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 of a single overlooked library buried deep inside one of the world’s most downloaded applications.I’ve spoken to many cybersecurity companies over the years, each of which addresses safety and protection in different ways. Usually, I hear about how they try to prevent attacks. This was the first time I had heard from a white-hat hacker.For those unfamiliar, a white hat hacker (or ethical hacker) is a cybersecurity professional authorized to identify security vulnerabilities in systems, software, or networks. By using ethical methods like penetration testing and scanning, they strengthen security before malicious hackers can exploit weaknesses.Today, the company’s mission is to redefine how application security works in modern software environments. This is achieved by focusing on what’s actually happening at runtime, rather than just scanning code or assessing theoretical risks. Its Application Detection and Response platform now protects Fortune 500 companies and recently secured a partnership with AWS. The company was founded in 2023 and has raised approximately $80 million to date, backed by Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ballistic Ventures, and TLV Partners, as well as security veterans like Shlomo Kramer, Adi Sharabani, and Eyal Manor.Elbaz and his team didn’t brute-force their way into Instagram. They found a vulnerability in an open-source image compression library built by Mozilla Firefox — the kind of invisible, unglamorous code that powers millions of apps without anyone realizing. The result was total access.“The moment that we can literally execute code, you can take over the flow of the application, we control the application,” he said. “We are Instagram - and we have everything that we want over your phone. We have every permission that exists. We have access to the camera, to the gallery, to the memory, to your contacts, to everything.”One thing that adds intrigue to my conversation with Elbaz is the way he thinks about what hacking actually is. For him, breaking into a machine and reading a person operate on the same fundamental logic. “Hacking is the art of controlling someone else’s mind, so to speak,” he explains. “Hacking is the manipulation of human beings who are behind the software. Phishing is the thing that brings them together because you trick people with technology.”He carries that philosophy into how he runs his company. “As a founder, you sell to employees, to customers, to investors, to everything around you — you sell, sell, sell, sell. And people don’t get it, that it’s very similar to talking to a machine. A very random machine. But it is a machine.”That mindset was forged early. Elbaz grew up in elite IDF intelligence units alongside his co-founders, CEO Nadav Czerninski and CPO Avshalom Hilu — childhood friends whose parents were themselves childhood friends — before going on to Check Point Software, where he spent years hacking the world’s biggest applications and presenting findings at black hat conferences and DEF CON.The Instagram hack wasn’t just a headline. It was the founding insight behind Oligo. What struck Elbaz was that the entire security industry was oriented around catching attackers after they’d already won. He wanted to catch them at the moment of entry. “We thought, what about detecting the act of the breach? What if you can detect the root cause? What if you can catch the hacker when they’re trying to get in? Because after they got in, you lost.”The urgency behind that mission has only intensified. The same open-source vulnerability problem that Elbaz exploited manually against Instagram can now be discovered and weaponized by AI agents in a fraction of the time. “It used to take 30 days to weaponize a zero-day by the most sophisticated attackers. Today it’s minus one. Agents can actually find zero days and exploit them so they can do the zero to one by themselves.” The defender’s margin for error, already razor-thin, is disappearing entirely.When I asked Elbaz which side of that equation feels more natural to him, the hacker or defender, he doesn’t hesitate. “Definitely the hacking one, a lot more fun. When it’s hacking, it’s pretty easy, right? It’s about yes or no, could I hack you or not? The proof is in the pudding.”The man who spent his career finding holes in systems — digital and human alike — is now in the business of closing them.[5-minute preview: Hacking Instagram, a white hat perspective] Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 is an Israeli company building licensed generative image infrastructure for enterprise clients. It ensures that AI-generated images and videos are controlled, accountable, and compliant by working with stock image providers like Getty and others. These, in turn, train its foundation models while also ensuring royalties and fair compensation for creators. It has raised more than $66 million from VCs such as Red Dot Capital, Entrée Capital, IN Venture, and others.When speaking with Adato, it was clear that he believes the product exists because a major obstacle to AI adoption isn’t just about model quality. It is about ownership, provenance, and legal usability.One consideration in all of this is the concentration of some of the leading players in the AI space. As a handful of American hyperscalers like Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI race to control the AI stack, Adato sees the distribution of benefits becoming dangerously narrow. “It’s a question of how the resources will split between current players, future players, and society,” he said. “There is a voice that wants to have all of the resources, all of the benefits of AI, for a few big companies. I think there will be a second voice that tries to split it more equally — because you don’t want to have three companies that basically control the world.”The idea of companies having a central control in the direction of AI-generated content can be considered a geopolitical problem, not just a market one. We reference similar ideological fault lines that produced competing visions of the internet: Silicon Valley’s open innovation, Europe’s regulatory model, and China’s state control are now reasserting themselves around AI infrastructure.The outcome of that contest, he argues, will matter more than any individual model breakthrough.AI’s Spotify MomentThe closest parallel may be the music industry's own reckoning a decade ago. The internet created a data distribution crisis that the music industry fought legally before Spotify resolved it economically — through per-use licensing, attribution architecture, and revenue sharing.Generative AI is producing a data generation crisis that demands the same kind of structural solution. “Spotify said something really smart,” he explained. “Instead of buying the album, we will let you use it per use, per listening. And every time you hear a song, there is a mechanism behind the scenes to pay the artist.”Bria AI is building that mechanism for visual artificial intelligence: an attribution engine that tracks which training data influenced a generated image and routes revenue back to the original creators. But Adato is candid about the gap between the vision and the current reality. He acknowledged Spotify’s failure in that the studios got rich, but the