I've had a front row seat for the last 15 years on the peaks and valleys of this cyber. I have seen the ebbs and flows and everything in between.
To really understand where we’re headed, we need to hear from the people building these systems: the investors, the operators, and the founders.
That’s why we’re launching The Cyber Roundtable: Security Evolutions.
This series features conversations with cybersecurity leaders who have shaped the industry. We’ll talk about their career paths, tough lessons, and what it takes to lead security teams through constant change.
In our first episode, I sat down with Jeff Kraemer, the Co-Founder and CTO of Realm.Security.
Jeff has been doing this since before most of us had email. He cut his teeth at DEC in the 90s, building embedded systems.
He shifted from networking to network security at Raptor Systems, back when firewalls were just starting to appear. He then worked on endpoint security at Okina and Cisco, and later helped pioneer EDR at Confer and Carbon Black.
Jeff has seen every major inflection point.
We discussed how the early days of the cloud are similar to where we are now with AI. Back then, people were afraid to put security data in the cloud. Now, it’s essential for any enterprise.
He believes AI is following the same path. There’s skepticism now, but its usefulness will eventually win people over.
We also talked about his time away from building security products, when Jeff took on a CISO role at a legal tech startup.
That experience changed the way he approaches building software.
He realized that CISOs aren’t losing sleep over finding a better tool. They’re more concerned about compliance and the high cost of processing data.
That change in perspective drives us today. Jeff explains the difference between selling a toolkit and selling a solution. Toolkits work well for the top 5% of teams with unlimited resources.
Everyone else just wants their problems solved.
It was a great conversation about the real challenges of engineering and the lessons learned along the way.
Check it out.