Alon Arvatz
Co-Founder and CEO, PointFive · 1 appearance on the record.
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Alon Arvatz is an Israeli entrepreneur who serves as the co-founder and CEO of PointFive. He previously co-founded cyber threat intelligence company IntSights, which was acquired by Rapid7, and authored The Battle for Your Computer.
21statements → 9claims → 1claims resolved → 4.1/5average certainty → 1.81/5average debate potential →
1 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not yet assessed 7 not checkable as stated how the 9 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
9 assertions · 10 insights · 2 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 9 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, 1 is not yet assessed, and 7 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Alon argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Everything Alon Arvatz said on A Product Market Fit Show that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Arvatz: Governments are rarely on the cybersecurity cutting edge due to air-gapping
“It's not that governments are in the cutting edge of doing cybersecurity. They typically aren't. Why? They don't need to, because they're not connected to the internet. So the risks are very different than the risks of the average company.”
Arvatz: Build the UI and do backend work manually before automating
“That's what we did because we said, okay, we want to start engagement. We want to start selling. It will take us time to build a software. Let's in the meantime, build a UI. We'll do it manually behind the scenes. We'll learn how to do it right through the man…”
Arvatz: Only fake backend workflows if they are automatable within four months
“I would only do something manually. If I know I can automate within three, four months, I wouldn't do something manually that I know it will take me at least a year to automate, which is something we did in insights and eventually it slowed us down.”
Arvatz: Cybersecurity startup seed rounds today are no less than $6 million
“Today, seed round for a cybersecurity company is no less than six million dollars.”
Arvatz prefers 8% in a market leader over 15% in third place
“And I also think there is a huge merit to being number one in your market. I prefer I don't know. I prefer eight percent in a company that is number one in its market than 15% in a company that is number three or four.”
Arvatz: First-time founders with market pull shouldn't settle for quick exits
“Don't think I need to, you know, do the exit and cash out and my next one will be a lot better because you might, you know, hit huge pain, huge market. You need to go full force. There are amazing companies that were built by first time founders. I don't need …”
Arvatz: Watching military peers found startups builds peer confidence to launch
“And at some point you work with someone and he finished his service and he starts to start. He's like, Hey, this moron worked with me like two days ago in the same room. He can do a startup. I can also do a startup. Okay. And it becomes this place where it cre…”
Arvatz: State backing gives military hackers unmatched offensive cyber capabilities
“What you can do as part of the government, it's something that you probably will never be able to do as a personal or one man show hacker. Because one, you get tools and budgets you won't find anywhere else. And two, you're not doing anything illegal. So you c…”
Arvatz: Exiting IntSights for $335M was a demotivating anti-climax
“The minute we sold the company, it was a complete anti-climax experience because for me suddenly, okay, it's not yours anymore. You don't have the responsibility anymore of like making the company work. And just like, you know, the motivation energy goes a bit…”
Arvatz: Cloud cost optimization must be an engineering problem, not finance
“Essentially the main gap in making it happen today is how you create this engineering experience that get them engaged and lead to action. Because in the end of the day, The finance team, they cannot make changes to the cloud infrastructure. They don't have th…”
Arvatz: Major cloud waste hides deep in service architecture configurations
“There is a whole concept of like hidden waste that people are not even aware of. Why? Because it's very deep on the architectural level, on the way you configure your managed services, things that you really have to read, like the cloud provider's manual to un…”
Enterprises pay up to seven figures for cloud-cost optimization software
“Like we talked to dozens of customers and evaluated the big enterprise will pay high six figures for a solution like that. And even seven figures for the bigger enterprises.”
Arvatz forfeited most of his IntSights earnout holdback to start PointFive
“Yes, we actually had, like two and a half like retention period, ok? And we gave most of the holdback, ok, to go and start .5.”
Arvatz: Mandatory military service creates dense co-founder networks in Israel
“Israel as a state has a mandatory military service. So basically it gets to pick and choose the best and the brightest And the most talented in technology in Israel in high school. And then they put them all together in one place and give them cyber challenges…”
Glilot backed IntSights without a pitch deck due to prior sector diligence
“And we were lucky that Glilot in specific, they knew about our space. And they almost made an investment in our space a few months earlier. So they knew the space very well. We didn't have to convince them about the space and that's what made it possible.”
IntSights scaled from $1M to $4M ARR in its first two years
“Like in the first year, I told you, we didn't really have a product and we hit like one million dollars ARR. The second year was already four.”
PointFive raised a $6M SAFE followed by a $20M funding round
“And another six in SAFE a few months later, and then we just closed another twenty million round a few months ago.”
PointFive reached high single-digit millions ARR one year after launch
“Yes. Yes. We're just a year since we launched the product, by the way. So we're just celebrating one year in a few weeks.”
IntSights reached product-market fit within three months of starting sales
“So first of all, I think that actually at Insights, we had a faster product market fit. So I think like within like, you know, two or three months really felt like, you know, we have a good fit since we, you know, started selling.”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| He exited for $335M—& felt "emptiness". So he quit, gave up millions in earnout, & grew to | Feb 10, 2025 | 32m |