Latest / Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth / 131: Ofer Ben-Noon, Co-Founder and CEO of Talon Cyber Security, an Innovation Sandbox finalist at RSA

Transcript

131: Ofer Ben-Noon, Co-Founder and CEO of Talon Cyber Security, an Innovation Sandbox finalist at RSA · Cyber Go-To-Market Talk: The Cybersecurity Podcast About Cyber Sales, Marketing & Revenue Growth

• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: It's not often a new category emerges in cybersecurity, and especially not often when you actually hear what it's all about, and it just makes a whole ton of sense.
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: Talon is a finalist in the innovation sandbox contest at RSA for a reason.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Find out what they do, what their innovation is, and how fast they are growing in this discussion with our co-founder and CEO, Ofer Ben Noon.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to the Sales Bluebird podcast, which exists because at B2B startups it's hard to get consistent traction and scale the sales team.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_00: Sales Bluebird provides you typical tricks, experiences, examples, inspiration, and ideas from people who know a thing or 10 about sales and building startups.
• 1:29
  SPEAKER_00: I am your host, Andrew Monahan, and our guest today is Ofer Ben Noon, co-founder and CEO at Talon Cybersecurity.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Ofer, welcome to Sales Bluebird.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very much.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you, Andrew.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: Really happy to be here.
• 1:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I'm looking forward to this conversation, not only because Talon got selected as a finalist in the innovation sandbox for RSA, but also the space you're in, I think is super interesting.
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm keen to learn more from you about how you got into that and what you think is delivers and the problems you solve for people.
• 1:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's the business side.
• 2:01
  SPEAKER_00: We'll get onto that in a second.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: But first of all, I want to get to know the real Ofer.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: So we're going to do that by spinning a wheel here on the screen, and it's going to spit up some questions for us.
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_00: And here we go.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_00: So Ofer, they say home is where the heart is.
• 2:21
  SPEAKER_00: Where is home for you?
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: Home for me is Israel.
• 2:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's Tel Aviv, and specifically home is where my family is.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: So assuming they are still in Tel Aviv, that's always home.
• 2:32
  SPEAKER_01: Have you always lived in Tel Aviv?
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: I was born in Rishon Letzion, which is about 25 kilometers south of Tel Aviv, but always worked and kind of most of my life were around Tel Aviv.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_01: So at some point we were happy to move into the city.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it definitely sounds like where your heart is, right?
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: Alright, next question.
• 2:56
  SPEAKER_00: Do you prefer a suite at the four seasons or a cabin in the woods?
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_01: For sure, cabin in the woods.
• 3:03
  SPEAKER_01: You know, it's more unique.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_01: It's harder to find one that is the quiet and the romantic period that is unique for you.
• 3:10
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have always the time to be with the family in a place where you say, hey, this is my land around me.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_01: It's always fun.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: I'm kind of with you on that.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_00: I think generally speaking, I prefer the Cabin in the Woods.
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_00: Although once in a while the Suite of Four Seasons is nice too.
• 3:25
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_00: Last one.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: Do you prefer a good book or a good movie?
• 3:33
  SPEAKER_01: Good movie.
• 3:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think that sometimes we need kind of the time to disconnect, to shut down the mind and not to think.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_01: And that doesn't happen that often.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: So being able to be kind of completely in a zone of not thinking, sometimes it's nice.
• 3:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, no, I'm with you on that.
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_00: You completely check out and get immersed in something, right?
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: All right, let's go on to the business side.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: So Talon Cybersecurity, selective with the Invasion Sandbox.
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_00: You must be doing something unique and different to get that far.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: What can you share with us right now about how big Talon is and what stage you're at?
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: So Talon is now about 60 people strong.
• 4:14
  SPEAKER_01: We are pre-A round stage, so we have raised about 43 million dollars seed and safe spirit to the A round.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_01: Product was launched about six months ago.
• 4:25
  SPEAKER_01: Since then, we're integrated in about 40 organizations, a few paying customers already onboarded onto the system.
• 4:32
  SPEAKER_01: We are progressing pretty much on all fronts.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: So technology, hiring our sales team, increasing our marketing team.
• 4:39
  SPEAKER_01: So it's the funnest state that the company could be in.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's all happening right now.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm sure excitement is building.
