It took less than five months for Jason Magee, former CEO of ConnectWise, to resurface in the channel as CEO of Cynet, an all-in-one cybersecurity platform company that was founded in 2015 and has offices in Boston and Tel Aviv-Yafo, Israel. A channel-focused company, Cynet partners with VARs, MSPs, MSSPs, and incident response providers. MSP Success spoke with Magee last week, his first on the job, right after he attended the sales kickoff week in Boston. In this conversation, Magee shares why he chose Cynet, his plans for expansion, and how the company stands out in a competitive market. This is an edited and condensed version of that conversation.
MSP Success: First, are you moving to Boston?
Jason Magee: I’m not. I’m not going to move my children at the ages they’re at right now. I’ll be commuting a lot. I plan on going to Israel to meet all of those employees early March.
MSP Success: Cynet is a ConnectWise integration partner. Did you already have a relationship with them before joining the company?
Magee: Actually no. Up until the executive recruitment firm reached out to me, I hadn’t really heard of them. Partially why that’s the case is they have a pretty good presence in the Europe and the MSP business is not as robust as one would think [there].
MSP Success: There are a lot of cybersecurity platforms out there. After leading ConnectWise as CEO, what appealed to you about Cynet?
Magee: Lots of things. As I started to do my research, [I asked myself], What do I want to do next? What am I passionate about? What are the things that I’ve been looking for? It came down to I’m passionate about platforms, and then it had to [have a play] either in cybersecurity or hyper automation/AI. And then as I started to have conversations with the team around Cynet, the founder [Eyal Gruner], and the investors, and doing my research, it turns out that it had all three components. There are great reviews, nice customer sentiment across the board, high NPS scores. Multiple routes to market. They’re predominately a VAR channel; this day and age there are a lot more hybrids, so product sales and managed services, plus the opportunity for additional types of routes to market. And they were performing. They hit all their numbers and key metrics in 2024, so that appealed to me over some of the other opportunities I was evaluating.
MSP Success: I’ve seen estimates that the company is around $20 to $40 million in annual revenue. Is that right?
Magee: We’re on the high end of that. Let’s put it that way.
MSP Success: Is the company currently profitable?
Magee: It’s venture backed so we’re spending a whole lot of money to focus on growth. We’ll just leave it at that.
MSP Success: The company’s been around about 10 years and I assume that replacing the founder with an experienced CEO like you signals the next stage of growth. Can you tell me about your mission?
Magee: You hit the nail on the head. And just be clear, Eyal is transitioning to full-time board member. We’re going to work very closely on a handful of things, the transition being one. His record speaks for itself. He’s had successful exits previously. He’s gotten Cynet to where it is today and goes out on a high note with tremendous performance in 2024. You use the word growth. That’s what it’s about. So come in and mature the organization a bit. Make sure we have the appropriate stuff in place to be able to scale, go from the $40s to $100 million, to $300 million and beyond. But yeah, growth is my focus.
MSP Success: Will you be adding some folks to your executive team?
Magee: Yeah, stay tuned. We have gaps, so we’ll make announcements in the next month or so.
MSP Succes: Will you poach any of your ConnectWise friends?
Magee: No, I’m not going to poach. I’m not going to do anything to put ConnectWise in a predicament.
MSP Success: You just started, but what do you think might be missing from the Cynet platform that you’d be looking to add or enhance?
Magee: I don’t want to show my cards to competitors quite yet. But if you look at the platform, it’s got a couple of things that need to be weaved into the story. But rest assured that I’ll be working with the product and engineering leaders and teams to make sure that we not only have the appropriate breadth across the platform for that all-in-one concept but also depth.
MSP Success: As you know, MSPs have become quite a target for cybercriminals. How does Cynet address that threat?
Magee: It’s a great platform. But not only that, it’s the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation results. [Cynet was the only cybersecurity vendor in the 2024 MITRE ATT&CK Evaluation to achieve 100% Protection and 100% Detection Visibility—with no configuration changes. And Cynet delivered these results with zero false positive detections. Cynet also provides 24/7 MDR support from its in-house SOC.]
MSP Success: The IT Nation community was very important to ConnectWise and your press announcement talked about deepening partnerships. Do you plan to take a similar approach with Cynet and building community?
