The DTC Enterprise Tech Podcast

The DTC Podcast with Benny Porat, co-founder & CEO of Twine Security

Deepak Jeevankumar (00:05)
Hi Benny, welcome to the Dell Technologies Capital podcast. Really great to be talking to you in this forum. It would be great to introduce yourself, Claroty and then Twine to the listeners here.

Benny Porat
Thank you very much. Thank you for having me So, yes, I'm Benny Porat I am 37 almost 38 married with four kids. Basically, live in Israel. Basically, in the cyber security space my whole life. The last day my last position was the co-founder and CTO at Claroty a very successful cyber security company Did that for eight years And right now, today, I'm at Twine where we are bringing agentic AI to the cybersecurity space, starting with the identity access management.

Deepak Jeevankumar (01:04)
Perfect. So, Benny, this is your second company. How was the transition from Claroty to Twine? You spent almost a decade at Claroty. Was there a specific moment or insight that said, am ready to start this painful founder journey again?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (01:25)
Oh, it's not painful, it's fun. No, but it's not really one moment. It's multiple things that come together. At the end, very early in the Claroty journey, I saw the big pain of the customers of executing their cybersecurity program. Basically, you know... They use Claroty. It was great. It's provided a of value, but it was really struggled for them to connect the people and the process around the technology. And for years, like the last 10 years, whatever I did with a lot of like friends, I can call them that – they were all customers/CISOs was to help them to, to execute their program. So, for many years I'm thinking about it and trying to help solving that.

Of course, the fact that there is the AI wave that started recently, make it the options to do Something basically much greater. And at the end, Claroty grew up. Claroty is a big company. The kids went to college. It's time for them to become independent in the day to day and is less dependent on me. So, it was a good timing to start again.

You mentioned painful like a journey. think like for me, it's like, uh, it's a way of living. Like I did this few months vacation retirement people can call it. And, uh, very quickly, my wife said that it's easier to be with four kids at the house than five. So, I think it's the right thing to do.

Deepak Jeevankumar (03:08)
Yeah, no, indeed. think while it can be painful Sometimes, most of the time the founder journey can be super rewarding. So, let's talk a little bit about how the macro startup scene is in Israel and in the world. So, compared to what you experienced during the early days of Claroty as a startup founder in cybersecurity, what is different this time around?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (03:38)
I think if I look at this, there is much, I can look about multiple points.
The first one, is, today there is more, faster exits. We see a lot of company doing exit very fast. I guess this is the basically cause company to need to run like really, really fast in the early days in order to declare the category leader, which is of course make the whole journey of product market fit much more difficult. I think this is one point which is interesting, which we need to be careful about.

But on the flip side, I think that if I will tell the new entrepreneurs that starting today that 10 years ago we spoke with the company enterprise and they told us that we are not working with startup for cybersecurity, they will laugh. Because today, it's of course the best, like this is what everyone doing. But you know, 10 years ago when we started, it was a common answer. Like we're working with a big company, not with startup. And this is completely different. So, there is much more acceptance for innovations and basically early days company, which we generate much bigger opportunity and actually help company to grow faster and basically building the journey with the customers.

Deepak Jeevankumar (05:11)
Yeah, and I think a consequence of Some of the things you've seen in cybersecurity over the last decade, more than 10 companies that have gone public, many of them are doing really well in the public markets, is that there are more investors interested to invest in cybersecurity at every stage, from the early stages to growth stages. So, can you talk a little bit more about how did you pick your investors this time around?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (05:39)
I think for me, choosing the investor, all about the people. At the end, you are choosing the people that are going to be around you in a very long journey. And you want, at the end, we having fun when we have people that we like around us. So, I think this is the main thing.

And when I look about the people, there is basically two questions that I'm asking myself. I think the first one is like, how much I admire the specific person. Like, will they like to get opinion from him when I have challenge? Like, it's like going to be, I going to look for the meeting with him in the day to day, or is that going to be bad? And, no, want like then the investors are the ones that you want to get their opinions. So, it's very, very important that we admire the opinion and basically look for that.
But in the same time, think that something that's very important is that it's easy to work with. Basically, like we need to have a good balance between the amount of how much they are involved and how much they are forcing their opinion. We see Some of them in the market as well, relatively to take a step back and let the company grow and build their independence basically. This is like, I think the main criteria for me.

Deepak Jeevankumar (06:59)
So, the other thing that you mentioned was also, that product market fit is different this time, like, you know, figuring out product market fit and So, on, because people, companies want to grow much faster, you need to grow big and establish yourself as the leader really fast. So, can you elaborate a little bit more about it? How was the journey for product market fit at Claroty versus this time around?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (07:00)
In Claroty, we got a much more clear answer when we spoke with customers. It was no, or it was yes.
But today, because of the situation of the market, you need to run fast, and it's really, people really like the innovation side, like let's do cool stuff, especially with the AI.

