Julian: Hi, everyone. Thankyou so much for joining the behind company lines podcast. Today, we have Idan Ninyo, the co-founder and CEO of Bionic. It is an application for securityposture management, a P company. We'll learn more about what that means andmore about the story behind it. But Idan, thank you so much for joining theshow.

I'm really excited to have you on here.And before, before we get into all the good stuff, what were you doing beforeyou started? .  

Idan: Yeah. So before Istarted running, I'm I'm basically a software engineer, right? Yeah. So I think where I first started, my journey was in the Israeli intelligence Corps.

So I was in what many people know is8,200, which is like basically the equivalent of the NSA just out of Israel.Yeah. And I was doing uh, Offensive cyber security for almost seven years of mylife. Then I did a few startups or it was one of magic leaps, first employeesout of Israel.

And about three years ago, decided tofound Bionic to go with my co-founder  

Julian: amazing. What, whatdid you do? You said offensive offensive security. What does that. .  

Idan: Yeah, so from obviousseason, I can, can probably touch into that too much, but basicallycybersecurity is a means to getting intelligence.

Sure.

Julian: Yeah. And, and in thatexperience, what got you excited about, you know, you could have, you couldhave continued in, in you know, cybersecurity and in military, but you, youchose to go the more you know, technology route. What got you excited abouttech and, and you know, jumping into, you know, software.

Idan: Yeah, so actually Idid a lot of software back in the military. That's was my day to day. Thereason I decided to leave was that's a good one. So obviously it was a also very,very hard decision. I think what's good about, you know, eventually servingyour country and the greater good at the end of the day is the fact.

you feel like you have purpose. Yeah.And and you're walking out only for yourself, right? Yeah. And that wasactually what I was also missing when I. At magically by the end of the day.And that's why eventually I decided to find my [00:02:00]own company to kind of relook for the purpose and see how I'm doing a lot ofimpact in my day to day.

So that's something that always led meand I think yeah.  

Julian: Yeah, that'sincredible. And, and I, I was learning a little bit more about your background.You worked for a company while venture. And tell me a little bit about thatexperience. It seems like you were helping invest in other businesses, in othercybersecurity entrepreneurs in, in Israel, in particular.

How is that experience like, kind of ona, it seems like on a VC in a VC perspective.

Idan: Yeah, that's a greatquestion. So basically before doing my own thing, when I realized I wanna dothat, I realized I also want a little bit of a. Business experience and try toexperience how the other side looks at tech, right?

How do we evaluate markets? How do welook at what is even considered to be good as a company? What metrics should Iaspire to and so on. So I decided to [00:03:00]leverage my experience in cybersecurity and join a visit that specializes incybersecurity. And that's why I decided to join Y and that's basically what Igot from there.

It was my first. Let's go this way, putin the door in the business world. Yeah. Yeah. And we invested with, forexample, one of the first companies that did cloud security and containersecurity back then, which is obviously also opened the gate to what yeah.Bionic is doing right now.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah. That,that's so fascinating how you transition, not only from a technologystandpoint, but then from a business standpoint in the VC.

I feel like from that perspective,there's always so much to learn about the repetitions of making a successfulbusiness. Tell me a little bit about what you've learned in that experience,and then now with Bionic on how, you know, successful businesses run orsuccessful startups run what's your, what's your perspective or what's yourexperience on how companies are successful?

Idan: Yeah, so I think it'sa combination of three things, especially when you're looking at cybersecurity,right? First of all, you need to target. A verybig problem, right? Mm-hmm, cybersecurity suffers from a lot of point solutionsthat are targeting very small problems, even feature solutions, but eventuallywhen you want to build a successful company, a big company, like even when youlook at Bionic and the rate that you've been expanding and growing over thelast Few months and two years basically, mm-hmm you have to tackle a very, verybig market that ties to eventually a very, very big problem.

Right? Yeah. And that's something we sawconsistently. The second thing is obviously execution. So it's great that youhave a huge problem. You also need to execute and build a great solution inorder to eventually solve this problem. Yeah. And the third piece of that is.So I think these are the three most important based stone eventually in orderto building a very successful company.

