Notable Perspectives

Idan Tendler is the Senior Vice President of Application Security at Palo Alto Networks, as well as the chairman and co-founder of Place-IL, a nonprofit tech initiative. Idan discusses his previous cybersecurity analytics startup, Fortscale (later acquired by RSA Security), and some key lessons he learned from his experience building the company. Before Fortscale, Idan founded Bridgecrew, a compan...

Rich Waldron is the CEO and co-founder of Tray.io, a company he founded with his two best friends. This is the second time we're talking to Rich on Founder Real Talk, make sure to check out his episode from 2019! Software has been around for a long time, and in many different forms. On the waves of cloud adoption and digital transformation, it's more important than ever for companies to...

Kishore Gopalakrishna, co-founder and CEO of StarTree, created a solution to a database problem with his co-worker and eventual co-founder Xiang Fu while working at LinkedIn. At the time, LinkedIn was debuting its now-popular feature called Who's Viewed Your Profile, which required the ability to slice and dice massive amounts of data in real time. Kishore and Xiang developed what they called...

Sid Sijbrandij is the CEO of GitLab Inc., the one DevOps platform that allows teams to collaborate, create, and deliver software in a single application. Before founding GitLab Inc. in 2012, he worked on recreational submarines and taught himself to code, going on to work at the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security, where he did version control software around lawmaking. GitLab Inc. was founded...

Nikita Shamgunov is the CEO of Neon, a new company building the next generation serverless Postgres database. Nikita got his PhD in St. Petersburg and worked as an engineer at Microsoft and Facebook before going on to co-found SingleStore, an analytical database company. At SingleStore, Nikita realized the massive size of the transaction databases market and the ubiquity of Postgres, the popular o...

Ryan Johson is the co-founder and CEO of Culdesac, which is working to build the first car-free city in the United States. After turning down M.I.T. and dropping out of Harvard, he chose to learn from the executives at Opendoor before co-founding Culdesac in 2018. Ryan has traveled to over 60 countries, but after visiting pedestrian and cyclist-friendly cities like Budapest and Amsterdam, Ryan was...

Bruce Felt is the CFO of Domo and a long-time friend of GGV Capital with a history that predates SaaS since he founded Renaissance Software in the late 1980s. With a well-rounded experience in finance, Bruce became the CFO for six companies, taking them through IPOs or M&As before bringing his expertise to the Domo team in 2014. Bruce faced his biggest challenge during his time as the CFO of S...

Steve Harvey is the CEO of BitSight, the cyber security platform used by nearly a quarter of the Fortune 500 companies and multiple government agencies around the world. With a background in risk assessment, Steve spent 13 years at the Institutional Shareholder Services (ISS) and became the CEO of BitSight in 2020, just before the COVID-19 pandemic. Because so many businesses were forced to go dig...

Zeev Farbman is the Co-Founder and CEO of Lightricks, which puts high-quality video and editing apps into the hands of average mobile phone users. Zeev immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union at the age of 12 and would go on to meet his future co-founders during his military service. He pursued a degree in computer science at the Hebrew University with the plan of becoming a tenured prof...

Guillermo Rauch is the Founder and CEO of Vercel, a cloud platform provider used to develop, preview, and ship frontend websites and applications using their Next.js open-source framework. Originally from Argentina, Guillermo taught himself JavaScript at just eleven years old and has developed multiple open-source libraries since then. He would go on to co-found LearnBoost and Cloudup, both of whi...

Matan Bar is the Co-Founder and CEO of Melio, the B2B online payment service that allows small businesses to manage payments and receivables digitally. While consumers have been using peer-to-peer payment services for years, many small businesses were still sending checks in the mail, waiting days or even weeks for payments to go through. Now, Melio helps save precious time while increasing cash f...

Tomer Weingarten is the Co-Founder and CEO of SentinelOne, an autonomous endpoint security platform with over 6,000 customers worldwide. SentinelOne prevents cyberattacks in real-time using AI and machine automation and helps companies adopt new technologies while staying protected. Before founding SentinelOne, Tomer worked as a software developer and founded multiple companies. SentinelOne now ha...

In this 15 minute salon episode, Sarika Garg, Co-founder & CEO of Cacheflow, shares why she and her Co-founder, Brian Zotter, decided to tackle the traditional SaaS buying experience with buy-now-pay-later. Cacheflow’s innovative approach has the potential to impact the way software is bought and sold across the global enterprise SaaS market, which is set to reach $400 billion in annual sales...

