Ayal Yogev On Raising $50 Million To Allow Businesses To Run Cloud Applications With Complete Data Security And Privacy

In the world of cybersecurity entrepreneurship, few stories are as inspiring and insightful as that of Ayal Yogev, co-founder and CEO of Anjuna. Ayal’s journey weaves through Israel’s renowned Unit 8200, Silicon Valley startups, and the transformative experiences of founding his own company.

Anjuna has attracted funding from top-tier investors like Insight Partners, M Ventures, SineWave Ventures, and DCVC.

In this episode, you will learn:

• Ayal’s time in Israel’s elite Unit 8200 instilled discipline, technical expertise, and a collaborative mindset, forming the foundation for his cybersecurity passion.
• Company culture is built on actions, not slogans—Ayal emphasizes accountability without blame as a key driver of trust and success.
• Early-stage companies should prioritize finding product-market fit over PR or competing, securing a small, loyal customer base first.
• Anjuna’s structured approach to investor readiness enabled swift success, exemplified by Insight Partners’ rapid term sheet offer.
• Transparency and proactive communication with board members foster alignment, trust, and better decision-making.
• Anjuna is revolutionizing enterprise security by enabling secure data processing across any environment, ensuring unmatched protection.
• Ayal likens startups to parenthood, with extreme highs and lows, emphasizing the importance of embracing the journey and finding joy amidst challenges.

 

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About Ayal Yogev:

Ayal has 20 years of experience in the enterprise security market, serving most recently as VP of Product Management at SafeBreach. Prior to that, he led the Umbrella product management team at OpenDNS, which was acquired by Cisco in 2015 for $635M.

Ayal has also held senior product management positions at Lookout and Imperva, and he was part of Imperva’s IPO in 2011.

Ayal holds an MBA with honors from UC Berkeley Haas School of Business and a B.Sc. Summa Cum Laude in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science from Tel-Aviv University.

Connect with Ayal Yogev:

• LinkedIn
• X
• Crunchbase
• RocketReach

Read the Full Transcription of the Interview:

Alejandro Cremades: Alrighty. Hello, everyone, and welcome to The Deal Maker Show. So today we have a really fantastic founder. you know ah We’re going to be talking about all the good stuff that I would like to hear, like the building, scaling, financing, yeah you name it. um We’re going to have some good stories there on the fundraising, you know how they thought about term sheets, Y Combinator, and then also culture. you know There’s some really interesting components on the way that they think about culture, how they gotten influenced by that culture, you know by also meeting, perhaps, you know like really reputable um leaders out there. ah But again, you know super inspiring conversation ahead. And without further ado, let’s welcome our guest today, Yael Yaguef. Welcome to the show.

Ayal Yogev: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

Alejandro Cremades: So originally born in Israel, give us a walk through memory lane. How was life growing up for you?

Ayal Yogev: It was good. Yes, I grew. I was born in Israel, grew up there. Actually, I moved to the Silicon Valley for a couple of years for my dad’s job back in the early 90s, which was a ah fun part. And then I came back to Israel. Eventually, I went to the to the IDF, like everybody in ni Israel has to end up going to Unit 8200, which is the essentially the Israeli NSA. And that’s essentially where I ran into you know security and enterprise security for the first time.

Ayal Yogev: And I sort of fell in love with fell love with the topic. And once I left and spent all my career in the private sector, I stayed in enterprise security.

Alejandro Cremades: and What was it about enterprise security that day i got you hooked?

Ayal Yogev: It was that’s a super interesting topic. and And it’s funny, I know if you, you know, I’ll give you a really good example of why, you know, toar so why I loved it and why so many, you see so many people coming out of Israel and creating these amazing cybersecurity companies. And if you ever kind of thought about why Israel became such a huge security hub. ah But essentially it’s kind of like when you look at, you know, the soccer teams of the US, right? The US has some amazing athletes, probably some of the best athletes in the world, but their soccer team is always not, you know, not the top, you know, never get to kind of the top,

Ayal Yogev: And the reason is, if you’re a very, very good athlete in the U.S., you’re probably not going to go into soccer, right? You’re going to go into football, you American football, you’re going to go into, you know, baseball, you’re going to go into basketball, but you’re not going to go into into soccer. It’s sort of the same thing that’s happening. Basically, what happens in as Israel is that you have to go into the into military service. And if you’re the kind of person who can be potentially phenomenal and and in the tech scene, you’re probably going to go into a unit like 8200 or similar units.