• 4:46
  SPEAKER_00: I first got involved in cybersecurity before it was called cybersecurity in 1998.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm a simple person from Scotland, and you know, Scottish people are simple people.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: How would you describe what Talon does to someone like me?
• 5:00
  SPEAKER_01: Actually, what Talon does is quite simple, generally speaking.
• 5:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's the ability to allow people to work from every place, every device, to any service, mainly web, if that's on-premise or SaaS, and the ability to do that securely by building the security infrastructure inside a browser which is based on Chromium.
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: Simple enough?
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_00: So if I was to contrast that, you know, previous models are on the actual machines, right, at the OS level, but you're building it into the browser.
• 5:35
  SPEAKER_00: Am I getting that right?
• 5:36
  SPEAKER_01: You got it right.
• 5:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the logic is the following.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And the world is now moving into SAS when we are moving into a modern workforce where people are working for many locations, for many different types of devices, from different types of operating systems, different types of workers, a lot of the devices which are connected with their organization are actually unmanageable.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_01: So in these use cases, we understood that the most natural thing that allowed the employee to be in the natural environment would be to allow a browser which is very similar to Chrome, with a lot of the, from one perspective, the access capabilities that you need, but also the cybersecurity capabilities that the organization needs in order to allow this type of workers to be the most productive possible.
• 6:23
  SPEAKER_00: So if I'm thinking about what might go in the browser from a cybersecurity standpoint, I'm thinking, I don't know, anti-malware, DLP, intrusion prevention.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: Am I along the right lines there when I say that?
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: Fantastic.
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_01: So indeed the things that you have mentioned, so it would be we start from the top, right?
• 6:42
  SPEAKER_01: So the top layer would be SaaS security.
• 6:44
  SPEAKER_01: So the ability to control who can access what resource in each one of the SaaS services, and also to make sure that the activity is done based on the corporate compliance requirements.
• 6:58
  SPEAKER_01: Then one layer underneath, you have the web security.
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: If that's anti-phishing, if that's a URL categorization, so making sure that people are not mistakenly accessing websites which are obviously harmful for them.
• 7:14
  SPEAKER_01: The next layer underneath would be, as you have mentioned, the isolation layer, if that's uh data leak prevention, so making sure that all of the work-related data remains in this bubble.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_01: So think about this browser as the corporate bubble.
• 7:29
  SPEAKER_01: And last layer would be security.
• 7:32
  SPEAKER_01: How do you harden the browsers and make them ideal fit for the enterprise needs?
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you think about it, in a sense, a browser is a consumer product.
• 7:43
  SPEAKER_01: And some of the things which are required when you are doing, for example, gaming are less required when you are accessing the management console of your SaaS provider.
• 7:54
  SPEAKER_00: I'm thinking in my head, Ophir, of if you were talking to your customers or when there were prospects, some of the questions they might have had for you, right?
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'd imagine one of them is well, not everything's inside the browser.
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: And what does that mean?
• 8:07
  SPEAKER_00: Does it mean that in addition to all the tools they already have, or are you able to replace some?
• 8:13
  SPEAKER_01: So that's actually a quite common question, and usually it goes into one of two ways.
• 8:19
  SPEAKER_01: A is the understanding that Talon is not necessarily for 100% of the use cases.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_01: So if there is a worker, that most of the work is outside of the browser, so Fed application and a lot of activities which is let's say either very much based on the operating system, or even if it's only 15% of the work, but this is the core of the work, then I'm saying, look, in this case, probably talent is not ideal.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: I would say we could be an added solution on top of the stack, but will certainly not be enough.
• 8:55
  SPEAKER_01: But then you have a significant amount of workers that are living inside the web 99.9% of the time.
• 9:03
  SPEAKER_01: And for these use cases, whether it's internal web apps or SaaS, that's where talent really shine and bring the most amount of value.
• 9:12
  SPEAKER_01: And this could be for in many cases contractors, employees uh working from their personal devices.
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_01: It could be customer support centers of customer-facing centers, whether it's sales or after sales support.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: And if we think about our these environments, they are becoming more and more web-oriented.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_01: And that's where we can actually cover a significant portion of stack.
