Gilly Raanan, founder of venture firm Cyberstarts, discusses how he evaluates success and portfolio company quality beyond financial metrics.
Opinion
Raanan: Israel possesses greater tech talent density than Silicon Valley
“You cannot get that density of talent anywhere else in the world. Definitely not in Silicon Valley, which spans over you know, significantly bigger geographical area.”
Prediction Open · timeframe Mar 2032
Raanan: An Israeli cybersecurity startup will reach a $50B valuation by 2032
“I'm pretty sure that in, in, in six years, maybe less, we'll see a fifty billion dollar and a hundred billion dollar cyber security company out of Israel. You know. I take it like take it like a fact, like, you know, the sun was, would rise tomorrow. You know,…”
Insight
Raanan: Cybersecurity must eliminate human operators to survive autonomous AI attacks
“The most important challenge for us as cyber security industry is to eliminate the men in the middle.
Making defenses completely run by self-aware, sophisticated mega agents.
And until we get to that point where we completely eliminate the men in the middle we…”
Insight
Raanan: Seed-stage product ideas and technology are noise compared to founder quality
“The idea and the technology at this stage, at the seed stage, is, is noise. It's part of the entropy. It's actually not helping me make the right decision. The best decision is to just watch the individual and decide if that's the individual you want to partne…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Raanan: The cybersecurity industry will face its darkest period this coming decade
“I hope I'm wrong, but I think I'm, we are going to face the darkest, darkest period in cyber security in the next.
10 years.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Raanan: Future cyber warfare will be fought entirely by autonomous AI agents
“In 20 years, or 10 years,
I don't know.
But it's not tomorrow.
we are going to see threat actors who are programs, very, very smart, sophisticated, maybe self-aware, and we'll talk about self-awareness in a second threat actors, and the defenders would be, yo…”