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The Army Officer Who Didn't Think He Was an Entrepreneur (Then Built Two 9-Figure Exits) · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  when I was a small kid, we immigrated to Israel from Uzbekistan,
• 0:03
  former Soviet Union. My parents were in their mid thirties when they came to Israel,
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  all they had is three hundred bucks in their pockets,
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  entrepreneurship and becoming wealthy was never part of my dreams.
• 0:13
  when you're in the trenches, it's very hard to realize and actually recognize
• 0:18
  the importance and the value of what you're doing,
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  You're so focused on this, task,
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  you have this incident and you're working around the clock and it's overwhelming
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  and you're flying all the time.
• 0:29
  good teamwork is what builds companies and poor teamwork is what ruins companies.
• 0:38
  All right, Arick Goomanovsky, welcome to Beyond Fulfillment.
• 0:42
  Thanks, Dave. Thank you for having me.
• 0:44
  It's a pleasure.
• 0:44
  Yes, thank you so much for being here.
• 0:46
  So, Arick, you've got quite a fascinating entrepreneurial journey.
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  you started your career actually with 15 years in the Israeli special forces,
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  doing cyber work specifically.
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  Then you transitioned out into the private sector and you were with McKinsey
• 1:00
  for some time. Then you became a founder and you very quickly
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  had two nine-figure exits.
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  And now you've got this brand new AI company that we're gonna talk about.
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  just to set the stage for our listeners,
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  can you talk about your backstory and how you became an entrepreneur?
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  Yeah, actually was a surprising journey for me.
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  as you correctly stated, I started my career as a career officer in
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  the military and I thought that I'll stay even for a longer period of time.
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  But at some point I wanted kind of to broaden my horizon,
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  explore other things, so I did an MBA.
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  and then I went to work for a McKinsey company doing consulting work
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  and what back then was one of the,
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  major economic centers in the world,
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  which was London, right? There was the center of the economic activity outside
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  the US. and was very exciting,
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  but not as exciting as I expected it to be.
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  And and I started thinking what's what's gonna happen next.
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  and I met an old friend who was my former superior officer in the army,
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  leading the Israeli national signal intelligence unit,
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  and he told me, Hey, you know,
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  Arick, you know a little bit about cyber and you know a little
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  bit about about consulting, and I'm starting this shop where
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  I'm basically gonna build cybersecurity companies.
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  and one of the companies I'm thinking of building is
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  a cybersecurity services company.
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  I want to build the McKinsey of Cyber.
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  And as it happens, you you were with McKinsey for some time,
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  and you understand a little bit about cyber,
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  so why don't you join me as a co founder here in this company?
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  my original thought was like Am I suited for entrepreneurship?
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  Is that is that the right thing for me?
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  Because I never thought of myself.
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  as an entrepreneur. I've spent my life in the military.
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  a career officer, and you would you could argue that the army is nothing like,
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  the private sector, there is nothing entrepreneurial about it.
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  and then he corrected me. He told me,
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  Aric, you don't understand what you've been doing your whole life.
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  You have actually been a pretty successful entrepreneur.
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  you were just doing corporate entrepreneurship because
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  Over and over in your career, gave you a task and you started that task by yourself,
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  and two years later you had a hundred people working on that direction
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  and ultimately bringing a lot of success in your military career.
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  See you've been building pretty successful endeavors your entire career over
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  and over again, and that's exactly what entrepreneur needs.
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  So I fully trust you to be able to
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  transition these capabilities into the private sector.
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  and that's what we did. we started a company called Cygnia.
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  It was twenty fifteen. ~ it was around the time that Mandia was acquired by FireEye,
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  right? And Mandia was the first big company doing incident response work in the US.
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  it was being acquired by FireEye.
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  For a very large multiple for a services company,
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  right? I think its revenue w back then was around a hundred million dollars,
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  maybe a little bit less, and was acquired for over a billion dollars,
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  ten figure exit. And a very nice multiple,
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  for a services company. And we thought maybe we can replicate that,
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  bring all the cybersecurity talent in Israel to work for the corporate America
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  on problems like incident response.
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  And back then, you know, the national threats to the corporate America were
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  on the rise, especially with the Asian actors,
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  right, and Chinese threat actors,
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  etc., targeting more and more of the Fortune 100 and Fortune 500 companies.
