#99: How the air force prepared me for product management | Yaniv Fatal (Founding PM @ Blast Security, formerly @ Wiz)

All right, we're live. I am really excited to have Yaniv Fatal with us. How are you Yaniv? Wow. I'm super excited and I'm happy to be here. I was waiting for this conversation so long. So I'm happy to see you. Yeah, I'm really excited for this too. Ben has shared so much about you, so I'm just pumped. Yeah, I'll start with like, we don't really do detailed intros, but a little bit of personal background is, I think Yaniv, you're my oldest friend, if I had to guess. I think we met when I was six. We celebrated our seventh birthday together at the zoo in Israel, in Jerusalem. Stayed in touch over the years. Very different kind of like paths, but you know, now we both find ourselves in the general product world. So it's cool to see those paths converge. Along the way, I've been following your journey, right? Like you from the Israeli IDF, you know, as like a, as a commander to an elite air force pilot to ultimately deciding you wanted to get out of the IDF and the military and enter like the tech sector. And it's been really cool to see how you went from knowing nothing about tech and cybersecurity, which is the space that you're in right now, to the, to a place where you're the founding PM at a very hot cybersecurity company in Israel. And along the way, conquering multiple Ironmans, pre-recording. For those listening, Yaniv has completed five Ironmans. He placed third out of a thousand people in an Ironman in Texas. He was in the world championship Ironman in Hawaii. And then you've run how many marathons at this point? I can't count, but something like 25. And along the way, you know, building a beautiful family, two kids, a dog, and just being like a kind of like a pillar of your community in Israel and Tel Aviv from everything I see. So anyways, even if I wasn't your friend, I think all of those things would just be so super, super impressive to me. But it's a particular honor to have you come on the show and spend time with us. And selfishly, this is one of the conversations I've been most excited to have. Yeah. Can I do a better intro than that? Is that a good intro? I think we need to leave now. You know, the mic has been dropped. You can talk about me. I'm here. I'm listening. Okay. So. That's great. I could spend another hour just talking about how cool you are. But I would say to kind of get into the conversation, you know, the thing I'm personally super interested to go deep on, because we haven't actually unpacked it together yet, is I want to start with a very specific kind of like moment in your journey where you. And the reason I want to start here is because I want this conversation to really go into like the way that you identify goals, because you're probably like the number one person I know who's like, once you pick a goal, it's like game over. Like you're gonna bend over backwards to hit that goal, despite so many things that get in your way. And you're very courageous and I think tackling new things you don't know anything about. So like where I want to start the story is or the conversation is when you were making the transition from, you know, being an Air Force pilot to the world of tech. And I know that process was really hard because it's like you're a lot of storytelling involved. You got to like really convince people to take a bet on you. But I want to start with a very specific moment where you got an interview at Wiz, which is a very hot cybersecurity company that's now been acquired or in the process of being acquired or has been acquired by Google for $22 billion or something. 32. 32. Okay, man. Prices went up, inflation. And you were going for a role that you were completely unqualified for, if we're honest. But you found a way to get qualified for that role in a very short amount of time to the point where you de-risked hiring you for it. And I'd love for you to maybe talk about the goal. Like when did you even set a goal that you like, what was motivating you to like make that transition? Like if you could talk a little bit about kind of the emotional way it gripped you. And then when you got this assignment, how did you break down how you're going to learn? You know a lot Ben. It's like really you can tell the whole story of this. But I do want to start from the beginning because it sounds like for me when you say it, it sounds like it was very easy, but it was not or not that complicated. Because for me, I was in the army for 13 years. I was never doing anything technical, there's no technical experience. Yeah, I did have or I learned at school a computer, but it was very basic. So while I was 13 years in the army, I didn't do anything that is close to what I did at Wiz. But it started when I found myself about to leave the army, it was 13 years already, I've been through a lot of roles. And I was thinking to myself, okay, what am I going to do when I leave the army? And I started to hear podcasts about high tech, about success, which is what really excited me, how people succeed in what they do, what was their passion, what moved them, what was their motivation. And I started with a few podcasts, listening to some people who built great companies, made some great technologies, and I really liked it. And the thing I was thinking about is, I don't know how they did it, but I want to be in this kind of environment. I want to be surrounded by this kind of successful people who want something, which sounds to me like science, something that I really don't know. I want to be there and I want to be part of them. I think that when I was in the army, when you are in the Air Force and you're surrounded by pilots, so it sounds like, okay, those guys are super special, but if you're one of them or you're surrounded by them, you must be like them, you must be one of them or you quit or you go out. So I found myself, or I wanted to be in this kind of community or environment. And I started to think, okay, what should I do to get there? Because I had something like one year to go out of the army. And in this one year, which was my last year in the army, was my time to learn. It was always only self-learning, reading books. Can I ask a question? That one year left in the army, was that like a timeline that you imposed to yourself or was it something that like you had been a pilot for X amount of time and you were kind of your duty was done? That's a good question because I stopped flying after they found, you won't believe it, but they found I have asthma. So I stopped flying and then I got back to fly and it was okay. You cannot stay in the same squadron, same airplane. You have a few choices to move to other role or leave the army. And that was for me, okay, I don't want to stay here if I don't want, if I'm not going to do what I love. And it was okay, go out of your safe zone and go find yourself. So I kind of didn't have a lot of choices, but being, I could stay in the army, but in some average roles, things that I don't want to do or push myself forward and start to find the next challenge. Because I think it's part of who I am. Yeah, without a challenge, you're the kind of person that always needs like a challenge or needs like a mountain to kind of climb or something like that. So with the air force, did you feel like you were on a track that you would have been happy to keep flying? You wouldn't even have thought of tech or do you think because you were listening to the podcast and you're starting to realize you're not one of the other guys, like, you know, you don't want the same things the other guys want that you