A lot of the time people keep speaking with you with the wrong reasons. It's much more difficult to understand if they really care about what you are doing or because it's cool for them.
And you need to basically speak with a lot of enterprises and you know, separate the wheat from the chaff and basically understand what is the right feedback and the right way to go.

So, doing all of that in this pace can generate a lot of mistakes. Now, because of the current stage of the market, sometimes you don't see the mistakes.

Because like, I know back then, and maybe some people will not agree with me, but it was much harder to get to the first one million 10 years ago.

At least in my opinion, which was the ultimate, the ultimate like objective for everyone to say, “I got to one million therefore I have product market fit.” Today, I think that there is a lot of cases that you see a company get to the one million, but still don't have product market fit.

Deepak Jeevankumar (09:42)
Okay, So, the metrics and KPIs have definitely changed because of the noise in the market and people trying out many products just for the sake of innovation. That's good to know. So, let's talk a little bit more about scaling lessons from Claroty. Are there any specific leadership lessons that you learned you would say were very super positive that you are applying today, every day at Twine?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (10:10)
Yeah, I think the first one will be perspective. You know, it's like, want all the time to compare building company to raising a child. And we, guess all of us that have children, we know that in the first child, when every time there is any issue, we are going to the hospital or to the doctor and we are basically very nervous, like, I know, with my first child, I've been in the hospital, in the ER, know, three times in the first year. In the second one less. And the fourth one, I didn't do it.

When you're building a company and you're so much invested in it, every single moment sounds like very, very critical for you. Like, you have a POC or a bake off and you lose. And you take all of this very, very seriously and like the ups and downs—because of that is very difficult.
I think at the end, if you look about this in the perspective of being on the journey, you don't remember most of the problems. Like you remember the good stuff, the wins. And it's because there is like, they're not really define you. What really defines you is the way you're able to basically to fight and find the right path emotionally, taking everything in perspective, learn from every mistake, learn from everything that you're doing, but not take it too much to your heart. But keep pushing forward, I think is the most important thing.

Where in the second thing, of course, I think everyone speaks about it, about the teams, right? At the end, like, building a product, building a company, it's a team effort and you must have the right team around you. You must have a great team that supports you and build a product and build it with you. So, that people around you. And if I double click on that, I think what is important, as well which is less spoken about as a founder is that you must have around you someone that you 100 % trust in the specific categories. It's not about, of course you have a lot of people and everyone’s good and bad in different things, but you need to have, because you're so busy and you have so many different things that you need to do.

You need to know that if there is a crisis in an area that you cannot handle because unfortunately sometimes you cannot handle it because you are busy in other crisis, there is the go-to guy for this specific area that can edit it for you. And you trust him 100 % to do it. So, yes, you need to build a big team, a strong team that are basically winners and excellent, but you also need to find the individuals that you really, trust and are the go-to guy in the day-to-day crisis.
Deepak Jeevankumar (13:26)
Yeah, I think that's a very good insight. So, maybe a trick question now. Are there any things that you learned that you want to leave behind, given the times have changed?
Benny Porat | Twine Security (13:40)
I leave behind You know, Claroty was a long journey, so, of course we did a lot of mistakes along the way and a lot of good stuff. I think I Think that overall it's very important when you’re building the company that I learned is that never make org structure decisions because of people. At the end, it never ends well. You need to first decide about what’s good for the company, what the company really needs, and then decide about the specific people.
Deepak Jeevankumar (14:56)
Okay, I'll do that, I'll do that. So, you just talked about how do you build a superstar and a talented team. So, I do know that many founders struggle with finding the right people with both the right scale and a cultural fit. So, what is your approach to do that?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (15:55)
First, I will say don't compromise. There is the number one thing. You must have great people and they must fit your culture. Otherwise, it will not work. If you compromise in culture, it's like basically we'll ruin the culture that you want for the company. If you compromise in skills, it'll one, ruin the culture, but it's also, ruining the overall feeling of the company.

Because at the end, I think about, you can think about a company like a party. Okay, and basically you want everyone outside the company looking at this party and wanting to join the party. Very simple. So, don't compromise, just take people that increase the party. Second, look for the stars. Look for this type of people that you know that if you will be able to take them, they will bring with them after them great people that will fit your culture and your environments. So, this is basically what we used all the way because at the end, great people attract great people.

And you mentioned fun, So, of course, fun happens when people feel connected and people feel they are winning. So, basically this is what we need to do. need to make sure that you are, make sure that you connect your people to the mission, understand what they need to do, understand what the company want to achieve, and how they are able to affect that. And make sure that you win so they will have fun.

