Inspirational Women Leaders Of Tech: Gal Helemski of PlainID On The Five Things You Need To Know In Order To Create A Very Successful Tech Company

An Interview With Penny Bauder

Team — It starts with the founding team but must continue with those that join you. You can lose so much time and resources when hiring the wrong person. I once hired a managing-level position under much pressure, and it was the wrong hire. It resulted in losing team members and eventually a year of rebuilding.

As a part of my series about “Lessons From Inspirational Women Leaders in Tech”, I had the pleasure of interviewing Gal Helemski.

Gal Helemski is co-founder and CTO/CPO at PlainID and a highly recognized and acclaimed cyber security expert. She plays a key role at PlainID as a strategic leader, visionary and evangelist while overseeing product development, including leading the product architecture, strategy and engineering teams. For the last 20+ years, Gal has defined solutions for customers and created and defined project specs, technical documentation, presentations and training focused on identity and access management. As an early member of the CyberArk team, Gal has been extremely influential in the identity space for most of her career. She earned a bachelor of science degree in physics and computer science from Bar-Ilan University after serving six years in the Israeli Defense Force’s prestigious Mamram computing unit.

Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dive in, our readers would love to learn a bit more about you. Can you tell us a story about what brought you to this specific career path?

My career started when I joined the Israeli army. I started as a developer and development trainer in Mamram, which was the main computing unit at the time. During that time, I came to know and love solving tech challenges and teaching in the space. After six years in the army, I joined Memco, which was one of the leading security start-ups in Israel. I chose to be in a customer-facing position, combining my technology experience with customer engagement. When Memco was acquired, I joined CyberArk — combining technology leadership in a customer-facing position. Cybersecurity and identity and access management were part of my career from the beginning. Therefore, I continued consulting and specializing in those areas up until I co-founded PlainID.

Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began at your company?

One of the interesting stories is the one about our seed round. At the time, we were self-funded, and money was running out. We were looking for funding, and got our first term sheet. It was so exciting, as the amount exceeded our expectations. So, we flew all the way to Silicon Valley to complete the deal. However, something didn’t feel right. Oren, my co-founder, started saying we need to drop this. We were in a situation where we had no money, already celebrated the term sheet with the team, and we were stuck in the airport with no refund options. We chose to drop the deal and changed direction to NY because we had another option there. We needed to present to the IT team of one of the largest financial organizations. If we passed, we would get the term sheet. All weekend we prepared for the Monday meeting. And, it was amazing. We presented to a group of 20 people, all tech professionals, on the 43rd floor of their building. When we landed back in Israel, the term sheet was there. Sometimes, you need to follow your gut and be ready to make bold decisions.

Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?

I’ll share a story from my early days in the industry, long before PlainID. I was starting my first position in a start-up. A month after I was going to participate in a customer meeting in London. It was right after serving six years in the army, and my wardrobe was very limited. What to wear was the question. So, my mother gave me a jacket and I had some pants that nearly matched, and so I went. During the meeting, I felt so embarrassed, like coming from the country to the big city. It didn’t feel right to me, I felt unprofessional. From then on, I didn’t repeat that mistake. This taught me that what you wear matters. It enables you.

Can you tell us a story about the hard times that you faced when you first started your journey? Did you ever consider giving up? Where did you get the drive to continue even though things were so hard?

Building a start-up is like a roller coaster. You get to experience the highest highs and the lowest lows. The hardest times are when deals are not closed, it takes too long or there are not enough. As a young start-up you need to build credibility in the market you want to operate in, so you try whatever comes your way and makes sense. There was one time we were approached by another vendor asking to work on a deal together (this was for a huge telecommunications customer). Obviously, we invested to win, but eventually it turned out they were doing the deal with our competitor and needed us for balancing the negotiations. But we learned and continued. Giving up is not an option for me, even when it’s very tough. The drive comes from the strong belief in what we do, a desire for success and responsibility for the company and our customers.

None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?

Yes, there are two actually. One is my mother and the second is Oren, my co-founder.

