The following interview is a conversation we had with Ayal Yogev, CEO and Co-Founder of Anjuna, on our podcast Category Visionaries. You can view the full episode here: $42 Million to Build The Future of Confidential Computing

Ayal Yogev
Thanks, Brad. Thanks for having me. 

Brett
Yeah, no problem. So, before we get talking about what you’re building, can we start with just a quick summary of who you are and maybe a bit more about your background? 

Ayal Yogev
Sure. So, as a background is born and raised in Israel, I spent the last 25 years in the searching the enterprise security space. I started my current unit, 8200, which is the Israel equivalent of the NSA, and then I moved to the private sector and spent most of my career in the private sector doing product management in enterprise security companies. I was at Imperva for the three years leading up to the IPO lookout, which is a mobile security company. I ran the umbrella product management team at OpenDNs, and after Cisco acquired us, I ran what was the umbrella product management team, which was essentially the cloud security solution for Cisco. And I ran that product team. And after a couple of years at Cisco, I moved to a company called safe breach to be their vp of product. 

Ayal Yogev
So my background is basically enterprise, always been enterprise security and mostly product related roles. 

Brett
Very cool. And we’ve had a lot of founders on the podcast that are from Israel and they were in Israel and military. And the question we like to always ask is, what was the number one life lesson or business lesson that you took away from your time in the military? 

Ayal Yogev
So for me, the big lesson, and it’s related to kind of where I was in the military, is everything is possible. Basically, if you want to achieve something, if you want something to get done, you just need to find a way to make it happen and anything is possible. 

Brett
Nice. I love that. And I’m sure that helps as you continue to build this company, which we’ll talk about further in a second. But two questions we like to ask before we dive into the company. What CEO do you admire the most and what have you learned from them and what do you admire most about them? 

Ayal Yogev
Yeah, it’s a great question. So I have two that come to mind, and I kind of admire them for different reasons. And if it’s okay, I’ll name two. So one is Satya from Microsoft. And what I really admire about him is that I think he actually completely transformed Microsoft. And it was sort of amazing to see that. And what was really amazing is that he took all these sort of things Microsoft kind of took for granted. This was like the basis of what Microsoft thought about things. So they were kind of said no to the cloud and they said no to open source. And there’s a bunch of things that Microsoft was kind of known for, and that was what was holding the company back. 

Ayal Yogev
And Satya just came and kind of rethought everything from scratch and that was able to completely transform the company. So that was extremely impressive to me. And the other one, which I know is a little bit more controversial, is Mark Zuckerberg. And what I love about him is that we’ve seen all these extremely successful founder ceos who I think very few people on the planet were able to become a sort of founder CEO of a company and take it to obviously the size that Zuckerberg took the company and remained the CEO of the company from a startup to a very large company. But also, what’s even more impressive to me with Zuckerberg is that you kind of see all these sort know. 

Ayal Yogev
I don’t know if it’s scandals, but things that these people get involved in, they kind of lose touch with reality along the way. And the fact that know still married to his know from back in the know, raising a like, it’s just phenomenal to see how he was able to kind of stay very grounded going throughout that extremely insane journey he’s been on. 

Brett
Yeah, that’s such a good call out. And I’m always surprised with the amount of hate that people have for Mark Zuckerberg, especially people who are entrepreneurs or founders in the tech world. I think if you look at Zuckerberg and all you can think about are things that he’s done wrong or things to criticize him on, it’s really dumb because you’re missing out on a really amazing story there and he’s just done such an incredible job. The facts speak for themselves when you look at Facebook as a company and as an organization for what they’ve done. 

Ayal Yogev
Yeah, couldn’t agree more. 

Brett
Now let’s switch gears and let’s dive right into the company and what you’re building so can you start with the origin story? 

