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Highlights

Thank you for the detailed guidelines and example. Based on the podcast transcript, I’ll write a long-form article focusing on Ayal’s GTM journey and category creation strategy, incorporating the Animalz writing principles.

Creating Infrastructure’s Next Category: How Anjuna’s Founder is Redefining Cloud Security

Most founders dream of creating a new category. Few succeed. Even fewer manage to create one that fundamentally changes how enterprises approach infrastructure security. But in a recent episode of Category Visionaries, Anjuna CEO Ayal Yogev shared how his company is doing exactly that by taking an unconventional approach: selling security through the CIO’s office.

“What was surprising to me is that we end up talking to the CIO or the infrastructure team and not necessarily to the security team,” Ayal explains. This counterintuitive go-to-market strategy has enabled Anjuna to quadruple revenue annually while closing deals with major banks in just six months – lightning fast for enterprise sales cycles.

The secret? Rather than positioning confidential computing as another security tool, Anjuna frames it as an infrastructure enabler that unlocks new possibilities. As Ayal notes, “Security is an enabler. If you build security the right way, then you can do things that you just couldn’t do before.”

This positioning stems from Ayal’s realization that traditional security approaches merely treat symptoms rather than the root cause. “When you kind of peel the layers of the onion of 80% of security problems, you get to that same root cause, which is once somebody gets access to your infrastructure, it’s game over.”

But building a new category isn’t just about having revolutionary technology. It requires carefully orchestrating market education and validation. Ayal describes the delicate balance required: “There’s sort of like a chicken and egg type of saying because they’re not going to talk to you or take you seriously until they hear enough about it from customers. But then there’s some customers who are not going to buy or talk to you unless they hear about it from Gartner and Forrester.”

Anjuna’s approach to this challenge has been to leverage industry tailwinds. “When Microsoft is talking about this and Amazon is talking about this and Google Cloud is talking about this and Intel and AMD and Nvidia, it all essentially helps us because customers are looking for way to leverage this.”

This strategy creates unique sales challenges. Unlike selling into existing categories with predetermined budgets, Anjuna must convince enterprises to create entirely new budget lines. “If you’re doing something slightly better, faster, cheaper, then you kind of walk in and there’s a budget aligned,” Ayal explains. “But for usually we walk in and there’s no budget allocated for confidential computing. We have to kind of go and convince people say that there’s this new thing, but it is going to make everything easier for you.”

The parallels to VMware’s early days aren’t lost on Ayal. “VMware is a great example… I’m seeing a lot of similarities, kind of what we’re going through and what VMware went through in their early days.” Just as VMware made virtualization accessible and eventually ubiquitous, Anjuna aims to do the same for confidential computing.

This vision requires maintaining a delicate balance between technical innovation and market education. Ayal notes they have “let’s say two years lead on the technology side” but emphasizes that “a lot of it now is about go-to-market execution.”

The goal isn’t just widespread adoption – it’s becoming the de facto standard for confidential computing. As Ayal puts it, “Anybody that wants to use confidential computing knows that Anjuna is the platform to go do that. That’s the best way to leverage this new category.”

For technical founders considering category creation, Ayal’s experience offers a crucial lesson: sometimes the path to success means selling to unexpected buyers and positioning revolutionary technology in evolutionary terms. It’s not just about building something new – it’s about making that innovation accessible and valuable to enterprises in ways they can understand and embrace.

Through this strategic approach to category creation, Anjuna isn’t just building a company – they’re reshaping how enterprises think about infrastructure security. For founders looking to create their own categories, that might be the most valuable lesson of all.