Since I was young, my mother always told me to build myself to be independent, to be a solver, and face challenges. She is the most optimistic and supportive person I know, and I’m highly grateful to her. Oren and I worked together before we founded PlainID. When we founded PlainID, he gave me a book by Dr. Seuss, “Oh, the Places You’ll Go!” I guess he knew better than me the journey that awaited us.

Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Can you share how that was relevant to you in your life?

“You just can’t let life happen to you, you have to make life happen.” Idowu Koyenikan.

I found this quote represents what I strongly believe in: you have to actively influence your life, and sometimes make changes for it to be the life you want to live. Before PlainID, I had a good job that paid well. I lived a comfortable life, but it wasn’t enough for me. I felt restless, like something was missing. And strangely enough, at the time I started speaking with Oren, I had another opportunity with another start-up. It seems that once you open the door for a change, options can flow in. Today, I’m at a place where my life has completely turned around, not only for me but also for my family. Speaking with my daughter today, she completely understands and appreciates the change.

Ok super. Thank you for all that. Let’s now shift to the main focus of our interview. We’d love to learn a bit about your company. What is the pain point that your company is helping to address?

PlainID was co-founded by myself and Oren Harel in Israel in 2014 as a way to take the difficulty out of authorization — the policies that dictate who can access which data or applications. By making that process easier, we allow organizations and their data to be better protected from both internal and external threats.

Until now, granting or changing authorization policies required software developers to make changes to code, which can create real hurdles for most enterprises because it slows down business operations. Our solution allows policies to be created in less than a minute and then immediately pushed through the organization. This is especially important in industries like banking where authorization policies need to be added, changed and implemented quickly.

What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?

Two areas make us stand out — product and attitude. Our product provides a strong technical solution in addition to the business processes required to support the management of authorization policies. It’s important to remember that technology by itself is not enough, especially in our area of expertise. There are important processes that are a crucial part of the solution, such as lifecycle management, approvals, investigation, governance and more. Understanding the business process and providing a wide technical coverage is what makes our product stand out.

By “attitude,” I’m referring to how we operate when there is an opportunity, or when there is a customer need. We are highly engaged with our customers at all levels, we value the voice of the customer, and it has a strong influence on our product roadmap.

I choose to share the story of one of our first wins in the US. It was an RFP where we came in as an underdog. Nobody knew us, and we had the lowest score at the entry point. So, we defined a dedicated team that took it all the way from a five percent chance to a full win. We were told much later that after we presented our response, they didn’t even want to see the other competitors. We won by product superiority and attitude.

Are you working on any exciting new projects now? How do you think that will help people?

I’m working on the new Authorization SaaS platform that would enable organizations and tech leaders to consolidate the management of their authorization policies into a single control plane. The platform comes with ready-to-use authorizers to easily connect with the existing technology stack. This is very exciting for us since we are taking authorization another step forward, to a higher level of management and control, enabling organizations to implement identity-first security and zero-trust all the way through. It will result in higher security controls and much better visibility of who can address what and when, which is the fundamental question of authorization.

Let’s zoom out a bit and talk in more broad terms. Are you currently satisfied with the status quo regarding women in Tech? What specific changes do you think are needed to change the status quo?

As PlainID’s Chief Innovation and Product Officer, I’m proud to be in a leadership position for a company that consists of more than 40 percent of women. I believe that representation matters and I’m grateful that my work shows that it is possible to succeed as a woman in technology. My goal is to encourage more women to pursue careers in cybersecurity.

In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women in Tech that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts? What would you suggest to address this?

The industry is growing to be more inclusive of women pursuing careers in technology, but I believe more can be done. Unfortunately, women only make up 11 percent of the global cybersecurity industry with less than 1 percent of them in C-suite leadership positions.

Not only are women having a difficult time working within the tech industry, but it is also rare for them to take on a leadership role, which is dominated by men. In order to address and rectify this imbalance, industry leaders must make an intentional strategy and approach to including more women in the tech space.

