Dan Schoenbaum Has Spent 30 Years Turning Partnerships Into Growth

Three days before this story was published, Dan Schoenbaum took a job whose title sounds narrower than the work. Axonius named him senior vice president of business development. The brief gathers technology alliances, channel partners and mergers and acquisitions into one office. For anyone who has followed his career, the combination feels less like a novelty than an overdue label. Schoenbaum has spent three decades working in the seams between the boxes on an organization chart. He has built products, opened partnerships, run marketing, led sales, bought companies, prepared one for public markets and sat in the chief executive's chair. His subject is growth. His preferred grammar is connection.

There is an unfashionable practicality to his explanation of the new job. He wants partners working with Axonius on joint solutions that help customers and drive revenue. No mist, no talk of ecosystems as if they were enchanted forests. A partnership has to do something. At a company whose Asset Cloud connects through more than 1,400 bidirectional integrations, that insistence matters. An impressive integration count can become a crowded slide. Schoenbaum's task is to turn it into a reason for two companies to enter a customer's problem together.

The first operating systemName the hill. Leave room for the route.

Long before the software titles, Schoenbaum grew up in the United States and made a choice that surprised even him. During college, a review of a book about military ethics caught his attention. He volunteered to spend two and a half years in the Israeli military and entered the paratroopers. He arrived without friends or family nearby and knowing only a few words of Hebrew. He has written that he was fluent within six months. He became a first sergeant and served as a sniper for the battalion.

The detail he carried into his management writing was not marksmanship. It was the march. Training culminated in an 80-mile effort with a 50-pound pack to earn the unit's green beret. At first the distance seemed absurd. The training made it imaginable in increments, with teammates sometimes pushing or pulling one another through the final mile. Confidence, in this account, was neither a slogan nor a personality type. It was accumulated evidence.

“I try to lead all my teams in a way that allows them to fail, but requires them to learn from each failure.”Dan Schoenbaum on leadership

Another lesson was about instructions. Commanders said which hill to take, but left the route to the unit. Schoenbaum later turned that into a compact management philosophy: make the objective simple, hire strong specialists, and give them space to decide how the work gets done. His writing argues that leaders should be generalists who understand enough of each discipline to help, without pretending to be the resident genius of all of them. He also kept the least glamorous rule from military life: do not ask someone to get cold, dirty or sleepless while you remain comfortably above the weather.

Learning every positionThe generalist takes the field

His corporate path looks like a practical test of that generalist idea. At Mercury Interactive, Schoenbaum worked in worldwide alliances and business development. At SeeRun, he led sales and marketing. From 2002 to 2006, he handled strategy and mergers and acquisitions at Compuware. Tripwire then put more of the machine within reach. He joined in 2006 and became chief operating officer of products. By 2010, the security company had filed an S-1. Accounts of his tenure credit him with helping triple revenue. Belden later bought Tripwire for $710 million.

This is where a tidy executive biography is tempted to become a procession of exits. That would miss the more useful pattern. The businesses changed, but the job kept expanding along the lifecycle of a product. Schoenbaum learned how it was built, how it was described, how partners carried it, how sales made it repeatable and how adjacent technology could be acquired. Chief executive roles at Redbooth and Cooladata gave him responsibility for the whole arrangement.

Redbooth also supplied the best prop in his career story. The collaboration company began as Teambox, a name that sounded too much like file storage for a product trying to organize communication and work. While Schoenbaum was considering a replacement, he moved into a house whose eccentric former owner had left a red British telephone booth in the basement. The object solved the naming problem. Redbooth had a visual memory, a communications cue and, crucially, available web addresses and trademarks.

Under the new name, the company pushed into enterprise collaboration, built integrations with familiar workplace tools and passed 900,000 registered users across more than 6,000 organizations. It was named a Gartner Cool Vendor and appeared on the Inc. 5000. In 2017, it merged with AeroFS. The red booth anecdote is amusing because brand strategy usually arrives in a deck, not a basement. It is instructive because Schoenbaum recognized what the product had become and found a name spacious enough to hold it.

The return to securityGrowth as connective tissue

In 2018, RiskIQ appointed Schoenbaum president and chief operating officer. He led sales, marketing and customer success for a company mapping the digital attack surface outside the traditional corporate perimeter. The role assembled the outward-facing parts of the business under one operator. Microsoft completed its acquisition of RiskIQ in August 2021. Schoenbaum later described that experience as a reason he had watched Axonius with interest: both companies made sprawling technology estates more visible, and both turned that visibility into action.

After RiskIQ came a set of roles that could look overlapping until viewed through the growth lens. He advised Panther's founders, then led marketing and business development as the cloud security company scaled. He spent four years at Team Cymru building go-to-market programs with Google, Microsoft, Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow. At Hive Pro, he served as chief marketing officer and head of technology partnerships, while appearing in live demonstrations and threat-research programming. Through High Tide Advisors, the firm he founded, he has coached cybersecurity companies on positioning, partnerships, sales and acquisition readiness.

The latest Axonius role pulls those threads tight. When Joe Diamond became chief executive in May, Schoenbaum reached out. He says they spent six months discussing the right role. What attracted him was the chance to combine go-to-market plays, technology partnerships and the channel. M&A sits in the mandate too, an unusual breadth that lets him consider whether an integration should become a joint offering, a channel service or something owned more directly.

“I realized, in my career, that growth is the thing that I love being in the middle of every day.”Dan Schoenbaum on joining Axonius

His criticism of conventional channel thinking is pointed. Companies often treat partners as remote sales capacity, useful for reaching accounts the vendor cannot cover itself. Schoenbaum argues for something closer. Pull partners in. Build a simple play that both sides can execute. Let the partner add services and build a broader customer relationship. One deal proves almost nothing; a motion that creates value repeatedly deserves to be called a partnership.

At Axonius, the raw material is unusually rich. The platform brings together asset and exposure data from across an organization's infrastructure. Schoenbaum notes that security leaders often cannot say how many assets they manage, and estimates can miss by an order of magnitude. Artificial intelligence adds new software, new infrastructure and new vulnerabilities faster than old inventories can settle. In his framing, visibility is the prerequisite. Partners can then use that shared picture to assess risk, support an acquisition, remediate problems or wrap other services around the platform.

What survives the title changesA simple play, seriously operated

Schoenbaum's public voice is energetic and direct, sometimes fond of capital letters, but the underlying ideas are restrained. Clear goals beat ornate instructions. Generalists should respect specialists. Meetings must move work forward. Leaders earn trust by joining the difficult work. Partners need a reason to invest, not just a place on a slide. Growth is less a burst of persuasion than a set of aligned behaviors repeated until the numbers notice.

Even his stories carry this structure. The impossible march becomes possible through training and mutual support. A confusing product category becomes legible through a red booth. A long list of integrations becomes useful through a joint customer play. The trick is not theatrical reinvention. It is finding the plain instruction hidden inside the complexity, then organizing people around it.