The world woke up today with the news that Israel and Hamas have finally secured a deal to release some of the hostages from the October 7 attack and slowly begin the end of the war.

It was news met with mixed emotions: some thinking the deal was a bad one and many just praying for the return of as many hostages as possible.

To discuss some of the details and emotions behind the arrangement, I invited Eitan Goldstein to share his views on the last 24 hours and predict the next stage in Israel’s journey of the war.

Readers of The Spiro Circle may already be familiar with Eitan. He is a Middle East expert who served as a policy NCO in the Foreign Relations division of the IDF. He was also a senior editor at Ynetnews, the English-language edition of Israel’s largest newspaper. Eitan currently works in public relations where he promotes Israeli organizations in the international press. He is fluent in English, Hebrew, and Arabic and previously wrote a story for us which can be read here:

Today we discuss:

* The details of the hostage deal

* The world’s reaction to the news

* Biden and Trump: Two leaders fighting for credit!

* Life after the war and ‘the least bad option’ for Israel

Please note that The Spiro Circle is still a new and growing project; the sound will improve as we grow in experience and equipment! I appreciate your patience.

Starting a new media venture can be daunting, especially since the results are published online for the world to see.

Of course, we all know that more often than not it is because the world does *not* see what is published. And it’s easy to be discouraged when your content is getting lost in the forest of creators.

I’ve been interested in this for a while; I purchased my microphone in 2019 intending to start a podcast - truthfully, that would have been the best time to do it right before a pandemic! Fate had other plans and it sat in my office collecting dust for a few more years.

2025 and things are different. Over the years I have built a strong network of founders, personalities, tech experts, and friends who have been instrumental in forming this new media landscape. And with everything going on in the world, now truly is the best time to jump in.

But it’s scary! Of course it is. To learn more about this process I spoke to Yoel Israel, the Founder and CEO of Wadidigital and founder of IsraelTech, an online show where innovators, VCs, and personalities all gather to share news from Israel’s tech community.

He’s already been in the game for a year and the chances are you’ve seen his content in your Instagram, X, or LinkedIn feeds.

Here are some of the things we spoke about:

* Taking the plunge to follow a passion

* Gamifying rejection

* Identifying tipping points

* Supporting the Israeli tech ecosystem online

* The future of media

* … and my own technical difficulties!

At the end, I battled a technical issue that I left in the show for two reasons: First, I needed a sign-off for the episode. But more important than that, I wanted to show the viewer at home the messy process this can take. Yes, there will be mistakes, but I hope over time to get more experience and help tell stories around the world.

I invite you to please tune in to the first episode and follow IsraelTech for more news.

https://x.com/YoelTIsrael

https://x.com/IsraelTech

https://www.linkedin.com/company/israel-tech

https://www.facebook.com/IsraelTech48/

https://www.instagram.com/israeltech48/

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

For the last few months, I have been sharing written work and short video interviews conducted on behalf of my work at CTech. Today, I wanted to share for the first time here a long-form interview from its popular BiblioTech series.

A few months back I spoke to Judah Taub, Co-founder and Managing Partner at Hetz Ventures, about his book ‘How To Move Up When The Only Way Is Down’. It is designed to transform readers’ decision-making by recognizing Local Maximums and skill-building based on lessons from AI.

I first read Judah’s book in October 2024 when I was on a long-haul flight to the Philippines and it was a pleasure to speak to him about his experience, his writing process, and some of the practical lessons that can be gleaned by readers. The conversation was wide-ranging, but we managed to discuss some of the following topics:

* His IDF experience

* Jewish philosophy and ‘The Devil's Advocate Unit’ [known as ‘Ipcha Mistabra’ in Hebrew]

* The Netflix/Blockbuster competition and the Theranos story

* What modern-day businesses can learn in their journeys

Judah Taub is co-founder and managing partner at Hetz Ventures. Previously, he served as Head of Data for Lansdowne Partners as well as an advisor to multiple young startups. In the Israel Defense Forces, Taub served as an officer in a classified intelligence unit where he engineered a large-scale project that won the IDF 2014 Creativity Award.

Please enjoy the video, and feel free to read the (slightly edited) transcript directly on CTech.

I hope that there will be more video content in the future, so watch this space!

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Here I tell the story of my experience visiting Kfar Aza and Nova, two sites impacted by the Hamas attack across Israel on October 7, 2023.

I discuss the following topics:

* The pain of the locals in the Kibbutz

* The Nova site and modern-day memorials

* Israel’s new responsibility as a site for “Tragedy Tourism”

* UNRWA trucks were giving aid… but no one talks about it!

My latest article, published in The Times of Israel, provides an in-depth review of my day. You can read it below:

https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/kfar-aza-and-me/

This week, I spoke with Hillel Fuld, an American Israeli business technology advisor.

A lot of you are probably already familiar with Hillel. He's got a large social media following online where he talks about all things Israeli high-tech, Startup Nation, Zionism, but also Israel's fight with Hamas.

Importantly, he's also fighting for its reputation as it struggles to gain sympathy among young people.

I wanted to speak to Hillel about a bunch of things. Honestly, we could have spoken all day. But we limited it to Israel's tech sector and also the fight online against ‘anti-Zionism’ - which, as many of us know, is often a dog whistle for antisemitism.

We spoke about some of the media personalities in the space and how they've tackled the conversation surrounding Israel. Notably, Piers Morgan and Joe Rogan’s recent episode with Dave Smith and Douglas Murray.

We also spoke about Israel's tech sector and what the anti-Zionists may be missing when they think of Israel.

Those calling to boycott our country underestimate the presence that Israel has in shaping the technology of our world.

I hope you enjoy.

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today, I wanted to dive into another episode from the CTech BiblioTech archive. This time, my conversation with Nimrod Vromen, author of “Prompting Happiness: A Guide to Prompting a Life Worth Living” recorded in July, 2024.

The book is an exploration of the human condition and the pursuit of true happiness. Nimrod navigates the complexities of midlife challenges, leveraging the potential of AI to provide practical strategies for personal growth and well-being.

In perhaps one of the first times I can think of, Nimrod also openly admits to using ChatGPT to help him pen his work.

“When I suddenly started playing with ChatGPT in October 2022, my philosophizing exploded because I felt that I was playing around with a technological revolution that was akin to the atomic bomb,” he told me during the episode. “I felt that I had seen technological revolutions in my 17 years as a professional. I saw the Internet in 1999 as a teenager, and computers before that in 1993. I thought to myself, ‘there's been nothing like this’. Every single technological revolution since the atomic bomb was an acceleration of a process that humanity has been dealing with forever, which is a process of interconnectivity, working together, and increased productivity.”

“But if you think about the atom bomb, that's a revolution where you do not live in the same world afterward. You think about AI now in that context, a day before this revolution. Humans are defined by their subjective experience of life and their collective experience of life, which is defined through their communication with one another, right? A day after AI passes the Turing test, the whole experience is going to change because now I can connect with infinite versions of humans. It's just a different world. And that set me off on a course of thoughts about my profession, about my family, about education.”

Nimrod is Founder and CEO of Ark Empowerment and Consiglieri - aiming to transform the world of professional services with AI. He is also the Chief Growth Officer for the Startup Sector at Arnon, Tadmor-Levy, after 16 years as a corporate lawyer at the firm. For the soul, he wrote and produced “Startup: Confidential”, an internet video series hosted on CTech and Calcalist, and authored “Prompting Happiness: A Guide to Prompting a Life Worth Living”. The book follows Nimrod as he addresses the complexities of modern life while offering a road map for navigating those intricacies, ranging from stimulating conversations on the future of AI to helpful strategies for fostering happiness in an increasingly digital society.

Those interested in an extended written interview with Nimrod can find it on CTech via following this link.

You can also buy your own copy here: https://www.amazon.com/Prompting-Happiness-Guide-Worth-Living-ebook/dp/B0D369PVDN

This week, I decided to do something a bit differently. I wanted to post a video episode from BiblioTech, a CTech video series I produced just over a year ago.

In the summer of 2023, I interviewed several authors about their newly published books, and today’s episode will be from its archive: Meet Yaniv Rivlin.

Yaniv is the Founding General Manager of Bird in Israel, where he also ran the EMEA Government Partnerships department. Before that, he co-founded and served as the Executive Vice President of Comtribute, a company that provided organizations with an online platform to raise funds and engage with consumers.

When we recorded this episode in September 2023, he had just celebrated the English release of "Live Like a Startup: Take The Initiative and Transform Your Life”. The book, originally published in Hebrew, was a #1 bestseller in Israel and is available now for readers looking for invaluable insights on creating genuine, lasting success in business and life.

“It is totally chaotic, but our life is chaotic. One of the things that I talk about throughout the book is getting into that state of fear,” he told me at the time. “When you start a startup, you take a risk. You go into that state of fear.”

In some ways, The Spiro Circle has been my startup. I left my comfort zone to take on a new task, learn a new skill, and make myself more vulnerable. I am incredibly proud of what I have achieved so far and look forward to seeing all the ways this project will go in the future.

For now, please enjoy our conversation. We discuss:

* Yaniv’s personal journey and the start of his career.

* The concept of Israeli “Chutzpah” and how it helps founders.

* What business leaders, entrepreneurs, or startup founders can learn from this book.

You can also read my entire interview with Yaniv on CTech’s website, which goes into far more detail about his book and journey.

Those who enjoyed our conversation are invited to purchase Yaniv’s book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Live-Like-Startup-Initiative-Transform/dp/B0CGL4H5S5

I’ve been thinking a lot about parenthood recently. Those who know me personally will know that I have my first child on the way. In the summer, I’ll be the father to a little boy - and I couldn’t be more excited and more nervous.

But today’s world isn’t easy for boys. They’re being raised to think that any masculinity they possess is somehow toxic. Or that they should or should not be acting a certain way.

On top of that, western nations are seeing men as the victims of deaths of despair - that is, death by suicide, drug overdose, or alcohol-related illness.

Women are outpacing men both in terms of university degrees and salaries in some working areas, making men’s traditional roles more obsolete.

This has all been on my mind. Men need strong mentorship, family structures, and inspiring leaders to help them grow and succeed - but where from?

This week I spoke to JP Dumas. Originally from a working-class upbringing in LA, he dodged the twin evils of gang violence and the crack epidemic, to become an executive in corporate America.

I wanted to hear from him about his journey and the lessons of resilience and leadership. I hope you enjoy it.

Notes:

* You might see my camera angle change for a few minutes - that was just a little technical glitch!

* At the start of the video, I make reference to JP currently working with children as a mentor. This is incorrect and something he did in the past.

As I approach the 10-episode milestone of this podcast, I have been on a journey to discover what exactly I want this to be. I am meeting with guests who all have unique insights or experiences in their personal lives or in a professional capacity.

It’s been a challenge, but I feel each episode gets a little easier; every time I whip out the camera, I get a little more confident at producing these, and each episode gets a little better.

I suppose what I’m trying to say is that I remained motivated to keep going - to overcome the obstacles of making this show and keeping a positive mindset.

This brings me to my latest guest, Swati Shirname. Swati is originally from India and moved to the United States to embark on several high-level jobs before becoming an executive at a corporate company. Then, she went off on her path and wrote a new book: “Generative AI for Leaders: Playbook for Innovation.” [link below"]

She did all this while being the single mother to two young daughters and overcoming not one, not two, but three different diseases over her life that doctors described to her as ‘incurable’.

This week, I spoke to Swati about her career trajectory, the parallels between parenthood and executive leadership, and how mindset really can be everything.

I hope you enjoy it.

Check out her book here: https://www.amazon.com/Generative-AI-Leaders-Playbook-Innovation/dp/B0DPLP4C2S

It's no secret that Israel’s reputation has taken a tumble after the Hamas attack on October 7 and the subsequent war fought in Gaza, headed by Iran and its proxies.

We’ve all seen the online conversation and the physical protests at college campuses and across the streets of European countries.

Whereas many of Israel’s supporters suggest that a loud minority creates this noise, sadly data is showing this changing sentiment toward Israel has further intensified: a poll by YouGov shows that in the last five months, American sympathy toward Israel has dropped: despite maintaining a plurality of support, the second highest number of respondents are now ‘unsure’.

The 4% drop in support represents 10 million Americans.

This news was also coupled with Israel’s dead-last ranking on the 2024 Nation Brands Index, thanks to perceptions among Gen Z as a country associated with the "forces of chaos" rather than as one contributing to global stability. This makes it less popular than North Korea, Russia, or other Middle Eastern countries.

I spoke with writer and strategic consultant Joanna Landau about these findings and what they mean for Israel in the future. She is the co-author of “Ethical Tribing: Connecting the Next Generation to Israel in the Digital Era,” and we discussed a variety of topics:

* The YouGov poll that shows a fall in American support for Israel

* How countries can improve their reputations

* Taking the reputation fight onto the online battlefield

* Joanna’s new initiative, Israel & Partners, to help improve the country’s reputation

You can find a link to her book, which I recommend (with no commission!), here:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Ethical-Tribing-Connecting-Generation-Digital/dp/1959840347

Enjoy!

I first met Adir Freilich in October 2017, soon after I moved to Israel. For the first year, we worked on a podcast together called Startup Camel. I didn’t know it at the time, but that would be the first time I dabbled in Israeli high-tech and podcasting - something I would still be doing almost eight years later!

In the time I have known Adir, he has remained optimistic and resilient despite four near-death experiences.

* At age 7 he was hit by a car

* At age 17 his appendix burst, requiring emergency surgery

* At age 27 he survived the ‘Miracle on the Hudson’ plane crash

* At age 36 he was diagnosed with stage four cancer and made a full recovery

I wanted to speak with Adir about how these experiences have shaped his mindset. He is one of the most optimistic people I know, and yet he has had to overcome several physical, emotional, and mental obstacles along the way.

He discusses The Law of Attraction, the power of positive thinking, and shares advice with those who may be facing their own battles.

I hope you enjoy it.

You can get in touch with Adir through his Instagram or Email: IG: @iammanhattan Adirfreilich@gmail.com

Last Friday saw Kanye West, also known as Ye, unleash a tirade of antisemitic, sexist, and abusive tweets on X where he called himself a Nazi, praised Hitler, and blamed Jews for a myriad of problems.