Ayal Yogev
Sure. So I talked a little bit about my background. So I’ve always been in security. And while I was at my roles in the VPA product at shape Reach, reconnected with my co founder, Jan Mikalevsky. And I’ve known yan for over 20 years, since we’re both in the israeli intelligence. And he took a different path. He went into engineering leadership, and eventually went to Stanford to get his phd. And he got a phd with Professor Den Bonet, who was one of the top cryptographers on the planet. And that’s where he ran into the concept of confidential computing. And he got super excited by what that means and sort of the implications it could have. And he reached out to me, and I got super excited as well, essentially for two reasons. 

Ayal Yogev
One is I’ve been in security for a long time, and 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. They just have access to everything that you do. And a lot of what the security industry is about is how do you make sure that never happens? Or if it does happen, how do you know that it happened? And finally, there was a solution to this problem, a solution that even if they do get root access, even if they get full access to your infrastructure, they just can’t get any access to your data. And that was super exciting for me, because, again, it can really transform the security industry as a whole. 

Ayal Yogev
And the other thing that got me even more excited is what I love about security in general. And I think that’s the right way to look at security, is that security is an enabler. If you build security the right way, then you can do things that you just couldn’t do before. And I’ll give you, the entire banking industry wouldn’t exist if we couldn’t trust banks to keep our money safe. Right? You need that layer of trust and security to be able to bid things on top of it. And this is computational computing is such a fundamental change in how we do things that it was going to change the world of compute. It essentially enables us to put data and code in any environment. And that was such a big shift. 

Ayal Yogev
And the possibilities was just so endless that I said I had to be a part of this. I left my job at safe breach to go start the company with yarn. 

Brett
And was that scary for you to make that jump? Or what was your state of mind as you made that. And what did you talk about with your wife? And I think you mentioned you have kids now. What were those conversations like? 

Ayal Yogev
No, you’re touching on a very good point, which is starting company is definitely scary, and it’s definitely on the financial side. I was married, I had two very young kids when I was starting the company. So it was definitely a know leap to take both on the financial side, but know in terms of how much time you have to commit to know. You need a very supporting spouse to go do something like this, especially if you have kids. But to me it’s funny, I’ve heard Bezos talk about this and why he started Amazon, and this is exactly why I started the company. I was kind of looking at this and said, this is something that excites me so much, and I always knew I wanted to start a company someday. 

Ayal Yogev
I don’t want to look back when I’m 60 or 65 and regret not doing this. So I think I would regret much more not doing this, looking back than if I did this and it failed miserably. And we’ve had a year with no selling. To me, it was just something that I knew would regret not doing. And that was kind of what kind of pushed me over the edge. 

Brett
Nice. That’s super interesting to hear, and I think that’s helpful for others who are listening in, who are maybe in technical roles and considering starting a company. So always really nice to have that perspective. Now, something else I wanted to ask you about. Can you just explain to us what confidential computing is? I feel like that’s a term that I’m seeing used now a lot more or more often, I should say, and if you can just walk us through what that is and how it works, that would be awesome. 

Ayal Yogev
Sure. It goes back to kind of what I’ve talked about, which was when somebody gets access to the infrastructure, especially root access, they just have access to everything happening on that infrastructure. And essentially the reason why that is that when an application needs to process data, it has to decrypt it and load it into memory to process it. And at that point, if somebody has access to the infrastructure, they can just look inside the memory and get access to the data. What sort of happened was that the cpu vendors, so intel, AMD, Nvidia arm, have added something into the chipset to finally solve that problem, to basically make sure that even if you do have full access, physical or root access to a machine, you’re not going to be able to look at that data and essentially have access to the data. Being processed. 

Ayal Yogev
And that is essentially what confidential computing is. How do you compute things in a confidential way without anybody with any type of access being able to see your data? Actually, let me tell you kind of a quick story on how it started, because I think it’s just a super interesting one, but it actually started on the phones. And I don’t know if you ever thought about what happens if you lose your mobile device. You have biometric data on the phone, your fingerprint or Face ID, which is obviously super sensitive. And a mobile device is something that can get lost pretty easily. 

