Identity at the Center #323 - Identity Security with Silverfort’s Hed Kovetz
Dec 16, 2024
Hed Kovetz, CEO and co-founder of Silverfort, leads identity security at a company protecting human and non-human access. He discusses securing legacy and modern systems, the rise of service accounts and non-human identities, preserving startup-style innovation while scaling, and how AI will reshape attacks, defenses, and identity strategy.
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Founding Identity Startup After Repeated VC Rejection
- Early VCs dismissed identity eight years ago, calling authentication a solved problem, forcing Hed Kovetz to persist through repeated rejections.
- That scarcity of early believers hardened the team and made later product-market fit and fundraising more meaningful.
Keep Startup Speed By Organizing Small R&D Squads
- Preserve startup-like teams inside growing companies by splitting R&D into small, focused squads that act like startups.
- Build a shared platform (infrastructure, security, compliance) that lets small teams innovate rapidly without reimplementing enterprise features.
Identity Security Is Becoming A Cross Platform Layer
- Identity security is emerging as a standalone layer that sits above fragmented IAM islands (AD, Entra, Okta) to provide cross-platform enforcement.
- Hed compared this to cloud and endpoint security platformization (Wiz, EDR) as a precedent.