Lance Glinn:

Yotam, thanks so much for joining us inside The ICE House. Happy to have you here.

Yotam Segev:

Thank you for having me, Lance.

Lance Glinn:

So earlier this year, Cyera announced a $400 million series F, which sets the company's valuation at nine billion. First and foremost, congratulations on that success.

Yotam Segev:

Thank you.

Lance Glinn:

And when that kind of capital comes in, it could really open up, I think, a set of new possibilities. So to start our conversation on this such funding, how are you really thinking about putting it to work? What does a capital allocation strategy look like now moving forward?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. I think that in the space we play, the challenge that our customers are dealing with is immense. And while Cyera today is able to deliver tremendous value for them, we're not yet at a place where we can solve the entire challenge the way we'd like. So when we are looking at this capital infusion, we see it as an opportunity to really invest in our product, invest in our platform, and move from a position of a value creator, a tool within their toolkit, into a solution to one of their key business problems and key business challenges. And I think that that is the real unlocker here with the capital and the real opportunity, is to leverage the momentum and traction we have in the market to double down on our product and really be able to offer the best offering in the market for data and AI security.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. And you really want to put the capital to ... It's one thing to bring it in, but it's then what do you do with it now that you have it? That really is what helps take a company to the next step. And when a company scales at the level that you have, it's really not just about adding more resources, it's about choosing really the right bets and the right areas of growth, right? Like I said before, you want to have the capital and then you want to figure out what to do with it. So what do you see as really the biggest opportunities for growth? And where do you sort of feel this new round will help Cyera to truly accelerate its trajectory?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. I think the challenges of adopting AI in the enterprise are still very nascent and we're only seeing the early innings of this campaign evolve. So our position is to bring together the AI itself with identity and with data, which is the core of our platform today. I think we want to turn this year from a company that is very strong in data security to a company that has a lot of strength in these three areas, AI, identity and data, and being able to stitch that fabric together in a very meaningful way. And I think that that's going to position us in a very robust and flexible way to enable the AI adoption, whatever it might look like. Because I think the question marks still outweigh the answers in this regard.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. Yeah.

Yotam Segev:

Every enterprise is trying to figure out the design patterns, the architecture. How are they going to enable agentic AI? How are they going to leverage LLMs with their proprietary data? And we want to be there, able to partner with them where they are.

Lance Glinn:

And so you bring up where AI is going. And I think there are so many more questions than answers still at this point, right? What does the future look like, not just five to 10 years from now, but next year, next month, over the next week? What does the future of AI look like? And a friend of mine said to me actually on this podcast, he made a good point, he said, "AI is the worst it's ever been right now." It will only continue to get better. So with that being said, with the fact that it will only continue to grow, things will only continue to change and evolve, do you have any insights or any ideas as to where it might be going? Where do you see this technology that is old, although sort of saw this boom maybe back in 2022, where do you see it going? In your opinion, where is AI's future?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. I think that the LLMs itself, what you might draw parallel to the brain, is quite powerful today. And they will get better and they will continue to improve. But I think that we're already seeing that there's some exceptional capability there that we really haven't seen before in previous waves of technology.

Lance Glinn:

True.

Yotam Segev:

But that brain today is a bit detached from a body. It doesn't necessarily have the right arms, legs, strength to go and actually make an impact, execute in the world. And especially when I look at the enterprise space, I think that the amount of work it takes to get AI into production, to actually turn AI into something that is more of a, let's call it a foundation and not a nice add-on, it takes tremendous work from the enterprise today. A lot of that work has to do with the security and compliance requirements that are non-trivial. A lot of that work has to do with the integration capabilities. How do we actually connect it into the environment? How do we get our data ready for AI usage? And I think that what I expect us to see in the next few years, I expect us to see these brains grow a body and become much more material in their ability to impact our organizations and the work we do. And I think that while that happens, there's also going to emerge new challenges.

