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Anjuna Security builds the software stack that makes confidential computing accessible to enterprises — doing for hardware-level data protection what VMware did for virtualization and what CUDA did for GPUs.
The company counts three of the top ten global banks among its customers, has expanded into the federal government through defense primes, and recently launched a second product to govern AI agents running inside a trusted computing environment.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ayal Yogev, CEO of Anjuna Security, to learn how the company sold a category that buyers had never budgeted for, what actually moves the needle when selling to the world's largest banks, and why he calls rationalizing exceptions to your ICP "basically a death warrant."
Topics Discussed:
● Why category education is a long game with uncontrollable accelerants — and how the JP Morgan global CEO's open letter to vendors changed buyer conversations overnight
● The two biggest GTM money pits: hiring salespeople before product-market fit and building large conference booths that attract the wrong buyers
● Why a private suite with pre-scheduled meetings adjacent to a conference consistently outperforms booth presence on ROI
● How Anjuna closed three of the top ten banks and what a year-long sales cycle actually looks like from first meeting to signed contract
● Why people movement between banks is a structural referral engine — and how touching 100-plus people inside a single bank compounds over time
● Champion identification in long-cycle enterprise deals: who to find, how deep to go, and what happens when your champion leaves before the deal closes
● Why selling direct to the US federal government was "close to impossible" and what finally worked: defense primes like Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Leidos, and CACI
● How government grew from roughly zero to 25% of revenue and is tracking toward 50% in the next 12 months
● Why focus is defined by what you say no to — including inbound that's outside your ICP
● The forward-deployed engineer model: why bundling actual engineers into the first enterprise deal changes success rates, churn, and renewals
● Anjuna's second product: a trusted supervisor agent running inside a confidential computing environment to solve the "arctic intern" problem for AI governance
Helium is building a decentralized wireless network and the software layer that runs on top of it, aggregating community-deployed Wi-Fi access points into a single network that carriers, MVNOs, and large indoor venues can use to serve their own subscribers.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Mario Di Dio, CEO of Helium, to learn how the company grew a network of forty five thousand access points serving one to two million people a day by selling offload capacity to carriers instead of building its own towers.
Topics Discussed:
● Why telco buyers are structurally risk averse and what that does to a startup's sales motion
● How Mario first encountered the Helium model in 2020 while at CableLabs, and what made it click
● The FreedomFi acquisition and how Mario came in to lead the mobile network effort
● Why Helium sold the consumer brand it had built specifically to create demand on its own network
● The reorg, the layoffs, and what a single point of focus did to the organization
● Why running enterprise B2B and consumer under one brand made brand voice nearly impossible
● How the AT&T and Telefonica Movistar partnerships solved the demand side without a consumer product
● The AWS analogy Helium uses to move carriers from CapEx-heavy tower builds to an OPEX connectivity model
● Why invisibility is both the proof of adoption and the monetization problem in telco
● What Mario watches for as the catalysts that accelerate carrier adoption of the offload model
GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:
// Sponsors: Front Lines, Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
Toloka is an AI data platform that produces training data, evaluations, and human expert contributions to help AI labs and enterprises build higher quality models. In a recent episode of Front Lines, we sat down with Olga Megorskaya, Founder and CEO of Toloka, to learn how the company has navigated every major phase of AI development and what she actually believes about the future of human expertise in AI systems.
Topics Discussed:
- How Toloka has evolved from basic crowdsourcing to RLHF to RL gyms across a decade of AI development
- Why the shift from foundational models to post-training and fine-tuning is driving new demand for human data
- How the types of human expertise Toloka requires have shifted as AI capabilities grew
- Why managing human efforts at scale is, in Olga view, a purely technological problem
- The customer concentration risk that came with the era of foundational models
- Why enterprise AI adoption is Toloka main bet for diversifying beyond frontier labs
- Why generating AI output is now easy and why verifying it remains the hard problem
- How physical AI and robotics is creating a new demand curve for human data
- Whether expert recruitment has gotten harder or easier as AI data work has become more respected
- The statistical methods from 1979 that Toloka quality management systems are still built on
Fazeshift is building AI-native accounts receivable automation for mid-market and enterprise companies. In a recent episode of Front Lines, we sat down with Caitlin Leksana, Co-Founder and CEO of Fazeshift, to learn how she discovered one of enterprise software most overlooked problems and why AI is the first technology capable of actually solving it.
Topics Discussed:
- How Caitlin discovered the accounts receivable problem while building a different company
- Why accounts payable has been solved but accounts receivable remains a manual, analyst-heavy operation
- The swivel chair problem that defines daily life for AR analysts
- Why there are roughly 1 million AR analysts in the United States, about the same as the number of public school teachers
- Why AI ability to handle variable, company-specific workflows is what finally makes AR automation possible
- How Fazeshift starts at the data layer before applying any AI
- What creating a market looks like in practice: no budgets, no timelines, no competing vendors
- How Caitlin ran founder-led sales for a year before hiring a founding account executive
- Why Fazeshift SDR team now drives 80% of top-of-funnel pipeline
- Why Caitlin looks at Salesforce as a brand model, not a product comparison
Wing Venture Capital Partner Jake Flomenberg opens every IC meeting at Wing with a question that didn't used to matter: if a frontier model ships something meaningfully better, does this company still have reason to exist? In this episode of BUILDERS, he walks through the trains vs. tracks framework, the three diagnostic tests he runs on every AI company, and what a real flywheel looks like versus a pitch deck concept.
