The Spiro Circle

When Gal Elbaz decided to hack Instagram, he didn’t need much convincing. “We wanted to hack Instagram because they’re Instagram, right? We don’t need a lot of motivation,” the co-founder and CTO of Oligo Security told me in a recent interview. What followed was a lesson in how modern cybersecurity actually works - not through confrontations with shadowy figures, but through the quiet exploitation...

When Bria AI CEO Yair Adato talks about AI, he sounds more like an economist watching a familiar crisis unfold in slow motion, as opposed to the typical startup founder I have spoken to over the years. “People think about this revolution as a technology revolution,” he said. “It has nothing to do with technology. It’s all about the economy and society. The technology is just an enabler.” Bria AI i...

Everyone is talking about AI. And Generative AI adoption, especially, has practically become a corporate mandate - everywhere you look, it is being deployed. Across industries, executives are urging teams to integrate AI into their workflows. Engineers want access to AI coding assistants, and consumers are constantly being introduced to new AI products whether they want them or not. But amid the r...

As tensions rise between Iran and Israel, one narrow stretch of water is once again holding the global economy hostage: the Strait of Hormuz. Nearly a third of the world’s seaborne oil passes through the corridor each day. This week alone, Iran deployed sea mines in the channel - and GPS spoofing, which is the manipulation of satellite navigation signals, continues to disrupt ships moving through...

Those who follow my show know that I speak to many cybersecurity founders. While the explosion of AI has certainly made the sector a fascinating place for technical discussions, there are also many areas where we can explore the human side of cybersecurity. Take security operations centers (SOCs), for example. These SOCs operate within large organizations that rely on dozens of monitoring tools to...

The airports may be closed, but that isn’t stopping the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange (TASE) from soaring. As Israel navigates renewed conflict with Iran, the country’s stock exchange did something surprising. Instead of tanking, it did the opposite. The TA-125 Index climbed to record highs of around 4,200 points, which represents a 66% increase compared to this time last year. At the same time, the Isr...

“Imagine you were a family in Eastern Europe during World War Two or during the Holocaust, and you had tremendous wealth, and you had houses, or you had gold in the bank, or money in the bank,” said Josh Varon. “All of a sudden, all you could leave with was a backpack, a coat, and a hat on your head.” This week, I spoke to Varon, who started BHforBitcoin , an online course where users can learn to...

When Argon Security was acquired by Aqua Security in 2021, Eylam Milner experienced a different kind of startup shock. Not the chaos of building a company, but the sudden absence of it. For years, he had operated on his own time. As the co-founder, decisions were immediate, and progress was measured in days, not quarters. But once moving into part of a larger company, movement required consensus....

AI is forcing companies into environments where they are no longer competing against rivals, but with adversaries. In cybersecurity, where attackers adapt in real time, the competitive advantage for defenders is no longer just about efficiency, but in how companies learning and revise their assumptions. Instead of optimizing for speed alone, some of the biggest AI security companies are being buil...

I spend a lot of my time talking to investors and entrepreneurs about AI. But the adoption of this tech goes way beyond Silicon Valley or Startup Nation. A few weeks ago, I spoke with Victor Varnado, an American stand-up comedian, writer, actor, producer, and tech creator. He has worked with local improv troupes and has also appeared in Hollywood movies such as " The Adventures of Pluto Nash with...

Obviously, it’s no surprise to people that I’m a huge fan of history. Working in news for years, I’ve always appreciated that the stories breaking each day (and the people reporting them) are contributing to what will eventually become history. “News is just history in real time”, right? I’ve long been fascinated by how social media, AI, and mass communication have reshaped the way we experience a...

For the past decade, election debates in the United States and some European countries have revolved around access, accountability, and security. The discussion has become deeply politicized, especially since the 2000 American election. One side pushes expanded mail-in and remote voting, whereas others push for voter-identification laws and stricter eligibility checks. In the USA, moves are being...