Deepak Jeevankumar (19:12)
So, Benny, think how does a founder like yourself translate that into action? What are the tactics you use to source the right candidates?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (19:27)
Yeah. So, actually we invest a lot in developer programs like this, actually I call it the star program. And the idea is basically it's a lot of legwork and it's not just like, it's not about a posting that you are hiring or like speaking with people. It's about being very thorough and you know, source the right list. And actually we, we, we actually work about on this, like we are working on our sales pipeline when we basically leads and we are looking for the right candidates for the right area.

For example in Israel it's easy because you're looking for the best time from the specific unit in the army or a specific course that is in the army but also, it's working in other area like looking for very specific a good company that you really admire that have great people to look about their names and you're starting with look about names and starting to sort that but and the whole idea is that you create a long list of names

And of course, like when you're doing sales and reviewing your pipeline, you're not just going to reach all of them one by one because this will never work. What you need to do is to identify the right people around them. So, what we develop is what we call the STAR program, basically we are reviewing the list and we are looking about people that we know and we give a star for people that we know that we vouch for them.

And because you want to make sure that you have really qualified candidates, what you do is basically what we did was basically we're only trying to get people that got two stars in the qualification process.

So, two different people need to vouch for the same person in order for us to approach him. And of course, after these two people vouch for him, most of the chances they know him and have good relationship to him so, they can actually ask him. So, actually it's becoming a very, very warm lead and also, you know that he's a very good talent. But the only way you can do that is if you have a long list So, first you need to start with a long list source your candidate don't approach them find a way to rank them to basically understand who is the right people that you want to get and find the right way to get them warm and basically make them want to work with you.

And what it leads to you is actually it's changing the interview process because now all of a sudden, because I already vouched for them, I know they are great. Basically, when we are doing the process, it's not about interviewing them anymore. It's about selling to them. It's about making, find basically culture fit, making sure that we have a good chemistry between us. And also, understand what they really want to achieve and see how you can give it to them inside your company.
So, it's like a little different way to do all of this process.

Deepak Jeevankumar (22:24)
So, that is super insightful, Benny. So, maybe let's talk a little bit more about the market focus and the customer journey. So, one of the key challenges in early stage startups is how you actually build the right product and build a product company and not like... doing a project company where you're solving some temporary need for a customer. Of course you have done this before. So, tell us about like how you arrived at this idea and how many customers you've spoken to, what is the real need in the market and why do you believe that this can be a product company?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (23:22)
You asked a few different questions. I will try to answer them one by one. For us at Twine, we spoke before we actually started to develop, spoke with around 100 different CISOs. And yes.

Deepak Jeevankumar (23:24)
Wow, 100 different CISOs. How do you get access to all of the CISOs?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (23:40)
So, basically most of them are friends from previous companies. So, I know maybe it's not a good advice to everyone because most of people don't have the access. But yes, like for us, was basically getting to a lot of our friends, a lot of our previous customers and speak with them to understand their pain.

But it also, it was a lot of experience from before because we work with these kinds of for long time. And we saw the challenge firsthand. So, it was clear that the pain is real. The pain is real. It's really, really painful and everyone wants to solve it. I think the only challenge for us today is that people are too skeptical that someone is able to solve it. They are feeling this pain for so long. And yes, AI is coming to the picture and people want to believe it will help, but they are skeptical.

So, this is like around, I think the product, why there is a, it's a great opportunity and why there is a play to actually build something big. But you're asking a good question about like a project versus product, like how much is like basically customized to specific enterprise versus like it's a product company.

I think over here, what's worked for me really well is that in the past, and of course we are now in the early days in Twine, and hopefully I will prove it again that it's working, is that you must have a clear vision in your head about the core technology. And I'm saying in your head because it's a lot of the time very, very difficult to articulate it outside, but at least in your head you must have it all connected.

If you are getting requests from customers, so you're feeling different pain, and you are running to solve it for them. But in your head, you cannot really connect it with the core technology that you are building today, and it's completely two different products. It's a problem. Because then it's very difficult for startup to build one core technology that differentiates the market. Building more than one, it's probably not possible.

So, you must make sure that everything is attached, because then what's going to happen? You want to invest most of the resource on the core technology that will make all the features that you built for the customer better in time. So, in the early days, it's okay that it may be like, you do it really fast for specific customers, but then you want them to be able, this feature that you did specifically for the customer, you want it to be better while your product is evolving. If you are building features for company, for customers, that are independent and are not really attached to core technology, they will just bother you in the future. So, this is the important piece.