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  And that's what we did, right?
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  So we took out the best talent we could find in Israel and We put that talent
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  to work on the most
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  interesting and exciting attacks that the corporate America ~ experienced,
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  right? Because unfortunately, the security agencies in the US
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  are tasked with protecting the US national interests but
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  not necessarily the corporate companies,
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  right? So it's up to the private sector to protect itself and that's what we did.
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  Right. And in three years we were able to service some of
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  the largest corporations in the US.
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  We were able to participate in defending them from some of
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  the most sophisticated attacks executed by both commercial threat actors
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  but also by national threat actors.
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  obviously I'm not privy to talk about everything that happened there,
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  but
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  a lot of these cases got published.
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  There were indictment, criminals got caught by US,
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  foreign services around the world,
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  brought to justice in the US, right?
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  We participated in all these right behind the scenes,
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  worked closely with a lot of law enforcement services in the US in in that process.
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  So that was a very, very thrilling three years.
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  And in twenty eighteen we sold the company to a large private equity f firm.
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  The company's still active, growing,
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  still doing its work as an independent company,
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  but owned by private equity firm.
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  And I left the company around the acquisition.
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  By the way, we were not planning to sell the company so so fast,
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  I think that the capabilities that we brought to market were extremely unique
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  and were
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  very interesting for for investors they made us an offer that it was very hard
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  to refuse at the time. so that's how we came to sell the first company so fast.
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  Okay. Wow. So appreciate that.
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  A lot to unpack there. you start off in the military.
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  You initially thought you'd be a career officer.
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  After about 15 years, you have this desire to do something else,
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  to broaden your horizons. You get into McKinsey,
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  you're in London, center of all the non-US financial activity.
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  So you're like really excited,
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  but yet working there doesn't really do it for you.
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  It's not as exciting as you thought.
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  There's something else
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  kind of burning in there that you want to do.
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  And you just so happen to meet a former superior officer that is starting this cyber
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  company. and you hadn't even considered entrepreneurship.
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  you even kind of doubted your abilities based on your previous experience.
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  and this other founder is basically telling you,
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  no, you've got the talent, you've got the skills,
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  I believe in you. Come join me.
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  And you say, okay
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  and you go do it and Your experience aligns,
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  your skill set is what he's looking for.
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  you go to start this company. you weren't planning to sell.
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  So you go from starting it, and that company,
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  exit was 250 million, is that correct?
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  ~
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  Yes, that's true. That's
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  okay, within three years, right?
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  So someone someone that's not even planning to be an entrepreneur and even
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  has some initial doubts.
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  and becomes a co-founder and exits for nine figures three years later.
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  talk about what those three years were like in terms of just starting from scratch,
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  scaling and achieving that level of volume and success in such
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  a critical industry at that time.
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  Like what was that like?
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  Well, you know, when you're in the trenches,
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  it's very hard to r realize and actually recognize the importance and
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  the value of what you're doing,
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  right? You're so focused on this,
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  task, right? Like you have this incident and you're working around
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  the clock and it's overwhelming and you're flying all the time.
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  And back then I remember my wife and I
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  I'm married, we have two boys.
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  Back then they were tiny, my oldest was two years old and my small
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  one was six months old when we started the company,
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  right? And I was like flying all the time and not sleeping while traveling
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  and working those crazy incidents,
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  right? Because that's just the nature of the job,
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  right? you're like a firefighter.
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  And then you coming back home and then you're not sleeping because
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  you have small kids it's crazy,
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  right? Like you're in constant jet lag,
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  you constantly want to sleep, but you're so laser focused on on your work
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  and delivering value to your clients because think about what what's
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  an incident response work is, right?
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  someone breaks into your client's house,
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  it's a ransomware situation, They've stolen some information it's critical.
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  The business can go bust, right?
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  And you're hand holding the CEO,
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  you're kind of mentoring them.
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  You have to be absolutely confident and you have to translate that confidence
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  to your clients saying, Okay, don't worry,
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  you're in great hands. We're gonna take care of you.
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  We're gonna explain what happened.
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  We're gonna understand. We're gonna kick out the threat actor.
