“Cybersecurity is becoming a business driver rather than a cost.”

Yochai Korm wasn’t actively looking for a CEO position, but when he got the opportunity to join Cybernet as CEO, he took it. He shares that one needs to think a lot to get through such an experience. Cybernet uses intelligence to find hackers before they can cause significant damage to organizations. Corum noted that cybersecurity is becoming a business enabler that expensive companies want to undercut. He says customers have high expectations of cyber security from any company these days. Corm shares how important it is to have different interests and ways of life. His undergraduate degree was in history and geography, and his first job came from a website he built to share hiking information in his military unit. He says these diverse interests have helped him become a better manager.

Your undergraduate degree was from The Open University, studying History and Geography. Connect the dots with the history and geography of the cyber risk entrepreneur.

I love hiking and traveling. I was also a tour guide. In the military, there is a special competition in knowing your heritage and geography. One challenge after another, I came to win all the IDF championships. “I will never be a historian; But I like history, so while I’m in the military, let’s take some geography, history, and archeology classes,” I said. It was great, not only your major, but I recommend it to everyone who has parallel paths in life. It helped me connect and give me ideas that make me a better person, a better manager, a better professional.

When I won this championship, I thought about how I can help others with my knowledge. I decided to set up a small website in 8200 and share tips for the next hike every weekend. I did it week after week. When I finished my military service, people said, “You should keep at it.” So I prepared the tulle. I think Tiuli is the number one site for recreation and hiking in Israel. I continued with this startup while studying and working.

As with any entrepreneur, the goal is to identify a problem and come up with a solution through a continuous evaluation process. People don’t know where to go on weekends. I saw that there was no good information on the Internet, and I decided to write these tips on my website. Suddenly, this site was visited by tens of thousands of people every day looking for ideas. I added people who can publish and promote.

I wanted to try to link it to a business, and I thought, “If I have more people visiting this website, maybe they can buy hiking gear.” This is how we shop today, isn’t it? 10 years ago, it was not the same. I wanted to partner with someone. I met LaMetal, who owns a large shop, and after working together for a few years, they decided to buy Tully.

With this love of history and geography, I wanted to give something back to society and volunteered a lot. But he also taught me business. Today, Tiuli is one of the largest sites in Israel that you can visit and enjoy. I started this 19 years ago.

Creating a product that is still being used after 19 years is an amazing feat, especially after M&A. What is the magic there?

Yuval Limon, founder and CEO of Lametayel, is a unique person with very similar DNA to myself. I’m not going to sell the tulle and make a lot of money and go home. I thought it would be a great house. I participated for another five years until I felt I had the right people in me. Lametelle’s DNA gave the tulle the extra color it needed.

Also, the product was very good. People go to Nahal Kziv or Jerusalem today, and they can follow my advice on where to go.

You are with Cybernet in cyber security today. What brought you here?

In parallel with being in Tully, I decided to be in high tech. I worked with various companies in product management and engineering, then sales and marketing. It gave me 360 ​​degrees of how an organization works. One day I got a call from a headhunter who said, “We think it’s time for you to become CEO.” I met with the Cybernet board of directors who were looking for a CEO. I thought my background in information and cyber would be useful, and I got the position.

Deciding to join an existing company as CEO, what was the decision-making process like for you?

I worked in a good company called CYE. I was happy and I really appreciate the CEO and the rest of the team. But I felt I had the experience and skills to do the shoot myself. At the end of the day, as a CEO, you need to make the calls. With 20 years of experience covering different areas, I felt this was the next natural step for me. When you get this opportunity, you should think three times before passing on such an opportunity.

What is the world we live in in terms of digital threat protection, threat intelligence?

People, and certainly Covid, have made a big push for working from home and using cloud environments. Hackers see that too, and it has become a very profitable business. There are people who want to hack organizations and sell this information. Others develop malware as a service in SaaS platforms. They know how to attack others.

Millions of computers are compromised every year. I wanted to be at an organization that helped make the world a better place to do digital business. When I got the opportunity to join such a company, I felt it was a perfect fit. Every day when I wake up, every day, I feel that we will stop the attacks.

How do you create a culture that resonates with the people in the culture?

We have a new employee, I think less than four weeks in the company, and yesterday in the kitchen “How are you?” And he was shining. He said: “Yesterday, I found a small piece, I found an attack that is really growing now, I was able to identify the alarm in time and can fix this problem.” This happens every day.

If you are looking to the future, where are we headed in terms of these threats and solutions?

How to stop those hackers? We have taken the approach of trying to identify the hacker correctly using intelligence before they go to the highest level of their activity. We do that by scanning the entire Internet and looking out for windows where the hacker can get in. We are also looking to see and discuss the open, deep and dark web for business and threat actors. The information you are trying to sell. We’re also looking for mistakes people make, uploading source code with data to code repositories and other places. Our goal is to identify that early.

I am optimistic by nature, which is very important for any CEO. But also, we need to be realistic and plan for situations where everything doesn’t go well. But we can identify attacks every day, which means our customers see the value.

Our vision today is what we call “Impact Intelligence,” which has an impact on an organization. We want to provide them with information about the problem and be able to fix it quickly. I think any company’s customers are asking for cyber security. I am excited to be a part of this transition where cyber security becomes a business enabler rather than a cost.

If you had to look at your day-to-day, what are those happy moments?

I feel like I have many of them every day. “I’m glad to be a cybernetic” employee. Or the client who says, “Thank you, I’ll sleep better at night when I see you.” Besides, I am a pilot today. I’m also on the air with my son, and it’s fun.

Michael Mathias, Forbes 30 Under 30, is a venture partner at Innovation Endeavors as well as an investment venture partner at Secret Chord and J-Ventures. He studied artificial intelligence and human computer interaction at Stanford University, and was an engineer at Hippo Insurance. Mathias previously served as an officer in the 8200 unit. 20MinuteLeaders is a technology entrepreneurship interview featuring one-on-one interviews with amazing founders, innovators and thought leaders who share their journeys and experiences.

Contributing Editors: Michael Matias, Megan Ryan