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- Friday Tech News | Founder Focus with Tomer Schwartz - CTO of Dazz
Friday Tech News | Founder Focus with Tomer Schwartz - CTO of Dazz
8/2/2024
Phil Moroni
August 02, 2024
Good morning and Happy Friday!
Thank you so much for making this a part of your Friday morning coffee time. I'm Phil Moroni, and I'm an Account Executive in the Information Technology industry here with another edition of Friday Tech News!
What is this? This is a newsletter that provides updates and insights on the latest trends and developments in the technology industry. I am a professional who specializes in supporting IT leaders in evaluating, investing, and managing people, processes, and technology tools that support their businesses.
Each week, I summarize relevant industry updates from popular Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEM's), software publishers, and managed providers. The goal of my research and newsletter is to keep you informed about current trends and events that may impact your business from a trusted and reputable source. It's just information I'm sharing, and I follow and work with hundreds of partners in the industry, keeping track of their growth, changes, and evolution so that you don't have to.
Bottom Line: As you focus on improving your business through digital initiatives, my commitment is to keep you informed of the fast-paced changes and trends taking place so that you can plan ahead and stay ahead of the game.
Key areas of focus for me are:
Cloud Computing, Security, Trends
Developer & Security Tools
Networking & Infrastructure Tools
End User Tools & Workspace Tech
Emerging Technologies and Future Concepts
If you have any questions, would like information about any specific vendors I follow, or would like to have a conversation about any topic that is challenging you, I invite you to engage with me! I value feedback immensely and would love to know what you find valuable about this newsletter so feel free to reach out!
Thank you for reading and stay digitally and physically safe!
Phil
Founder Focus | $.02 Observations 🔭
This week was certainly a privilege. I was fortunate enough to sit down and chat with Tomer Schwartz, CTO at Dazz ahead of Black Hat about his life, their product, what they’re seeing in the market, and what’s to come from them with their latest funding round. Check out the interview below!
What’s a day in the life of Tomer look like?
Tons of emails and meetings—more than I’d like to admit now that the business is growing so rapidly. I try to start my day at my favorite coffee shop near my apartment (if you’re ever in Tel Aviv, go try WayCup coffee; they also supply the coffee to our office!). It gives me time to reflect before I start my day. After that, it's usually back-to-back meetings with our R&D team in Israel, then with our US team and customers from ET morning time to afternoon. I’m trying to work out at least three times a week, so the typical time for that is around midnight in Israel, or at 8pm if I’m stateside.
Who are your mentors?
I majored in music, and I had an exceptional teacher—Boris Shnaiderman— who was a double bass player in the Soviet Union before moving to Israel. Life pushed him to be creative in every facet: from his career in music, to military service, to emigrating to Israel, and a ton of hard-earned lessons on survival in a collapsing dictatorship. I absorbed as much as I could. As hard as I work these days, it still feels like a walk in the park compared to how much he pushed me and the rest of the students to excel.
How did you get started solving problems in enterprise IT?
It wasn’t intentional as one would think. I already mentioned that I majored in music, but I was always around computers since I can remember. Sort of a side hobby. In hindsight, apparently, I wasn’t too bad. When I was recruited to military intelligence, I had a chance to cross paths with some people I’ve been friends with ever since. The shift from military service to the startup ecosystem was natural in Israel at that time. I first joined Adallom as one of the first employees because I was already friends with the team, then after the Microsoft acquisition I started Armis with some other friends from the same circles. I had another short stint at Microsoft before launching Dazz in 2021 with Merav Bahat and Yuval Ofir. Between all of these experiences, I ended up with about 15 years of experience in enterprise IT, and even longer in information security.
What’s your favorite part about doing what you do?
I love working with amazingly talented people. We have a group of individuals who constantly challenge me (in a good way!) and elevate us as a team. It is so fun to finish the day and reflect on something new I learned or something surprising that I couldn’t have expected. Personally, I love the fast pace, the dynamism, the excitement, and the creativity. But what brings us together as a team in my opinion is the love for solving complex problems that really matter. We simplify and automate how security and engineering teams remediate security issues. This is a problem that has existed since the dawn of cybersecurity. We feel we have the right team at the right time to finally solve it. The technology landscape evolved: from cloud computing to AI to DevOps, and we are taking advantage of all of it to bring an unprecedented remediation experience to thousands of end users already. I love it because we actually help them fix the right issues way faster, before they cause any significant damage.