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  We won't let them come back, right?
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  We're gonna help you negotiate,
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  right? You're gonna do all that,
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  right? But on the back end, you still have to deliver.
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  The fact that you're promising doesn't mean that you're you're you know,
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  you still have to go and you have to do the work and you have limited resources
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  and you have to
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  work extremely fast. it's a very tough job.
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  after doing that for a few years it's actually becoming a little bit difficult.
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  But you're so focused, you don't have the moment to breathe and step out
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  and look at this and say, hey,
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  it's unbelievable what we have been able to build here over the last couple
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  of years.
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  but luckily that specific co-founder,
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  he was our chairman, Nadab. He runs Checkpoint today,
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  by the way. He's the CEO of Checkpoint Today,
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  one of the largest security companies in the world.
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  he had this vision and he was able to help us kind of navigate the company towards
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  a very successful exit. And frankly,
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  when the figures started coming in and we realized
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  what's the outcome gonna look like,
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  right? And it's really there and it's materializing,
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  it was hard to believe in the beginning,
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  right? Because as you said, very short period of time,
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  very successful exit. It's a services company.
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  So the multiple was very high even for a product company,
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  but now to speak about a services company.
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  there was a short euphoric moment,
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  but then we had to, get back to work,
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  right?
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  Because even if you're you're doing a successful exit,
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  there are still clients that need your attention,
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  there are still employees that need your guidance,
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  right? There are still investors,
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  et cetera. So still a lot of work to do.
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  Okay. So like you said, when it really started materializing and
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  you realized what was gonna happen,
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  like you said, it was euphoric and like surreal,
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  almost kind of hard to believe,
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  given that breakneck speed that you were working at,
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  and like you said, flying all the time,
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  no sleep, young kids, every day at the office is like a an adventure with some some
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  kind of crazy high stakes.
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  situation you're involved in. what was the emotion when the exit
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  was finally final and you realized that it it had been done?
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  Look, there was obviously a at least for me,
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  a sense of relief, just to give you a bit of background,
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  I don't come from a very like whatever privileged background.
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  when I was a small kid, we immigrated to Israel from Uzbekistan,
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  former Soviet Union. My parents were in their mid thirties when they came to Israel,
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  all they had is like something like three hundred bucks in their pockets,
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  and good education and
• 11:13
  big aspirations, But to make it in the Israeli dream,
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  like the American dream, but hardworking people,
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  my mom's a teacher, my dad's an engineer,
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  They were never entrepreneurs for them,
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  the top of their dream was like to have a home of their own,
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  to have a car and to build a future for their kids,
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  the background I come from.
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  entrepreneurship and becoming wealthy was never part of my dreams.
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  I'm a scientist by education. I've been doing engineering
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  and strategy and government work for many years.
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  but you always have this thought at the back of your head,
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  like, okay, I have to put bread on the table every day from now until,
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  I'm gonna have kids, I need to put them through college,
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  Like all the concerns that we all have,
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  right? Then in our day to day life.
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  and having that feeling that you have that done,
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  that you probably don't have to worry about like putting,
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  bread on the table for the rest of your life,
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  it's huge. It's huge.
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  because now you can start really dreaming about doing extra stuff,
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  doing things beyond the day to day survival or keeping lifestyle that is nice,
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  you can really start thinking about other things as well,
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  that go beyond.
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  All right. So the exit happens and then so what happens next?
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  Yeah, so as it happened, I was anyway planning a transition to my next thing.
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  I kind of realized over that three years that I'm exceptionally good
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  of taking a company from a zero to a hundred,
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  I'm probably not the right person to take it from,
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  one hundred to one thousand, right?
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  it's a different type of character that is necessary.
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  It's a different set of capabilities.
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  And that I really like to build things from zero to one,
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  that's where I thrive, that's what I'm doing best.
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  so I joined forces with a bunch of old friends back from the army days,
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  glory days. one of my friends just exited his first company as well,
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  also in cybersecurity. We joined forces with two other experienced co-founders
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  and start another company called Ermetic
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  this time a different story for me.
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  I went from a services company to a product company.
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  For those of our listeners and viewers who know about this business,
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  these are totally different types of businesses,
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  selling a product is nothing similar to selling a service business.