started to feel pulled into tech, even if you didn't have asthma. So I think that I was always thinking that I'm not sure I want to stay in the army. I do want to aim higher and aim for the big world, I would say, without any limits, because still in the army, you do have some kind of limits. If you want to grow and be in a higher in higher rank, it's about time. And outside of the army, it's not about time. If you're good, you'll be at the top. And it's all about you. Which is what I wanted to, what I wanted to do, you know, when, when you think when it's about you, then you don't have any excuse, you must be good. Because if you're not succeed, it's about you. And if you succeed, yeah, it's also about you. So going back to where I started to, to looking into this world. So those podcasts made me feel very excited. I, I, I wanted to be this guy that is interviewed in podcast, but after a really big success, not like today, today, I feel like this is maybe, you know what, maybe it is another step in, in where I'm looking for until I talked about it now, I didn't really think about it that way, but I did want it to be this kind of person who has a story of success that can inspire and really has a real impact on people, on technology, on something big. And it's funny because one of the most interesting people I heard in podcast was Ami Lutvak, which is the CTO of Wiz. And after I think almost one year that I heard him in this podcast, he was my direct manager. And you didn't, you didn't know each other when you, when you listened to the podcast? No. And before he interviewed me, I got back to this podcast episode and heard him again, get prepared for this interview. So how I did it, it sounds like I made it short, but it was the way to this success. I had a lot of failures. I interviewed to a lot of companies, tech companies, and I think I failed around 20 interviews. So I was kind of getting ready really well, but when I got to the interview, I said, okay, I'm not that good. And I going to think about what was not good and how can I improve it? And this is the process or the way I think of debriefing something and make it better next time. It's actually, it's came, it came from the army, from the air force. This is one of the things that pilots do is always debriefing yourself and seeing what could you do better. And even if it was, if you haven't done any mistake, everything was great. You do debrief it to understand what you did to do the same good thing in the next time. So I was debriefing myself the whole time before I interviewed. And by the way, just like for the debriefing, when you were a pilot, are you, does it happen right after you take the flight? And is there some questions that you're asking? Like, is there like, it's like three questions that you ask every time and are you like reading them down? Are you like debriefing with a person? Like, how does, how is that process? So there is a leader when you do whatever kind of flight of training, or if it's operational, you have a video of your flight and the sound recording, and you do see your video highlights and talk about it. And the, in this environment lets you really debrief anyone. It doesn't matter about rank. You can debrief your, or talk about your commander. If he did something wrong, you can tell him, okay, I think that was wrong. And that's really acceptable. And I think this is one of the most important thing if you want to, if you want to improve yourself always. So I did it while interviewing and while going to the companies. So after every interview, did you wait? So let's say the 20 interviews, which by the way, I was in a similar boat before I landed at Facebook. I went to about 20, 20 different interviews until I got one yes. So I can relate to how hard that must have been. I don't think I was doing a proper debrief for myself in that process. Looking back, I was kind of just keep thinking about the next goal and not looking back as much. So when you say you were applying that same, that same rigor, that same discipline during those, all those rejections and all those failures, what did that look like? Is it like literally after you get out of the interview, you sit down and think about it? Or did you wait until you got the feedback that it was a rejection and then you, you did your reflection? It's a good question because actually it's right away after I'm finishing something, I'm debriefing myself, like how I felt it was. And then you see, because sometimes you're not, you know, you don't really know what they see. And you might think something was bad, but it actually was not that bad, but it is still something that you want to talk. If you, you think something was wrong, it's important to write it right away because you missed it. You forget it later. I have, I don't know, thousands of notes that I'm writing in my phone about a lot of things. I can, I can find now maybe something that I wrote after an interview in a iron source. I remember this day because I was, you know, iron source, this company sounds familiar, but I don't think I know the company. Yeah. So I, I've been interviewed there for, I think three interviews. The first one I passed, the second one was, I'm not sure. And then they said, okay, try another apartment department in our company. But this one was also bad. So I, I remember that I was right away writing things that about how I talked about myself and what I marked. And I mean, I felt, okay, this one was not good. No one cares that you were a commander or something talking about what can you ship, what can you bring to the table if you're going to be a product manager or account manager or something that is the company cares about. So I remember that was one of the, when this, when I understood what I'm doing wrong. So moving forward to Wiz, that was, I think luck and also the right time, the right place. And they were, I think it was right when they get their AC, serious A and they hired a lot of people and they were looking for good people actually. The first role I interviewed to was to be a escalation engineering team manager. And they said, because someone there was in the army and he had some experience with pilots, he said, okay, I know pilots. They know how to learn things very fast and they can be good managers. So let's try something with one pilot. And they sent some message in a pilot's WhatsApp group. And in this WhatsApp message, they said, we're looking for a pilot who can manage technical things. And we knew that it worked very well in the army and it should work also here at Wiz. So let's try. I said, okay, I have some technical background after all I've been through. And maybe it can be a good match. So I reached out to this guy and he sent me some exercise, home tasks, right? So I looked at it. It was two pages of something that I'm really, I don't understand. And it was like, okay, this is a real challenge and challenge accepted. Let's go for this. And I started to break down every task, every sentence, every word. And I started to understand what that means. I took a course in cloud platforms and the basic course of AWS and started to understand, okay, what they want. Once I understood what they want, it took me, I think, two weeks. I started to work on the real task, which was kind of script that identifies some vulnerability in EC2 instances. And it was a real challenge for me. And after three weeks, I've done this task. And in the email they sent me, they said it should take you a couple of days. So I said, okay, I don't have anything to lose. I'll send him back. And I sent it to him and he said, okay, that looks good. Just to