Shahar Azulay

Overview

Shahar Azulay is the co-founder and CEO of Groundcover, an observability company built around eBPF Observability and a bring-your-own-cloud architecture.

Current Profile

In Founder-Led Sales: He Learned to Sell and Closed 50 Customers, Shahar appears as a technical founder who learned enterprise selling by doing the complete job himself. His product and go-to-market judgments are closely connected: kernel-level telemetry and customer-hosted data support a different cost model, while early demos, proofs of concept, discounted contracts, and replacement migrations taught the company what buyers needed before it could build a specialized sales organization.

Key Characteristics

• Combines cybersecurity and engineering-management experience with observability product design.
• Treats Founder-Led Sales as a way to learn procurement, security, legal review, pricing, customer value, and product priorities.
• Personally handled prospecting, discovery, demonstrations, proofs of concept, pricing, negotiation, and closing during Groundcover’s early growth.
• Remained involved in demonstrations and non-North-American sales after the first sales hires to stay close to customers and competitors.
• Advocates going deeply into any company function important enough to determine the outcome, even when the work resembles an SDR’s job.
• Distinguishes early low-leverage deal making from the pricing confidence a more mature product, reference base, and replacement motion can support.

Evidence

Technical and product judgment:

• Founder-Led Sales: He Learned to Sell and Closed 50 Customers describes Shahar’s cybersecurity background, early eBPF experiments, and role in developing Groundcover’s customer-hosted observability architecture.

Sales learning and leadership:

• Founder-Led Sales: He Learned to Sell and Closed 50 Customers says he sourced meetings, ran demos and proofs of concept, negotiated the first contracts, and continued selling while Groundcover learned how to recruit and train a commercial team.

Replacement execution:

• Founder-Led Sales: He Learned to Sell and Closed 50 Customers shows him treating migration and verified incumbent removal as part of the customer outcome rather than assuming a signed contract completed the sale.

Qualifications

This profile is based on one founder interview. Company scale, timelines, outreach allocation, contract values, and product performance are self-reported or episode-framed rather than independently verified, and the source identifies Shahar’s co-founder only as Chez.

What Changed

• Created the profile around the link between Shahar’s technical architecture judgment and founder-led commercial learning.
• Preserved the distinction between winning an early contract and successfully completing an incumbent replacement.

Relationships

• Groundcover - company Shahar co-founded and leads.
• eBPF Observability - technical approach central to Groundcover’s sensor and differentiation.
• Observability Cost Architecture - product-economic model joining data location, telemetry volume, and pricing.
• Founder-Led Sales - sales-learning method Shahar practiced directly.
• Incumbent Replacement Migration - execution discipline developed as Groundcover moved into displacement deals.
• The SaaS Podcast - show on which Shahar presented the case.