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  and I find myself in the seat of a CRO of a product startup.
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  because among the four founders,
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  I'm the one with most commercial experience.
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  and I find myself leading and building a leading sales organization,
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  but for a product company, which before that I was doing for a services company.
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  So again, I have to start from the beginning to learn how you build
• 13:35
  a go-to-market organization for a product company,
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  how do you build pipeline, how do you do sales development,
• 13:41
  how do you do pre-sale, how do you close deals,
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  like how do you customer support and success.
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  that's what I'm doing over the next three to four years.
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  All right. So you make the exit,
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  you reunite with a bunch of army buddies,
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  right? One who just had an exit,
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  everything lines up, so you're starting this product company totally different than
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  the services company you had prior.
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  You wind up being the chief revenue officer and start building out
• 14:04
  the pipeline and going through that whole process.
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  And then ironically enough, a very similar trajectory four years later,
• 14:11
  another nine figure exit. talk about how that unfolded,
• 14:14
  how a startup a product company.
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  So that's not something you were used to.
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  So you're learning all over again.
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  But yet four years later, that exit was three hundred million dollars.
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  Yeah, that's true. was three hundred million dollars.
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  actually it was a classical roller coaster right.
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  we start very fast. We raise a pretty sizable back then,
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  twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen.
• 14:33
  pretty nice seed round and then less than a year later Excel comes
• 14:37
  in they wanna lead our A round,
• 14:39
  they believe in the team, they've invested in part of the team prior,
• 14:42
  in some of our previous startups.
• 14:44
  We're super excited we're running fast,
• 14:46
  we're starting selling, ~ we're already a couple of millions in revenue,
• 14:49
  and then an offer comes in to buy the company for 200 million dollars roughly from
• 14:54
  one of the leading cloud vendors,
• 14:55
  and we're kind of sitting on the fence and we're trying to understand,
• 14:58
  hey, should we exit or should we continue working?
• 15:01
  And we're four founders
• 15:03
  We're not certain. It's not a unanimous decision.
• 15:05
  people are having ~ second thoughts.
• 15:07
  So there is an option to either sell the business very nice exit two years later,
• 15:13
  but there is also an opportunity to raise another very,
• 15:16
  very nice B round and continue on building the company.
• 15:19
  and ultimately we decide to raise a B round and continue scaling the company.
• 15:23
  And what happens then is
• 15:25
  2023, there was a hype in the market and then with the the bust in the market
• 15:30
  and we realize that things are not going as well and the competition is hard.
• 15:34
  And we are growing but we're not growing as fast as the competition
• 15:38
  but we're burning a lot of cash.
• 15:40
  so we understand that we have to extend our runway,
• 15:42
  right? So we're doing what everyone else is doing at that time.
• 15:45
  We're trying to extend our runway.
• 15:46
  So we're shrinking the company
• 15:49
  scale a go-to-market organization from zero to like 80 people over a year
• 15:53
  and then to shrink it to like 50 people over six months,
• 15:57
  it's a very tough process of hiring and then letting people go while you're still
• 16:01
  continuing to sell and grow the business right so we took the business from zero
• 16:05
  to two million to six million to twelve million and then we
• 16:08
  are finding ourselves it's 2023
• 16:10
  the cash is gonna end at some point.
• 16:12
  We need to raise another round.
• 16:14
  The market is not looking great.
• 16:16
  We're getting some offers, but they're not like great offers.
• 16:20
  It's definitely not gonna look like a huge up round if at all.
• 16:23
  and then we have this offer coming in to buy the business.
• 16:27
  We're starting to start negotiating and then another offer comes in.
• 16:30
  And we're in this crazy situation where we have an offer on the table,
• 16:34
  a potential offer like up in the air,
• 16:37
  and also an offer to another investment realm,
• 16:39
  and we have to navigate all that with this complex situation in the market,
• 16:43
  with the strong competition, ~ with a number of founders in the company that
• 16:48
  do not always think
• 16:49
  the same about like where we should be taking the company.
• 16:52
  So it's a complex situation to navigate,
• 16:54
  right? And it's complex for each and every one of us,
• 16:57
  the founders, it's complex for the company.
• 16:59
  But ultimately we decide to take one of these offers.