Topics Discussed:
GTM Lessons For B2B Founders:
// Sponsors: Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. www.FrontLines.io
Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role. Subscribe here: https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
Cognizant is a global technology services company that invests heavily in research-driven thought leadership, publishing studies on AI, cybersecurity, and the future of work that reach audiences from LinkedIn newsletters to Davos.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Marlowe Newman, Director, Thought Leadership of Cognizant, to learn how B2B technology brands are shifting from the attention economy to the authority economy, and how research-driven content earns buyer trust at both ends of the funnel.
Topics Discussed:
GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:
// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
Pennylane spent its first two years operating an accounting firm to experience the workflows it intended to fix. It then sold the profitable business, removed the channel conflict, and went all-in on software. After three years of deliberate customer development, growth accelerated to more than one million SMEs on the platform. In this episode of BUILDERS, Tobias Janiesch, Managing Director - Germany at Pennylane, breaks down the accountant-led distribution model, the trust-building behind its growth, and why entering Germany required both a product rebuild and a startup-style local team.
Topics Discussed:
GTM Lessons for B2B Founders:
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Sponsors:
Front Lines — We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership.
www.FrontLines.io
The Global Talent Co. — We help tech startups find, vet, hire, pay, and retain amazing marketing talent that costs 50-70% less than the US & Europe.
www.GlobalTalent.co
//
Don't Miss: New Podcast Series — How I Hire
Senior GTM leaders share the tactical hiring frameworks they use to build winning revenue teams. Hosted by Andy Mowat, who scaled 4 unicorns from $10M to $100M+ ARR and launched Whispered to help executives find their next role.
Subscribe here:
https://open.spotify.com/show/53yCHlPfLSMFimtv0riPyM
SafetyWing is building a social safety net for people who live, work, and travel across borders — covering health insurance, income protection, disability, and life insurance that follows you around the world. The company was founded in 2017 and has insured over 400,000 people through its consumer products. Its Trustpilot rating sits at 4.3 stars. Its NPS score is 10x the insurance industry average.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Joey Flores, Head of Marketing at SafetyWing, to learn how a nine-year-old company built category leadership in global health insurance by rejecting fear-based marketing and betting on an aspirational brand identity.
Topics Discussed:
GTM and Technology Adoption Lessons:
// Sponsors: Front Lines - Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
Labrynth is an outcome-based AI regulatory intelligence platform that helps regulated entities accelerate permitting, compliance, and licensing workflows. Stuart Lacey, CEO and Founder, built the Red Tape Index as a free, unpaywalled public resource measuring regulatory burden across U.S. jurisdictions and expanding globally. He used it to create inbound pipeline, earn mainstream media coverage, and demonstrate the company's core thesis: give the market something useful before asking it to give you anything back.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Stuart Lacey, CEO and Founder of Labrynth, to learn how his team generated tens of millions of impressions, a direct call from the mayor of Washington D.C., and coverage from Bloomberg to Fox News with no paywall and no sales outreach, and why deterministic AI is the only model that works in regulated compliance environments.
Topics Discussed:
GTM and Technology Adoption Lessons:
// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio. We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
Handl Health is building an AI platform that aggregates and analyzes publicly available healthcare pricing data, helping brokers and benefits consultants design, evaluate, and personalize health plans for self-insured employers.
In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ria Shah, Co-founder & Chief Product Officer of Handl Health, to learn how the company turned newly mandated price transparency data into a plan design platform that brokers and benefits consultants rely on.
Topics Discussed:
GTM & Technology Adoption Lessons:
// Sponsors: Front Lines -- Silicon Valley's leading Podcast Production Studio.
We help B2B tech companies launch, manage, and grow podcasts that drive demand, awareness, and thought leadership. Mention you are a listener and get a 10% discount. www.FrontLines.io/Podcast-as-a-Service
From the publisher's feed
Welcome to BUILDERS — the show about how founders get new technology adopted.
Each episode features a founder on the front lines of bringing new tech to market, sharing how they broke into their industry, earned early believers, built credibility, and unlocked real technology adoption.
BUILDERS is part of a network of 20 industry-specific shows with a library of 1,200+ founder interviews conducted over the past three years.
For the full network, visit FrontLines.io.
Brought to you by:
www.FrontLines.io/FounderLedGrowth — Founder-led Growth as a Service. Launch your own podcast that drives thought leadership, demand, and most importantly, revenue.