artists mostly didn’t. “We try to do it differently… but in many cases, the artist is simply not there.”The stakes go beyond fairness to individual creators. If synthetic media can replicate everything for free, the incentive to create erodes entirely. “The fact that we can monetize intellectual property is mandatory to continue to develop the economy and society,” he says. “If you cancel the concept of copyright, there’s no reason to create games and movies. There’s no reason to create a brand because it has no value anymore.”Regulation, he believes, is coming to answer the question the market has so far avoided: Who gets to benefit, and on what terms? “Something will happen,” he says. “I don’t know when, I don’t know how. But something will happen.”The revolution, it turns out, will not be televised - it will be generated. But whether the economy forming around it is a fair one remains entirely unresolved.Watch a 5-min preview: “AI regulation: A geopolitical game between USA, EU, and China” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 rush to deploy new tools, many organizations are overlooking a simple question. Is it doing its job and making anything any better? “We are helping engineering leadership to govern AI and adopt it,” said Liad Elidan, co-founder and CEO of Milestone. The platform provides engineering leadership with something deceptively simple: an honest account of what AI is actually doing inside their organization. Not what the AI vendors tell them it’s doing — what’s really happening, measured against business outcomes that matter.Elidan described it as a situation where the whole system is pushing forward at once: “The world’s adopting AI. Every person is using AI, either in their personal life or in their professional life.” But the result is that many organizations deploy AI tools before they fully understand what those tools are actually doing. And the metrics provided by those tools do not necessarily answer the questions executives actually care about.This is giving rise to an emerging category of technology: systems designed specifically to measure the interaction between humans and AI tools inside enterprise environments. Milestone sits at the center of that category — sitting above the vendors, correlating usage data with actual engineering outcomes like code quality, review times, and delivery speed.Elidan described this challenge as a shift in management thinking. “Now you add another animal into the play, which is AI itself.” Looking further ahead, he is optimistic about where this leads — for engineers willing to adapt. The profession isn’t contracting, he argues. It’s mutating into something far more powerful.“It’s very controversial,” he said, “but you can be much more independent now. And that is amazing.” The engineer who learns to work with AI tools effectively, who treats adaptability as a core professional skill rather than an occasional inconvenience, is not being replaced. They are being amplified.Five years from now, Elidan predicts the best engineers won’t be defined by what they can write, but by what they can direct. “I expect that engineer to be almost a Superman engineer compared to the engineer of today,” he said. “He’ll have a hundred or more agents under his belt — agents that he can run, configure, and push forward.”The future of software development, in other words, may be defined by the ability to manage how humans and AI work together and the wisdom to actually measure whether it’s going well. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 the region.For Yarden Gross, co-founder and CEO of maritime technology company Orca AI, this is exactly the kind of moment his industry has feared. “90% of the goods today in the world, $5 trillion a year, is moving through the seas,” he said. “When you see the disruptions happening, it’s usually when you see major events.”Those events are now arriving in quick succession. The corridor is narrow, congested, and the world is watching it get weaponised. These tensions are creating a distinct kind of disruption, sending oil prices climbing and forcing shipping companies to navigate increasingly dangerous waters.This is where a company like Orca AI can help. It has built a platform that collects data from onboard cameras and sensors, analyzes it in real time, and shares it across a network of ships. The company now has over 100 million nautical miles of data, compounding as more vessels come online. In a GPS-denied environment, the system operates independently of all standard navigation instruments, using thermal cameras and computer vision to detect objects — including small boats, and now, sea mines — that would otherwise be invisible at night. When spoofing is detected on one ship, alerts are shared with others approaching the same area. “They can actually take preventive actions,” says Gross. “They can be aware that reaching an area or a specific location, they’re going to have GPS spoofing there.”For decades, maritime technology lagged far behind other industries. The reason, he argued, was structural: without reliable internet connectivity at sea, updating software across a fleet required physically boarding each vessel with a hard drive. The arrival of low-orbit satellite internet in 2023 changed everything. “I saw like a massive change,” says Gross. “It’s so massive changing the perspective of the shipping companies, how they look at technology.”The longer-term vision goes further than smarter ships with human crews. Gross anticipates a shift in how the industry thinks about high-risk corridors — from large, expensive vessels requiring protection, to smaller autonomous craft designed for agility and expendability. “Imagine if you had a small swarm of smaller vessels that can actually take fuel and gas out of there,” he said. “If one is going to get hit, fine. It’s going to be a very small quantity and it’s not going to be like a hit on a major tanker.”The Strait of Hormuz is narrow, but its implications are vast. What is playing out there right now is not just a regional conflict story, or an energy markets story. It is a story about whether the technology underpinning global trade can keep pace with the forces trying to disrupt it. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 detect suspicious activity across networks, devices, and identity systems. Each system generates alerts when something unusual occurs.In theory, those alerts help security teams identify attacks early. But in practice, they can overwhelm the people responsible for responding.“Over time, this became overwhelming,” said Guy Teverovsky, co-founder and CTO of Semperis. “We have been hearing from multiple customers that they are drowning under the amount of different alerts from different solutions.” Organizations are now collecting so much security data that analysts often struggle to determine which alerts represent genuine threats and which are harmless anomalies. The change in new age cybersecurity means that challenges are not only technical, but they can have a lasting impact on the stress levels of industry workers. Teverovsky said that when security teams face thousands of alerts every day, their most valuable resource becomes the ability to prioritize. Missing the one critical signal buried in a sea of warnings can allow attackers to escalate privileges, move through networks, or disrupt key infrastructure.