The Spiro Circle

James Spiro
  • 5.0 (1)
  • TECH NEWS
  • UPDATED WEEKLY

Join me as I discuss issues relating to Israel, tech, media, and news. Sometimes with a guest, sometimes solo. www.thespirocircle.com

  1. "Democracy is in Limbo": Can Voting Be Trusted Again? - #0049, Shai Bargil

    2D AGO

    "Democracy is in Limbo": Can Voting Be Trusted Again? - #0049, Shai Bargil

    For the past decade, election debates in the United States and some European countries have revolved around access, accountability, and security. The discussion has become deeply politicized, especially since the 2000 American election. One side pushes expanded mail-in and remote voting, whereas others push for voter-identification laws and stricter eligibility checks. In the USA, moves are being made to introduce the SAVE America Act, which would ensure identification for voting. But the voter-ID debate is solving identity, not legitimacy — and a new industry is emerging to solve the second problem. This week, I spoke to Shai Bargil, co-founder and CEO of Sequent, a company that uses cryptography and open-source software to provide secure, transparent, and end-to-end verifiable digital election results. According to Bargil, the future of election legitimacy is based on how organizations can independently verify the outcome afterward. “People are kind of losing trust in the system today,” he told me. “It’s very hard to track how elections are being conducted. Whether it’s on paper or whether it’s digital.” Founded in 2021 by Bargil alongside CTO Eduardo Robles and Head of Research David Ruescas, Sequent has raised $3.2 million. It works with election bodies for governments, municipalities, and public institutions such as unions and universities to ensure voter privacy, ballot secrecy, fully open-source election results, and system-wide transparency for online votes. Its ambition is to do for e-voting what online banking did for finance: make it accessible, secure, and auditable. Remote Voting Turned Elections Into A Technology Platform Tensions surrounding policy and implementation are intensifying as voting habits change. Remote participation expanded dramatically across the West through absentee ballots, mail-in voting, and overseas voting programs, especially in the United States in the 2020 election. “Thirty percent of all Americans vote in federal elections by mail,” Bargil noted, with the trend only set to increase. Once voting happens outside a polling station, elections start to resemble other online systems, and so verification and trust become central issues. “If you’re voting by mail, you basically don’t identify in any way,” he said, arguing that verification must be paired with proof of accurate counting. “We need to prove above all doubts that the winner won and the loser lost,” he added. So here lies the joint-solution: that voter ID laws answer eligibility, but cryptographic verification solutions like Sequent answer legitimacy. The Philippines Became A Real-World Test Case Last year, it helped roughly 1.2 million cast digital ballots remotely for elections in the Philippines, with the deployment functioning as a live demonstration of a model where authentication and verification are built together. Instead of trusting a vendor or election authority alone, observers can audit mathematical proof that votes were recorded and counted correctly. “You don’t really have to trust either the system or the vendor,” Bargil says. Elections Are Becoming Regulated Tech Infrastructure Historically, election legitimacy came from process visibility: observers watching ballot boxes, physical counting, and human oversight. Digital systems can break that psychological assurance since citizens cannot “see” software and how it is gathering and counting votes, or if the vote was counted at all. The solution, Bargil argued, is about replacing visual trust with mathematical certainty. “Criticism comes because most of the systems today are pretty much black boxes.” This shifts the questions surrounding election integrity into the faith in the technology itself. The goal isn’t to prevent fraud alone, but to reduce unverifiable outcomes - a concern often raised by critics of large-scale remote voting. The Next Political Fight May Be Technical These new American voter-ID laws may therefore represent only the first layer of a new civic technology stack. Identity verification will confirm who participates (like in most other countries), and Sequent’s cryptographic verification technology can confirm what actually happened. “My biggest concern… people losing trust and losing interest in elections,” Bargil concluded. In the coming decade, election disputes may shift away from courtroom arguments over ballots and toward technical arguments over proof standards — similar to cybersecurity breaches or financial audits. Much like any other area, it could cause deep civil mistrust in the institutions that are designed to protect democracy. Whether this new technology can restore trust remains an open question, but the next-generation technical battleground is already forming. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    47 min
  2. Israel Can Win the AI Boom - #0048, Amir Fishelov