Julian: Amazing. Yeah. Yeah.What was the inspiration behind Bionic? You know, you've gone, you've had thecybersecurity experience from the military then, and of the Subaru and workingwith startups. And what was the inspiration for starting your own company,especially within cybersecurity? Was it, you know, you already having theexpertise or did you see something in particular that.

You know, an issue or problem orsomething that needed to be focused on in cybersecurity that, that led you tostart Bionic.  

Idan: Yeah. So that's a,that was an interesting route. So basically when I, when I when I did, youknow, venture capital, what I saw is. Everybody of becoming a software company,right?

Yeah. And I saw the kind of customers,some of our companies had, and I was amazed to say that, you know, suddenlyfast food companies are consuming cloud technologies and have a lot ofdevelopers. Mm-hmm and we, I saw internally all the challenges they're goingthrough. You. While transforming there. And, you know, we had a thesis backthen of everybody is going to be a software company.

It's just a matter of time. Yeah. Sothat's where we kind of started looking. And then what we did I think many ofthe, eventually the customers knows what their problems are. They don'tnecessarily know how to solve them, but they know. Problems are they know muchbetter than we do. Right. And so we literally, we were very humble about it.

And we just interviewed, we interviewedabout over the course of two months, something like 50, 60 CIO CTO, CSOs, orfortune 500 companies. And we basically. Just ask them about their problems,what problems are they're experiencing? We haven't even talked about asolution. We didn't try to solve anything. We didn't have anything to solve.

We just wanted to understand whatproblems they're experiencing. And they told us, and the, you know, all of usas this sort of like pattern recognition mechanism. Sure. And. It really kickedin when everybody told us the same thing about we're a software company, ourdevelopers are moving very, very quickly.

And we are today in a position where wedon't even know how many apps, applications we are running in our productionenvironments. Wow. And it's just growing bigger and getting worse day by day.And that's when we realized we were onto something. And that's where we kind ofstarted our.  

Julian: So was the issue withthese companies that they were, they were having so much, I guess, likesuccessful productivity within their development team, but they didn't haveenough either security around these applications.

What, what exactly was, you know, the,the, the problem that they were facing. Yeah.

Idan: So I can give, walk,walk you to an example. So think about it. So you're an organization, you havethousands of developers, right? You have no idea what you're doing and they'redoing right. So how can you secure and complIdant what you don't even knowabout?

So that's where it starts. Right? Andthen later on, you're in a position where you have thousands of developers,thousands of developers, each one pushes a few changes a day to production. Andone small change can basically put the entire business at risk giving anexample of one of our customers who is a very big.

Insurance company in the us, they had anincident last October where a developer was working on a microservice that wasprocessing financial information of us customers, millions of them. And thedeveloper didn't know that because it wasn't documented anywhere. Developersare not very well known for, you know, documenting what they were doing.

Yeah. And it was pretty new to thecompany and they actually accidentally started sending data from thesemicroservices out of the organization to a third party that started showing itin their portal. So this is just an example of how Bionic, like the problemthat we help eventually solving. And obviously we have a very cool decked us dothat as well.

yeah, no, but these are the kind ofproblems we kept on hearing.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. Tell us alittle, I always am always fascinated as the threat of cybersecurity grows, youknow, and I was talking to another founder who had started a cybersecuritycompany. And he was just talking to me, his, his particular was ransomware andit was.

Interesting to see how these teams ofpeople that are almost companies now and, and they grow and they're, sothey're, they're no longer, you know a hacker in a hoodie in his mother'sbasement. Right. Which is, you know, you know, we fantasize about that or havethat in, in our, in our media. But they're like, you know, structured teams andrun like companies and operations.

What are the different ways that yousee, or that companies are under threat from cyber, from cyber securityattack.  

Idan: Yeah. So I think it'sgood things. The first thing. Obviously, there are a lot of attackers outthere, cyber security and adversaries is a well old machine and it's it'sorganizations that that's what they do, right?

