About
Fifteen years leading cybersecurity marketing teams.
InterimCMO is Elias Terman’s independent publication and testing ground for product marketing, responsible AI, and GTM engineering in cybersecurity.
Elias Terman
Building cybersecurity categories, brands, and companies.
Elias Terman is a cybersecurity marketing executive who helps technical founders define categories, build iconic enterprise brands, and scale high-growth security companies. He has led marketing at venture-backed startups spanning cloud security, identity, data security and privacy, bot mitigation, and AI agent security.
He was Orca Security’s first marketing hire, helping build the company from seed stage through its emergence as a cloud security unicorn. He helped Uptycs transition from EDR and security analytics to hybrid cloud security. He later served as CMO-in-Residence at YL Ventures, advising portfolio companies on strategy, category creation, positioning, and GTM execution, before joining AI agent security company Vorlon as VP of Marketing.
Earlier in his career, Elias helped pioneer the bot mitigation category at Distil Networks (acquired by Imperva), led marketing at data privacy automation company Integris Software (acquired by OneTrust), and helped build OneLogin into an early identity and access management pioneer.
An entrepreneurial start.
I spent a good part of my 20s as an entrepreneur living in Mexico City. I founded DESIGNET, a web development agency that grew to 35 people, and spun off eTrato, an online marketplace I sold to Quepasa.com for $15 million in stock at the height of the dot-com boom. I rode that stock all the way up, and then all the way down.
I also co-founded eSocios, a SaaS platform that helped Mexican businesses build websites and sell online. I still love startups. These days, I’d rather help build one as a marketing leader than run my own as CEO.
Why I believe in tools and their limits
A great tool can change the work. It cannot do the thinking for you.
Later, I became Marketo’s first customer. Marketo had approximately 15 employees and did not yet have a reporting module when Jon Miller, its co-founder and CMO, sold it to me directly. The product was incomplete, but it was light-years ahead of anything else I had seen. I bought it immediately.
That experience still shapes InterimCMO: adopt useful tools early when the advantage is real, document what they can and cannot do, and keep consequential decisions under human control.
The method
How InterimCMO works.
I test tools against work I need to do. I record the setup, corrections, time, and cost, then explain whether I would keep using them.
Vendor support, product access, and commercial relationships are disclosed. A self-serve capability is reported differently from one that requires support or a custom workaround.
The manifesto explains the principles behind this work; the Juma experiment method shows how I apply them.