This Serial Entrepreneur Sold Two Companies To Cisco And Red Hat, A Third $500-Million Company To Oracle, And Is Now Helping Businesses Configure Their Applications

Rami Tamir is no stranger to the startup world. A seasoned entrepreneur with multiple successful exits, he has honed his ability to build, scale, and navigate acquisitions like a veteran baseball player hitting home runs with each venture.

Rami’s journey–from his early days in the Israeli military to his pioneering work in networking and virtualization–offers invaluable lessons for any entrepreneur looking to make their mark. In this exciting discussion, he talks about recognizing and jumping at available opportunities.

Rami also reveals his experiences with creating something to address a problem he identified. And how to build the foundation of what can be a meaningful business.

Listen to the full podcast episode and review the transcript here.

From the Israeli Army to Startup Land

Born in Nazareth, Israel, Rami’s journey began in a small, quiet town known for its biblical significance. But his real education started in the Israeli army, where he served for five years.

The military instilled in Rami a sense of discipline, responsibility, and rapid decision-making that would later shape his entrepreneurial approach. Being in charge of other people’s lives ingrained instant maturity, he recalls.

“In the army, you start as a young person fresh out of high school. Within a year, you’re commanding people and making split-second decisions. Responsibility is absolute—there are no excuses. You either get the job done, or you don’t,” Rami explained.

This fast-paced, high-stakes environment trained him to optimize decision-making rather than obsess over perfection. It also introduced him to some of the brightest and best minds, an experience that would later prove invaluable in building high-caliber startup teams.

Finding His Passion in Software & The First Startup Experience

Despite his structured military background, Rami’s entry into software engineering was somewhat random. Fresh out of service, he followed his brother’s lead and enrolled in a competitive university program.

Rami remembers picking the hardest thing to get into, thinking, ‘Worst case, if I don’t like it, I’ll just pivot.” Luckily, software was a perfect match. The problem-solving nature of coding captivated him, and he found a deep passion for building solutions—a passion that still drives him today.

Rami’s first startup experience wasn’t as a founder but as an early engineer in a fast-growing company. What started as a five-person team in a basement quickly scaled to 200 employees. Despite being an engineer, Rami was promoted and soon found himself managing people.

“The technology was amazing, but we had no clue how to build a business. We were trying to do something like YouTube before broadband internet was ready. The market timing was off, and ultimately, we failed.” Rami recalls.

This early lesson stuck with Rami—great technology isn’t enough. Without a solid go-to-market strategy, even the best innovations can fall flat. For the next six months, he worked with companies, coding and helping them develop around video networking–his core skill set.

Although Rami made a lot of money with his consulting gig, he was ready to start his first company around networking. He partnered with Benny Schnaider, and together, the duo started Pentacom.

The First Big Win: Pentacom and the Art of Seizing Opportunities

Rami’s first venture as a co-founder was Pentacom, a company that initially set out to build packet processors. However, a pivotal meeting with Cisco changed everything. Rami and Benny pitched the idea, but Cisco had something bigger in mind.

As Rami recalls, they said, “If you’re interested, you could develop a key component for us.” Seizing the opportunity, he and his team pivoted, committing to an intense one-year timeline to deliver Cisco’s required solution.

Their product was a hit, covering all company costs of shipping within the next two quarters. Rami and his team had to develop whole hardware and chassis, two types of line cards at speeds that were not common back then.

“The market timing was perfect. Cisco picked us up, and we became part of the company.”
Pentacom’s success led to its acquisition by Cisco for a rumored $118M, marking Rami’s first taste of M&A from the inside.

The entire experience was nerve-wracking for Rami because of everything that could go wrong. However, Cisco was proficient at acquiring and assimilating businesses. Rami was impressed by the level of efficiency they demonstrated.

The Key to Acquisition Success

Having been acquired and later assisting other startups through M&A at Cisco, Rami learned valuable lessons about what makes a successful acquisition:

• Don’t build to be acquired. “If you focus solely on getting acquired, you’ll think short-term. You won’t develop the company and build a sustainable business. Great companies get acquired; they don’t get sold.”
• Develop a solid business. “Your go-to-market, sales, and operational strategy need to be strong. If you create a real company, good things will happen.”
• Be ready for integration. “Most acquisitions fail due to poor post-merger integration. Companies need to think about how they fit into the acquirer’s ecosystem by optimizing.”