• 9:35
  SPEAKER_01: And in many cases, our customers are taking us for use cases of replacing legacy VDI, VPNs, DAS, because they do need the control of the visibility, but not necessarily you need this added cost and added complexity to achieve what the organization needs.
• 9:54
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I would imagine the if you ask someone, will you have more people doing things in the browser in 10 years' time or less, you know, we know which direction the market's going, right?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_01: I think we've already passed this inflection point, right?
• 10:09
  SPEAKER_01: There, the point that it's becoming most of the work.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, pre-COVID, I don't think it was in most of the work if you take on average ego organizations.
• 10:19
  SPEAKER_01: But also the move of Microsoft and the push to O365 was significant and have done a lot of the productivity environment to move more and more to the web.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_01: And we have a lot more long tail of uh SaaS services that are taking a lot more of our day-to-day work in productivity environment, and we're seeing that step-by-step uh growing, where some organizations, some of them by the way, are very, very mature and very, very big, are getting in 60-70% of the population to 100% SaaS.
• 10:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I bet there's many like that, especially more modern companies, right?
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:56
  SPEAKER_00: You build companies these days, right?
• 10:57
  SPEAKER_00: For sure.
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: Another question I was thinking about if I was a customer or prospect would be what's my user experience like?
• 11:04
  SPEAKER_00: Even though it's on Chromium, does it somehow affect their day-to-day or they just don't notice?
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I would say that the user experience would be Chrome.
• 11:14
  SPEAKER_01: So in many cases, after we're starting the evaluation process with a prospect, after one week they say, Does this product do anything?
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_01: Are you sure that you added inside the capabilities?
• 11:26
  SPEAKER_01: Because our employees didn't feel any different.
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: So we see all of the logs, we see all of the activities.
• 11:32
  SPEAKER_01: It's clear that it does something, but we don't feel any negative impact on the UX.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: It feels the same.
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: Some even told us that they felt that it's faster than Chrome.
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: And we said, look, it's not supposed to be faster, it's supposed to be equivalent, but we're happy that that's the feeling.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_00: And then the the big innovation is the fact you're doing things in the browser now.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_00: Is that it, or is it something more that you're doing around it that I'm not aware of right now?
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: So the main innovation is with the understanding that the browser is actually becoming our new entryway to the organization for a significant percentage of the population.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: And understanding that if in the past you had 10 applications that potentially were kind of evenly split in terms of the amount of time that our employees spent time inside in order to access the corporate resources, the browser is really becoming the entryway.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: It's the main door.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, new opportunities actually evolve.
• 12:34
  SPEAKER_01: So if, for example, in the past you needed to reroute traffic all over the world in order to have monitoring, compliance, and control in terms of who can do what, in terms of web activity, network activity.
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_01: Now you can do a significant portion of that in the browser, which improves the UX because you don't need to reroute traffic anymore.
• 12:54
  SPEAKER_01: You don't have this added hope that obviously slows you down.
• 12:58
  SPEAKER_01: And you don't also need to implement so many different rules in your sec.
• 13:03
  SPEAKER_01: But it's not only simplicity and cost, it's also added capabilities.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: Because if you think about it, all websites are becoming now end-to-end encrypted, right?
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_01: Everything is moving to HTTPS.
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: And this encryption breaking is complex, right?
• 13:19
  SPEAKER_01: And not for all websites, it's even possible.
• 13:22
  SPEAKER_01: And more and more applications are now starting to move into the direction of SSL certificate pinning.
• 13:29
  SPEAKER_01: And with that move, we have a lot more capabilities in terms of the visibility of the context.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_01: And the last point would be the last mile security.
• 13:38
  SPEAKER_01: So people are talking about last mile security for the last, I don't know, five, ten years, I guess that we're hearing that statement.
• 13:45
  SPEAKER_01: But the browser is actually one of the most classical points to implement last mile security because if you think about it, that's exactly the point where our employee is accessing that data, manipulating that data, and we see all of that.
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: It's in our hands, right?
• 14:02
  SPEAKER_01: So, for example, I can tell you, okay, now that data was copy-pasted from that service to that service.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: Are we okay with that with compliance perspective?