Ayal Yogev: And what they’re going to focus on there is essentially security, right? That’s that’s what they’re they’re focused on. So things around cybersecurity and enterprise security. And that’s why you see people kind of coming out. And they kind of fell in love with the topic because it’s obviously it’s it’s super interesting. It’s super deep. It’s technical. There’s a lot of it exciting things you can do there. And people come out already in love with that topic. And that’s why you see so many startups in that space coming out of visual.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about, the you know, how it was for you because, you know, as as you were saying, you know, you were in the and NSA equivalent. and i’m I’m sure that, you know, but the the the army there in Israel, you know, it gives you a lot of discipline and and and I guess, how was that experience for you of like having to do the army years and and how do you think that shaped you up?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, so it definitely does, but you kind of have to grow up relatively quickly, right? If you’re 18 and you’re you know in Europe or the US, you go to college. and you you know it’s sort of yeah I haven’t gone to an American four-year college, obviously. I went to to kind of duke with university in as Israel. But I’m guessing it’s basically like the continuation of high school and in many extents, and you kind of see all the parties and all of that. and You go into the military, and obviously it’s a very, very different environment. And you essentially have to grow up very, very quickly.

Ayal Yogev: um And again, it’s not like 8200, it’s to some extent, in many in many aspects, it’s like a tech company, in the sense that again, you kind of work, you you know you you there’s all the developers or you know these types of things that you get engaged with. ah But it is, again, it the commitment levels are very different, like because it matters of life life and death, right it’s national security. So people, and and and it is a military type environment.

Ayal Yogev: So you tend to kind of grow up very, very fast. And to some again again for me, it was phenomenal. There’s a lot of other people that I’ve seen around me. It was phenomenal for them. And to me, the best thing out of it was you just the network that you build. I’ve met some of the best and the smartest people that I’ve met in my life in that environment, people that I’ve stayed in touch with throughout this day. And if I kind of look back now and I know some of the most successful entrepreneurs, some of the most successful investors, some of the kind of you know leading people you know, an Israeli society or people that I, you know, got to be there because again, it’s just a phenomenal group of people.

Alejandro Cremades: Now, in your case, you were involved in several companies, you know some of that they were acquired, others that IPO’d. I guess, what were some of the patterns or the traits that you saw on those companies that day that had that that that thing how would i say the the positive ingredients that would allow for the company to thrive and and to succeed?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah. So I guess before I kind of go into kind of deeper, I think one of one thing is Zlock, right? Zlock has a lot to do with this. And I think, you know, to some extent, you’ve seen some so phenomenal companies not being successful. And again, they’ve done everything right. But again, timing wasn’t right or something else happened. ah So again, but one is I want to kind of, you know, ah preface by by saying this. But I think the to me that the one ingredient that is more important than anything else is is company culture.

Ayal Yogev: And that’s what’s essentially you know separating companies that are going to be very, very successful than companies that are you know sort of becoming less successful. um And there’s a lot of things that go into the kind of the company culture. ah But essentially, again, the the you know working you know working together, you know working in a way that you know is collaborative, you know wanting wanting to succeed, you know willing to kind of to do whatever it takes. There’s a lot of things that kind of go into the culture of companies that are eventually very, very successful um versus companies that don’t. and and some extent Obviously, every company has its own kind of unique culture, and sometimes you need a specific culture you know to to kind of win a market. right I think Uber is a great example of a company that i think

Ayal Yogev: you know, wouldn’t necessarily have a culture that that’s a good fit for me, or at least the kind of the early days of Uber, because Uber was a lot about kind of going and fighting, you know, territory by territory, fighting the regulators and kind of, you know, going against, you know, everybody, which again, requires a very specific type of culture that was great for them, but again, wouldn’t be right for other companies.