“Prioritization becomes critical,” he explained. “You have to surface the most critical findings… otherwise you’re in a big problem.”That pressure has pushed many cybersecurity companies to rethink how alerts are generated and delivered. Instead of flooding analysts with raw signals, modern systems increasingly attempt to contextualize threats, highlight the most dangerous activity, and recommend specific remediation steps.Semperis provides threat prevention, detection, response, and recovery for Active Directory, the Microsoft directory service for connecting users with network resources. Customers who use its services get layered defense across the entire lifecycle of an AD-based attack, both on-prem and in the cloud. The company serves over 1,000 organizations, including government agencies and a significant portion of the largest U.S. companies. It has raised a total of $369.5 million. AI plays a role in helping teams process all this new information by helping security platforms analyze patterns across massive volumes of data. But even as automation improves, the human factor remains central to cyber defense.Decision-making during a live security incident still depends on experienced engineers, analysts, and responders who must interpret signals, assess risk, and act quickly under pressure.So in that sense, cybersecurity today is about enabling people to make the right decisions in an environment defined by constant digital noise. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 Israeli shekel strengthened against the U.S. dollar. That isn’t to say the conflict hasn’t caused disruption and anxiety across the country, but it does demonstrate that there is confidence in Israel’s ability to bounce back from adversity. "The stock market is a predictor of what the belief or expectation is about what's going to happen in the future, not what's happened in the past," said Ezra Gardner, Partner at Varana Capital. “The stock market in Israel is actually doing the right thing, because the signaling is that Israel is going to boom when this is over. Israel is going to be the winner, and Israel is going to deliver even more on the things that they’ve delivered on in the past, in innovation and helping the world.”Gardner was supposed to arrive in Israel alongside South Valley CEO Travis Vap, and this episode was supposed to take place in a studio. But when their flight was cancelled hours before take off, we decided to continue our conversation as planned, this time virtually. It was already in the calendar, so it made sense to everyone. According to both men, not a single meeting with Israeli companies or officials was cancelled.“To me, these people are in a geopolitical conflict that I can’t imagine because I’m not there and I’m not dealing with it,” said Vap. “But the fact that we’re on calls, on Zoom, on Teams, and it is...4pm, 6pm, 8pm, 10pm Israeli time. It’s just a little overwhelming… it just reinforces what good people there are, people that are focusing on much bigger things than what's happening right now on the ground.”The case for the TASE’s trajectory may lie in this response to adversity that has become all too familiar since the early days of the pandemic. Gardner and Vap had been to Israel before (Vap only once) and were struck by the entrepreneurial culture embodied among its people. Despite the country’s challenges and an army mobilization rate that at one time reached 15% of the tech workforce, business rarely slowed. In fact, for Gardner’s deeptech and hardware portfolio companies — the kind involved in drones, semiconductors, and defense-adjacent infrastructure — closer to 50% of staff were called up. “The productivity actually went up. People worked 10 times harder when half of the staff was gone.”Gardner spent the first half of his career in the public markets. His experience spans from J.P. Morgan to Michael Dell’s family office, MSD Capital, and running the US equities desk at UBS at an unusually young age. So, when he says the TASE is doing “the right thing,” it carries weight. He argues that the market isn’t ignoring the war - it’s pricing in what comes after it. You can catch our entire conversation about the market’s response to the war in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

“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 understand Bitcoin, money, and global change. He does so through a specific lens: through the context of Jewish historical vulnerability to confiscation and monetary debasement, and the significance of Jewish self-determination in a shaky world.“We don't know which country's money will get inflated,” he added. ”We don't know which country we might be kicked out of again. And we can say it's not going to happen, but we also know that it has happened.”It’s only been a few generations since Jews had their homes, finances, and assets taken from them by the Nazis. Today, we can see how civilians caught in conflicts around the world can suffer the same fate. Even in stable democracies, access to financial systems can become politicized through practices like “debanking”, often conducted by the Biden Administration before legal protections were put in place. He recently launched an online course titled Bitcoin and the Future: Why Jewish History Makes This Technology Impossible to Ignore. For him, Bitcoin is not primarily a speculative asset or a get-rich scheme - and he isn’t out to try to get people to stock up on the asset. Instead, he frames it as a conversation rooted in Jewish memory.“Wherever the Jewish people have gone in their history, they’ve been entrepreneurs, they’ve created their own businesses, they’ve done well economically,” he said. “They’ve created wealth for themselves and their families. But we also see that there’s been, obviously, antisemitism that we’ve been dispersed from countries that we’ve lived in.”Here’s the primary value for Varon, who has been following and investing in Bitcoin for eight years. “Imagine you were able to take that wealth with you and have a seed phrase or a code in your brain, in your mind, where you can show up in this new country. You don't have to start over.”His course is concise, aimed at beginners, and is explained through the context of the Jewish experience. It is an introduction to fundamentals: supply caps, decentralization, and monetary policy - and explores why those ideas might resonate with a people shaped by exile.He describes Bitcoin as freedom from dependence on institutions that history shows are fragile, operating in empires that eventually fall. “No empire in the world has not fallen. It's a fact,” Varon said. “We have seen that empires fall.”Critics, of course, would point to volatility. Bitcoin has experienced dramatic booms and crashes - at the time of writing, it sits at around $67,000, half of what it was worth at its October 2025 peak. Varon does not deny that. Instead, he describes it as an early-stage technology in price discovery and believes that its omnipresence alone signals its long-term health.When pressed to define Bitcoin in one sentence, he offers a single word: “Freedom.”His course is available via the link: https://bhforbitcoin.thinkific.com/products/courses/bitcoin-and-jewish-history?ref=a82aff Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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.