It was a return to a form we saw in December 2022, when his last outburst led to him being dropped by Addidas and largely canceled by the wider world.

A little over two years have passed, and the world is different. Elon Musk purchased Twitter, turning it into X, and reinstated his account in a turn that was said to promote free speech.

It’s been three days and Kanye has suggested that “Jewish People are always going to steal”... they “Love to take ownership over shit they didn't make or own”, and that they “are like bitches” who need to be “kept in check”.

He also praised Hitler and made tasteless comments against the black community, gay people, Muslims, and white people more generally. Honestly, the list goes on.

At the time of this episode’s recording on Sunday evening, his posts all remained up apart from some being ‘limited’ with restricted share abilities due to X’s rules against hateful content. In the 12 hours following this conversation, he had also started posting pornographic material - and by the time this episode was published (Monday morning), his account appeared deactivated.

Those who know me know that my libertarian instinct has always favored free speech online over censorship. I do believe that the internet should be open and free, and bad ideas should be presented and judged accordingly. I prescribe to Musk’s idea that free speech is the bedrock of a functioning democracy, and that speech that matches the law should remain online - then the free market of ideas will sort the good from the bad.

But even I had to take a moment to consider how Kanye’s rant was allowed to continue. Old Twitter may have censored too much, but this was a little extreme, even for me. And I was concerned about the real-world consequences of actions taken by such a prominent public figure.

To understand all of this better and gain a different perspective, I spoke to CyberWell Founder & Executive Director Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor.

CyberWell is an independent nonprofit focused on combatting online antisemitism and Holocaust denial on social media. I wanted to know more about the impact these outbursts have on online discourse, how and if that bleeds over to the ‘real’ world, and what other social media platforms are doing in comparison to X.

I hope you enjoy it.

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

This week, I was joined by Omri Hurwitz, regarded by many as a media maven in marketing, tech, PR, and more.

If you’re active in the Israeli tech ecosystem, you have certainly come across his content over various social media channels where he meets with prominent players in the sector while offering his analysis of news events.

Omri and I have shared a few conversations in the past about New Media. Over the years we have discussed Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its consequences, Fake News, and the general media landscape as it continues to evolve.

Every time we speak there is something new to discuss.

This time, our focus was on the unstoppable train of AI and how it has been impacting our information and news cycles.

Together we discussed:

* The future of media

* AI algorithms in news

* Community Notes and its power to fight fake news

* The impact of China’s DeepSeek

* The need to remove media ecosystems

Please feel free to watch or listen here wherever you get your podcasts. Unlike previous episodes, video is not essential for this conversation.

Follow Omri here: https://x.com/OmriHurwitz

https://www.linkedin.com/in/omrihurwitz

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

The Voice of the People, a global initiative spearheaded by President Isaac Herzog to unite and empower Jewish communities worldwide. The organization recently released its 2025 Jewish Landscape Report based on responses from over 10,000 Jews across six continents.

The results were shocking.

It revealed that rising antisemitism - across campuses, workplaces, and social media - has overtaken all other issues as the number one concern uniting Jews of all ages, backgrounds, and denominations.

Some troubling figures that caught my eye highlighted that respondents in Israel (89%) expressed deep concern for the safety and stability of diaspora communities, and British Jews (81%) reported a growing need to conceal their identities in public.

I spoke to CMO and CPO Neta Danciger about these results and what they meant. Interestingly, she told me that, however many people were hiding their Jewish identities as a result of real-life events, it also caused many others to speak out louder than usual and reidentify with their heritage.

She described these people as “October 8th Jews.”

“I learned it from the answers to our survey,” she said in today’s episode. “So many people refer to themselves as ‘October 8th Jews.’ They felt that after October 7th, something changed in their identity, in the way they feel as a Jewish person in the world. Many started to feel they wanted to be involved in the Jewish community or network.”

Our conversation includes more results from the survey as well as an examination of the sentiment felt among Jews as a whole. In addition to our conversation, you can also download the full report here: https://www.voiceofthepeople.network/landscape-report/#full

You can follow Voice of the People below:

Facebook | Instagram | Linkedin

The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

We all have incentives. I have an incentive to produce this podcast well enough so that I attract more readers and listeners, and hopefully, you have an incentive to tune into new episodes with a goal to learn something or get enjoyment from it.

I also carry personal incentives, such as being a good father, husband, brother, son, colleague, and member of my community.

Some incentives are more cynical. Money or fame often drives people to big things, but not without risk or without affecting their ego, health, or safety.

Reward and punishment, each on different sides of a coin, can determine incentive structures.

“Incentives are something that drives families, economies, companies, and societies,” I wrote for CTech in 2023. “We are told as children that if we behave well, we can have a candy bar or play outside with our friends. As employees, we may be incentivized with money or status, or find fulfillment from within by knowing we are doing something that adds meaning to our lives and our communities.”

I wanted to share this conversation with you today from CTech’s BiblioTech archive because I believe it relates strongly to each of us. The interview, which was conducted for CTech as part of its BiblioTech series, is still as relevant as ever.

About Uri Gneezy:

Uri Gneezy is a Professor of Economics and Strategy and the Epstein/Atkinson Chair in Behavioral Economics at the University of California San Diego Rady School of Management. Before that, he was a faculty member at the University of Chicago, Technion, and Haifa. Uri’s research focuses on using both lab and field experiments to study how people react to incentives. He is the co-writer of The Why Axis, which discusses how using field experiments can improve our understanding of economic interactions in the real world.

You can read the entire (albeit lightly edited) transcript of this interview directly on CTech:

You can also catch a copy of Mixed Signals: How Incentives Really Work on Amazon here: https://www.amazon.com/Mixed-Signals-Incentives-Really-Work/dp/0300255535

Today, I want to share a conversation with Josh Wheeler, founder of Be Broadcast, about the state of UK broadcast media and, notably, how it covers certain topics. The conversation follows a report written by Be Broadcast that outlines how TV and radio stations in the UK approach their reporting on climate change [linked below].

It was a 6-month analysis examining media coverage for events such as the Spanish floods, the Californian wildfire, and the US withdrawal from the Paris agreement. Specifically, I wanted to look at how the media presents its messaging versus how the public sentiment reacts to it.

I was quite amazed at the use of language. The report found that 55% of all UK media coverage regarding climate change is ‘alarmist’ and uses extreme expressions such as ‘ticking time bomb’, evoking a sense of catastrophe among its viewers.

Should UK media be conveying any form of emotional messaging in its reporting, and what does that do to its credibility? We discuss it all.

Those who follow this channel know that I sometimes talk about Israel and I sometimes talk about the United States, but I very rarely talk about my hometown, the UK. Since I studied Broadcast Journalism as my first degree over there, I thought this was the perfect topic to dive into.

Click below to see the entire report: Be Broadcast Mission Control: The Climate Conversation »

https://bebroadcast.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Be-Broadcasts-Mission-Control-The-Climate-Conversation.pdf

I’ll be honest: I entered into this most recent conversation for The Spiro Circle knowing almost nothing about quantum computing. I said as much to my guest, Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, before we even started recording. That’s alright - most people don’t really understand it, he told me. Even scientists used to laugh at the idea that quantum computing would ever be commercially viable.

But then, about halfway through our conversation, he said something that piqued my curiosity and made me put down my notes.

The threat isn’t that quantum computers will simply ‘make things faster’. It’s that they’ll make things possible that are currently impossible. And one of those things is breaking the encryption that protects everything - and keeping cryptographers up at night. He cited potential examples as banks, messages, the NSA, and Bitcoin.

“Quantum computers are not interesting because they’re going to take problems we solve today and solve them faster,” Sivan told me. “But rather they will take problems today we deem as impossible and make them possible.”

The mechanism is an algorithm called Shor’s algorithm, which can factorize enormous numbers at speeds no classical computer could approach. Modern encryption is built on the assumption that factorizing very large numbers is effectively unsolvable. But by taking away that assumption, the entire architecture collapses. “Something that would take a hundred thousand years might be solvable at the scale of minutes,” he told me.

Quantum Machines (QM) is a Tel Aviv-based company that has raised $280 million to build the orchestration layer running quantum processors. Founded in 2018, customers include academia, national labs, and the private sector.

What struck me was that he raised this before it exploded as a mainstream story. At the time of our recording, he flagged that a newly published paper suggested quantum computers would need far fewer qubits to break encryption than previously thought. “We’re still digesting it. If they’re right, we’re going to see some big changes in the world in a few years.” And almost as an aside: “One of the claims is that it will be able to break the underlying encryption used for Bitcoin. Just that itself could be a big impact.”

Research published between May 2025 and March 2026 shows that breaking widely used cryptographic systems may require far fewer quantum bits than previously thought. Estimates dropped from around 20 million physical qubits in 2019 to under one million by 2025. Papers from Caltech and Google in early 2026 prompted one Bitcoin security researcher to estimate a 10% chance that a quantum computer recovers a Bitcoin private key from an exposed public key by 2032.

In April 2026, a researcher successfully broke a 15-bit elliptic curve cryptography key using publicly accessible quantum hardware — a 512-fold improvement over the previous public demonstration just months earlier.

Google has already set a 2029 deadline to migrate its own authentication services to post-quantum cryptography. The so-called “harvest now, decrypt later” threat (adversaries collecting encrypted data today, waiting for quantum capability to mature before cracking it) means the clock is ticking, even though many still believe their things will be protected for many more years.

Sivan’s broader point, the one I kept coming back to, is that quantum won’t replace the computing infrastructure we’ve built - but instead plug into it. It means the vulnerabilities we’ve built into that infrastructure travel with us.

“Not a question of if,” he told me as we finished. “A question of when.”

I didn’t know much about quantum computing before this conversation. But I think I know enough now to think that answer should concern all of us!

Watch a 5-minute preview of our conversation on this topic, here:

Imagine the scene: A developer at a large financial institution merged a routine code update. Nothing alarming yet, just a minor change that, on its own, meant little.

But Terra Security’s AI agents were watching.

AI agents flagged the change, verified a potential vulnerability, and then did something a human penetration tester probably wouldn’t have done. They kept looking. Eventually, they found two more vulnerabilities nearby, each individually insignificant. But they spotted a pattern and connected all three together.

“1+1+1 = 1,000,” said Shahar Peled, co-founder and CEO of Terra Security. The result was a Remote Code Execution (RCE), a cybersecurity vulnerability that allows an attacker to run malicious code on a target system or server from a remote location. It is considered one of the most critical vulnerability classifications of its type.

The customer found out from their vendor, not from an adversary.

Founded in 2024, the Tel Aviv and New York-based startup has raised $38 million across a rapid Seed and Series A, and counts Fortune 100 enterprises among its customers. Its core product is an agentic offensive security platform where swarms of AI agents are trained to think and act like “ethical hackers”, running continuously across a company’s attack surface.

The traditional model of penetration testing (hiring an external team once or twice a year to probe for weaknesses) was never designed to catch what Terra caught in that unnamed financial institution. “Until 2025, it happened on an annual basis mostly,” Peled explained. “Once a year, you hire someone externally to work for a week or two weeks... The reason you couldn’t do it continuously is that you couldn’t really train software to hard-code how adversaries think and act.”

But AI has changed all that. Terra Security’s agents scan for known vulnerabilities and simulate the reasoning of an attacker, chaining together findings and verifying whether a vulnerability is actually exploitable rather than merely theoretical.

But Peled is careful not to overclaim, and beat me to my own next question. “Are AI agents today better than any ethical hacker in the world? They’re not,” he said. “They don’t yet possess the creativity of the best ethical hackers. But they can be more scalable than anyone in the world. They can run continuously. They never sleep. They’re already better than the vast majority of ethical hackers in the world.”

With AI, there are no longer cyberattackers who wait for annual review windows. Adversaries now use tech to find entry points faster, adapt in real time, and strike before defenders can patch. A point-in-time test is, by definition, already outdated the moment it concludes.

Terra’s idea is that continuous, AI-driven offensive security is the only architecture that matches the pace of modern attacks. The chained vulnerability Peled mentioned in our conversation was only catchable because an agent was watching the moment the code changed - and not six months later, when a consultant finally showed up.

“I still see too many organizations that say, ‘Okay, now we have AI in offensive security’,” he concluded, and as a slight warning to CISOs still budgeting for annual pen tests. “[They say] ‘I want to do the same thing I’ve done before, just faster, better, cheaper’. And that scares me.”

Lior Yogev says he’s barely been home in three months.

The FundGuard CEO and co-founder has spent the better part of the year in client meetings, and the conversation at every stop has been a variation of the same thing. “Everybody is now thinking, how do we remodel how we’ve worked over the last 30 years?”

The forcing function is agentic AI and the shift toward autonomous systems capable of taking action across complex workflows without human instruction at each step. In asset management, the implications are massive. Compliance flags that require manual review could be triaged, contextualized, and escalated automatically. Portfolio data that currently arrives in overnight batch files could flow in real time to the decision-makers who need it.

FundGuard’s platform replaces legacy fund accounting systems with cloud-native infrastructure that handles everything from NAV calculations to portfolio accounting to operational automation, in real time rather than overnight batches. The company has raised more than $150 million, counts Citi and State Street among its investors, and now operates across six cities, including Tel Aviv, New York, and London.

The company’s thesis is that large banks and asset managers were using archaic core systems that were expensive, slow, and error-prone. The way this industry has operated “since the 1970s and 1980s” starts to look unprepared for the variety, complexity, and volume that he describes as spiraling out of control. “They can clearly envision the future that’s going to be totally different than the way that they’ve been working the last two or three decades,” Yogev explained.

The first obstacle is the infrastructure itself. The core systems still running much of the asset management industry were built in the 1970s and 1980s and updated minimally since. It is still a conservative and traditional space: large, singular, slow to change. They also process data in overnight runs rather than continuous streams. In Yogev’s framing, this is not an inconvenience to be worked around. “Legacy systems, because they’re [so] monolithic and batch-based, just don’t carry the weight and can’t really interact with the infrastructure that’s being built in the world.”