Ayal Yogev
And the short answer is that you don’t have to worry about this, because Apple was the first, but then all the other companies followed suit, is that they’re using a confidential computing environment that was added in the arm chipset, something called trust zone, to make sure that even if you do lose your phone and somebody gets physical access to it, they’re not going to be able to break into that environment and steal your biometric data. And that’s essentially how it started. And then all the cpu vendors realized very quickly, this is going to be even more powerful on the server side, because that’s where enterprises keep their sensitive data at a very high level. This has been a shift in sort of computing architecture, right? 

Ayal Yogev
And every time there’s a shift in computing architecture, you need a software stack on top of it to essentially enable it, to make it easy to use this new computing architecture and to make it look the same across the different hardware solutions. The biggest example of this was virtualization, and what VMware has done. Again, virtualization was this change in computer architecture. It allowed you to utilize servers better instead of before VMware. We had 10% utilization of servers in the data center. And cpu vendors added the ability to virtualize, to create these virtual machines, to create better utilization. But nobody was really using it because it meant rewriting everything from scratch, and nobody was going to do that. And what Zmore did was build a software stack to make it super simple, to virtualize anything. And within a few years, everything was virtualized. 

Ayal Yogev
I think there’s almost no workloads running in an unvirtualized environment today. And we do the same for continental computing. It’s a huge shift in computer architecture. It provides a lot of value, but it’s extremely difficult for organizations to go and rebuild everything to go use it. And what we’ve done is build a software stack to make it super simple to run anything in confidential computing. 

Brett
Got it. Interesting. That makes a lot of sense. So who are the actual target customers, then is it the computing companies themselves, or who’s paying you, and who are your customers? Or what are examples of your customers today? 

Ayal Yogev
We essentially have two types of customers. One is essentially g 2000, so large global 2000s that need to use this to. The number one use case with them is to move sensitive workloads or sensitive data to the cloud. For example, we’re working with a very large bank to move PII data, private information, private customer information, to the cloud for the first time. So these are the type of use cases that we have. And then the other type of customers that we have are isvs, software vendors, or mostly SaaS companies. And the reason they’re using us is that they get, as part of the security review that they go through with their customers, is they get a question which is, are you going to have access to my data within your platform? 

Ayal Yogev
And today they have to be on their back foot trying to kind of answer and kind of sell around that question, because, of course, they have access to customer data within their platform. But when they use our solution, or when you use confidential computing, the answer to that becomes no, we don’t have any access to your data within our platform, and none of our employees have any access to your data. And that actually becomes a competitive advantage for them compared to their competitors. 

Brett
Fascinating. And what type of traction are you seeing and adoption are you seeing? Are there any numbers or metrics that you can share? 

Ayal Yogev
Yeah, I can tell you that we’re growing extremely fast. We’re about to quadrupling every year now, which is pretty phenomenal to see. And what was really surprising to me is just how fast extremely large organizations can move because of the value that it brings them. And we’ve closed deals with very large banks within a six month cycle, which is extremely fast compared to how these banks tend to move. And we are also getting extremely high within those banks. One of the banks we’ve gotten to board level visibility just because of what this enables you to do. This is such a fun. It’s not just a security solution that allows you to reduce the risk a little bit. This essentially enables you to do things that you just couldn’t before. So, again, moving, embracing the cloud in a much stronger way. 

Ayal Yogev
We’re moving to new geographies, so we’re getting very high level visibility, which is also very exciting for me to see. 

Brett
And what do you attribute to that success of being in a position to quadruple every year and experience that type of growth? What do you think you’ve gotten right, because this space does have a lot of noise or just in general, I think cybersecurity does have a lot of noise in the market today. 

Ayal Yogev
I guess, interestingly enough, I grew up in security, so I thought about us sort of as a security solution. But the way the customers are looking at us is not as a security solution, but more of as an infrastructure solution. 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. This sort of becomes a way to, again, to make security as an enabler rather than a sort of a risk reduction or blocker. And the reason why we’re seeing this, again, we’re not know compared to other security solutions, again, we sell to the infrastructure and the CIO organization. I think that’s been extremely helpful. And the other thing is that we’re getting a lot of tailwinds from the public cloud and from the cpu vendors that are doing this. 

