Curiosity-Driven GTM: 3x Founder Cy Khormaee on Building AegisAI
Key Takeaways
- GTM Is Connecting Need with Solution: Cy defines go-to-market as efficiently bridging customers who have a problem with the product that solves it—simple to state, hard to execute, and unchanged across his career.
- Curiosity Is a GTM Superpower: Curiosity and problem-solving—not aggressive selling—shaped Cy's GTM approach across Microsoft, Contastic, Google, and AegisAI.
- Scale Security to Enterprise: At Google, Cy took reCAPTCHA and Safe Browsing—platforms protecting billions of devices—and built enterprise GTM motions that worked from Indian Railways to Spotify.
- Pivots Are Inevitable: Lessons from Contastic and Google taught Cy that pivots are inevitable—the key is staying grounded in real customer pain while iterating on the solution.
- Build Where AI Changed the Game: AegisAI was founded when agentic and reasoning technology made AI-powered attacks more dangerous—defenders needed LLM-native defense systems.
- Founders Solve Real Pain: The foundation of entrepreneurship is solving real customer pain—not chasing trends or building solutions in search of problems.
- Referrals and Trust Scale GTM: In early-stage security sales, referrals, trust, and customer success are the primary scaling mechanisms—every reference customer compounds.
- Differentiate or Die: Go-to-market is inherently competitive—the path to breakthrough is doing things differently from the start, not optimizing what everyone else is already doing.
Key Topics
In this episode of the B2B Go-To-Market Leaders Podcast, Vijay Damojipurapu sits down with Cy Khormaee, co-founder of AegisAI, to explore his journey from computer science research and early Microsoft days to entrepreneurship, Google, and eventually building AegisAI.
Cy shares insights into curiosity-driven sales, the challenges of scaling security solutions, lessons from pivots like reCAPTCHA, and how entrepreneurs can stay ahead of technological and market shifts while remaining grounded in customer problems.
The conversation covers the role of referrals, trust, and customer success in scaling GTM motions, along with practical advice for young professionals entering sales and go-to-market careers.
Choose Your Path
Make the call from where you are.
GTM TEAMS
You already have a motion. It’s not fully working at your current stage.
Fix the motion before you scale it.
FOUNDERS
You are the GTM motion. It doesn’t scale.
Make it repeatable before you hire into it.
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