• 17:02
  we negotiate a good deal ~ for us.
• 17:04
  We it's also an excellent deal for the buyer.
• 17:07
  And we decided that in order to be able to compete in the market with
• 17:10
  the strong competition, we have to join forces with someone strong.
• 17:13
  And we sell the business to a public company,
• 17:15
  a public established company with
• 17:17
  almost one billion dollars of revenue,
• 17:19
  around five to six billion dollars of market cap,
• 17:23
  one thousand sellers in the market,
• 17:25
  one thousand engineers. So we identified that to be a great home for us
• 17:29
  and and we decide to sell the business to a public company in the US called Tenom.
• 17:33
  the product company, what was the product that you were selling?
• 17:35
  Yeah, so we were in the space of cloud infrastructure security,
• 17:40
  specifically in cloud identity and permissions in the cloud,
• 17:44
  and that was the space that we were focusing on.
• 17:46
  All right. And then so you make that exit too.
• 17:49
  And like you said, there were some ups and downs.
• 17:51
  You had multiple rounds. you had an offer a couple of years back.
• 17:54
  You decided to decline it, keep raising more money and keep extending.
• 17:58
  And then you had some challenging time.
• 18:00
  But ultimately too, you still landed on a very nice exit and made
• 18:04
  the best of everything that happened even four years into to starting that company.
• 18:08
  yes, that's true. I think it was a true entrepreneurial journey where
• 18:11
  not everything aligns perfectly and you have challenges and you work through these
• 18:15
  challenges, right? And you work with the market and you work with your
• 18:18
  co founders and your investors to ultimately navigate the company to a safe haven,
• 18:23
  for everyone, for the employees,
• 18:24
  for the investors, for for the founders.
• 18:27
  Okay. given that was so much different than your first entrepreneurial experience
• 18:31
  and exit, what's the most important lesson you took from that whole process?
• 18:35
  Teamwork. actually I took it from my first company and the second company that good
• 18:39
  teamwork is what builds companies and poor teamwork it is what ruins companies.
• 18:44
  if you have a good team and they know how to collaborate and work together well,
• 18:49
  then at least you have a good chance of getting to a good outcome.
• 18:52
  It might not be the perfect exit,
• 18:54
  But
• 18:54
  it's probably gonna be a much better outcome.
• 18:56
  But if you don't have a a well functioning team and where everyone knows
• 19:01
  the role and they want and are willing to work together,
• 19:04
  then your chances of making anything successful are very,
• 19:08
  very low.
• 19:48
  And another question, how important do you think your military experience
• 19:53
  in the first part of your career was to these two entrepreneurial stints
• 19:57
  you had in those exits? how much do you think that prepared and helped
• 20:00
  you for those experiences?
• 20:01
  Think it's a fair question. I think
• 20:03
  There is a lot about how you cope with stress and how you build and scale teams.
• 20:08
  these are definitely experiences that I I've gained in my first part
• 20:13
  of my career right in the military.
• 20:14
  obviously the professional part as well,
• 20:16
  right? Because that's where I started doing cybersecurity
• 20:19
  and building my cybersecurity knowledge,
• 20:21
  etc. But I think the the really well
• 20:24
  translatable skills are how do you cope with stressful situations,
• 20:28
  how you keep calm in stressful situations,
• 20:30
  and how you build a and lead a strong team in those situations.
• 20:34
  I think these are the most important personal traits that I've gained
• 20:38
  in my military career.
• 20:39
  But I think a lot of people, most of the people,
• 20:41
  most of the successful founders,
• 20:43
  they don't come from the same background.
• 20:44
  They come from different backgrounds.
• 20:46
  obviously in the US, right, where there is no obligatory military service,
• 20:49
  most of the people don't go through through that experience and they still build
• 20:53
  amazing, unbelievable companies,
• 20:56
  right? And I don't think it's necessary.
• 20:58
  in my view,
• 20:58
  One should have in order to be a successful founder is dedication and agility.
• 21:03
  You have to be very adaptable.
• 21:05
  You have to be able to be responsive to the market,
• 21:07
  especially what happens today with the AI market,
• 21:10
  it's moving so fast that you have to like really reinvent yourself every six months,
• 21:15
  so you really have to be very adaptable and you have to be dedicated.