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Yotam Segev:

Because today, many of the AI security challenges are theoretical, or at least they're mostly theoretical. But once you have hundreds of millions of cars on the road and the cars are going at 80 miles per hour, then the security of car seats, seatbelts, airbags move from being a theoretical control to something that saves lives every day. And that's exactly what we're going to see in the AI security space as that AI becomes fully fleshed out and starts to be part of the day-to-day operation of the companies and enterprises and organizations that really enable our lives. We're going to see the risks materialized in a much more meaningful way, in much more frequent occurrences, and the need for security that will arise from that will grow as well.

Lance Glinn:

Absolutely. And we'll get to Cyera and how it's evolving and how this AI security is evolving later in the conversation. But before we get there, you recently returned from Davos. And we talked a lot about travel over the last couple minutes before we started recording. Neither of us going to very warm places, at least as of late. But you recently returned from Davos and the World Economic Forum, which look, it's filled with ideas, a place that's filled with perspectives, opinions, conversations. So just from a personal standpoint, what stuck with you most about the trip? Things that may have shifted or expanded. And just the overall conversations that you were hearing when you were on the ground.

Yotam Segev:

I think the thing that struck me the most is that everybody is kind of in the same place right now. Where on the one hand, we all know we are living through what might be the greatest technological revolution in human history. At the same time, I think most of us have more questions than answers about how that affects our organizations, how that affects the world. And it seemed to me like every leader I met was in a place of exploration, a place of curiosity, trying to reinvent and reinvigorate the organizations in this new AI age.

But at the same time, a place of much concern, and I might even say fear, because I think everyone understands that the game is changing and it's changing much faster than it might have in the past, but we don't know exactly what it's going to look like. And that was a very common thread, very common theme across the board. And I think that the call to action for us is simplicity, right? There's so much complexity in the world around us, technological complexity, geopolitical complexity. What we need to provide our customers is simplicity, simplicity in the way we help them secure and enable their data transformation, simplicity in the way we help them enable the AI transformation. And simplicity is becoming much, much more valuable-

Lance Glinn:

Yeah, to say the least.

Yotam Segev:

... due to the world's complexity. And I think that that was, for me, my biggest takeaway from Davos, is really hearing these CEOs and world leaders talk about AI and look for that simple answer to be able to focus their attention on something that can provide an end-to-end solution. That is exactly our strategy at Cyera to become that end-to-end solution for enterprise AI adoption and be able to support every part of that motion from the AI that the end users use to the LLMs that are brought in-house and have access to the company's proprietary competitive edge data, to the way that you protect yourself from AI misuse and AI data leakage. And I think that simplicity, being a one-stop shop, being a full platform, full solution is what I heard these leaders asking for.

Lance Glinn:

And look, we've all been there, whether it's with something like data security or something with much less consequence, right? We hate the complex. We hate when we're placing an order for something or we're doing a simple task or we're making a call to wherever, trying to connect with a doctor through a agentic chatbot, and it's just complex. We hate that. We just want to be simple. We want to be able to know how to do this without feeling like we're jumping through hoops or jumping ropes or going through all this different tape to try to finally find our destination.

But that I think, that wanting to get to simplicity rather than complexity is a lot easier said than done, right? I think you would agree with that. It's a lot easier said than done. Everyone wants to be simple, but to get there is really, really tough. And now I know Cyera, we talked about the valuation earlier and the recent funding, but it's continued to grow, continue to grow, continue to grow. When you first started, was that simplicity always the goal? Was that something that you always had in mind, that whatever you were going to build, you wanted it to be simple so that customers could use it and feel confident using it?

Yotam Segev:

Absolutely. I think that was perhaps the biggest lesson that the customers, our customers taught us in the beginning. And that is the difference between the optimal solution and the feasible solution. As engineers, we sometimes gravitate towards the optimal solution. We want to implement technology in a way that can solve the problem in all of its aspects. But the enterprise practitioners, the CISOs, CIOs, CDOs, chief data officers, that we work with and sell to have a very pragmatic worldview and they know that the optimal solution might not be feasible, might not be implementable in the organizations.

And I think that lesson that they taught us in the early days, how do we reduce friction, how do we make the solution more implementable, more feasible, more usable to the customer, it's been a huge learning for us. And it's part of everything we are doing today. I think maybe the greatest achievement in the world is to take a complex problem and solve it in a simple, elegant solution. And that is what we strive to in our efforts. Sure, you can throw a complex solution at it, but then what value does that create?