Pivoting to Success: The KVM Story

After five years at Cisco, Rami co-founded Qumranet. Initially focused on IO solutions for modern servers, the startup hit a roadblock. The market was fragmented, and achieving traction was difficult.

“In a startup, brutal honesty is key. After six months, we looked at our data and realized the market wasn’t there. Instead of dragging things out, we pivoted,” Rami recalls. He and Benny turned to their biggest asset: their engineers.

The hardest thing entrepreneurs sometimes have to do is be open-ended with their investors, which Rami did not want to do. He wanted a plan around their assets before he talked to them about the possible pivot. Getting their employees on board was also challenging.

Rami and Benny ideated new directions in an open discussion with their 15-member team. The result? The KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine), which became the standard virtualization technology for Linux, powering giants like Amazon, Google, Oracle, and every other cloud.

Their work caught the attention of Red Hat, which acquired Qumranet for approximately $120M. Red Hat was an open-source giant that wanted to be on top of virtualization. Rami credits the company’s engineers with creating a fantastic product and doing an exceptional job.

The Power of Co-Founder Dynamics

A critical factor in Rami’s success has been his long-time partnership with co-founder Benny Schneider. Together, they’ve built multiple companies with stellar outcomes.

“It’s like a marriage. You need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, know when to listen, and, most importantly, check your ego. Engineering culture helped us—we focus on the merits of the idea, not who suggested it.” The duo effectively created a framework for making decisions.

Rami has seen firsthand how poor co-founder relationships can sink companies. “I’ve been on boards as an angel investor where founders let personal issues and their lack of coordination override business priorities. That’s a death sentence for a startup.”

Rami, a seasoned entrepreneur with multiple successful exits, has consistently demonstrated his ability to build, scale, and navigate acquisitions.

With two successful company exits early in his career, he recognized the risk of overconfidence but remained focused on the realities of each new venture. His next company, Ravello, proved to be a significant success, reportedly acquired by Oracle for approximately $500M.

The Dangers of Overconfidence and the Power of Strategic Thinking

Rami acknowledges that overconfidence can be a challenge for some repeat entrepreneurs. However, for him, the bigger concern was avoiding complacency.

“Once you start a startup, you’re paranoid for a reason—you’re going up against so many things that can go wrong,” Rami explained. At Ravello, he and his team deliberately took on a challenge that major players like IBM and Cisco had previously failed to solve.

Rather than relying on blind confidence, Rami and his team followed a structured approach. They invested their own money and spent six months evaluating the market, the technology, and their ability to execute.

After three to four months, Rami and Benny realized they had found a viable opportunity. While they underestimated the effort required, their strategy ultimately led to a decisive outcome.

Rami believes experienced entrepreneurs face a unique challenge—not panic, but comfort. “The worst thing for a repeat entrepreneur is losing that edge. If you don’t panic when things go wrong, your team might assume everything is fine, leading to complacency.”

Ravello: The Cloud Virtualization Breakthrough

Ravello was a rich cloud virtualization technology, designed to help enterprises move their on-premise applications to the cloud without modification. At a time when cloud adoption was accelerating, businesses lacked cloud-ready applications.

Ravello’s technology solved this problem by allowing applications to run in the cloud seamlessly.
The company’s first customer signed a $1M annual contract, giving the team confidence that they had cracked the go-to-market strategy.

However, replicating that success proved challenging. “For a year, we couldn’t find another customer like that first one, which was a unicorn in terms of how applicable their technology was for the customer,” Rami admitted.

Eventually, the sales team identified alternative use cases, which evolved into a scalable business model. When Oracle approached Ravello, the acquisition aligned perfectly with Oracle’s cloud ambitions, leading to a successful exit.

Salto: Solving SaaS Configuration Management

After leaving Oracle, Rami reflected on his challenges at Ravello. One major pain point stood out: managing SaaS applications like Salesforce and Marketo was inefficient, error-prone, and lacked systematic change management.

“I realized that this wasn’t just our problem—this was an industry-wide issue,” Rami said. SaaS applications relied heavily on manual configuration, creating operational inefficiencies and security risks. Hundreds of changes needed to be made on a daily and monthly basis.

Rami and his team set out to solve this problem by creating Salto, a platform that applied modern software development practices to SaaS configuration management. They started a company, invested their personal money, and spent time trying to develop the technology for it.