This creates a sequencing problem that the industry is only beginning to confront honestly. Agentic AI requires live data, modular architecture, and cloud-native infrastructure. Almost everything being built to power the AI revolution assumes these things exist. At most large financial institutions, they do not. The result is an enormous appetite for what AI promises, but paired with the structural inability to capture it.

The second obstacle is governance. Yogev described financial institutions as simultaneously the most excited and the most restrictive audience he encounters. “Most large financial institutions are going to ask you to turn off or disable the use of models, at least at this stage, and not even use their data in an anonymous way.” The concerns relate to data leakage, penetration points for bad actors, and regulatory exposure.

He draws a parallel to the cloud and to institutions' concerns about putting client data anywhere outside their own servers. It felt reckless, legally exposed, and competitively dangerous— until it didn’t. “Just like with the cloud, it took a few more years to be fully embraced by financial institutions. It’s going to be the same with AI,” he predicted. “Everybody is looking at what we’re delivering and gets very excited. And they go with us because they know that we’re futureproof.”

Yogev does not believe the AI transition will move as slowly as cloud, but warns: “If you don’t do it, you’re essentially going to die.”

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Institutions that have already modernized their core infrastructure by moving to cloud-native platforms, and in other ways, will be positioned to deploy agentic capabilities more quickly. But those still running batch-based legacy systems will eventually face a two-front problem: they will need to rebuild the infrastructure and close the AI gap, while competing against those who solved the first problem years ago.

The $200 trillion asset management industry has spent 30 years optimizing around the constraints of its technology. It is now up to institutions whether they can reverse that relationship before someone else does it for them.

[Preview: How better tech could add $100K to YOUR retirement]

When the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, the opening moves were not B-2 bombers or Tomahawk missiles. Before the first strike aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace, Iran’s radars had already been blinded, its command-and-control links severed, its communications networks dismantled.

Within this context, one Israeli startup has spent four years building the communications infrastructure that conflicts like this one keep exposing as absent. Commcrete, which raised $29 million in seed and Series A funding — backed by investors including Mobileye founder Amnon Shashua — makes narrow-band satellite connectivity solutions that connect to geostationary satellites 36,000 kilometers away without requiring line of sight or clear skies.

Some of these devices are small enough to fit in a jacket pocket, and all are resilient enough to operate in all weather conditions.

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Most defense companies outsource the ethics of who they sell to — to export regulators, to governments, to the comfortable abstraction of compliance departments. Itzik Daniel Michaeli, the company’s co-founder and CEO and a former senior commander with over 25 years in Israeli special operations and intelligence, does not.

“There are the good guys and the bad guys,” Michaeli said. “It exists. And Hollywood can keep on pushing out those great movies about good guys and bad guys because eventually you saw that when the bad guys mean that they want to destroy you or to harm you, they’re putting their efforts, their money, everything on that.”

Commcrete’s products — Stardust, a 150-gram unit enabling voice, text, location and distress signalling; Flipper, which converts any radio into a satellite-enabled system; and Bittel, which extends those capabilities to vehicles — address a $200 billion global SATCOM market. Its tech is already deployed in active conflict zones, integrated into drone platforms, and operating in the hands of defense, public safety, and emergency response customers across multiple continents.

Since the start of the US-Israel war with Iran, GPS and navigation interference has surged across the Persian Gulf, disrupting shipping, aircraft, and emergency services across the region — exposing the degree to which modern infrastructure depends on satellite connectivity that can be jammed, spoofed, or seized.

Reports from analysts at CSIS and navigation intelligence firms have flagged evidence that Iran may be accessing China’s BeiDou satellite navigation system, boosting the accuracy of its missile targeting in the process.

Commcrete’s architecture is built for this environment. The system uses a proprietary waveform and protocol that make it near-invisible to adversaries. So if a user isn't transmitting, they don't exist on the spectrum.

During live demonstrations, the company invites customers to try to find Commcrete’s signal on the spectrum. Michaeli claims they can’t, which explains the company’s reported 82% demo-to-acquisition conversion rate.

While Michaeli doesn’t disclose his customers, he does disclose who he would - and would not - sell to. “You don’t want to put the weapon in the hands of your enemies, in the hands of your future enemies,” he said.

The question of who can get access to such technology comes with another layer of complexity, one that is specific to Israeli defense companies operating in the current geopolitical climate. Commcrete sells to customers in countries that cannot or do not publicly admit they buy from Israel.

Germany has spent recent years pressing Israel on West Bank policy while simultaneously proceeding with multibillion-dollar defense deals and resuming weapons export approvals. Finland’s president condemned Israel for violating international law, then purchased the David’s Sling air-defense system from Rafael. France blocked Israeli firms from the 2025 Paris Air Show and prohibited Israeli munitions from crossing French airspace. Israel ultimately ended all defense trade with the country in response.

Half his meetings occur in countries that have publicly criticized Israel and the company has been banned from three major international exhibitions. But the phone kept ringing regardless. “Some countries and some authorities are saying… with the same sentence, ‘we can’t buy your stuff but we really do like your stuff so maybe we can buy your stuff only if you… don’t mention that we’re customers’.”

The ongoing conflict has already answered the question of whether the market for what Commcrete builds is real. But the question that remains, and one that Michaeli has appointed himself to answer, is whose hands it ends up in.

“With great power, which is our technology and our capability to do that and to manufacture that, comes a great deal of responsibility,” he concluded. “I really believe in that. And I think that’s part of the game. You have to be in it. You have to understand it. You can’t avoid it. If you don’t understand the landscape of all those layers, you can’t be in the game.”

[5-minute preview: Selling Israeli defensetech in the face of political pressure]

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We were told never to get into a stranger’s car. Yet millions of us do it every day.

The rules most people grew up with (“don’t talk to strangers online”, “never open the door to someone you don’t know”) have been dismantled by the platforms we now use without thinking. Sharing economy platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Marketplace, and DoorDash run entirely on the assumption that strangers can be trusted at scale.

“We live in a generation that buys everything online,” said Yair Tal, CEO of AU10TIX. The Israeli identity verification helps organizations confirm that a person is who they claim to be when opening accounts, making transactions, or accessing services online. “We trust people that we don’t know. We go on a car share ride in the middle of the night in a place that you would never go into someone else’s car. This is where we live today.”

The question AU10TIX answers is simple: how do you know the person on the other side of the screen is who they say they are?

Before digital onboarding was a mainstream category, Tal was Senior Vice President and Head of Enterprise at Payoneer, trying to serve users in places where conventional verification breaks down. “‘The address is the house near the tree behind the garden’,” Tal recalled. “This is the home address. How do you validate that this is the right person?”

That problem of having to verify identity across emerging markets, for unbanked freelancers in Bangladesh, Vietnam, and Pakistan who needed access to global platforms, forced AU10TIX to build systems that Western banks never had to imagine. That early stress-testing became the architectural foundation for what the company does today.

Deepfakes Broke Identity - At Scale

The threat landscape, however, has changed faster than most anticipated. For most of identity verification’s history, fraud was fundamentally an individual problem. The scale was manageable, and the detection logic was straightforward: check the document, match the face. Deepfakes and AI-generated identities broke that model entirely. What was once a manual, one-at-a-time problem is now industrial.

“If we see for a specific company that there’s payments going into APAC of about 20,000 fake IDs in a day, we need to block them,” Tal said. “We’re not talking anymore about the individual. We’re talking about the massive scale of applications that companies are seeing — and it’s so easy to create them with deepfake.”

Detection can no longer happen at the document level alone, and AU10TIX’s automation-first architecture is designed precisely for this volume.

Privacy vs. Security: “The Two Number Ones”

Complicating matters further is the regulatory environment, which is pulling companies in two directions simultaneously. Governments are demanding stricter identity verification while also tightening privacy protections, creating what Tal calls a structural conflict with no easy resolution. “It is not that you can say that my highest priority is privacy and the second priority is security,” he said. “Both of them are your first priority.”

The practical answer AU10TIX has arrived at is to collect only what the decision requires. A platform that needs to restrict under-18 purchases doesn’t need a user’s address, employment history, or document number. It needs one binary answer.

The pub bouncer, Tal argued, doesn’t care where you live or what you do for work. He needs to know if you’re allowed to order that beer.

The stakes of getting this wrong are no longer abstract. Companies that have failed at the identity layer haven’t just faced regulatory fines. They’ve put people in physical danger. “We recently saw companies that lost their data, their reputation, their customers,” Tal said. “They took the wrong people into their cars. People stayed in the wrong apartments.” The sharing economy’s entire value proposition - that a stranger’s home or car can be trusted - collapses the moment that verification layer fails.

The next ‘frontier’ is digital government IDs and QR-code-based national verification, to the delight or horror of everyone. The promise is that they will introduce stronger source-level authentication, but new fragmentation challenges for companies operating across borders. Critics will be skeptical of government or private company attempts to collect, store, or exploit personal information.

The infrastructure will keep evolving, but the principle remains fixed. “The digital identity is the only way for us to keep the trust going,” Tal concluded. Whether companies, governments, and society can achieve the careful balance of safety, privacy, and security remains the next challenge.

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[Preview: The Painful “Necessity” of Digital Identity]

I’ve written extensively about Europe and its tech sector for many years.

For some, it seems slow, stagnant, and tied up in regulatory bureaucracy. For others, it is a champion in responsible data protection and privacy laws that spread across the world.

Either way, the continent should not be disregarded when we discuss tech ecosystems and innovation coming from startups and large corporations.

The bloc has undergone a bit of scrutiny since Mario Draghi delivered his report on European competitiveness to the European Commission in September 2024. Its diagnosis showed slowing productivity, demographic challenges, rising energy costs, and increased global competition as the forces putting pressure on Europe's long-term prosperity.

Europe's productivity gap with the United States was being driven, in significant part, by a failure to adopt technology at scale. What followed was a significant reorientation of sovereign wealth toward tech investment: governments funneling capital into venture funds, seed programs, and national innovation vehicles, all aimed at catching up.

“Europe realized that the US is taking care of the US, especially today,” said Eran Westman, Managing Partner of Planven, a Zurich-based fund with roughly $300 million in assets under management. “And if Europe wants to have its own independence on the technology, it can also be, of course, in defense and other aspects, Europe should take care of Europe.”

Westman joined Planven in 2024 to lead its Israeli expansion. His vantage point sits at the intersection of European capital and Israeli innovation, which he sees can offer a structural opening that Israeli companies are uniquely positioned to fill. Companies born out of Startup Nation can bring something to Europe's sovereign capital push: decades of accumulated instinct for scaling across borders and for navigating unfamiliar regulatory regimes.

Israel’s Numbers in Europe

Many companies in Israel immediately consider expansion and look toward the US. And the perception of European-Israeli relations in tech tends to be shaped by political noise. The reality, documented in hard data, tells a different story.

For example, a report published in late 2025 by Planven, EIT Hub Israel, and KPMG mapped the footprint of Israeli technology companies across Europe and found not retreat but deepening integration. As I wrote for JNS at the time, more than 1,600 Israeli tech companies now employ over 30,000 people across Europe, with a 4.8% annual growth rate over the past three years.

The report highlights strong alignment between Israeli strengths in AI, cybersecurity, healthtech, defense, and climate tech and EU strategic priorities for 2024–2029, particularly in security, sustainability, and digital infrastructure. That alignment matches the sectors that Europe has identified as the most urgent need for strategic autonomy and where Israeli companies have the deepest bench.

In September 2025, Planven exited Nozomi Networks — an Italian-Swiss company protecting operational technology infrastructure across power grids and railways — in a billion-dollar all-cash sale to Mitsubishi Electric. The company had been profitable for approximately 18 months before the deal closed.

Its exit demonstrates that a company built at the intersection of European engineering and Israeli-style security expertise can produce a world-class outcome, and it can also show the EU's emerging defensetech conversation: Protecting critical infrastructure is not a peripheral tech problem. It sits directly inside the strategic autonomy agenda that the Draghi Report put at the center of European competitiveness policy.

The data shows that European-Israeli business collaboration has continued to grow through the current conflict period — a signal of the difference between political weather and structural economic logic. “The continent may protest Israel politically, but economically, it is building a future that relies on Israeli innovation,” I wrote last year.

The Antisemitism Tension

The same period that produced these numbers also saw documented rises in antisemitism across European cities, EU-level noises about sanctions on Israel during the latter stages of the Gaza conflict, and a political climate that has, at various points, made the Israeli flag a contentious symbol in European public spaces.

Westman is careful on this point, and it is worth taking his care seriously. He speaks from a specific vantage point: the deal table, the LP meeting, the board room — and he is explicit about what he can and cannot claim. “I have not met with any antisemitic comment, a question, or approach during the time that I’ve been... I speak with the ecosystem, other VCs, investors, LPs, companies, partners, all the ecosystem.”

He notes that he does encounter concern about operational continuity for Israeli companies during wartime. Questions about whether engineers can still reach the office. About what happens to a company when its CEO is called up for reserve duty. These are legitimate business anxieties, not antisemitic ones.

“There were some noises in the EU in the later part of the Gaza war in August, September of last year,” he acknowledged. “Maybe there will be some sanctions from the EU on Israel. So these were some issues that were maybe coming — but again, nothing that I can directly connect to any antisemitic comment.”

Looking Ahead

Westman is optimistic about the decade ahead. The deal flow he reviews weekly has improved materially in quality over his two years at Planven. European founders are arriving at first meetings with more global ambition than he had seen before. The capital environment, for all its structural gaps, is maturing.

But the honest version of the story holds the tension rather than resolving it. European sovereign capital is being deployed by the same governments whose foreign policy toward Israel remains complicated and variable. The business relationships have proven durable so far. Whether that durability persists as the geopolitical environment continues to shift is the question nobody in Westman’s world can fully answer.

What the numbers show, and what his experience confirms, is that the economic logic of the Israel-Europe tech relationship is stronger than the political conversations around it. Europe needs what Israel has built. And Israeli companies, for all the complexity of the European market, cannot afford to ignore a customer base of 450 million people sitting a few hours’ flight away.

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The joint US-Israeli operation against Iran — the most significant military collaboration between the two countries in modern history — validated a thesis that Protego Ventures had been building since October 7, 2023.

