The Cyber Security Matters Podcast · 2026-05-14 · 29 min
Mike McKenna, Co-Founder and CRO of Manifold Security, to dig into why the jump from LLMs to autonomous agents is the biggest inflexion point in cybersecurity and why most existing security tools aren't built for it. Mike's path into cyber started with a stroke of luck: his then-girlfriend (now wife) fielded a cold recruiting call for Coalfire and pointed them his way. What followed was eight years watching Coalfire scale from 100 people and $30M in revenue to a compliance powerhouse, with Mike's average deal size growing from $30 - 40K to $300K. A formative stint at Protect AI under three-time founder Ian Swanson showed him what elite decision-making looks like at startup speed. When Protect AI sold to Palo Alto Networks, Mike and his co-founders, Neal Swaelens and Oleksandr Yaremchuk saw the next big gap: first-generation AI security was built for chatbots, not for agents that act autonomously across enterprise systems.
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