Adam Markowitz is the Co-founder and CEO of Drata, the San Diego-based startup that provides companies with fast and efficient automated security compliance, a once painstakingly long and arduous process. A former rocket scientist, Adam founded his first startup, Portfolium, in 2013 and created a network of over 5M students, connecting them to mentors and future employers. Six years later he sold...

Dan Adika is the CEO and Co-founder of WalkMe, a cloud-based platform that simplifies the digital adoption process for employees and customers while increasing company productivity. Before co-founding WalkMe in 2011, Dan was a software engineer at HP and served in the Israeli Defense Force for over five years as a programmer and team lead. WalkMe’s Digital Adoption Platform is used in over 43 coun...

Ariel Cohen is the Co-founder and CEO of TripActions, the cloud-based platform that uses real-time data to make corporate travel and spending easier for everyone while cutting down on company costs. Founded in 2015, TripActions saw exponential growth and a $4 billion valuation before the travel industry came to a grinding halt during the onset of COVID-19. After making key pivots, TripActions quic...

Tomer Bar-Zeev is the Co-Founder and CEO of Tel Aviv-based ironSource, a software company that helps content creators turn their app into a successful and scalable business through distribution and monetization. Originally from Israel, Tomer studied computer science before becoming VP of Business Development at AtlasCT and Payoneer. He co-founded Foxtab before co-founding ironSource in 2010 with s...

Eynat Guez is the Co-founder and CEO of Papaya Global, a cloud-based solution modernizing the way companies approach payroll, payments, and workforce management. Before Papaya Global, Eynat was the CEO of two different relocation service companies based out of Israel and China. Since its inception in 2016, Papaya Global has raised $190M in funding and is used in over 140 countries. When she’s not...

Shay Banon is the Co-founder and CEO of Elastic, a search company that makes data usable in real time and at scale for enterprise search, observability, and security. The foundation for what became Elastic was laid in 2004 while Shay was building a recipe app for his wife. Shay built Elastic Search the product in 2009 and open sourced it in 2010. He co-founded the company Elastic Search with Steve...

Guy Podjarny is the Co-Founder, President, Chairman of the Board, and former CEO of Snyk, the leader in developer-first “cloud native” application security. Before co-founding Snyk in 2015, Guy helped develop AppScan and co-founded Blaze.io (acquired by Akamai in 2012). In 2020, Snyk won four Best Places to Work awards and was named a CNBC Disruptor in 2021. In this episode, Guy shares how he’s en...

Zvi Schreiber is the Founder and CEO of Freightos, the company on a mission to completely optimize and modernize the world of international freight shipping. Before founding Freightos in 2012, Zvi has had an extensive background as Founder and CEO of multiple companies including Unicorn Solutions, which was acquired by IBM in 2006. Founded in 2012 in Israel, Freightos has become a global company w...

Ali Ghodsi is the CEO and Co-Founder of Databricks, an AI-enabled, open source data analytics platform company, valued today at more than $28 billion. Over 5,000 companies use the company’s open source-driven lakehouse architecture to process, engineer, and analyze their unstructured and semi-structured data. In this episode, Ali shares how an open source project he helped start as a researcher at...

Amit Bendov is the Co-Founder and CEO of Gong, a revenue intelligence platform that analyzes the data of sales calls, emails, texts, and social media to create insights to optimize company sales. Founded in Tel Aviv in 2015, Gong is valued at over $2B today. With more people working from home, Gong has been able to establish itself as one of the top sales data providers on the market. In this epis...

Thierry Schellenbach is the Co-founder and CEO of Stream, a scalable API platform that’s growing rapidly. After the acquisition of his previous company, Fashiolista, Thierry set out to help create a scalable API for chat and activity feeds that can keep up with company growth. Thierry founded Stream in 2014 in his home country of the Netherlands, but he’s now based in Boulder, Colorado. Stream gai...

Dev Ittycheria is the President and CEO of MongoDB, the maker of the world’s most popular general purpose database. Built on open source, MongoDB has had an enviable run since its 2017 IPO. Dev joined MongoDB in 2014 and has steered the company through some of its highest-growth years. Before taking the helm of MongoDB, Dev founded and IPOed two companies—Breakaway Solutions, which went public in...