Your Cyber Self Requires ‘Healthcare’: The Story of Jeremy Banon and The Cyber Health Company
Jeremy Banon, Founder & CEO of The Cyber Health Company, didn’t set out to build a cybersecurity company. He learned a hard lesson that product security is no substitute for personal security. In the wake of a personal cyber attack, he engineered a new framework for securing one’s online identity. It looks less like defending a fortress under assault and more like proactive healthcare; stacking the deck to keep one out of a cyber “emergency room.” This framework informed their platform, which quantifies executive cyber risk with over 300 unique data points and minimizes that risk with personalized automations. Decades of cyber debt is now due. The Cyber Health Company makes high risk individuals undesirable to attackers.
Becoming His Own First Customer
Jeremy grew up in a family of entrepreneurs, so business was always around the dinner table. Two internships in college, one at a small investment firm and one at a large retailer, taught him one thing for certain: big companies weren’t for him.
His first job out of school was as an Associate at a venture capital firm. The first deal he worked on, Series A for Coinbase, arguably the most successful crypto company ever. That public affiliation made Jeremy a target. Attackers went after his personal identity to steal funds directly and leverage their way into the firm.
“I was not prepared and had a brutal experience. Getting obsessed with personal cybersecurity and online privacy was a natural response,” he says.
Back then, personal attacks spilling over into companies was exceedingly rare. Lateral moves were difficult in a pre-AI era and there was a limited market for this. The irony wasn’t lost on him. “I was a early-stage investor. My job was finding small niche companies,” Jeremy says. “And I couldn’t find anything worth buying.” He was ready to spend to protect himself and his firm, but had nowhere credible to spend it.
So he rolled up his sleeves. He went to meet ups, grinded through reddit and Twitter, tested open source tools, made plenty of mistakes, and cranked his own security and privacy “up to 11.” Without meaning to, he became a go-to expert among the New York investment community. The research conducted for his own well-being would eventually become the foundation for The Cyber Health Company.
The Unlock
Even with all that expertise, Jeremy wasn’t sold on this as a business. He’d solved his own problem but figured his situation was unique given his role and access. Then he read a Wall Street Journal story about people whose Facebook accounts had been hacked. They couldn’t reach anyone at Facebook support, so some of them bought $400 Oculus headsets. They did this because Oculus had human support.
That article changed his mind. Our most valuable assets, our crown jewels, were digitizing. At the same time, trust in the giant tech companies was plummeting and they were cutting operating expenses. Companies maintained enterprise security to protect themselves and minimal product security to protect their customers. But when an incident arose, individuals were left hoping the platforms would look out for them. Jeremy saw this was not the case. The incentive was broken. Security and privacy are operating expenses and thus in tension with margin structure. There was room for a company whose value proposition (i.e. COGS) was protecting the individual.
He raised money as a solo founder and started selling a beta that was, by his own description, a landing page and a few people working behind the scenes. It brought in about $25,000 before there was a real product. More importantly, his customers did two things that would reshape the business.
First, they kept asking if they could expense it. Even though the service was explicitly about personal risk, they saw it as a business expense. Second, executive after executive said some version of the same thing: I want this, but I need you to talk to my security team first.
That was the light bulb. “The executives are valuable to attackers, but their employer is even more valuable,” Jeremy says. If companies were willing to pay, it was because they saw the risk too. Once The Cyber Health Company signed a major enterprise pilot, the path was clear. The product would be sponsored by employers and enjoyed privately by their executives, much like health benefits.
Cyber Health, Not Fear
That healthcare comparison is the heart of everything Jeremy has built. Today, The Cyber Health Company gives executives one place to manage their personal security and online privacy, across a digital footprint that’s usually scattered over dozens of apps, accounts and devices. The team handles incident response when it’s needed, but the majority of their work with members is proactive.
Jeremy is deliberate about how different that feels from the rest of the industry with its black color schemes, shield logos and “Secret Service for your digital life” pitches. In his view, that approach backfires. “If you frame yourself as an emergency service and your house is not always on fire, then actually you end up with this disincentive to try and create fear at all times.” Most doctor visits are checkups. You need the ER now and then, but nobody wants to live there.
The proactive approach shows up in the details. One executive the team worked with had a Facebook profile picture they hadn’t thought about in ten years. It showed them standing in their kitchen, and on the refrigerator behind them was their phone number, written in marker for the kids or babysitter. The security team hadn’t even considered it, but was already spending on costly threat intelligence because executives were being targeted on their personal cell phones.
