In cybersecurity, hesitation can be the most expensive decision a company makes. Shahaf Galili knows this not as a management theory, but as a lived operational reality forged across 22 years running offensive cyber units inside the Israeli military.
“You always need to make decisions when you don’t have all the information,” says Galili, co-founder and CEO of Mars Security, a Tel Aviv-based threat detection startup that raised $9 million in 2025. “The most dangerous thing to do — if you’re investigating a breach, if you’re conducting an offensive operation, if you’re trying to decide which product line to invest in — is to wait. Targets are moving and evolving. There’s a lot of chaos and multiple unknowns.”
It is a philosophy shaped by his real-world experience in the Israel Defense Forces, confronting actual life-or-death consequences. Galili left the IDF at 39, relatively later than most who leave after their mandatory three-year commitment, which he considers an advantage. The extra years gave him something that fast-track civilian careers rarely produce: a visceral comfort with operating under conditions that would paralyze most executives.
“The more chaos that you live through,” he said, “the better you will thrive in chaos.”
That thesis now underlies how Galili runs his founding team and how he thinks organizations should respond to a security breach in progress. His core conviction is that an imperfect action consistently outperforms a perfect decision arrived at too late - or one not performed at all. “I believe that an action, even if it’s the wrong one, is always better than not acting,” he explained. “An action will help you understand reality. You need to act… and then have the flexibility to understand that you made a mistake and change.”
I pointed out that there is something almost Shakespearean in how he thinks about cybersecurity. Hamlet, history’s most famous illustration of the cost of indecision, understood perfectly what needed to be done but died precisely because he couldn’t bring himself to do it. The play is a 400-year-old case study in strategic paralysis, and one that Galili would recognize immediately as a security failure as much as a human one.
History, it turns out, doesn’t repeat itself - but we all know it can rhyme. Delay was Hamlet’s ‘fatal flaw’. In cybersecurity, it remains one of the most common that can still cost enterprises their data.
This is not merely philosophical for Galili. The detection gap that Mars Security is built to close between the moment an attacker enters an organization, and the moment the organization realizes it is partly a technology problem and partly a mindset one. Security teams have been conditioned to gather more data before acting. Attackers, meanwhile, are moving across identities, cloud environments, SaaS platforms, and corporate networks in hours, not days.
“You need to be good all the time,” Galili said. “The attacker has one advantage: he has the initiative. If you take this from him and start being proactive, looking all the time at how they’re evolving, they don’t have a chance.”
The best piece of advice he ever received from a commanding officer? He doesn’t hesitate: “Love the chaos.”
The ability to embrace chaos in 2026 is as applicable to building a startup as it was to running operations in the years before - even if contexts and technologies evolve. And the leaders who thrive are never the ones who waited for more certainty before moving. They’re the ones who always kept moving.
