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A
They would like to have a magic wand with one solution that fits everything. All of my AI will be secured. It never happened. I don't believe it will ever happen.
B
Welcome back to another episode of Builders. As always, this show is brought to you by Frontlines IO, Silicon Valley's leading B2B podcast production studio. If you're bringing technology to market and want to learn from your peers, we have a library of more than 1200 interviews with Venture backed founders and marketers. Where they talk, all things go to market. Of course, if you want to launch your own podcast, we offer podcasts as a service to more than eight tech startups. The idea there is very simple. You show up and host and we do everything else. Now, with all that said, let's jump in today's episode. Today our guest is Ofer Klein, co founder and CEO of Reco. Ofer, welcome to the show.
A
Thank you for having me.
B
Of course. Looking forward to the conversation. Let's jump right into it. So you were telling me pre interview, you've made two big bets for the company. Let's talk about the biggest of those two bets.
A
Yeah. So we started the company basically on AI, first building a graph that is a heartbeat of every company. And we didn't really know exactly where it should take. We believed that SaaS is going to be everywhere and then AI is going to be embedded everywhere. And it wasn't completely focused. And we built the first few years, the technology, the graph, the AI, the patents, all of that. And then the first bet was let's double down on basically securing the SaaS layer, the Salesforce, workday, servicenow, et cetera. And then we started growing very quickly. And the second big bet was double down on AI. Every SaaS become AI, every AI become agent. And then we started growing exponentially. So every, every change seems easy, but do we need to change? What does it mean then? You know, pros and cons for that. How do you communicate internally, externally, all of those things are crucial in order to make it successful.
B
Do any stories stand out to you from when you were making those changes, of just hard moments or tense moments or difficult moments that you had to navigate?
A
Yeah, we have one of our customers basically telling us, what do you mean you change? We built our practice on top of Ricoh. If you change, what should we do? And then we had multiple conversations with them to say what is staying, what is drifting basically to the next level as an evolution of their platform. Eventually they stayed. They doubled down last year. They're extremely happy. But the immediate conversation of am I disappointing my customers that trusted me from day one? And sometimes, by the way, you have to take tough decisions. For some customers, it's not good enough because they still want to protect the past or whatever. But in high level, 95% of the customers from that day stayed with the ricoh and doubling down and tripling down for the future, basically securing AI.
B
What are you telling yourself when you're going through those moments of change, when you're making a big bet? I feel like just for founders, it sounds sexy, right? When someone's like, oh yeah, like, let's bet everything on this direction. But the reality, I think behind the scenes is it's scary and painful and not always pleasant to do it. So what's going on inside your head as you're making these big decisions and implementing these big changes?
A
Yes. So my DNA coming from the Air Force, I was a pilot in the, in the Israeli Air Force. You continuously debrief, brief, understand what you did well, what you didn't do well enough, and then you go and change and say, you, it's not only you personally, it's you as a team. And once you have this DNA in the company as well, continuously listening to your customers, by the way, unfortunately, your customers will not tell you where to go. They can just tell you their pains. What should I do with it? I don't know. That's your problem. Right. So how do you filter continuously listening to your customers, seeing what they actually do, listening to the market as well, and then taking a decision. I think the most important thing in taking the decision is having markers of if my decision here is right, what does it mean in the market? I will need to get more pool, bigger deals, more logos, whatever it is. But you have to measure it right away to make sure that your decision is right.
B
What are the signals or what are markers that you're typically looking for?
A
So the number one is the opportunity, or basically pipeline, let's call it from existing and new ones. Because only once you ask the big question of do you have budget for X? I'm building a new table for your kitchen. Do you have budget for it? If they say, wow, this is amazing table and I'm going to go, it means they're bullshitting you, they don't really care. But if they have budget and they're already testing two other table manufacturers, it means that you are in the right position. And now how do I win against the competitors? So the number one is pipeline. Between one, like I have budget, I'm already testing others Or I was about to do that. Number two obviously is purchase and number three is adoption. If they buy it basically as a white elephant and it doesn't do anything, it means that maybe you have good relationship with one or two or three that want to buy it, but the mass market will not buy it. So how do you make sure they actually use it and get the value? So that's on the product metrics for you.