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Yotam Segev:

Being able to strive to that simplicity is a lot of the magic of the experience we deliver for our customers today. And a lot of what we're looking at as we're expanding our footprint, growing the problem, right? If yesterday we solved the problem that was this size, tomorrow I want to solve a problem that's this size. And in a year from now, I want to solve a problem that's this size-

Lance Glinn:

And they're just going to keep getting bigger.

Yotam Segev:

And keep doing it in a simple fashion. If you lose the simplicity, you lost the magic.

Lance Glinn:

Yep, absolutely. And like you said, you want it to be simple because you might have a complex solution, but to your point, if a company can't implement that complex solution, then what's the point of even having the complex solution in the first place? And so I want to go back to Cyera's beginning because you're sitting there with your co-founder tomorrow, you guys are figuring out what Cyera is going to look like in the future, in 2026 where we sit now. Was the vision always the same? Was it always a, "We want to solve X problem, we want to make it simple?" Or did the vision take on a number of different transformations over the course of where we sit today in February of 2026?

Yotam Segev:

I think that at the pace that Cyera is growing and amassing traction in the market, the vision always has to be several steps ahead. So the vision has grown immensely over the past five years and it continues to grow, right? I think if you would've asked me a year ago, our scope would've been more limited than it is today because I think that vision is perhaps the most important way to align thousands of people around the mission. Right? If you want to have thousands of people rowing in the same direction, all of the Cyera employees, and to a degree our customers and partners as well, you have to give them a north star, you have to give them a shining city on the hill that everybody can look to and everybody can make sure that we're all rowing in the same direction.

I think that one of the challenges of companies as they grow is that lack of alignment that sometimes arises, the politics. And I always joke that I want to have a very, very clear vision that everybody can look to. And I want to make sure that the goals are so ambitious that nobody has time to take their eyes off the goals and start to find all the reasons why things are challenging or why the politicking ... Keep everybody aligned on the goal and keep everybody in a very intense motion to get there. And I think that that creates an extremely compelling opportunity for people.

Lance Glinn:

And so I want to pivot the conversation now to just your personal journey. And you served in Unit 8200 of the Israel Defense Force, an elite cyber unit within the IDF. What did you just learn about not only cyber, but security overall, pressure, teamwork, innovation that still really shows up in your leadership and helps you as you now lead Cyera?

Yotam Segev:

That's a wonderful question. I think the experiences in the military service have definitely been some of the more formative experiences of my life. And to a degree, I think that the same message that I just shared has been really relevant for us, for me at least in my military service. And that is when you have a clear goal, you can get there much faster than anyone would imagine. When you know what you want to accomplish, what you want to achieve, it's sometimes surprising how quickly you can actually achieve it despite the fact that when you're at the square zero, at point zero, you have nothing. You don't have the right talent, you don't have the right technology, you don't have the right skillset.

Lance Glinn:

Everything looks so far away.

Yotam Segev:

It looks so far away. But if you have clarity of goal, clarity of purpose, the ability to achieve it and achieve it in a very short timeframe is immense. And I think that was an exercise that I had several opportunities throughout my military service to undergo, where the realities of the world put a challenge in front of us that we had no clue how to tackle with the capabilities and tool sets that were available to us. And four months later, we managed to conquer that goal and find a solution to that problem and implement it, because that was what was needed. The urgency, the need was the primary driver. And we had to be very creative and flexible and competent in order to overcome the call to action.

Lance Glinn:

Now, not everyone goes from military cyber operations to building one of the fastest growing data security companies today. Away from Cyera, just what drew you into entrepreneurship? Was there a specific moment when you kind of realized I need to build something to ... And ignore whatever the problem you thought might've been around. What just got you into, I need to build something to solve problems? What got you into, I want to be my own boss, I want to create something that really makes a difference?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. So I think there were two elements for me that were incredible. I think the first element was the partnership. So Tamar and Yonatan, who were my co-founders and started the company with them, the opportunity to work with them was something that I couldn't pass up. And I think that that says a lot about the culture of Cyera today as well. We are very, very ambitious and we have incredible goals in front of us. But it's something that I always like to remind everybody, is that we have to enjoy the journey. Because once we get there, there's not going to be some cathartic moment where we're like, "Okay, we got there. Now we can be happy." If we're not happy today, then we won't be happy when we get there either.

