Guarding the Gates: Belsasar’s Relentless Drive Behind Cerby

11.21.2025

Before he ever wrote a line of code, Bel Lepe understood the meaning of work.

As a first-generation Mexican American, he grew up watching his parents chase opportunity with extraordinary sacrifice. His father, Casimiro Lepe, came to the U.S. at just 15 as part of the Bracero program, after his own father passed away, leaving him as the oldest of eight children. Within hours of that tragedy, he took responsibility for his family and traveled north to work as a migrant farm laborer, beginning the season  picking lemons in Southern California to apples in Washington, sending 100% of his earnings back home. He would spend nothing on himself and rely on the provided-for food and lodgings from his employer. His mother worked three jobs at a time. Together, they put six doctors through school. That example left an imprint so deep that Bel still measures himself against it today. 

Few people, he says, can outwork him. And if he ever fails, it will never be because of lack of effort.

 

Seeing Excellence Early

Bel’s older brother, Bismarck, played a defining role in shaping his path. Bismarck, who would later co-found Ooyala with him, pushed Bel to apply to elite boarding schools. Bel earned spots at Phillips Academy Andover and The Thacher School, environments that expanded his world and showed him “what excellence looks like in other forms.”

From there, Bel studied Computer Science at Stanford, where he also entered Google as one of the youngest engineers on the team, starting the job just three months before freshman year. The intensity of Google, Stanford, and Silicon Valley became his operating baseline.

From Ooyala to a New Problem No One Was Solving

In 2007, Bel co-founded Ooyala with Bismarck and Sean Knapp, scaling it to 200+ employees and thousands of customers before selling to Telstra, and later reacquiring and selling it again in 2019. Ooyala was a “script-to-screen” video platform, helping brands like ESPN and Univision produce, deliver, and monetize content at scale, and even powering production tools for major content houses like HBO. The company began with the vision of building a Netflix-like platform before Netflix itself existed, and evolved into a B2B platform that transformed how media companies managed professional video. The experience taught Bel how to build, lead, and exit a complex, fast-growing global business.

 

But it also taught him something more subtle: that chasing an exit is not the same as building lasting value.

When he began exploring his next chapter, a conversation with one of the biggest media companies unlocked an opportunity too compelling to ignore. They had a problem — corporate social media accounts were being hacked, often during critical events. During a FIFA World Cup, security friction caused delays that cost them real-time posting windows.

They weren’t alone either. As Bel began interviewing CIOs and CISOs, nearly all the executives said the same thing: compromised applications create chaos, outages, and reputational damage on a scale that traditional IT tools weren’t designed for.

The insight gave Cerby its name, an homage to Cerberus, the guardian of the gates of the underworld. Because when one of these disconnected applications gets breached, “all he** breaks loose.”

Cerby: The Security Problem Hidden in Plain Sight

What started as protection for corporate social media accounts quickly expanded into managing access for all disconnected applications — SaaS, legacy, on-premise, and everything in between. Customers pulled the company from one use case to the next.

“Customers have led us every step of the way,” Bel says.

Historically, this entire category had been solved with expensive services, system integrators, and manual processes. But Bel saw a better way to automate the painful parts of security so users get protection and productivity. Not one or the other.

Cerby’s focus today blends automation with thoughtful services, just enough to solve the problem without slowing down scale.

The CEO Shift

While Bel had previously been a founder-CTO, Cerby required something different. Being CEO brought new weight.

“There’s no safety net,” he says. “You own every outcome.”

He also found himself energized by the work. By the discomfort, by the challenge, and by the responsibility of assembling a team that truly loves building products.

His philosophy shifted from “How do we get acquired?” to “How do we build the best team in the world to create a product customers genuinely love?”

Sharpening the Story Through Engage

As part of Engage’s Cohort 15, Bel refined Cerby’s narrative, pitch, and segmentation strategy. With over a dozen corporate presentations during the program, he learned how to position Cerby differently for highly regulated enterprises versus brand-centric companies, and how to communicate value in a crowded cybersecurity market.

He appreciated the speed, structure, and quantifiable value of the program.

“Engage made us better. You feel the improvement every week,” he says.

The Long Game

For Bel, the mission isn’t just to build a security product. It’s to fundamentally change how security integrates with work, making it fast, automated, and invisible.

He’s also inspired by the community around him: fellow founders, shared excellence, and the collective drive to build something meaningful.

Growing up, Bel learned that effort is its own form of privilege and that relentless commitment can close gaps that talent, resources, or luck can’t.

That clarity shapes how he builds, leads, and works every day.

Bel’s Founder Equation

When asked what drives his success, Bel points back to the forces that shaped him: the resilience he learned from immigrant parents who worked relentlessly, the network he built through years of deep relationships, and the stubborn optimism that carried him through every inflection point, from Ooyala to Cerby. It’s the founder equation he relies on in every chapter of his journey:

“Network + work ethic + optimism that borders on stupidity.”