Show Notes
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.
More from Inside the Network
Our guest in this episode is Sachin Nayyar, a rare founder who has built not one, but two major cybersecurity companies: Securonix and Saviynt. Even more unusually, for nearly a decade, he was building both at the same time. After Sachin's first company was acquired by Sun Microsystems, he became a millionaire in his twenties. Instead of experiencing the moment as the triumph most founders imagine, Sachin fell into depression. It became an early lesson in the difference between being in love with entrepreneurship and being in love with solving a problem, and that lesson shaped how he would approach company building, leadership, and his own health for the rest of his career. This also inspired him to found Live Your Best Life (LYBL), a holistic health-tech platform designed to help people understand and overcome chronic health conditions. Sachin went on to co-found Securonix, helping pioneer User and Entity Behavior Analytics (UEBA) and build the company into a major player in security analytics and SIEM. At the same time, Sachin was also building Saviynt, an identity security company that was bootstrapped for its first seven years and has since grown past $300 million in ARR and reached a valuation of more than $3 billion. On Inside the Network, Sachin shares what it was actually like to build two cybersecurity companies simultaneously, including commuting between Securonix in Dallas and Saviynt in Southern California. He talks candidly about burnout, why founders shouldn't treat exhaustion as a badge of honor, and the management mistake that slowed both companies down: waiting too long to bring experienced operators into the business. We also dive into Sachin's unconventional approach to financing companies. Rather than following the traditional Silicon Valley playbook, Saviynt was self-funded for more than seven years, using services to get close to customers and fund product development. Later, Sachin leaned heavily on private credit rather than raising equity when he believed the market was undervaluing the company. Sachin also explains why he never believed building a successful cybersecurity company required a Silicon Valley ZIP code, how he built major engineering organizations across Southern California, Texas, and India, and why founders should focus more on customers and conviction than on following the industry's standard startup playbook. Finally, we explore the next chapter of identity security. Sachin shares his thesis that AI creates an opportunity to move identity controls all the way to build time, embedding identity and access management directly into applications and AI agents. He explains why he still thinks of Saviynt as a “startup at scale,” how incumbents can compete with AI-native challengers, and why the explosion of machine identities may force the identity industry to rethink traditional per-user pricing models.
Our guest in this episode is Kyle Hanslovan, Co-Founder and CEO of Huntress. When Kyle started Huntress in 2015, most investors believed protecting small and mid-sized businesses wasn't a venture-scale opportunity. The contracts were too small, customer churn would be too high, and the market simply wasn't attractive enough. Kyle heard “no” more than 60 times from VCs before raising his first institutional round.
Our guest in this episode is Rob Lee, co-founder and CEO of Dragos. Two weeks ago, Accenture agreed to acquire a majority stake in Dragos as part of the massive, over $4 billion transaction that also included the acquisitions of runZero and NetRise. As luck would have it, we recorded this conversation just a few weeks before the announcement. Massive congratulations to Rob and to the entire teams of Dragos, runZero, and NetRise! When Rob started Dragos, most investors didn't believe critical infrastructure security was a venture-scale opportunity. Despite getting more than 100 rejections from investors, Rob stayed committed to his mission. Today, Dragos protects critical infrastructure around the world and has become one of the defining companies in industrial cybersecurity. This episode isn't simply about building a unicorn or leading a company to a massive exit. It's about building a company around a mission. Rob explains why Dragos exists to "safeguard civilization," why protecting critical infrastructure is fundamentally different from protecting enterprise IT, and why cybersecurity in operational technology is ultimately a public safety problem, not just a business problem. Throughout the conversation, Rob shares candid lessons from building Dragos over the past ten years. We discuss choosing investors, surviving VC rejections, scaling from three founders to more than 600 employees, building a founder-led culture, making difficult executive hiring decisions, expanding internationally, and why Rob believes founders should optimize for long-term mission rather than short-term valuation. We also dive deep into the future of critical infrastructure security. Rob explains how AI is changing operational technology, why cyber warfare is increasingly targeting civilian infrastructure, what keeps him awake at night as geopolitical tensions continue to rise, and why he believes the next generation of cybersecurity founders should pay far more attention to industrial systems than they do today. It’s a fascinating story about a founder who decided to build a mission-driven company instead of trying to optimize for an exit or the next funding round. By doing that, not only has he succeeded in building something lasting, but he also achieved a massive financial outcome.
Our guest in this episode is Mike Fey, co-founder and CEO of Island, one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies. Founded just five years ago, Island has raised over $700 million in funding, crossed $5 billion valuation, and helped create an entirely new category: the Enterprise Browser.
This episode of Inside the Network is unique because it is our very first show recorded live on the RSAC 2026 stage in front of security leaders, startup founders, and identity experts. For this episode, we had the privilege of sitting down with one of the most accomplished founders in cybersecurity, founder and CEO of SailPoint, Mark McClain.