Tomer Weingarten: From cyber outsider to building SentinelOne into a $1B ARR category leader

In this episode of Inside the Network, we sit down with Tomer Weingarten, Co-Founder and CEO of SentinelOne, one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity companies. From writing code and designing the company’s first UI himself, to taking SentinelOne public and crossing $1 billion ARR, Tomer’s journey is a rare combination of technical excellence, grit, and long-term conviction.

Tomer didn’t grow up surrounded by startup founders or Silicon Valley mentors. He was raised in a small Israeli town with few resources and found computers as a creative escape. He met his SentinelOne co-founder, Almog Cohen, in second grade, began hacking games as a teenager, and exited his first startup at just 24 making millions of dollars. Then, in an unusual move, he spent all the money to reset, stay grounded and hungry to build something big. That big ambition would become SentinelOne.

When SentinelOne launched in 2013, most endpoint vendors were still focusing on signature-based antivirus, and the idea of autonomous, behavior-based prevention powered by AI sounded like science fiction. Tomer wanted to reimagine cyber defense from the ground up. The company’s early traction didn’t come easy, and it took several years of heads-down engineering effort to get to the point when the company signed its first customer and investors stopped being skeptical. Tomer believed the problem wasn’t being solved deeply enough, and he stayed patient while the market caught up.

Tomer shares how he navigated the “wartime CEO” moments like fighting off rivals with 10 times the budget, managing internal politics, and surviving near-death moments during fundraising. He reflects on how leadership styles evolve under pressure, and how the discipline of writing down decisions helped him become a better CEO. He also breaks down how founders confuse early ARR with true product-market fit, and why most security companies today are in his opinion workflow wrappers, not tech companies.

We also explore Tomer’s views on the LLM hype cycle and why he believes most of the AI noise in cybersecurity today is more marketing than the actual deep tech. Tomer believes that true moat lies in foundational models trained on real, curated telemetry, and in solving hard tech problems, not just ChatGPT integration. This episode is a deeply personal look at what it takes to build enduring companies in cybersecurity. This is one of our most honest, unfiltered founder conversations, and if you care about the art of company-building, you won’t want to miss it.