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Yotam Segev:

So you have to always balance that ambition with the ability to enjoy the journey and really appreciate the journey. I think that the opportunity to work with people that I admired and I held in the highest regard and I knew will always have my back and will always support me, that was something huge for me. And that was the biggest catalyst to starting the company.

I think that from an entrepreneurial standpoint, Israel is very entrepreneurial. And it's almost impossible to do something at this type of scale in Israel not through entrepreneurship. Since we don't have the big companies that America has, we don't have opportunities at the size and scale that some other countries might provide. If you want to do something huge, entrepreneurship was pretty much the only option open to us. And we definitely wanted to. We wanted to do something that can scale to the international level and be a first class company at the world stage.

Lance Glinn:

And so I want to go back to, in one of your previous answers you talked about setting a common goal for everyone that people can really look towards, that they really stay on task. And especially as you scale and as the size of your company and the number of your employees only grows, right, it's more important than ever to keep everyone, whether they've been with the company since the beginning or are in day one, they need to be glued to that common goal, that common mission. How do you really create that environment though where employees, they feel empowered, they feel supported, they feel trusted so that they can tackle the challenge at hand that does require really creativity, that high performance, that urgency, that sometimes requires that pressure, right? How do you make sure everyone stays aligned with the company growing at the scale that yours is?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. I think for us, maybe the biggest enabler to that is to embrace failure. And failure is a word that has so many connotations for people. Some people say it or just think about it and they get shivers throughout their body. But I think failure is maybe the greatest growth catalyst.

Lance Glinn:

But is it a fail fast type of mentality? Do you want to fail fast?

Yotam Segev:

Failing fast is much better than failing slow.

Lance Glinn:

That's true.

Yotam Segev:

But I think in general, the ability within the workplace to say, "I tried and I failed and this is what I learned from it. This is what I didn't like about the way things happened. This is what I didn't like about the way I handled things or the choices I made. And this is what I learned from them." So the ability to do that cycle, which sounds so trivial when I say it here now, but in reality, in how many organizations do people feel empowered to call out their own shortcomings and their own failures? And I think that that is such a core part of the Cyera learning culture, is the ability to understand where did we go wrong? What could we have done better as a team and as individuals?

And that is always present. No matter how good things are, no matter how good things went, what can we learn? What could we have improved? How can we do better next time? And I think that that attitude that permeates, I hope for me and my co-founders personally, all the way across the organization, enables people to lean in, take chances, experiment, do things that they're not sure are going to work, but they might. And if they will, it's going to be amazing. So you have to create a culture, you have to create a place where people really feel like they have the place to do that. And for us, I think failure is one of the biggest catalysts for growth and progress. But it's very important in my mind to be able to call it out and not to sugarcoat it, not to make it seem nicer than it was. How was it? Yeah, it was okay. No, it wasn't okay-

Lance Glinn:

You don't want to shy away from the fact that it didn't work.

Yotam Segev:

We did badly. We did poorly. We messed up. We screwed up. Why? Why did this happen to us? And how do we make sure that it doesn't happen again?

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. But I would say that last point, the why of it, right, the why is so important. It's not just, okay, we failed, we moved on. It's we failed, why did we fail? What did we learn from it?

Yotam Segev:

What can we learn from it? What can we learn from it? How do we extract all the learnings possible from it? Because that's the only thing we have. And the interesting thing is that when you fail, it's usually relatively easy to know why you failed. And when you win, it's oftentimes very hard to know why you win.

Lance Glinn:

There you go.

Yotam Segev:

So everybody wants to double down on the wins, but sometimes you don't know how you got them.

Lance Glinn:

Sure, sure.

Yotam Segev:

And in failure, I think it's very practical and very applicable to be able to learn from failures in a very, almost a religious manner.