B
I see you use the phrasing AI sprawl a lot and I've seen that used in other categories with Data Sprawl or SaaS. Sprawl for you. If you look at AI sprawl as a concept, as an idea, is that something that you're really trying to evangelize into the market and educate the market on, or does everyone already understand that? Like, do you have to convince anyone of AI sprawl at this point, you'll
A
be surprised, but the answer is yes. We called the first meeting, then they see what they really have. The oh shit meeting across the apps, the agents and all of that. And we hear amazing stuff from customers saying, don't worry, sorry, I'm protected. What do you mean? Yeah, I have all of these policies and whatever. Do you care about AI? Yeah, the CEO told everybody to use AI because otherwise they will get fired. Whatever. Great. So you have 80% of your AI is shadow. Wake up. Because that's the nature of marketing and product and sales and whatever. They will run with or without you. So sometimes you need to actually show them, sometimes they talk to their peers what they had at the oh shit moment. And this is why this connecting in minutes and showing it to them in hours with no effort on their end is extremely important because by definition you don't believe me that your status is so bad, quote, unquote. It's good on the business side because everybody's using AI. It's not so great on your side as CISO or even CIO because you need to protect it.
B
How do you or what else do you do to get people to that oh shit moment faster? I feel like that's like the number one goal for a lot of companies or should be the number one goal. Like, I know myself, you know, I'll have calls with people and I'm selling specific products or services and like their eyes just light up. They get it. That's like the ultimate feeling for a founder, that. But it's hard to replicate that. What have you learned and how have you approached just iterating to get people to that oh shit or that. Aha, faster.
A
Yeah. I think the first point, if you can get connected to what they care about, business wise, then you have a much, much faster path to the. Oh, and I'll give you an example. If you are at a director level, they have budget for it, but nobody on the top cares because it's a. Whatever side project, it will take you a long time. But if we ask the question of do you care about the AI? Yes. The entire company is doubling down. We need to save $1 billion over the next few years by using AI. By the way, that's a real statement from one of our customers. Which means, okay, that's a board level discussion. Are you protected from the lithos, for example, which can detect and penetrate pretty much every app that is not protected and if so, how you did.
B
Wow.
A
Shit. Actually yeah, we're talking about it every day now as a stand up meeting. Would you like to have a magic wand to protect? And once they see that part of if I have something like that, how can I use it? Then everything is running much, much faster. So start with the business, the most important business project you can help with, and then go backwards.
B
This show is brought to you by Frontlines Media podcast production studio that helps B2B founders launch, manage and grow their own podcast. Now if you're a founder, you may be thinking, I don't have time to host a podcast, I've got a company to build. Well, that's exactly what we built our service to do. You show up and host and we handle literally everything else. To set up a call to discuss launching your own podcast, visit Frontlines I.O. podcast. Now back to today's episode for your go to market. Is it possible to maybe break up your go to market journey into chapters or kind of stages and maybe just unpack that for us a little bit?
A
Yeah, so the first part when we started selling was basically we call it commercial deals. Companies that are 2,500 people and below, fast deals, pretty small, you know, very quick turnaround. We started there and the level of, you know, sellers, the level of leaders, the level of product was accordingly. Then we started getting pulled from the large enterprises, 25,000 people and above, which have completely different motion and requirements. We actually needed to replace a bunch of mid management, some of the sellers, some of the people that were amazing before that, but were not fit for the second phase of the company. So at the beginning we say, but what am I doing? This person is amazing because he or she did 1, 2, 3. But you always have to look two steps ahead to say where are we going to? Is that going to be good enough for them and for the company for the next step? And we needed to take some tough decisions and to part ways with some amazing people that were just not fit for the next step.
B
What would you say has been the most important go to market decision along that entire journey? And I know it's always hard to find like the one thing, but when I asked you that question, what immediately popped into your head?