• 14:14
  SPEAKER_01: Do we need to communicate with the employee and to say, hey, based on the compliance requirements of the organization, we need to monitor the activity just that you know, and please be careful.
• 14:27
  SPEAKER_01: We need to do this, this, and this, what you are copying, or potentially even to decide that that type of data cannot be copied or on in these circumstances.
• 14:37
  SPEAKER_01: So the advantages of what we can do on top of what you had in the past is dramatic, but still better user experience and better cost performance, especially in this time and all of us obviously feel that is dramatic.
• 14:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it must be very intriguing for enterprise security teams, but I mean from a simplicity standpoint, right?
• 14:59
  SPEAKER_00: The more you concentrate in one area, concentrate everything, workflow, workloads, what people can do, the more you can control and protect that work activity, right?
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: What were you doing that caused you to come to this realization that there was an opportunity to do this?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I think that if we're talking about how did we get to that, it's a combination of two things.
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm a huge believer in the why now.
• 15:23
  SPEAKER_01: Every time that I'm looking at an idea, the first thing that I ask myself or potentially the team that is working on it is the why now.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: And here we had a unique combination of technical why now and a business need, why now?
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_01: And when thinking about it, it was June of 2020 when Ohad Bobrov, my co-founder and myself started working together.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: Ohad was the founder and chief technology officer of Lacoon Mobile Security.
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_01: It was the first EDR for smartphones.
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_01: I acquired by Checkpoint in 2015.
• 15:56
  SPEAKER_01: After that, it was vice president of cloud security, endpoint security, data leak prevention, and uh mobile security for uh Checkpoint.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_01: And myself, I was the founder of Argus, which was the first automotive cybersecurity company acquired by Continental AG in 2017.
• 16:15
  SPEAKER_01: And we know each other from our time as officers in 8200 intelligence unit, and we always wanted to work together, right?
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: But we just need to find something that was big enough, exciting enough that we want to spend our next decade there working on something that we think brings enough value to the world.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: So here we are, June 2020, three months into the pandemic, and we asked ourselves, what has changed?
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_01: Or what has changed, and we believe that we'll be the same for the next decade.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: And we asked ourselves, in terms of employee activity, how did we connect to the corporate resources?
• 16:55
  SPEAKER_01: And we felt that the main three things that have changed dramatically are the following.
• 16:59
  SPEAKER_01: The first one is how do employees are working in terms of from where.
• 17:04
  SPEAKER_01: And we understood that employees will always work in kind of a hybrid model, it will not be office only anymore.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think it's going to be work from home only as well, but it would be hybrid mode.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: That means that perimeter-based security, when we need to enforce the data only when it goes via perimeter, is going to be a lot more complicated looking into the future.
• 17:29
  SPEAKER_01: With that, also the human factor is becoming a lot more challenging.
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_01: Because if we think about that portion of the human factor, we don't know our employees as we know them in the past.
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_01: It's harder to train them to be cyber aware and to act in a governed way.
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: The second area is around the explosion of SaaS.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: So every company that I know of is now migrating in and going through their digital transformation, moving to be a lot more SaaS-oriented.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_01: But for the main SaaS, I guess the security controls that we have are fantastic.
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: But the long tail of SaaS service, that's a completely different story because they don't have the same security APIs exposed to review all of the data to analyze it in order to comply with uh SaaS security requirements is technically hard because also of the encryption that we touched.
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_01: And the third area is the variety of devices and the variety of workers that we have.
• 18:28
  SPEAKER_01: So we have now a lot more contractors, third party, blue collars.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_01: We have more types of employees, and a lot of these devices are coming now from many more operating systems.
• 18:40
  SPEAKER_01: In many of them, we don't have any administrative privileges, so we cannot install the typical security stack.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: What do we do in these scenarios?
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: And then Oad and I felt this is a task we want to bring value on.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_01: This is the task that we want to bring solutions into the world.
• 19:01
  SPEAKER_01: And with that understanding in mind, we started to look at different technical alternatives.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And in April of 2020, Microsoft have migrated Edge browser from the proprietary code into Chromium.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_01: Chromium is the open source layer underneath Google Chrome.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_01: So you have two of the most popular browsers running on one code base, which is open source.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I didn't know that about Edge.