interrupt for a second, they sent you a take home assignment that they said should take you a couple of days. You were, did you tell them, I'll get back to you when I'm ready? Or did you tell them, I'll get it to you in two days, but you just didn't send it? You just sent it to them three weeks later? I think I haven't replied. I'm not sure what was it, but I said, okay, there's no way they will accept it after three weeks, but let's try. So you were working on it for three weeks, thinking there's a chance they might not even look at it. Yeah. Yeah. But for me, it was part of the process of learning. It was important for me to succeed in this task for me, for myself. To be honest, I was, I had no clue about what they're going to think and I think I was thinking that there's no way they're going to accept it. But it was, so they did. And the reason you needed to do it for yourself, because I think there's an important lesson in here. There's something really interesting about you here. What I'm hearing is that you saw this thing that was really scary and intimidating and unfamiliar, but it felt like it was, if I can do this well and I can understand what this means, new opportunities can open up for me because what I want is maybe on the other side of that scary thing I'm looking at. Is that, is that why you spent three weeks? Like it didn't even become about the job at that point, it became about the project and like just getting comfortable with that. It was the new mantra. Exactly. I think after the first time I read this home assignment, I was okay. There's no way I'm going to do it in a few, in a couple of days, but I really want to succeed in that one for myself and to, to build your confidence that you can do these kinds of things. Because if you cannot do this home assignment, you are not in the right place. You're not looking for the right job. And I think it's all about people because, you know, I knew some people were in high tech companies. I know people that were, they were like me. So if they know how to do, they learn in some way, I can do it also. So yeah, so you email them, so you basically, you go quiet for three weeks and then you email them thinking maybe they'll never look at it or they already hired someone else, but you're like, fuck it. Like here it is. And then what happened? Yeah. So then they replied very quick, can you come tomorrow and introduce your home assignment? And I said, I'm too busy this week. I can do it next week. And of course I had nothing to do. So yeah, we, we scheduled a meeting in Waze office and I took this week to get prepared very well on everything I did. And it was, I felt really good about what I'm doing, but if they would ask me something about something that related, I would not know, I wouldn't know what, what to answer. When I came there and I introduced what I did, they really liked it and I was honest. And I said, before I got this home assignment, I didn't know anything. And it took me three weeks to get there. And if you appreciate what I did and you know who I am as a person, I'd be very happy to get this job. So the interview finished, like I was not sure what's going to happen, but looking back after I got there, they were thinking that I'm not sure I want the job. So they called me again and they said, we want you to meet the team so you understand how it looks, how it works. And I said, okay, I'd be happy to see that because I need more confidence to make sure that I'm ready for this. I didn't tell them that, but I was very happy to get there and meet the team, meet the people there. And once I met some, one of the guys there was, who became one of my best friends. I said, okay, I want to be there. And I just replied him after this meeting, I want to be there, so what are the next steps? I said, okay, so you do want to come? I said, yes. And that's how it started actually. You got the job basically, or there were more interviews? No, there was another interview with Ami, the CTO. And it was kind of just a meeting to meet each other. He didn't really ask any question that was kind of interview. He knew who I am, he knew I don't have any background or enough background to ask some questions. But he said, okay, we want you, you have a few weeks or months to learn what we do and let's see. Amazing. Yeah. So maybe I want to go back to, you just explained the journey, which by the way, it's amazing. And I just love all the, you took a lot of risks along the way that paid out, right? Like waiting three weeks, then being super honest, but hey, I had no idea what this meant. And they all worked out, which is great. And I think also speaks highly of Wiz's culture. But what I'm really curious about is like kind of deconstructing kind of like the way you like set the goal and then kind of like how you go about like accomplishing that goal. And I picked up a few things, right? I think you pick up a goal, be like, hey, I listened to something, I was inspired by it, I want to get into that world, right? That's the very clear goal, like no matter what role like I want in. Then there's also the elements of like, just self-reflection and I'm doing that often after every interaction. So you can kind of like constantly like update your software. But I'm curious, like, is your approach just to like jump in and get feedback right away? Or are you doing anything in preparation before that, like the first interview, the second interview, like how much, how intentional were you about breaking down, like landing a job in a tech company? So I did a lot of work to get prepared for everything. And in self-learning, reading, seeing YouTube videos and a lot of reading and asking people that knows things about what I'm going to do. I think that I learned how to learn during this process, because to understand what you need to read or wait, because you look at this word and there are so many buzzwords and things that, okay, what is, that means, where should I start? It takes a lot of time to be, to get focused. So part of the process was, okay, you must get prepared. You must work hard. And as you go or as you move in the process, you understand how you learn better and how you get prepared better. And I think that the point about getting there or today, getting there was maybe the easy part because once I got into this role as a manager in my first day at Wiz, right? I had two employees that were much more technical than me with experience and everything. And I think one of the things that I'm good at is, I know how to, I know how to listen and I don't have any ego or I don't, I never came to Wiz as, okay, I'm the manager. Now you do what I say. No, never. I always was listening, learning, and then starting to talk about what should we do. Always I'm always consulting with people, always, like I used to always to consult with people. Today I'm more confident and I know what I'm, what I'm doing, but still I'm always consulting with people and I'm allowing people to talk about what they think because I learned that if you are in a great environment with a lot of talented people, you must know you're not the smartest guy in this room and you must listen to everyone. You must hear everyone. And if you are the guy that decides what we're going to do, you maybe, you're going to listen to everyone and understand what's the best thing to do. So I think that this thing came from the army as a commander. I was never the commander. You do what I'm saying. I was always listening to, to my soldiers, to my guys and, and making decisions with them. And still that's the same. And it sounds like the same was true when you were doing debriefs after missions as a, as a, as a pilot and your, your commander, the person that's overseeing the mission made a mistake or did, could have done something better. I think the culture in Israel is such that is very comfortable with that kind of directness and the, the ability for like a subordinate to give critical feedback to a manager, which is something that you now bring into your, your, you know, that's, that's how you bring, that's what you bring with it with you into the private sector now, because, because the Israeli culture, it's like the Israeli tech culture is kind of hard to separate from the Israeli military culture because everyone starts in the military, right? Exactly. Yeah. And the, those cyber companies, they born actually in the army where those guys, those technical guys were in 8200 unit or other units that did this thing. And yeah, it's the same culture, it's the same culture of talking about everything, feeling free to talk about bad things and good things. And for a good purpose, not to make someone feel like he's ashamed or anything, just to make everyone better or the next time better. Can I, can I skip, can I, can I, sorry, Mark, do you have a follow up? Yeah. I just, because I know, I know you, I know you want to go forward and, but actually like I think something that's fascinating, right, is that it sounds like a key part of your process to get to where you got at Wiz. to get to where you got at Wiz was like almost like learning to learn again. And also with no one, there is no curriculum for you to follow. Right. So you had to figure out, like, what is the most effective way for you to learn? It's like he created his own curriculum is what it sounds like. Right. So, yeah, it was I was the first one to do something, but it's not true that I had no one to talk with because I was surrounded with great people, their job was not to train me. But I knew who to ask what and to come with the right question. So that was part of the process. Yeah. So maybe that's what I'm interested in. Like, how what did you learn about the most effective way of learning something new from that journey? Because that's something that I feel like it's such an important skill for for life. But I think now it's more important than ever as like technology is changing so quickly and and yeah, like the people that are able to pick up new things fast and adapt and be willing to be wrong, be willing to fail, I think are going to have an advantage over those that don't. Yeah. It's like, what did you learn from that experience? If you're enjoying this conversation, please check out the links in the show notes to support the podcast. Mark and I do this out of love, but to keep it going, we also need your support. Thanks. Now, back to the episode. And, you know, when I started, I think asking the right question or the right person and get this credibility from him was my goal, my small goal just to make this guy that I want to work with feel like, OK, this guy know what he wants, know what what to ask and maybe I can trust him. And once you get this credibility or trust with colleagues. You can feel more comfortable to make a real process with him and make him part of your process, so I have I had a few guys in Wiz who were part of my process and I felt very comfortable to talk with and it didn't happen in one day. It happened after I made a few, I would say, good tasks like making some scripts for big companies, solving some problems that no one knew how to get to. And those things came from my manager, who were it was Ami and his director. Actually, I really talked day by day, every day. And the first thing happened after he asked me to do something for I think it was Procter & Gamble. They were I think they were one of the biggest customers of Wiz. It's not a secret, right? They asked for features or some feature requests that Wiz didn't have yet at that time. And my manager said, maybe, you know what, you can write a script that can do this thing with our API and maybe they'll like it. And I said, OK, that sounds like a great opportunity. And I'm going to do that. And it took me around two weeks to make a Python script from zero. It was without AI. I think it was four years ago, more than three years ago. And I built it by myself. And after two weeks, it was ready and working. And we scheduled a meeting with them. And that was the first time I'm talking to Procter & Gamble's CISO and all his cloud security architects, introducing them what I did. And they said, wow, that's great. It's working. And I remember this guy, my manager, today is the director of CTO team at Wiz. He took a screenshot of this Zoom call with the script working on the break one. And he sent me this over Slack and he said, great job, man. That's your first success here. Something like that. And I said, wow, I did it. And after a few months, what I did became a feature at Wiz. Not my code, of course, but the capability that I made for them was one of the features at Wiz. And that was my first time that I was connected to product managers because I was a solution architect or solution engineer. And that was my first touchpoint to product. And that was the first time that I got the credibility from someone in product who liked what I did. And when I got there or when we when I started to work with him and my goal was, OK, I want I think that's something that I can be good at. And it's it's a good good. It might be good for me for my my next next role or step that I'm looking at, looking for. And I started to look in at these product management area and. In Wiz, it was not an option at that time, and for me, I grew as a manager. So I was the head. How many how many people were there at the time at Wiz? Well, I think around 40. And the reason it wasn't an option, because they were basically looking for people that had a certain amount of minimum experience that you didn't have yet, so they they weren't really looking to kind of groom their own PMs in-house. Yeah, and it was not necessary because they brought the most talented PMs in the industry. People came from all companies in cyber. And I think the talent, the talent in Wiz was amazing. Like the best people in cybersecurity and cloud security were there. And so I knew that I'm not qualified for this, but I'm I'm aiming for this one day. Was it was it was it mission? Except was it a challenge accepted at that point? Yeah, but, you know, silently, like no one told me that's your next challenge, but in my goals, future goals, yeah, it was part of them being a product manager at Wiz or in another company. And just for context, because I don't know if I've told this to Mark, but I'm connecting the dots to something that I don't think we've discussed yet, which I think is important in this process, which is you and you have your own goals. You and your wife have goals that you've set for like years in the future, you know, where you want to be at 40, 45. I don't know how long you've taken it now, but my understanding is that. Once you have those long term goals, you start to look at your short term options through the lens of how they can help you advance to those long term goals, right? Mm hmm. Yeah. So is there so is there something about the product management path that felt to you like it would be in service of accelerating your path towards your goals? Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's a good point. And you talked about my the goals of me and my wife. We have a notebook with goals for years. I think the last time we talked about where we want to be at age 45. One of my personal goals was to be C level or CEO of some company. And I'm telling you that because. It helps you to make decisions, small decisions while where you are in the process, because if you don't know where you want to be in 10 years from now on, you will never know what you should do today or tomorrow where you have to aim. And. I found myself in a position that I can be a product manager after what I've been through and that thing can take me to be C level or to have experience and things that CEO needs. I'll talk about what I'm doing today because today I'm a product manager doing almost everything. And I think today product managers should do everything because they have AI, because they can do a lot of things, they can develop mockups, they can develop features, they can do their own research, write PRDs in hours and do what a team of 10 people did, I think, three years ago, one or two PMs can do. Yeah. Yeah, even a year and a half ago. I feel like it's changing so quickly. And I'm actually very curious because, by the way, I love I love long term, long term thinkers. They're my people and I think there's not enough out there in the world. So I love that. But you think 10 years out and that you also your goals are bold. But I'm curious, like, can you walk me through the point where, OK, I think I want to be a C-suite or a CEO. And why why product as like the key stepping stone as opposed to like, you know, like it sounds like you were like in a solution architect path, you could have worked your way up to like a CRO, which, you know, the key part of like the business. Right. It's how you make money, which is probably the only the only way you stay alive as a business. And then you could have made that transition to to then become like a CEO. So I'm curious. Yeah. Like, why do you see product such a key stepping stone to those goals? First, I'm thinking about what is my advantages, what can I bring to the table? So for me, it was more relevant to be to aim being a product manager than CRO or CTO. I found myself doing things that are related to be product manager and, you know, I'm looking at big CEOs like Google CEO or even Microsoft CEO. They they were all product managers or most of them. And if I think about it, why they became that? Because. The only people or the one responsible to solve problems in in a company, how I see it, is the product manager who leads the product, who sets what we, what a company should do and which problem they solve. And I think that's what important because developing things and maybe selling, it's super important. No one will succeed without it. But if you want to solve the right problem that we're paying for, then your company won't be won't be succeed. And so. I want that's why I wanted to be there or that's why I am there. Felt like the most strategic kind of position to make like a leadership kind of impact, because that's where it feels like the most kind of critical long term decisions or most strategic decisions are being made. I'm curious, too, sorry, because I just find it like fascinating of like how like I always I also love goals and and always try to get better how I set goals. So, for example, for like the goal that you have for 10 years, whatever, like becoming like a C-suite or a CEO, do you have like different milestones for different years? Like how far out are you planned out? Right. It sounds like you're already like burned through the first chapter, which is like landing a PM role and then you're kind of like me in the second step, right, of like kind of like finding PM, potentially building out a team. So like, yeah, how how high fidelity are the goals as time goes up? If that makes sense. Yeah, so I think it's about it's about opportunities or, you know, I so today I'm not sure I said it, but today I'm the sole product manager at Blast Security, which is we are a new startup. We just not just a year and a half ago, we raised the seed and today we have product and a few customers. And in where I am today, so I'm doing a lot of things that are not only the product manager school, which is not just defining products and features, writing PRDs, it's also talking to customers and sales and working on pricing for customers and the agreements with the lawyers and documentation and building mockups and talking to engineering every day like an engineer, because if you won't talk in their language or understand exactly what they have to do and talk in their language, so you won't get their credibility. And in where I am today, I think as a product manager in a small startup, I got the opportunity to do all of this, which is actually what I wanted or what I've been looking for. And I feel like I know today how or I know more about how a company is born and what you need to do to build a successful company, because I see Blast Security, our company is a successful one. We do have some competitors and we do have this market has a lot of products in cyber. And our product is one of the best in our category. So I feel that or I really think that what we're doing today, we're doing it right. And when you do something right and you see how it started and you're going through how it became a real product that's working and companies are paying for this, you get a lot of tools and a lot of experience for your next step. So where I am today, I feel that I'm almost ready to get our next step, which can be maybe a higher role here. We're still small, but it's maybe maybe it will happen once we grow or maybe in one year or a few months going to my own way, which is something that I'm thinking about, but I do want to see this company succeed before I move to my next step. So it sounds like a founder, like a founder chapter. As you think about your path into maybe that 10 year goal to end up with a C-suite CEO kind of title, you can either find a company and grow within the company into the CEO of that company, or you could start your own company and be the CEO of that company. Is there a third option? Or that kind of feels like it's basically the two paths, right? Yeah, those are the two paths. I think the second one is more where I'm aiming to. But who knows? You know, when I when I left Wiz, I was thinking on that time maybe to go to this the second option you said. And I got this opportunity here to be product manager, the first product manager under the CPO, which was an amazing opportunity for me. And who knows, you know, what will happen next? Yeah, not to interrupt you, but I'm so just continuing to pull the thread on like deconstructing goals and kind of focusing your self learning on the right things. So let's say that if the next goal is to be a successful founder, which, by the way, for the record, starting a venture backed company as a founder, I personally think is the hardest thing to do in business. Like, I don't think there's much I can think of that's harder. It does feel like. Like a mountain to climb, and I've been the first PM at a few startups, I kind of have an idea of what it might be like to be that first that first PM, and I'm curious, like, are you are you currently in the process of almost talk like talking to other people about are you talking to a bunch of founders to understand their life, obviously marrying some of what you're hearing with your own experience, being the founding PM within your own company and observing there? But are you starting to like assemble a map of all your different blind spots or like the gaps in what you know and trying to like actively chip away at learning those things so that you're better prepared for for that chapter right now? Yeah, yeah. So I do mostly about I feel like I have. I never or I do today a little talk to our to some funds and no funding is something that I've never done before, but I'm always exploring it and talking about it with my CEO, how it works and what the plans next and how was it before they just started and I'm not doing it myself, but I'm trying to learn as much as I can from what I do here today. And I find myself a lot of times knowing a lot of people who works at some companies or at some funds that can be good for me in the future. So it makes me feel more more confident about I know who to reach. I have some connections and I know and if Blast will succeed, it will be a good thing for me for the future. So I see Blast today as my place to grow. And if it will succeed, it will help me in the future. I do. I know that I have a lot of things that I don't know, but what I see here in Blast or at least before, it's always about people. If you get the right people who knows what to do or who will do whatever needed to succeed, then it must go there. And building a great team. I think this is the most challenging thing, more than finding problems and solutions, more than funding, more than everything. Building the right team. I think this is the most, the hardest things when you want to start. I'm just I'm just kind of continuing to pull the thread on that. I mean, you're definitely like top, you know, whatever, point zero one percent of self learners that I know who like to do really difficult things as you think about building your own team, finding a co-founder, hiring. And I know I know you're not quite there yet, but maybe you'll be hiring in your current role or in the next year or two. How important is it to you that the people that you surround yourself have the same kind of like relentless learning muscle like that, that whatever it is that you have around just like doing hard things and kind of entering ambiguous territory with excitement and being able to break stuff down, like how important is it for you to surround yourself with that kind of. People, it is important, but I think that you will never know from interviewing if you interview someone once or twice. It's hard to understand if if that person who stands here is that curious and how can you really trust him? And. I think that, you know, maybe maybe, you know, when I got interviewed to Wiz and I told him that I took this home assignment and worked at it for three weeks without knowing what will happen, it's funny to say, but this is someone that I will look for, that he's not giving up, is is going to do, is going to achieve the goal, whatever needs, whatever, without any anyone that will promise him that it will succeed. So. Think that if you know how to find out these kind of people, that's that means that, OK, this guy is the guy you want to work with. And whatever people will tell you in an interview and maybe you ask the question and they will answer, great, because they are smart, they have experience, it's not easy to understand if they are that curious and they will give everything to succeed. It's so hard to evaluate that, it's so hard to evaluate, like, because I'm trying to even define what that quality is that you just described. Is it like basically people that are going to do, going to go above and beyond. To do something challenging and do way more than was asked. Because they feel like that's what they need to do for themselves, is that like I'm trying to define what that characteristic is, Mark, I'm curious if you. Yeah, I mean, I think for me, it's like a combination of things. I don't think we can distill it to just one word or unless I don't know what that word is, but what I was hearing that is it's a combination of like curiosity. Right. There's a combination of like endurance, right? Like if you do hard things, you just need to endure through it and not give up and make it to the finish line. I think there's way too many people that just like throw the towel into the floor because they're like, there's no way I'm going to figure this out. Like I don't even know what the first two sentences mean on this page is like three pages, like, you know, I'm not, you know, I'm not crazy. So, yeah. And then I think there's almost like just the humility of like being a beginner again and learning and I don't know, those are the things that I picked up. I can, I really, I find what you said very, I'm reasoning with this, right? Yeah. But when you say that, I think that in sports or endurance sport, there's all those things that you're looking for in someone like this, in a teammate like this one, because they have the consistency and self-discipline and they achieve goals. So I wouldn't say that I want to build a team of Ironmans. They know how to build products or sell products or something like that. But I would look for those kind of, I say, like characteristics or traits. Yeah, characteristics. Yeah. So Mark understands Hebrew now. Yeah. I'm basically fluent, guys. Yeah, it sounds like basically I think that there's this, there's this evolving situation right now in the workplace where the technologies and the capabilities for just doing like almost like anything, like at work and in life is the capabilities are evolving faster than you could kind of keep up with for most like no one, no one that I know is able to keep track of all the things. So as a result, there's like, there's the number of things that people don't know how to do or don't know how to apply in their job is growing at an accelerating rate. The kind of visual that comes to mind to me is almost like this, this like cloud of ambiguity is just growing bigger and bigger. And each of us still has, you know, 24 hours a day. We still have jobs to do. We still need outcomes. We still need to hit our goals and hit our results. So there's like a level of discernment and judgment that I think every person right now has to apply in their life to figure out which things do I want to learn and how and which things am I willing to let slide by. And I'm not going to I'm just not going to focus on them because I don't have the ability to. And so I have a we haven't talked about this before, but I have a feeling you're probably you've got some thoughts about this. You know, if I just love to kind of get your take on like as someone who is super curious and as someone who's super motivated and you want to stay at the at the cutting edge of your field, how are you thinking right now about which things you're almost willing to not learn about or which and which things you really do want to learn about? How what's your what's the machinery under the hood for like you'd making those decisions? It's a great question, because I or actually, I think that today you can learn everything you want very quick or at least being enough with enough knowledge to to do something because you have A.I. And and if you find something that is not that important, maybe you can write one prompt and learn enough to to be relevant and to be enough ready to talk about and make decisions about things. So you talked about maybe what you should learn or what not. I think that you maybe the right question is what you should. Be focused on in your work and what you do in your 24 hours, and it depends on what the company goal is now and. If, for example, in that time, we are working on some feature that might win the next POC, so everyone is focused there and even if it's not something that you've done before, you should learn about it very quick and you should understand what this company wants, what is their pain and design very quick their feature and make some mockup or something that works and gets feedback. And that's possible today because I can think about one feature in the morning or get something from a customer and building something by the end of the day and showing it to my team. I don't think that you have to not focus or not think what you don't have to learn. You have to focus on what is what is going to bring you to the next goal of the whole company, because today, if you will think about it, I think that's what you're saying, that your time is a resource that is very limited and it's still it's very limited, but you can do much more things with your time today. And because you don't feel like you don't feel like overwhelmed by the amount of things that can be learned. It sounds like you're looking at every single day through the lens of the goals for that day. And then, you know, if you talk to a customer in the morning and you there's like something that you would like to do, you're like, ah, I should deliver that to them by the end of the day. Let me see if I can. So it's like challenge accepted. I'll try it. I'll spend today trying to get that out the door. And then maybe so, like, the way that you learn about the new tools, the way that you figure out how the new tools fit into your workflow are because you're kind of operating out of an assumption that, like, it's almost like I should assume this is possible. I'm going to figure out how to do it. And if I can't, like, I'll figure out why. So I'll find the edge of what the tools are capable of doing. But you're not like out there just tinkering with tools for the sake of tinkering with with tools. You're kind of trying to make sure the tools always map to, like, the goals. Yeah, exactly. So, yeah, that's how I understood it, right. It's like all the learning that you do is in service of accomplishing the goals. Right. And the goals could be the company goals or your personal goals, right, which could be like maybe becoming a founder one day. Right. And I think anything that doesn't fit, any learning that doesn't fit within that bucket is a distraction to you getting to that goal faster. Yeah, exactly. So maybe for me, it sounds like obvious or I always know what what should I focus on. But if you are not there, if you won't focus then or you won't understand what's the end goal and it takes me back to my notebook and my future goals. If you don't know what's your goal in the end of the day, in the end of the week, the end of the year. Well, in the end of the day, in the end of the week, the end of the year, you won't know where to focus today. And that relates to everything I'm doing in life, here in the company, in sports. So just to, just to read it back. So it's like, basically, um, if the goal in 10 years, I'm kind of working backwards, so if the goal in 10 years is to like be a CEO and the best chance, or like the most likely way that you become the CEO is to found your own company and become a successful CEO of your own company, then we work backwards to the best way that the thing that will be most helpful for you to become a successful founder is to actually see blast to become extremely successful. Right? So now making blast become successful is the goal. And you work backwards from that to like, well, what's going to make blast successful? There's a really important customer we're trying to close right now. And if we can close this customer or get them integrated or up and running or whatever, that's going to be an incredibly important case study or whatever. That's going to allow us to go and get other customers and get revenue. So the most important thing to do today is to get that customer, like to make as much progress on getting that customer onboarded as possible. Exactly. Exactly. You explained it much better than me. So, um, yeah, that's exactly what I meant to say, or that's my point. So in where I am today, as you explained it great, it's easy to explain it, but I think it's easy because I know what's the end goal and I'm looking forward or I'm looking far at my end goals, which is set all my decisions that I make every day. Um, so as we start wrapping up, uh, Yaniv, I just wanted to ask, is there any other part of your learning process that maybe, um, I picked up on something in your last answer, which is like, maybe it's just obvious to people that you should, you should tie what you do today to your goals, which by the way, I don't think is, maybe it's obvious when we say it, but I do, I don't think a lot of people behave it. I don't think a lot of people work that way, but you, you have the discipline to actually implement it. So is there anything else that feels kind of obvious to you about like learning that, you know, maybe it's not actually that common in people? You said that. I think, I think consistency and self-discipline, which is most important thing for, for success or for doing something that you really want to be good at. Some people, for some people, it's easy to learn new stuff. For me, I know that my superpower is this consistency and keep on asking questions and not getting tired until I'm getting into solution or achieving my goal. And I say, I say it in like high level, but if you take something practically for learning, you have to ask a lot of questions and the map what you know and what you don't know. And if there is something that you don't understand and it is important because it's part of what you want to do, you must learn enough and ask all the questions before you move forward. So for me, for example, when I learned or when I got to Wiz or cloud, cloud infrastructure, I learned everything from the beginning. I didn't know what is API and what is how network works. And I took the most essential courses of how network works, all the layers, how computer work, and once I understand those essentials and, and I could talk about it, which is the level that I think you have to do if you want to be good enough, you have to know how to talk about what you, what you know, and maybe teach it, then you can move forward to the next step. If you have the environment, if you have the people that can help you, it's a bonus, but you, it's not a must because you have everything today in your, in, in one prompt or even Google today, you know, you can find everything you need to know very easy. So I think going to the essentials and asking and keep on asking questions. It's my, for me, it's the key. And of course that's it. Consistency, self-discipline, always trying to understand everything as much as you can. It's almost like don't, don't take shortcuts, right? Like learn, learn the basics and because if not, you're working out of a shaky foundation and it's going to come back to bite you at some point, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I found it out when I was talking about some things that I, I didn't have those foundations. So when I found out myself talking about private networks or anything else, I, when, where I don't know how a network works, I said, okay, I have to learn some things. And that's how I found myself moving back to, to, to the foundations and essentials of every, everything that I know today. I also love the idea that like, you don't really understand something until you can teach it. That feels, that feels really solid to me too, as a concept. And I generally like find that I, I, I really enjoy ask, like I enjoy feeling stupid in a conversation where I, where I don't know something about something that is important to me to learn. My guess is you, I mean, knowing Mark, I know this is for sure true. I'm guessing the same is true for you and Eve too, which is like, you're not worried about sounding dumb in a conversation. You're happy to sound stupid, ask all the dumb questions and then you come back to the next conversation. It's like, wow, that guy got way smarter, way faster. And then it's like, almost like the pace of learning is the thing that matters more than being right. Or, you know, get, you know, something like that. Does that feel, feel right? Yeah. Yeah. I think you have to be confident enough to know, to, to feel that way. So, you know who you are. It's okay to feel dumb or if you don't know anything, it's okay to ask it. I saw great people asking dumb questions and I learned from them. Yeah. I mean, I think all the best CEOs that I've worked for, they are all incredible asking questions. And even when I've met with them and I should have been the one asking questions, they somehow always managed to be the ones that asked the most amount of questions. And I think that's just like, part of the job is like having that information asymmetry. I think part of it too is like, they're probably inherently curious and yeah, it's such an important trait. What's crazy, I remember just a quick, quick story. Like when I was living in San Francisco, I remember going to a coffee shop one morning. I was like a Saturday morning and I saw, I look around and I recognize Patrick Collison, who's the, one of the co-founders and CEO of Stripe. He's sitting at this table alone, you know, in Soma in San Francisco. And I'm not kidding. He had four big books on this table and he's just got a notepad and I can just see him like book open notepad and Stripe at this point was already a successful like multi-billion dollar company. Right. And I just had this moment where I was just like, I didn't even want to, I didn't even want to say anything. I just wanted, I was just looking. And, and so I think, I think that's kind of my, when I think of the greatest CEOs and maybe the Collison brothers are on the extreme end of, of growth mindset. It's just like the learning is never, never done. You're always learning. And so to some degree, building the muscle of being a good learner might, might be the best muscle to develop on the, on that path to being a CEO. Yeah. And the other word that came up to me, like, I know we've touched a lot of like words that I feel like define like people that you want to work for, but also people that I think like what defines you and has a lot of you to be successful. I think like a keyword that's maybe a little bit hidden, but I think it's very important is like honesty. And I think honesty in like, of course, always saying the truth, but, and you know, and I, and you did that when you showed up and be like, Hey, actually, I don't really understand most of this stuff, but I'll promise to you guys, I'll learn it, but I think it's like honesty. I think the heart, I think a lot of people are really good at being honest with people, other people, but they're very, they're not good at being honest with themselves, right? I think like we humans can be very self delusional because we want to tell a story to ourselves, especially as smart people, like we can be very good at rationalizing things, but I think to learn something, you need an intellectual honesty of like how much you understand something and, and yeah, it's so important and I think a lot of people take it for granted and, but it's really hard and I think that with humility, I think it's like the powerful combination of like just getting really comfortable asking dumb questions and really making sure that, that the key basics are ingrained in your brain. So, yeah. That's one thing that came up for me, man. I wish we could keep going for another hour, but yeah. Um, let's start wrapping up. So, um, two more questions before our final exciting gratitude corner, which, uh, you can take Ben, but, uh, Yanniv, this has been awesome. Um, if people want to learn more about what you're doing, where can people find you and then finally, how can the audience be useful to you? Yeah. So, um, I think you can find me on LinkedIn, Yanniv Fatal, which is fatal, which is, uh, it's not that bad. Um, so yeah, you can find me there. I'm not that active those days, but I should be more in there. I'm planning to be more, more active and sharing more updates about our product. And maybe you can help me find some, uh, sales, salespeople in the US. Looking for someone who familiar with the cybersecurity, um, companies or some, or was part of a cybersecurity company. So we hiring today, we're trying to expand now our product in, in, in the US. Um, and yeah, contact me if you have, uh, if you have someone great. Um, and it can be anywhere in the US. Uh, it sounds like more like an account executive type of role. Kind of. Cool. Um, yeah. Cool. We can link if, if you have any, uh, if you have any, uh, those job openings posted, we could link those in the show notes so people could pass those along. And if someone knows someone ping me, ping Mark, ping Yanniv directly, let's get these guys, uh, let's get these guys some go-to-market fuel here in the US to kind of eat more of the market. Um, and then, um, and then the, the thing we like to finish on is, is gratitude corner, so gratitude corner, um, here, we basically want to take a finish with a few moments where, um, we want to hear about someone who has played some kind of really important role for you in this journey, it could be multiple people. We, we don't want to be too prescriptive with which parts of the journey, but just whatever comes to mind, if you're feeling any, any, um, large amounts of gratitude to someone for the, for their help. Yeah. So I'm thinking about two people. So one of them, I just talked about, I think at the beginning, it's, uh, Ami Ludwak, who was the CTO of Wiz. We're still good friends talking, talking sometimes, and he really helped me, uh, get into this world. And I want to thank him because he believed in me and I think that's what I needed that, that day, those days. And the other person is, um, Ron, Ron Cole, who was, was also my colleague and my manager for a few months at Wiz. And he really helped me to move forward and being a manager of global team. And still, yeah, I think in this, this world, I really, I owe them a lot. So thank you guys. I really appreciate it. If you hear me. Amazing. I love that. Great. Well, uh, we'll include, um, we'll include their, their profiles in the show notes too, so people can go check them out and we'll give them a shout out when we go live with the episode too. But this was a real pleasure. I really enjoyed this. Thanks for taking the time. I learned a lot and I'm, I'm really excited to see. I feel like despite all the progress, I feel like we're just in the early, the first part of your story is, is kind of always what I feel when we, when we catch up and when I look at it, so I'm celebrating all the progress and at the same time, just very excited to see also what's, uh, what's coming up. Yeah. Yeah, man, I'm inspired. I'm going to run, go, go for a run, set some goals. Um, and I just put out a post it on my computer. It'd be like, what would Yaniv do here? And, and then also just, you know, remember us when you're raising your pre-seed, so, you know, so we get a piece of the action. Well, at least someone in the US. Exactly. Yeah. Cool. Thank you so much. Yeah. Thank you. That's a wrap. Yes. If you enjoyed this conversation, please share it with someone who you think would benefit from it as well. We really appreciate it. We'd also love a follow or a rating on Substack, Spotify, or YouTube. That's going to let other people find us. And if you have any topic recommendations for a future episode, please send myself or Mark a DM on LinkedIn. We'd love to hear from you. Thanks.