The fund, one of the first in Israel to explicitly target defensetech, had already placed bets on the idea that the US-Israel alliance was evolving from a diplomatic relationship into something more structural. Founders Lital Leshem and Lee Moser imagined a technology pipeline backed by private capital, battlefield data, and a generation of founders who had seen war up close.

“When an Israeli company wants to sell today to the DoD, we have the mutual understanding that we stand for the same values, and we fight together,” Moser said. A former Israeli diplomat and chief of staff to Ambassador Michael Oren, she spent years in the corridors of Congress lobbying for Israeli defense systems.

The Data Point Advantage

“Most of the entrepreneurs in Israel are graduates of elite information units… Add to that the revolution of AI and add to that what the world sees right now,” she added. “You got yourself a superpower. Superpower with data from the battlefield.”

Israel’s defensetech sector has long been seen as a natural evolution of cybersecurity, which in turn was born out of Israel’s need to create robust security measures upon its establishment in 1948. The US-Israel alliance has been strong since its inception.

But what makes this defense relationship different in 2026 isn’t just the joint operations. It’s what Moser calls Israel’s data advantage: 80 years of continuous conflict compressed into a body of operational intelligence that no other country can replicate. “Unfortunately, we’ve [needed] to fight for 80 years,” she said. “And this data can be translated to save people's lives in all aspects.”

Founders in today’s Startup Nation era who build on that data are a different breed from the fintech and cybersecurity entrepreneurs who came before them. They’re coming out of active reserve duty, returning from the battlefield with firsthand knowledge of what the technology gaps actually are. “They know exactly what the pain is,” added Leshem, who was herself at the IDF Southern Command’s Central War Room by 9 am on October 7. “They’re coming with their own ideas and a lot of motivation to grow it and implement it. And it’s actually happening.”

America First, India Next

The loop that battlefield experience feeds into startup formation, which then feeds into defense procurement, is something I have witnessed over the last few years. And it is accelerating beyond the US–Israel axis. From India to Europe, governments and institutions are increasingly looking to plug into Israeli defense innovation, whether through partnerships, procurement, or investment.

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One of Protego’s portfolio companies, Xtend, recently closed an $11 million contract in India for its drone-integrated robotics system. The US remains the primary go-to-market, but the alliance architecture Protego is betting on extends globally.

The Information War

One final aspect of our conversation focused on the changing battlefield and how the country’s fights have migrated from land and sea to online. Moser was unambiguous about what she sees as an equally urgent front: the information war, waged through AI-generated content, foreign influence operations, and weaponized social media ecosystems.

“What was real? What was fake? I think what we see today is like the first AI war,” she said. The conflict with Iran has only sharpened that point: deepfake propaganda, coordinated disinformation, and AI-generated imagery have become standard tools of modern conflict, running parallel to every kinetic operation.

Protego is actively backing founders working in what Leshem calls the “cognitive war” space, treating information integrity as a defense problem with the same urgency as drone protection or force projection. “Everything that has to do with the cognitive war or the information war, that is something that we’re seeing a lot,” Leshem said. “A lot of entrepreneurs are going in this direction.”

[5-minute preview: Israel's defense sector is creating global alliances]

Every time Anthropic drops a product update on X, a startup somewhere dies.

That’s the sentiment across the startup world right now. Claude can do new things each week that were once considered core products of companies, not just simple feature additions. Each week, founders watch their whole business become a footnote, and the post-mortems begin.

I recently spoke to Eyal Fisher, co-founder and CPO of Sweet Security, and former head of the cyber operations center in IDF Unit 8200, about this. Even though the concerns are real, the lesson is being misread.

When a major AI platform ships a capability that overlaps with an existing startup’s product, the instinct is to panic. Fisher pushes back on the reaction. “I think that in most cases, it’s a little bit too early,” he says. “If that capability will miss important things, really bad things can happen. So I’m not sure that everybody’s running to replace all the security tools with AI — yet this is a trend. This is where it’s going.”

After more than two decades in Israeli military cyber operations, he co-founded Sweet Security in 2022 alongside former IDF CISO Dror Kashti and Unit 81 veteran Orel Ben Ishay. The company has since raised $120 million, including a $75 million Series B led by Evolution Equity Partners, and grown its enterprise customer base tenfold. So when Fisher talks about what it takes to survive, he’s speaking from experience.

The Core Capability Trap

According to Fisher, founders who treat these announcements as an obituary are making a strategic error.

The deeper problem, he argues, is that founders are building companies around capabilities, rather than ecosystems. “Let’s say that you’re trying to invent some kind of system that can summarize calls,” he tells me. “That capability is a waste of time to develop today because AI is doing it like that.”

Companies that once developed transcription and call summarization as their core product a decade ago do face a reckoning: not because they ‘failed’, but because the ground shifted underneath them.

For example, I use a media platform to record my podcasts, and an instant transcription is available as an extra feature. I no longer need an entirely new service because it’s part of the suite I operate in. It’s great as a user, but Fisher said that founders need to consider this everywhere and build the moat around the capability, not inside it. “You need to make sure that it’s going to be easy to use, interact with everything else that you have in your company, have a full ecosystem.”

This pattern is already playing out across software: from media tools to sales platforms to developer products. In other words, the feature will be commoditized. But the platform and its integrations are harder to replicate.

What Every New Founder Should Know

Fisher is a founder with 25 years of experience behind him, as opposed to many founders who are only 25 years in age. His advice to young entrepreneurs starting today urges them to pursue things that AI cannot disrupt today.

“Go after things that cannot be disrupted today by AI,” he said. “You don’t want to build something that someone else can do exactly the same in like half a year… If you think that you can do something in half a year, someone else can do it in half a year as well.” But then came the truth underneath that advice: “At the end, AI will replace everything.”

For many users, including myself, features like transcription are now embedded into existing tools I use for video recording and editing - I’m not looking for a solo tool anymore. So, his advice is particularly relevant for founders thinking about what to build next.

If replacement is as inevitable as he says, then the question becomes how much time you have before it happens - and what you build around your core in the meantime. That way, you can avoid the dreaded update from a large AI giant that risks putting you out of business.

Sweet Security’s Own Answer

Fisher applies this logic to his own company. Sweet Security’s runtime sensor — the technical foundation of its cloud security platform — is written in Rust, a low-level programming language that makes it unusually difficult to replicate. “There is almost no other company out there that wrote such a sensor in that programming language,” Fisher says. “It’s very hard. It’s very complicated.”

But even he doesn’t treat that as a permanent shield. “Eventually, maybe it’s going to happen. Until that happens, what we are doing is building the ecosystem around it.”

The Bottom Line

For founders worried every time a major AI company posts on X, Fisher’s parting advice cuts through the noise: “Patience. One day you are here, one day you are here. You need patience and resilience. It’s a hard journey.”

The founders who survive the AI update cycle will be the ones who built the deepest and had the discipline to keep building when everyone else was busy panicking.

[5-minute preview: AI's Impact on Startups: Avoiding "The Core Capability Trap"]

When fans walk into Wembley Stadium or Wimbledon, they see the show - but what they don’t see is everything underneath it: An ‘invisible’ workforce working hard in unison, powering the global experience economy to make sure the event is running seamlessly.

“In order to make an experience… it can be thousands of workers,” Omri Dekalo explained.

The hidden infrastructure behind modern events is a fragmented labor force made up of temporary workers, contractors, and staffing agencies. It spans industries (from sports and concerts to catering, security, and hospitality) and often operates in clear view but with near-total invisibility.

“No one feels it, no one sees it,” Dekalo said. “It just works and it creates amazing moments.” But beneath that seamless experience is a system that, until recently, was anything but that.

Dekalo is the co-founder and CEO of Ubeya, an Israeli B2B SaaS platform positioning itself as an “operating system” for this invisible workforce. With more than 250,000 workers on the platform and clients including Wembley, Wimbledon, and the UEFA Champions League Final, Ubeya sits at the intersection of the gig economy, HR tech, and the multibillion-dollar live events industry.

It’s a space that, until recently, many will recognize as still being managed largely through WhatsApp groups or spreadsheets. Workers would check in via pen and paper, or be reassigned mid-shift with a handwritten note.

The scale of what happens behind the scenes at a major event is something most attendees never consider. A Taylor Swift concert is not a Champions League final - even if they sometimes use the same venue. Each event requires a completely different configuration of workers like caterers, cleaners, security personnel, stagehands, or bar staff.

Many of these workers don’t even work directly for the venue itself.

At Wembley, as at most major stadiums globally, a significant portion of the workforce is sourced through third-party agencies. Before platforms like Ubeya, coordinating all of them would take up space, time, and energy for all involved.

“It’s moments that people like remember for their whole life,” he said, discussing the excitement of attending a live event. “And in order to make it happen, there are a lot of stakeholders… that are doing a lot of work there. It can be thousands of workers that are coming early in the morning.”

Ubeya's platform streamlines that complexity into a single system. Managers can check worker availability, book and approve staff, track time and attendance, and run payroll all from one place.

The platform also tracks which individual is deployed in which area, how much revenue they generated, how well they performed, and where they should be redeployed mid-event. "Suddenly this whole connection between the tech and the real life — that's the magic," Dekalo explained.

An Event Operating System for Post-Pandemic Performances

We are six years since the start of Covid-19, and while there was a dip in live performances for most of that time, the industry is experiencing a surge.

There are currently 500 stadiums under construction in the United States alone, part of a broader shift toward multipurpose venues that can host a football game one weekend and a global concert tour the next. Wembley, for example, now sits at the center of an entire neighborhood: hotels, malls, and restaurants are all built around the stadium as the anchor experience. The workforce required to run that ecosystem is only growing.

Ubeya has scaled roughly ten times in revenue over the past two and a half years, employs more than 50 people, and is operationally breakeven on $13.5 million raised to date, with enough cash for a run rate of 40 years.

“That’s a lot of Taylor Swift,” I said. “That’s a lot of heartbreak.”

[5-minute preview: The “invisible workers” behind your Taylor Swift concerts]

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When Gal Elbaz decided to hack Instagram, he didn’t need much convincing.

“We wanted to hack Instagram because they’re Instagram, right? We don’t need a lot of motivation,” the co-founder and CTO of Oligo Security told me in a recent interview. What followed was a lesson in how modern cybersecurity actually works - not through confrontations with shadowy figures, but through the quiet exploitation of a single overlooked library buried deep inside one of the world’s most downloaded applications.

I’ve spoken to many cybersecurity companies over the years, each of which addresses safety and protection in different ways. Usually, I hear about how they try to prevent attacks. This was the first time I had heard from a white-hat hacker.

For those unfamiliar, a white hat hacker (or ethical hacker) is a cybersecurity professional authorized to identify security vulnerabilities in systems, software, or networks. By using ethical methods like penetration testing and scanning, they strengthen security before malicious hackers can exploit weaknesses.

Today, the company’s mission is to redefine how application security works in modern software environments. This is achieved by focusing on what’s actually happening at runtime, rather than just scanning code or assessing theoretical risks. Its Application Detection and Response platform now protects Fortune 500 companies and recently secured a partnership with AWS. The company was founded in 2023 and has raised approximately $80 million to date, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ballistic Ventures, and TLV Partners, as well as security veterans like Shlomo Kramer, Adi Sharabani, and Eyal Manor.

Elbaz and his team didn’t brute-force their way into Instagram. They found a vulnerability in an open-source image compression library built by Mozilla Firefox — the kind of invisible, unglamorous code that powers millions of apps without anyone realizing. The result was total access.

“The moment that we can literally execute code, you can take over the flow of the application, we control the application,” he said. “We are Instagram - and we have everything that we want over your phone. We have every permission that exists. We have access to the camera, to the gallery, to the memory, to your contacts, to everything.”

One thing that adds intrigue to my conversation with Elbaz is the way he thinks about what hacking actually is. For him, breaking into a machine and reading a person operate on the same fundamental logic. “Hacking is the art of controlling someone else’s mind, so to speak,” he explains. “Hacking is the manipulation of human beings who are behind the software. Phishing is the thing that brings them together because you trick people with technology.”

He carries that philosophy into how he runs his company. “As a founder, you sell to employees, to customers, to investors, to everything around you — you sell, sell, sell, sell. And people don’t get it, that it’s very similar to talking to a machine. A very random machine. But it is a machine.”

That mindset was forged early. Elbaz grew up in elite IDF intelligence units alongside his co-founders, CEO Nadav Czerninski and CPO Avshalom Hilu — childhood friends whose parents were themselves childhood friends — before going on to Check Point Software, where he spent years hacking the world’s biggest applications and presenting findings at black hat conferences and DEF CON.

The Instagram hack wasn’t just a headline. It was the founding insight behind Oligo. What struck Elbaz was that the entire security industry was oriented around catching attackers after they’d already won. He wanted to catch them at the moment of entry. “We thought, what about detecting the act of the breach? What if you can detect the root cause? What if you can catch the hacker when they’re trying to get in? Because after they got in, you lost.”

The urgency behind that mission has only intensified. The same open-source vulnerability problem that Elbaz exploited manually against Instagram can now be discovered and weaponized by AI agents in a fraction of the time. “It used to take 30 days to weaponize a zero-day by the most sophisticated attackers. Today it’s minus one. Agents can actually find zero days and exploit them so they can do the zero to one by themselves.” The defender’s margin for error, already razor-thin, is disappearing entirely.

When I asked Elbaz which side of that equation feels more natural to him, the hacker or defender, he doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely the hacking one, a lot more fun. When it’s hacking, it’s pretty easy, right? It’s about yes or no, could I hack you or not? The proof is in the pudding.”

The man who spent his career finding holes in systems — digital and human alike — is now in the business of closing them.

[5-minute preview: Hacking Instagram, a white hat perspective]

When Bria AI CEO Yair Adato talks about AI, he sounds more like an economist watching a familiar crisis unfold in slow motion, as opposed to the typical startup founder I have spoken to over the years.

“People think about this revolution as a technology revolution,” he said. “It has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about the economy and society. The technology is just an enabler.”

Bria AI is an Israeli company building licensed generative image infrastructure for enterprise clients. It ensures that AI-generated images and videos are controlled, accountable, and compliant by working with stock image providers like Getty and others. These, in turn, train its foundation models while also ensuring royalties and fair compensation for creators.

