# Shlomi Ashkenazy

Shlomi Ashkenazy is a cybersecurity B2B marketer who works on positioning, messaging, and marketing at Rein Security. Ashkenazy also describes themself as a startup advisor and podcast host.

- Profile: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/creators/shlomi-ashkenazy/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shlomi-ashkenazy
- LinkedIn followers: 2,936
- Topics: artificial-intelligence, content-marketing, ai-agent-security
- Based on 19 dated posts, latest 2026-10-08

## Summary

Shlomi Ashkenazy is most useful for cybersecurity B2B positioning, customer research, category narratives, and product marketing.

- Best for: A cybersecurity B2B SaaS company seeking paid advisory or content on positioning, category design, and usage-led marketing.
- Not for: A high-reach sponsored content package sold on impressions and engagement to a broad security audience.
- Check first: Confirm podcast name, earlier work, and audience data before contacting them.

### Takeaways

- Positioning should come from buyer interviews, not founder intuition.
- A category only holds if it is built into the product.
- Marketing should teach people to use more of the product, not just want it.

## Main ideas

- **Positioning should come from buyer interviews, not founder intuition**: Ashkenazy’s method is to interview buyers at length and let recurring themes define the narrative. They say they have conducted more than 90 one-on-one CISO interviews and distil them into three questions: how do you do things today, in a perfect world how would you do things instead, and what matters most when choosing a new vendor? The value lies not in individual answers but in recurring patterns, which become message pillars and category language. Ashkenazy says founders cannot argue with what buyers say, even when they dislike it; answers may concern technology, trust, partnerships, or culture.
- **A category only holds if it is built into the product**: Ashkenazy argues that a category claim weakens when it lives only in ads or on a website. Narrative, positioning, and category are embedded in product architecture, feature naming, onboarding, sales enablement, and the exact words a sales team uses with customers. Every touchpoint either reinforces the story or dilutes it. Category design, then, is an operating task, not a copywriting task. Ashkenazy calls the long-run payoff of that consistency “Compound Brand Interest” and says whether a category name is perfect matters less than whether it is applied consistently.
- **Marketing should teach people to use more of the product, not just want it**: Ashkenazy distinguishes demand-led marketing, which creates the desire to buy, from usage-led marketing, which shapes how much of a product people actually use. They argue the second is underrated and directly affects upsell, retention, and long-term growth. Top-of-funnel content, in this view, should show prospects how to use the full scope of a product before they become customers. This framing gives companies a reason to fund “how to use it” material for prospects, not just existing accounts.
- **B2B versus B2C is the wrong question**: Ashkenazy challenges the common advice that B2B brands should borrow from consumer marketing. Looking at brands often cited as proof, they argue the shared factor is not a consumer mindset but a deeper understanding of the audience. Wiz combined technical B2B credibility with entertainment and fun in a grey category; Salesforce owned CRM and made a heavy, complex category feel light and simple. Labels get in the way: the task is to build the right brand for a specific customer, sometimes understanding what that customer wants before they articulate it themselves.
- **Security should enforce what agents are allowed to do, not chase what is broken**: In a post they describe as a departure from their usual marketing writing, Ashkenazy argues that AI capable of finding thousands of vulnerabilities and chaining exploits makes patch-based security obsolete: you cannot patch faster than something can find flaws you did not know existed. Their alternative is to stop asking what is wrong and start defining what is allowed: set a behavioral baseline for an agent, and stop it in real time if it deviates, before anything happens. Ashkenazy says they are not verifying every claim in Anthropic’s demonstration, only accepting its direction, so the argument is a strategic position rather than a tested result. The post links to a longer write-up and ties the opinion to the product thinking at Rein Security, where they work.
- **Their priorities: build the whole marketing function hands-on, and be present in the community**: Ashkenazy’s account of their working life is deliberately broad. In a satirical day-in-the-life post at Rein Security, they list positioning and messaging, AI-powered go-to-market engineering, an LLM-assisted content operation, AI video production, website, SEO and AI search, sales enablement, product marketing, PR, partnerships, events, campaigns, and category building. The humour doubles as a statement of working style: Ashkenazy presents themselves as an operator who handles the range of work rather than an outside strategist, while keeping a human check on machine-generated content. They also emphasize being present in cybersecurity marketing circles, including smaller invite-only settings.

