Positioning Your Cybersecurity Brand to Stand Out - Shlomi Ashkenazy, Positioning Expert at Cybellum

Are you struggling to set your cybersecurity company apart in a crowded market? Do you find it challenging to communicate your product's unique value to the right audience? Are you curious how storytelling and personality can revolutionize your brand's image?

In this conversation, we discuss:

👉 Crafting a competitive edge and message in saturated cybersecurity markets.

👉 Leveraging CEO personality and company narrative to stand out.

👉 Importance of targeting and tailoring strategies to customer needs.

About our guest:
Shlomi Ashkenazy, a renaissance man with a vibrant past as a musician, has leveraged his diverse talents to become a trailblazer in cybersecurity positioning. With hands-on experience in repositioning over 60 VC-backed startups and forming 38 new market categories, Shlomi's expertise has become invaluable for companies like Cyber Donut seeking to sharpen their sales and marketing edge.

Summary:
Join us as Shlomi Ashkenazy delves into the nuances of cybersecurity marketing, emphasizing niche carving and emotional resonance with customers. Learn how to align your CEO’s energies with your brand and why nailing your narrative could be the key to accelerating growth. Don't miss out on this insightful conversation — tune in now!

Links for more insights:
Connect with Shlomi Ashkenazy on LinkedIn
Explore Cybellum's approach to cybersecurity
Book a session with me to dive deeper into your cybersecurity startup's potential. 

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan:
I know there are many cybersecurity companies looking for a way to stand out, to get noticed, to be memorable. After all, there are 3700 vendors out there, and it's too easy to get lost in the market. One way to do it is to get very clear and impactful on how the company is positioned. And I've been on the lookout for someone who has a lot of experience doing this in tech and also with cybersecurity companies. In this episode, we're going to chat with Shlomi Ashkenazy, who is that person? He's helped position over 60 VC-backed startups, including some in cyber. And he will walk us through a very practical process a company can follow to position themselves for success. He brings on this episode with the process, with the examples and with his stories. Do not miss this one.

Andrew Monaghan:
Welcome to the Cybersecurity Go to Market podcast. We tackle the question, how can cybersecurity companies grow sales faster? I am your host, Andrew Monaghan. Our guest today is Shlomi Ashkenazy, head of brand and strategy at Cybellum. Shlomi, welcome to the podcast.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Thank you, Andrew. Happy to be here.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I'm looking forward to Shlomi. You know, here's the thing. We got connected through your CMO at Cybellum, David. I reached out to him and he said, you know, I didn't come in the podcast, but, you know, the person you actually want to talk to is Shlomi. Right. And, you know, I'll be perfectly honest with you, when, when someone passes me like that, I'm like, I don't know, they passed me along. Done. What's.

Andrew Monaghan:
What's going on here? Right. So I looked at your, your LinkedIn profile, right. And let me read what I read. Right. There was Shlomi in his last role before Cybellum repositioned more than 60 VC-backed startups, helping them turn complex b, two B tech products into memorable, impactful, strategic narratives, eight of which later became unicorns. And you formed 38 new market categories for startups from various fields, one of which was cybersecurity, and talked about these categories with impact and with visual stories. I read that, I went, perfect. This is going to be a great conversation.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Well, then I'm happy that David made the connection then.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, let's introduce our company that we've been talking about in the podcast now for quite a while, which is Cyberdonut. I want to give this, this conversation some context and some practicalities. Right? And yeah, this is probably a situation that is out there at a lot of companies right now, you know, Cyberdonut, to remind everyone we're still at the stage, even though we're nine months in the journey. We've got five design partners, early adopters signed up. We've got ten real customers. And now the leadership team feels like we're ready to scale and grow sales and marketing. Right. We got a couple of folks, or a few folks in sales and a couple of folks in marketing.

Andrew Monaghan:
So they're looking to say, okay, now we're going to invest. But, you know, we've learned some things from talking to customers and we learned some things from the design partners. We want to make sure that when we hire these people, that they're going to be set up for success. So if we get the CEO, the head of product, we got a marketing leader and a sales leader together. Let's talk about the process that you'd encourage them to go through, the questions they should be asking and how they should be thinking about this, as they're probably not a wholesale pivot, but it's definitely a transformation from where they're messaging maybe six months ago to where they will be going forward.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Great. First of all, this is one of the biggest challenges simply because, as you said, they already have messaging and they're already out there in the market. Sometimes easier to start from scratch, but if you already have a name and a message, it's a bit more challenging. So I would say in terms of the process, even before we start with the actual steps, I think the group you mentioned is the group you want to have involved, and that's really important, especially the CEO. And I saw in a lot of companies that sometimes they think it's a marketing thing, it's a sales thing, and they leave the CEO out of it. That's a huge mistake. I think there is a huge connection between the success of a messaging project and the level of involvement of a CEO simply because he's the ambassador or he or she are the main ambassadors of this thing. So that's just a more operational thing I wanted to get out of the way.