Ayal Yogev
There’s just a lot know 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. And this is an amazing solution, what the cpu vendors have built. But then when people want to start using this, they essentially have a choice, either they go rebuild every application or they go use our platform. And the fact that all these very large companies are talking about this and they’re talking to their customers about this has been extremely helpful to us. 

Brett
That makes a lot of sense. And what about market categories? What are your views when it comes to the market category that you’re in? 

Ayal Yogev
There’s one book that I always mentioned that when people talk about business books, and it’s a book called play bigger. I don’t know if you’ve read that book and it talks about category creation, and I think that’s exactly what we’re doing. Like I read this book and I said, well, this is exactly what we’re doing. This is exactly the same challenges we’re facing, but also the same potential outcome. And we’re essentially creating a new category. I think confidential computing in general is a new category that’s being created right now. And to me, the category creation piece is about teaching the world that there is sort of a new, better way of doing things. 

Ayal Yogev
And to me, I share that a lot of security is about these almost like band aid solutions to try to mitigate the risk of the core problem of somebody having access to the infrastructure has access to everything. This solves the core problem. So basically you don’t necessarily need all those sort of band aid solutions that people have been using so far. There’s a new, better way of doing things. And to me that’s sort of the definition of a new category. So again, that’s, I think, you know, VMware is a great example of know which I think we’re kind of doing. I’m seeing a lot of similarities, kind of what we’re going through and what VMware went through in their early days. I think to some extent salesforce is another category creator. Right. They kind of taught the world that SaaS made sense. 

Ayal Yogev
SaaS makes more sense in software for solutions like these. And again, we’re going down that same path of convincing people there’s a better way of doing things. 

Brett
Yeah, we do a lot of work in category creation and study it a lot, and it certainly sounds like that’s the opportunity here. I think what’s unique about your company and everything that you’ve described here is there’s already this shift that’s underway and it truly is a different approach to solving this problem in a different way of doing things. A lot of the companies that I see out there who are trying to create categories, they’re just essentially doing what the old category has always done in a slightly different or slightly better way. But their market message is really just all about being better, faster, cheaper, which is very difficult to stand out. Whereas it looks like for you it’s completely different. It’s a totally different way of approaching things. So I’m guessing that helps your category creation efforts a lot. 

Ayal Yogev
It definitely is. And there’s pros and cons to that approach. Right. If you’re doing something slightly better, faster, cheaper, then you kind of walk in and there’s a budget aligned. Right. And you can sort of need to convince people why to buy your product versus the competitor’s product. 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. It’s going to enable things that you weren’t able to do before. Once they kind of realize the value, then it becomes again, it becomes conversation with very senior people very quickly and it’s just a great conversation to have without all the possibilities this opens up. 

 

Ayal Yogev
But it is a much more difficult sell cycle than just walking into a category that’s already there and that the budget is approved. Exactly. You need to talk to. The messaging has already been defined. It’s a very different type of a journey that we’re on, but it’s also more exciting, at least for me. 

Brett
Yeah, I think that’s the downside of books like play bigger is it makes category creation sound so cool and sexy and amazing, but it doesn’t really talk that much about the downsides and the risks. Like you were saying, it’s difficult to convince someone to create a totally new line item for something they didn’t know that they previously existed, especially in this insane environment that we’re in right now. So that makes a lot of sense. So another follow up question on that then, for you. On day one or from day one, was it clear that it was going to be a category creation play, or did that naturally just kind of happen organically as you started to bring this to market? 