Alejandro Cremades: So I know that you, for example, you even met Eric, the co-founder and CEO of Zoom. What did you learn about perhaps the way that he was thinking about culture?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, i so I got a chance to kind of meet him in sort of a small group founder setting. And we talked and and one of the things he he loves talking about and he talked about was culture. And it really resonated with me. This was kind of very early on in my in my journey. um And again, I kind of went back to thinking I spent a lot of time in a lot of companies, you know, over over the years. So I kind of saw what I liked and what I didn’t like about specific cultures and what you know specific behaviors or you know culture kind of leads to specific behaviors that yeah are detrimental or you know helpful to the success of the company. ah What I loved about the way he talked about this, which I adopted for you know for my company, is he said he has kind of one word for for culture. and kind I kind of always had the the notion, I’ve seen this in many cases, that you can put whatever you want on the wall. right You can have these 10 things you put on the wall. None of that really matters. right it’s It’s not about what you say, it’s about what you do.

Ayal Yogev: And it’s the thousands of decisions that you make every day that kind of make up the culture of the company that comes from, you know, from from the leadership, right? Everybody kind of looks at what the CEO does and everybody looks at what the executive team is doing. And it’s not what about you say, it’s about what you do. And he said, and he kind of shared that same sentiment. He said, that’s why he has only one word. And for him, that word was care. He said, you know, we care about our employees. We care about our, you know, we care about our customers. We care about our partners.

Ayal Yogev: And I thought that was just a beautiful way to but kind of think about this and then into and to phrase it. And I borrowed that same thing for the culture, you know, for Anjuna, just because this is, again, I think this is the right way to, and I’ll give you one one very, very good example of this. I’ve worked at companies where if something goes wrong, you know, whoever the manager is or the CEO is looking for, you know, who who should be blamed for this.

Ayal Yogev: And I think that’s horrible for the for the the culture of the company. And it it doesn’t get you the results that you want, right? You find somebody to blame, you kind of made them feel bad about it. But, you know, and I think the right conversation to have is once something bad happens, you know, you want to figure out, okay, how how do we fix this? And then how do we learn, you know, going forward to make sure we don’t repeat that same mistake? I think that’s a much, much healthier approach than, you know, finding who to blame, which again, doesn’t really yeah mean maybe and make somebody feel better in that second, but it’s not going to help the company.

Alejandro Cremades: So so let’s let’s talk about one thing here, because you basically decided to um to shift gears you know when you attended your master’s in Berkeley. ah And then from there, you know you kind of like went into doing different day roles, Lookout, OpenDNS, Safe Breach.

Ayal Yogev: the data.

Alejandro Cremades: i mean You did like ah like a bunch of those different companies, but I’m sure that you have that business thing you know in you. At what point does that business in you start to form the shape of, hey, you know maybe it’s time for me to start my own company?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, no great question. So to some extent, I always kind of knew that I want to be an an entrepreneur at some point. Again, to me, it was both kind of the right timing in my career as well as having kind of the right idea that I’m extremely excited about. And, you know, I thought would be extremely sort of revolutionary. And something that for me, if I wanted to start a company, I wanted to do something that’s going to shift, you know, it it wasn’t about kind of doing some, you know, feature type applications going to get acquired quickly and which are going to, it might have a nice financial outcome, but I wanted to to work on things that are actually going to make a difference. so um And some extent, all the experience that I’ve had helped me kind of shape

Ayal Yogev: shaped me into who I am today and you know kind of prepared me for for starting the company, both in terms of just you know learning you know learning the business, learning you know how the market works, learning how to build a company and kind of seeing it when other people are doing it, as well as again seeing cultures that I liked or didn’t like that helped my thinking about my culture. ah What eventually happened is um I was a VP of product of a company called SafePreach, again, ah a really great company, and I enjoyed my time there. ah But then my, who ended up being my co-founder, Jan, who I’ve known for know about 25 years, he was also in the Israel intelligence community. He was just finishing up his PhD at Stanford, and he came up with this phenomenal idea. He ran into a technology called confidential computing that he he was super excited about, and he came to me to to talk to me about this, and and I just got super excited by what this means for the market.

Ayal Yogev: And the reason I got excited was I don’t know how much you know about enterprise security, but essentially the best security solutions were always business enablers. but And what I mean by that is that something you see it in the physical world as well. right if If you didn’t trust your bank with your money, just banks wouldn’t exist. right You need that security and trust to be able to build businesses on top of it. If you don’t have that security and trust, you can really build things on top of it. And obviously, we see this in the digital digital world as well. i the The firewall, which I’m sure you’re familiar with, is is a very, very good example. The reason why the firewall became so successful wasn’t the security aspect was because of what it enabled.

