Q1. Could you start by giving us a brief overview of your professional background, particularly focusing on your expertise in the industry?

I'm the founder of Marketing by Maya, a boutique consultancy providing fractional CMO services to B2B cloud, infrastructure, and DevOps startups. My work focuses on the things that actually move the needle early: positioning, go-to-market strategy, partner marketing, demand generation, and building the marketing foundation that scales.

The formative experience for me was being employee #35 at DoiT International, where I built the global marketing function from scratch, and the company had since grown to 800+ people and surpassed $10 billion in managed cloud spend. DoiT was a partner-first business — deeply embedded as the top MSP in the AWS and Google Cloud ecosystems — and that shaped how I think about growth fundamentally. If you know me, you know I'm partner-obsessed and customer-obsessed. That's not a positioning statement. It's the lens through which I've built everything.

Earlier in my career I worked at Google and MassChallenge Israel, which gave me a strong foundation in both enterprise ecosystems and startup growth. What those experiences share is a focus on relationships — with customers, with partners, with the ecosystems that surround a product and ultimately determine whether it succeeds or gets forgotten.

Today, working with early-stage B2B tech companies, I bring that same orientation. Most of my clients are building something genuinely differentiated in crowded markets. My job is to help them articulate that differentiation clearly, take it to market in a way that builds trust, and create the kind of customer and partner relationships that compound over time. The thread across all of it: helping technical companies translate what they do into language that drives real business outcomes.

Q2. Given your hands-on execution across content, events, and lead generation, which traditional digital acquisition channels are experiencing the fastest efficiency decay in 2026, and how has that structurally altered the target payback period for modern SaaS startups?

Paid search and social are where I see the most noise about declining efficiency — and frankly, most of the founders and teams I work with have already internalized this. AI-generated content has flooded those channels, attribution is murkier than ever, and the cost of paid clicks keeps climbing while conversion quality drops. The math that justified significant paid investment two or three years ago is increasingly hard to make work.

What I'm actually seeing on the ground is a reallocation toward things that build trust over time: thought leadership, partner ecosystems, customer advocacy, community. These take longer and don't shorten your customer acquisition payback period overnight. But they compound in a way that paid channels simply don't. A piece of content that establishes genuine expertise, a partner relationship that generates consistent warm introductions, a customer who advocates publicly — these assets appreciate. Paid spend depreciates the moment you stop funding it.

And honestly? The partner and customer channels aren't just more cost-efficient — they're more credible. A warm introduction from a trusted cloud partner or a reference from an existing customer carries more weight than any campaign I've ever run. Enterprise buyers in cloud, DevOps, and cybersecurity are sophisticated. They tune out noise quickly and pay attention to signal. The companies winning on GTM efficiency right now are the ones who've invested in becoming that signal — through relationships, reputation, and genuine customer value — rather than chasing diminishing returns on paid acquisition. The smarter question I'm hearing from founders isn't "how do we cut payback period" — it's "what are we building that customers and partners would genuinely advocate for?" That shift in framing changes everything downstream.

Q3. From a field marketing and co-selling perspective, what are the primary operational points of friction or hidden margin trade-offs that occur when partnering with tier-1 cloud optimization firms, compared to traditional direct sales cycles?

I spent years inside the AWS and Google Cloud partner ecosystem at DoiT, and partnerships are genuinely where I thrive.

The best piece of advice I can give anyone navigating a co-sell relationship with a large cloud partner? Learn how the people you interact with are measured on success, and figure out how you can help them achieve it. Sounds simple. Most people skip it. When you understand what your counterpart at AWS or Google Cloud is actually incentivized on — whether that's cloud consumption, new workloads, marketplace transactions, or partner-sourced pipeline — you stop pitching your product and start doing everything you can to becoming genuinely useful to them. That changes the entire dynamic.

Large organizations move at their own pace and have their own priorities. The friction in co-sell almost never comes from lack of interest — it comes from misalignment. Your sales cycle doesn't map to theirs. Your metrics don't match their scorecards. The companies that crack co-sell are the ones that do the work upfront to close those gaps — building joint business plans, aligning on shared customer targets, investing in enablement so the partner's field team can speak confidently about your solution.

Attribution and credit do get complicated when multiple parties contribute to the same customer journey — that's real. But when the relationship is strong and everyone is genuinely oriented around the customer outcome, those conversations are much easier to navigate. The best partnerships I've built didn't feel like partnerships at all — they felt like one team with a shared customer to serve.

Q4. In DevOps, cloud, and cybersecurity, we're seeing go-to-market motions become increasingly partner-first, with a significant share of new business now partner-sourced. What does it take to actually succeed in that model?

This is the world I've lived in, and I'm deeply passionate about it.

The first thing to understand is that "partner-first" isn't a channel strategy — it's a company orientation. The organizations that succeed in DevOps, cloud, and cyber ecosystems aren't just listing themselves in a marketplace or showing up to AWS re:Invent. They've made a fundamental decision that their growth runs through relationships, and they invest accordingly — in partner marketing, in ecosystem presence, in the people and processes required to make co-sell actually work at scale.

In practice, succeeding in this model means operating on two levels simultaneously. First, get embedded in the hyperscaler ecosystem early. AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure partner motions — co-sell programs, marketplace listings, solution provider relationships — are where an enormous amount of enterprise buying happens now. If you're not visible and active there, you're invisible to a significant portion of your addressable market. But visibility alone isn't enough — you have to show up as a genuine partner, not just a listing.

The second level is the technology partnership layer, and this is where I see the most underinvestment. In DevOps and cyber especially, buyers don't evaluate tools in isolation — they evaluate stacks. I’m also seeing newer ecosystems like Snowflake and Anthropic develop serious partner motions that are increasingly influencing where budget flows in data-heavy and AI-driven organizations. If your product integrates cleanly with the platforms your customers already run, and the companies behind those platforms are actively recommending you, that's compounding GTM leverage that no campaign budget can replicate.

The way I've always approached it: learn how your partners are measured, and make their success your business. When a partner's field sales and marketing teams sees you as someone who helps them hit their numbers, referrals come naturally, co-sell conversations get warmer, and the customer experience is better too. Partner-sourced pipeline isn't a shortcut. It's a long game. But in these ecosystems, it's the most durable growth motion I've seen.

Q5. If you were an investor looking at companies within the space, what critical question would you pose to their senior management?

"Show me evidence that your customers and partners would genuinely miss you if you disappeared tomorrow."

Revenue and adoption numbers tell you something, but they don't tell you everything. A company can show strong top-line growth while sitting on a churn problem that hasn't fully surfaced yet, or a partner ecosystem that looks impressive on a slide but generates almost no actual pipeline. The question I'd really want answered is whether the product has become embedded in something that matters — a critical workflow, a partnership motion, a business outcome that customers can't imagine operating without. That's the difference between a vendor and a true ecosystem player.

The companies I find most compelling can point to retention, expansion, and partner behavior that demonstrates real dependence — not just satisfaction. Satisfaction is fine. Dependence is a moat. And when you see it reflected in both your customer base and your partner ecosystem simultaneously, that's when you know something durable has been built.

In the cloud, DevOps, and cybersecurity markets specifically, the bar is high. Buyers have seen enough vendors come and go that they're cautious about deep commitment. When a company has genuinely cleared that bar — when customers renew without hesitation, expand without being pushed, and refer without being asked — that's the signal I'd be looking for. And when partners are proactively bringing that company into deals because it helps them win, not because they're contractually obligated to, that's the other half of the picture. Together, those two signals tell you that something real has been built.