How Yotam Segev Built Cyera Into a Multi-Billion Dollar Cybersecurity Leader

Thank you. Thank you for having me, Ben. Very excited to share it. The first thing I'll say is it's not me, it's us. And I think Albert Einstein might have been the last person in humanity to have made any significant progress on their own. Today we do it in teams, and it's a we sport and an us sport more than it's an I sport. But yeah, thank you for your compliments.

So, technology has always been a part of my life. My dad was in computers, and programming was always part of my life since I remember myself. I loved the technology. I loved tinkering with the different computer games that I was playing to see how I can alter their back end and their code in order to change the rules of the games in ways that benefited me. And as I became a teenager, I started to build software on my own and see the power that that has. Always enjoyed that, always loved it. Over the years, that passion has been coupled with my passion for leadership and for people, and I really enjoy doing things with others and in a group. And I think that seeing a group of people come together and make something happen in the world is probably one of the most exciting things for me. And I think that it was very natural to bring these two things together in Cyera and really see what we can build together in data security around the problem that we felt was extremely painful in the market. The lack of control over data, the lack of control over information that organizations are experiencing and the resulting damage they're incurring due to that. And that's really what set me on the path. Good partners and a good problem to go tackle.

I think that the strongest experience we've had as officers in Unit 8200 is the fact that you get problems served to you in a very raw way. The problems nobody chewed them up for you. Nobody made them simple and straightforward. So, you get a very raw problem that could sometimes be a national security matter. And you have to find ways to use the skills and the resources at your disposal in that regard, much of it was cyber, in order to really make an impact on that problem. And I think the biggest opportunity for me as a young officer within that organization was to really be able to build those bridges between the need that is sometimes quite ambiguous, sometimes quite complex, and operations. What can you do about it? We always used to talk in 8200 about intelligence, operations, and technology. In the end of days, they call it people, process, and technology. So it's a very similar type of environment where in order to accomplish success, you have to figure out the system, you have to understand how to leverage the system, and how to make the system function and operate towards the goal you're trying to achieve.

Definitely. I think that you need to think very creatively, to think about things that maybe have never been done before. And how we could use the things that we know how to do in order to create outcomes in the world that just haven't been achieved before. I think we saw an example of that with the recent security events in Israel with the pager attack on Hezbollah. And essentially the ability to leverage that type of access and that type of capability to create a huge disadvantage for the enemy in that sense, before any soldiers have to cross enemy lines, any planes have to put themselves at risk, and any pilots. And that's the type of thinking and the type of approach that you really have to practice on a day-to-day basis.

So, Tamar, my co-founder, our CTO, and myself, in our last position in 8200, we had the opportunity to build a new cloud division for the agency. And this division was one of our first experiences leveraging cloud technologies and building a business on top of it. Much more efficient, much faster, really very positive experience. But when it comes to data security, we kind of found ourselves in a new situation. We used to lock data up in a vault. We used to detach it from the internet, make sure nobody can access it, move it in any way or shape. And then you enter the cloud in this new reality, and you realize, well, that's just not going to fly anymore. Right? Like, we have to find new ways to adapt to this new reality that there is no perimeter when you become a hybrid enterprise, when you become a hybrid organization. And what does data security mean in this new reality? That's where the approach of DSPM started to come to fruition. We spent the first eight months of the company speaking to CISOs and their teams across the US, Europe, Canada, and really learning from their experiences to articulate the problem in the most precise way because, if you make a little mistake, one degree mistake left or right, over time that accumulates and puts you very far away from the mark. And nailing down exactly what the problem was for our customers, what the pain was with the existing solutions, was a huge part of being able to address it with technology, with cloud-native architecture, with AI-based classification. In those eight months where we were hunkering down, other players in the market were moving, putting up websites, making a lot of noise, and we were still sticking to our mentality of 'we still don't know what we're doing. We have to talk to more practitioners.' That really paid dividends because once we had that product market fit nailed down, the pace at which we accelerated in the market was incredible.

So, one of the challenges when you look at data classification today is the amount of data that organizations have. We have customers today with many hundreds of petabytes of data that are being classified. And when you think about that, there's a cost associated with it. So, you have to find the right balance between comprehensiveness, covering every piece of data at a rapid pace, and at the same time cost and compute. How much does this take for the company and how much does it cost? Being able to strike that balance and using a lot of techniques like clustering and sampling in order to provide full comprehensiveness, but at the same time a different level of speed and value that is more affordable to the customers. So, that's one balance that we had to strike.

So, if you think about it very simply, think about ChatGPT that we're all experiencing in our pockets today. I like the ability to take a 50-page Word document, stick it into ChatGPT, and tell ChatGPT in four tags tag what this document is about. It's not going to be perfect, but it's going to be pretty darn good. And that's the power of LLMs and the power of AI that is available today and available to us. And we are using it in the market. The challenge that we are dealing with is how do you do that at scale? Because the enterprises that we serve, they don't have one document they want to classify. They have hundreds of millions of documents they want to classify, sometimes billions. And they have huge quantities of data that reside in so many different data warehouses, in so many different shapes and formats. And how do we give them that value that the AI has to offer, but really bring it into their enterprise realities and make it work within their ecosystem in a comprehensive way.

Well, that's why we're busy. I think on top of that, that's just the classification, but Cyera, classification for us is a means to an end. If you look at the full scope of the data security platform that we're building and taking to market, there's so much that involves, right? There's so many use cases that the customers are asking us for and so much depth when it comes to data security, data governance today, that we've been at it for almost four years now and we're scratching the surface, right? Like the customers want more and more from us and that's pretty incredible.

In which sense? In the level of their data security maturity?