    4D AGO

    Israel Can Win the AI Boom - #0048, Amir Fishelov

    Much of the global conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on models, interfaces, and applications. But Amir Fishelov, managing partner at Square One Labs and, before that, co-founder of SolarEdge, believes that narrative is incomplete. What’s more, it is potentially misleading about the current state of high tech, especially in Israel. “It doesn’t matter if Google will win the race or OpenAI,” Fishelov says. “They all need the same infrastructure.” I spoke to Fishelov about Square One Labs, a venture creation and investment platform that helps founders build transformative tech companies from the earliest stages. Founded in early 2024, it blends early-stage funding with operational support, providing labs, facilities, mentoring, and strategic guidance to turn big ideas into real companies. It is deliberately focused on what Fishelov calls “physical infrastructure for AI”: energy, semiconductors, robotics, and the hardware systems that make large-scale AI possible. While software continues to move quickly, he argues that the real bottlenecks sit much deeper in the stack. “Looking into AI, we figured out there’s lots of opportunity in the software space,” he says. “But there’s a huge opportunity on the actual infrastructure for AI.” The logic makes sense. Training and running advanced AI systems requires enormous amounts of energy, compute, and physical reliability. Regardless of which models dominate, the same foundational systems must exist underneath them. “All the basic software layers, all of these are critical infrastructure that any solution for AI needs,” Fishelov says. This focus is informed by experience. At SolarEdge, Fishelov helped scale energy and semiconductor systems globally, selling more than 200 million units of proprietary semiconductors. That operational background shapes Square One Labs’ investment thesis today. “We just came from these worlds,” he said. “Energy is our bread and butter. We also saw what happens in manufacturing.” Unlike consumer software, infrastructure businesses operate on long timelines and demand precision early. “Deeptech companies were hard 20 years ago,” Fishelov says. “They’re still hard today.” In these sectors, missing early accuracy can be fatal. “Not hitting a target fast can cost the company three to four years in terms of capital and runway.” That difficulty, however, is exactly what creates defensible moats. “The moat is very high,” he says. “Once they penetrate into the market and you have a differentiated solution… you can be in the game for the long run.” Fishelov points to energy as a clear example. New systems don’t just need to be cleaner—they must be cheaper and more reliable than technologies built over a century. “You’re competing with gas solutions, oil solutions, whatever, which were built here for the past 100 plus years,” he says. “Now you need to build a new solution which is more cost-competitive than that.” One Square One Labs investment in geothermal energy reflects this approach. By developing more efficient drilling methods, the company aims to deliver “cheaper energy, green energy, and available 24-7 energy,” Fishelov says—an infrastructure-level improvement that benefits any AI system layered on top. AI itself, he adds, is accelerating deep-tech development rather than replacing it. “AI can help you understand a much broader range of topics,” he says, speeding up research, simulation, and material discovery. But it doesn’t remove the need for physical systems that work reliably at scale. I enjoyed speaking to Fishelov, who emphasized that the future of AI will depend less on who writes the best model, but who builds the systems that keep it running. You can learn more in the video above. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    47 min
  3. AI Didn’t Break the Cloud. It Revealed What Was Already Broken - #0047, Roi Ravhon

    FEB 10

    AI Didn’t Break the Cloud. It Revealed What Was Already Broken - #0047, Roi Ravhon