Ayal Yogev: And what it essentially enabled was it enabled organizations to connect to the internet for the first time. Because I’m i’m sort of still old enough to remember that all these, you know, internal networks were completely disconnected from one another and nobody wanted to connect to the internet because of the security risk. And the firewall is what opened it up and created just a huge amount of value.

Ayal Yogev: Uh, and when Jan came to with, you know, with the other countries computing to me it was very clear. This was the next big, uh, you know, big neighbor, business and neighbor when it comes to security. So it was sort of exciting enough for me to kind of to take the plunge and and go start in June.

Alejandro Cremades: So then let’s talk about in June, you know, how the um how how how essentially, you know, you guys got to the point of getting started and and what those early days say, you know, look like.

Ayal Yogev: Sure. So, um, Essentially, the first thing that I’ve done you know is is, again, I was excited about this, but I wanted to see that, again, I’m um basically a product manager at heart, right? This is kind of this is i kind of grew up you know doing product, and that was most of my career.

Ayal Yogev: And I basically wanted to go talk to as many customers or potential customers as possible ah to go see if this was a good idea. And I’ve spent a few months kind of doing that, getting just a ton of feedback and seeing you know this is as exciting as I think it is. Then what we’ve done is we basically started talking to investors um mostly here in Silicon Valley. And we’re sort of lucky enough to to to have gotten a term sheet relatively quickly from just a phenomenal VC firm.

Ayal Yogev: um And again, we we actually end up with a few term sheets. One of them was just have a really phenomenal one that we loved working with. ah The other interesting thing that happened was around the same time is we we applied to YC and we just we got the call that we we got into YC. So essentially at that point, we had kind of the the dilemma, right? We had a term sheet from from a $300 seed round and we had you know the the acceptance, do I see?

Ayal Yogev: And it’s only because we talked to both of them. And YC basically told us, why do I see and go raise money after YC? If you’re raising now, it’s going to be even easier after you go to YC. And the investors told us, why do you already have the term sheet? Why do you need YC? Or have the investment go, take that investment, and go build a company. And I cannot understand both point of views, but we ended up eventually doing both.

Ayal Yogev: um And again, I’m extremely happy how things turned out because YC is one of the best, you know, entrepreneurship schools out there. And they’ve taught us a lot about, you know, how to build a company and how to fundraise and it was just a phenomenal, phenomenal experience. And obviously, the YC network is is great. But those investors turned out to be just phenomenal investors to work with. And they just helped us tremendously as as we kind of build the company and and still are doing so.

Alejandro Cremades: What was the before and after of Y Combinator?

Ayal Yogev: in the sense of, you know, what what the company?

Alejandro Cremades: In the sense of what like what kind of experience of ah of impact did you guys get from attending the accelerator?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, so I think one of the biggest benefits it gets from IC, ah as they said, is is raising, you know, is being able to cut out to to come out and raise a seed round. ah To some extent, in that sense, they were right. And when I talk to people that are applying to IC or got into IC and are thinking, you know, should we go? A lot of what I’m saying is if you haven’t raised a seed round,

Ayal Yogev: going into YC is going to, one, make it all easier and also is going to make the valuation much, much higher just because of the brand name, but also because of how YC kind of make make sure you do the right things to be able to to to you know build a great company. So they kind of focus you on what’s important and and kind of defocus you from what’s not important. So I think it’s ah it’s a really great thing to do. um And to some extent, again, for us, we already raised the seed round. But it was exactly that. It’s kind of focusing us on, OK, this is the right things to focus on as a company. This is what matters. This is what you know matters less or doesn’t matter now. I’ll give you one example that I thought was great. So you Drew ho Houston, the the you know CEO, co-founder of Drawbox, was one of the speakers. And they’re obviously a very famous YC company. And he came to talk to us during the batch. And one of the things he said, which I think was absolutely right, he said, like

Ayal Yogev: and At your stage, just don’t focus on competitors. like it It just doesn’t matter. If you’re a seed stage company, go find product market fit. Just don’t focus. Don’t don’t even think twice about what competitors are doing. He said, you know when we’re you know a much, much bigger company, and I think it was Steve Jobs and one of the Apple conferences came in and said, you know we’re going to build something. They’re going to kill Dropbox. At that point, yeah, we’re worried about competition, but not not as a seed stage company. I think it’s sort of tips like that on what to focus on versus what not to focus on, what not to spend your time on.