By extracting configurations into text format and applying software delivery methodologies, Salto enabled companies to track, audit, and manage SaaS changes systematically. Rami and Benny developed an engine and technology that could support a growing number of SaaS applications.

Salto initially focused on business applications like Salesforce and NetSuite but later expanded into IT applications like Jira, Zendesk, and Google Workspace, among others.

More recently, the company discovered a critical opportunity in security applications, helping organizations manage changes in platforms like Okta, Microsoft Entra, Jumf, Intune, and several others to improve security posture.

Salto helps analyze the configuration, making it possible to revert the change and create backups. It enables complete monitoring and audit trailing every change that has been made, which is the first stage of security.

Rami explains how they can look at the configuration and understand its connections. Thus, they can offer fixes to the misconfiguration and avoid security holes on the development end of things before it hits production.

The Business Model, Market Growth, And Selecting the Right Investors

Salto primarily targets IT departments, providing efficiency gains and reducing technical debt in SaaS platforms. For enterprises, improved feature velocity in Salesforce or other business-critical applications directly translates into revenue growth.

Rami noted that while SaaS configuration management is an emerging category, once companies recognize its value, they inevitably return.

“We have a saying internally: ‘They always come back.’ It might take months or even years, but once the pain becomes evident, companies realize they need a solution like Salto.”

With multiple high-profile exits behind him, Rami has had no shortage of investor interest. However, he remains selective when choosing investment partners.

“If you look at Salto’s employee list, you’ll see many people from Ravello and past ventures. The same applies to investors. Once you learn how to work with the right people, you try to maintain those relationships.”

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Rami emphasizes the importance of board dynamics. “A board relationship can be stressful, but you want to be in the room with the right people who help you make the best decisions rather than just appease stakeholders.” He believes in working with a combination of old and new investors.

The Vision for Salto

Rami envisions a world where SaaS configuration management is as structured and efficient as modern DevOps. He recalled a conversation with a CIO who described the disparity between application DevOps and SaaS management:

“With my DevOps, I feel like I’m ready for 2050. Everything is automated, structured, and predictable. With my SaaS applications, I feel like I’m in the 90s—I have no visibility or control.” Users are often nervous about unexpected breakdowns and having no idea of what went wrong.

Salto aims to bridge this gap, giving enterprises complete visibility and control over their SaaS configurations.

Advice for Aspiring Entrepreneurs

Reflecting on his entrepreneurial journey, Rami offers two key pieces of advice:

• Embrace Adaptability: Startups have limited resources like money, teams, or routes to the market. But they can outmaneuver larger competitors by iterating quickly. “If you aren’t constantly evolving your idea to meet the market, you’re forfeiting your biggest advantage.”
• Leverage Your Team: Hiring top-tier talent is only half the battle—founders must harness their team’s brainpower. Rami advocates for a culture of radical transparency, where every meeting and decision is documented and shared.

“I expect my team to challenge me. I don’t have ancient wisdom—I might be wrong, and I want them to tell me when I am. But for that to happen, they need access to all the information.”

Rami warns against founders who withhold information due to fear of exposing challenges. “In a startup, 90% of things are going wrong. If you don’t share that information, you’re not leveraging the intelligence of your team.”

In Conclusion

Rami Tamir’s journey is a testament to resilience, adaptability, and strategic thinking. His track record proves that startup success isn’t just about luck—it’s about smart decisions, timing, and the relentless pursuit of solving big problems.

Through Ravello, Salto, and his previous ventures, Rami Tamir has demonstrated an ability to navigate the complexities of entrepreneurship with a balance of boldness and pragmatism.

His journey underscores the importance of adaptability, strategic decision-making, and fostering a culture of transparency and collaboration.

For aspiring entrepreneurs, Rami’s journey offers a blueprint for turning obstacles into opportunities and scaling companies that stand the test of time.

Listen to the full podcast episode to know more, including:

• Rami Tamir’s success stems from his ability to pivot quickly when market conditions or product viability change.
• Without a solid go-to-market strategy, even the best innovations can fail.
• Sustainable companies attract acquisitions, but focusing solely on an exit leads to short-term thinking.
• Long-term partnerships based on trust and complementary skills are crucial for startup success.
• Overconfidence can lead to failure, but maintaining a sense of urgency ensures continuous innovation.
• Choosing investors and board members who align with your vision fosters long-term success.
• Sharing challenges openly empowers teams to contribute solutions and build resilient companies.

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