Why I Joined Linx (And Everything That Went Through My Mind)

“I’m done with startups, next I’m going for a nice big corporate job”. That’s what I tell myself after every startup and after every time building from scratch. Yet, here I am. About a week ago (as of writing this), I started a new job as VP of Marketing at Linx. A series A startup in the identity security space. I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I had a few strong choices in cybersecurity, including some bigger companies. But pretty quickly the right choice became clear.

So, why Linx?

The People

This sounds cheesy. It is cheesy. But something just clicked very early on. In cybersecurity startups, you typically see two types of founders. Young, brilliant, high energy founders who might not have a lot of experience but are able to bring new solutions to old problems. Their experience (or lack thereof) is both their strength and weakness. They are not bound by the status quo, but they can also run very fast in the wrong direction. 

The other kind are (just as brilliant) industry veterans. They’ve been around and they’ve experienced the problems they’re solving firsthand. They know which processes work and which don’t, and they have a robust network of friends, investors, and customers to call on. However, they can be shackled by what they’ve seen work years ago, that might not work today. 

Very rarely, you meet daywalkers. A combination of experience, energy, and willingness to break the mold. And with marketing being what it is in 2025, the old mold gets you nowhere. When I met Linx’s co-founders, Israel Duanis and Niv Goldenberg, I saw very quickly who I was dealing with and I knew I needed to get in. After meeting Niv and Israel, I saw why Sarit Reiner Frumkes chose to join as CTO. The caliber of people that were in my interview panel, including Gili Raanan, the Cyberstarts mega-investor, and Raaz Herzberg, the CMO at Wiz, were only further proof that this is something I need to be a part of. Not to mention the other heavy hitters involved with Linx, like Shardul Shah from Index Ventures and Adam Aarons, former CRO of Okta and Drata. 

The Market

I did quite a bit of research on this one. I was in a fortunate enough position that I was talking to a few companies doing amazing things. Some very squarely in the AI gold rush. Identity stood out to me as a massive, reliable market that has a rare combination - identity security, governance, and management are must-have solutions, and are ripe for disruption. And as a bonus, this is a challenge that practically every company needs to solve. Tech, healthcare, finance, retail, hospitality, you name it. Every business, once it gets big enough, needs to manage and secure access for human and non-human identities.

With the traction Linx already quietly built, the opportunity became clearer the more time I spent with them. Also, after working in cybersecurity for a while, it’s nice to work on a product that doesn’t just secure something, but actually makes people’s job easier. 

On my first day at Linx I immediately had access to everything I needed (which is pretty rare in startups), but I’ve also worked for huge companies where if someone moved to a new position they had to spend weeks hunting down access. Or if you needed elevated access to something just to complete a task? Forget about it. 

When I talked to Linx users they weren’t just talking about risk reduction and MTTR, they were talking about employees having a better experience. A massive pain that is all of a sudden gone and makes work less frustrating. Which leads me to…

The Product 

Our Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer Niv keeps calling Linx “a power tool for busy users”. And to be honest at first I had no idea what he was talking about, but I was nodding along because I wanted him to give me the job. 

After watching a few demos it clicked for me. This is an incredibly powerful platform that understands and analyzes all the connections (“links”, you could say) between users, NHIs, permissions, and applications. That graph-based understanding lets you do a lot of stuff: Manage Joiners, Movers, Leavers (JML), find things like partially deprovisioned users (maybe someone left the company but still has some access that can be used as a backdoor), remediate risk, and tons more. 

But all of that potential complexity is abstracted away. Linx customers aren’t Linx experts. They don’t need to be. They tell the product what they need to do, and it does it. One of the most common phrases on customer calls I've listened to is “it just works.”

It’s also one of the most useful implementations of AI that I’ve seen. Not AI for the sake of saying AI, but actually something that makes a job easier without having to invest hours in it. It didn’t take me long with the product to realize I could do some cool things here. Which leads us to our final points…

The Marketing

I love marketing. I mean I REALLY love marketing. Everything from how you build out your metrics and funnels to creative and weird campaigns. From Astronomer hiring Gwenyth Paltrow to respond to their CEO being caught on camera at a Coldplay concert, to this cereal company being better at LinkedIn at any B2B brand, I relish any example of good marketing. And I’m pretty damn proud of our work at my last company, Endor Labs.

One of the questions I ask when I’m considering joining a company is this:

“Will mediocre marketing make a difference here?”

Meaning, if I just do the basics. Some collateral, process, automation. Some nice designs. Some events. Will that alone make a big difference? If the answer is “Yes, the basics will actually take us a long way”, I get excited. Because that means that creative, fun, and hopefully stellar marketing can take us to the moon. And after getting to know the people here, I know there’s an appetite for it. We’ll see just how weird Israel and Niv let me get, but it’s clear everyone is here to push boundaries. And that’s my speed. So as King Theoden says to the Rohirrim in The Return of The King, “LET’S F***ING GOOOO!”

Well the actual quote is “Forth, and fear no darkness!” but same energy.