Ayal Yogev: Again, talk about you know PR at early stage. said if You don’t need a PR agency. You don’t need to focus on PR at early stage because it’s not going to matter. You’re not going to get customers through PR. and What you need to focus on at this stage is getting as many customers as you want. right you know Another great piece of advice that I loved was that it’s better to have 10 customers that love you than 1,000 customers that like you. and Once you have 10 customers that love you, you can go expand from there. there there’s all these sort of something’s going to save me as you can see for years later and it was just phenomenal, just a phenomenal startup school in terms of what is really important and what’s not important.

Alejandro Cremades: so um So for the people that are listening to to get it, what ended up being the business model of Anjuna? How do you guys make money?

Ayal Yogev: yeah So we’re essentially a very classic enterprise, you know enterprise sales company. We tend to sell to you know, to we essentially a B2B with a classic you know enterprise sales motion. um the the again Security is weird in the sense that the early adopters of security, and it’s true for us as well, tend to be kind of the large regulated industry. So, you know, financial services, ah you know, banking, payments, you know, insurance companies, et cetera, healthcare, that’s all the providers, the more the insurers and and pharma, um you know, ah

Ayal Yogev: At least for us, the government has been a customer as well, even though that they’re obviously extremely un notably stuff too tough to get into. and um you know Oil and gas, manufacturing, all this kind of more regulated industries. And I think the reason why in security they tend to be the early adopters is that they’re the ones with kind of the most burning need, right?

Ayal Yogev: a large regulated industry, you know if you’re a bank, right one is you’re regulated, so you have to kind of do kind of the best you can into security, but also you’re a target. Banks are where the money is. and If you’re a targeted, then you have to think you know long and hard about security, and you always have to kind of be two steps ahead of the you know any attacker that might want to steal something. so That’s why these organizations tend to be early adopters in security, even though they’re not early adopters in other areas.

Alejandro Cremades: And how much capital have you guys raised to date and what has been the journey of going through the capital racing rounds?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, so we raised about just over 60 million. So we’ve done the seed round. The A-round was actually um pretty great for us because the company that invested, it was a playground global, it’s just a phenomenal firm that invested, that led our seed round, ah basically did that in order to to be able to kind of be first in line to lead our A-round. So when we were ready to go out for an A-round, they just basically gave us a term sheet and we never actually went out to market, which was phenomenal. um And then when we raised our Series B,

Ayal Yogev: I was and a few and sure you you’ve talked a lot about kind of the process people kind of put together towards a a fundraise. What we essentially end up doing is we wanted to kind of get everything ready. so Again, the the investment deck, the data room, you know the the customer references, we kind of wanted to kind of have everything essentially ready for for the fundraise. and Again, I talked to a lot of my you know advisors.

Ayal Yogev: about you know the the deck about different types of you know How do we you know explain this is just we don’t process the ones already what i did was i end up having a list of. You know investors that i thought could be a good fit for the round and i can i didn’t rank them you know basically you know one two or three.

Ayal Yogev: were one, were kind of the top ones that I really wanted to work with. I thought they were the perfect fit. Two was kind of in the middle, and then three were kind of… And what I then did, I said, okay, I’ll go out and kind of reach out to to the investors in tier two. And based on the reaction I get, if you know there’s a lot of excitement, things move forward, I’ll kind of open it up to tier one. And if not, we can kind of decide if we want to open up to tier three, or maybe we’re not ready, and we kind of you know wait before we go out.

Ayal Yogev: Um, and what ended up happening, I kind of opened it up to two to tier two. I started, I’m sharing this, she started going extremely well. Uh, but before even opening up to to tier one, uh, insight, uh, reached out and they kind of think that they kind of knew about us. They were picking us every quarter. And this was some, somebody that was essentially an analyst. It wasn’t, you know, one of the, one of the GPs said, okay, this was like a low risk, you know, thing. I’ll go talk to an analyst, even though I’m not ready to talk. And so I was one of our kind of tier one, you know, companies they wanted to work with.

Ayal Yogev: So I’ll talk to an analyst, kind of update him, and kind of tell them we’re about to start a process. And everything just happened super quickly from there. Basically, I talked to him, and I’d say within, I think, five days, I had a term sheet from Insight in my inbox. It was just phenomenal how quickly they were able to move. and the you know I think they were probably researching the space. They kind of knew what they were doing. The partner that led the the the deal that ended up you know joining my board was extremely knowledgeable.