Ayal Yogev
That’s a great question. I haven’t thought about this. I can tell you when I play bigger, and this was probably a few years into, a couple of years into the journey, just everything sort of clicked for me. So I didn’t even think about things in sort of a category creation type of a thing. But I remember looking at, there’s all these sort of category maps, especially in enterprise security, and I remember looking at the map and trying to kind of figure where we fit. Where we fit. And I really couldn’t. I said, we can fit here, but we also fit here, and we also fit here. We’re going to impact this. And it was just very clear to me that this was going to be very impactful, but it was hard to kind of place us in kind of an existing category. 

Ayal Yogev
So again, obviously, later, when I kind of had the right, almost like the right terms to talk about this, everything sort of clicked. But in the beginning, I didn’t even think about it in those terms, if that makes sense. 

Brett
Yeah, that makes complete sense. Somewhat controversial question, then, just in the discipline of category design, I see a lot of people debating this. What are your views on the importance of analysts in your efforts to create this category? Do you view that as mission critical to get Gartner and Forrester on board, or is this something that can happen outside of Gartner and it doesn’t matter if they end up running with this category? 

Ayal Yogev
Well, I definitely think the Gartner and Forrester and the analysts do have a role to play. They were extremely important role to play in the ecosystem. And also the Gartner and enforcer, they kind of tend to name categories, right? Like when you create a new category, eventually the people that eventually kind of give it the stamp and then kind of name it are usually Gartner enforcer or companies, other analyst firms. And they’re definitely talking to the market or talking to customers. But there’s sort of like a chicken and egg type of a 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 Garner and Forrester. 

Ayal Yogev
So it’s always like this balance of talking to customers, getting customers excited, and having them talk to Garner and Forrester, or have customers kind of hear about this and ask, go ask Gardner and Forrester about a solution. And then you talking to the analysts, getting their feedback and advice because they’re getting very close to the market, but also sort of explaining to them what you do and what you’re seeing in the market as well. And it’s always this balance. Again, I think they have a very important role to play in the ecosystem, but you kind of have to do it in the right way, the right time. If you kind of go with an idea and like a very early product with no customers to Garden Forester, they’re not going to be that helpful to you. 

Brett
Makes a lot of sense, and that’s very helpful advice. Now, let’s talk about challenges. So as you brought this platform to market, what would you say has been your single greatest challenge and how did you overcome it? 

Ayal Yogev
Yeah, there’s been a lot of challenges across a lot of different things, I’d say personally. And again, maybe this is kind of taking this to a different direction that your question was intend to. But to me, the most difficult thing is, again, it’s extremely difficult and extremely hard being a founder and especially a founder CEO. And you kind of own the full thing, right? The buck kind of sort of stops the new. And to me, that’s always been one of the biggest challenges. It’s a very lonely job, right? There’s very few people that you can just very few people you can talk to or you can need to build yourself a support system of people you can talk to, I guess is a better way of talking about this. But I never used to kind of wake up at 04:00 a.m. 

Ayal Yogev
Thinking about work before I started the company. And it does happen to me now. I think this has always been sort of the biggest challenge. It’s funny, I read this super interesting, super funny tweet that somebody wrote online. I forget who it was, but they said that they had trouble sleeping, and they tried all these sort of things like complete darkness and trying to meditate before going to bed and no screens and all these melatonin and all these different things. And what eventually helped me is to stop being the feel of my company. 

Brett
I think there was a Ben Hort quote around that, too, right? Of like, he sleeps like a baby every night and he wakes up at 02:00 a.m.. 

Ayal Yogev
Exactly. 

Brett
Yeah, that certainly seems to be the case with a lot of the founders that we bring on. And it’s nice to hear you talk about the challenges from your perspective as a CEO, as opposed to just like a go to market challenge or something along those lines. One follow up question then, based on that, how did you go about building that network of, is it your peers, is it other ceos that you’re very close with to talk about some of these unique challenges in a safe space, or what have you done to overcome that challenge? 