It has raised more than $66 million from VCs such as Red Dot Capital, Entrée Capital, IN Venture, and others.

When speaking with Adato, it was clear that he believes the product exists because a major obstacle to AI adoption isn’t just about model quality. It is about ownership, provenance, and legal usability.

One consideration in all of this is the concentration of some of the leading players in the AI space. As a handful of American hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI race to control the AI stack, Adato sees the distribution of benefits becoming dangerously narrow. “It’s a question of how the resources will split between current players, future players, and society,” he said. “There is a voice that wants to have all of the resources, all of the benefits of AI, for a few big companies. I think there will be a second voice that tries to split it more equally — because you don’t want to have three companies that basically control the world.”

The idea of companies having a central control in the direction of AI-generated content can be considered a geopolitical problem, not just a market one. We reference similar ideological fault lines that produced competing visions of the internet: Silicon Valley’s open innovation, Europe’s regulatory model, and China’s state control are now reasserting themselves around AI infrastructure.

The outcome of that contest, he argues, will matter more than any individual model breakthrough.

AI’s Spotify Moment

The closest parallel may be the music industry's own reckoning a decade ago. The internet created a data distribution crisis that the music industry fought legally before Spotify resolved it economically — through per-use licensing, attribution architecture, and revenue sharing.

Generative AI is producing a data generation crisis that demands the same kind of structural solution. “Spotify said something really smart,” he explained. “Instead of buying the album, we will let you use it per use, per listening. And every time you hear a song, there is a mechanism behind the scenes to pay the artist.”

Bria AI is building that mechanism for visual artificial intelligence: an attribution engine that tracks which training data influenced a generated image and routes revenue back to the original creators. But Adato is candid about the gap between the vision and the current reality. He acknowledged Spotify’s failure in that the studios got rich, but the artists mostly didn’t. “We try to do it differently… but in many cases, the artist is simply not there.”

The stakes go beyond fairness to individual creators. If synthetic media can replicate everything for free, the incentive to create erodes entirely. “The fact that we can monetize intellectual property is mandatory to continue to develop the economy and society,” he says. “If you cancel the concept of copyright, there’s no reason to create games and movies. There’s no reason to create a brand because it has no value anymore.”

Regulation, he believes, is coming to answer the question the market has so far avoided: Who gets to benefit, and on what terms? “Something will happen,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how. But something will happen.”

The revolution, it turns out, will not be televised - it will be generated. But whether the economy forming around it is a fair one remains entirely unresolved.

Watch a 5-min preview:

“AI regulation: A geopolitical game between USA, EU, and China”

Everyone is talking about AI. And Generative AI adoption, especially, has practically become a corporate mandate - everywhere you look, it is being deployed.

Across industries, executives are urging teams to integrate AI into their workflows. Engineers want access to AI coding assistants, and consumers are constantly being introduced to new AI products whether they want them or not.

But amid the rush to deploy new tools, many organizations are overlooking a simple question. Is it doing its job and making anything any better?

“We are helping engineering leadership to govern AI and adopt it,” said Liad Elidan, co-founder and CEO of Milestone. The platform provides engineering leadership with something deceptively simple: an honest account of what AI is actually doing inside their organization. Not what the AI vendors tell them it’s doing — what’s really happening, measured against business outcomes that matter.

Elidan described it as a situation where the whole system is pushing forward at once: “The world’s adopting AI. Every person is using AI, either in their personal life or in their professional life.” But the result is that many organizations deploy AI tools before they fully understand what those tools are actually doing. And the metrics provided by those tools do not necessarily answer the questions executives actually care about.

This is giving rise to an emerging category of technology: systems designed specifically to measure the interaction between humans and AI tools inside enterprise environments. Milestone sits at the center of that category — sitting above the vendors, correlating usage data with actual engineering outcomes like code quality, review times, and delivery speed.

Elidan described this challenge as a shift in management thinking. “Now you add another animal into the play, which is AI itself.” Looking further ahead, he is optimistic about where this leads — for engineers willing to adapt. The profession isn’t contracting, he argues. It’s mutating into something far more powerful.

“It’s very controversial,” he said, “but you can be much more independent now. And that is amazing.” The engineer who learns to work with AI tools effectively, who treats adaptability as a core professional skill rather than an occasional inconvenience, is not being replaced. They are being amplified.

Five years from now, Elidan predicts the best engineers won’t be defined by what they can write, but by what they can direct. “I expect that engineer to be almost a Superman engineer compared to the engineer of today,” he said. “He’ll have a hundred or more agents under his belt — agents that he can run, configure, and push forward.”

The future of software development, in other words, may be defined by the ability to manage how humans and AI work together and the wisdom to actually measure whether it’s going well.

There’s a new security risk out there, and it’s come to be known as The Shadow AI Problem.

It suggests that the next major corporate data breach may not come from a sophisticated nation-state actor or a phishing campaign, but rather from an employee asking an AI chatbot to read or summarize sensitive company data.

That’s the reality Itamar Golan has spent the last two years building a company around. As co-founder and CEO of Prompt Security (acquired by SentinelOne earlier this year for $250 million), he has become one of the voices warning of the gap between how fast enterprises are adopting AI and how little they understand about where their data is going. According to him, most CISOs focus on traditional attack vectors, but the real risk is employees pasting IP addresses into unauthorized tools.

Prompt Security’s platform now detects nearly 20,000 distinct AI applications operating across enterprise environments. Golan clarified that the figure isn’t plugins or product variants, but 20,000 separate entities. “Today, essentially almost any SaaS application, website, native application running on your endpoint… we are converging towards a landscape where any one of those will be an AI application by itself,” he told me.

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The visibility problem is one thing, but the training problem is another. Prompt Security’s research found that roughly 40% of AI applications, when surveyed at the configuration level, are set by default to train on the data they receive. “Not only has confidential data leaked out of your organization,” Golan explained, “it’s now potentially becoming part of the model’s brain.” Details like corporate strategy, personnel data, or legal documents will be available for everyone to see - and there is no obvious retrieval mechanism once embedded in a model’s training run.

The sectors most exposed are also the typically traditional ones that are now moving fastest to catch up: Financial services, insurance, and legal firms are adopting AI precisely because it performs exceptionally well on their core workflows. “They find themselves in this very tricky situation,” he told me. “On the one hand, they are adopting AI the fastest, and the potential gain is immense, but the risk of making a mistake is so big as well.”

It is a distinctly Israeli problem to be working on. Golan mentioned that when he surveyed the security stacks of Fortune 500 CISOs while building Prompt, he found that around 60% of the tools on their lists were built by Israeli companies. Startup Nation has given the world Check Point, CyberArk (acquired by Palo Alto Networks), and Wiz (acquired by Google). Now, Prompt Security, as part of SentinelOne, is trying to secure the AI layer that sits above all of them.

“We cannot stay blind,” Golan concluded. “We must admit that our employees are using hundreds or thousands of AI applications. A big portion of those are able to train on the data we are sharing with them.” Acknowledging that reality, he argues, is the first step to acting on it.

As tensions rise between Iran and Israel, one narrow stretch of water is once again holding the global economy hostage: the Strait of Hormuz.

Nearly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the corridor each day. This week alone, Iran deployed sea mines in the channel - and GPS spoofing, which is the manipulation of satellite navigation signals, continues to disrupt ships moving through the region.

For Yarden Gross, co-founder and CEO of maritime technology company Orca AI, this is exactly the kind of moment his industry has feared. “90% of the goods today in the world, $5 trillion a year, is moving through the seas,” he said. “When you see the disruptions happening, it’s usually when you see major events.”

Those events are now arriving in quick succession. The corridor is narrow, congested, and the world is watching it get weaponised. These tensions are creating a distinct kind of disruption, sending oil prices climbing and forcing shipping companies to navigate increasingly dangerous waters.

This is where a company like Orca AI can help. It has built a platform that collects data from onboard cameras and sensors, analyzes it in real time, and shares it across a network of ships. The company now has over 100 million nautical miles of data, compounding as more vessels come online.

In a GPS-denied environment, the system operates independently of all standard navigation instruments, using thermal cameras and computer vision to detect objects — including small boats, and now, sea mines — that would otherwise be invisible at night.

When spoofing is detected on one ship, alerts are shared with others approaching the same area. “They can actually take preventive actions,” says Gross. “They can be aware that reaching an area or a specific location, they’re going to have GPS spoofing there.”

For decades, maritime technology lagged far behind other industries. The reason, he argued, was structural: without reliable internet connectivity at sea, updating software across a fleet required physically boarding each vessel with a hard drive. The arrival of low-orbit satellite internet in 2023 changed everything. “I saw like a massive change,” says Gross. “It’s so massive changing the perspective of the shipping companies, how they look at technology.”

The longer-term vision goes further than smarter ships with human crews. Gross anticipates a shift in how the industry thinks about high-risk corridors — from large, expensive vessels requiring protection, to smaller autonomous craft designed for agility and expendability. “Imagine if you had a small swarm of smaller vessels that can actually take fuel and gas out of there,” he said. “If one is going to get hit, fine. It’s going to be a very small quantity and it’s not going to be like a hit on a major tanker.”

The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, but its implications are vast. What is playing out there right now is not just a regional conflict story, or an energy markets story. It is a story about whether the technology underpinning global trade can keep pace with the forces trying to disrupt it.

Those who follow my show know that I speak to many cybersecurity founders.

While the explosion of AI has certainly made the sector a fascinating place for technical discussions, there are also many areas where we can explore the human side of cybersecurity.

Take security operations centers (SOCs), for example. These SOCs operate within large organizations that rely on dozens of monitoring tools to detect suspicious activity across networks, devices, and identity systems. Each system generates alerts when something unusual occurs.

In theory, those alerts help security teams identify attacks early. But in practice, they can overwhelm the people responsible for responding.

“Over time, this became overwhelming,” said Guy Teverovsky, co-founder and CTO of Semperis. “We have been hearing from multiple customers that they are drowning under the amount of different alerts from different solutions.”

Organizations are now collecting so much security data that analysts often struggle to determine which alerts represent genuine threats and which are harmless anomalies. The change in new age cybersecurity means that challenges are not only technical, but they can have a lasting impact on the stress levels of industry workers.

Teverovsky said that when security teams face thousands of alerts every day, their most valuable resource becomes the ability to prioritize. Missing the one critical signal buried in a sea of warnings can allow attackers to escalate privileges, move through networks, or disrupt key infrastructure.

“Prioritization becomes critical,” he explained. “You have to surface the most critical findings… otherwise you’re in a big problem.”

That pressure has pushed many cybersecurity companies to rethink how alerts are generated and delivered. Instead of flooding analysts with raw signals, modern systems increasingly attempt to contextualize threats, highlight the most dangerous activity, and recommend specific remediation steps.

Semperis provides threat prevention, detection, response, and recovery for Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources. Customers who use its services get layered defense across the entire lifecycle of an AD-based attack, both on-prem and in the cloud.

The company serves over 1,000 organizations, including government agencies and a significant portion of the largest U.S. companies. It has raised a total of $369.5 million.

AI plays a role in helping teams process all this new information by helping security platforms analyze patterns across massive volumes of data. But even as automation improves, the human factor remains central to cyber defense.

Decision-making during a live security incident still depends on experienced engineers, analysts, and responders who must interpret signals, assess risk, and act quickly under pressure.

So in that sense, cybersecurity today is about enabling people to make the right decisions in an environment defined by constant digital noise.

The airports may be closed, but that isn’t stopping the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) from soaring.

As Israel navigates renewed conflict with Iran, the country’s stock exchange did something surprising. Instead of tanking, it did the opposite. The TA-125 Index climbed to record highs of around 4,200 points, which represents a 66% increase compared to this time last year. At the same time, the Israeli shekel strengthened against the U.S. dollar.

That isn’t to say the conflict hasn’t caused disruption and anxiety across the country, but it does demonstrate that there is confidence in Israel’s ability to bounce back from adversity.

"The stock market is a predictor of what the belief or expectation is about what's going to happen in the future, not what's happened in the past," said Ezra Gardner, Partner at Varana Capital. “The stock market in Israel is actually doing the right thing, because the signaling is that Israel is going to boom when this is over. Israel is going to be the winner, and Israel is going to deliver even more on the things that they’ve delivered on in the past, in innovation and helping the world.”

Gardner was supposed to arrive in Israel alongside South Valley CEO Travis Vap, and this episode was supposed to take place in a studio. But when their flight was cancelled hours before take off, we decided to continue our conversation as planned, this time virtually.

It was already in the calendar, so it made sense to everyone. According to both men, not a single meeting with Israeli companies or officials was cancelled.

“To me, these people are in a geopolitical conflict that I can’t imagine because I’m not there and I’m not dealing with it,” said Vap. “But the fact that we’re on calls, on Zoom, on Teams, and it is...4pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm Israeli time. It’s just a little overwhelming… it just reinforces what good people there are, people that are focusing on much bigger things than what's happening right now on the ground.”

The case for the TASE’s trajectory may lie in this response to adversity that has become all too familiar since the early days of the pandemic. Gardner and Vap had been to Israel before (Vap only once) and were struck by the entrepreneurial culture embodied among its people. Despite the country’s challenges and an army mobilization rate that at one time reached 15% of the tech workforce, business rarely slowed.

In fact, for Gardner’s deeptech and hardware portfolio companies — the kind involved in drones, semiconductors, and defense-adjacent infrastructure — closer to 50% of staff were called up. “The productivity actually went up. People worked 10 times harder when half of the staff was gone.”

Gardner spent the first half of his career in the public markets. His experience spans from J.P. Morgan to Michael Dell’s family office, MSD Capital, and running the US equities desk at UBS at an unusually young age. So, when he says the TASE is doing “the right thing,” it carries weight. He argues that the market isn’t ignoring the war - it’s pricing in what comes after it.

You can catch our entire conversation about the market’s response to the war in the video above.

“Imagine you were a family in Eastern Europe during World War Two or during the Holocaust, and you had tremendous wealth, and you had houses, or you had gold in the bank, or money in the bank,” said Josh Varon. “All of a sudden, all you could leave with was a backpack, a coat, and a hat on your head.”

