The Spiro Circle

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”

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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 Leadership

In 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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 Success

That 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.

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In the mythology of company leadership, founders are expected to trade stability for scale. Long hours, constant travel, personal sacrifice. Family life is often framed as something to be balanced later, once the company is big enough to afford it.

This week, I spoke to Zack Levine from Checkout.com, who tells a different story.

Levine leads Checkout.com’s North American and Israel operations and moved to Israel two years ago from the United States. Today, he is preparing to return to the United States, this time to Dallas, Texas, ahead of the birth of his second child, another son.

We spoke about family and how he sees it not as a constraint on leadership, but as the condition that makes leadership possible. His recent decision, he explained, was driven less by ambition than by a belief that professional performance depends on personal grounding.

“If I feel good about where things are in my family life, in my personal life, my outcomes at work are way better,” he said. “Family comes first for me. Making sure that my wife and my kid are feeling good and happy. That’s the most important. And then from there, I can build the best professional version of myself.”

Checkout.com is a fintech company that provides payment processing services for enterprise clients in the media, technology, and e-commerce space. The company is growing fast, with thousands of employees across more than 20 countries. Levine’s role demands constant travel between offices in the United States, Europe, and the Middle East. So when it came to leaving Israel, many elements came into consideration.

“I need the security and stability in my personal life in order to create the best work outcomes and for my kids to have a chance to be raised next to their grandparents,” he explained. This proximity to extended family and being in a manageable travel hub were not personal luxuries. They were operational requirements.

I found this framing to run counter to how leadership decisions are often discussed. Moves are explained, especially from Israel to North America, as market access opportunities or strategic positioning. The personal lives and the support systems that allow leaders to function rarely make it into public narratives. But our discussion made them explicit.

Parenthood, in particular, reshaped his understanding of leadership - something I could understand on a personal level, too. Running a company while navigating young children and distance from family forced a recalibration of priorities. It’s only natural.

The lesson I gleaned from our chat is not that every founder should move closer to family, or that ambition should be softened. But it made me think about how performance can depend on the foundations behind the scenes that are rarely visible to outsiders. Offices, travel schedules, and support networks matter as much as strategy decks and growth targets.

For Levine, family stability is not something he protects from work. It is what allows the work to function at all.

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This week, I spoke with Isaac Heller, the Founder and President of Trullion, an AI-powered accounting platform that automates financial workflows for accounting and audit teams.

It’s a sector long-viewed as conservative and slow-moving, but one that is increasingly vulnerable to disruption. The stakes are high, not just for young professionals entering the workforce, but also for the legacy firms that have dominated the accounting industry for decades and may assume their scale makes them untouchable to change.

Institutional firms like KPMG, PwC, Deloitte, and EY still loom over city skylines - but history offers a cautionary tale: dominance has a shelf life.

“If you drive down the highway in Tel Aviv on the Ayalon, or you’re sitting in Times Square and you look up, the biggest buildings have EY, PWC, or Deloitte, right at the top of the pearly white tower. These are massive companies that are critical to the financial ecosystem,” Heller explained.

Then he drew a comparison that cut close to home. “When I grew up in America, there were four dominant TV channels: Fox, NBC, ABC, and CBS. Then something called Netflix came along,” he said. “Now Netflix dominates.”

The lesson, Heller argues, isn’t that incumbents inevitably lose. But we can see how disruption doesn’t discriminate in who it dethrones. The accounting sector, he believes, is entering a similar moment. AI could either become the Netflix of the industry, or these companies will integrate this technology to keep their names on the tower.

Trullion has raised almost $34 million in funding from investors that include Stepstone Group, Aleph, Third Point Ventures, and Greycroft. The company was also voted as one of Calcalist’s Most Promising Startups in 2024.

The conversation then turned to young people and how AI adoption will transform these sectors and career opportunities. According to Heller, success will always rely on having a deep, foundational understanding of technology, culture, and business.

“If you’re entering into law, accounting, or engineering, there may be some cynicism about trying to learn some of the basic tasks that those industries are founded on,” he said. “However, if you learn and focus on those tasks before you get to the AI-powered stuff, you can actually be more powerful long-term.”

Those who work with AI tools will be at an advantage when faced with the problem of when those technologies ultimately fail. “When you work with AI tools in the industry, and they don’t work, which happens one to five percent of the time, you actually have to go back and fix the code, right? You have to keep going deeper to understand why it didn’t execute. So if you don’t know the fundamentals, you’re only going to be stuck on the shallow layer in accounting.”

In other words, AI won’t replace expertise. But it will expose who actually has it.

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The world of biotech and drug development has long relied on trial and error and statistical averages. While we often associate this approach with diseases like cancer or autoimmune disorders, it has left the immune system, one of the most important systems in the human body, among the least systematically understood in medicine.

That gap is becoming harder to ignore. In the United States, funding cuts threaten to slow basic research at the very moment when the complexity of biological problems is increasing. As public support tightens, the pressure grows to build new kinds of infrastructure that can help translate scientific discovery into long-term medical progress.

To understand some of these challenges more, I spoke with Noam Solomon, the co-founder and CEO of Immunai. The Israeli company has raised almost $300 million with the mission to create “the Google Maps of the immune system.”

And that mission is massive - requiring time and patience on a mathematically enormous scale.

Immunai aggregates and analyzes vast amounts of single-cell data to understand how the immune system behaves over time and across conditions. The work may not deliver immediate breakthroughs, but it could shape how medicine, industry, and governments make decisions in the future.