• 19:29
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I can see that's a big factor for a large enterprise, right?
• 19:32
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that was really, really important for us.
• 19:35
  SPEAKER_01: And with that, we felt that we have the business need and we have the technical enabler.
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe that when a need and a technical feasibility are meeting at in a specific point in time, that's an opportunity that I as an entrepreneur cannot miss.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, yeah.
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: It must have been exciting to see that change happen.
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is probably another example of COVID accelerating what was happening anyway, right?
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: It might be in five years' time before this became relevant, but now suddenly it is, which is good for everyone.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: They accelerate and then innovation comes to the fore.
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_00: I noticed on LinkedIn that you do have a sales team.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm wondering when did you start hiring salespeople?
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_00: And did you go for a leader first or did you go for sellers first?
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_01: So we started with onboarding the sales team after about four months.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: And the first person that I have onboarded is Amit here in Israel, as business development leader, to help me with the market validation and the product market fit.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think this is the most important thing that the CEO is involved in in the early stage of a company is to understand okay, what are the needs, how our solution should look like in order to address that and to work with our first design partners, with our first customers, to make sure that we deliver the best product that we can in order to solve their pain points.
• 20:59
  SPEAKER_01: When we progressed a little bit more, the company was about 10 months old.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_01: We hired Richard Benino, one of the most talented sales leaders that I've met for the early stages of a startup.
• 21:10
  SPEAKER_01: So I've done that multiple times.
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: And I think that at that point we felt that we are ready to scale up for him to bring people that he used to work with in the past to bring his network of prospects of early stage adapters, and really to start building that machine.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: How important was it to get someone like Richard who is used to doing early stage?
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think it was critical because while we sometimes as entrepreneurs feel that our product is perfect, that our pitch is perfect, that the market is mature and ready, obviously are always wrong, right?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_01: Because in a sense, when a company is young, everything is young, right?
• 21:52
  SPEAKER_01: And and you would need someone who is able to work in an agile environment, that is able to be patient enough that when things are not perfect, you will work with the team to refine the pitch, to expand the messaging, that if the templates for proposals are not ideal, you would say that's fine, give me a day, okay, now it's perfect, let's continue.
• 22:13
  SPEAKER_01: Rather than to say, hey, the infrastructure here is not good enough.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_01: I didn't sign up for this.
• 22:18
  SPEAKER_01: Someone who is used to have a crazy back office team for everything, but in early stage startup, you know, everyone is are doing everything.
• 22:26
  SPEAKER_01: It's a teamwork, so you want someone who is comfortable in this hectic environment.
• 22:32
  SPEAKER_01: And by the way, it's for that leader, but also the salespeople underneath that person, there is a huge, from my perspective, huge advantage of bringing senior sales reps who did work in the past in startups and understand that not everything is perfect in a startup.
• 22:48
  SPEAKER_01: The other point is that we're a lot faster than anyone else.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I always feel like those early stage people need to be able to sell, but they need to be able to learn at the same time, right?
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_00: They go one ear is listening on how do I position the sell, and the other thing is what am I hearing that might need to change how we're going to market right now.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: But also to bring feedback back is critical.
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_01: So the early stage salespeople, from my perspective, are entrepreneurial in spirit, right?
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_01: By definition, because they are bringing something new, they are shaping how the product looks like, they are shaping the marketing material, the pitch, the explanation.
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: So it's easy for everyone to grasp.
• 23:27
  SPEAKER_01: They are educating and mentoring our customers.
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_01: So why does this technology and approach make sense?
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: Right?
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: So this is really an evangelism.
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it really is, right?
• 23:38
  SPEAKER_00: And you need to be comfortable with that.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's not just a no, it'd understand why, right?
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: And what else are you thinking that's this causing you to not think this is the right thing at this time for your company, right?
• 23:47
  SPEAKER_01: 100%.
• 23:49
  SPEAKER_01: And do you remember your first customer, Ofer?
• 23:51
  SPEAKER_01: I will always remember my first customer.
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: Can you share who it was?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_01: No, it's under NDA, but I would never forget my first customers.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: By the way, the reason why I will never forget is that all of them have been so instrumental to building my companies.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: You have a customer, but you have a partner, right?
