The Spiro Circle

Manny Marotta has a theory about why America’s 250th birthday felt subdued. It isn’t purely politics, though politics is tangled up in it. It’s the structure. There are simply too many feeds now, and not enough shared ones. And the ones that do break through to the masses get read as political, whether they mean to be or not. I sat down this weekend with Manny for the second time. He’s the creator...

Jira tickets used to sit open for years. A medium-severity vulnerability, flagged by a routine scan, could be assigned to an engineer who had bigger fires to fight. It had largely been that way for years: patch the criticals, manage the highs, let the mediums age. When it came to CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures), a publicly available list of known cybersecurity flaws in software and har...

In the early days of Teramount, investors kept asking CEO Hesham Taha the same question. He had a platform that could connect chip to chip using light instead of electrons, considered a technical feat he and co-founder Avi Israel had spent years developing. But the problem, he recalled, was everything else. “We thought it was a great idea, see how easy we can connect the light to the chip. Everyon...

Everyone is talking about a water crisis brought on by AI use. But think of this: the data centers powering the AI economy are not built from code. They require concrete, steel, cranes, and the coordination of hundreds of subcontractors across millions of square feet of new floor space. And right now, the construction industry is struggling to keep up. Capital expenditure from the 14 largest publi...

Everyone is talking about the $90 billion M&A wave that hit the sector in 2025: Google’s $32 billion purchase of Wiz, Palo Alto Networks’ $25 billion buy of CyberArk. People love to talk about those, but almost nobody talks about how few companies can actually write those checks. Except Ofer Wolf. As Akamai’s SVP and General Manager of Enterprise Security, Wolf sits on the buy side today. But he g...

The robotaxi race has a winner’s podium that everyone can name. Waymo is expanding fast, with TechCrunch reporting that its fleet has now crossed 3,000 vehicles , completing over 500,000 trips per week across multiple U.S. cities. Tesla launched its robotaxi service in Austin. Chinese players like Baidu and WeRide are scaling aggressively at home, as well. But Igal Raichelgauz, CEO and founder of...

Every boardroom in the world is having the same conversation right now. A vendor pitches an AI product. Someone on the executive team then asks the question that has become the most disruptive five words in enterprise software: “Can’t we just build it?” Increasingly, the answer appears to be yes. The barrier to generating a working prototype has collapsed. With the right prompt and an afternoon wi...

Last week, I heard a number that should terrify every founder raising a Series A. Between 50% and 60% of Israeli tech startups that reach round A never make it to round B. Think of it: You’ve pitched, hustled, and convinced initial investors that your idea is worth betting on… yet statistically, you’re more likely to flame out before the next round than not. The reasons are messier than most found...

I’ll be honest: I entered into this most recent conversation for The Spiro Circle knowing almost nothing about quantum computing. I said as much to my guest, Itamar Sivan, co-founder and CEO of Quantum Machines, before we even started recording. That’s alright - most people don’t really understand it, he told me. Even scientists used to laugh at the idea that quantum computing would ever be commer...

Imagine the scene: A developer at a large financial institution merged a routine code update. Nothing alarming yet, just a minor change that, on its own, meant little. But Terra Security’s AI agents were watching. AI agents flagged the change, verified a potential vulnerability, and then did something a human penetration tester probably wouldn’t have done. They kept looking. Eventually, they found...

There’s a new security risk out there, and it’s come to be known as The Shadow AI Problem. It suggests that the next major corporate data breach may not come from a sophisticated nation-state actor or a phishing campaign, but rather from an employee asking an AI chatbot to read or summarize sensitive company data. That’s the reality Itamar Golan has spent the last two years building a company arou...

This isn’t the first time I’ve covered Israel’s foodtech sector. Back in 2022, reporting for CTech, I mapped the ecosystem at a moment of tension, when investment was holding up better than in any other tech vertical, but the skeptics remained. I was, and still am, bullish on Foodtech - at least at the start. I tasted 3D-printed burgers in Tel Aviv and called them “technically perfect, albeit crea...