• 21:18
  And everything else is secondary.
• 21:20
  Okay. All right. and that's a good segue into your next company,
• 21:23
  which is Band AI. So talk about what that is and why you decided
• 21:28
  to start this company.
• 21:29
  Yeah, so basically the reason I decided to start this company because it's gonna
• 21:32
  be much easier to explain what we're doing compared to my previous companies
• 21:36
  in cybersecurity.
• 21:36
  Yeah.
• 21:37
  but we believe that the world is going agentic.
• 21:39
  There are gonna be AI agents all around us,
• 21:42
  obviously in the enterprise doing a lot of work that humans are doing today,
• 21:45
  but also supporting us as consumers.
• 21:47
  We're gonna have like ten different,
• 21:49
  digital type of assistance focused on different types of work that we have to do,
• 21:53
  right?
• 21:53
  And in order for this amazing,
• 21:55
  vision of agentic economy to really come true,
• 21:58
  agents need the capability of collaborating with each other,
• 22:02
  just like humans do. and we have these human collaboration platforms whether it's
• 22:07
  signal or whatsapp or telegram for our personal use or if it's Teams or Slack.
• 22:13
  in the enterprise space, agents don't have any of that.
• 22:16
  And actually agents need that more than we are,
• 22:18
  because if you think about what an AI agent is,
• 22:21
  they are not social beings. We carry millions of years of evolution,
• 22:26
  hundreds of thousands of years of you know society and and social interactions that
• 22:31
  made us social beings.
• 22:33
  Agents are not social beings. They were not trained to be social,
• 22:36
  They were trained to, fast answer complex questions,
• 22:39
  that's what they were built for.
• 22:41
  if you want agents to really be able to work together,
• 22:44
  there are a lot of engineering challenges that you have
• 22:46
  to solve cross-communication, how they speak to each other,
• 22:49
  and how you enable that, collaboration,
• 22:52
  how they work together, and on top of that,
• 22:55
  the control.
• 22:56
  and management primitives that we need to introduce because you don't want them
• 23:00
  to do whatever they want. We all saw what happens when you let a bunch
• 23:04
  of agents run freely, they go around and and hack places like Hugging Face,
• 23:08
  etc. Right? So we don't want that on one hand,
• 23:11
  but on the other hand, us as managing team of agents,
• 23:14
  we want to be able to manage them effectively,
• 23:15
  right? If I have a team of agents working for me,
• 23:18
  I want to know what they're working on.
• 23:20
  I wanna be able to guide them,
• 23:21
  I wanna be able to direct them,
• 23:23
  I wanna be able to steer them into the right direction,
• 23:26
  give them feedback, improve their work,
• 23:28
  etc. Right? So
• 23:29
  in order to us for us to make this dream of the agenic economy come true,
• 23:34
  agents need that ability to work together and collaborate.
• 23:37
  And this is what we have built here at Band Band is basically
• 23:40
  the collaboration platform for AI agents and
• 23:43
  It's a place where agents can come to and once they connect to the platform,
• 23:48
  they can see other agents who are on the platform that they are obviously allowed
• 23:53
  to see, right? And that's where the human control kicks in.
• 23:55
  And once they see other agents,
• 23:57
  they can invite them into channels,
• 23:59
  they can start full duplics, stateful,
• 24:02
  peer-to-peer, but also multi-peer conversations,
• 24:04
  delegate tasks, receive tasks,
• 24:07
  discuss.
• 24:08
  work right and on top of that we as humans have full visibility into
• 24:12
  how these agents are working, we're able to improve their collaboration
• 24:17
  and their work together and we can guide them into the right direction.
• 24:22
  right. And then so where is this company in terms of its life cycle?
• 24:25
  Yeah, so we are, a young company,
• 24:27
  but in AI everyone is a young company,
• 24:29
  right? even anthropic are our young company.
• 24:31
  We started a year ago. we raised so far almost twenty million dollars
• 24:35
  in in funding from leading investors.
• 24:38
  we have close to thirty people on the team.
• 24:40
  we work with a lot of different organizations,
• 24:43
  mostly obviously tech,
• 24:45
  friendly organizations. These are either,
• 24:47
  you know, some of the largest chip manufacturers in the world.
