‘It’s Never Too Late To Learn a New Language’: Yair Solow, CEO of Centraleyes

/ @ysolow

HackerNoon Reporter: Please tell us briefly about your background.

Before founding Centraleyes, I was a senior executive at Visa and led business activities in a number of European markets. My passion has always been entrepreneurial. After helping spearhead the launch of Visa’s Innovation Hub in Israel in 2016, I saw an opportunity in the cyber risk and compliance space and decided to disrupt the GRC market with a next-generation platform.

What's your startup called? And in a sentence or two, what does it do?

Centraleyes is a next-generation, automated GRC platform that gives organizations an unparalleled understanding of their cyber risk and compliance. Centraleyes provides an exceptional ability to measure, understand and react to growing risks and gaps in a place where other solutions are ineffective. Centraleyes’s customers have automated and orchestrated their GRC function to the point where it is simply 10x faster and 10x better. This is truly cyber risk management reimagined.

What is the origin story?

One day, the CEO of Visa had flown to Israel especially to launch a project that I had built. And after the successful launch, I realized I needed to start my own company and try and change the world.

What do you love about your team, and why are you the ones to solve this problem?

We have a very unique and dedicated team that brings a variety of backgrounds and skillsets to the table. Combining deep cyber expertise from the military with risk and compliance experts has led to a truly magical outcome. We’ve simply created the most advanced and differentiated GRC platform on earth today.

If you weren’t building your startup, what would you be doing?

Helping make positive change in the world.

At the moment, how do you measure success? What are your core metrics?

If my employees wake up every day and want to come to work while, in parallel, our customers love our products that help keep their organizations safe, we’ve truly reached success.

What’s most exciting about your traction to date?

Seeing your product purchased by tens of enterprise customers in your first year of sales is truly amazing. Seeing some of the largest brands in the world adopt it is simply mind-blowing. We truly created this company from a vision that we simply never gave up on.

What technologies are you currently most excited about, and most worried about? And why?

Very excited about cloud environments and, in particular serverless, with the amazing long-term advantages this has for growing our company rapidly. We’re always worried about the security around all technologies, so think we could safely say we are very careful with all technologies.

What drew you to get published on HackerNoon? What do you like most about our platform?

HackerNoon is a unique tech platform that gives you credible news, updates, and insightful stories from some of the best minds in the industry- all wrapped in a warm community feeling. I think this website is a great gathering place for extremely talented people with great ideas.

What advice would you give to the 21-year-old version of yourself?

Read more, listen more, and be much more vulnerable.

What is something surprising you've learned this year that your contemporaries would benefit from knowing?

I surprisingly taught myself guitar. It’s never too late to learn a new language or a new way to communicate. Music has opened up a whole new world for me.