A
I think by far the biggest one is doubling down on the AI side from the AI security. We started AI Native from day one. My co founder is AI PhD CyberPhd. We have multiple AI PhDs in the company. We called ourselves Ricoh AI two years before ChatGPT. That's how deep we are in AI. Okay, back then there were the jokes of AI is bullshit, it's just presentation. Machine learning is code. So we had internal AI like from years ago. But to double down on detecting and securing AI where everything we heard from the market is that's bullshit. I'm just blocking everything AI. Everything AI is going to be blocked. That was the industry thesis a year ago, not 20 years ago, a year ago. Everything that AI I'm going to block. We heard it dozens of times and still we believe, great, you will grow up because your CEO will tell you to open everything very soon. And lo and behold, that's exactly what happened. And when it happened, we were ready because we basically gambled or bet based on our thesis that this is going to be open up because AI value is way beyond getting blocked.
B
What was it like for you? And I've had a lot of conversations like this with people who were kind of, you know, pre chatgpt and post chatgpt that the world completely changed. And pre chatgpt trying to sell AI to the market was very, very difficult. And they just struggled trying to create demand. Create demand, create demand. ChatGPT comes out and then shortly after they say it was more a battle to try to capture the demand because there was so much demand. Has that been similar? Is that what you've seen as well?
A
We've seen it in many two or three steps. The fourth step, especially in security, unless I'm forced to do it, I'm just going to block it because it has a lot of things I don't know. And unknowns in security are not well accepted. Which means at the beginning it was blocked and very suspicious towards it. Then it was testing. I have only 50 people, only in copilot, I have only 30 people only on OpenAI. And by the way, these companies have the largest amount of shadow because if on one hand they told me to run faster on AI, on the other hand everything is blocked because guess what? I'm just going to go behind your back. And that's exactly what we've seen. So the third step was the AI sprawl. AI is everywhere. We find companies that didn't know they have 20, 30,000 agents today and they're running amazingly, but they're not secure. So we actually saw it in adoption steps and now it's like the Wild west. Everybody's using it. The bad guys are now getting the frontier models like the Mythos and how can we help the enterprises stay safe?
B
How do you think about the market category? Like what's the category that's being purchased today and do you think that's going to be the same category two or three years from now?
A
So categories are shifting for sure. If you ask the buyer, they would like to have a magic wand with one solution that fits everything. All of my AI will be secured. It never happened. I don't believe it will ever happen. That is going to be one solution that fits everything that you need. So you start seeing solution of AI you build. For example, you have a chatbot in your website and you need one type of companies or AI that you buy, which is us. Like every piece of software you buy from the outside that has AI or agents we will detect and secure. Then you have identity companies and you have the endpoint like CrowdStrike and Sentinel 1 and Microsoft. The categories in general stay the same. A lot of companies are adding I'm AI security 4x versus the previous terminology. The analysts are pretty much all over the place and I think the market will define at the end of the day where the most amount of value is in order to call it a new category. But it will definitely be something in the sense of AI Security, AI SPM or whatever because the AI eventually is going to be all the software that you use.
B
That's a big thing I've been wondering is like are we still going to use the word AI or the words AI in the future? Or is it. It's just going to be assumed that like everything is AI so it's no longer necessary. Like I feel like in the dot com days you had to have, you know, dot com but like that slowly went away because it was just assumed like yeah, you have a dot com, like do you think that's going to happen or do you think we'll still be saying AI a few years from today or five years, however far out
A
you want to go, I believe that it's still going to stay the same. Meaning using AI for many reasons. One of them, you'll be surprised about liability. If AI is involved and I'm a bank, I need to do 1, 2, 3, because the regulator is basically demanding that. So I have to use the term AI, which is non deterministic and all of those things that comes together with AI. So the regulator, the legal, the liability are forcing a lot of companies to differentiate between AI, not AI. What will happen that everything will have AI? I don't know. They will need to call it something else or it's going to be the same as we're doing today. But you'll be surprised. You have a lot of software in the companies today that still don't use AI Evolving very quickly, but it's like old and new. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, a marketing leader's best friend. In these times of budget cuts and efficient growth, we help marketing leaders find, hire, vet and manage amazing marketing talent for 50 to 70% less than their US and European counterparts. To book a free consultation, visit globaltalent.co.