Andrew Monaghan:
No, I'm glad you said that, Shlomi. I'm going to interrupt quickly. I talked to Andy Raskin 18 months ago now probably, and he said he learned very quickly that he won't take on a project now if the CEO is not the one leading the project. You know, as you might imagine, he gets people coming in from different levels in the organization. He doesn't take them on unless the CEO is the one involved.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, so Andy is great. I've been following him for a very long time. And yeah, he and I think, agree completely on this notion. And I know he works specifically with CEO's, sometimes even, you know, individually with CEO's, which is really the name of the game, because eventually, messaging and narrative is kind of the strategy of the company. So if a CEO is not on board and fully understands and kind of puts that message out there, it won't really work to your main question, which is what the process is. So I think, first of all, many say it, but it's sometimes difficult to do. The very first thing I would start with is, of course, the customers. And you said that this company already has ten real customers, which is incredible.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Five design partners. What I would try to do first is try to sit all of these people in a room, not the customers, I mean, the team, the internal team, and try to figure out who their main champion is. And this seems easy, but it's not always the case, because if you have ten customers or 15 customers, you might have different roles for these people. Some may be, I don't know, a CISO, some may be cybersecurity engineers. And it's sometimes difficult to pinpoint who is our main champion. And that's the first decision, really, they need to make. Not because they're not going to go after other people, but because messaging is at its best when it's, you know, focused. And the more you focused on one kind of Persona, you want to create kind of the main high message around the brand, around, the better.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So that's, I would say, the main kind of decision that we need to make early on. Are we going after a seesaw? Are we going after and or head of cloud security? Are we going after head of compliance? Completely different messages depending on who you choose, so.

Andrew Monaghan:
And is it normal if you've got ten to 15 customers like Cyberdonut has to be able to make that call? Or is it could be still a little bit murky. You wouldn't see the pattern there yet.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So I've worked with companies who had barely have even two or three customers, and they tried to do it. I wouldn't say it's the best case scenario, but I think ten or 15 is a good amount, considering that they're already customers. So they probably know the product, they know the company. And also, you have quite a lot of knowledge in house, I imagine between these four people you mentioned the CEO, the head of product, the marketing. I wouldn't count just on their word, but I think between the knowledge we have in house and those 15 customers, you should get to a fairly good point to start with.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Okay, so we zero in on. It's obviously CISo, but let's say it's not CISo, it's, I don't know, the head of security architecture, maybe that's the person. Right, perfect.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So once they did that, now the name of the game is really try to understand that person as much as possible. So usually what we would do is we would first do kind of a workshop with the internal team and try to identify this person in terms of two main things, I would say. One is their functional needs. So functional needs would be, you know, their day to day activities, the jobs they need to do. They need to, for example, speed up their security processes, they need to reduce the budget, they need to know what's going on in their cloud environment. There are many different functional needs they may have. And when you identify those needs, you also need to figure out the priority of those needs. So for example, if we have 15 customers we're going to talk to, we want to try and find the things that are common amongst a lot of them, and not just the things that we heard once or twice.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
And that's also sometimes difficult if you know CEO's as well as I think you do, Andrew. So they tend to get excited about the recent call they had with a really, really interested customer.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
They would tell you, oh, but this customer told this to me yesterday, and he's interested in a cloud automation for APIs.

Andrew Monaghan:
We need to pivot the company.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, exactly. Let's change the name. Let's do a hunger. It's part of the DNA of a CEO, right? A good CEO has to be that excited. But I think our job is to tell them, okay, let's stop for a minute and ask them, is this representative of 70% or 80% of your customers right now? So this is kind of the exercise of finding the needs of these champions. And I think once you put these four people together and you pick the right people, right. We have the product on the one hand, which is very practical, you have the CEO, you have the CMO. All of these people together usually fight in between themselves and figure out what the answer is.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So once you do that, I would get to the second part, which is trying to figure out really their emotional, or more like personal drivers. So if you're talking about a CISO, for example, one driver could be that they want to be seen as innovative, right? They want to be seen as leaders in their field, which is a completely different emotional driver than I want, you know, monetary compensation, for example, or I want to solve complex problems and each one of them is different. And figuring out which one is the most powerful for this person is also an important element.