Yeah. So this is obviously one aspectthat they target eventually companies in order to cause in order to blackmailthem in order to sell their data into black market. And so on. So, and so, soobviously there is that when you're looking at critical infrastructure, likebanking, power and so on, so on and so on.

Organ organizations and you live, andyou can sit also from the solar winds attack that happened need to also protectthemselves from statewide state sponsored attacks, which is a completelydifferent story, right? Yeah. I think the third app aspect of that is also.sometimes people are just making mistakes that eventually can compromise theorganization.

And I would even say that's probably 80%of the, of the incidents. It's not a cybersecurity attack, but it's a security,cybersecurity incident that happens. So that's another very, very big portion.And that's what you see a. On the cloud security and application securityspace. It's not about adversaries, not necessarily about adversaries.

It's a lot of times it's about, youknow, cloud is new. Yeah. For most companies, they move to the cloud only. lasttwo or two years, even sometimes even newer than that. But that being, thatbeing said, you know, the developers, they're not spread out of college,they've never developed for the cloud. They don't necessarily even know.

And they will never expected to writesecure code over the cloud.  

Julian: Yeah, yeah, yeah.  

Idan: That's the problem.That's the problem. We see a lot.  

Julian: Yeah. Yeah. So whatare some ways that Bionic kind of helps alleviate that problem? Within. .  

Idan: Yeah, so that's sothat's eventually what we do, right? So it all starts with eventuallyinformation.

In order to secure something, you, firstof all, need to know what it is and what you're secured. Right? You cannotsecure what you don't know about. Right? It's the basics of cybersecurity. Youhave to start with knowing whether you send, which once were it'll know what ,what your once were deployed. So Bionic first starts with giving you thisinformation, mapping all of your applications, advance production, right?

So that's the first piece, mappingeverything out, understanding the architecture and how it works at scalebecause organizations are growing. They keep on growing microservices.Architectures are very, very, very complex and you need to understand them inautomated fashion. So that's the first thing that bar does.

The second thing that he does, that we.Is we map this architecture and all the information we have into risk  insights. So many times the problem. Okay. Youhave all this information, but how do I consume it? Many times security teamsstruggle because they just don't have enough personnel. Right? The organizationis scaling.

There is more developers that are moremicroservice, every. Thing is scaling, but the security remains at home thesame. It cannot scale in a linear way. So you have to give them insight onwhat's most important for them to fix. So that's the second thing that we do.The third thing that we do now, we do it in a continuous fashion.

So whenever a developer makes a changeto production, we let organization, well, whether this change introduced anynew risk, To their production or posing any new risk from security orcomplIdance standpoint. So these are like the three pillars that that we giveorganizations in order to eventually help them secure the cloud and applicationenvironments.

Julian: Yeah. Yeah, no, that,that makes sense. And so tell me a little bit more about the traction you're,you've created a great system, this great technology you work, you know, withteams on creating just a secure [00:13:00]application environ. How, how, where is Bionic now? What, what are thecompanies you're working with?

Where is your funding at and then kindof, what are the next stages of growth for your, for Bionic?  

Idan: Yeah, so we grew thisyear from around 40 people to one 20 people. We raised Bionic in RA, like eventhough we are three years old, even a bit less than that, we raised around 90million capital.

Amazing. And we had to be around lastMarch. Led by insight partners. So that's where we are from a companystandpoint and capital and HR perspective in terms of traction. So with servicesecurity, sometimes it's a problem exposing to customer needs. But what I cansay is that we're working with the largest banks in the us largest financialinstitutions, largest insurance firms, automotive companies retailers, fastfood companies pharmaceuticals, basically, almost everybody, everybody, and,and tech companies, obviously we're seeing this problem spans across verticalsand basically, almost any company with.

One 50 developers, which is basicallyalmost everybody are experiencing it.  

