Employees of the D-ID startup company work at the company’s office in Tel Aviv, Israel, Feb. 7, 2018. Photo: Reuters / Amir Cohen.

CTech – “Snyk started as a two-headed monster with dual operations in London and Tel Aviv. It happened because, when I founded the company, investors told me that it is impossible to set up a cyber company without a branch in Israel,” said Guy Podjarny, founder and president of cyber startup Snyk, which reached a valuation of $8.5 billion last September, at Calcalist‘s Mind the Tech London conference.

Podjarny, who spoke in a joint conversation with Andrei Brasoveanu, a partner in the venture capital fund Accel that has invested in Snyk, said in an interview conducted by Calcalist reporter Sophie Shulman that it was important for him to set up the company with dual operations in London and Tel Aviv to connect to the two different developer chains in the two cities.

“Tel Aviv has an excellent technological community in the cyber field,” he said. “London has a lot of knowledge from the worlds of user experience and engineers who build tools for developers. We wanted to connect to these two networks.

“It was important for me to make sure we were one team so we decided that no single development team would operate from one location, and even when we were small the teams were split between the two branches. There was no team just from London and only a team from Tel Aviv,” he added.

“This allowed us to expand and connect between the various skills,” he explained. “It’s a significant component in our company’s success, the ability to connect a diverse system of skills.”

Podjarny also talked about Snyk’s future plans.

“Our plan is to build a company that will be here for generations to come,” he said. “That’s what we are building towards. Recruitments and acquisitions are just points in time.”

“I recently spoke with someone who was the 800th employee at Facebook and he saw himself as one of the ‘early’ employees there,” he recounted. “Being employee number 800 sounds like a lot, but in a company like Facebook it’s considered early. For him, what matters is the length of the journey.”

“We have high profit margins,” Podjarny said. “We do not need to raise money. We raise money if the conditions are right. We still expect to become a public company, but are not in a hurry to get there.”