Inside Artemis' "AI vs AI" war | Shachar Hirshberg & Dan Shiebler (Co-founders, Artemis)
In Depth
Closing the First Customers
Shachar shares how early design partners bought in early, became champions, and accelerated product maturity and trust.
In this episode of In Depth, First Round Partner Josh Kopelman sits down with Shachar Hirshberg and Dan Shiebler, co-founders of Artemis, the AI-native security platform that just emerged from stealth with $70M in combined seed and Series A funding. Shachar and Dan unpack how they built a 30-person team in seven months, why AI-native companies are outperforming their AI-enabled counterparts, and why they plan to stay on a texting basis with every customer, even at scale.
In today's episode, we discuss:
- How to interview for AI fluency when building an AI-native startup
- Why founder-market fit is a critical early signal for startup success
- The surprising lesson Dan learned from founder-led sales
- How Dan and Shachar are instilling customer-obsession into Artemis’ culture
- How the two co-founders approach conflict and decision-making
References:
- Abnormal: https://abnormal.ai
- Amazon Web Services (AWS): https://aws.amazon.com
- Anthropic: https://www.anthropic.com
- Artemis: https://artemissecurity.com
- CrowdStrike: https://www.crowdstrike.com
- Demisto (now Cortex XSOAR): https://www.paloaltonetworks.com/cortex/cortex-xsoar
- OpenAI: https://openai.com
- Palo Alto Networks: https://www.paloaltonetworks.com
- Todd Jackson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toddj0/
Where to find Shachar Hirshberg:
Where to find Dan Shiebler:
Where to find Josh:
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jkopelman/
- Twitter/X: https://x.com/joshk
Where to find First Round Capital:
- Website: https://firstround.com/
- First Round Review: https://review.firstround.com/
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/firstround
- YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@FirstRoundCapital
- This podcast on all platforms: https://review.firstround.com/podcast
Timestamps:
00:00 Introduction
00:06 What Artemis does and why now
02:51 Shachar’s AWS and Palo Alto playbook
05:15 Dan’s founder journey: From Twitter to Abnormal
08:51 Why founder-market fit is critical for startups
11:38 Finding the right moment to take the leap and build
13:52 The hiring process that powers a startup in stealth
16:58 Building a team centered on AI capabilities
21:48 How AI implementation changes dashboard metrics
23:22 The ICP they chased and the one they ignored
26:44 The magic of closing the first customers
27:49 The surprising signals of early product-market fit
32:06 Critical lessons from founder-led sales
33:51 Why the first product should make founders uncomfortable
36:03 Hiring 30 people while still in stealth
42:08 “Should we be arguing more?”
43:37 How the AI security market is evolving
49:03 Why AI-native beats AI-enabled company structure
51:09 The most surprising moments as a first-time founder
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