Now of course you can do small features. If there is very small thing that you need to be done, that customer really need to, So, you can do them, because you're investing lot of time on them. But most of the work need to be in the core technology or in area where the core technology will evolve it will affect them as well.

And if you have it in your mind, and to be honest, I found it very, very difficult in the early day to articulate it outside. And from the outside view, people all the time ask me in the cloud, like, how is this connected?
But you might add something and like, anytime explain it was a very long discussion to explain. It's still okay, but you need to have it in your mind at least, because usually you're the only one that can see the full picture as the founder of the company that can connect all the dots. But you must have it in your mind. If you don't have it your mind, you're in trouble.

Deepak Jeevankumar (27:39)
Okay, So, you mentioned at the beginning of this conversation, you're using agentic AI and all the developments in GenAI to solve cybersecurity problems, but you identity and IAM first. So, how did you arrive on that through this process?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (28:02)
Listen to the customers, very easy. Listen to the customer, actually, you know, when I started the process, was, like for my Claroty days, I was sure it's going to be a different discipline to start with. But after listening to CISOs, when asking the question that you, that you think that you know the answer, but you don't know the answer. So, ask them the question, what is the top priority? And when the answer, what is the top priority? Ask them why, what is it like deep down on this?

Because I think this is one of the things that I learned about product management overall. A lot of the time we are as vendors approaching company, approaching different petitioners and asking them questions like, what do you need? What is your pain? And we are assuming they are coming prepared. They did the warm-up and they know that we are going to ask them. And they are giving you the right answers. But most of the time you basically speak with a person that didn't know what you were going to speak with him about before the meeting, and he has his mind in a different place, and you basically tackle him with the question. And he's a very smart guy, So, he can come up with the answer, but he didn't give it a full thought about it.

So, if you just ask the question and take the answer for granted and just continue, it probably will not be the best answers. You really want to dig into with the customer and ask him why is this the pain and what is really the pain inside and give him the opportunity to take a back step back and say, “Wait, maybe this is not the biggest thing actually. It’s something else.”

Benny Porat | Twine Security (30:00)
So, it's really better to go deep inside the answers. And yes, So, basically we asked all the questions. It was really surprising for us that identity was clearly the number one. So, this is we start.

Deepak Jeevankumar (30:12)
Okay, that's great. So, congratulations now that Twine is out of stealth and you've announced your $12 million funding, which we're obviously very proud to be part of. So, what does success look for you in the next 12 months?

Benny Porat | Twine Security (30:26)
It's very simple. We have one clear and easy measure in the company. Basically, our only objective for the year is for Alex, our AI digital employee, to save 2,000 hours per week for our users. So, this what we need to achieve.

Deepak Jeevankumar (30:48)
Okay, So, you have a very strong KPI for your digital employee, Alex, which is your company's product. Man, that's a, we are entering a workforce where digital employees are going to be working side by side with human employees. So, let's fast forward like three years. What do you think Twine would have contributed to changing cybersecurity landscape.

Benny Porat | Twine Security (31:22)
So, you we mentioned three years. I'm not sure it will take three years, more or less. I don't know.
I really want to get to the stage where security leaders can define their strategy, understand the risk appetizer of the organization, define how they want to handle it, and don't need to be worried about executing it. And I really believe that they will be able to do it thanks to the Twine AI digital employees that we will build for

Deepak Jeevankumar (32:01)
Okay, that's a really very bold vision. we are cheering you and supporting you in this in executing this bold vision. And I'm sure you'll be super, super successful. So, thank you for partnering with Dell Technologies Capital. I'm going to ask one last question. Any other advice you have? One for founders and two for CISOs as they partner with early state startups.

Benny Porat | Twine Security (32:31)
Hmm.
For founders, the answer is, I think it's easy today, everyone speaks about it. It's resiliency or don't give up. At the end, this is what makes the success. So, maybe it's the most obvious one. And maybe everyone speaks about it already. But I think, of course, this is the most important. Just don't give up.

For CISOs, I think, at the end, in today’s market, when there is So, many different solutions and it's moving so fast, you really need to focus on your objective. In the last 10 years, what we see in cybersecurity is the vendor dictates the strategy for the enterprise. It should be the opposite. You as a CISO, you must stick to your objective, stick to what really bothers you, what you really want to achieve, and find the best way to use your tools to achieve them, and not let the tools dictate your cybersecurity program.

Deepak Jeevankumar (33:51)
That's fair advice. With that, thank you again for joining our podcast. We will be seeing you more on this podcast in the future. Thank you.

Benny Porat | Twine Security (34:01)
Great. Thank you for having me. It was great and I really appreciate all the help from DTC.

Deepak Jeevankumar (34:07)
Thank you.