    For years, cloud computing quietly rewired how companies build products, scale infrastructure, and manage costs. And the widespread sudden adoption of AI has accelerated it. In doing so, it exposed a far more dangerous problem than rising bills: how little most enterprises actually understand about what they’re spending and why. This week, I spoke to a company that understands how the financial stakes have changed. “We’re spending all that money on something that we’re not really sure what the ROI is,” Roi Ravhon, Co-founder and CEO of cloud cost management platform Finout, told me. What once lived in innovation budgets is now embedded directly in business fundamentals. “Now it’s part of our gross margin… It’s part of what we’re building as a service.” Founded in 2021, Finout helps enterprises monitor, allocate, and forecast cloud spending across providers, including AWS, Google Cloud, Azure, Datadog, Kubernetes, and Snowflake. The company has raised $85 million to date and works with customers such as Lyft, The New York Times, SiriusXM, Wiz, and Tenable. Not only is one problem that is AI inherently expensive, but businesses are also adopting it and transforming their practices without clarity. “AI is a lot more expensive than what we thought it would be,” Ravhon explained. “We’re not really sure how predictable it’s going to be. We’re not really sure if we’re using it effectively or not. Just buying and buying and buying more AI services.” Cloud costs were already complex before AI arrived. But today, AI workloads are priced by tokens, usage, and models that can quickly change, making it even harder to ignore. The result is cost waste that hides in plain sight. “There are so many dumb ways, it’s amazing,” Ravhon says when asked how those may materialize. The dynamic is familiar, even if the scale is not. Just as individuals may lose track of unused subscriptions, businesses can accumulate cloud services that persist simply because no one is sure what would happen if they disappeared. In some cases, the scale is staggering. Ravhon recalls working with enterprises that had “tens of millions of dollars of ‘shadow IT’”, meaning services running in the cloud that no one fully understood and no one wanted to turn off. Teams hesitate to shut anything down because it might break something, or might do nothing at all. I asked if there was a tension between the engineering teams, who are incentivized to move fast and build reliably, and the finance teams, who are accountable for budgets and forecasts. Turns out there is - and in practice, engineering usually wins. “I'm an engineer, we tend to be very defensive,” Ravhon says. “Finance sets a budget, engineering depletes it.” He adds, “It’s very easy to pick the most expensive model to sleep better at night.” Ravhon, who first spotted these kinds of gaps when he was Director of Core Engineering at Logz.io, a cloud observability company, argues the conversation needs to shift away from simply cost-cutting and toward control. “Cloud is not spend, it’s an investment,” he says. “The best way to overcome this is with data.” When asked during our quickfire round what leaders should remember from the AI cost reckoning now underway, Ravhon doesn’t hesitate. His answer is a single word: “Allocate.” In the AI era, ignorance can be an existential issue if not managed from the start. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    38 min
  4. The Art of Being a "Disciplined Generalist" in Investing - #0046, Brian Sack