This week, I spoke to Varon, who started BHforBitcoin, an online course where users can learn to understand Bitcoin, money, and global change. He does so through a specific lens: through the context of Jewish historical vulnerability to confiscation and monetary debasement, and the significance of Jewish self-determination in a shaky world.

“We don't know which country's money will get inflated,” he added. ”We don't know which country we might be kicked out of again. And we can say it's not going to happen, but we also know that it has happened.”

It’s only been a few generations since Jews had their homes, finances, and assets taken from them by the Nazis. Today, we can see how civilians caught in conflicts around the world can suffer the same fate. Even in stable democracies, access to financial systems can become politicized through practices like “debanking”, often conducted by the Biden Administration before legal protections were put in place.

He recently launched an online course titled Bitcoin and the Future: Why Jewish History Makes This Technology Impossible to Ignore. For him, Bitcoin is not primarily a speculative asset or a get-rich scheme - and he isn’t out to try to get people to stock up on the asset. Instead, he frames it as a conversation rooted in Jewish memory.

“Wherever the Jewish people have gone in their history, they’ve been entrepreneurs, they’ve created their own businesses, they’ve done well economically,” he said. “They’ve created wealth for themselves and their families. But we also see that there’s been, obviously, antisemitism that we’ve been dispersed from countries that we’ve lived in.”

Here’s the primary value for Varon, who has been following and investing in Bitcoin for eight years. “Imagine you were able to take that wealth with you and have a seed phrase or a code in your brain, in your mind, where you can show up in this new country. You don't have to start over.”

His course is concise, aimed at beginners, and is explained through the context of the Jewish experience. It is an introduction to fundamentals: supply caps, decentralization, and monetary policy - and explores why those ideas might resonate with a people shaped by exile.

He describes Bitcoin as freedom from dependence on institutions that history shows are fragile, operating in empires that eventually fall. “No empire in the world has not fallen. It's a fact,” Varon said. “We have seen that empires fall.”

Critics, of course, would point to volatility. Bitcoin has experienced dramatic booms and crashes - at the time of writing, it sits at around $67,000, half of what it was worth at its October 2025 peak. Varon does not deny that. Instead, he describes it as an early-stage technology in price discovery and believes that its omnipresence alone signals its long-term health.

When pressed to define Bitcoin in one sentence, he offers a single word: “Freedom.”

His course is available via the link: https://bhforbitcoin.thinkific.com/products/courses/bitcoin-and-jewish-history?ref=a82aff

When Argon Security was acquired by Aqua Security in 2021, Eylam Milner experienced a different kind of startup shock. Not the chaos of building a company, but the sudden absence of it.

For years, he had operated on his own time. As the co-founder, decisions were immediate, and progress was measured in days, not quarters. But once moving into part of a larger company, movement required consensus.

“We had to do some mind-shifting,” he told me. “For example, large companies don’t move like startup companies, and employees cannot move things like founders can. So I had to find a new path for me to move the product in the direction that I thought was right, and the business in the direction that we thought was right.”

Milner spent three years at Aqua with co-founder and CEO Eilon Elhadad before they both left to start Echo Security. The company examines critical components of original open-source code and then rebuilds it from scratch while continuously updating it as new vulnerabilities are discovered.

It has raised $50 million in its first 10 months from Notable Capital, N47, SVCI, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. The experience did not slow him down, but it changed what he pays attention to when building again.

Kill Your Darlings

Milner brings new insight and experience to a startup as a second-time founder - something he says offers perspective as he begins to build a new product. This includes knowing when to dive deeper into a product, or accepting when it might be time to change course and remain tuned to the market.

“We product engineers are all builders, right? They create stuff out of nothing, which is magical on its own, but you fall in love with it,” he said. “The more time you invest in a project, in a feature, in a milestone, the more you are in love with it and the harder it is to shift or pivot.”

For young startups or first-time founders in particular, emotional attachment could become a liability as a company grows and it becomes harder to question whether it should exist at all.

“You have to stay on your toes and be able to not fall in love with the thing you built and be willing to throw it away or to shift left and right to get the correct result of value proposition for your customer.”

At Echo, iteration is treated as part of the process rather than a correction. “It’s about repetitive change… in order to make sure you are on the right path,” he concluded.

And for that love? “I would recommend keeping it platonic.”

AI is forcing companies into environments where they are no longer competing against rivals, but with adversaries. In cybersecurity, where attackers adapt in real time, the competitive advantage for defenders is no longer just about efficiency, but in how companies learning and revise their assumptions.

Instead of optimizing for speed alone, some of the biggest AI security companies are being built around principles closer to IDF intelligence operations that include constant simulation, adversarial thinking, after-action reviews, and learning under uncertainty.

To better understand this, I spoke to Ido Geffen, Co-Founder and CEO at Novee Security. Novee is an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on transforming how companies find and fix security vulnerabilities.

Rather than traditional penetration testing, which is manual, periodic, and slow, the company uses continuous, autonomous AI that simulates real-world attackers to proactively uncover hidden vulnerabilities and validate them in real time.

Geffen described modern cyber defense as fundamentally imbalanced. Defenders must be perfect all of the time, whereas attackers only need to succeed once to penetrate a company. Its platform blends offensive cyber tradecraft with AI to close the gap between evolving threats and slower defensive testing processes.

“You can be perfect in 99.9% of the time, but then you have this one hole, and you lose the game,” he explained. “And the bad guy doesn't have these constraints… they just need one shot that will work.”

The new reality facing companies and cyber defense technologies means there is a shift in how to tackle these threats. Traditional enterprise software ships features, but companies like Novee continuously discover failure. This is where the mindset shifts from an engineering discipline to an intelligence discipline.

Geffen, who has experience in the IDF, including time spent in Gaza’s dangerous tunnel system, explained how the differences between preparedness and adaptability were a military skill he adopted and brought to the cybersecurity sector.

“One of the main things that I learned during those years is the ability of every soldier or a man in this type of unit to come up with ideas on how we can improve, what we can do differently,” he explained. “So I think this is one of the strengths of this type of unit. It’s hierarchy and all of that, but in the end, if someone comes up with a very good initiative, you can really change the way things are being done. And I think that, at least for me, it was very inspiring.”

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The AI era is creating companies that operate in new environments where the problem space evolves daily - and cybersecurity companies are forced to keep up with the hackers. In those conditions, efficiency is key, and adaptability must operate alongside preparedness.

The company emerged from stealth last month with a $51.5 million funding raise across Seed and Series A in just four months since its founding in May 2025 - a huge testament to its tech, talent, and market position. Backers include YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev via Zeev Ventures.

As AI agents interact with complex real-world systems across finance, infrastructure, or healthcare industries, the companies building them will need to adopt strategies that resemble military intelligence: constantly testing reality, updating beliefs, and assuming uncertainty is permanent.

I spend a lot of my time talking to investors and entrepreneurs about AI. But the adoption of this tech goes way beyond Silicon Valley or Startup Nation.

A few weeks ago, I spoke with Victor Varnado, an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, producer, and tech creator. He has worked with local improv troupes and has also appeared in Hollywood movies such as "The Adventures of Pluto Nash with Eddie Murphy.

So Victor is a creative - there’s no doubt about that - but he also stretches his entrepreneurial muscles: He’s the CEO of Supreme Robot Pictures, a creative production and technology company that helped produce a miniseries for Penguin Random House calledThe Great Fantasy Debate.

I wanted to speak to Victor about his approach to creativity and where technology like AI can fit into that. It feels like artists can be sensitive about the use of artificial intelligence (as a writer, I would know!), but I wanted to see how people in the comedy industry can use the technology as a tool, similar to a utility.

He describes a recent brainstorming session where he considered becoming “the world’s most benign supervillain”, which sparked the kind of conversation I’ve never had on this show. “AI helped me figure that out. So now I’m going to launch a public campaign where I become a supervillain,” he explained. By using AI, he crafted a campaign centered around his new persona, King Supernuts, complete with public events like “The Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship” and a unique twist on villainy.

This integration of AI into his creative workflow showed how technology can elevate artistic expression rather than replace or replicate it. He noted, “AI can help me make the images... logos... all along the way for the creative process.”

I could relate. I use AI every day for things like interview transcription, research, and light editing of my articles. I shouldn’t feel threatened by its presence, but rather liberated by how it can streamline and modify my process.

Victor’s career path shows how we can apply tech to a cohesive creative identity - and that AI isn’t reserved for spreadsheets or mundane tasks. By embracing technology and humor, he illustrates how the arts can evolve in the digital age.

We also spoke about my attempt at stand-up comedy and whether AI can “be funny”: What it means for a technology to make someone laugh, and whether intent is a qualifier for humour. You can learn about it all in our episode.

Obviously, it’s no surprise to people that I’m a huge fan of history. Working in news for years, I’ve always appreciated that the stories breaking each day (and the people reporting them) are contributing to what will eventually become history.

“News is just history in real time”, right?

I’ve long been fascinated by how social media, AI, and mass communication have reshaped the way we experience and understand those moments.

Last week, I spoke to Manny Marotta. He’s the creator and curator of the Live History Project, which takes a couple of accounts on X and posts in real time what’s happening in that moment in history.

There’s: 25 years ago - @25YearsAgoLive 50 years ago - @50YearsAgoLive 100 years ago - @100YearsAgoLive and 250 years ago - @250YearsAgoLive

Right now, that means we’re living through 2001, 1976, 1926, and 1776 simultaneously.

It’s an interesting insight into what was happening at that moment in history on those days, but also Manny does a great job at showing us how the news was covering those events. He doesn’t editorialize. He simply presents the news as it is.

Much of our conversation focused on the 2001 account. It’s no secret that there’s a century-defining event taking place later that year, and we get into it all in the episode.

But more than anything, the account taps into a powerful sense of nostalgia among his 205,000 followers (this number is significantly growing after some viral posts in the last few days).

No one really has nostalgia for 1776, and few people can personally remember 1926 — but 25 years ago? That many of us remember. I remember reading those headlines, following those stories as they happened, and it’s strange to realize some of what he posts now is a quarter century old.

So we talk about his project and his passion for it, and we also talk about our relationship to the news and to the mass media that reported the news to us.

Social media has transformed how we consume information, but by showing us exactly what audiences saw at the time, his project helps explain how we arrived at the present.

It was a really interesting conversation, and I really wish that we could have spoken for hours in more depth. I’m sure we’ll speak again at some point in the future, but for now, please enjoy our introductory conversation.

Preview: Companies use AI to exploit cultural nostalgia at 2026 Super Bowl

For the past decade, election debates in the United States and some European countries have revolved around access, accountability, and security.

The discussion has become deeply politicized, especially since the 2000 American election. One side pushes expanded mail-in and remote voting, whereas others push for voter-identification laws and stricter eligibility checks.

In the USA, moves are being made to introduce the SAVE America Act, which would ensure identification for voting. But the voter-ID debate is solving identity, not legitimacy — and a new industry is emerging to solve the second problem.

This week, I spoke to Shai Bargil, co-founder and CEO of Sequent, a company that uses cryptography and open-source software to provide secure, transparent, and end-to-end verifiable digital election results. According to Bargil, the future of election legitimacy is based on how organizations can independently verify the outcome afterward.

“People are kind of losing trust in the system today,” he told me. “It’s very hard to track how elections are being conducted. Whether it’s on paper or whether it’s digital.”

Founded in 2021 by Bargil alongside CTO Eduardo Robles and Head of Research David Ruescas, Sequent has raised $3.2 million. It works with election bodies for governments, municipalities, and public institutions such as unions and universities to ensure voter privacy, ballot secrecy, fully open-source election results, and system-wide transparency for online votes.

Its ambition is to do for e-voting what online banking did for finance: make it accessible, secure, and auditable.

Remote Voting Turned Elections Into A Technology Platform

Tensions surrounding policy and implementation are intensifying as voting habits change. Remote participation expanded dramatically across the West through absentee ballots, mail-in voting, and overseas voting programs, especially in the United States in the 2020 election.

“Thirty percent of all Americans vote in federal elections by mail,” Bargil noted, with the trend only set to increase. Once voting happens outside a polling station, elections start to resemble other online systems, and so verification and trust become central issues.

“If you’re voting by mail, you basically don’t identify in any way,” he said, arguing that verification must be paired with proof of accurate counting.

“We need to prove above all doubts that the winner won and the loser lost,” he added. So here lies the joint-solution: that voter ID laws answer eligibility, but cryptographic verification solutions like Sequent answer legitimacy.

The Philippines Became A Real-World Test Case

Last year, it helped roughly 1.2 million cast digital ballots remotely for elections in the Philippines, with the deployment functioning as a live demonstration of a model where authentication and verification are built together.

Instead of trusting a vendor or election authority alone, observers can audit mathematical proof that votes were recorded and counted correctly.

“You don’t really have to trust either the system or the vendor,” Bargil says.

Elections Are Becoming Regulated Tech Infrastructure

Historically, election legitimacy came from process visibility: observers watching ballot boxes, physical counting, and human oversight. Digital systems can break that psychological assurance since citizens cannot “see” software and how it is gathering and counting votes, or if the vote was counted at all. The solution, Bargil argued, is about replacing visual trust with mathematical certainty. “Criticism comes because most of the systems today are pretty much black boxes.”

This shifts the questions surrounding election integrity into the faith in the technology itself. The goal isn’t to prevent fraud alone, but to reduce unverifiable outcomes - a concern often raised by critics of large-scale remote voting.

The Next Political Fight May Be Technical

These new American voter-ID laws may therefore represent only the first layer of a new civic technology stack. Identity verification will confirm who participates (like in most other countries), and Sequent’s cryptographic verification technology can confirm what actually happened.

“My biggest concern… people losing trust and losing interest in elections,” Bargil concluded.

In the coming decade, election disputes may shift away from courtroom arguments over ballots and toward technical arguments over proof standards — similar to cybersecurity breaches or financial audits. Much like any other area, it could cause deep civil mistrust in the institutions that are designed to protect democracy.

Whether this new technology can restore trust remains an open question, but the next-generation technical battleground is already forming.

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Much of the global conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, interfaces, and applications. But Amir Fishelov, managing partner at Square One Labs and, before that, co-founder of SolarEdge, believes that narrative is incomplete. What’s more, it is potentially misleading about the current state of high tech, especially in Israel.

