After spending decades in cybersecurity – working with large enterprises, fast-growing startups, and everything in between – you develop a strong intuition for signal versus noise. You’ve seen countless companies promise transformation, only to deliver incremental change wrapped in new language.
So when I began thinking about my next chapter, I was deliberately selective. I wasn’t looking for “another security company.” I was looking for something fundamentally different – something that challenged how the industry thinks about risk.
That’s what drew me to Astelia.
A Red Team Mindset, Grounded in Humility
The first introduction came through someone I trust deeply: a longtime colleague and mentor who knows both me and Astelia’s CEO, Alon, a veteran leader of Israel’s National Red Team. He suggested I speak with Alon not because of a pitch deck, but because of his perspective – shaped by years spent thinking like an attacker, where assumptions are challenged and only what truly works under real-world conditions matters.
That first conversation sealed it.
I’ve worked with Israeli cybersecurity companies before – this is my fourth – and there’s a consistency you come to recognize: rigorous thinking, intellectual honesty, and an unwillingness to settle for half-measures. What stood out immediately was not just Alon’s background or the caliber of the team he’s assembled, but how he leads.
He leads with humility.
When a CEO is comfortable saying, “I don’t know—let’s figure it out together,” that tells you everything about the culture he’s building. Culture doesn’t live in slogans or offsites; it’s defined from the top down. And at Astelia, that clarity, openness, and intellectual rigor show up everywhere.
I firmly believe you follow good people first. The product mattered – but I knew that with this team, it was going to be exceptional.
AI is trending, fundamentals still broken
Cybersecurity today is saturated with conversations about AI. Every vendor claims to be “AI-powered,” “AI-driven,” or “AI-first.” But if you step back, attackers aren’t winning because of flashy technology. They’re winning because fundamentals, especially vulnerability management, are still broken.
The truth is most organizations still struggle to patch effectively. Meanwhile, attackers are using automation and AI to compress the time-to-exploit window dramatically. What once took months – or even years – now happens in hours.
This isn’t a theoretical problem. It’s happening right now.
Yet most exposure and vulnerability management solutions still rely on probabilistic models: likelihood scores, asset importance, threat intelligence overlays. They add intelligence, but they don’t change the equation.
Astelia does.
One simple question changes everything
What fundamentally changed my perspective was Astelia’s willingness to ask a question the industry has largely ignored:
“Does this vulnerability actually risk my environment?”
Security teams are flooded with data: vulnerabilities, threat intelligence, scores, exploit timelines. All of it is valuable but too often it’s abstract. Risk is still discussed in terms of averages, probabilities, or what could happen somewhere, to someone.
What’s missing is context.
Not every issue that looks urgent on paper is relevant in practice. The real question security leaders are trying to answer is much more concrete: Is this something an attacker can actually use against us, here and now?
That distinction sounds subtle, but it shifts the conversation from theoretical exposure to practical relevance. When you frame risk that way, everything changes – how teams prioritize work, how they measure progress, how they communicate with the business.
This way of thinking also restores trust in the process. Security leaders don’t just need more intelligence; they need clearer answers. Answers that stand up in boardrooms and incident reviews.
Anchoring risk to real-world applicability rather than abstract severity is what convinced me this problem was finally being approached from the right angle. It doesn’t just make vulnerability management more efficient. It reframes how organizations understand and talk about risk altogether.
Why this opportunity matters now
What made this opportunity especially compelling for me is timing.
Organizations already have budget allocated to vulnerability management because the pain is real. But more often than not I hear from colleagues and customers that they’re overwhelmed by chasing endless remediation cycles, managing risk through guesswork, and too often paying for downtime they could have avoided.
The pace has also changed. The window between a vulnerability being disclosed and it being actively exploited has collapsed due to AI. What once took months – or even years – now takes days or hours. Customers are now not only worried about a vulnerability backlog problem, but also a race against the clock.
In industries like manufacturing, energy, and critical infrastructure, the stakes are even higher. Patching isn’t always feasible without disrupting operations. If you can mitigate risk by changing a firewall rule instead of taking systems offline, the business value is immediate and quantifiable.
That’s why one of my first priorities at Astelia is helping customers and prospects clearly articulate that value. It’s not just about security improvement, but about true economic impact. It’s not about a “better mousetrap.” It’s about a better outcome.
Building the next phase
Personally, what excites me most is the building phase. Hiring the right people. Creating early momentum. Watching the team hit meaningful milestones together – from the first million in ARR to the next inflection points beyond that.
Those early wins matter. They validate not just the product, but the approach.
This market is ready for a change. It won’t happen overnight, and it won’t happen without challenging long-held assumptions. But when CISOs start telling their peers they can finally answer whether something is truly exploitable, with confidence, that’s when the dominoes fall.
That’s the future Astelia is building. That’s why I joined and I look forward to the adventure to come.
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