Andrew Monaghan:
That's a really interesting insight. I think that too often in our world we get so focused on the hard stuff, the effectual things, you know, well, we're going to help them get promoted and we're going to reduce their cost and increase their response times, things like that. Right. So, yeah, I'm really encouraged to hear you say that. It can be difficult, though, just for that internal team, right, to know that you have to know the person quite well, I think, to get an idea about what they're, what they're really interested in. Is there a good way to go do that and talk to these people to ask those questions, or are you still the team still doing it themselves?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So that's a great question because, you know, I'm an opinion that this entire process should be as kind of methodological as possible, and I even like to call it, you know, brand engineering. So I try to make it as kind of scientific as possible on purpose because brand is sometimes perceived as this, you know, abstract, creative thing, and I really don't think it is. But in that sense, like the figuring out, the emotional driver or the personal driver, it is a little bit like that because, you know, the person obviously won't tell you. You do need a good understanding of their kind of personality. What I learned that could really, really help is actually talking to people who are not customers but also are not part of the company. So people like, for example, VC's or investors who kind of have a very broad understanding of the market and meet a lot of people, they could usually answer these questions for you. They can tell you, yeah, from my experience, you know, these people are really driven by money, or these people are driven by the. They want to be seen as these innovators.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So they are usually the ones who give you this answer. And also when you get an external person, consultant or. This is a lot of what we did, we try to look at it objectively. So during the interviews we did with their customers, we would ask questions and try to figure that out during the conversation. But yeah, eventually you need to be a little bit of a psychologist.

Andrew Monaghan:
Any specific questions that you go to on that?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So, you know, there's the usual questions of, you know, what keeps you up at night and what are the things you're most concerned about. Another question that I really like asking, actually with regards to the company specifically if they are customers, is how did their life change before and after they use this product? And this is where you get a lot of the juice because you start when. When people answer that, they really talk about what's meaningful to them. So they will tell you, you know, I need to deal much less with figuring out what my team is doing. So you understand that maybe, you know, this anxiety of not knowing what their team is doing and not having control might be something that drives them.

Andrew Monaghan:
So that was interesting. So the words you use was, how did your life change? What you didn't ask was what you were doing before and what you're doing after. Right. Or what was the change in your mean time to response before and after. Right. You ask, how did your life change? And that, that probably opens up that whole conversation about, to your point, what matters to them, and get an idea about, you know, what they were excited about to see change. It might not just be the logical stuff, right?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, for sure. Look, it's personal. I think the biggest realization I had in b two B is that it's no different than b two C in terms of why people buy. It's even sometimes the emotional and the personal aspect of it is even stronger than b two C because these are people's careers, the tools they choose, the solutions they choose. It's personal to them. It affects their life. So, yeah, I love these kinds of questions. Another question I usually ask is, what would be your dream in terms of your day to day? How would that look like? And that's where people really open.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
When people really open up and tell you what would be their dream scenario, how they would want to see their career going and the work going. And that's where you find the right messages eventually.

Andrew Monaghan:
That's awesome. All right, so we've done the work to figure out who our main champion is. We've got some idea about their functional needs, and we're starting to learn about their emotional side, what they're really driving for, what they want to get out of their career, and working with vendors. What do we do next?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So I would say the next thing probably is the product. I would look at the product, look internally. So after we figured out who the customer is, we need to figure out what is our differentiation, because if, you know, we find a message that is not believable or doesn't have proof in the product and we can't really do much. And here I think the challenge, again, I kind of repeating myself, but it is the biggest challenge is to focus, because B, two b companies love to talk about the million of features they have and how, you know, we are the platform to solve all platforms, and you're probably familiar with that more than I do, Andrew. So that's the biggest problem. And messaging is the opposite, is the art of focusing. So I think here we really need to find the one thing that is the essence, but also the differentiator in the market. And it doesn't mean that this will be our focus forever, but it means that that's the thing we start with.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
A good example I like to give is splunk. Splunk started out as they focused on one thing. They focused on giving you data about machine data and doing sort of analytics for machine data. They told you, hey, you have like gold in this machine data that you're not looking at. We can give you some insights on that. Great. A very focused solution. And then they grew to becoming, I don't know, they call themselves now the data to everything, or this security platform to solve all security platforms.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So obviously that message changed, but they started out with something very specific they knew they were very good at. So that's what I would recommend, starting with.