Julian: Yeah, no, that that'sincredible and congrats on, on all the success. What, what is you know, like acontributor to that success and, and you described, you know, companies thatare successful have, you know, strong execution, great culture of, you know,and then I think one more variable you, you described, but what about yourexecution has led to Bionic being so successful in such a short amount of.

Idan: Yeah, so I think thefirst thing is about talent. Yeah, we are, we are only as good as our people atthe end of the day and that's something we firmly believe in. So all of thepeople in Bionic are people that I'm proud to be working with on a personallevel. And I think they're all better than me.

So that's my hiring technique.constantly hire people that are much, much smarter than me. And I think I'vebeen, and all of the managers in here have been very, very successful in doingthat. So that's the first piece. Now the second thing about execution that Ifeel is very important for startups is being able to focus down you know, as astartup founders, the center to know the first thing you wanna do is like boilthe ocean.

You want to solve everything at once.But unfortunately you can do that. Like you're an organization with finiteresource. And like when you look at us, we're trying to also build a new marketand building a new market is a difficult task. And you can only do that if youare very, very focused on, first of all, our customer's pain, like customerpain is the thing that leads us the most.

And, and that's the, and everybody alsohas to be aligned on it across the organization where it sells marketingdevelopers product. Everybody has to be aligned around what pain are we solvingto our customers. And then they have to be very, very aligned. what do we needto do in order to do that? And eventually if you solve someone pain you can makethem successful.

Yeah. And that's how we believe we cango business. We are in the business of selling people value, not necessarilyselling product. We need to sell them value and you can only sell value if yousolve them with pain point. Yeah. And you make them.  

Julian: No, that, that, that'sawesome to hear. And, and tell me a little bit about the culture piece.

So, you know, you're aligned onexecution. You're, you're focused on the problem that you're solving. Everyoneis, is. All, all hyper focused on that one on that one problem, and thenexecuting at each stage of, of the process. How do you maintain a strongculture within, in an environment that can be seen as stressful or, or highvelocity?

You know, there's a lot of differentways founders like to make sure that they maintain a strong culture. What aresome ways that you maintain a strong culture within your teams?  

Idan: Yeah. So first of all,it's difficult and you need to admit that it's difficult, right. And you need tobe very proactive about maintaining the strong culture and strongly talk andconstantly talk about it, right?

Yeah. And be very clear about what yourculture is and have everybody aligned around what the culture is. So I think weare doing three things. The first. we're a startup. It's difficult as it is,and we're also creating a new market. So we expect every employee to give theirbest to eventually help the company achieve its goals.

That's all the only thing we can ask youfor to do your best. The second thing is we strongly believe that managers needto lead by example and have this mentality that there is no job. That's toosmall for me. And I'm also leading that personally, there is nothing I won't doin order to help a customer, give them value, help, get a deal done even helpthe engineers.

There is nothing anyone in here won't doin order to eventually make the company more successful and that's somethingthat's extremely important. would say the third thing is, is that's very importantfor us. we have a very, very strict, no joke policy, because as you said, it'shard, it's stressful.

So you need to be in a place and workwith people that you want to work with. And you need to also have fun or atleast try to have fun and have people you can have fun with doing this process.Otherwise. Honestly life is too short. So we are very, we have no problemturning down top talent. If we don't think they'll be fun to work with.

And we constantly only hire the bestpeople that live by our values.  

Julian: I love, I love that.And I love the no joke policy. It's simple, but but effective. And I agree, youknow, it, there, there's so many challenges. You face so many problems and, andthe way we focus it on our company is every problem.

The opportunity you know, every, wetreat every problem as an opportunity. And when you work with people who kindof view things in that perspective, and don't go, don't, don't get down ordon't have kind of like such a visceral emotional response and just kind ofcollaborate as team members. It's just such a great environment and leads tosuch quick productivity and success.

One thing I always like to ask foundersas, as they're growing and scaling their C. Is about risks that they face. So whatare, what are some of the biggest risks that your company faces today?  

Idan: I don't know if riskis the right word, but we do ex face some challenges. I think the moststraightforward challenge we had to face with was the remote walk.