Ayal Yogev: about this. like I could kind of see it from the questions that he asked, that he’s gone very, very deep. And yeah, just the process was just a pleasure for us.

Alejandro Cremades: so So in that in that in that sense, you know too what have you what have you also learned from now that you’ve gotten you know investors you know on board and and you’re dealing now with the corporate structure and and and and running an effective you know by board meeting and making sure that board members are adding value and and really, you know, up to date with the issues that the company is experiencing so that they can, you know, help provide their strategic guidance to it. I mean, what what have you learned on ah what typically works best works best to to make sure that everyone at the board level is is contributing?

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, so I guess to me, the to to me, board management is something that you have to kind of think about and plan. It’s not something that you if you if you don’t think, of you know, it’s one of the, again, it’s kind of like culture in the sense that, you know, culture happens, whether you think about it or not.

Ayal Yogev: right But if you think about it and you kind of guide it, you’re going to get much better results than if you don’t. And it’s the same with kind of board management. or you There’s going to be a relationship with the board. The board is going to make decisions. But you need to kind of if if you want to do it you know in a you know way that’s effective, you’ve got to think about this. ah To me, one of the things I’m doing is with every one of my board members, I try to meet either every week or every other week. And part of it is just kind of making sure that they always know exactly what’s happening in the company. They’re good and they’re bad. right Some things are good, but you know like any any startup. right One of my early investors, I just saw him write a post about, and he’s he’s ah one of the super angel investors. He invested in probably hundreds of companies. so Never met a successful company you know founder who’s happy about the state of the company. I think that’s a very good. you know I think that’s very true. So again, there’s a bunch um ah but a bunch of bad things that that are happening. In some sense, if you’re the CEO, you know all the bad, right? Because any problem that’s you know big enough not to be able to be solved up to you eventually ends up on your desk, right?

Ayal Yogev: So you kind of know all the bad, but I want to be extremely open with ah with my investors because then if you do need their help, if you do need their advice, then they’re there for you. I think you know founders that kind of try to hide you know the bad from their from their board or from their investors end up in a much, much worse situation and then having to, one, fix the situation without the help they could have had, but also it just erodes the trust that you have with your board members, your investors, which is just a horrible thing to do. ah So one is I talk to them every you know, other every week or every other week to to update them on what’s happening. ah The other thing is, again, before every board meeting, we, you know, I shared the deck with them to get their feedback, you know, ahead of the board meeting. I obviously changed things or add things based on their feedback.

Ayal Yogev: um Again, i’m not I know that some people are kind of worried about kind of the board talking without you there. I um i have no issues with that. i don’t have I have no issues with the board talking to my executive team you know directly.

Ayal Yogev: i think I think transparency, and again, it kind of goes to culture of the company to some extent. I think transparency is just a very, very good thing to have, and I think it leads to good things. I don’t think hiding problems helps.

Alejandro Cremades: Now 100 percent now obviously all these people you know whether it’s investors customers employees and they’re all betting on a vision. So imagine what we’re thinking of a vision here and and and we’re thinking about you going to sleep tonight I am and you wake up in a world where the vision of a June is fully realized. What does that world look like.

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, so so essentially, what we’re doing is something called confidential computing that, as I mentioned, the lab enables collaboration. I think eventually, confidential computing will just become computing. um and And I think it’s going to change the world in essentially um and essentially two ways. One is, when confidential computing is is essentially computing, when everything is running this way, you can just run anything and any anywhere, right? You can run, that you can take any any piece of code, any piece of data, and put it in any environment. It’s all completely secure.

Ayal Yogev: and And it just means you can run, again, you can move anything to the public cloud. You can tell all the access, you know, machines that you have in your data center and you can rent them out to somebody to go run, you know, code on them and they’re going to be safe doing so. And you’re going to be safe when they do so. So I think just the world of infrastructure just becomes almost like the slayer on top of, you know, you did the data center and the cloud. You can just run anything anywhere. and And I think it’s going to go to the edge where you can, there’s a lot of risk in running things at the edge.