Andrew Monaghan:
You hit the nail on the head, though, Shlomi. Right. You get a founder, you get the CTO CEO. Together, they're not short of ways that their product is different. It's better here, it's better there. But how do you get that, though? You made it sound very easy. You got to just focus on the one thing. I imagine that's very difficult to do, though.

Andrew Monaghan:
How would you encourage cyber donuts team to put their egos aside a little bit and come to a realization about what the main thing is?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, that's a great question. It is very difficult, and I think the same thing we did with the customer needs, we need to do here. So ideally, we would have them map out the ten or 20 main kind of capabilities or things that the product solves. I also like to map out kind of what are the benefits, the real benefits of each thing, because sometimes technologists get excited about specific features that don't really have benefits. So I want to understand, for each thing, they tell me, what is the actual benefit to the customer? So we map all of that out, and then another exercise that's usually really, really helpful is prioritizing it in a way that tells me what, out of these, all of these features are real kind of painkillers. So they're really solving an immediate pain that the customer has. And which ones are kind of, you know, nice to have. Or maybe we call them vitamins that are things that, okay, make my life a little bit better, but they're not really solving a big pain.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So once you do that, you'll usually end up with a very few kind of benefits or capabilities in the product that you can start focusing on.

Andrew Monaghan:
It feels like you need someone in the group to be the skeptic, the one that says, you know, that's not as different as we think it is to try and get that conversation going. I remember last year, I was working with a client, and I asked them for their differentiation stuff, and they sent me a deck with, like, six slides that answered the question, how we different, right? And I'm more technical than most on the go to market side, and I was looking at this thing for a while, trying to figure it out, and I couldn't do it. And then when I talked to the sales team, they were like, yeah, they were the ones that have to talk to customers. And they were like, yeah, most of that is not as good as we think it is. And they were the ones that said, actually, this bit right here is the place that we go to because we know that it resonates better. It gets a richer conversation going when we go talk to customers. So it feels like you need that sense of realism to come in there.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, for sure. And I'm glad you said that, because I also learned that the people who meet the customers most are the most realists. So that's why I really believe that you should talk to customers as much as you can or put people in the room when you do these discussions that really know the customer to be like the sanity check. And actually, I found out that similar to what you said, a lot of times, solution engineers, they are kind of the sanity check. You know, if you look at the Gilberts of the world, if you know Gilbert, they're usually a really, really good person to consult with this, because they will tell you pretty quickly. You know, these ten features are nice. They seem nice, they seem excited, but no one really cares about an AI that talks to you while you solve your cybersecurity problems. What people actually care about is this boring dashboard that no one thought was interesting, but gives a lot of value.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So I completely agree with you there, and I think adding these people to the conversation, but mostly talking to real customers, should help you zero in. That's funny.

Andrew Monaghan:
You mentioned that just yesterday. I was on a call, and it was the se who was the one that was, we're trying to translate some of this into, like, how would you actually talk to a prospect? Right? And the se was the one that was saying no, you know, you actually kidding yourself if you think that that's the way to do it or that's the way to describe that or whatever. So he was great, right? He was the one that really drove the conversation. Shlomi, let's learn a bit more about you. I have 35 questions here of my virtual wheel. I'm going to spin the wheel and whatever the question comes up that corresponds to that number is what I'm going to read out. And just so you know, this is a highly sophisticated number, next generation, fully audited, completely random way of using AI to pick out just three questions. All right, so there's a lot of sophistication.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
I wouldn't have it any other way.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, a lot of sophistication to this. So let me spin the wheel and let's see what comes up. All right, number 23, shlomi, how did you make money as a kid?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Oh, I love that question. Brilliant one. You can learn so much about a person by asking them that. So actually, I was always both a creative and analytical kid. So from a very young age I used to do shows and stand up shows and music performances for anyone who would watch, you know, family, neighbors, you name it. The funny thing is that equally as exciting for me was actually the process of kind of promoting it and selling tickets. So I remember from a very young age, from the age of six, maybe going around creating these paper tickets and trying to sell them to anyone who would be interested in it. And I didn't make a lot of money out of it, as you can imagine.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
But I did learn quite a lot about marketing and promotions from that little exercise. So that's the thing that came to mind.

Andrew Monaghan:
And do you still put on performances for family members these days?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
I do, actually, as a hobby. A big hobby, actually. I write songs and I perform sometimes. So that's part of what I do. Maybe not as crazy as they were when I was six years old, but as equally as fun.