We came from culture that we never didit before. And now everybody. On the us side of Bionic in Israel, we walk fromthe office, but on the us side they do walk. Remotely. It was a very, alsocautious decision to keep it as such, but obviously it also creates a lot ofchallenges like alignment, making people feel like they're part of the company.

And so on.  

Julian: Yeah. What, what aresome ways that you kind of because I hear this a lot in, in the sounds like youget a, you have a hybrid working. Like, what are some strategies that youimplement at a, at a systemic level that helps people still become you know,feel as though they're part of the company and also kind of maintain I'm surewith cybersecurity, there's some kind of securities around having people workat home and just keeping everything kind of bottled in there.

Yeah, we, what are some strategies thatuse.  

Idan: So I think the firstthing is around alignment being part of the company. So making sure everybodyunderstand what everybody are doing, like they would be if they were to work inthe same office. So it means a lot of communication, all hands, every executivehas a, has to present at least quarterly what he is doing like by himself, notas part of our whole hands who are doing a concept like blind dates betweendifferent people in the organiz.

So that would be a first, the secondpiece is again, in order to make people feel like they're part of something,which they are, is around celebrating successes, big and small. Yeah. So that'ssomething we will encourage across the organization. I would say these are thetwo pieces we're trying to yeah.

Really focus on.  

Julian: Amazing, amazing. I'm,I'm curious you know, just within your experience, what what's, what makes yourjob.

Idan: What doesn't whatmakes my job hard? I think what makes V CEO's job hard, especially in a, sucha, in a business, it scales very, very quickly is the fact that your jobchanges every quarter or so every quarter. So you have to. Kind of reinventyourself. Yeah. And stop for a second and understand am I currently doingwhat's best for the company and what's most important.

Right. And that's something that we, Ipersonally, constantly need to do. Yeah.

Julian: Yeah, no, that's agreat answer. What, you know, if everything goes well and, and you know,obviously it's been going well with the success you've seen recently, but ifeverything goes well with Bionic, where do you see the long term vision of the.

Idan: so obviously we wantto be one of the most prominent software companies, enterprise softwarecompanies in the world. That's what we are aiming at the executive who brought onour people that have done exactly this. We brought executive from GitLab,AppDynamics. Yeah. And those sort of com like multi-billion dollar companies.

So they'll be able to take us to thisbasically place of like post. Company. Yeah. That's what I would consider  

Julian: success. Yeah.Amazing. Amazing. Well, thank you. I, I love, you know, hearing your story,your background obviously, you know, would love to learn more about themilitary experience, but I, I understand not being able to go too deep intothat.

Really excited about what you've donewith Bionic and where it's leading to and how it's really influence. Andallowing companies to scale their applications, but also in a way that allowsthem to be secure and consumer secure too, because I think, you know, that'sanother piece is when you're building software really thinking about thecompany or the consumer's best interest in the user's best interest.

I always like to ask this question, notonly for my own personal research, but for my audience as well, to get moreinformation, but tell me a little bit, I love this I love this bonus question,but what are some books or some people that have influenced you the.  

Idan: So currently I'mactually reading a pretty good book that I would recommend.

And he founder, EMP up by FrankLuman.  

Julian: Love it. Give us alittle snippet. What have you learned  

Idan: so far from that book?Yeah, he talks a lot about how to build, so Frank was the CEO of ServiceNow.Now he is the CEO of snowflake. Yeah. And he talks a lot about how to build.How to build culture at the end of the day and how to align everyone aroundthis culture.

Yeah.

Julian: Amazing.  

Idan: Which is a very bigchallenge at the end of the day.  

Julian: Right. Right. Right.Well, thank you Don so much for answering all my questions and being on theshow. I hope you had a fun time and you know, I'm really excited to see whereyou take Bionic, where Bionic leads to in terms of its success and its growth.

But again, man, thank you so much forbeing on the.  

Idan: Thank you so much. Ireally enjoyed it.

Julian: Awesome.

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