What are you seeing in the market that CISO’s and practitioners are trying to solve for in 2024? What’s to come in 2025?
Everyone is looking to reduce risk faster and better. I don’t think that is going to change much. The real question is how the threat landscape evolves and how innovation evolves to solve this in the right way. What I’m hearing the most is about the complexity of the attack surface, and how quickly it expands. Between cloud, applications, identity, I’m sure this will continue into 2025 and beyond. In our space we’re having a lot of conversations about cloud security, strategy, and architecture. We’re seeing that many organizations are still shifting left and trying to figure out which functions and applications should operate in the cloud, and how to secure them. Second, is GenAI and AI in general. Security leaders want to take advantage of the value of AI, but mitigate the risks. The industry has a huge opportunity in this space, and it requires quite a bit of research. Third, creating efficiencies and optimizing costs. Talent remains a huge problem, so this is where new technologies like AI and automation can have a big impact. I feel like in 2025 security leaders are looking to evaluate the effectiveness of their tools, demonstrate ROI from their investments, and make smarter investments as the threat landscape evolves.
What trends in AI and Automation are you seeing right now?
In cybersecurity and information security, AI has already become a real and present threat. We’re operating in a world where security breaches occur on average every 11 seconds, and the advanced AI tools that fall into the hands of attackers give them a massive opportunity to evolve their attacks more efficiently and at scale. However, precisely because AI will be the central cyber challenge for organizations in the coming years, it can also become the industry's greatest opportunity. We’ve been using machine learning and data correlation to help our customers automatically find, deduplicate, analyze, and fix issues at root causes since day one at Dazz. Our customers are using AI and automation to streamline remediation by generating fixes for code vulnerabilities. These fixes can be easily applied to CI/CD models where the code is tested and deployed if it runs successfully. Most customers are still using human oversight to understand the full context and nuances of how this code comprises the overall application, and how the application is deployed. However, I predict that over time AI security fixes will become more reliable than human-generated fixes and a common occurrence in cybersecurity and development.
How were you inspired to create your current products at Dazz?
The inspiration for Dazz came from my firsthand experience with the security challenges in cloud environments. The operational cost of resolving vulnerabilities is staggering. It isn’t scalable. Seeing these issues repeatedly during my career, I teamed up with Merav Bahat and Yuval Ofir to create products that effectively tackle these problems. We didn’t want to build yet another detection tool; we wanted to build something that helps organizations stay secure and keep ahead of evolving threats.
We developed a unified remediation platform to address how security issues get fixed. It spans across all detection tools and environments, including code, clouds, applications, and infrastructure allowing for full visibility from which we can prioritize, analyze, and suggest what the right fix is for all security issues. We can even automate that process.
Congratulations on the continued 50M series A raise in July! What’s the process like behind raising money for a startup for you? What challenges have you run into?
This time, the process was a bit different because we didn’t need to look for any investors. Our existing investors—Greylock, Cyberstarts, Insight Partners, and Index Ventures—decided to double down on their initial investments to accelerate our momentum in redefining risk prioritization and remediation using AI technologies. We feel very grateful to have the strongest VCs in the cybersecurity industry behind us since day one, and we’re honored to see the continued trust they’re putting in the company.
Thanks again for the time Tomer - I’ve thoroughly enjoyed watching the rise of Dazz from my seat!
OEM News & Updates 📰
I’m going to do something new here. This week I decided to put my data in a viewable, shareable database. I chose airtable for a specific reason. If you aren’t familiar with it, give it a try! Point is - I’m going to start putting my data in a viewable database for you to manipulate yourself.
Just make sure to expand the article insights. There are typically 2-3 takeaways per article that I try and capture / give perspective on. What else should I be tracking/adding to this? I can’t wait to show you what I have in store for the future!
Anyway - If you like this, would you let me know and I’ll keep it available? If you want me to still extrapolate the links I’m happy to do that too.
Enjoy!
Articles I Liked This Week 💡
Great title. This won the week in headlines.
Seriously read this one. The innovator of cloud computing is doing some real interesting backpedaling. Plus, with Github hitting 2B in ARR, I think nixing codecommit isn’t that bad an idea for AWS sellers. There’s just simply too many services they offer and come out with daily.
Tech Funding & M&A 💸
Check the table!
Meme of the week 🤣
Recommendations 👉🏻
This is a section that I intend to build out more! Know fantastic newsletter resources for information? Please let me know so I can start linking appropriate reads here!
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