Andrew Monaghan:
But that was your genesis, right? That was your starting point of being comfortable performing in front of people?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
For sure, yeah. Yeah. Most people are afraid of the stage, but I'm always. I liked it, which I guess is why I'm in marketing.

Andrew Monaghan:
Love it, love it. All right, let's spin the wheel again and see what comes up. All right, number seven, what's an embarrassing or memorable story or moment in your career so far?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Oh, wow. So this actually has to do with the other question. It's not directly related to my career, but since I'm a musician from a very young age. So a few years ago, I had quite a lot of songs that I wrote and decided, okay, I have to do something with this thing. So I was already in marketing, so I thought, okay, the best way to try and do something with this is build a really, really good pitch and go out and find any kind of music industry person I could in Tel Aviv and try to pitch them. The idea that these songs are amazing, and to the surprise of no one, that didn't really work as planned, because apparently every musician in the world is doing the same thing. And the guys I talked to probably heard the same story a thousand times. But then I did something, you know, that any SDR would probably do, which is just try to find a person that I thought would be a great fit for the music that I do and write him an email.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So I just picked a producer that I used to love as a kid that is actually out of Britain, and he's sort of a big shot. He used to work with the Rolling Stones and all of that.

Andrew Monaghan:
Oh, wow.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
And I said, okay, what are the odds of this person ever replying back to me? Just send him the simplest email possible. No fancy schmancy. Hey, here are a couple of my songs. I'm looking for a producer. Are you interested? And he answered. The guy answered and invited me to his house, actually, in England. And that kind of resulted in the craziest year of my life so far, had nothing to do with my cybersecurity career. But I went on to record an album with him and met a lot of really cool people in the music industry.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
I'm not, you know, I'm no Jimmy page, but as you. As you can see. But this was an amazing year, and simply, all of it was thanks to this little SDR email that I shot out to this guy. So, you know, it shows you the value of product, market fate, I guess, just finding the right person and writing.

Andrew Monaghan:
To it and persistence and just shooting your shot, right? Go for it. See what happens. Yeah, you got nothing to lose. I love that story. That's a great story. Let me spin the wheel one last time here. All right, number 19. What is the story behind you getting your first job in cybersecurity?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Oh, wow. So that one actually also has a funny answer, simply because my current job is technically my first job in cybersecurity. So I've been working with founders for the past ten years or so, ten or 15 years. But I did it mostly as an advisor and a consultant at Deloitte and Trejo and a bunch of other companies independently as well. So the job I have now is actually technically the first time I'm doing things in house. And the way I got to it is through this amazing advisory career that I had so far. I met the founders a few years ago when they were, you know, five people and a dog sort of company. And they literally had an office on top of a mechanic's car garage, which is even worse than working out of a garage like Apple and these kinds of stories.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
You would need to go through the car garage to go up to the office. And luckily, this company did really well, and they asked me to join a few years later, which I was happy to do. And that's how I got my first and current job inside a cyber security company.

Andrew Monaghan:
Was it tough to make the switch then, from being at an agency role versus being in house?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Very much so, yeah. I mean, it was challenging, but also a lot of fun. So the reason I did the switch to begin with was that I did these projects as a consultant. As you can imagine, you are also familiar with it, probably. You get really excited about a company, about the founders, about the people in a specific project, but then after three months, four months, they move on. You move on, and that's it. And you don't really see the fruits of that. And that bugged me after a while.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
And I really wanted to try and do this thing in house and also have the responsibility and kind of the pressure of trying to do something that I know that if I screw up, it's on me. So that part was exciting. But, of course, it's a whole different challenge because you're basically dealing with the same product, with the same people, with the same market for a few years now, and you really need to reinvent yourself all the time.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, you get the chance to go in depth and you own the outcome for the first time right before you probably dip in for a few months and obviously be part of the outcome. You want to see outcomes, but you're not the person that the CEO is looking at to say you own this over a couple years of.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, for sure. That's a much tougher spot to be in than a consultant that just tells you what to do and then. And then disappears.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, so, cyber donuts team, we've got some clarity. Let's say we narrowed it down to a couple of bigger things that we think are you know, huge differentiators, clear differentiators in the market, we get an understanding that they actually matter as well. Right. It's not, you know, just a nicer shade of blue. It actually means makes a difference for our prospects. What do we do next?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So we have to deal with the c word competition. Up until now, we really lived in our own world and we do have to look at the market. So that, I would say is kind of the third part of that circle that I would say is not that difficult, is not as difficult as the other ones, but still, we need to pay attention to attention to a few things. So, first of all, looking at the competition doesn't mean necessarily looking just at their product and what their product has, which a lot of, you know, product marketing people are doing. And again, the people in product tend to look at all the features of their competitors and see, we're better at this and they're better at that. That's not what it's about. You really, you want to understand how is the competition perceived and what kind of messages they try to own. It's really all about perception.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
And I'll give you just one example. So if you look at, if you take Zoom, for example, okay, so Zoom took off during COVID as kind of the main video conferencing tool before, even before COVID their main branding. If you lived in the, in the west coast area, we used to see these signs that said video conferencing. That doesn't suck. That's all they said for months on billboards. And anyone who ever used the video conferencing before Zoom knows exactly what we're talking about. They were all so, so bad. Like, I don't want to name names, but we all know what companies we're talking about.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So they didn't need to do much. All they needed to do was understand how their competitors are being perceived and build a message against it. And that did the job. And Zoom also happened to have a really good technology and a really good experience, so it worked out for them. So that's really what it's about. It doesn't matter if their competitors have a lot of features, a lot of things, it's really how they're perceived. That's what you want to try to find. So, you know, practically speaking, it would mean go see their website, see the first search result on Google, see their videos.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Don't dig too much. Just see what is the first thing, the main thing they're trying to own and make sure that you're not competing with that. If they have a category you wanted as well, then I would reconsider if you want to use that category or something like that.

