When Argon Security was acquired by Aqua Security in 2021, Eylam Milner experienced a different kind of startup shock. Not the chaos of building a company, but the sudden absence of it.
For years, he had operated on his own time. As the co-founder, decisions were immediate, and progress was measured in days, not quarters. But once moving into part of a larger company, movement required consensus.
“We had to do some mind-shifting,” he told me. “For example, large companies don’t move like startup companies, and employees cannot move things like founders can. So I had to find a new path for me to move the product in the direction that I thought was right, and the business in the direction that we thought was right.”
Milner spent three years at Aqua with co-founder and CEO Eilon Elhadad before they both left to start Echo Security. The company examines critical components of original open-source code and then rebuilds it from scratch while continuously updating it as new vulnerabilities are discovered.
It has raised $50 million in its first 10 months from Notable Capital, N47, SVCI, Hyperwise Ventures, and SentinelOne S Ventures. The experience did not slow him down, but it changed what he pays attention to when building again.
Kill Your Darlings
Milner brings new insight and experience to a startup as a second-time founder - something he says offers perspective as he begins to build a new product. This includes knowing when to dive deeper into a product, or accepting when it might be time to change course and remain tuned to the market.
“We product engineers are all builders, right? They create stuff out of nothing, which is magical on its own, but you fall in love with it,” he said. “The more time you invest in a project, in a feature, in a milestone, the more you are in love with it and the harder it is to shift or pivot.”
For young startups or first-time founders in particular, emotional attachment could become a liability as a company grows and it becomes harder to question whether it should exist at all.
“You have to stay on your toes and be able to not fall in love with the thing you built and be willing to throw it away or to shift left and right to get the correct result of value proposition for your customer.”
At Echo, iteration is treated as part of the process rather than a correction. “It’s about repetitive change… in order to make sure you are on the right path,” he concluded.
And for that love? “I would recommend keeping it platonic.”
