TL;DR: I'm leaving Gartner Innovation Center and joining Cybereason. Why? I found myself in a comfort zone.
The blog post is split into four parts:
- Past: A brief history of Senexx and how Gartner Innovation Center was formed.
- Present: What Gartner Innovation Center is doing now
- The decision to move
- Future: My thoughts on what's going to happen next
Senexx was acquired by Gartner three years ago. Originally, Gartner meant to move the development to the U.S.
Zeevi Michel (CEO, Senexx) & Michael Gelfand (CTO, Senexx) wanted to stay in Israel.
Nir Polonsky had an idea (back then He served as a VP for Gartner's New Markets Group). He believed that Gartner should start expanding to new markets that were previously untouched by Gartner, and pitched the idea to Eugene Hall (CEO, Gartner).
Eugene gave them the go-ahead and GICI (short for Gartner Innovation Center Israel) was born.
I joined just five months after the acquisition, and as far as I remember, was the fifth employee. We were a startup of our own - starting fresh, building the infrastructure for innovation.
I was tasked to quickly implement various proof-of-concept projects and to pitch them to management. It was very important that get something out the door before 2015, to show our capability.
We succeeded in pitching two ideas, and two products were born. My pitch for an Business Intelligence system gave me "Dev Lead" responsibilities, and together with Eran Katoni (now VP R&D), formed a team that would take the project from concept to reality.
We grew fast, but were still a family. We ate breakfast, lunch and dinner together. Company-wide lunches weren't unusual. We goofed around a lot and built some amazing things.
A lot has changed since then. We renovated our building in Lilinblum, Tel Aviv & grown 10x. We've grown so much that our building couldn't fit everyone, so we had to lease another office. We also received a lot of recognition inside the company, built some amazing products that gave significant impact.
Today GICI is split into two distinct groups:
- Digital Markets: working on the entering new markets. One of their key products is CloudAdvice.
- Core: finding new ways to make Gartner work more efficiently. Most of the products are heavily based on data science, and have been extremely disruptive.
I was always at Core, and always working closely with Zeevi and Michael. I actually reported directly to the Zeevi (now Managing Vice President, Head of GICI) for two years, until I moved to the "CTO Office" and started reporting to Michael, the CTO.
At my new role I was Michael's sidekick. I shared my time between writing infrastructure code, Proof-of-Concept projects, being part of high-level and low-level architectural decisions, bug hunting, Devops and around-the-clock evangelism.
I loved it.
I love GICI. GICI is literally my second home. I love the people, the products, the management, the perks. I even love the building. Did I forget to mention that WE ARE HIRING?
The problem is that after three years, I got into a comfort zone. If you've ever visited my about page you've probably noticed Rumi's quote at the beginning of the page: "Run from what's comfortable. Forget safety. Live where you fear to live. Destroy your reputation. Be notorious."
As much as I love GICI, it was too comfortable. Moreover, being a security fanatic, I had a dream of moving to the cyber security field.
A few weeks ago a dear friend of mine, Amit Serper, said he's coming for a visit.
Amit is the Principal Security Researcher at Cybereason, a startup that I've been following for a few years now:
"Cybereason is the leader in endpoint protection, offering endpoint detection and response, next-generation antivirus, managed monitoring and IR services.
Founded by elite intelligence professionals born and bred in offense-first hunting, Cybereason gives enterprises the upper hand over cyber adversaries.
The Cybereason platform is powered by a custom-built in-memory graph, the only truly automated hunting engine anywhere. It detects behavioral patterns across every endpoint and surfaces malicious operations in an exceptionally user-friendly interface.
Cybereason is privately held and headquartered in Boston with offices in London, Tel Aviv, and Tokyo."
I told Amit what's on my mind, and he told me to send him my resume.
Fast forward a few days, and a lot of enthusiasm on both parts, I signed.
I won't lie to you guys. I'm scared as hell. I built myself a reputation at GICI. I have the respect of my colleagues and management. I know everyone. I'm familiar with all the products and all the technologies.
Now I'm moving to Cybereason. I'm not familiar with most of the technology stack, I don't know anything about the internals of the product, I almost don't know anyone at the company and to top all that, Cybereason's VP of Engineering, Aviv Laufer, kind of told me that he expects me be a 10x programmer.
I'm basically starting from scratch, and I'm thrilled!
I do hope I won't fail miserably and find myself out of a job in a few months :)