From What’s Next After Building a $2.5B Cybersecurity Company with Dean Sysman · · Hacker Valley Media
“The number one thing I kept doing and tried to do as well as I can is first of all, identify where I am not capable or I'm not doing a good job. And then understand why. And is this something that I can improve in myself or is this something that's better suited by having somebody on my team and handing that off to them. The way to be able to have enough visibility to that is first of all, you have to be really ego-less with yourself... The second factor is ask the people around you to help you with that... And the third and this one's the most important because then other people won't be truthful with you. You have to be vulnerable.”
On , Dean Sysman, CEO & Co-Founder at Axonius, spoke about self-improvement during What’s Next After Building a $2.5B Cybersecurity Company with Dean Sysman on Hacker Valley Media.
Dean Sysman, CEO and co-founder of Axonius, has discussed the company's growth and strategic direction in several recent appearances. He noted that Axonius passed $100 million in annual recurring revenue in 2023, achieving that milestone in four and a half years, which he described as one of the fastest growth rates in cybersecurity. Sysman stated that the company is evaluating the right timing to become a public company and aims to become a leading security vendor. He also said that Axonius raised funding in early 2024 at the same valuation as in early 2022, which he characterized as a signal of the company's performance and growth prospects. Sysman has emphasized the importance of asset visibility and data correlation for cybersecurity. He described the challenge of fragmented data across multiple systems and said Axonius's platform connects tools to provide a "single source of truth" for asset and vulnerability data. In discussions about federal cybersecurity, he argued that traditional approaches to asset management—network scanning, agent-based tools, and manual CMDBs—are insufficient for modern environments. Sysman also said the company's product roadmap is driven by customer outcomes, citing examples such as a public school system finding missing children and healthcare organizations providing care during crises through the platform.