CyberWire Daily - Slavik Markovich: Time is of the essence. [CEO] [Career Notes]

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Slavik Markovich, CEO of Descope joins Dave to discuss his career as a serial entrepreneur. Before Descope, he co-founded and was the CEO of Demisto, a leader in the SOAR industry, which was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for $560M, where he then served as SVP of Products. Before co-founding Demisto, Slavik was VP & CTO of database technologies at McAfee. He joined McAfee via the acquisition of Sentrigo, a database security startup he co-founded and served as CTO for. He goes into depth of his career changes throughout the years and how that has helped lead him to where he is now in his career. He shares that as a CEO and found of multiple companies he values time and hard workers. He says " I think we really stress the importance of, uh, of responsibility. So if, if you kinda take something, you, you make sure to finish it and on time, if you promise to do something, you do that. And so that's really important for us." We thank Slavik for sharing his story with us. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

You're listening to the Cyber Wire Network, powered by N2K. and VPNs, yet breaches continue to rise by an 18% year-over-year increase in ransomware attacks and a $75 million record payout in 2024. These traditional security tools expand your attack surface with public-facing IPs that are exploited by bad actors more easily than ever with AI tools. It's time to rethink your security. Thank you. Learn more at zscaler.com slash security. I was heavily into martial arts and martial art movies, and I wanted to be a martial arts instructor. It's kind of funny, but nothing related to technology at all, at least until I was like 10 or 12. So my parents got me my first Commodore, and I had neighbors going to the university that was in our city and they taught me a bit of BASIC and I got all the manuals for that. And yeah, I started a bit programming with BASICs,

then learning a bit about how computers are made, and that kind of decided it. So I guess from 10 years old, I kind of switched and said, okay, I want to be something with computers. That became a big part of my life. So in high school, I went to study electronics, and part of that was also a lot of computer classes, but also a lot of like actual electronics and playing with resistors and capacitors and all of those. So yeah, it was pretty cool. I think the first kind of professional exposure to computers was in the Technion, which is a university in Israel, where I studied computer science. So that's kind of the, I'd say, formal education in computers. Before that, I was kind of playing around with stuff.

formal education in computers before that i was kind of playing around with stuff and following that i spent six years in the israeli defense forces also doing computer stuff mostly managing a team for database administrators for large you know back-end architectures in the IDF. This is my third company. Prior to that, after leaving the army, I was part of a consulting firm. So I was a partner in consulting firm and saw how databases were protected or lack of protections for databases. And so my first startup was actually

trying to solve that. The startup was called Shintrigo and it was a database activity monitoring which is very challenging from a technological perspective. It was very interesting for me to develop it. A lot of reversing of databases, a lot of low-level memory access. And then we sold that company to McAfee. Following that, this is where I met one of my co-founders, Rishi, who was on the buying side. And then we decided to leave McAfee, founded another company called Demisto, which was in security orchestration, automation and response, and sold that in 2019 to Palo Alto Networks for roughly $600 million. And after a few years in Palo Alto Networks, I felt that, hey, I'm ready to start something new. And this is where we started Descope.

We really try to get to a decision via consensus. We're very, I'd say, open and completely non-hierarchical. So, you know, a developer would shout at me and reject my pull request. And yeah, I have no problem with that. And so on the one hand, we're like very flat organization. Everybody has a say

and we're really equal partners. On the other hand, I think we really stress the importance of responsibility. So if you kind of take something, you make sure to finish it. And on time, if you promise to do something, you do that. And so that's really important for us. We really try to just have fun here in Disco. I guess, to me, I have my own kind of rituals that let me unwind

and relax. I like to run, you know, work out, things of that nature. But just to be clear, we are, a lot of us are Israelis here in the company and we really like to shout at one another,

but that's fine. I mean, it's not the end of the world and eventually we get to a, you know, a consensus. Be curious, be out there, talk with people. Probably half of it is just getting out there and being there.

The other part is make sure to do what you love, which will help you quite a lot because if you like what you're doing, you'll get better and eventually really good at it. So that's my advice. I really liked security from when I was a kid.

I did a lot of reversing, did hacking, things of that nature, and ended up doing that for my career. So I cannot be happier. Hey everybody, Dave here. Have you ever wondered where your personal information is lurking online? Like many of you, I was concerned about my data being sold by data brokers. So I decided to try DeleteMe. I have to say, DeleteMe is a game changer.

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