“We had to do some mind-shifting,” he told me. “For example, large companies don’t move like startup companies, and employees cannot move things like founders can. So I had to find a new path for me to move the product in the direction that I thought was right, and the business in the direction that we thought was right.”Milner spent three years at Aqua with co-founder and CEO Eilon Elhadad before they both left to start Echo Security. The company examines critical components of original open-source code and then rebuilds it from scratch while continuously updating it as new vulnerabilities are discovered. It has raised $50 million in its first 10 months from Notable Capital, N47, SVCI, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. The experience did not slow him down, but it changed what he pays attention to when building again.Kill Your DarlingsMilner brings new insight and experience to a startup as a second-time founder - something he says offers perspective as he begins to build a new product. This includes knowing when to dive deeper into a product, or accepting when it might be time to change course and remain tuned to the market. “We product engineers are all builders, right? They create stuff out of nothing, which is magical on its own, but you fall in love with it,” he said. “The more time you invest in a project, in a feature, in a milestone, the more you are in love with it and the harder it is to shift or pivot.”For young startups or first-time founders in particular, emotional attachment could become a liability as a company grows and it becomes harder to question whether it should exist at all. “You have to stay on your toes and be able to not fall in love with the thing you built and be willing to throw it away or to shift left and right to get the correct result of value proposition for your customer.”At Echo, iteration is treated as part of the process rather than a correction. “It’s about repetitive change… in order to make sure you are on the right path,” he concluded.And for that love? “I would recommend keeping it platonic.” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 built around principles closer to IDF intelligence operations that include constant simulation, adversarial thinking, after-action reviews, and learning under uncertainty.To better understand this, I spoke to Ido Geffen, Co-Founder and CEO at Novee Security. Novee is an AI-driven cybersecurity startup focused on transforming how companies find and fix security vulnerabilities. Rather than traditional penetration testing, which is manual, periodic, and slow, the company uses continuous, autonomous AI that simulates real-world attackers to proactively uncover hidden vulnerabilities and validate them in real time.Geffen described modern cyber defense as fundamentally imbalanced. Defenders must be perfect all of the time, whereas attackers only need to succeed once to penetrate a company. Its platform blends offensive cyber tradecraft with AI to close the gap between evolving threats and slower defensive testing processes.“You can be perfect in 99.9% of the time, but then you have this one hole, and you lose the game,” he explained. “And the bad guy doesn't have these constraints… they just need one shot that will work.”The new reality facing companies and cyber defense technologies means there is a shift in how to tackle these threats. Traditional enterprise software ships features, but companies like Novee continuously discover failure. This is where the mindset shifts from an engineering discipline to an intelligence discipline.Geffen, who has experience in the IDF, including time spent in Gaza’s dangerous tunnel system, explained how the differences between preparedness and adaptability were a military skill he adopted and brought to the cybersecurity sector. “One of the main things that I learned during those years is the ability of every soldier or a man in this type of unit to come up with ideas on how we can improve, what we can do differently,” he explained. “So I think this is one of the strengths of this type of unit. It’s hierarchy and all of that, but in the end, if someone comes up with a very good initiative, you can really change the way things are being done. And I think that, at least for me, it was very inspiring.”Thanks for reading The Spiro Circle! This post is public, so feel free to share it.The AI era is creating companies that operate in new environments where the problem space evolves daily - and cybersecurity companies are forced to keep up with the hackers. In those conditions, efficiency is key, and adaptability must operate alongside preparedness.The company emerged from stealth last month with a $51.5 million funding raise across Seed and Series A in just four months since its founding in May 2025 - a huge testament to its tech, talent, and market position. Backers include YL Ventures, Canaan Partners, and Oren Zeev via Zeev Ventures. As AI agents interact with complex real-world systems across finance, infrastructure, or healthcare industries, the companies building them will need to adopt strategies that resemble military intelligence: constantly testing reality, updating beliefs, and assuming uncertainty is permanent. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 Eddie Murphy.So Victor is a creative - there’s no doubt about that - but he also stretches his entrepreneurial muscles: He’s the CEO of Supreme Robot Pictures, a creative production and technology company that helped produce a miniseries for Penguin Random House calledThe Great Fantasy Debate.I wanted to speak to Victor about his approach to creativity and where technology like AI can fit into that. It feels like artists can be sensitive about the use of artificial intelligence (as a writer, I would know!), but I wanted to see how people in the comedy industry can use the technology as a tool, similar to a utility. He describes a recent brainstorming session where he considered becoming “the world’s most benign supervillain”, which sparked the kind of conversation I’ve never had on this show. “AI helped me figure that out. So now I’m going to launch a public campaign where I become a supervillain,” he explained. By using AI, he crafted a campaign centered around his new persona, King Supernuts, complete with public events like “The Worldwide Tic-Tac-Toe Championship” and a unique twist on villainy. This integration of AI into his creative workflow showed how technology can elevate artistic expression rather than replace or replicate it. He noted, “AI can help me make the images... logos... all along the way for the creative process.” I could relate. I use AI every day for things like interview transcription, research, and light editing of my articles. I shouldn’t feel threatened by its presence, but rather liberated by how it can streamline and modify my process.Victor’s career path shows how we can apply tech to a cohesive creative identity - and that AI isn’t reserved for spreadsheets or mundane tasks. By embracing technology and humor, he illustrates how the arts can evolve in the digital age. We also spoke about my attempt at stand-up comedy and whether AI can “be funny”: What it means for a technology to make someone laugh, and whether intent is a qualifier for humour. You can learn about it all in our episode. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 and understand those moments.Last week, I spoke to Manny Marotta. He’s the creator and curator of the Live History Project, which takes a couple of accounts on X and posts in real time what’s happening in that moment in history.There’s: 25 years ago - @25YearsAgoLive 50 years ago - @50YearsAgoLive 100 years ago - @100YearsAgoLive and 250 years ago - @250YearsAgoLiveRight now, that means we’re living through 2001, 1976, 1926, and 1776 simultaneously.It’s an interesting insight into what was happening at that moment in history on those days, but also Manny does a great job at showing us how the news was covering those events. He doesn’t editorialize. He simply presents the news as it is.Much of our conversation focused on the 2001 account. It’s no secret that there’s a century-defining event taking place later that year, and we get into it all in the episode.But more than anything, the account taps into a powerful sense of nostalgia among his 205,000 followers (this number is significantly growing after some viral posts in the last few days).No one really has nostalgia for 1776, and few people can personally remember 1926 — but 25 years ago? That many of us remember. I remember reading those headlines, following those stories as they happened, and it’s strange to realize some of what he posts now is a quarter century old.So we talk about his project and his passion for it, and we also talk about our relationship to the news and to the mass media that reported the news to us. Social media has transformed how we consume information, but by showing us exactly what audiences saw at the time, his project helps explain how we arrived at the present.It was a really interesting conversation, and I really wish that we could have spoken for hours in more depth. I’m sure we’ll speak again at some point in the future, but for now, please enjoy our introductory conversation.Preview: Companies use AI to exploit cultural nostalgia at 2026 Super Bowl Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 made to introduce the SAVE America Act, which would ensure identification for voting. But the voter-ID debate is solving identity, not legitimacy — and a new industry is emerging to solve the second problem.This week, I spoke to Shai Bargil, co-founder and CEO of Sequent, a company that uses cryptography and open-source software to provide secure, transparent, and end-to-end verifiable digital election results. According to Bargil, the future of election legitimacy is based on how organizations can independently verify the outcome afterward.“People are kind of losing trust in the system today,” he told me. “It’s very hard to track how elections are being conducted. Whether it’s on paper or whether it’s digital.”Founded in 2021 by Bargil alongside CTO Eduardo Robles and Head of Research David Ruescas, Sequent has raised $3.2 million. It works with election bodies for governments, municipalities, and public institutions such as unions and universities to ensure voter privacy, ballot secrecy, fully open-source election results, and system-wide transparency for online votes. Its ambition is to do for e-voting what online banking did for finance: make it accessible, secure, and auditable.Remote Voting Turned Elections Into A Technology PlatformTensions surrounding policy and implementation are intensifying as voting habits change. Remote participation expanded dramatically across the West through absentee ballots, mail-in voting, and overseas voting programs, especially in the United States in the 2020 election. “Thirty percent of all Americans vote in federal elections by mail,” Bargil noted, with the trend only set to increase. Once voting happens outside a polling station, elections start to resemble other online systems, and so verification and trust become central issues. “If you’re voting by mail, you basically don’t identify in any way,” he said, arguing that verification must be paired with proof of accurate counting.“We need to prove above all doubts that the winner won and the loser lost,” he added. So here lies the joint-solution: that voter ID laws answer eligibility, but cryptographic verification solutions like Sequent answer legitimacy.The Philippines Became A Real-World Test CaseLast year, it helped roughly 1.2 million cast digital ballots remotely for elections in the Philippines, with the deployment functioning as a live demonstration of a model where authentication and verification are built together.Instead of trusting a vendor or election authority alone, observers can audit mathematical proof that votes were recorded and counted correctly.“You don’t really have to trust either the system or the vendor,” Bargil says.Elections Are Becoming Regulated Tech InfrastructureHistorically, election legitimacy came from process visibility: observers watching ballot boxes, physical counting, and human oversight. Digital systems can break that psychological assurance since citizens cannot “see” software and how it is gathering and counting votes, or if the vote was counted at all. The solution, Bargil argued, is about replacing visual trust with mathematical certainty. “Criticism comes because most of the systems today are pretty much black boxes.” This shifts the questions surrounding election integrity into the faith in the technology itself. The goal isn’t to prevent fraud alone, but to reduce unverifiable outcomes - a concern often raised by critics of large-scale remote voting.The Next Political Fight May Be TechnicalThese new American voter-ID laws may therefore represent only the first layer of a new civic technology stack. Identity verification will confirm who participates (like in most other countries), and Sequent’s cryptographic verification technology can confirm what actually happened.“My biggest concern… people losing trust and losing interest in elections,” Bargil concluded.In the coming decade, election disputes may shift away from courtroom arguments over ballots and toward technical arguments over proof standards — similar to cybersecurity breaches or financial audits. Much like any other area, it could cause deep civil mistrust in the institutions that are designed to protect democracy. Whether this new technology can restore trust remains an open question, but the next-generation technical battleground is already forming.The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 OpenAI,” Fishelov says. “They all need the same infrastructure.”I spoke to Fishelov about Square One Labs, a venture creation and investment platform that helps founders build transformative tech companies from the earliest stages. Founded in early 2024, it blends early-stage funding with operational support, providing labs, facilities, mentoring, and strategic guidance to turn big ideas into real companies.It is deliberately focused on what Fishelov calls “physical infrastructure for AI”: energy, semiconductors, robotics, and the hardware systems that make large-scale AI possible. While software continues to move quickly, he argues that the real bottlenecks sit much deeper in the stack.