Lance Glinn:

Yep. So as Cyera, and we've talked about the company obviously scaling, we talked back to the funding, but as Cyera scales and the company takes on bigger challenges, you mentioned, right? A challenge might be this big, then the next week it's this big, then the following month it's that big. So as Cyera scales, as the company takes on bigger challenges, there's always the risk ... And I think this is with any company, not just Cyera, right? There's always the risk of drifting from the principles of the early days, right? And we talked about having a clear goal, having a clear mission, having something you want to tackle, but still as you get bigger, that risk I think only grows.

So with that being said, how do you stay grounded in the foundations that really built the company? When you go back with Tamar and Yonatan, how do you really stay true to how the company started and make sure that all the employees remember that first day and not get cocky or complacent and remain humble to continue to grow from where Cyera is right now?

Yotam Segev:

So I think that's a super important question and my answer is limited to my experience and what I've done. I'm sure that it's not the right answer and there's a lot more-

Lance Glinn:

Is there even a right answer to it, though?

Yotam Segev:

There's a lot more that is needed there. But for us, the things that we are trying to do, first of all, flesh out what it means. What do we expect from our people? And for us, one of the phrases that caught fire in the company is smart, humble, hungry. So when we think about the Cyerans, the people that make up Cyera, we want them to be smart, humble, hungry. And that is a statement that gets repeated a lot. It's not something that is said once. It's something that is said again and again and again in many different forums, in many different environments. And when a new employee joins the company, I think they'll probably hear that phrase over 50 times in the first three months in the company.

Speed is another super important word in Cyera. We call it Cyera Speed. And it's something that is talked about in every part of the company's life. How fast do we respond to customers? How fast do we solve problems for them? How fast do we innovate and develop our software? And that is a value that has been coined, a terminology that has been coined, and is repeatedly and constantly communicated within the company to every employee and new employees especially. So I think that is one thing that is super important. The other thing that is super important in this regard is to really explain to the people who are joining now what it took to get here and what do we believe it will take to get there.

Lance Glinn:

Sure.

Yotam Segev:

So sometimes I tell employees, you're joining a rocket ship. But a rocket ship is a really bad metaphor because when you think about a rocket ship, it's got this jet propulsion engine in the back. And if you're sitting on the rocket ship, you don't have to do anything. It just flies, right?

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Yotam Segev:

But no-

Lance Glinn:

You have to do something.

Yotam Segev:

... this is much more like the Flintstone's car. Right? The feet-

Lance Glinn:

Yeah, have to be moving.

Yotam Segev:

You have to be moving all the time, otherwise there is no rocket ship.

Lance Glinn:

You can't just put it into auto drive. You can't just put it into autopilot. You got to do it yourself.

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. So there is no rocket ship in order to propel this thing to where we want it to be. All of us have to be moving our seat every minute, every second and pushing this thing forward. And all of you just joined, I tell this to the new employees, "All of you just joined. Until you start putting points on the board, you're a burden on all of our backs. We have to carry you. All of us have to carry you. So hurry up. Hurry up, figure out how to put points on the board and get to contributing as quickly as possible. Because in the meantime, we are all busy enabling you and training you."

So I think that being able to convey to the new employees what they're walking into. What is this company? What do they expect from me? What does good look like? And using that as a way to assimilate the culture. Another super important thing is that you have to choose which people you bring in in the first place. Assimilating people to culture is much easier if they're coming hungry for it.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. If they're that smart, hungry, humble.

Yotam Segev:

Yes. And they're choosing to go into a company that they know is a bit extreme. They know it's going to be very demanding. They know it's not going to be the most balanced work-life environment they've been in their lives. They know and they chose it. It's much easier to get people assimilated into the culture if they want it. They want to be assimilated. If you get somebody who doesn't want it, "Oh my God, I thought this was a nine to five and nobody's supposed to call me after 5:00 PM."

Lance Glinn:

I wish [inaudible 00:27:20].

Yotam Segev:

And then they realize that they walked into a very different place and a very different ecosystem. And that's also a super important part.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. No, bringing in the right talent I think makes, as you said, things a lot easier. When you can assimilate the right talent that wants to be there, I think that makes it a lot easier than trying to assimilate the talent that maybe has sort of the wrong idea what they're coming into.

