laundering and check fraud. Uri previously came on the podcast in 2022 and talked about the evolution of fraud prevention over the last 20 years. I re-released that episode back in August because I loved the story so much. At that time, we talked mostly about his previous company, BioCatch, which sold a majority stake to Permira earlier this year at a 1.3 billion dollar valuation. In this episode, we pick up the sto...
Oct 22, 2024•55 min
David is CEO and Founder of Naoris Protocol, which provides a blockchain-based mesh architecture for improved endpoint integrity. The company was founded in 2016 and has since raised over $30 million. Before Naoris, David was a cyber leader at a range of global companies including AT&T, Electronic Arts, London City Airport, and others. In the episode, we discuss his background discovering cybersecurity in a small farming village in Portugal and the real-world applications of blockchain techn...
Oct 08, 2024•46 min
Oded is co-founder and CEO of Akeyless, which provides a vaultless secrets management platform for companies to manage their non-human identities. We will talk more about the vault vs. vaultless approach in the episode, but essentially the Akeyless design allows for a SaaS model which dramatically reduces time to value compared to often cumbersome vault implementation. Akeyless last raised a whopping $65 million dollar Series B in late 2022. Before Akeyless, Oded navigated a winding career parth...
Sep 24, 2024•52 min
Oz is co-founder and CEO of Opsin, which provides access control capabilities to LLM outputs ensuring users only get appropriate outputs based on their access level. The company was founded earlier this year, but they have already seen strong customer and investor interest given they are aimed at a key roadblock in making gen AI more available within the enterprise. Before Opsin, Oz worked in product management at high profile technology and security companies for most of the last decade, includ...
Sep 10, 2024•44 min
Kabir is co-founder and CEO of Leen, which is creating a unified security API to enable simpler integrations of security tooling. As Kabir will immediately tell you, he has no background in cybersecurity. However, he does have extensive experience with growing partnerships and sales numbers in industries where he has no background. He worked in business development for the last 15 years across a variety of tech companies including NativeX, Kiip, and Typeform. As he tells in the episode, he very ...
Aug 27, 2024•45 min
This episode is a re-release of a conversation I had with Uri back in the beginning of 2022. It is truly one of my all-time favorites because of how well he illustrates the evolution of fraud prevention in financial services over time. Rest assured, he will be back on the show soon to talk about his new company which was in stealth at the time of this recording. His new company's website Our sponsor, VulnCheck!...
Aug 14, 2024•54 min
Andy is CEO and co-founder of BreachRx, which provides incident response management tooling to help organizations respond effectively, consistently, and in accordance with legal requirements. Andy has a JD, an MBA, and a philosophy degree, which combine for a unique skillset. He worked in data breach litigation early in his career, and before starting BreachRx he was a Director for a government consulting group specializing in technology litigation. BreachRx ties together his experience across h...
Jul 30, 2024•48 min
Craig is co-founder and CEO of Bleach Cyber, which is building a product for small businesses to manage their holistic cybersecurity posture in a streamlined fashion. Before Bleach, Craig was COO and co-founder of Cyvatar which is a cybersecurity as a service offering for SMBs. Craig has 15 years of experience as a CISO or equivalent, including at companies such as Monster.com and Fujitsu. In the episode we touch on his journey from CISO to founder, the comparison of cybersecurity for extremely ...
Jul 16, 2024•41 min
Vivek is the CEO and co-founder of SquareX, which is building a Chrome extension to help users secure their web browser activities. Before SquareX, Vivek founded and led Pentester Academy, one of the leaders in online cybersecurity training. Pentester Academy was acquired by INE, which then led to the birth of SquareX. In the episode we discuss his story of learning penetration testing skills and building educational resources along with the pros and cons of offering an extension-based product c...
Jul 02, 2024•44 min
Luigi is CEO and co-founder of Bfore.ai, which detects malicious infrastructure before it is used in an attack. The company has two products today under its broader pre-crime technology umbrella, and we talk about those in more detail during the episode. Prior to Bfore.ai, Luigi was a diehard Dell employee. He started in tech support and worked his way to become a VP for solution sales for the EMEA market. He then led EMEA sales for Quest software, which was a spinout from Dell. He left in 2017 ...
Jun 18, 2024•41 min
Liran is one of the founding partners at Team8, one of the most preeminent investors in Israel with over one billion dollars under management. Team8 started in 2014 with a focus on cybersecurity and enterprise technology, and it has since evolved to include investments in fintech and healthcare as well. Before starting Team8, Liran was in Unit 8200 and then worked in product-focused roles at two high-growth tech companies. In the episode we discuss his story of starting such a successful fund at...
Jun 04, 2024•50 min
Gil is co-founder and CEO of Orca Security, one of the leading cloud security platforms on the market today. The company was last valued at 1.8 billion dollars in late 2021. Orca has 8 co-founders, and Gil started as Chief Product Officer before taking the CEO reins last year. We talk more about this dynamic in the episode. Before Orca, Gil worked at Check Point for a decade where he gained experience across a variety of different cutting-edge domains including mobile security, advanced threat p...
May 21, 2024•40 min
Chris is co-founder and CTO of Veracode, an application security powerhouse which was last valued at 2.5 billion in march 2022. The company was founded in 2005 as a code review automation platform, and it has since evolved to be one of the gold standard application security tools. Before founding Veracode, Chris worked as a security researcher and engineer for a decade where he grew frustrated with the manual source code review process. In the episode, we discuss how long it took Chris to believ...
May 07, 2024•42 min
Shashank is CEO and co-founder of Uno.ai, which is building an AI platform for managing GRC activities such as knowledge base usage and audits. I interviewed Shashank on the podcast back in November 2022, and at the time Uno was focused on using AI to automate activities in the SOC. The AI world has changed a lot since November 2022. The company has since pivoted, and in this episode we focus on what triggered the change in vision, what was wrong with the previous solution, and what is attractiv...
Apr 23, 2024•47 min