Gil Geron

Growing Up in a Family of Five Children

He grew up in Israel with three brothers and a sister. On the Founder Storiez podcast in 2025 he said my parents allowed us to have a lot of experiences, with hikes almost every weekend and a steady run of activities. He became a guide in the Israeli Scouts and later led the scout branch in his village, which he believes taught him to try things he found uncomfortable: it made me really comfortable outside of the comfort zone consistently.

His father kept the family rules short. Gil, you can do whatever you want. Don't do drugs, okay? Don't ride motorcycles, but everything else you can do. When one of his younger brothers was 10, their father bought him a bicycle and told him to ride it home alone along a highway, then circled back in the car and followed the boy the whole way without telling him. all of us have this feeling that we can do anything, he said. He manages people the same way and lets them make mistakes when the damage is containable.

A Decade at Check Point

He joined Check Point expecting a short stay. He told the Secure Ventures podcast in 2024: I thought I'll be there for two years. Instead, every two or three years he took on something new: software development, then mobile security just as the iPhone and app stores arrived, then catching zero-day malware, meaning attacks no security product has seen before, and finally managing a product line.

His work on zero-day attacks gave him the idea that became Orca. He told Unite.AI: In my last role, I focused on zero-day detection and threat prevention, which exposed me to the difficulties of selecting the right security tools for comprehensive coverage. That experience sparked the idea that eventually became the foundation for Orca. He added that he would not have left on his own: I don't think I would have done it alone.

Eight Founders Without an Idea

Orca began as two groups of Check Point veterans. A group of software architects had decided to start a company, and separately he and Avi Shua, who became Orca's first chief executive, decided to leave and start one too. They had no product in mind. Their plan was to sit in a coffee shop facing the sea and, if nothing came of it in six months, find new jobs. when we left we really really didn't know anything, he said. The two groups joined, and the company started with eight founders, each with a defined role.

They looked for a market where customers were unhappy and found it in cloud security. The founders came up with a way to inspect cloud servers without installing agents, the small programs that other tools need on each machine. He liked that the work behind it was unglamorous: the tech around it is really boring. They went to investors before they had a demo or even a slide deck. One of the first investors told them this is either the best idea I've ever heard in my life and I heard a lot of ideas or you guys are a bunch of scammers. That investor did invest, after the founders built a proof of concept on their laptops to show the technology worked.

Orca's First Customers

As chief product officer he led work on SideScanning, Orca's patented method of reading each cloud server's storage and the cloud provider's own interfaces. With it, customers do not have to install or maintain agents. He explained it on theCUBE in 2021: Basically, when you integrate Orca, you are able within minutes to understand, to read, and to view all of the risks.

The first paying customer was Fiverr, the online freelance marketplace. Its security chief asked to start paying after about three weeks. Easy setup became Orca's main selling point. He described a meeting with an early customer where the head of DevOps shouted at Orca's sales engineer, I cannot install any more tools, while a team leader in the same room connected Orca on the spot.

Running Orca From the United States

On March 22, 2023, Orca announced that he would become chief executive and that Shua would move to the new role of chief innovation officer and stay on the board. He moved his family to the United States for the job: I migrated my family here to the US because of work. His LinkedIn profile lists him in New York City.

He has said the job changed him at home as well as at work. if you ask my wife she would say it's a completely different person, he said,. His advice to people starting out is to keep pushing and to expect the work to be hard: if it's hard for you doesn't mean it's wrong.

In a LinkedIn post he wrote that AI has changed where the hard part of the work lies: Discovery is no longer the hard problem in cloud security. AI solved that. As employees across companies build their own apps with AI tools, he sees security's task as making sure security can see and trust what they build.