"Category education is a long game with uncontrollable accelerants" | Ayal Yogev

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

How do you find your champions?

Ayal Yogev (0:01)

Ideally, the champion is somebody who can actually sign the contract, but also wants this and then wants to drive this. If you can get to the CISO being a champion, that's phenomenal. But again, the type of accounts we sell to, the CISO is usually so high up that it's usually somebody within their team. For us, I think it's one level down below the CISO, and you want to invest a lot in that relationship, really make sure that they're successful, that you see their point of view, what's going to make them happy and successful and reach their goals within the organization. We have three of the top ten banks' customers.

SPEAKER_1 (0:30)

How do you get those referrals?

Ayal Yogev (0:31)

We talked to more than 100 people in the bank. Just to land that first banking customer, you want to have a trusting relationship, you want them to get real value from your product. And once that exists, it becomes easier, and they want you to succeed. Your customer is making the intros, because sometimes they're not public references, they trust you, they like you enough to introduce you to their peers.

SPEAKER_1 (0:47)

I would guess you have strong pull from the government.

Ayal Yogev (0:50)

It was just...

SPEAKER_1 (0:54)

Yo, welcome back to the show.

Ayal Yogev (0:55)

Yo, thanks. Thanks for having me.

SPEAKER_1 (0:57)

Of course, it's been two and a half years since we last spoke. We had talked just after ChatGPD came out. So, excited to get into it. Before we do get into it, maybe just introduce the company quickly.

Ayal Yogev (1:06)

Sure. So, we're... My name is Anjuna Security.

We're essentially... We started as a confidential computing company. And what I mean by that is maybe like a 22nd intro, is it's one of the kind of the most well-known problems in security where if you use somebody else's infrastructure, let's say you run in somebody else's cloud, right? Like Amazon or Azure, or use somebody else's product, let's say you use, you know, ChatGPT or use Salesforce. Essentially, they have full access to your data on top of their within their product or on top of their infrastructure. And that is because even if you encrypt everything, you know, rest and in transit, the application needs to decrypt data to process it and adapt when the data is exposed. What happened in the industry was that the hardware vendors, so NVIDIA and Intel and AMD and Arm, added something called confidential computing to their silicon to basically protect code and data as they're being processed.

And what we've done is Anjuna is every time there's a fundamental shift like this in hardware architecture, you need a software stack to enable it, kind of like what VMware did to virtualization, right, or what CUDA is to GPUs. It's a software stack to make it easy to use. We've done that for confidential computing. And that was our kind of core product and core platform. We've actually now released a new product into the market to leverage that, to do essentially agentic governance, and to help secure agents, to make sure that AI agents do what you think they're going to do and not go rogue. I'm happy to talk about that some more, but this is what we do as a company.

SPEAKER_1 (2:37)

And in terms of confidential computing, did you have to educate the market on that topic or did everyone just understand that? If you said that was everyone, oh yeah, exactly.

Ayal Yogev (2:44)

No, no, we definitely had to. And I think that was a lot of the conversation we had last time. This was sort of a category creation type of a company where everybody understood the problem, but not a lot of people understood or even knew that there was a solution. So we, and there's a much better way of doing this, because the way people used to do it is either not move specific things to the cloud or not use specific solutions or put a lot of different, you know, solutions really didn't solve the problem, but reduce the risk around it. But now there's a much, much better solution. And a lot of what we did was to educate the market, to make sure people knew it exists and then I think is that we've had a lot of help from a lot of other people with bigger megaphones than us in the ecosystem. So the hardware vendors, the NVIDIA and Intel, and seeing Jensen's standing on stage at their conference and talk about confidential computing obviously helps a lot. And people pay a lot more attention to Jensen than to me.