The Cyber Health Company’s platform caught the leak during onboarding and prioritized removal. “The wrong way to sell it is, the house is on fire,” Jeremy says. “The right way to sell it is, you’re smart, you get ahead of risk.”
Jeremy also has conviction Cyber Health is the next frontier of personal wellness. It will trace the journey of mental health and gut health, from fringe to mainstream. Because of shame and disincentive to report, the problem is structurally suppressed. The company estimates this is affecting ~3,000,000 Americans each year and is a $100bn problem. “Once the data catches up, it’ll be too late,” he says. The company’s soft goal is a big one: when someone writes the Wikipedia page for Cyber Health, he wants it to say the term was coined by The Cyber Health Company in New York in 2022.
And nobody is immune, not even the experts. Jeremy has found surprisingly little connection between how technical someone is at work and how protected they are at home. It’s a lot like how doctors are famously the worst patients. Even the CISOs his team supports tend to have the same room to reduce their personal risk as every other executive.
Bigger Than the C-Suite
Executives are where The Cyber Health Company started, but they aren’t where Jeremy plans to stop. He points to Tesla, whose first car was a sports car built partly from other automakers’ parts. It proved people would buy an electric vehicle and throughput enabled the company to debug the factory. This directly led to the Model 3.
The Cyber Health Company has followed a similar arc. It started literally by hand, with no technology at all, then moved to third-party services, and is now building more and more of its own tools that don’t exist anywhere else. The goal is to make Cyber Health something most Americans can access, and eventually the world.
Jeremy believes that shift is coming whether people are ready or not. Today, he estimates maybe 20% of American adults have some form of personal protection, whether they pay for it themselves or get it through work. Within 10 years, he expects that number to reach 75%, especially as AI makes it trivial to target whoever is least protected. “It will be like an adult without health insurance,” he says. “It’s going to be irresponsible to have nothing.”
One Hour, Then Keep Going
Building a category that doesn’t fully exist yet takes a particular kind of stamina, and Jeremy is refreshingly honest that there’s no secret to it. “There is no easy answer. There’s no shortcut,” he says. Things will go wrong, some of them completely out of your control, and nobody is coming to rescue you.
What he does have is a rule. “When I’m really feeling beaten up over a bad break or company mis-step, I give myself one hour,” he says. “It doesn’t matter when or where it is. But after an hour, it is over, and you have to move forward.” Give those feelings too much oxygen and doubt will fester. In his view, that’s the number one reason companies fail. Not competition, but running out of tolerance for the pain.
His other piece of advice for solo founders is a little unexpected: watch the reality show Alone. Contestants are dropped in the wilderness with a handful of tools and try to survive as long as they can. Most don’t leave because they’re hurt or hungry. They tap out because they’re lonely. “Being a solo founder is a lot like that show,” Jeremy says. (I’ve since added it to my watch list.)
Learning the Enterprise’s Pace
Jeremy says every entrepreneur he respects has an irrational attachment towards speed and momentum, and he’s no exception. Selling to large enterprises tests that. Early in his time with Engage, he’s leaned into accepting the long runway between a first meeting and real progress, rather than fighting it, while still finding ways to build urgency where he can.
He’s also come to see the security teams inside those companies as true partners. Those teams need visibility and a way to show results, so The Cyber Health Company has built reporting and ROI tools just for them, while holding a firm line on executive privacy. It’s a move that has made even his longtime customer relationships stronger.
Jeremy’s Founder Equation
Since he started the company, Jeremy has watched funding and headlines chase one trend after another: crypto, the creator economy, the Zoom boom, AI, space. His own details have changed plenty along the way. The very first product idea was an app built inside Zoom, and the platform moved from desktop to web. But the core belief hasn’t budged. Personal security and privacy are healthcare of the 21st century, it’s best treated before something goes wrong, and if they do, enterprises pay the steepest price.
“Persistence is a precondition for luck,” he says. “You have to be in the game to get lucky.” Staying in the game also means holding your conviction through the seasons when you’re out of fashion, because, as he puts it, nothing worth building is finished fast. And underneath it all is something only a founder who lived the problem can bring. “Because of my personal problem, I have irrational, emotional scar tissue around this market,” Jeremy says.
So when asked what he attributes his success to, his answer comes straight from the road that got him here:
Persistence + Conviction + Scar Tissue.
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