Product Market Fit, Secure by Design, and Betting on the Models with Daghan Altas

Product Market Fit, Secure by Design, and Betting on the Models with Daghan Altas

Daghan Altas is Head of Product at Semgrep, a code security company that helps engineering teams find and fix vulnerabilities in the code they ship. He's spent his career moving between product and sales, from creating the MX security appliance and SD-WAN product line at Cisco Meraki to building Semgrep's sales function as Chief Revenue Officer before returning to lead product. Stephen and Daghan, who worked together at Meraki, get into how to recognize real product market fit, why AI has turned code security into a race for defender velocity, and why he believes human code review is on its way out.

Main Topics Covered:

• Building the MX product line at Meraki: why most of product management comes down to calling customers, and his test for product market fit, a $100K deal closing without him in the room
• Breaking the sales leader catch-22 at Semgrep: taking over sales before the company could attract a seasoned sales leader, and why the best product leaders have real empathy for sellers
• Secure by design over vulnerability hunting: why X-raying a finished bridge is the wrong model for software security, and why the fix is more cultural than technical
• Betting on the models: why a product built to patch a model's current weakness has a one-year lifespan, and why the real race in code security is closing the full loop from detection to remediation to proof of work
• Where to start if you're behind on AI: clock eight hours a week, start with the omelet before the full Italian menu, and put your strongest AI people on one team instead of spreading them thin
• Coding stopped being the bottleneck: why line-by-line human PR review is going away, and why humans should stay focused on architecture and threat modeling

Links & Resources

• Connect with Daghan Altas: LinkedIn
• Connect with Stephen Koza: LinkedIn
• Connect with EverOps: Website | LinkedIn

References:

• OWASP Top 10 from the OWASP Foundation
• Project Glasswing from Anthropic
• Semgrep, where Daghan leads product