Jason Magee: Community is a broad term. Am I going to build an event like IT Nation? Likely not. I participate in the key industry things that make sense. With Cynet, it’s a bit more broad than just MSP, so where there are prospective partners, on the reseller side and for whatever MSP that makes sense, [that] want to join us on this journey. Everything that we’re going to do, and it’s a lot of what Cynet has been doing, is going to start with the customer and partners. We’re going to get lots of feedback. We’re going to understand their pain points and their challenges and make sure that that’s being built into what we do, whether that be from a product standpoint, a solution standpoint. Or whether it’s the partner program and benefits that could help our VARs and MSPs grow their business to become more profitable. We’re looking to embrace all different flavors of partners.
MSP Success: Can you tell me how many MSPs that you work with today, ballpark?
Magee: Hundreds.
MSP Success: How would you differentiate Cynet from both the older guard cybersecurity platforms and the new guard?
Magee: The MITRE [evaluation] is a really big differentiation plus the breadth of what we have. So those are the two areas [of] differentiation against some of the newer all-in-one platform concepts. [Some of the established players] it’s not so much as all in one as there are a bunch of products mainly done through acquisitions over time that integrated, versus an all-in-one built from the start as a platform. Again, the MITRE results speak for themselves because a lot of those players go through that and we did better than all of them.
MSP Success: So Cynet is certainly a lot smaller than ConnectWise. Is this a change of pace you were looking for?
Magee: Yeah, great question. We could probably do a whole article on just my thought process. But in short, if you look at my history, I started at ConnectWise 14 years ago [and] I think we were smaller in size than where Cynet is today. And when I was looking at what’s next, I want to get back to be more focused on growth, more organization, be able to have a bigger impact, be able to bring the experience, knowledge, and know-how that I’ve amassed in the 13-14 years at ConnectWise at varying stages, from $30 million $300 million to shy of a billion. The experience I bring at those stages is invaluable for a company like Cynet.
MSP Success: I know you got asked this a million times when you were at ConnectWise, but Cynet has investors too. So is it part of your job to get it ready to sell?
Magee: I give everyone the standard [answer], whether it was at ConnectWise or Cynet. Yeah, there are investors that ultimately want to monetize their investment, whether it’s sold to another investment firm, whether it be private equity or venture capital, or a strategic or go public. So what I’m really focused on is getting that growth and getting it to a certain size over the next couple of years, and we’re going to build a multiyear plan, and if something makes sense, we’ll see. But make no mistake about it, the investors want to get their return at some point.
MSP Success: When I asked you at IT Nation in November if you had a noncompete, you said you couldn’t tell me. Can you tell me know?
Magee: I’ve got things that I’ve got to keep an eye out on. Let’s put it that way. It’s pretty standard in our space and pretty standard that noncompetes are out there. So yeah, there is an aspect of that.
MSP Success: And I would assume Cynet’s not considered a direct competitor of Connectwise.
Magee: Not the way I see it; you could do your own assessment. What we do, ConnectWise does through partnerships today primarily, and they’ve built other stuff around the partnerships.
MSP Success: I have to ask this too. Was it your decision to leave ConnectWise?
Magee: I just go back to the articles [that have been written]. That’s the true story. It goes back to the July time frame. I approached the board and long story short, we got to a point where it was win, win, win all around. I was ready. They were ready. It turns out Manny [Rivelo, who replaced Magee as CEO] became an available player and timing was good for him.
Again, ConnectWise is a great company and I’ll be its No. 1 raving fan and No. 1 cheerleader as they continue to execute upon their strategy, course, and path. And If there’s opportunity for me to work with ConnectWise in the seat that I’m sitting in as CEO of Cynet, I’d welcome that opportunity.
MSP Success: For MSPs, which I know is just one of your partner bases, what do you think will be the biggest cybersecurity challenge for them this year?
Magee: The challenge will always be their customers understanding the need and the MSP being able to convince said customer of the needs and the robustness. Then what I would say is the cyber insurance ever changing requirements will be a challenge that they’ll continue to face in 2025. And then making sure that they’re picking the right tools, platform, and vendors to partner with. And make sure that they feel good in those choices.