    FEB 8

    The Art of Being a "Disciplined Generalist" in Investing - #0046, Brian Sack

    For much of the past decade, venture capital has been moving in one direction: specialization. Funds are starting to brand themselves as ‘cyber-only’, ‘fintech-only’, or ‘defensetech-only’, each promising deeper expertise and sharper focus. But in Israel’s startup ecosystem, a counter-trend is growing that favors pattern recognition and intellectual flexibility over narrow vertical obsession. To understand this concept better, I spoke with Brian Sack, a partner at TLV Partners, an Israel-based early-stage venture capital firm. TLV Partners was founded in 2015 and specializes in early-stage investments, particularly in AI infrastructure, cybersecurity, developer tools, and cloud-native systems, as well as vertical AI across industries such as fintech, biotech, healthcare, and more. It has $1B assets under management, and has supported companies such as Next Insurance (acquired by Munich Re), Run:ai (acquired by NVIDIA), Granulate (acquired by Intel), Laminar (acquired by Rubrik), Aqua Security, Aidoc, Qodo, Port, and Quantum Machines, among others. He describes his approach as being a “disciplined generalist,” which he explains as understanding how ideas migrate across sectors. “We want to look at every new technology trend, and we want to look at all verticals across the board,” he said. “We’re just extremely curious people. So we’re always tracking up-and-coming technology trends… Over time, we’ve realized that this has a huge impact as well on our strategy as a fund.” The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. As a journalist myself, I could connect this idea to my own personal attitude of being “a jack of all trades, and master of none”. I often describe my work as needing to cast a wide and shallow net over a variety of industries. But for TLV Partners, they take it a step further - their net is both wide and deep. That philosophy runs against conventional wisdom in today’s VC market, where specialization is often framed as a prerequisite for conviction. But Sack argues that early-stage investing, particularly at seed, demands the opposite: an ability to sit with ambiguity long enough to see connections others miss. “You’re almost sort of like journeying through darkness a lot of the time,” he added. “You don’t have a lot of data, and often you have to make decisions based on intuition or gut feeling. And I think growth investors are great at doing what they do and being very analytical. I prefer, and as a fund, what we like, and what we know how to do best, is to work with founders during the abstract time.” The concept of investing at this early stage was in contrast to a previous conversation I had with a growth investor, who relished in the data and proof of product-market fit. I was fascinated by the difference in approach and how that translated to working with entrepreneurs and navigating markets. “We need our founders to be a little bit crazy,” he added. “They have to have those crazy dreams and visions. I think as a firm, it’s part of our investment strategy and part of our culture, which is why I think a lot of entrepreneurs come to us for investment - because it’s something that is known in the industry that we never think of ourselves as there on the board investing to manage or make decisions on behalf of the company.” You can learn more about the fund in the conversation above. BONUS: Catch the viewpoint of Shay Grinfeld, a growth investor from Greenfield Partners: Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    51 min

  5. FEB 6

    Media narratives in the AI Age - #0045, Hunter Stuart

    In my latest episode, I speak with Hunter Stuart, founder of Big Game PR. Our discussion centered around Hunter’s journey from journalism to public relations, particularly in the context of cybersecurity. Headquartered in Chicago, Big Game PR “brings results-driven public relations and marketing services to B2B technology companies”, including those from Israel. Hunter also shared his experiences as a journalist in Israel, highlighting how living here transformed his understanding of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In 2017, he penned an article for JPost that outlined his journey and how his experience here changed his perception of the region and its people. He emphasized the complexity of narratives surrounding this issue and the importance of seeing both sides to foster understanding. We then turned to the evolving landscape of PR and journalism more generally, particularly in the age of social media and AI. Our world is increasingly being framed and controlled in echo chambers that set narratives into motion - and so we spoke about the impact on storytelling and public perception. Some takeaways: * The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is “the mother of all narratives.” * It’s easier for people to craft a satisfying narrative in their heads about the Israeli-Arab conflict. * People are entering an echo chamber and they like what confirms their beliefs. * The rise of AI and automation has made relationships even more important. * Companies need to start owning their own channels. Preview > “Experiencing Israel” Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    42 min
  6. When Product-Market Fit Is Only the Beginning - #0044, Shay Grinfeld