• 24:51
  that are very important to the AI space,
• 24:53
  with some of the leading tech forward financial institutions.
• 24:57
  we work with cybersecurity companies,
• 24:59
  we work with insurance companies,
• 25:01
  And in all these companies what we do,
• 25:03
  we basically help them scale and manage their multi agent systems.
• 25:08
  we help them bring different agents from across the enterprise,
• 25:11
  allow these agents work together on different tasks,
• 25:14
  etc.
• 25:14
  Okay. All right. And so given your previous two experiences too,
• 25:19
  with the short timeline with the exit and the kind of some very action packed
• 25:23
  entrepreneurial stints, right,
• 25:25
  with those previous two companies,
• 25:26
  what's it like now with this new company in a different space and kind
• 25:30
  of running things yourself?
• 25:31
  So first of all, I have to admit I after my two exits,
• 25:35
  you know, one straight after the other,
• 25:37
  I wasn't that excited about starting a new company so soon,
• 25:40
  that wasn't a plan. but part of my dream was to play a role or maybe
• 25:45
  to contribute to the AI revolution that we are under.
• 25:50
  And I truly believe that humanity is undergoing a revolution.
• 25:53
  It's something probably gonna be similar to the industrial revolution.
• 25:56
  Just instead of taking a hundred years,
• 25:58
  it's gonna take us ten years. And the impact on you know where the humanity
• 26:03
  is gonna be ten years from now is gonna be huge.
• 26:06
  And I thought that, standing on the sidelines,
• 26:08
  taking an outsider view on that,
• 26:10
  It's not something that I can allow.
• 26:11
  myself to do like I I'm privileged to be able to play in this space right
• 26:15
  and contribute to that and I said okay let's let's do it and this area
• 26:20
  of agentic collaboration my co-founder and I quickly identified that
• 26:23
  as like the missing layer in the agentic step and we said okay this
• 26:27
  is our opportunity to make something very very meaningful here and that's
• 26:31
  how we got into the space
• 26:32
  It's unbelievably exciting to be able to be part of that today and to
• 26:37
  be part of where this industry is going and to be part of how fast this industry
• 26:42
  is evolving.
• 26:43
  right. And Arick, when you look back on your whole journey,
• 26:45
  right, with the military service and then the McKinsey stint and then these
• 26:50
  two exits and then now you right you weren't even in a hurry
• 26:54
  to start another company, but like you said,
• 26:56
  you really feel strongly about this.
• 26:58
  We're in the AI revolution and you want to contribute in a meaningful way.
• 27:02
  Looking back on your whole entrepreneurial journey,
• 27:04
  what's been the best part of it for you?
• 27:06
  the need to learn new stuff and to reinvent yourself over and over and over again.
• 27:11
  That I think was the most exciting part,
• 27:13
  Because you're transitioning from the army to McKinsey,
• 27:16
  so you have to learn what the private sector looks like and what's working
• 27:20
  for a multinational consultancy firm looks like,
• 27:23
  in a central financial hub like London.
• 27:25
  And then going from that to a small startup and learning how do
• 27:29
  you sell services and how do you incident response and then again starting from
• 27:34
  a clean slate over again and learning what it means to go and build a business
• 27:39
  in a product company and then you know starting something new now in
• 27:43
  a totally new field of AI and agentic AI and also in a new role of a CEO,
• 27:49
  right? So
• 27:49
  had to learn again and reinvent myself and the company,
• 27:53
  I think that's the most exciting part of the journey.
• 27:55
  All right. And Arick, if people want to learn more about band AI or connect with
• 27:59
  you personally for any reason,
• 28:01
  what's the best way people can find you online?
• 28:02
  Yeah, very easy. We're at www.band.ai.
• 28:06
  please go there or you know, hit me on LinkedIn,
• 28:09
  Arick Goomanovsky band AI. we would love to hear from you.
• 28:13
  Okay. All right. Well, Arick, thank you so much for taking the time to
• 28:16
  be here and sharing all this incredible wisdom from your journey with our listeners.
• 28:20
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 28:22
  Thank you, Dave. Thank you for having me.
• 28:23
  It's a pleasure.