Ayal Yogev
Yeah. So to me, it’s a combination of two things. One is my wife, which is, she’s amazing. She’s been extremely supportive throughout this journey, and she’s sort of to be the go to person that I can go talk to about anything. And I know she’s 100% on my side, wanting what’s best for me personally, which is great. But on top of that, it’s been other founder ceos of companies and other roughly the same stage, or that are a stage or two ahead of me that’s been extremely meaningful to go talk to them and then just other advisors. Some of my investors, some investors, not my investors, but have been advisors to me, it’s just been phenomenal to have sort of a group of people that you can go talk to. 

Ayal Yogev
Where I learned this a lot was early on went through Y combinator, and what was really amazing about Y combinator is that’s essentially a group of founders that are all working in different companies, but they’re all roughly in the same stage. And the fact that you have essentially a peer group that you can go talk to and get advice, and none of them are sort of in the weeds of your company, but they’re roughly going through the same challenge as you are. And it’s just great to have a group of people you can go talk to and get advice. And some of them probably gone through this. Some, again, they’re a group of very smart people that can give you very good advice, even if they haven’t gone through this. 

Ayal Yogev
And I’ve been through a bunch of these sort of founder CEO type of groups, and it’s always been extremely valuable. So I now have a bunch of these peer groups that I’m part of, and that’s also extremely helpful. And this is one of my recommendations to people is find that peer group that you can go talk to and get advice from. 

Brett
And is this like a formalized peer group for you? Like, do you meet once a month at the same spot and run the same questions? Is it a slack group? Is it a text? Like, how formalized is that for you? 

Ayal Yogev
So the ones I’m in is like a WhatsApp group. One is a group that we actually do meet every, it’s not every month, but let’s say it’s roughly every quarter or so that we get together and meet and talk about things twice a year. It’s like an off site retreat where you kind of go away for the weekend and talk about multiple things. And then with some of the people, I created an even stronger personal relationship where we just chat and I can just call them every time I have something that, some big question that comes up or something that I’m not sure how to handle, and I can just call them and get their advice and thoughts about something. And this has been extremely helpful. 

Brett
Nice. That’s amazing. I can see how that would be very impactful. Last question here for you before we wrap. So let’s zoom out into the future three years from today. What’s the company look like? 

Ayal Yogev
Essentially? I think we’re looking at the company. We’re sort of following VMware footsteps to some extent and some of the things that we do. So essentially the way I look at this is we build this pretty amazing platform and we have a, let’s say two years lead on the technology side, looking at other competitors that are not trying to follow us. To me, a lot of it now is about go to market execution. And that’s the phase I’m working on now is essentially getting as many customers as possible, even with sort of a small landing use case, because once you’re an infrastructure solution, customers are not going to use multiple infrastructure solutions for things. So I’m essentially looking to kind of grow that footprint as well as grow. We have a partnership with AWS, we have a partnership with Azure. 

Ayal Yogev
So I’m growing these partnerships with the public cloud. And to me, that’s essentially where we’re going to be in a few years. We’re becoming sort of the default for confidential computing. And 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. 

Brett
Amazing. Well, unfortunately, that’s all we’re going to have time to cover for today’s interview before we wrap up. If people want to follow on with your journey as you continue to build, where’s the best place for them to go? 

Ayal Yogev
So obviously, they obviously can come to our website on Juno IO. In terms of my personal journey, I do these podcasts every now and again, but I don’t have any sort of blog or anything that I can’t talk about the journey. But you can. Always happy to connect to people. You can ping me over on LinkedIn or my email, which is essentially my first name at Anjuna IO, and always happy to connect with people and especially any entrepreneurs that want advice or help. I’m always excited to give back. So many people helped me throughout my journey. I’m always happy to give back and help people that are getting started. 

Brett
Amazing. Hopefully you don’t get too much spam for saying that. We appreciate you coming on. Thanks for talking about what you’re building and the vision here. This is all super exciting and it’s been super informational and I’ve learned a lot from this. So let’s keep in touch and we wish you best of luck in executing on this vision. 

Ayal Yogev
Thank you. Thanks for having me. 

Brett
All right, keep in touch. Close.