What would you advise to another tech leader who initially went through years of successive growth, but has now reached a standstill. From your experience do you have any general advice about how to boost growth or sales and “restart their engines”?

I’d suggest zooming out from where you are and look at what you have done and how customers are using your solution. What are the competitive options in the market, and new directives that are seen? Discuss this with the larger team and understand together what’s the cause of the standstill. You’ll get interesting insights that will enable you to start moving forward again.

In your specific industry what methods have you found to be most effective in order to find and attract the right customers? Can you share any stories or examples?

Thought leadership is the best method in this industry. Customers are looking for real solutions to the challenges they face, not fancy language. Understanding the customer challenges will get you half the way there, and completing it is done by showing them the right solution. I tend to meet with customers early in the process, and they often tell me, “We heard you speak a year ago about….” That’s when they make the connection and want to follow up with the discussion.

Based on your experience, can you share 3 or 4 strategies to give your customers the best possible user experience and customer service?

Understand the user journey. Translate it in the most simple way possible in your product.

Add guidelines and instructions where needed.

Position the main items and functions up front. Place less emphasis on rarely used functions such as initial settings.

Lastly, release capabilities with essential tools, while learning from your customers.

As you likely know, this HBR article demonstrates that studies have shown that retaining customers can be far more lucrative than finding new ones. Do you use any specific initiatives to limit customer attrition or customer churn? Can you share some of your advice from your experience about how to limit customer churn?

It’s highly important to minimize customer churn, but the way to do that changes from one industry to another. In our industry, it’s critical to be engaged with the customer, both during implementation and long after it has ended. At PlainID, we chose to build a team of project managers and customer success that are accompanying the customer along its journey. They are sensitive to tickets the customer opens, questions they ask, and any existing and new challenges they face. Additionally, the product team is highly engaged with customers in order to get their feedback and share the product roadmap regularly.

Here is the main question of our discussion. Based on your experience and success, what are the five most important things one should know in order to create a very successful tech company? Please share a story or an example for each.

The most important things to create a successful company are:

Team — It starts with the founding team but must continue with those that join you. You can lose so much time and resources when hiring the wrong person. I once hired a managing-level position under much pressure, and it was the wrong hire. It resulted in losing team members and eventually a year of rebuilding.

Market — Understanding your market is crucial, a great product for a small market would result in a small company.

Vision & Innovation — If the market is right and large, then there are more players. You need to stand out, articulate your vision and be more innovative than others. PlainID was the first company that introduced the graph concept into authorization and that made us stand out.

Funding — It goes without saying, but money is needed to hire the talent you need for your company.

Grit — I would like to recommend a book: Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, by Angela Duckworth. The journey of building a successful company is very challenging and has its ups and downs. To pull yourself up from the down periods, you need grit.

Wonderful. We are nearly done. Here are the final “meaty” questions of our discussion. You are a person of enormous influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)

There are so many areas where I believe we can do more and improve. I choose an area that hasn’t gotten a lot of focus, but I believe with a little effort it can have a big influence on many lives, and that is mentoring teenage kids. In most cases, the education system up until high school doesn’t provide tools for real life. Kids have to go through a journey to translate what they learned into effective knowledge that will guide them forward. Mentors can help kids at this stage focus on one area of interest, show and discuss how things work, and address questions from a different point of view. This can make a real difference in the career path kids choose. Many kids are starved for real-life knowledge, so why not give it to them by an adult who’s already in the workforce? All it takes is for a manager to mentor one kid in management, a lawyer to show another how a law firm works, and so on. There are mentoring programs in place, but they are primarily for kids in special conditions. I think mentoring should be for all.

We are very blessed that very prominent leaders read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them :-)

I’d love to have breakfast with Cathie Wood. She is the founder and CEO of Ark Invest. They have been very successful in a tough area — one with probably less female representation than the tech space. Understanding that you can manage your finances is another area women must do better in, and Cathie is a unique and strong example of that. Additionally, she strongly believes in technology and innovation. It would be very interesting to have a discussion with her.

This was very meaningful, thank you so much. We wish you only continued success on your great work!