Why these Startup Nation founders did it all over again

I got on a video call recently with a cybersecurity founder who wanted to talk about vulnerability management, but ended up talking about marriage instead. I never considered those things much of the same, but let me tell you how it came up.

His name is Eilon Elhadad, co-founder and CEO of Echo, a company he built with his longtime co-founder and CTO, Eylam Milner. It’s actually their second company together. Their first, Argon Security, sold to Aqua Security for $100 million in 2021, a little over a year after they founded it. And nobody would have blamed either of them for stopping there, riding into the sunset as another success story from Israel’s Startup Nation tech scene.

Often, I speak with founders or investors coming from Israel. I started from my work at CTech, and it’s something I still do for my work as an independent writer and podcast host at The Spiro Circle, my own platform. In many ways, hearing founders “take the leap” to chase their dream role is what inspired me to do the same. So the habit of grabbing a coffee with someone in Sarona Market, or connecting via Zoom, is something I still cherish.

This time, I was hearing from Elhadad about his second company: the company thesis is narrower and more infrastructure-heavy: Echo rebuilds the open-source components most software runs on  (container images, libraries, packages), stripping out known vulnerabilities before they ever reach a developer’s build.

I asked him what it’s like running a second company with the same person. His answer didn’t sound like a business answer at all; it leaned directly into the personal. “For us it’s amazing,” he said. “We communicate very, very well. We never need to speak about responsibilities… everybody knows the things they’re better suited to. It’s like a relationship. It’s like you’re getting married. And for us, it’s worked very well from day one until today. We’re just able to run much faster because we know each other better.”

It’s a strange thing to hear from a man mid-sentence about vulnerability remediation, and it was also one of the most honest answers I’ve gotten to that question in a while. Most founder partnerships don’t survive one company, let alone a second! I know because my tech coverage at CTech would cover the successes and failures of companies that would fall due to hubris, overconfidence, or dishonesty.

Anyway, Elhadad and Milner spent nearly three years running opposite ends of the same machine after Aqua’s acquisition. Elhadad told me he relocated to Boston to learn go-to-market at scale, closing six- and seven-figure deals with customers like Netflix and Bank of America. Milner, on the other hand, remained close to the engineering and the product here in Israel. By his account, they barely needed to divide the work. They’d already learned each other’s instincts building Argon. “Everything is connected to people,” Elhadad told me at one point.

As I have mentioned, I often speak with one or both co-founders. I know the setup, and I felt like I knew the dynamics going into this call, too. However, what I heard this time went more than just the leadership: it was the team they managed. When the pair left Aqua to start Echo, they didn’t have to convince anyone to follow them. Apparently, roughly 70% of Echo’s early team are people who’d worked with them before, some going back to their time at Argon. “I don’t think in the last seven years anyone’s ever left us,” he told me. Not laid off, not poached, not burned out. Seven years, two companies, one acquisition, and (by his account, at least) a clean sheet.

I had truly never heard that before.

I joked that it was either real loyalty or just the safest bet in venture-backed cybersecurity: confidence that if this one gets acquired too, there’ll be a third to follow him into. He seemed to genuinely believe both things could be true at once.

There’s a certain kind of founder story that gets told as a solo act and celebrated here in Israel: The visionary, the continuous grind, or the sleepless nights. Elhadad’s version keeps circling back to other people: an initial investor who let him walk from a signed term sheet with grace, or a repeat co-founder he compares to being with in a marriage, and, finally, engineers who apparently never once looked for the exit.

Maybe that’s the actual reason the first exit wasn’t the end of their story as it sometimes was with other founders I spoke with over the years whose companies were acquired. He didn’t build something he wanted to escape. Instead, he built a way of working he wanted to keep doing, with the same people, indefinitely.

I spend a lot of time speaking to founders and investors across Startup Nation. You can read my work on my independent platform and podcast, The Spiro Circle.