Gili Raanan
speaker
558 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Mar
Gili Raanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
It's valued at around $8 billion, thousands of customers, including BNY Mellon and BNB Paribas and ABN AMRO. Five Blocks was my first investment in CyberStarts in 2018, June 2018. We invested $3 million, and that was the seed for Five Blocks. It's an $8 billion company today. And Michael's personal story is that he immigrated to Israel from the former Soviet Union as a child.
He grew up without a father raised by a single mother. And he learned early on in his life to navigate through uncertainty. moving to a new country, learning a new language, learning how to deal with things and push through challenges. I loved it. I thought that's the most important thing.
Michael is a friend, is a brilliant guy, but I'm sure that there are people out there with higher IQ, but that's not what's important. When we started the company, just a few months after the first investment, we got into the first crypto winter. Six out of the 10 first design partners of Michael went bankrupt. So how do you deal with that? That's a major blow to your plan.
Design partners are so important to build a solution. And you have to simply rethink about the entire plan, about the focus and who the customers are. I think that his childhood experience, the roughness in him, the life experience that you'd face challenges and you'll manage to overcome them, that's what kept him moving forward. and overcoming those challenges and building an amazing business.
It's part of what I need. It always goes there. But I learned that what's important in a story is not the what, it's the why. It's not about... what you did. It's about why you did, why you choose to do that, why you pick job A and not job B, why you pick that partner in life, not another partner. It's always about the why. So it's not just about a unique, heartbreaking lifestyle.
It's spending time with an individual and understanding the way they make decisions, the way they analyze the situation, what drives them, what really makes them tick. And it's not so much about what they did and what. accomplishments they managed to achieve, et cetera. It's always nice to know that, but that's not what's important.
I think that in order to tell the full story of the Sunrise, I have to go back to 1997 and my first startup experience. By that time, I just finished a decade of service at the Israeli NSA in 8200. Tell you more about it in a few minutes. And by the way, the 8200 formation years for myself and got to work with Briad set of people.
And in many ways, those were the years where the cybersecurity market in Israel was created. I worked with folks like Shlomo Kremer, who is the founder of Checkpoint and Cato Networks today. And Gil Schwed, the Checkpoint CEO and founder, was just two years older than I am and We heard many stories about him. The officer that was sitting next to my office was Nir Tzuk from Palo Alto Networks.
So those were formation days. And I left the service and started a company. And we raised money from Sequoia Capital. So that was the first time I encountered into Sequoia Capital. Pierre Lamont was on my board. We didn't have a clear idea what we want to build.
One of the first technologies we thought to develop the company around was a challenge response system that would distinguish between a human and a bot and a machine. Years after, I realized that the name for that technology is Captcha. So we had the luck to invent Captcha and build the first working prototype of Captcha. I hired two 16-year-old kids. At that point, we were not well-funded enough.
I hired two 16-year-old kids. Later, you know, Ohad Pressman, who was the CTO of Chegg, and Eyal Naval, who later became the CTO of Hippo Insurance. Two very successful companies and two very smart individuals. But their first real project in the commercial world was to build the first sculpture. So we built the first sculpture. And we tried as hard as we can.
And we couldn't find a business model for the technology. And that taught me a lesson. And we had to pivot into something else. And luckily, we pivoted into the web application firewall space. We were the first team to build a web application firewall. That was the path that company, Perfecto Technology, that later renamed into Sanctum, managed to build itself.
That company later merged with Watchfire and got acquired by IBM. But that lesson of capture, that you can invent and build a very impactful technology, almost every person on the planet uses, and still you're unable to find a business model for the technology. That lesson convinced me that I was completely wrong about the way I approach my startup.
Starting with the technology and then search who has a problem that that technology solves. The process should be reversed, completely reversed. We should first look at what are the important pain points in a market, find the customers, find who's willing to spend money on solving that problem, and then go and build a solution that mere mortals can use.
And that shift in order, as simple as it sounds, I think that's what made CyberStarts as successful as it is, and that's what helped all those amazing founders really feel the full potential of their talents. We continue to evolve the Sunrise methodology because it's not just around product market fit.
It's actually a program that takes an entrepreneur from day one, from inception, through the first three or four years of running their business. But the early days of the sunrise is all around focusing on finding the most important pain point in the market.
And you do that by going out and speaking with large organizations, making sure you understand their priorities, what gives them the most, and only then
So keep in mind that our company is B2B SaaS. So all of them sell to large organizations. So obviously large organizations are the customers and they are who you like to ask the questions. And the best person to ask is the chief information security officer that oversees the security operation for that business. The idea behind Sunrise process is that you're going to chase pain and identify pain.
That requires a lot of smartness. Because if you're going to ask, go out and ask the chief information security officer, this week, what's your biggest pain? You'll get one answer. You ask the same person the same question in a week, you get a different answer. And then another week, you'll get another answer. And they're not smart. Playing games, they are just being human.
There are other ways to identify pain. For instance, one of my most favorite questions is, who's the vendor you hate the most? Because if you don't like a vendor, that's a big motivation for you to displace that vendor. Another reason Important observation is words are cheap. So don't look at what the customer says.
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