Datarails CRO Aviv Canaani has an unusual vantage point. He runs the full revenue engine of the financial planning and analysis platform for Microsoft Excel users — sales, marketing, partnerships — from New Jersey, while his marketing team operates out of Israel. He relocated to be closer to the North American customer base as the marketers stayed put. And after years of sitting inside both ecosys...

Every few years, a new American administration arrives in the Middle East convinced it can start fresh. Trump’s team was no different. They came to the problem with a clean slate and nothing but the confidence of a New York real estate mogul. They produced two documents across both his terms: the January 2020 plan and the October 2025 twenty-point Gaza framework. The result, according to my guest...

As conflict dynamics shift across the Middle East, from disrupted shipping lanes to drone warfare, a new question is emerging: who controls the software behind autonomous systems? Military power used to depend on access to advanced weapons systems, often built through international supply chains and dominated by a handful of large contractors. Today, conflicts in Ukraine and Iran, and tensions wit...

I know better than anyone that there’s a version of Startup Nation that the world is perfectly happy to celebrate. The record exits, the Wiz acquisition - $15.6 billion raised in 2025, with exits totalling $74 billion. Those stories write themselves. I know that because I spent five years doing it, too. But the other story, the one about what it actually takes to keep a company’s messaging intact...

There is a record being broken in America right now, and almost nobody is talking about it. According to U.S. Census Bureau data , 5.48 million new businesses were formed in 2023 — the highest annual total ever recorded. That number has barely dipped since, running at over 5.1 million annually through 2025, a figure that represents a near-50% increase on the pre-pandemic baseline. February 2026 al...

The last two years in AI have been disorienting. Every week brought a new model, a new product launch announced on X, and a new reason to reconsider assumptions that felt settled only months before. For startups trying to keep up, the experience has been less like riding a wave and more like trying to read a map while the terrain keeps shifting beneath you. It was something I discussed on another...

Lior Yogev says he’s barely been home in three months. The FundGuard CEO and co-founder has spent the better part of the year in client meetings, and the conversation at every stop has been a variation of the same thing. “Everybody is now thinking, how do we remodel how we’ve worked over the last 30 years?” The forcing function is agentic AI and the shift toward autonomous systems capable of takin...

When the US and Israel launched Operation Epic Fury, the opening moves were not B-2 bombers or Tomahawk missiles. Before the first strike aircraft crossed into Iranian airspace, Iran’s radars had already been blinded, its command-and-control links severed, its communications networks dismantled. Within this context, one Israeli startup has spent four years building the communications infrastructur...

We were told never to get into a stranger’s car. Yet millions of us do it every day. The rules most people grew up with (“don’t talk to strangers online”, “never open the door to someone you don’t know”) have been dismantled by the platforms we now use without thinking. Sharing economy platforms like Uber, Airbnb, Amazon Marketplace, and DoorDash run entirely on the assumption that strangers can b...

I’ve written extensively about Europe and its tech sector for many years. For some, it seems slow, stagnant, and tied up in regulatory bureaucracy. For others, it is a champion in responsible data protection and privacy laws that spread across the world. Either way, the continent should not be disregarded when we discuss tech ecosystems and innovation coming from startups and large corporations. T...

The joint US-Israeli operation against Iran — the most significant military collaboration between the two countries in modern history — validated a thesis that Protego Ventures had been building since October 7, 2023. The fund, one of the first in Israel to explicitly target defensetech, had already placed bets on the idea that the US-Israel alliance was evolving from a diplomatic relationship int...

Every time Anthropic drops a product update on X, a startup somewhere dies. That’s the sentiment across the startup world right now. Claude can do new things each week that were once considered core products of companies, not just simple feature additions. Each week, founders watch their whole business become a footnote, and the post-mortems begin. I recently spoke to Eyal Fisher, co-founder and C...

When fans walk into Wembley Stadium or Wimbledon, they see the show - but what they don’t see is everything underneath it: An ‘invisible’ workforce working hard in unison, powering the global experience economy to make sure the event is running seamlessly. “In order to make an experience… it can be thousands of workers,” Omri Dekalo explained. The hidden infrastructure behind modern events is a fr...