Yaniv Bar-Dayan, Co-founder and CEO at Vulcan, shares a remarkable story of how incorporating the voice of the customer in the early days of the product proved to be a game-changer. Taking cue from the feedback of CISOs, Vulcan pivoted from building a product that identified security vulnerabilities to a risk-based remediation platform, thereby transforming the business model.

In this conversation with Biplab, he talks about managing risks effectively and creating a resilient cyber defense stance. He shares his thoughts on how the culture and ecosystem in Israel foster innovation.

“I ask myself, where is my attention going to be invested in the most effective way to take the glass ceiling, one step further from the company? If it means hiring the right executive, then I'm going to do that. If it means improving onboarding, I'm going to do that. I'll do whatever it takes to help the company scale more effectively.” - Yaniv

Key Takeaways: 

• First-time founders feel the pressure of proving themselves to their investors and employees. They likely do not have all the answers but having a willingness to learn goes a long way in establishing trust.
• The term growth is often misinterpreted to mean hiring more. Throwing more money on a problem may steer the company away from other effective ways of solving the problem. When it comes to hiring, there is a delicate balance between hiring fast and hiring the right person.
• For enterprise businesses trying to navigate their cyber defence, it’s important to build a structure and set a process that allows the organization to embed the security requirements of a task within the regular workflow of the business process. Once the process and structure are aligned, communication is more effective and there is less noise.
• Competition is healthy. It means someone else is passionate about solving the problem and is taking ownership along with you to evangelize it. 

“When it comes to investors, the profile of the person that's going to join the board or have observer rights is incredibly important. Virtues and values become important. As an entrepreneur, I ask myself, would I take these folks into battle? Are these folks the people I need when we hit downtime? Are they going to lift us up?” - Matt Carroll

Key Takeaways: 

• Every decision around data requires legal oversight - its method of collection, who is using it and why, and is there consent to use this data? The transformational part of this data movement is to detect sensitive data and automatically build rules around it to ensure audit and compliance.
• Being deliberate about the virtues that define the company and its mission reflects a company’s culture. Values are aspirational; it's what you want your company to be. Virtues are intrinsic to who you are. Sustaining the culture requires a strong focus on hiring around virtues.
• Demand generation in a post-Covid world requires every employee and stakeholder to become a champion. Itis about building the four horsemen - inbound, outbound, referral, and partner and establishing supporting programs. Growth by expansion is realized by building a world-class customer success organization.
• When it comes to deciding on features of a global product, talking to your customers and having a structured process to include the voice of the customer into the product is the key.

Balaji Parimi, Founder and CEO of CloudKnox, shares his experiences building the company from inception to its recent exciting acquisition by Microsoft. CloudKnox is a cybersecurity startup which has essentially defined its tech category, Cloud Infrastructure Entitlement Management (CIEM), which involves refining how enterprises protect critical cloud resources from insider threats, whether malicious or accidental.

In this conversation with Biplab, Balaji talks through his journey of initially identifying the problem and validating its significance, to then finding the right team as well as investors needed to build and scale a company solving this problem. Throughout the conversation, he shares his thought process and rationale for making key decisions, recruiting a team, and finding investors.

“Being fairly technical, I spent a couple of months writing all kinds of scripts… to get answers to my questions, but when I looked at the answers…there was no easy way to address that risk because there are literally thousands and thousands of actions that are possible within these cloud infrastructures” - Balaji describing his research to validate the existence of the market need for a CIEM solution 

Key Takeaways: 

• Balaji’s experiences at VMware and other SaaS startups led him to identify the security issues that can arise in hybrid cloud environments. He validated the existence of the issue among his peers at other companies and searched the market for an existing solution but found nothing. He knew these issues would only grow larger as time passed, which gave him the confidence to found CloudKnox.   
• In the early days of CloudKnox, having knowledgeable, experienced investors and mentors helped alleviate many of the initial uncertainties they faced. These investors were able to guide on key milestones the company should hit, and how to approach as well as think about different phases of building the business.
• Balaji and his team didn’t set out to build a new category (CIEM). They were patient in their expectations around educating the market, customers and even investors. They knew they initially didn’t have the resources or creditability to tell the world about this new problem, but they were confident high-profile issues would arise and help bring their solution into the spotlight.
• Founders should figure out the value-add they are looking for in investors. Particularly now, when it’s easy to raise money, founders should be thoughtful about what purpose an investor can serve both immediately and as the company matures. For CloudKnox, early investors were helpful in educating the market, while later investors were helpful in go-to-market and acquiring customers.