• 24:09
  SPEAKER_00: And you know, true partnership is one that's very deep when it works.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_01: Working with an early stage startup, this is a joint journey of that customer and us as a startup, where we have pretty much an unwritten contract where that customer is very patient, and we from the other side are doing 200% to deliver everything that they need, even if it's not exactly on our future roadmap, because eventually everyone needs to be happy for that partnership to work.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_00: I asked some people a few months back about you know, what is that type of person that wants to work with early stage and what do they hope to get from it?
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_00: And someone said, you know, when you work with early stage and there's a gap, they fill the gap in two design sprints, right?
• 24:57
  SPEAKER_00: If you work with a big company, they fill that gap in two years.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very different proposition.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: I completely agree.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_01: This is from a technical value, and the other side would be each one of us, in a sense, want to do the best that we can for our shareholders, for our bosses.
• 25:14
  SPEAKER_01: And the other thing is that we want to make an impact on the world.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And the early customers of a startup are helping to shape that product and the value that they are also going to bring to their peers with the years.
• 25:28
  SPEAKER_01: So you certainly want to be part of an ecosystem like that.
• 25:33
  SPEAKER_01: If you are a CISOF big organization and you want your peers to get a better product, so work with that startup, make it better.
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_01: So your peers are also going to benefit from that.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 25:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, Lofra, I really enjoyed the conversation this morning.
• 25:47
  SPEAKER_00: I imagine you're hiring.
• 25:49
  SPEAKER_00: If you are, where do you want people to go to look for positions?
• 25:52
  SPEAKER_01: We are hiring.
• 25:53
  SPEAKER_01: We are hiring sales reps all over the US pretty much.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: They are very welcome to join too.
• 25:58
  SPEAKER_01: Log into our website, uh www.talon-sec.com.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: Log into our careers page.
• 26:04
  SPEAKER_01: We would love hearing from you, myself, Richard, and thank you.
• 26:09
  SPEAKER_01: And if someone wants to get hold of you personally, is LinkedIn the best way to get in touch?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: LinkedIn is by far the best way to get in touch.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: I'm always answering.
• 26:17
  SPEAKER_01: I would love to hear from everyone.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: Well, listen, I wish you every success during RSA week for the Sandbox Innovation Competition, I guess it is.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_00: Uh a lot of success in 2022 and 2023.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you very, very much.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: Much appreciated.
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: So for me, that was super interesting listening to how Ofer talked about a whole bunch of things and how talent is positioning itself, how it came to be, some of the important decisions they're making along the way.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: I had three main takeaways, and yours may be different, but here are my three.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, the real true importance of design partners.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_00: And I think one of the things that I think Ofer emphasized was the partnership element of that.
• 26:59
  SPEAKER_00: There's give and take in there.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: There's deep relationships that are often built up over time.
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_00: But these design partners early on are the ones that are patient enough to work with you, but also drive you to be great.
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: As he said, you know, they're patient, but we're working at 200% to deliver.
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_00: So that was one takeaway.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: The second one was when he was talking about the DNA of early stage salespeople.
• 27:23
  SPEAKER_00: And I think, you know, obviously a lot of people talk about you've got to be comfortable with chaos and things not being there and having to do a lot of things yourself.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I think the other thing that was interesting was that Ofer talked about they've got to be entrepreneurial themselves.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_00: They got to be learning about what the customer or prospect is saying back.
• 27:41
  SPEAKER_00: You know, why are they gravitating towards what we do and why are they not?
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And really learning what's working, not working as you're positioning the company in the market.
• 27:50
  SPEAKER_00: So I thought that was interesting.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_00: And the final thing was when he talked about the genesis of talent, how timing is everything.
• 27:56
  SPEAKER_00: You know, things come together, both from a personal relationship standpoint.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Him and his co-founder, it was the right timing for them personally.
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: Obviously, COVID came along and accelerated a whole bunch of things in this world, a whole bunch of change.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_00: And this is one of them in terms of you know the hybrid work environment we're walking into, and also the kind of growth and SaaS and how people are working.
• 28:16
  SPEAKER_00: So really interesting, my three takeaways there, really interesting conversation with Ofer, and I wish them every success with the sandbox competition, but also in 2022 and 2023.