Andrew Monaghan:
So the main company, the big company in cyber in the last few years that's really risen out of nowhere and dominated is wizard. And there's a whole bunch of other cloud security players in the market trying to survive. I feel like Wiz is sucking the oxygen at a lot of things. They're doing so many things right to try and dominate the space, but all these other companies are trying to figure out their little niche. So let's say cyber donut was in the cloud space as well. They'd have to think about some completely different way. There's no point going head to head with Wiz and some of their messaging, right?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, that's a wonderful question. So Wiz really brute forces for forced their way into cloud security stardom, by the way, I personally think a lot of it has to do with their branding and messaging as well because they kind of created a whole new identity that you didn't see that was very, very fresh in this market. So to your question, I tend to agree. It really depends on the company that comes up now. But I wouldn't dare competing against wizards trying to be the be all kind of main cloud security platform. And in general in cybersecurity niche, kind of finding your niche is really, really powerful sometimes because there are so many problems that if you pick the right one and you know who your champion is, then you can really kind of find your way into it, you know, to find a specific message that could compete with Wiz is different. It depends a lot on the technology and everything, but what I would say is if you go into the cloud security market, the first thing you need to do is make sure you don't sound, you don't look like whis to the point of maybe even not positioning yourself exactly like a cybersecurity company. There are a lot of really good cybersecurity company now that are not speaking the cyber language.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
They are talking generally to other teams like developers or things like that. So that's another angle. Maybe try to figure out maybe your champion is a little bit different so you won't go after the same champions that whiz is going after.

Andrew Monaghan:
Any examples spring to mind of a company that's doing that?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, so I actually have a good friend who's leading the brand at a company called Island. I don't know if you've heard of them. So he kind of was involved in building their brand from the get go. And I think they did a really, really nice move, which is calling their solution the enterprise browser. So it is a cybersecurity solution. At the end of the day, it's a secure browser. But the way they built their brand and their messaging and everything is really not about security. It's about making work more seamless and talking about work.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Another example I can give is a company I worked with in the past called Axis security, and they kind of have kind of competing solution to VDI and this sort of thing. And again, their messaging is a lot about work and harmony, similar maybe to Ireland in that sense, they don't talk that much about security. So there are ways to differentiate, I think, even if you were in cyber.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Look at island's webpage right now. So above the fold, there's one word to do with security. So it says, enterprise browser works natural. Next step. The world's leading enterprises are completely modernizing the way they secure and enable work by simply changing one thing. Welcome to Ireland. Right? So, yeah, this is, if you didn't know anything about island, it's pretty hard to do at this point in cyber, but if you didn't, you might not even think this is a cybersecurity company.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right? You think what? This is like a chrome competitor or something?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, yeah. And I think that's what they went for, and it's going really well for them in that front end.