Yotam Segev:

And also the mindset. Because our lives aren't that short, they're not that long, but they're not that short either. And there's many chapters in life. I hope I won't work this hard my entire life. It's not my hope forever and forever to work as intensely as I do now. But I think people need to choose their chapters with open eyes.

Lance Glinn:

Yes.

Yotam Segev:

Sometimes you're in a chapter in your life where you want to be part of this like Olympic grade team and you're willing to put what it takes in, which is a lot of sweat.

Lance Glinn:

A lot of hard work.

Yotam Segev:

And sometimes you're in a different phase in your life and you want something a little bit more balanced. And that's A-okay too. I don't think a person is this or that. But I think that we have to be very, very transparent and open with everybody who's considering joining the company about what Cyera is like.

Lance Glinn:

No, that makes a ton of sense. So I want to change the conversation now from that thought leadership to AI, specifically agentic, which I know we sort of touched on at the beginning of the conversation. But agentic AI, right, it has become one of the most important topics, and frankly, one of the most frequently just used words in any business, right? Take any industry, take any business, you always hear agentic AI. Some people don't even know what it means. Some people have different definitions. I feel like you can ask five people what agentic AI is, you'll get five different answers, right? But it's something that is so prevalent today in tech and business and industry, whatever it might be. From your vantage point, how is this new class of AI systems just reshaping both the threat landscape and the capabilities that are available to companies like yours? Because just as threats are growing, so are the capabilities of stopping those threats, I would think.

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. So the metaphor that I have in mind is that the way we did security at present was almost clumsy. It's not the previous security is always a business that's on the back foot in a sense, but it's not like we had it figured out before AI came into the scene. It was still very challenging and we saw the breaches even before AI became a part of the scene. So you think about that and you say, "Okay, essentially the present state is that we are barely able to protect our organizations and enterprises from human attackers." Humans are flawed. They're slow. They make mistakes. And now we're in the next few years going to find ourselves in a situation where we're going to have to protect these organizations from agentic attackers, that today might be still a little clumsy, as you said, the worst they will ever be today, but they're going to get better very fast and in a very meaningful way over the next few years.

And you think about that and the asymmetry that arises and you're saying, "Okay, if we don't progress our security controls and our security processes and the way we do security very, very, very quickly." The gap that is going to open up is going to be a horrible, horrible situation to be in. And that is, in my mind, the biggest call to action today in the cybersecurity landscape, is we were on the threshold, as it were, and AI is going to put us in a very different situation very quickly. We got to move. We got to invest. We got to lay better foundations in place. We got to double down on the things that the foundations of security that scale and work.

And we got to make sure that we're not caught flatfooted when these agentic attackers start knocking on our doors every morning. And that's going to happen faster than anyone feels comfortable. The attackers are not bound by any regulation or compliance, the threat actors, and they're adopting AI as quickly as possible. Whereas in the enterprise space, to bring that AI to bear in security, we have to mature it, we have to make sure that it's ready. And the cycles might be longer. And that worries me immensely, that potential gap that I see widening and widening with every day that goes by. And I think that the call to action is urgent because this is such a big thing, such a big revolution that we might not be able to play catch up.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah. No, to your point, security of all kind, then you take cybersecurity, take AI security, it's not something that companies can afford to fall behind in. They have to continue to change and evolve their security measures to meet as the attackers are changing and evolving their own different threats. So it's not something that obviously we can afford to lapse on. It's not something that we can afford to push to the side. It has to be towards the top of any company, regardless of the size or the scale that they're growing at, correct?

Yotam Segev:

And you bring up a really good point, that it's never done. It's never done because the IT landscape, what you're trying to protect is evolving and changing rapidly. The threat landscape, what the attackers are doing is evolving and changing rapidly. If compliance and regulation are a part of it, that's also evolving and changing rapidly. So you can never get to an end state in security. And that's part of the excitement and action of it. But it's also part of the challenge because in many things we do in life, we can get to, okay, it works now. We can move on to the next thing.

Lance Glinn:

But for something like this you can't.