“Looking into AI, we figured out there’s lots of opportunity in the software space,” he says. “But there’s a huge opportunity on the actual infrastructure for AI.”The logic makes sense. Training and running advanced AI systems requires enormous amounts of energy, compute, and physical reliability. Regardless of which models dominate, the same foundational systems must exist underneath them. “All the basic software layers, all of these are critical infrastructure that any solution for AI needs,” Fishelov says.This focus is informed by experience. At SolarEdge, Fishelov helped scale energy and semiconductor systems globally, selling more than 200 million units of proprietary semiconductors. That operational background shapes Square One Labs’ investment thesis today. “We just came from these worlds,” he said. “Energy is our bread and butter. We also saw what happens in manufacturing.”Unlike consumer software, infrastructure businesses operate on long timelines and demand precision early. “Deeptech companies were hard 20 years ago,” Fishelov says. “They’re still hard today.” In these sectors, missing early accuracy can be fatal. “Not hitting a target fast can cost the company three to four years in terms of capital and runway.”That difficulty, however, is exactly what creates defensible moats. “The moat is very high,” he says. “Once they penetrate into the market and you have a differentiated solution… you can be in the game for the long run.”Fishelov points to energy as a clear example. New systems don’t just need to be cleaner—they must be cheaper and more reliable than technologies built over a century. “You’re competing with gas solutions, oil solutions, whatever, which were built here for the past 100 plus years,” he says. “Now you need to build a new solution which is more cost-competitive than that.”One Square One Labs investment in geothermal energy reflects this approach. By developing more efficient drilling methods, the company aims to deliver “cheaper energy, green energy, and available 24-7 energy,” Fishelov says—an infrastructure-level improvement that benefits any AI system layered on top.AI itself, he adds, is accelerating deep-tech development rather than replacing it. “AI can help you understand a much broader range of topics,” he says, speeding up research, simulation, and material discovery. But it doesn’t remove the need for physical systems that work reliably at scale.I enjoyed speaking to Fishelov, who emphasized that the future of AI will depend less on who writes the best model, but who builds the systems that keep it running.You can learn more in the video above. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 stakes have changed. “We’re spending all that money on something that we’re not really sure what the ROI is,” Roi Ravhon, Co-founder and CEO of cloud cost management platform Finout, told me. What once lived in innovation budgets is now embedded directly in business fundamentals. “Now it’s part of our gross margin… It’s part of what we’re building as a service.”Founded in 2021, Finout helps enterprises monitor, allocate, and forecast cloud spending across providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Snowflake. The company has raised $85 million to date and works with customers such as Lyft, The New York Times, SiriusXM, Wiz, and Tenable.Not only is one problem that is AI inherently expensive, but businesses are also adopting it and transforming their practices without clarity. “AI is a lot more expensive than what we thought it would be,” Ravhon explained. “We’re not really sure how predictable it’s going to be. We’re not really sure if we’re using it effectively or not. Just buying and buying and buying more AI services.”Cloud costs were already complex before AI arrived. But today, AI workloads are priced by tokens, usage, and models that can quickly change, making it even harder to ignore. The result is cost waste that hides in plain sight. “There are so many dumb ways, it’s amazing,” Ravhon says when asked how those may materialize.The dynamic is familiar, even if the scale is not. Just as individuals may lose track of unused subscriptions, businesses can accumulate cloud services that persist simply because no one is sure what would happen if they disappeared.In some cases, the scale is staggering. Ravhon recalls working with enterprises that had “tens of millions of dollars of ‘shadow IT’”, meaning services running in the cloud that no one fully understood and no one wanted to turn off. Teams hesitate to shut anything down because it might break something, or might do nothing at all.I asked if there was a tension between the engineering teams, who are incentivized to move fast and build reliably, and the finance teams, who are accountable for budgets and forecasts. Turns out there is - and in practice, engineering usually wins. “I'm an engineer, we tend to be very defensive,” Ravhon says. “Finance sets a budget, engineering depletes it.” He adds, “It’s very easy to pick the most expensive model to sleep better at night.”Ravhon, who first spotted these kinds of gaps when he was Director of Core Engineering at Logz.io, a cloud observability company, argues the conversation needs to shift away from simply cost-cutting and toward control. “Cloud is not spend, it’s an investment,” he says. “The best way to overcome this is with data.” When asked during our quickfire round what leaders should remember from the AI cost reckoning now underway, Ravhon doesn’t hesitate. His answer is a single word: “Allocate.”In the AI era, ignorance can be an existential issue if not managed from the start. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 understand this concept better, I spoke with Brian Sack, a partner at TLV Partners, an Israel-based early-stage venture capital firm.TLV Partners was founded in 2015 and specializes in early-stage investments, particularly in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, developer tools, and cloud-native systems, as well as vertical AI across industries such as fintech, biotech, healthcare, and more. It has $1B assets under management, and has supported companies such as Next Insurance (acquired by Munich Re), Run:ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Granulate (acquired by Intel), Laminar (acquired by Rubrik), Aqua Security, Aidoc, Qodo, Port, and Quantum Machines, among others.He describes his approach as being a “disciplined generalist,” which he explains as understanding how ideas migrate across sectors. “We want to look at every new technology trend, and we want to look at all verticals across the board,” he said. “We’re just extremely curious people. So we’re always tracking up-and-coming technology trends… Over time, we’ve realized that this has a huge impact as well on our strategy as a fund.”The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.As a journalist myself, I could connect this idea to my own personal attitude of being “a jack of all trades, and master of none”. I often describe my work as needing to cast a wide and shallow net over a variety of industries. But for TLV Partners, they take it a step further - their net is both wide and deep.That philosophy runs against conventional wisdom in today’s VC market, where specialization is often framed as a prerequisite for conviction. But Sack argues that early-stage investing, particularly at seed, demands the opposite: an ability to sit with ambiguity long enough to see connections others miss.