    FEB 2

    When Product-Market Fit Is Only the Beginning - #0044, Shay Grinfeld

    There is a moment in every startup’s life when imagination eventually gives way to math. I’ve heard this story hundreds of times before. Founders are rewarded for vision and lauded as dreamers. They pitch an idea, raise a Seed round, build their first product, and iterate. As Shay Grinfeld, a General Partner at Greenfield Partners, said, companies repeat this loop “20 or 30 times” until they land on the one product when the penny drops. “‘They said ‘You know what, actually hits a nerve’,” he told me. For this episode, I spoke to Grinfeld about being an early growth investor, and what happens when companies reach their initial targets in revenue: An achievement, of course, but also the beginning of a much harder phase. Growing a Dream into Profit “That’s when we meet them,” Grinfeld says. The point where early momentum must turn into durable growth, usually around Series B and C, optimism alone is no longer enough. Growth investors arrive with a different question: can this company scale its go-to-market strategy once identifying a successful product-market fit, and will it do this faster than the cost of capital? “You have to grow at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” he told me. “Otherwise, you will not get the funding that will allow you to grow.” According to Grinfeld, what separates founders who push forward from those who sell early, he adds, is not recklessness but “bravery with confidence… and knowledge.” Greenfield Partners was founded in 2016 and invests in early to growth stages in Infrastructure, Vertical Software, and Deep Tech. It has $1 billion in total assets under management after closing a $400 million third fund in 2025. The “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market” One of its strongest areas is structured thinking around go-to-market and company building. Our conversation frequently referenced the “7 Pillars of Go-To-Market”, when Grinfeld describes growth failure as a structural issue rather than one singular mistake. “Every time you fix something, something else breaks naturally,” he says. For example, hiring ahead of the pipeline creates idle sales teams, and scaling leads without customer success can erode retention. The problem is rarely one pillar in isolation. To address this, Greenfield leans heavily into these pillars as concepts: strategy, sales operations, hiring and enablement, lead generation, partnerships, and customer success. The firm has even written playbooks available for founders to glean their insights. The most underappreciated challenge in that phase, he argued, is the gap between product-market fit and what he calls product-market sales fit. “That’s the moment that you think you can actually sell your product at a cost that is cheaper than the cost of capital,” Grinfeld says. It shows up when non-founders can sell, when the pipeline becomes repeatable, and when revenue sees a predictable pattern. “When it actually clicks,” he says, “it’s magic — because you can start compounding it.” A Signal For Leadership In the end, growth comes down to leadership. The founders who make it through the transition are not the ones with the loudest narratives, but the most adaptable mindsets. “Hungry, humble, smart — in that order,” Grinfeld says. You can watch the entire exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    53 min
  7. Inside Cybersecurity’s AI Arms Race - #0043, Itai Tevet

    JAN 29

    Inside Cybersecurity’s AI Arms Race - #0043, Itai Tevet

    The cybersecurity world is grappling with proliferating AI-based attacks, expanding attack surfaces, and surging daily alerts riddled with false positives. With potentially thousands of warnings flooding Security Operations Centers (SOCs) that something could be amiss, the sheer volume creates endless headaches for security teams. It’s the newest cybersecurity nightmare in the AI era. “In cyber, you have this interesting angle where AI doesn’t only disrupt the ‘normal’ industry that everybody is familiar with, but it also disrupts how cyber attackers operate,” said Intezer Co-founder and CEO Itai Tevet. “There’s an arms race of AI not only on the defense side, but also on the offense side. So I think it’s a very interesting dynamic.” Intezer aims to tackle the “ staggering and unmanageable” problem of limited human capacity in cyberspace. As AI empowers bad actors to target enterprises at record scale, the problem isn’t a talent shortage per se, but that the sheer ability of technology will mean humans will never be physically able to catch up with the new threat landscape, including the 97% of false positive alerts that cause distraction and anxiety among overworked teams. The Spiro Circle is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. The company is part of a growing category of cybersecurity tools that use AI as an extension of human analysts to manage high alert volumes. It develops an AI-powered SOC analyst to investigate security alerts from existing tools and triage them in minutes, automatically resolving false positives and escalating only critical threats. Founded roughly a decade ago but experiencing a surge in activity in 2024/2025, it recently raised $33 million in Series C funding by Norwest Venture Partners, bringing its total to $60 million. Its clients include giants like NVIDIA, Salesforce, MGM Resorts, and others. As technology increases across all industries, AI will become essential for the survival of SOC teams amid rising threats from bad actors, nation-states, and others. According to Tevet, non-adopters could soon become obsolete. And those who embrace the technology won’t be replaced by it, but rather be elevated by it; human roles will no longer be distracted by small-scale attacks, and they will be able to graduate to more superior positions. “From a global perspective, but in my niche, I have a very clear idea of what’s going to happen,” added Tevet. “It all has to do with the nature of the SOC team job, which is going to absolutely change dramatically. Humans will supervise the AI instead of chasing tickets all day long.” You can watch the full exchange in the video above. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    42 min
  8. Why Software Is Moving Beyond “Move Fast and Break Things” - #0042, Ben Bernstein