Ayal Yogev: um again think of like I’ll give you an example. with like Tesla is a great example. right Every Tesla is essentially a community data center. There’s a lot of computing power within your Tesla. ah The problem is you don’t want to have a lot of sensitive data out there because you don’t want somebody breaking into your car and stealing, not just you know whatever you left in the car, but also your data there. It’s just a very, very risky thing to do. But if you’re running it in continuous computing, physical access means there’s no access to the data. So you can just run whatever workload you want you know in the car itself. And it’s true for anything, sort of any you know, edge device where you just, it’s extremely risky to do it without, you know, that level of security. And if you have the right security, it just allows you to run the code anywhere. So I think that’s one of the the pieces of the vision. The other one relates to security. It just simplifies security in a huge way, because when you have this level of security, you know, a lot of the existing solutions, like, you know, even firewalls or, you know, antiviruses, their need to some extent, whether it goes away or becomes much, much lower.

Ayal Yogev: Because if you can run something on a machine, you know, let’s say you’re an unpatched, you know, no firewall, no antivirus, you know, connected to the internet and you have, obviously you’re going to have, you know, attackers with root access, you know, all over that machine running code. If that, if, even if they can do that, they can get access to your data. That’s just a whole new world of how you do things. I think it’s going to simplify security in a big, big way. Whereas today we never solved kind of the root cause of the problem. We’re always kind of solving the perimeter of the problem. And this allows you to finally solve that root cause of the problem.

Alejandro Cremades: So we’re talking about the future here. I want to talk about the past, but doing so with a lens of reflection. If I was to put you into a time machine and I bring you back in time, let’s say I bring you back in time to that moment where, you know, around 2018, you were thinking about building something of your own right before you gave your notice.

Ayal Yogev: Yeah.

Alejandro Cremades: Okay. ah And then while you were working, let’s say at SafeBridge and you were able to Have a chat with that younger self. Give that younger self one piece of advice before launching a business. What would that be and why? Give me what you know now.

Ayal Yogev: ah well that’s ah That’s a really great question. I’ll tell you one piece of advice. is It’s going to be a lot you know its to be a lot you know harder and longer than you’d you’d expect. but just I guess my my advice would be just to enjoy the journey. but again I’m still trying to kind of give myself this advice you know every every day.

Ayal Yogev: It’s funny, i’ll give you I’ll tell you a story. I read this, somebody wrote on Twitter, which I thought was, you know, a phenomenal, he basically said, you know, I had trouble, you know, sleeping at night. I couldn’t, I couldn’t, I couldn’t sleep. And I tried all these things, you know, complete darkness. And I’ve tried, you know, not looking screens for time before I sleep. And I tried, you know, melatonin, you know, what, I told you things, what eventually worked for me is I stopped being the CEO of my startup.

Ayal Yogev: And it’s it’s it’s it’s basically that, right? It’s just a very, very, it’s a difficult thing to do. It’s hard, you’re you know invested, you’re all in. And that’s kind of the good and the bad of it, right? that I always talk about you know being a startup founder is like having kids. I don’t know if you have if you have kids or not.

Alejandro Cremades: I do.

Ayal Yogev: Yeah, it’s the same. When I had a friend didn’t have kids ask me what it was like, I said it just makes everything a lot more extreme. The good is so much better. I’ve never thought I could love someone so much. It’s an amazing life experience to have kids, but the bad is also so much worse than you could ever imagine. You’re waking up at 4 a.m. with a leaky diaper, right, or one of your kids has some health issue. It’s just such a…

Ayal Yogev: It’s such a difficult experience to go through and you just couldn’t even imagine those extremes before you had kids. And it’s very, very much the same with startups. That’s the extremes, you know, the good and the bad. And I think unlike kids, the kind of the the good is probably at startups, maybe like two or 3% of the bad is the rest of it. ah But it’s still an amazing, amazing experience.

Alejandro Cremades: ah That’s incredible. So, Ayal, for the people that are listening that would love to reach out and say hi, what is the best way for them to do so?

Ayal Yogev: The best way is either through my email. My email is my first name, so ayl.anjuna.io. So feel free to to email me happy to to get back or just reach out to me on LinkedIn.

Alejandro Cremades: Amazing. Well, easy enough. Well, Ayal, thank you so much for being on The Dealmaker Show today. it It has been an honor to have you with us.

Ayal Yogev: No, thank you. Thank you for having me.

*****

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