Co-founder. Exited. Now on your side of the table.
You raised it to prove something, and the clock started the day the money landed. Most companies spend that runway being busy: shipping requests, chasing every deal, hiring against a plan that already changed. Now there is payroll, a board, and a number you have to hit. I co-founded Suridata, took it through enterprise security buyers, and sold it to Fortinet. I know where those months go. I help founders stop losing them.
I co-founded Suridata and led product as CPO, but the founder job was never just product. We had to pick a market before we were sure, earn trust from enterprise security buyers who had no reason to give it, price something that did not exist yet, hire people to run a plan we were still writing, and keep it all moving while the company changed underneath us.
Fortinet acquired us, and I spent the next stretch leading product inside a global security company. I do this full time now. The way I think has not changed. Start with the constraint. Stay close to the customer. Kill the assumption everyone is protecting. Make the tradeoff explicit so somebody can actually decide.
That is what I bring to founders who are already in it. Customers signed, people hired, money spent. Not a product opinion from the outside. A company-level read from someone who has already paid for the lesson.
Momentum does not simplify a company. It multiplies it. A customer request outranks the roadmap because they are paying. A sales promise becomes a commitment engineering never agreed to. Two people you just hired wait on a decision nobody has made. The board wants a number that only exists if three other things go right. Every month costs real money now. More options, less room to be wrong.
I work with founders to find the one constraint everything else is downstream of, get the company aligned behind it, and turn it into a plan people can actually execute.
Most founders are solving the loudest problem, not the binding one. We find what is really holding the company back: product value, market focus, positioning, sales motion, adoption, team capacity, or the decision everyone is avoiding. Then we say it out loud.
Diagnosis · Priorities · Tradeoffs · Focus
Three deals that look nothing alike is not product-market fit. Separate customer evidence that repeats from requests that happened once. Decide which market you are actually serving, what the product has to prove next, and where the roadmap stops reacting.
Customer evidence · PMF · Product · Roadmap
Interest is not demand. Sharpen the buyer, the positioning, the offer, the price, the pilot, and the sales process until a first conversation has a predictable path to a signature, and you can explain why it worked.
Positioning · Pricing · Pilots · Sales
Strategy that lives in the founder’s head is not strategy. Connect product, GTM, customers, hiring, and execution to the specific milestones the company has to hit before the next round, and make sure every person can name them.
Team · Execution · Milestones · Next round
Working with me looks like this.
Ongoing advisory with a founder or a founding team. This is what I do full time now, not a side project between other things. Regular working sessions on whatever is actually blocking the company that month, not a fixed curriculum. Where the relationship earns it, an advisor or board seat comes on top.
It works best once there are paying customers, people on payroll, and a round you have to justify. That is when the decisions already cost something.
Learned the expensive way, not the theoretical way. These are what I come back to every time a company mistakes momentum for a machine.
Early wins matter. The only question that matters next is which of them can repeat.
Roadmap, positioning, sales, customers, and hiring are the same decision wearing different clothes.
Repeated behavior beats internal confidence, and it beats the one loud request every time.
Choosing a market means choosing what you will not sell, will not build, and will not hire for.
Demand has urgency, budget, an owner, and a buyer willing to act. Everything else is a nice call.
Build the company that deserves the round, not the story engineered to raise it.
Suridata
Co-founded Suridata and led product as CPO. Took it from a market thesis nobody had validated to an enterprise product, paying customers, a team, and an exit.
Suridata + Fortinet
Fortinet acquired Suridata. The product, the team, and the customer value we built went into a global security platform.
Fortinet
Led product inside a global cybersecurity company: enterprise customers, product strategy, integrations, and AI-driven capabilities, at the scale most founders are building toward.
Now
Full-time advisory and advisor seats with founders who have raised, hired, and started selling, connecting product, GTM, customers, and team to the milestones that decide whether there is a next round.
Before that
Led teams through enterprise and cybersecurity problems, and learned the thing most product people learn too late: how buying decisions actually get made, and how little of technology adoption is about the technology.
I speak about the part nobody puts in the deck: the stretch between early traction and a company that can carry weight. Finding the real constraint. Turning customer evidence into a decision. Selling into enterprises that do not need you. Committing before you are certain.
The questions founders ask before they send the first note, answered the way I would answer them on a call.
If product, GTM, customers, and team are pulling in different directions, that gap does not close on its own. It widens every month you fund it. Tell me what is working, what is stuck, and what the next round has to prove. I will tell you what I actually think.
Or email me directly: h@havivohayon.com