Andrew Monaghan:
And actually, if I look at Wiz. So Wiz right now secure everything you build and run in the cloud. So they're going after that we do it all message. Right? So if I was. If cyber donut is in one of the submarkets, such as DSPM or CSPM or whatever, I guess they gotta focus on that bit of it, right. So, I don't know. We're the ones that if you really care about your data in the cloud, you go with a specialist company to do with data. That's the best they're probably trying to get to.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, that's very true. That's one of the most powerful things you can do against a behemoth like Wiz. Once you say you do everything, it's a very powerful message, and whiz can own that message. But the downside of it is that you can't be good at everything. Everyone knows that. So if you start a company and specialize in one specific thing, then that is usually, you know, that could be a solution. And another approach would be not competing with Wiz at all, but maybe coming before whiz or after Wiz or trying to figure out how your solution is seen as kind of like an add on to whiz and not replacing.

Andrew Monaghan:
I like that a lot as well. Yeah, because you ride the coattails a little bit. Right? They created this big wave. Why not ride the wave rather than trying to create your own wave?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Definitely. Yep.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Wizards integration page is one of the biggest I ever saw in my life, by the way, if you're going to. They basically work with everyone. So their message is like, we are the main platform. Don't even, you know, try to mess with us. So, yeah, you need to be careful.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. I looked on their left hand side here. They've got all the acronyms. DSPM, CWPP, CDR, CSPM, cNaps, Kim. They're all there. Right? So they're. They're playing at some level in all these places, but to your point, I don't know. They're going to be strong in some of these areas, but they can't be strong in the mall.

Andrew Monaghan:
So how do you nip away at that and try and get your unfair share of that market? And I think for, if I'm competing against this somehow, if I'm a smaller company, I don't need to be 100 million ARR in the next two years to be successful. I just need to get going to start building up my bit of the market right. So I can get some momentum. One of the things I noticed that the companies coming out of Israel in the last couple of years is, to your point, like Wiz, did they get a very short name that's different, and they go with colorful, they stand out brand. Right. So someone said to me once, they called a series a blue. When you go to a website and it's all that kind of dull blue, and it's got series a messaging and series A colors on it. And a lot of companies out of Israel right now are not doing that.

Andrew Monaghan:
Right. They got these good names that are coming out, and I'm wondering, it's obviously by design. Is that something that is part of the ecosystem now in Tel Aviv?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So, yeah, I was lucky enough to see that transition going because when I started out, there were very few cybersecurity companies who really cared about marketing and branding. And it used to be very, very old school enterprise looking kind of brand. And the general kind of approach was, yeah, we're going to build a really, really good technology and everyone is going to buy it. And, you know, who cares about this marketing shop? And again, this is for you know, for Facebook, we don't care about that. But then the competition grew and everyone started noticing that the companies who do build really, really strong brands stand out. You know, there are a lot of examples to that in recent years. You can think of companies like Gong and JFrog, who I also had the opportunity to work with. So they kind of managed to build a really, really cool brand and stand out and own an entire market.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
And I think the other thing that happened was that there were a lot of really young entrepreneurs that started companies. And my kind of theory is that this generation, which is more like the younger generation, they understand the value of marketing because they grew up with social media. So these entrepreneurs knew the importance of marketing and invested more in marketing. And a lot of these companies that you mentioned are built by younger kind of leaders.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, probably crusty old people like myself or, you know, we grew up at an age when there was the 1.0 websites that were truly awful, you know, 2030 years ago. And maybe we, we've got more of a tolerance for that sort of stuff than someone who's, who's come through the last ten years doesn't know what it was like back in those days where you were staring at page full of links and that was deemed to be a good website.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, yeah, before my time, but I can imagine. And, yeah, for sure. And also, look, the customer is also changing generations, so the customers are becoming younger. Cloud security people are younger, for example. So you want to appeal also to a younger audience. But I also think even not the younger one, like even the more veterans are more inclined to be interested, I think, in these new and fresh looking companies.

Andrew Monaghan:
Well, I think these days, from a consumer standpoint, if you look at the apps on your phone, I mean, all of these are beautiful apps these days, right? Everything around you in tech is beautiful, well designed, it's colorful, it's engaging. And then when you see something that's not these days, I find it jarring. It's like, what the heck? What are these guys trying to do here? This is kind of weird. So I think it's just part of the, part of the way we are in society right now.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, I completely agree. That's the standard.