Much of the global conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, interfaces, and applications. But Amir Fishelov, managing partner at Square One Labs and, before that, co-founder of SolarEdge, believes that narrative is incomplete. What’s more, it is potentially misleading about the current state of high tech, especially in Israel. “It doesn’t matter if Google will win the race or...

For years, cloud computing quietly rewired how companies build products, scale infrastructure, and manage costs. And the widespread sudden adoption of AI has accelerated it. In doing so, it exposed a far more dangerous problem than rising bills: how little most enterprises actually understand about what they’re spending and why. This week, I spoke to a company that understands how the financial st...

For much of the past decade, venture capital has been moving in one direction: specialization. Funds are starting to brand themselves as ‘cyber-only’, ‘fintech-only’, or ‘defensetech-only’, each promising deeper expertise and sharper focus. But in Israel’s startup ecosystem, a counter-trend is growing that favors pattern recognition and intellectual flexibility over narrow vertical obsession. To u...

In my latest episode, I speak with Hunter Stuart, founder of Big Game PR. Our discussion centered around Hunter’s journey from journalism to public relations, particularly in the context of cybersecurity. Headquartered in Chicago, Big Game PR “brings results-driven public relations and marketing services to B2B technology companies”, including those from Israel. Hunter also shared his experiences...

There is a moment in every startup’s life when imagination eventually gives way to math. I’ve heard this story hundreds of times before. Founders are rewarded for vision and lauded as dreamers. They pitch an idea, raise a Seed round, build their first product, and iterate. As Shay Grinfeld, a General Partner at Greenfield Partners, said, companies repeat this loop “20 or 30 times” until they land...

The cybersecurity world is grappling with proliferating AI-based attacks, expanding attack surfaces, and surging daily alerts riddled with false positives. With potentially thousands of warnings flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that something could be amiss, the sheer volume creates endless headaches for security teams. It’s the newest cybersecurity nightmare in the AI era. “In cyber, y...

In the early years of tech innovation, software development was driven by a simple cultural assumption that was born in Silicon Valley: that speed equals progress . Entrepreneurs, founders, and developers were encouraged to move fast, experiment freely, and ship continuously. Restraint, social consequences, or legality were often treated as obstacles to overcome or avoid; necessary evils at best,...

In the AI boom, speed is being celebrated. Funding rounds are closing quickly, teams can double in quarters, and products ship before the market has time to catch its breath. But for Niv Braun, co-founder and CEO of AI security company Noma Security, the real challenge isn’t how fast a company grows, but about it’s what breaks when it does. “One of the biggest challenges in a fast-moving and fast-...

In the mythology of company leadership, founders are expected to trade stability for scale. Long hours, constant travel, personal sacrifice. Family life is often framed as something to be balanced later, once the company is big enough to afford it. This week, I spoke to Zack Levine from Checkout.com, who tells a different story. Levine leads Checkout.com’s North American and Israel operations and...

This week, I spoke with Isaac Heller, the Founder and President of Trullion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows for accounting and audit teams. It’s a sector long-viewed as conservative and slow-moving, but one that is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The stakes are high, not just for young professionals entering the workforce, but also for the legacy firms...

The world of biotech and drug development has long relied on trial and error and statistical averages. While we often associate this approach with diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders, it has left the immune system, one of the most important systems in the human body, among the least systematically understood in medicine. That gap is becoming harder to ignore. In the United States, funding...

This week I spoke to Noa Eshed about all things AI, marketing, podcasting, and branding. Our chat highlighted how the media landscape has transformed over the years. She noted that while print media was once king, the shift to digital has redefined how content is consumed and monetized. The emergence of social media as a primary traffic source has created challenges for traditional publications, a...

Last week, I sat with Lior Dolinski, co-founder and CPO of Agora, to discuss how a team of veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 is modernizing the traditional world of real estate investment. “It’s important to understand the real estate sector is the biggest asset class in the world,” he said. “And it’s not only the biggest asset class, but it’s also the most complex one and the most old-fashioned. It’...