"Category education is a long game with uncontrollable accelerants" | Ayal Yogev

Anjuna Security builds the software stack that makes confidential computing accessible to enterprises — doing for hardware-level data protection what VMware did for virtualization and what CUDA did for GPUs. The company counts three of the top ten global banks among its customers, has expanded into the federal government through defense primes, and recently launched a second product to govern AI agents running inside a trusted computing environment. In a recent episode of BUILDERS, we sat down with Ayal Yogev, CEO of Anjuna Security, to learn how the company sold a category that buyers had never budgeted for, what actually moves the needle when selling to the world's largest banks, and why he calls rationalizing exceptions to your ICP "basically a death warrant." Topics Discussed: ● Why category education is a long game with uncontrollable accelerants — and how the JP Morgan global CEO's open letter to vendors changed buyer conversations overnight ● The two biggest GTM money pits: hiring salespeople before product-market fit and building large conference booths that attract the wrong buyers ● Why a private suite with pre-scheduled meetings adjacent to a conference consistently outperforms booth presence on ROI ● How Anjuna closed three of the top ten banks and what a year-long sales cycle actually looks like from first meeting to signed contract ● Why people movement between banks is a structural referral engine — and how touching 100-plus people inside a single bank compounds over time ● Champion identification in long-cycle enterprise deals: who to find, how deep to go, and what happens when your champion leaves before the deal closes ● Why selling direct to the US federal government was "close to impossible" and what finally worked: defense primes like Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, Leidos, and CACI ● How government grew from roughly zero to 25% of revenue and is tracking toward 50% in the next 12 months ● Why focus is defined by what you say no to — including inbound that's outside your ICP ● The forward-deployed engineer model: why bundling actual engineers into the first enterprise deal changes success rates, churn, and renewals ● Anjuna's second product: a trusted supervisor agent running inside a confidential computing environment to solve the "arctic intern" problem for AI governance