Andrew Monaghan:
Shlomi, let me ask you something to finish up here, is that Cyberdonut's done all this work and we realize that we're going to have this little sliver is going to be our little sliver of the market. How that then translates into what the website says or what a salesperson says in front of a prospect matters, right? And we could go through a list of companies in cyber right now and pull up the web pages and go, you know, it sounds a bit weird, right? Some of them are really bland, right? They tried not to, I don't know, they almost go out their way not to offend or stand out or whatever. And then some people go the other way and they make huge grandiose claims and they're, you know, they're not Wiz. There's some really small company and they say, we're the one that do everything. Right. And it's how you actually ends up going to market with your narrative matters. How do you encourage companies to think about that so they don't fall into the too timid or even the too bold trap?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Right? So you said the magic word here, which is narrative. So I would say, you know, everything we talked about so far is the analytical side of trying to figure out what your positioning is and what your focuses. And once you do that, you do need the narrative, which is essentially the way you communicate that message and carving out that this is really your North Star. Once you have that, you can build a website, you can build your messaging hierarchy, you can train your sales team. And I would say the way to stand out in this thing is try to put as much personality into it as possible. So let's say that after all of this research, you figured out the cyber donut want to be the company that solves whatever. Cloud security automation, because cloud security is too manual and they want to focus, double down on automation and do it much faster. You can say it like that.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Just, you know, we are the cloud security automation company, which probably you heard a million times, or you can find a much more exciting way of talking about it with a very, you know, kind of direct and rebellious kind of personality. And you can build booths at conferences that show people typing with old school type machines and vulnerabilities into their thing and how manual it is. So there are many ways of telling a story. And here I think the more you try to be creative and different and find better personality, the better.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah, I think that especially you go to RSA, for example, and you go around the booth or you just look at the websites. I think too many people don't, are not bold enough. Right. They don't look for that next level of narrative around what they do. They kind of do a little bit. And then I don't know what happens if they don't have the resources or the manpower to do it, but they kind of hold back at that point. It's kind of interesting to see. See that kind of happen to companies.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, because I think eventually it kind of goes back to the beginning of a conversation where we talked about the CEO. At the end of the day, the narrative that comes out has to be in sync with the CEO. The CEO is a very traditional, old school person. It would be very hard to have the entire company, you know, bold and rebellious. So you do need to have that kind of synergy between them. So this is partly maybe why this is what you see at conferences and stuff. So not everyone can be bold, but there are other ways of being different. You know, you can be different by not talking the cybersecurity mumbo jumbo, for example, and actually having a more kind of b two c talk and look and feel or something like that.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So it will fit better, maybe the personality of the CEO, but also be different. So this is really an iterative exercise to try to find the right narrative, the right personality. And this is something that they solved in b two c a long time ago. So I don't think we need to reinvent the wheel. There are many methodologies to doing that. You need to find your archetype. You need to understand what their personality is, what your tone of voice is. And that's really something you can do methodologically, really easily.

Andrew Monaghan:
Yeah. Essentially you say that the secure code space has been a big thing in the last few years about shift left. And if you look at a lot of the companies, you can see the ones that have made developers their DNA. Everything is on their site. How they talk, the resources they have, where they speak, how they do. RSA is all about developers. I know there was a. I forget which company it was last year, but their whole booth was basically like a bunch of benches for developers to sit down and do code stuff.

Andrew Monaghan:
And they lead coding things, your code stuff, for that. It's just part of what they do. And then you see other companies that are in the secure code space and it's more traditional enterprise security things. You wonder whether the ones that are really figured out, that whole other side of being with developers are the ones that are going to do better in the long term.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yeah, that remains to be seen. Marketing is not everything. It's very powerful, but it's not everything. I think it's really a question of what do you need marketing and brand to help you with? Which is another important part of that process. Because if, for example, you have a few big enterprise customers and then a lot of smaller companies, then I don't think your brand should really focus on the big enterprise customers because you're probably going to invest a lot of time into them anyways. You have the salespeople. It's kind of like very individualized, very personal marketing ABM sort of that you're doing with these companies. You don't necessarily need the website for this, but for the large amount of smaller companies that are searching for you online for them, you might need the brand.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
So that's a way to focus, for example, as part of the process. So, you know, there are a lot of questions you can ask yourself to see how the brand can help you because it needs to help you at the end.

Andrew Monaghan:
Slowly. I really enjoyed the conversation. I had to wrap it up for getting to the end of time here. Thanks so much for joining us and taking us through the process that Cyberdonut would go through, which hopefully is similar to what other companies can follow as well. If someone wants to get in touch with you, what's the best way to do that?

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Yes, good old LinkedIn. Best way.

Andrew Monaghan:
All right, I'll put that link in the show notes for that. Thanks for joining us.

Shlomi Ashkenazy:
Thanks, Andrew. Thanks for the questions.