## Work to read

- [How Tenable uses its product offering as a secret brand growth tool](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_how-tenable-uses-its-product-offering-as-activity-7396926598521974785-WtGL)
- [What B2B founders can learn from toothpaste companies about Usage-led Marketing](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_what-b2b-founders-can-learn-from-toothpaste-activity-7310642602335240192-IrzN)
- [I interviewed more than 92 CISOs about marketing — these 3 questions are the most valuable for crafting your cybersecurity start up's narrative](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_i-interviewed-more-than-92-cisos-about-marketingthese-activity-7305948196185264129-0zMU)
- [2B or not 2B, that is the question](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_2b-or-not-2b-that-is-the-question-one-activity-7307719764066398210-CCCH)
- [TL;DR — We raised a $25m series A round, and we're using it to become the security layer for the agent economy](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_tldr-we-raised-a-25m-series-a-round-activity-7513909812666134528-iv_K)
- [Someone has to break the Claude Mythos myth](https://www.linkedin.com/posts/shlomi-ashkenazy_someone-has-to-break-the-claude-mythos-myth-activity-7450109421256425472-Nhud)

## Brand relationships

- **Rein Security** (employment)
- **Cybellum** (mention)
- **CyberMarketingCon** (mention)

## Partnerships

Shlomi Ashkenazy’s posts show public appearances and advisory-style work, not packaged placements. They announce a stage talk at CyberMarketingCon in Austin on 15–18 November and a last-minute trip to the RSA Conference. They also describe their work as a startup advisor and podcast host following one-to-one interviews with more than 90 CISOs, and outline the marketing remit they run at Rein Security. The posts do not specify sponsorship formats, deliverables, rates, audience terms, or a booking route. Buyers considering a sponsored post, webinar, event slot, or paid advisory engagement should ask directly whether sponsorships are accepted and confirm the terms before planning.

## Alternatives

- Val Tsanev: Choose Val Tsanev when the bottleneck is not the wording but access to the buyers who will judge it. Their posts describe five-plus years at Execweb facilitating more than 4,000 one-to-one meetings between cybersecurity founders and CISOs, and a podcast built as "Conversations with Cybersecurity Founders" for founders selling into large enterprises. If a positioning sprint needs to be tested with enterprise security buyers and repeated in front of them, Tsanev brings the room. By contrast, the posts about Shlomi Ashkenazy show a method for extracting messages, but not a standing buyer audience. The renewals post also offers a useful category-brief question: "if my product disappeared tomorrow, could my customer get 80% of the value from something they already own?" It’s a hard stress test for a new category claim. Their account of legacy vulnerability management and standalone SOAR being cut for being defensible rather than defective explains why category language must answer a platform-consolidation argument, not just a feature comparison.
- Sandra Roberts, CSM, CySA: Choose Sandra Roberts when the goal is to educate security leaders on issues they already track, rather than redesign a category. Both posts address a CISO readership: one lays out business-value communication, AI adoption, data governance and privacy, security culture, and regulation as areas CISOs must manage; the other argues that quantum readiness is a board-level roadmap problem, not just a CISO-term problem. It covers the "harvest now, decrypt later" risk and the mismatch between short CISO tenure and long board tenure. For a campaign built around steady, credible explainer content that keeps a vendor in front of security buyers on governance, compliance, and long-horizon risk, that framing is a better fit than a positioning exercise.
- Steve Hunt: Choose Steve Hunt when the audience is security leaders and the subject is the credibility gap between the security function and the executive room. Their long first-person essays name a problem, describe its symptoms, and propose a method—a structure well suited to thought leadership: "Inside security, you're a hero. Outside, you're 'that security guy.'" Hunt writes as a thirty-year observer of the pattern, explains why more slides and stronger ROI analysis do not fix it, and describes teaching security leaders to translate risk into the language of business outcomes. If the client’s product helps CISOs get budget, hold influence, or speak to a board, Hunt is closer to that problem than a general positioning engagement.

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AI-assisted summary of public posts. Audience demographics are not available. Engagement appears only where we checked recent posts. Method: https://b2binfluencer.marketing/methodology/