In this special year-end episode of Inside the Network, we’re joined by two of the most trusted strategic advisors in cybersecurity - Dino Boukouris, Managing Partner at Altitude Cyber, and Sam Bronstein, Partner at AXOM Partners. Between them, they’ve worked on billions of dollars in cybersecurity M&A, helped founders navigate exits to the world’s largest tech companies, and advised the CEOs behind some of the biggest public and private deals in the industry.

In this episode, which also happens to be the 20th episode of Inside the Network, we break down what really happened across the cybersecurity landscape in 2025, from customer buying patterns and budget constraints to the $96B in M&A deal volume. Dino and Sam share insights on what’s driving consolidation, how buyers think about valuation and timing, and what defines a hot company in 2026 (hint: it’s not just growth).

We talk about how mega-deals like Wiz and CyberArk are reshaping competitive dynamics in the industry, why SASE, identity, and security for AI have been the most active M&A themes, and what founders need to understand about building relationships with buyers long before they’re ready to exit. Sam and Dino explain that founders who achieve the best outcomes usually build relationships with potential acquirers over many years, and break down why many late-stage founders are likely to choose acquisition over IPO in the coming cycle.

We close with tactical advice for founders heading into 2026: how to think about your board and investors, what metrics you’ll be judged on, and how to align your capital strategy with your long-term goals. And yes, we also talk about race cars, zero interest rates, outcome-based pricing, and what Palo Alto Networks might buy next.

In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Dean Sysman, co-founder and CEO of Axonius, one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies in the world. From struggling with his first startup to building a category-defining unicorn valued at $2.6 billion, Dean’s journey is a raw, insightful, and unfiltered look into what it really takes to build in security.

Before founding Axonius, Dean co-founded Cymmetria, a Y Combinator-backed deception startup that despite all the efforts, didn’t end up leading to a successful outcome. That experience didn’t stop him; it made him more grounded, more strategic, and more deliberate. Dean 2.0 didn’t enter a hot market. Instead, he went after a boring but foundational problem everyone had, but no one wanted to touch - cyber asset visibility. In just under five years, Axonius surpassed $100M in ARR and raised over $600 million to fund growth and acquisitions.

Dean’s path has been unconventional from the start. He taught himself to code at 12, won an international robotics competition at 15, and led a team in Unit 8200 by 21. In the military, he learned responsibility the hard way: “If you fail, no one else is coming to help.” That mindset became the core of his entrepreneurial approach. In this conversation, Dean opens up about what most people get wrong about Unit 8200, why the army’s bureaucracy actually helped him understand enterprise sales, and how he turned a failed venture into the insight that led to Axonius.

We talk about the early days of building Axonius, the decision to go deep into a “Toyota Camry” problem, and how he convinced two close friends from Unit 8200 to bet on a boring idea that became a unicorn. Dean breaks down the evolution of cyber asset management, what it took to define a new category, and why timing and value communication matter more than tech novelty. He also shares lessons from Axonius’ first acquisition, Cynerio, and what founders need to understand about getting M&A right: culture, timing, and strategic alignment matter far more than valuation spreadsheets.

In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Tomer Weingarten, Co-Founder and CEO of SentinelOne, one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies. From writing code and designing the company’s first UI himself, to taking SentinelOne public and crossing $1 billion ARR, Tomer’s journey is a rare combination of technical excellence, grit, and long-term conviction.

Tomer didn’t grow up surrounded by startup founders or Silicon Valley mentors. He was raised in a small Israeli town with few resources and found computers as a creative escape. He met his SentinelOne co-founder, Almog Cohen, in second grade, began hacking games as a teenager, and exited his first startup at just 24 making millions of dollars. Then, in an unusual move, he spent all the money to reset, stay grounded and hungry to build something big. That big ambition would become SentinelOne.

When SentinelOne launched in 2013, most endpoint vendors were still focusing on signature-based antivirus, and the idea of autonomous, behavior-based prevention powered by AI sounded like science fiction. Tomer wanted to reimagine cyber defense from the ground up. The company’s early traction didn’t come easy, and it took several years of heads-down engineering effort to get to the point when the company signed its first customer and investors stopped being skeptical. Tomer believed the problem wasn’t being solved deeply enough, and he stayed patient while the market caught up.

Tomer shares how he navigated the “wartime CEO” moments like fighting off rivals with 10 times the budget, managing internal politics, and surviving near-death moments during fundraising. He reflects on how leadership styles evolve under pressure, and how the discipline of writing down decisions helped him become a better CEO. He also breaks down how founders confuse early ARR with true product-market fit, and why most security companies today are in his opinion workflow wrappers, not tech companies.

We also explore Tomer’s views on the LLM hype cycle and why he believes most of the AI noise in cybersecurity today is more marketing than the actual deep tech. Tomer believes that true moat lies in foundational models trained on real, curated telemetry, and in solving hard tech problems, not just ChatGPT integration. This episode is a deeply personal look at what it takes to build enduring companies in cybersecurity. This is one of our most honest, unfiltered founder conversations, and if you care about the art of company-building, you won’t want to miss it.