B
it's always a good reminder that we can live in bubbles sometimes. Just in general, I live in this kind of like panic state of mind about AI. I feel behind about AI and I have to always remind myself that it's in this like, you know, little. I don't say Silicon Valley as in like the area, but just like, you know, the community, the culture. I think it's very easy to forget that there's a world far outside of tech and AI is, you know, not as prevalent as it is, you know, for all of us who are kind of buried in this industry.
A
Yeah. Actually what you see is really interesting. When a CEO of a telco, for example, one of our biggest customers is a telco, a very large telco company. Once the CEO went public and say we just saved 40% of our cost on customer service, for example, because we used AI, all of the competitors are now doubling down as well. So we just need one innovator in order to go and show that there's value there. And then all of the others, the leggers are moving right along. Banks, insurance, healthcare, pharma, all of them.
B
Makes sense. Well, I mean, there's such a strong pull with the message, right? With AI, it's effectively if you don't embrace this, you're screwed to some extent. So I think there's a very strong kind of reason to adopt it. It's not just the carrot, it's also the stick. And I think you can kind of choose which one you're motivated by. But that has to be. I don't know if that's unique, but it you. For me, that seems like that's what's unique about this technological wave is there's such strong pull in people's consumer lives where all of the consumers are using ChatGPT, they're using AI in their daily lives, that when they put on their business hat or their business suit, it's just a lot more straightforward to get them to adopt it and understand this technology, which just seems to be pretty unique.
A
100%. And you just touched on another very unique challenge security teams have. You have your own private cloud and you have the enterprise cloud. How do I know what you're using? And by mistake, you just uploaded the entire employees list with all of the PII to the wrong one. And what should you do with it Exactly? Because everybody today are using the ChatGPT and Claude and Gemini and et cetera. How do I make sure the enterprise is safe and without basically touching your private life?
B
I was talking to someone the other day at a friend of mine's little sister and she's at a, like a big four consulting firm and she was saying how they're not allowed to use ChatGPT and she's like, oh yeah, but I just use my personal one constantly, just copy and pasting it over. And she's like, how could I not? It makes work so much better.
A
That's exactly what we tell all of the big companies. The more strict you are, the more shadow you will have, the more people will go behind your back. You have to have a critical mass of things you approve in order to allow me to be successful and to get my bonus as whatever, marketing, product, sales. And then I will go with your path. But if everything is blocked, I'm going to jump behind the fence and just do whatever I need to be successful. The vast majority of the risk is not coming from attackers and hackers, even though obviously that's a big risk. It's by specific mistakes people do. For example, oh, I didn't know this agent is open to the universe and sharing everything in my website. And now we have all of this sensitive data over there.
B
Final couple of questions for you. We talked about the two big bets that you've made so far in terms of company direction. What about marketing bets? What about growth bets? What are you betting on in 2026 and beyond to just skyrocket and have hockey stick growth.
A
Yeah. So there as well, you can be the nice guy and just say yes, including to investors, or you can go with what you feel and what you bet on. And in our case, we went doubling down on the team, the marketing spend and the product investment even before we started seeing the hockey stick that we see now. And this is a big bet that you need to really understand where you're going. But we decided to speed things up and accelerate significantly even before we got this huge market pool. And the market will just accelerate it further. So marketing, I'll give you an example. We did a very strong last conference at RSA in San Francisco, which is one of the largest security conferences. And the bet was I'm big enough for people to know who I am. So now is the time to spend more money and to let so many more people see the value at Ricoh. If you do it too early, who's this company that just spends so much money on nothing? If you do too late, other companies can actually keep up. And now you have a lot of noise.
B
What was that spend?
A
Roughly X amount of dollars. Yeah, let's keep it there. It was significantly more than a normal conference that we were doing more than double and it paid off significantly.
B
And final question for you, let's just zoom out three, five years into the future. What's the big picture vision for everything that you and the team are working so hard to build?
A
So we believe every piece of software in the future will become AI and then agentic. And in order to do that, we continuously think, how can I be basically the biggest company in AI security for AI that you buy across everything that you do, one stop shop and that's going to be a multi, multibillion dollar company. And we basically map from the end backwards what do we need to do? And then we meet reality. And when we meet reality, some of these decisions make sense and some we need to adopt quickly because the market is changing. Mythos is out. Mythos is not out. You have a bridge, you have new type of technology, you have new type of architecture. So continuously need to adopt. But in high level, we are here to build the biggest AI security company for third party software. We're on the path and it's super
B
exciting, amazing, I love it. Well, you have to keep us updated. You have to come back on every couple of years and really enjoyed the conversation. Where should we send people if they just want to follow along with you in this journey?
A
So the website is recall AI R E C O AI we have a lot of collateral there to learn about the problem and see customer feedback as well. And obviously if you want to see it in action, ask for a demo. Happy to share.
B
Amazing. Thanks so much for taking the time.
A
Thank you for having me.
B
Well, that's all for today's episode of Builders, brought to you by the Frontlines. If you want more amazing content like this, visit Frontlines IE where you'll find the library of more than 1500 interviews with founders, marketers and other GTM leaders where we unpack the tactical lessons from their journey. And of course, as always, if you do want to launch your own podcast, we'd love to have a conversation with you. Visit Frontlines IO Podcasts as a service. Mention that you listen, mention you love the show and we'll give you a 10% discount. Thanks for listening. We'll catch you in the next episode.
Guest: Ofer Klein (Co-founder & CEO, Reco)
Date: July 31, 2026
In this episode, host [B] interviews Ofer Klein, Co-founder and CEO of Reco, an AI security company. Ofer shares the story behind Reco’s foundational bets on SaaS and AI security, their structured approach to validating big strategic moves, and how they navigate the evolving landscape of AI adoption and risk. The conversation dives deep into how Reco identifies real market signals, the challenge of AI sprawl, and the rigor of building trust with customers through periods of change. Ofer also unpacks their go-to-market journey and shares insights on building a company to lead in the rapidly expanding frontier of AI security.
Initial Vision and Product Evolution (00:59)
“Every SaaS becomes AI, every AI becomes agent.” – Ofer Klein [01:17]
Managing Change With Customers (01:59)
The Air Force DNA & Debrief Culture (03:05)
“Your customers will not tell you where to go. They can just tell you their pains...That’s your problem.” – Ofer Klein [03:21]
Three-Signal Framework for Validation (04:04)
“If they buy it as a white elephant and it doesn’t do anything… mass market will not buy it. So how do you make sure they actually use it and get the value?” – Ofer Klein [04:40]
Creating the "Oh Shit" Moment (05:21)
“We called the first meeting, then they see what they really have. The ‘oh shit’ meeting…” – Ofer Klein [05:23]
Accelerating Customer Understanding (06:47)
“Start with the business—the most important business project you can help with—and then go backwards.” – Ofer Klein [07:46]
Phased GTM Strategy (08:22)
Most Important GTM Decision (09:32)
“...we basically gambled or bet based on our thesis that this is going to open up because AI value is way beyond getting blocked.” – Ofer Klein [10:28]
Demand landscape changed overnight (11:06)
Continuous Category Evolution (12:17)
Will “AI” disappear like “.com”? (13:24)
Adoption driven by competitive pressure (15:20)
Shadow AI is inevitable if policies are too strict (17:22)
Aggressive investment during uncertain times (18:19)
Vision for the Future (19:36)
This summary skips all sponsor messages and non-content banter, focusing on the founder’s tactical and strategic journey making Reco a leading player in AI security.