From CISO to Founder: How Itzik Alvas Built Entro by Solving the Problem He Lived

A problem he had already lost to#

Itzik was CISO of a large healthcare services company, and before that was responsible for the formal security of Microsoft Defender Cloud and Office 365. He had been on the receiving end of non-human identity breaches before the industry had settled on a name for them. That is a materially different starting position from studying a market and picking a gap.

Non-human identities are the credentials applications use to authenticate against resources, databases and infrastructure. They are now the second most frequent attack vector in cybersecurity. In a company of 1,000 people, that is roughly 144,000 credentials most security teams cannot see, track or manage.

Two hundred interviews before any code#

Itzik ran 200 conversations with CISOs and practitioners before building. The interviews did two jobs at once. They confirmed the problem was real and widespread, and they created the relationships that produced Entro’s earliest customers, because the people who had spent an hour describing the problem were the people most motivated to see it solved.

Crossing from buyer to seller#

Having made CISO buying decisions himself, Itzik has an unusually clear view of what changes when you move to the other side of the table. He talks through what that taught him about trust, budget cycles and how decisions actually get made, as opposed to how vendors imagine they get made.

Ship it broken#

One of the more contrarian points in the episode. Itzik argues for delivering something early and incomplete rather than waiting for a polished beta, because early design partners give you information that no amount of internal refinement will produce.

Why AI agents helped#

Every agent an organization deploys is another non-human identity requiring credentials. The direction of travel in AI expanded Entro’s problem space rather than threatening it.