    JAN 25

    Why Software Is Moving Beyond “Move Fast and Break Things” - #0042, Ben Bernstein

    In the early years of tech innovation, software development was driven by a simple cultural assumption that was born in Silicon Valley: that speed equals progress. Entrepreneurs, founders, and developers were encouraged to move fast, experiment freely, and ship continuously. Restraint, social consequences, or legality were often treated as obstacles to overcome or avoid; necessary evils at best, innovation killers at worst. My latest conversation showed me how that era is coming to its end, and that a more conservative movement is growing from the ashes of the Wild Wild West of progress that saw growth encouraged to ignore guardrails or accountability. According to Ben Bernstein, co-founder and CEO of Minimus, the software world is now entering a period of ideological correction, one that closely mirrors what happened with social media and what the LLM era is susceptible to falling into as well. “We identified the problem the first time,” Bernstein says of his first company, Twistlock. “But what was interesting is that we didn’t solve it the first time… Apparently, just identifying the problem is not good enough anymore.” His previous company, Twistlock, is a cloud-native security platform with security and compliance coverage for users, applications, data, and the cloud technology stack. It helps security teams see vulnerabilities created by cloud-native development and containers, but the team realized that visibility alone didn’t stop the explosion of risk. “There are thousands and thousands of issues in every little application,” he said. Bernstein argued that the issue isn’t malicious developers or bad code, but the excess of code that can cause security issues. “The problem isn’t malicious code,” Bernstein says. “It’s unnecessary code.” This realization has driven the philosophy behind Minimus, which builds secure, minimal container images designed to reduce attack surface by design. After Twistlock was acquired by Palo Alto Networks in 2019 for approximately $410 million, Bernstein got to work on his next company: one that would set out to solve the problem identified by his first. Minimus recently announced a whopping $51 million Seed round to “kill” upto 95% of software vulnerabilities by replacing bloated containers with secure, minimal images, slashing risk and development time across the software supply chain. The round was co-led by YL Ventures and Mayfield, with participation from Bernstein, Dima Stopel, and John Morello. But Minimus is less interesting as a product than as a sign of the times: a broader shift in how the industry thinks about freedom and responsibility. In our conversation, we discussed how the past decade has become somewhat of a pendulum swing: In the early 2000s, security and IT teams held tight control, slowing development. Then came cloud, containers, and open source, and the pendulum swung hard in the opposite direction. “Developers got maybe too much freedom,” he says. “And now they see, ‘my God, these are the consequences of what I just did.’” The result is familiar to anyone who followed the arc of social media. Platforms like Facebook, Instagram, and recently X were optimized for engagement first, governance later. Only later did we realize that their push for scale without guardrails produced systemic harm to young people. Bernstein draws the parallel explicitly: “When you get too much freedom, it’s just too much.” What’s changed is who is asking for constraints. “It’s not even the security team asking anymore,” Bernstein notes. “It’s actually the people who want to innovate. This is because developers now spend their time chasing vulnerabilities, patching dependencies, or responding to issues that never should have existed in the first place. “We cannot allocate 50% of our time to just maintain existing software,” Bernstein explained. “Because it actually stifles our innovation.” In this sense, Minimus represents a broader reckoning on what it means to move fast. Ideologically, techies are starting to recognize that speed without structure doesn’t scale. “Velocity can lead to chaos,” Bernstein says. “And chaos is not progress. Chaos is regression.” Just as social media eventually discovered that moderation wasn’t always censorship, software is now discovering that guardrails aren’t necessarily anti-innovation. They are what make innovation sustainable. Get full access to The Spiro Circle at www.thespirocircle.com/subscribe

    43 min
See All (50)

About

Join me as I discuss issues relating to Israel, tech, media, and news. Sometimes with a guest, sometimes solo. www.thespirocircle.com

Information

  • Creator
    James Spiro
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    50
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © James Spiro
  • Show Website
    The Spiro Circle