“You’re almost sort of like journeying through darkness a lot of the time,” he added. “You don’t have a lot of data, and often you have to make decisions based on intuition or gut feeling. And I think growth investors are great at doing what they do and being very analytical. I prefer, and as a fund, what we like, and what we know how to do best, is to work with founders during the abstract time.”The concept of investing at this early stage was in contrast to a previous conversation I had with a growth investor, who relished in the data and proof of product-market fit. I was fascinated by the difference in approach and how that translated to working with entrepreneurs and navigating markets. “We need our founders to be a little bit crazy,” he added. “They have to have those crazy dreams and visions. I think as a firm, it’s part of our investment strategy and part of our culture, which is why I think a lot of entrepreneurs come to us for investment - because it’s something that is known in the industry that we never think of ourselves as there on the board investing to manage or make decisions on behalf of the company.”You can learn more about the fund in the conversation above.BONUS: Catch the viewpoint of Shay Grinfeld, a growth investor from Greenfield Partners: Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 as a journalist in Israel, highlighting how living here transformed his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.In 2017, he penned an article for JPost that outlined his journey and how his experience here changed his perception of the region and its people. He emphasized the complexity of narratives surrounding this issue and the importance of seeing both sides to foster understanding. We then turned to the evolving landscape of PR and journalism more generally, particularly in the age of social media and AI. Our world is increasingly being framed and controlled in echo chambers that set narratives into motion - and so we spoke about the impact on storytelling and public perception.Some takeaways:* The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the mother of all narratives.”* It’s easier for people to craft a satisfying narrative in their heads about the Israeli-Arab conflict.* People are entering an echo chamber and they like what confirms their beliefs.* The rise of AI and automation has made relationships even more important.* Companies need to start owning their own channels.Preview > “Experiencing Israel” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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 on the one product when the penny drops. “‘They said ‘You know what, actually hits a nerve’,” he told me. For this episode, I spoke to Grinfeld about being an early growth investor, and what happens when companies reach their initial targets in revenue: An achievement, of course, but also the beginning of a much harder phase.Growing a Dream into Profit“That’s when we meet them,” Grinfeld says. The point where early momentum must turn into durable growth, usually around Series B and C, optimism alone is no longer enough. Growth investors arrive with a different question: can this company scale its go-to-market strategy once identifying a successful product-market fit, and will it do this faster than the cost of capital?“You have to grow at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” he told me. “Otherwise, you will not get the funding that will allow you to grow.” According to Grinfeld, what separates founders who push forward from those who sell early, he adds, is not recklessness but “bravery with confidence… and knowledge.”Greenfield Partners was founded in 2016 and invests in early to growth stages in Infrastructure, Vertical Software, and Deep Tech. It has $1 billion in total assets under management after closing a $400 million third fund in 2025. The “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”One of its strongest areas is structured thinking around go-to-market and company building. Our conversation frequently referenced the “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”, when Grinfeld describes growth failure as a structural issue rather than one singular mistake. “Every time you fix something, something else breaks naturally,” he says. For example, hiring ahead of the pipeline creates idle sales teams, and scaling leads without customer success can erode retention. The problem is rarely one pillar in isolation. To address this, Greenfield leans heavily into these pillars as concepts: strategy, sales operations, hiring and enablement, lead generation, partnerships, and customer success. The firm has even written playbooks available for founders to glean their insights.The most underappreciated challenge in that phase, he argued, is the gap between product-market fit and what he calls product-market sales fit. “That’s the moment that you think you can actually sell your product at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” Grinfeld says. It shows up when non-founders can sell, when the pipeline becomes repeatable, and when revenue sees a predictable pattern.“When it actually clicks,” he says, “it’s magic — because you can start compounding it.” A Signal For LeadershipIn the end, growth comes down to leadership. The founders who make it through the transition are not the ones with the loudest narratives, but the most adaptable mindsets. “Hungry, humble, smart — in that order,” Grinfeld says.You can watch the entire exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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, you have this interesting angle where AI doesn’t only disrupt the ‘normal’ industry that everybody is familiar with, but it also disrupts how cyber attackers operate,” said Intezer Co-founder and CEO Itai Tevet. “There’s an arms race of AI not only on the defense side, but also on the offense side. So I think it’s a very interesting dynamic.”Intezer aims to tackle the “ staggering and unmanageable” problem of limited human capacity in cyberspace. As AI empowers bad actors to target enterprises at record scale, the problem isn’t a talent shortage per se, but that the sheer ability of technology will mean humans will never be physically able to catch up with the new threat landscape, including the 97% of false positive alerts that cause distraction and anxiety among overworked teams. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.The company is part of a growing category of cybersecurity tools that use AI as an extension of human analysts to manage high alert volumes. It develops an AI-powered SOC analyst to investigate security alerts from existing tools and triage them in minutes, automatically resolving false positives and escalating only critical threats. Founded roughly a decade ago but experiencing a surge in activity in 2024/2025, it recently raised $33 million in Series C funding by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total to $60 million. Its clients include giants like NVIDIA, Salesforce, MGM Resorts, and others. As technology increases across all industries, AI will become essential for the survival of SOC teams amid rising threats from bad actors, nation-states, and others. According to Tevet, non-adopters could soon become obsolete. And those who embrace the technology won’t be replaced by it, but rather be elevated by it; human roles will no longer be distracted by small-scale attacks, and they will be able to graduate to more superior positions. “From a global perspective, but in my niche, I have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen,” added Tevet. “It all has to do with the nature of the SOC team job, which is going to absolutely change dramatically. Humans will supervise the AI instead of chasing tickets all day long.”You can watch the full exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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, innovation killers at worst.My latest conversation showed me how that era is coming to its end, and that a more conservative movement is growing from the ashes of the Wild Wild West of progress that saw growth encouraged to ignore guardrails or accountability. According to Ben Bernstein, co-founder and CEO of Minimus, the software world is now entering a period of ideological correction, one that closely mirrors what happened with social media and what the LLM era is susceptible to falling into as well. “We identified the problem the first time,” Bernstein says of his first company, Twistlock. “But what was interesting is that we didn’t solve it the first time… Apparently, just identifying the problem is not good enough anymore.”His previous company, Twistlock, is a cloud-native security platform with security and compliance coverage for users, applications, data, and the cloud technology stack. It helps security teams see vulnerabilities created by cloud-native development and containers, but the team realized that visibility alone didn’t stop the explosion of risk. “There are thousands and thousands of issues in every little application,” he said.Bernstein argued that the issue isn’t malicious developers or bad code, but the excess of code that can cause security issues. “The problem isn’t malicious code,” Bernstein says. “It’s unnecessary code.”This realization has driven the philosophy behind Minimus, which builds secure, minimal container images designed to reduce attack surface by design. After Twistlock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for approximately $410 million, Bernstein got to work on his next company: one that would set out to solve the problem identified by his first. Minimus recently announced a whopping $51 million Seed round to “kill” upto 95% of software vulnerabilities by replacing bloated containers with secure, minimal images, slashing risk and development time across the software supply chain. The round was co-led by YL Ventures and Mayfield, with participation from Bernstein, Dima Stopel, and John Morello.But Minimus is less interesting as a product than as a sign of the times: a broader shift in how the industry thinks about freedom and responsibility. In our conversation, we discussed how the past decade has become somewhat of a pendulum swing: In the early 2000s, security and IT teams held tight control, slowing development. Then came cloud, containers, and open source, and the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction.“Developers got maybe too much freedom,” he says. “And now they see, ‘my God, these are the consequences of what I just did.’”The result is familiar to anyone who followed the arc of social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and recently X were optimized for engagement first, governance later. Only later did we realize that their push for scale without guardrails produced systemic harm to young people.Bernstein draws the parallel explicitly: “When you get too much freedom, it’s just too much.”What’s changed is who is asking for constraints. “It’s not even the security team asking anymore,” Bernstein notes. “It’s actually the people who want to innovate. This is because developers now spend their time chasing vulnerabilities, patching dependencies, or responding to issues that never should have existed in the first place. “We cannot allocate 50% of our time to just maintain existing software,” Bernstein explained. “Because it actually stifles our innovation.”In this sense, Minimus represents a broader reckoning on what it means to move fast. Ideologically, techies are starting to recognize that speed without structure doesn’t scale. “Velocity can lead to chaos,” Bernstein says. “And chaos is not progress. Chaos is regression.”Just as social media eventually discovered that moderation wasn’t always censorship, software is now discovering that guardrails aren’t necessarily anti-innovation. They are what make innovation sustainable. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

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-growing company is how you grow the team very fast and in a way that will be aligned with the great business growth that we see,” Braun told me. “At the same time, keeping the culture.”Noma is better positioned than most to understand this problem. Founded in 2023, the company has already raised $123 million, including a $100 million Series B, and works with some of the world’s largest and most regulated enterprises. But the speed at which the company grows can be detrimental if not managed correctly. “The moment that you move in a quarter from 40 to 70 or 80 people,” Braun added, “it could completely change the dynamic of the company.”When I spoke to Braun, he described culture as being nurtured and defended through this growth, starting with the hiring process.“Sometimes we see the most amazing talents in all areas,” he explained. “But we don’t think that they’re going to be completely aligned with the Noma culture. And this is why we think that it’s not a good fit.” It’s not about ability ot background, but finding pieces that can glue together. “I don’t think that it’s because we are better than them… I just think that there are two different puzzles,” he added.The Cultural Pillars For SuccessThat discipline is built around three cultural pillars. The first is what Braun calls a winning mentality. “Winning mentality is the state of mind,” he says. “They know how, in crunch time, to do the right thing, to take the right decisions under pressure.”The second is radical ownership. “People that take a topic end to end,” Braun said, describing a culture where engineers influence marketing, sales teams shape product strategy, and silos are actively discouraged.The third is an explicitly anti-blame environment. “It’s super collaborative and anti-blaming culture,” he concluded. Without it, Braun believes proactivity collapses, feedback shuts down, and growth becomes fragile.This is particularly visible in how Noma handles failure. “On every POC that we lose,” Braun explained, “there are going to be lesson learning about it. Again, it’s not blaming, but it’s true learning together.” This environment isn’t helped by softening disappointment, either. “We don’t accept it,” he adds. “We make sure that it doesn’t happen, like never, again.”The AI era could see technology resetting or pivoting every few months, and Braun sees culture as one of the few durable advantages left. “This is the only way,” he says, “to scale together with this DNA.”Today, speed may get you noticed, and large funding rounds get you headlines. But as Noma’s growth aims to show, it’s the culture that will determine whether companies survive. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe