CyberRisk TV Interview: How and When to Build Advisory Boards with Benny Lakunishok

Summary

Zero Networks CEO Benny Lakunishok recommends waiting to form a formal customer advisory board (CAB) until a company has hundreds of customers and the budget to run structured, in-person meetings. Before then, founders should rely on informal advisors. In this episode of Founder Stories from CyberRisk Alliance, he also covers hiring the right people, why bringing in a VP too early can backfire, and why he sees cybersecurity shifting back toward prevention.

Key takeaways

• Benny calls a formal CAB a “big league” investment and suggests waiting until a company has hundreds of customers.
• Early on, informal advisors, including potential customers, can guide pricing, messaging, features, and roadmap.
• Hire the right people without compromise, and part ways quickly with the wrong ones.
• Prove you can sell to about 10 customers you don’t know before hiring a VP of sales or marketing.
• Benny sees the industry moving from detection back to prevention, a shift he calls “prevention 2.0.”

This interview was published in November 2024. Timelines mentioned reflect Zero Networks at that time.

[00:02] Narrator: Welcome to Founder Stories, where we dive into the journeys of cybersecurity leaders, from first-time founders to industry veterans. Each story reveals the passion, resilience, and problem-solving spirit that drives innovation forward. Whether it’s tackling financial challenges, conquering regulations, or building a great company culture, these founders have insights and advice that inspire. Let’s hear their stories.

[00:21] Allan Alford, Host, Founder Stories: Howdy, folks, and welcome to Founder Stories TV, the only show where we interview cybersecurity founders and learn all about their trials, their tribulations, and everything else they go through. With me today is Benny Lakunishok from Zero Networks. Benny, thank you so much for joining us.

[00:44] Benny Lakunishok, Co-Founder and CEO, Zero Networks: Thank you, Allan. Thank you for pronouncing my name correctly, and thanks for having me.

[00:48] Allan Alford: I love it. All right, let’s dive straight in. I’ve got a series of questions for you about being a founder. Are you good with that?

Benny Lakunishok: Sure.

What obstacles do first-time founders not see coming?

[00:56] Allan Alford: First question. What is an obstacle you faced as a founder that you could not have predicted? Something that surprised you and that you had to overcome?

[01:09] Benny Lakunishok: First of all, there are many obstacles you don’t know about. You don’t know what you don’t know, and every few months there are different challenges as the company grows. I would say the main one, and also one of the first, is understanding how important it is to have the right people, with a capital R. And if someone isn’t the right person, you have to let go very quickly. Otherwise, they’ll hold you back rather than move you forward. The right people are key.

[01:42] Allan Alford: And as you got started, you had to figure out what the roles were. The stereotype is that when you start as a founder, you’re putting in 16-hour days yourself. How true is that? How much were you working before you hired the right people, and how many hours are you still putting in?

[02:04] Benny Lakunishok: It’s bad. There’s nothing else. Everything in life is on hold. Even if you find the right people in the beginning, and even more so later, you’re growing fast. Think of the company as a ball whose surface keeps growing. Even as you add people, there’s more to do than the people you add can handle. So even if everything is perfect, you just need to work more so the company goes faster. And that’s the best-case scenario.

[02:49] So in the beginning, even if you add the right people, you’ll need to work a lot more than you think. And when I say the beginning, it can be multiple years, not just the first year.

[03:04] Allan Alford: How often do you find yourself to be the limiting factor? Where you have to be in the loop, and even though you’ve hired all the right people, it comes back to you and you have to be the one to deal with it?

[03:17] Benny Lakunishok: Nowadays, not as much. This is me speaking five years in [as of 2024], and it’s no longer the case, which is great. It’s a very different experience now than it was in the first few years. Am I the limiting factor? You can always be the limiting factor. You can always do more. But there also has to be some balance: time to sleep, to rest, to do something for yourself, even something small, so you can still be energetic the next day. Nowadays, it’s not as much. Back in the day, it was literally all the time.

Why does Benny Lakunishok discourage people from becoming founders?

[03:56] Allan Alford: I ask a lot of founders for their words of encouragement, to get people to say, “Hey, I should be a founder too.” I want to hear your words of discouragement. What’s the warning? What should people know before they become a founder?

[04:13] Benny Lakunishok: I’ll put it to you differently. In Israel, where I’m from, there’s a lot of innovation, so there are a lot of founders, and I cross paths with many people who want to become founders. I always start with: I wouldn’t wish being a founder on my enemies. I could tell you many things, but the main one is that you will most likely fail. And whether you fail or succeed, the first few years are most likely going to be [miserable]. You’ll need to invest a lot of time. It’s extremely difficult. Some of the people who are with you in the beginning, you probably won’t speak to afterward.

Allan Alford: Wow.

[04:58] Benny Lakunishok: It also depends on your family situation. Luckily, I was single before I started this. But statistically, if you’re in a relationship, there’s a very high probability the relationship will end. That’s just statistics, not me speaking. It’s very impactful on your life. So don’t do it. Literally, that’s my recommendation.

What would Benny Lakunishok do differently?

[05:25] Allan Alford: Wow. All right. That being said, I can’t help but feel that along your journey, you figured out ways to overcome some of the bad stuff. What challenges were you able to overcome? What did you learn the hard way? What would you do differently to get a better outcome?

[05:49] Benny Lakunishok: Interesting question. The first one is to find the right people and not compromise. Wait a few months until you find the right person. That applies from the co-founder all the way down to the people doing the work and the people who manage them. They need to be top-notch people who fit your values and fit the way you feel, intuitively, in your gut, that things need to be handled. If things are being done differently from how you feel they should be, it’s going to explode, whether or not the company succeeds. Sometimes it works out anyway, but most of the time it doesn’t. So that’s the main thing.

[06:38] Then there are many smaller things, like understanding what’s really important or urgent. Many times you feel something is, but it isn’t. You need to prioritize, or find the right people you can discuss things with logically and coolly: do we do this now or not? In life, we’re used to just acting: “Obviously I want to do this,” or “I don’t want to do that.” Here you need to stop and think. Some things are tangents that will sink time without improving where you are or what you need to achieve, whether you’re in year one, two, three, four, or later. A lot of prioritization needs to happen, and it’s very difficult to do.

[07:28] Allan Alford: Staying on mission versus chasing rabbits all across the field.

[07:33] Benny Lakunishok: Yes. It sounds trivial, but when you’re in the weeds and so much is happening, it’s very nontrivial.

[07:43] Allan Alford: That makes a lot of sense. And I can see where distraction becomes one of your biggest enemies.

[07:52] Benny Lakunishok: Yes. And it’s not just a distraction of time; it’s also a distraction from the outcome you need to achieve.

When should a startup hire executives versus generalists?

[08:01] Allan Alford: That ties into my next question. It’s easy to get distracted by all the possibilities, and it’s easy to want to do everything. I think that’s why at most startups, everybody wears multiple hats. You might be the CISO involved in product, or the CTO who also supervises the sales engineers. Is that what you see? Do you look for leaders who can wear multiple hats? Which leader do you bring on next, and how do you fit them in? Or do you start to focus and say, “You are strictly going to be the CRO”? What’s your hiring strategy for leadership?

[08:54] Benny Lakunishok: That’s a broad set of questions, so I’ll answer them as they made sense in my head. I’ll start with yes: in the beginning, you need to wear a lot of hats and do more than you typically would. It’s very hard to give a guideline on when to recruit people who can own these functions instead of you. Generally speaking, you need to do it earlier than you think. But I also see the opposite. People think, “I need a VP of marketing.” No, you don’t. You don’t have a product yet.

[09:39] Have a product. Make sure you can sell it 10 times and that it’s working. Selling 10 times isn’t just the act of selling. It means you’re selling to people you don’t know: not your friends, but random prospects you told, “This is what I can do.” They validated that you can do it, they liked it, and they voted with their wallets.

Allan Alford: Market validation.

[10:12] Benny Lakunishok: That signals many things. It also sounds trivial, but it isn’t. Many things need to evolve in the product for those first 10 sales, the magic number, to happen. And when you’re doing founder-led sales, those things will be different from what’s needed for the first 10 sales without the founder. Even then, the product and processes need to keep evolving, along with the supporting functions in the company. So there’s no guideline. It changes from company to company, depending on where they are, what market they’re in, and what the founders’ expertise is. There are a lot of parameters in play, and there’s no simple answer.

[11:01] But yes, you need to wear a lot of hats. Understand which hats come naturally to you, and keep wearing those. For the ones that don’t, find ways to get help as quickly as possible. And help doesn’t mean “I’m going to move my hat to the next VP.” It can be an individual contributor who’s really good at that work and pushes it forward. It doesn’t need to be an executive. People think, “I’ll give it to the VP of whatever, and it’s going to be amazing.” No. Sometimes bringing in a VP of sales when you have, say, half a million in ARR is very bad.

Allan Alford: Yes.

[11:41] Benny Lakunishok: Because they won’t know what to do. They need a machine that operates, even a small one, so they can make it bigger. They won’t know how to create the machine, and half a million isn’t a machine yet. It’s just some sales the founder made. That’s one example of why not to bring in an executive too early. The same goes for a VP of marketing, sometimes, depending on the person. There are always exceptions: an executive who has built something similar from scratch before and would love to do it again. Typically, by the way, people like that leave after two or three years, because by then the company’s growth requires different things than it did in the beginning. It’s almost a different set of problems to solve. That’s a long answer to a very broad set of questions.

[12:47] Allan Alford: No, that’s great. You covered exactly what I wanted to get into, and you talked about how it changes over time, which I think is significant. Our audience is people thinking about becoming founders, other founders who are new and looking for tips, and even CISOs who want to understand the other side of the fence. You answered the question not just for the immediate term but over time, and that’s vital. In a startup, the rules that apply today aren’t the rules that apply tomorrow. That’s a very important point.

How do you handle responsibilities no one owns yet?

[13:22] Allan Alford: So as you hire your leadership, you find you need different skills, and sometimes there are gaps. You figure out you can wear two and a half hats, and someone you brought on has grown into wearing two others, and you still have one and a half hats left over. Do you try to hire that exact one-and-a-half-hat person? Or do you balance the workload across the people you have? At some point, it feels like you’re backed into a corner where you need someone with a very specific and very strange set of skills.

[13:59] Benny Lakunishok: There’s no single way to do it, and there are almost no templates. If some of that one and a half hats can be taken on by people already in the company without hurting the business, do that, especially if they’ll enjoy the challenge of doing something new. It’s a conversation with them. I never believe in “You need to own this now.” It’s more like, “Look, I have this, and I need some help. Would you like to take it on?” That’s also a matter of management style, the people you have, and the culture of the company.

[14:45] I’m also a believer in being opportunistic about people I find along the way. Many times I’ve met someone and thought, “Wow, they’re amazing at that, but I don’t have a function for it.” It doesn’t matter. A startup always needs something. If I can see that 70% of a role is there, I’ll find the other 30% for them to do. So when you come across people and there’s a fit that’s really beneficial, hire them. The vacuum of a growing startup will make sure they find more work to do.

[15:31] So on the one-and-a-half-hat question, don’t force it. Don’t try to fit a square peg in a round hole. If you find the right person who can take something off your plate, bring them on. If you don’t, try to distribute the work, or keep it yourself for now.

[15:57] Allan Alford: Got it. That’s where it almost becomes a cycle.

Benny Lakunishok: Yes.

[16:03] Allan Alford: Once you finally get people hired and everything humming, sometimes you’re working more and sometimes less as you hire the next round. It goes in a bit of a cycle as you grow. And I love your model of the company as a sphere with a growing surface. That’s a great way to think about it.

Where does Zero Networks fit in the cybersecurity ecosystem?
[16:20] Allan Alford: That ties into another question. Every cybersecurity startup fits into the ecosystem somewhere. You land, you expand, you grow, and you become part of a giant cybersecurity world. It’s a technology ecosystem, a cultural ecosystem, and a community of investors and buyers. Where do you see Zero Networks fitting into that ecosystem? You can answer in terms of technology, culture, or impact on the community.

[16:59] Benny Lakunishok: Again, a very hard question. The point is, I’m biased.

Allan Alford: Sure.

[17:10] Benny Lakunishok: I’m soldier number one in my company. I think we’re leading the thought leadership, and I can point to proof: there are receipts of us being copied by many others in the industry, including on our basic approach and on ideas no one had thought of before. Others have even tried to do similar things in other markets. That’s one aspect. Culturally, I don’t know what others are doing, but I feel we’ve found something extremely unique in how we’re building our culture, our values, and what we care about as a company.

[17:57] Technologically, I think the industry is moving into prevention 2.0. The industry started with prevention about 25 years ago: perimeter firewalls, antivirus, tools that assumed you could prevent things. Then everything shifted toward, “Well, the attackers are inside. We can’t stop them. Let’s have visibility and detection.” All the detection solutions came along, and in my opinion, EDR won the detection game. And in the last few years, everybody has an EDR. It’s commoditized, and yet we’re all still being compromised all the time. So it’s not enough. Now I think there’s a theme of prevention 2.0 again, and we’re spearheading a lot of prevention controls in the network. That’s how we’re contributing to shaping the cybersecurity landscape.

[19:03] Allan Alford: That’s a brilliant answer. You said it was a hard question, and that was spot on, so thank you. That’s exactly the kind of answer I was looking for. A lot of folks lose sight of where they are and who they are. You get blinded by your own marketing and sales, and you think, “We’re this cool thing that does this cool thing,” and you lose sight of the bigger picture. You spoke to it beautifully, again with an answer that spans time, which is so important. Everything evolves, not just for a startup, but for the whole industry, and you captured that.

When should you start a customer advisory board?
[19:43] Allan Alford: Let’s pivot and talk about getting help from that ecosystem. People do early-stage design partnerships, and eventually you reach a point where you want a customer advisory board. It might be made up of actual customers, non-customers, or potential customers. So it’s a two-part question. First, when is the best time to kick off an advisory board? And second, who do you choose? Who makes the best advisors?

[20:18] Benny Lakunishok: There’s a difference between having advisors, some of whom can be CISOs, and having a customer advisory board. You can informally have advisors who are customers or potential customers and ask them about pricing, messaging, new campaigns, features, roadmap, all of that.

[20:49] A customer advisory board, or CAB, is a big-league play. You don’t do it early, because it requires a lot of effort and needs to be very structured. To put it in perspective, we’re just starting ours now, after five years [as of 2024]. I don’t think it should start before you have the energy and time to organize very structured meetings: What’s the topic? What’s the engagement? I’m also a big believer in meeting in person rather than virtually, which means having the budget to meet advisors where they are, or even fly everyone to one location for deep conversations on any topic. It’s a big investment.

[21:39] In the early days, just have a few advisors if you need them. We didn’t need them, by the way. We have product experts. I don’t want to talk about myself too much, but I’m a product expert in what I do, and we have others. Between us and two early customers, we didn’t need advisors; we knew what we were doing. If you don’t have the product expertise, in my opinion, you shouldn’t open a cybersecurity startup. But if you do, you need advisors, and they don’t have to be a CAB. Bring advisors onto the cap table and talk with them a lot, informally and fluidly. In the beginning, that’s just how it works.

[22:32] I feel that once you have hundreds of customers, that’s when you formalize an official CAB. That’s my opinion. Maybe it’s not right for every company or every market, but that’s how I view it.

[22:47] Allan Alford: I like that. And I love that you talk about informal advisors, having friends and allies from the practitioner side help you long before you have a real CAB. That’s a great answer. Folks, if you want to learn more about Zero Networks, go to FounderStories.tv/zero.

[23:11] Benny Lakunishok, CEO of Zero Networks, thank you so much for coming out and chatting with us. This has been a brilliant conversation. I threw you some hard questions, and you had some brilliant answers. I think this is going to be super valuable to all of our viewers.

[23:27] Benny Lakunishok: Thank you all.