Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Elisity CEO James Winebrenner (Part 1)

For those of you following our coverage of techies transitioning into successful entrepreneurs, here is another terrific case study.

Cyber Security is probably the tech industry’s more prolific segment. James discusses a specific approach to network security that has become increasingly more contemporary and relevant: segment-based policy.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start by introducing our audience to a bit of your background as well as Elisity.

558th 1Mby1M Entrepreneurship Podcast with Deepak Balakrishna, Adya (Part 1)

Deepak Balakrishna, Co-founder CEO of Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. We review his lessons from the trenches, steering a Bootstrapping to Exit transaction.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start with at the 1Mby1M premium program with Adya, which was acquired by Qualys. Qualys, as you might know, is a public cyber security company. Adya was also in the cyber security space. I invited Deepak to talk about exit strategy and what he went through.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 5)

Slava Bronfman: It was a better year in terms of sales. Earlier, a lot of our sales were based on physical conferences. It’s hard to compete as a small startup. If you go to a conference and you have a small booth, it’s hard to compete. Now remote working levels the playing field. We felt that it was easier for us to approach customers remotely. We have customers around the globe. We have customers in the United States, Europe, China, and Japan. It was relatively easier than before.

Sramana Mitra: I’ve heard this from a lot of startups. The pandemic has been a boon for them for exactly the same reasons.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: You’re giving a lot of automotive examples. Is that one of the areas where you entered the market?

Slava Bronfman: Yes, we wanted to start with one segment that we can really understand well. We started with automotive. Today, we are in other segments like medical devices and industrial IoT. When we started, we were laser-focused on the automotive segment.

Sramana Mitra: When you were designing the product, did you have a design partner?

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 3)

Sramana Mitra: By December, you had the MVP. How many of the other customers came on board?

Slava Bronfman: Just a handful in the first quarter of 2017.

Sramana Mitra: What was the incident to make you realize that you had to pivot?

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 2)

Sramana Mitra: You’ve finished this accelerator program and you’ve got some mentors. What was your trajectory? Were you building a product first? Were you talking to customers? Where did the validation of your idea come from?

Slava Bronfman: We were a bit naive. We just started building the product. Our product is very tech-heavy. We were thinking that two guys can just build the product. We understood that it’s not the case. The right thing to do is to build a nice presentation and approach investors. We had a big mission here and we needed a lot of people to build the product.

From Hardcore Techie to Successful Entrepreneur: Cybellum CEO Slava Bronfman (Part 1)

Slava was a Cyber Security geek in the Israeli military. In this interview, he tells the story of his transition to a successful entrepreneur.

Cybellum has been acquired by LG but continues to operate as an independent business unit subsidiary within the conglomerate. Awesome story with numerous lessons for geeks who aspire to be entrepreneurs.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s start at the very beginning of your journey. Where are you from? Where were you born, raised and in what kind of background?

Thought Leaders in Cyber Security: Saviynt CEO Amit Saha (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: Let’s double-click down into your own space. Talk to me about what are the key drivers and key customer pain points that you’re addressing. What are the trends within your space? Tell me about some of the white spaces within your segment where there is opportunity for innovation and where new entrepreneurs can plug some of those gaps that you are not working on.

Amit Saha: The biggest trend right now in the identity and security business is around zero trust. If you look at the Biden administration, they launched an initiative with different vendors to look at zero trust. It means different things to different people. Zero trust is an approach and mindset. Based on a context, you make decisions on the fly on how much you want to trust and how much access do you want the user to have.