Ultimately, it will create what Solomon describes not as a dataset, but as a functional map of the immune system. The distinction matters: A map allows prediction, whereas a spreadsheet does not.

Solomon is unusually candid about the structural constraints shaping biotech innovation. He shares how public funding bodies like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), a part of the US Department of Health and Human Services, remain essential - but their incentives often reward safety over speed.

Venture capital fills the gap, but this can push companies toward milestones that don’t always align with biological truth or expectation. So Immunai, he argues, sits in the tension between those worlds: trying to build long-term infrastructure in an ecosystem optimized for short-term validation.

The company today has raised $297 million from earlier investors TLV Partners and Viola Ventures, as well as later players Koch Disruptive Technologies, Alexandria Venture Investments, 8VC, Piedmont, and ICON. It has also secured partnerships with top pharmaceutical and academic centers such as Teva and AstraZeneca.

Solomon describes the hardest phase in biotech not as a scientific challenge, but as a structural one. Between early discovery and real clinical impact sits what he calls the Valley of Death: the phase where promising research struggles to secure funding, data, or industrial backing. It’s where academic breakthroughs lack the funding, data, or industrial backing to move forward, and where companies are forced to prove value long before biology is fully understood.

In this sector specifically, “the Valley of Death takes longer, and it's bigger, and more companies die,” he explained. This is not because it’s wrong, but because the system isn’t built to support long-term understanding.

Bridging that “Valley of Death,” he argues, requires infrastructure, patience, and incentives that reward learning — not just results. “We are a tool or a technology that can support biotechnology companies and biopharma companies to bring their drugs to the market faster, better, and cheaper,” Solomon explained.

The broader implication is clear: as biological challenges become more complex and resources more constrained, the future of biotech may depend less on ‘breakthrough’ moments and more on whether the industry is willing to invest in understanding before certainty.

You can learn more about the company and some of the long-term biotech challenges in the video above.

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This week I spoke to Noa Eshed about all things AI, marketing, podcasting, and branding.

Our chat highlighted how the media landscape has transformed over the years. She noted that while print media was once king, the shift to digital has redefined how content is consumed and monetized. The emergence of social media as a primary traffic source has created challenges for traditional publications, as they now compete for attention in a crowded online space.

This change emphasizes the importance of adaptability for brands and marketers.

As the conversation progressed, the discussion turned to the role of artificial intelligence (AI) in shaping the future of marketing. Noa emphasized that AI has altered how brands must approach visibility, as many consumers now rely on language models for information rather than traditional search engines. This shift necessitates a change in strategy for brands to remain relevant. Engaging in platforms like Reddit can enhance a brand’s presence, as these discussions are often scanned by AI models.

“Demystifying Success” through Storytelling:

We also touched on the guest’s own podcast, “Real Life Superpowers,” co-hosted with Ronen Menipaz, which aims to “demystify” the narratives surrounding success. By sharing stories of individuals who have navigated unconventional paths, it challenges the notion that success is reserved for a select few.

Watch a preview: AI's Impact on Media & Marketing in the LLM Era

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Last week, I sat with Lior Dolinski, co-founder and CPO of Agora, to discuss how a team of veterans of Israel’s Unit 8200 is modernizing the traditional world of real estate investment.

“It’s important to understand the real estate sector is the biggest asset class in the world,” he said. “And it’s not only the biggest asset class, but it’s also the most complex one and the most old-fashioned. It’s a business that is built on handshakes, communication, and relationship building. And the biggest technological advancement in the real estate space over the last 50 years was Excel.”

Agora was founded in 2019 as a proptech/fintech SaaS platform to modernize how real estate investment firms manage capital, investors, reporting, and operations. It addresses a historically manual, “Excel-heavy” industry by automating core processes and providing a unified platform for both investment managers and their investors.

Real estate is one of the largest asset classes globally, but tech adoption has been slow compared to industries like finance or software. Agora is part of a broader wave of digital transformation in proptech, where technology is pushing efficiency gains into entrenched, offline processes.

Today, the company serves real estate investment firms globally, but particularly in the US, Europe, Australia, and Israel, and manages tens of billions in assets on its platform.

Dolinski shared the journey from a failed blockchain idea to building an operating system that manages billions of dollars in assets. “We were fascinated by the realm of possibilities of what tech could do to real estate,” he added, thinking back to what inspired him to establish the company with co-founders Bar Mor (CEO) and Noam Kahan (CTO). “So we started with this intersection of blockchain and real estate with a totally different idea - talking about liquidity: how can we provide liquidity to real estate asset owners?”

Agora has raised almost $64 million, including a $34 million Series B last year led by Qumra Capital with participation from Insight Partners and Aleph. In 2025, it was named as one of Israel’s Most Promising Startups by Calcalist, and each founder was included in Forbes’ "30 Under 30” for their innovation.

We then discussed the challenges of scaling a company from Israel to the US, and the importance of maintaining a ‘Day One’ mentality in company culture, an idea inspired by Jeff Bezos. “You’re small, you’re scrappy, you’re moving fast, decisions are made super‬ fast, there’s no bureaucracy. What you have in mind is only the customer. You’re not thinking about internal challenges. You’re thinking about the challenges the customer has, and everything just happens,” he said.

Dolinski then elaborated on how ‘Day Two’ mentality is the exact opposite. “Decisions are slow, with large teams… that mentality is where companies die, according to Bezos. So we’re really trying to stay in that ‘Day One’ mentality.”

You can catch the entire interview above.

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