Yotam Segev:

And in cybersecurity, that just never is the case.

Lance Glinn:

So Yotam, as we come closer to the conclusion of our conversation, I do want to just touch on the industry as a whole. Today it does feel more dynamic and more complex than ever. We talked about simplicity earlier. We obviously just talked about the need for cybersecurity and AI security to match the speed at which attackers are going. What's your just overall assessment of where it stands, what organizations are getting right about it, and where there still may be blind spots that aren't necessarily getting the attention that they deserve?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. So I think there's a few points that are worth making. And maybe the first one is another one from Davos. I met many CEOs there of large public companies and we say, "Hi, what do you do? I'm in cybersecurity." And almost always the first thing they tell me is how long ago they had a breach and how bad it was. And then they almost fault me for not being there when that breach happened, right? It's like, "Hi, two years ago I had a breach. It was horrible. Why weren't you there?" And what I took from that or what I learned from that is that many of the business leaders today still envision security as something that happens when a breach happens. But security has to be done before the breach happens.

Lance Glinn:

Sure. You want to be proactive.

Yotam Segev:

Once the breach happened, we are already in a different scenario. Now we're in the incident response world, which is a world of its own-

Lance Glinn:

A whole 'nother can of worms.

Yotam Segev:

... with many challenges.

Lance Glinn:

Yeah.

Yotam Segev:

But the business of security is reducing the risk of a breach happening and reducing the impact of a potential breach that might happen, being able to react quickly and effectively to a breach if it happens. So that has to happen before the breach. And I was a bit surprised, honestly, to learn that that is not fully well comprehended by some of the world's business leaders. So I think that's one thing that is a really, really important learning.

I think in terms of spaces that require improvement, I think that there is a huge, huge communication challenge when it comes to cybersecurity. The cybersecurity people live within cybersecurity. They eat, drink, and breathe cybersecurity. That's all they think about. And the business people don't. And that's okay. They shouldn't. But as cybersecurity, as an industry, we have to do a ton of work translating the things that we are aware of that are happening in the world and we are aware of that could happen to our organizations into business layman's terms that people that don't live in that world and don't want to live in that world can understand and can take action on.

And that communication gap is much bigger than most people imagined, right? Since cybersecurity is doing really well in the stock market, a lot of people believe it's understood or it's something that's ... It is not. I think that the gap is still much bigger than people believe. And that's on us, on the cybersecurity industry, to really represent ourselves better and be able to connect with the business leaders better, and be able to bring everything that's happening in our world and the complexity of it, if we go back to that point, into simple consumable insights for business leaders making strategic decisions.

Lance Glinn:

So as we wrap up our conversation, I do want to bring it back to Cyera now. What is the roadmap really for this next chapter? What could partners, innovators, your own team expect from the company over the next year? And I guess we've talked a lot over our conversation about journey and about working hard now and where we were five years ago to where you are now. And I guess my one question too, and I know this is sort of a multi-part question, but I think the most important question I have in this is, is the journey ever ending? Does it ever end? Or is it just continuing to go and go and go as threats continue to go and go and go? Is there ever an end to what you hope to do, or do you just hope to continue to work, or not continue to work, but continue to work to solve the threats as they come?

Yotam Segev:

Yeah. So I think that our job doesn't seem to be ending anytime soon. And we're committed to continue to invest and continuing to work and continuing to better ourselves and our abilities for our customers in order to support them in their changing needs. And our mission ahead of us right now is to be in a position where we can support and enable a large enterprise to adopt AI securely and to prevent data from leaking from the organization in any way. That is a very ambitious mission. We're trying to make it sound simple, but there's enormous complexity behind it and incredible innovation that needs to happen in order to actually enable this AI revolution in a secure way, and to make sure that the data that is the competitive edge of every organization today remains secure, isn't stolen, isn't leaked, doesn't end up in the wrong places, whether that's due to human behavior or agentic behavior.

Lance Glinn:

Well, Yotam, it's so great to see how much Cyera is growing and all the great things that your company is doing. Thank you so much for joining us inside The Ice House.

Yotam Segev:

Thank you for having me. It was a wonderful chat.