“It doesn’t matter if Google will win the race or OpenAI,” Fishelov says. “They all need the same infrastructure.”

I spoke to Fishelov about Square One Labs, a venture creation and investment platform that helps founders build transformative tech companies from the earliest stages. Founded in early 2024, it blends early-stage funding with operational support, providing labs, facilities, mentoring, and strategic guidance to turn big ideas into real companies.

It is deliberately focused on what Fishelov calls “physical infrastructure for AI”: energy, semiconductors, robotics, and the hardware systems that make large-scale AI possible. While software continues to move quickly, he argues that the real bottlenecks sit much deeper in the stack.

“Looking into AI, we figured out there’s lots of opportunity in the software space,” he says. “But there’s a huge opportunity on the actual infrastructure for AI.”

The logic makes sense. Training and running advanced AI systems requires enormous amounts of energy, compute, and physical reliability. Regardless of which models dominate, the same foundational systems must exist underneath them. “All the basic software layers, all of these are critical infrastructure that any solution for AI needs,” Fishelov says.

This focus is informed by experience. At SolarEdge, Fishelov helped scale energy and semiconductor systems globally, selling more than 200 million units of proprietary semiconductors. That operational background shapes Square One Labs’ investment thesis today. “We just came from these worlds,” he said. “Energy is our bread and butter. We also saw what happens in manufacturing.”

Unlike consumer software, infrastructure businesses operate on long timelines and demand precision early. “Deeptech companies were hard 20 years ago,” Fishelov says. “They’re still hard today.” In these sectors, missing early accuracy can be fatal. “Not hitting a target fast can cost the company three to four years in terms of capital and runway.”

That difficulty, however, is exactly what creates defensible moats. “The moat is very high,” he says. “Once they penetrate into the market and you have a differentiated solution… you can be in the game for the long run.”

Fishelov points to energy as a clear example. New systems don’t just need to be cleaner—they must be cheaper and more reliable than technologies built over a century. “You’re competing with gas solutions, oil solutions, whatever, which were built here for the past 100 plus years,” he says. “Now you need to build a new solution which is more cost-competitive than that.”

One Square One Labs investment in geothermal energy reflects this approach. By developing more efficient drilling methods, the company aims to deliver “cheaper energy, green energy, and available 24-7 energy,” Fishelov says—an infrastructure-level improvement that benefits any AI system layered on top.

AI itself, he adds, is accelerating deep-tech development rather than replacing it. “AI can help you understand a much broader range of topics,” he says, speeding up research, simulation, and material discovery. But it doesn’t remove the need for physical systems that work reliably at scale.

I enjoyed speaking to Fishelov, who emphasized that the future of AI will depend less on who writes the best model, but who builds the systems that keep it running.

You can learn more in the video above.

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This isn’t the first time I’ve covered Israel’s foodtech sector. Back in 2022, reporting for CTech, I mapped the ecosystem at a moment of tension, when investment was holding up better than in any other tech vertical, but the skeptics remained.

I was, and still am, bullish on Foodtech - at least at the start. I tasted 3D-printed burgers in Tel Aviv and called them “technically perfect, albeit creatively void.” I interviewed investors who compared the industry to early mobile phones — primitive first iterations, but with everything still to come.

I wanted to delay a full embrace of alternative foods until the markets all caught up. Turns out many felt the same way. So years later, I wanted to revisit all of that with someone who’s lived it from the inside.

Ilanit Kabessa Cohen has spent 25 years asking one question: what does it actually take to bring innovation to market? As the first Head of Innovation at Osem-Nestlé, a corporate venturing lead at Dole in Singapore, and now co-founder of the advisory firm URIKA, she’s seen the food ecosystem from virtually every angle — and she joins me to share what she’s learned.

Our conversation opens with an assessment of Israel’s position in global foodtech. Despite being a relatively small player in terms of total funding (roughly $16 billion globally), Israel punches well above its weight: driven by its kosher culinary traditions, research institutions, a culture of cross-domain improvisation, and the Israel Innovation Authority’s risk-sharing model that few other governments have replicated.

But Ilanit is candid about where the industry fell short. The first generation of alternative proteins disappointed consumers, investors, and believers alike. Not because the vision was wrong, but because first-generation products rarely win. She argues we’re now entering a correction phase, with more mature companies, better-tasting products, and a smarter understanding that the real action right now is B2B ingredients, not consumer-facing brands.

The most forward-looking part of the episode covers what she calls “animal-free technologies” — a next-generation wave that goes far beyond food. Think collagen produced via precision fermentation for use in cosmetics, pharma, and nutrition. Or how biomaterials could replace shark liver extract or horseshoe crab blood in medical testing.

She said how the next decade of opportunity lies in the convergence of food, health, and biotech - and finally, she discussed two opportunities: the Coller Startup Competition (now open, with a $100K prize) and URIKA’s Generate partnership program with CSM Ingredients for startups in sugar reduction and proteins.

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For years, cloud computing quietly rewired how companies build products, scale infrastructure, and manage costs. And the widespread sudden adoption of AI has accelerated it. In doing so, it exposed a far more dangerous problem than rising bills: how little most enterprises actually understand about what they’re spending and why.

This week, I spoke to a company that understands how the financial stakes have changed. “We’re spending all that money on something that we’re not really sure what the ROI is,” Roi Ravhon, Co-founder and CEO of cloud cost management platform Finout, told me. What once lived in innovation budgets is now embedded directly in business fundamentals. “Now it’s part of our gross margin… It’s part of what we’re building as a service.”

Founded in 2021, Finout helps enterprises monitor, allocate, and forecast cloud spending across providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Snowflake. The company has raised $85 million to date and works with customers such as Lyft, The New York Times, SiriusXM, Wiz, and Tenable.

Not only is one problem that is AI inherently expensive, but businesses are also adopting it and transforming their practices without clarity. “AI is a lot more expensive than what we thought it would be,” Ravhon explained. “We’re not really sure how predictable it’s going to be. We’re not really sure if we’re using it effectively or not. Just buying and buying and buying more AI services.”

Cloud costs were already complex before AI arrived. But today, AI workloads are priced by tokens, usage, and models that can quickly change, making it even harder to ignore. The result is cost waste that hides in plain sight. “There are so many dumb ways, it’s amazing,” Ravhon says when asked how those may materialize.

The dynamic is familiar, even if the scale is not. Just as individuals may lose track of unused subscriptions, businesses can accumulate cloud services that persist simply because no one is sure what would happen if they disappeared.

In some cases, the scale is staggering. Ravhon recalls working with enterprises that had “tens of millions of dollars of ‘shadow IT’”, meaning services running in the cloud that no one fully understood and no one wanted to turn off. Teams hesitate to shut anything down because it might break something, or might do nothing at all.

I asked if there was a tension between the engineering teams, who are incentivized to move fast and build reliably, and the finance teams, who are accountable for budgets and forecasts. Turns out there is - and in practice, engineering usually wins. “I'm an engineer, we tend to be very defensive,” Ravhon says. “Finance sets a budget, engineering depletes it.” He adds, “It’s very easy to pick the most expensive model to sleep better at night.”

Ravhon, who first spotted these kinds of gaps when he was Director of Core Engineering at Logz.io, a cloud observability company, argues the conversation needs to shift away from simply cost-cutting and toward control. “Cloud is not spend, it’s an investment,” he says. “The best way to overcome this is with data.”

When asked during our quickfire round what leaders should remember from the AI cost reckoning now underway, Ravhon doesn’t hesitate. His answer is a single word: “Allocate.”

In the AI era, ignorance can be an existential issue if not managed from the start.

For much of the past decade, venture capital has been moving in one direction: specialization. Funds are starting to brand themselves as ‘cyber-only’, ‘fintech-only’, or ‘defensetech-only’, each promising deeper expertise and sharper focus.

But in Israel’s startup ecosystem, a counter-trend is growing that favors pattern recognition and intellectual flexibility over narrow vertical obsession. To understand this concept better, I spoke with Brian Sack, a partner at TLV Partners, an Israel-based early-stage venture capital firm.

TLV Partners was founded in 2015 and specializes in early-stage investments, particularly in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, developer tools, and cloud-native systems, as well as vertical AI across industries such as fintech, biotech, healthcare, and more. It has $1B assets under management, and has supported companies such as Next Insurance (acquired by Munich Re), Run:ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Granulate (acquired by Intel), Laminar (acquired by Rubrik), Aqua Security, Aidoc, Qodo, Port, and Quantum Machines, among others.

He describes his approach as being a “disciplined generalist,” which he explains as understanding how ideas migrate across sectors. “We want to look at every new technology trend, and we want to look at all verticals across the board,” he said. “We’re just extremely curious people. So we’re always tracking up-and-coming technology trends… Over time, we’ve realized that this has a huge impact as well on our strategy as a fund.”

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As a journalist myself, I could connect this idea to my own personal attitude of being “a jack of all trades, and master of none”. I often describe my work as needing to cast a wide and shallow net over a variety of industries. But for TLV Partners, they take it a step further - their net is both wide and deep.

That philosophy runs against conventional wisdom in today’s VC market, where specialization is often framed as a prerequisite for conviction. But Sack argues that early-stage investing, particularly at seed, demands the opposite: an ability to sit with ambiguity long enough to see connections others miss.

“You’re almost sort of like journeying through darkness a lot of the time,” he added. “You don’t have a lot of data, and often you have to make decisions based on intuition or gut feeling. And I think growth investors are great at doing what they do and being very analytical. I prefer, and as a fund, what we like, and what we know how to do best, is to work with founders during the abstract time.”

The concept of investing at this early stage was in contrast to a previous conversation I had with a growth investor, who relished in the data and proof of product-market fit. I was fascinated by the difference in approach and how that translated to working with entrepreneurs and navigating markets.

“We need our founders to be a little bit crazy,” he added. “They have to have those crazy dreams and visions. I think as a firm, it’s part of our investment strategy and part of our culture, which is why I think a lot of entrepreneurs come to us for investment - because it’s something that is known in the industry that we never think of ourselves as there on the board investing to manage or make decisions on behalf of the company.”

You can learn more about the fund in the conversation above.

BONUS: Catch the viewpoint of Shay Grinfeld, a growth investor from Greenfield Partners:

In my latest episode, I speak with Hunter Stuart, founder of Big Game PR.

Our discussion centered around Hunter’s journey from journalism to public relations, particularly in the context of cybersecurity. Headquartered in Chicago, Big Game PR “brings results-driven public relations and marketing services to B2B technology companies”, including those from Israel.

Hunter also shared his experiences as a journalist in Israel, highlighting how living here transformed his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

In 2017, he penned an article for JPost that outlined his journey and how his experience here changed his perception of the region and its people.

He emphasized the complexity of narratives surrounding this issue and the importance of seeing both sides to foster understanding. We then turned to the evolving landscape of PR and journalism more generally, particularly in the age of social media and AI.

Our world is increasingly being framed and controlled in echo chambers that set narratives into motion - and so we spoke about the impact on storytelling and public perception.

Some takeaways:

* The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the mother of all narratives.”

* It’s easier for people to craft a satisfying narrative in their heads about the Israeli-Arab conflict.

* People are entering an echo chamber and they like what confirms their beliefs.

* The rise of AI and automation has made relationships even more important.

* Companies need to start owning their own channels.

Preview > “Experiencing Israel”

There is a moment in every startup’s life when imagination eventually gives way to math.

I’ve heard this story hundreds of times before. Founders are rewarded for vision and lauded as dreamers. They pitch an idea, raise a Seed round, build their first product, and iterate.

As Shay Grinfeld, a General Partner at Greenfield Partners, said, companies repeat this loop “20 or 30 times” until they land on the one product when the penny drops. “‘They said ‘You know what, actually hits a nerve’,” he told me.

For this episode, I spoke to Grinfeld about being an early growth investor, and what happens when companies reach their initial targets in revenue: An achievement, of course, but also the beginning of a much harder phase.

Growing a Dream into Profit

“That’s when we meet them,” Grinfeld says. The point where early momentum must turn into durable growth, usually around Series B and C, optimism alone is no longer enough. Growth investors arrive with a different question: can this company scale its go-to-market strategy once identifying a successful product-market fit, and will it do this faster than the cost of capital?

“You have to grow at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” he told me. “Otherwise, you will not get the funding that will allow you to grow.” According to Grinfeld, what separates founders who push forward from those who sell early, he adds, is not recklessness but “bravery with confidence… and knowledge.”

Greenfield Partners was founded in 2016 and invests in early to growth stages in Infrastructure, Vertical Software, and Deep Tech. It has $1 billion in total assets under management after closing a $400 million third fund in 2025.

The “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”

One of its strongest areas is structured thinking around go-to-market and company building. Our conversation frequently referenced the “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”, when Grinfeld describes growth failure as a structural issue rather than one singular mistake. “Every time you fix something, something else breaks naturally,” he says. For example, hiring ahead of the pipeline creates idle sales teams, and scaling leads without customer success can erode retention.

The problem is rarely one pillar in isolation. To address this, Greenfield leans heavily into these pillars as concepts: strategy, sales operations, hiring and enablement, lead generation, partnerships, and customer success. The firm has even written playbooks available for founders to glean their insights.

The most underappreciated challenge in that phase, he argued, is the gap between product-market fit and what he calls product-market sales fit. “That’s the moment that you think you can actually sell your product at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” Grinfeld says. It shows up when non-founders can sell, when the pipeline becomes repeatable, and when revenue sees a predictable pattern.

“When it actually clicks,” he says, “it’s magic — because you can start compounding it.”

A Signal For Leadership

In the end, growth comes down to leadership. The founders who make it through the transition are not the ones with the loudest narratives, but the most adaptable mindsets. “Hungry, humble, smart — in that order,” Grinfeld says.

You can watch the entire exchange in the video above.

The cybersecurity world is grappling with proliferating AI-based attacks, expanding attack surfaces, and surging daily alerts riddled with false positives. With potentially thousands of warnings flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that something could be amiss, the sheer volume creates endless headaches for security teams.

It’s the newest cybersecurity nightmare in the AI era.

“In cyber, you have this interesting angle where AI doesn’t only disrupt the ‘normal’ industry that everybody is familiar with, but it also disrupts how cyber attackers operate,” said Intezer Co-founder and CEO Itai Tevet. “There’s an arms race of AI not only on the defense side, but also on the offense side. So I think it’s a very interesting dynamic.”

Intezer aims to tackle the “ staggering and unmanageable” problem of limited human capacity in cyberspace. As AI empowers bad actors to target enterprises at record scale, the problem isn’t a talent shortage per se, but that the sheer ability of technology will mean humans will never be physically able to catch up with the new threat landscape, including the 97% of false positive alerts that cause distraction and anxiety among overworked teams.

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The company is part of a growing category of cybersecurity tools that use AI as an extension of human analysts to manage high alert volumes. It develops an AI-powered SOC analyst to investigate security alerts from existing tools and triage them in minutes, automatically resolving false positives and escalating only critical threats.

Founded roughly a decade ago but experiencing a surge in activity in 2024/2025, it recently raised $33 million in Series C funding by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total to $60 million. Its clients include giants like NVIDIA, Salesforce, MGM Resorts, and others.

As technology increases across all industries, AI will become essential for the survival of SOC teams amid rising threats from bad actors, nation-states, and others. According to Tevet, non-adopters could soon become obsolete.

And those who embrace the technology won’t be replaced by it, but rather be elevated by it; human roles will no longer be distracted by small-scale attacks, and they will be able to graduate to more superior positions.

“From a global perspective, but in my niche, I have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen,” added Tevet. “It all has to do with the nature of the SOC team job, which is going to absolutely change dramatically. Humans will supervise the AI instead of chasing tickets all day long.”

You can watch the full exchange in the video above.

In the early years of tech innovation, software development was driven by a simple cultural assumption that was born in Silicon Valley: that speed equals progress.

Entrepreneurs, founders, and developers were encouraged to move fast, experiment freely, and ship continuously. Restraint, social consequences, or legality were often treated as obstacles to overcome or avoid; necessary evils at best, innovation killers at worst.

My latest conversation showed me how that era is coming to its end, and that a more conservative movement is growing from the ashes of the Wild Wild West of progress that saw growth encouraged to ignore guardrails or accountability.

According to Ben Bernstein, co-founder and CEO of Minimus, the software world is now entering a period of ideological correction, one that closely mirrors what happened with social media and what the LLM era is susceptible to falling into as well.

“We identified the problem the first time,” Bernstein says of his first company, Twistlock. “But what was interesting is that we didn’t solve it the first time… Apparently, just identifying the problem is not good enough anymore.”

His previous company, Twistlock, is a cloud-native security platform with security and compliance coverage for users, applications, data, and the cloud technology stack. It helps security teams see vulnerabilities created by cloud-native development and containers, but the team realized that visibility alone didn’t stop the explosion of risk. “There are thousands and thousands of issues in every little application,” he said.

Bernstein argued that the issue isn’t malicious developers or bad code, but the excess of code that can cause security issues. “The problem isn’t malicious code,” Bernstein says. “It’s unnecessary code.”

This realization has driven the philosophy behind Minimus, which builds secure, minimal container images designed to reduce attack surface by design. After Twistlock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for approximately $410 million, Bernstein got to work on his next company: one that would set out to solve the problem identified by his first.

Minimus recently announced a whopping $51 million Seed round to “kill” upto 95% of software vulnerabilities by replacing bloated containers with secure, minimal images, slashing risk and development time across the software supply chain. The round was co-led by YL Ventures and Mayfield, with participation from Bernstein, Dima Stopel, and John Morello.

But Minimus is less interesting as a product than as a sign of the times: a broader shift in how the industry thinks about freedom and responsibility. In our conversation, we discussed how the past decade has become somewhat of a pendulum swing: In the early 2000s, security and IT teams held tight control, slowing development. Then came cloud, containers, and open source, and the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction.

“Developers got maybe too much freedom,” he says. “And now they see, ‘my God, these are the consequences of what I just did.’”

The result is familiar to anyone who followed the arc of social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and recently X were optimized for engagement first, governance later. Only later did we realize that their push for scale without guardrails produced systemic harm to young people.

Bernstein draws the parallel explicitly: “When you get too much freedom, it’s just too much.”

What’s changed is who is asking for constraints. “It’s not even the security team asking anymore,” Bernstein notes. “It’s actually the people who want to innovate. This is because developers now spend their time chasing vulnerabilities, patching dependencies, or responding to issues that never should have existed in the first place. “We cannot allocate 50% of our time to just maintain existing software,” Bernstein explained. “Because it actually stifles our innovation.”

In this sense, Minimus represents a broader reckoning on what it means to move fast. Ideologically, techies are starting to recognize that speed without structure doesn’t scale. “Velocity can lead to chaos,” Bernstein says. “And chaos is not progress. Chaos is regression.”

Just as social media eventually discovered that moderation wasn’t always censorship, software is now discovering that guardrails aren’t necessarily anti-innovation. They are what make innovation sustainable.

In the AI boom, speed is being celebrated. Funding rounds are closing quickly, teams can double in quarters, and products ship before the market has time to catch its breath.

But for Niv Braun, co-founder and CEO of AI security company Noma Security, the real challenge isn’t how fast a company grows, but about it’s what breaks when it does.

“One of the biggest challenges in a fast-moving and fast-growing company is how you grow the team very fast and in a way that will be aligned with the great business growth that we see,” Braun told me. “At the same time, keeping the culture.”

Noma is better positioned than most to understand this problem. Founded in 2023, the company has already raised $123 million, including a $100 million Series B, and works with some of the world’s largest and most regulated enterprises. But the speed at which the company grows can be detrimental if not managed correctly. “The moment that you move in a quarter from 40 to 70 or 80 people,” Braun added, “it could completely change the dynamic of the company.”

When I spoke to Braun, he described culture as being nurtured and defended through this growth, starting with the hiring process.

“Sometimes we see the most amazing talents in all areas,” he explained. “But we don’t think that they’re going to be completely aligned with the Noma culture. And this is why we think that it’s not a good fit.” It’s not about ability ot background, but finding pieces that can glue together. “I don’t think that it’s because we are better than them… I just think that there are two different puzzles,” he added.

The Cultural Pillars For Success

That discipline is built around three cultural pillars. The first is what Braun calls a winning mentality. “Winning mentality is the state of mind,” he says. “They know how, in crunch time, to do the right thing, to take the right decisions under pressure.”

The second is radical ownership. “People that take a topic end to end,” Braun said, describing a culture where engineers influence marketing, sales teams shape product strategy, and silos are actively discouraged.

The third is an explicitly anti-blame environment. “It’s super collaborative and anti-blaming culture,” he concluded. Without it, Braun believes proactivity collapses, feedback shuts down, and growth becomes fragile.

This is particularly visible in how Noma handles failure. “On every POC that we lose,” Braun explained, “there are going to be lesson learning about it. Again, it’s not blaming, but it’s true learning together.” This environment isn’t helped by softening disappointment, either. “We don’t accept it,” he adds. “We make sure that it doesn’t happen, like never, again.”

The AI era could see technology resetting or pivoting every few months, and Braun sees culture as one of the few durable advantages left. “This is the only way,” he says, “to scale together with this DNA.”

Today, speed may get you noticed, and large funding rounds get you headlines. But as Noma’s growth aims to show, it’s the culture that will determine whether companies survive.

In the mythology of company leadership, founders are expected to trade stability for scale. Long hours, constant travel, personal sacrifice. Family life is often framed as something to be balanced later, once the company is big enough to afford it.

This week, I spoke to Zack Levine from Checkout.com, who tells a different story.

Levine leads Checkout.com’s North American and Israel operations and moved to Israel two years ago from the United States. Today, he is preparing to return to the United States, this time to Dallas, Texas, ahead of the birth of his second child, another son.

We spoke about family and how he sees it not as a constraint on leadership, but as the condition that makes leadership possible. His recent decision, he explained, was driven less by ambition than by a belief that professional performance depends on personal grounding.

“If I feel good about where things are in my family life, in my personal life, my outcomes at work are way better,” he said. “Family comes first for me. Making sure that my wife and my kid are feeling good and happy. That’s the most important. And then from there, I can build the best professional version of myself.”

Checkout.com is a fintech company that provides payment processing services for enterprise clients in the media, technology, and e-commerce space. The company is growing fast, with thousands of employees across more than 20 countries. Levine’s role demands constant travel between offices in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. So when it came to leaving Israel, many elements came into consideration.

“I need the security and stability in my personal life in order to create the best work outcomes and for my kids to have a chance to be raised next to their grandparents,” he explained. This proximity to extended family and being in a manageable travel hub were not personal luxuries. They were operational requirements.

I found this framing to run counter to how leadership decisions are often discussed. Moves are explained, especially from Israel to North America, as market access opportunities or strategic positioning. The personal lives and the support systems that allow leaders to function rarely make it into public narratives. But our discussion made them explicit.

Parenthood, in particular, reshaped his understanding of leadership - something I could understand on a personal level, too. Running a company while navigating young children and distance from family forced a recalibration of priorities. It’s only natural.

The lesson I gleaned from our chat is not that every founder should move closer to family, or that ambition should be softened. But it made me think about how performance can depend on the foundations behind the scenes that are rarely visible to outsiders. Offices, travel schedules, and support networks matter as much as strategy decks and growth targets.

For Levine, family stability is not something he protects from work. It is what allows the work to function at all.

This week, I spoke with Isaac Heller, the Founder and President of Trullion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows for accounting and audit teams.

It’s a sector long-viewed as conservative and slow-moving, but one that is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The stakes are high, not just for young professionals entering the workforce, but also for the legacy firms that have dominated the accounting industry for decades and may assume their scale makes them untouchable to change.

Institutional firms like KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, and EY still loom over city skylines - but history offers a cautionary tale: dominance has a shelf life.

“If you drive down the highway in Tel Aviv on the Ayalon, or you’re sitting in Times Square and you look up, the biggest buildings have EY, PWC, or Deloitte, right at the top of the pearly white tower. These are massive companies that are critical to the financial ecosystem,” Heller explained.

Then he drew a comparison that cut close to home. “When I grew up in America, there were four dominant TV channels: Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Then something called Netflix came along,” he said. “Now Netflix dominates.”

The lesson, Heller argues, isn’t that incumbents inevitably lose. But we can see how disruption doesn’t discriminate in who it dethrones. The accounting sector, he believes, is entering a similar moment. AI could either become the Netflix of the industry, or these companies will integrate this technology to keep their names on the tower.

Trullion has raised almost $34 million in funding from investors that include Stepstone Group, Aleph, Third Point Ventures, and Greycroft. The company was also voted as one of Calcalist’s Most Promising Startups in 2024.

The conversation then turned to young people and how AI adoption will transform these sectors and career opportunities. According to Heller, success will always rely on having a deep, foundational understanding of technology, culture, and business.

“If you’re entering into law, accounting, or engineering, there may be some cynicism about trying to learn some of the basic tasks that those industries are founded on,” he said. “However, if you learn and focus on those tasks before you get to the AI-powered stuff, you can actually be more powerful long-term.”

Those who work with AI tools will be at an advantage when faced with the problem of when those technologies ultimately fail. “When you work with AI tools in the industry, and they don’t work, which happens one to five percent of the time, you actually have to go back and fix the code, right? You have to keep going deeper to understand why it didn’t execute. So if you don’t know the fundamentals, you’re only going to be stuck on the shallow layer in accounting.”

In other words, AI won’t replace expertise. But it will expose who actually has it.

The world of biotech and drug development has long relied on trial and error and statistical averages. While we often associate this approach with diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders, it has left the immune system, one of the most important systems in the human body, among the least systematically understood in medicine.

That gap is becoming harder to ignore. In the United States, funding cuts threaten to slow basic research at the very moment when the complexity of biological problems is increasing. As public support tightens, the pressure grows to build new kinds of infrastructure that can help translate scientific discovery into long-term medical progress.

To understand some of these challenges more, I spoke with Noam Solomon, the co-founder and CEO of Immunai. The Israeli company has raised almost $300 million with the mission to create “the Google Maps of the immune system.”

And that mission is massive - requiring time and patience on a mathematically enormous scale.

Immunai aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of single-cell data to understand how the immune system behaves over time and across conditions. The work may not deliver immediate breakthroughs, but it could shape how medicine, industry, and governments make decisions in the future.

Ultimately, it will create what Solomon describes not as a dataset, but as a functional map of the immune system. The distinction matters: A map allows prediction, whereas a spreadsheet does not.

Solomon is unusually candid about the structural constraints shaping biotech innovation. He shares how public funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, remain essential - but their incentives often reward safety over speed.

Venture capital fills the gap, but this can push companies toward milestones that don’t always align with biological truth or expectation. So Immunai, he argues, sits in the tension between those worlds: trying to build long-term infrastructure in an ecosystem optimized for short-term validation.

The company today has raised $297 million from earlier investors TLV Partners and Viola Ventures, as well as later players Koch Disruptive Technologies, Alexandria Venture Investments, 8VC, Piedmont, and ICON. It has also secured partnerships with top pharmaceutical and academic centers such as Teva and AstraZeneca.

Solomon describes the hardest phase in biotech not as a scientific challenge, but as a structural one. Between early discovery and real clinical impact sits what he calls the Valley of Death: the phase where promising research struggles to secure funding, data, or industrial backing. It’s where academic breakthroughs lack the funding, data, or industrial backing to move forward, and where companies are forced to prove value long before biology is fully understood.

In this sector specifically, “the Valley of Death takes longer, and it's bigger, and more companies die,” he explained. This is not because it’s wrong, but because the system isn’t built to support long-term understanding.

Bridging that “Valley of Death,” he argues, requires infrastructure, patience, and incentives that reward learning — not just results. “We are a tool or a technology that can support biotechnology companies and biopharma companies to bring their drugs to the market faster, better, and cheaper,” Solomon explained.

The broader implication is clear: as biological challenges become more complex and resources more constrained, the future of biotech may depend less on ‘breakthrough’ moments and more on whether the industry is willing to invest in understanding before certainty.

You can learn more about the company and some of the long-term biotech challenges in the video above.