Omri Erel Has Spent 19 Years Turning Startup Chaos Into a Growth System

On the internet, growth companies arrive pre-ironed. Their charts climb politely, their departments cooperate, and every important decision appears to have been made at a tasteful off-site with reliable Wi-Fi. Omri Erel has spent his career in the less photogenic version. It is the version where demand needs a definition, sales needs a useful lead, a new category needs a sentence, and the people building all three are learning at speed.

His route through software reads like a map of modern B2B marketing: WalkMe, Socialbakers, Transmit Security, Connecteam, AppsFlyer, and now Panorays. The logos change. So do the buyers, from teams adopting software to enterprises managing cyber exposure through third parties. The repeating assignment is to turn an ambitious product and an imperfect organization into a growth system that can be understood, measured, and repeated.

He was writing the manual while learning the machinery

In 2012, the same year he joined WalkMe, Erel started a project called SaaSAddict. The title has the sweet earnestness of an earlier web, when naming yourself after a software delivery model sounded more like curiosity than corporate positioning. He wrote about cloud migration, churn, customer behavior, market segmentation, and the architecture of SaaS. Later, Product2Market carried his work on positioning and onboarding. The subjects were not decorative. They sat on the seam between product and customer, exactly where a marketing operator eventually has to work.

At WalkMe, that curiosity acquired a pipeline. Erel moved through advertising and performance work into demand-generation leadership. A published executive biography credits him with helping create and build the marketing and sales-development departments. The detail matters because a department is more demanding than a campaign. It needs definitions, handoffs, hiring judgment, feedback loops, and the occasional peace treaty between a spreadsheet and a human being.

One WalkMe case study offered a glimpse of his preferred instrument panel. The company used predictive lead scoring to concentrate effort on higher-potential prospects and connect advertising decisions to sales outcomes. The point was not that an algorithm could sprinkle intelligence over a funnel. It was that marketing could become more precise about where attention belonged. Erel's career kept widening from that premise: measurement should change the next decision, not merely decorate the previous quarter.

“Your employees can be your biggest brand advocates.”Omri Erel, 2022

That line, posted while he was CMO of Connecteam, points to the other half of his operating view. Growth is not only traffic moving through stages. It is also a social system. People repeat what they believe, teams expose the promises that branding cannot keep, and culture eventually leaks into the customer experience. A marketer who ignores that machinery may still produce an attractive launch. It simply will not survive contact with Monday morning.

The title changed because the system got larger

After six years at WalkMe, Erel became Senior Vice President of Marketing at Socialbakers, the social-media marketing company later folded into Emplifi. Then came consecutive CMO roles at Transmit Security and Connecteam. Each move expanded the surface area. Performance marketing asks what acquired the prospect. Demand generation asks how interest becomes pipeline. The CMO seat asks whether product, story, market, team, and commercial motion can agree on reality for long enough to move together.

A peer who had worked with Erel during a pressured startup period described him as the person able to look across the system, find bottlenecks, and connect its human and business pieces. The observation is revealing. The scarce skill in a growth company is rarely another opinion about campaign colors. It is the ability to see which dependency is quietly governing the whole machine: a vague customer definition, a confused handoff, a team hired for yesterday's problem, or a promise the product cannot yet make elegantly.

The industry likes to describe this as alignment, a word so smooth it conceals the actual labor. Alignment means persuading people with different incentives to use the same nouns. It means deciding what a qualified opportunity is before announcing how many exist. It means giving creative work enough room to be memorable and enough discipline to be useful. It means noticing that a bottleneck can wear a technical costume while being, underneath, a question of trust.

Then, after 19 years, he left the next box blank

When Erel left Connecteam in 2023, he did not attach the customary announcement of a better title. He thanked colleagues and managers by name, called the experience an adventure, and wrote that he was taking a breather for the first time in 19 years. He also admitted he was not sure what came next. For an executive trained to produce forecasts, the refusal to manufacture certainty had its own charm. The calendar could survive a white space.

“For the first time in 19 years, I'm taking a breather.”Omri Erel, 2023

The pause led to AppsFlyer, where Erel became Vice President of Global Revenue Marketing. His explanation emphasized the product, but lingered on the people and culture: bright minds, warm hearts, and a place where creativity and strategy could intersect. That phrasing makes his selection criteria unusually legible. He was not merely shopping for a famous software company. He wanted an environment whose human operating system could support the commercial one.

“Revenue marketing” can sound like marketing after an accountant has frisked it. In practice, it names a useful demand: connect activity to business consequence. Erel's path had been heading there for years, from predictive scoring at WalkMe to the broader obligations of a CMO. The creative idea and the revenue model are not opposing camps in this view. They are colleagues who should probably speak before the launch meeting.

At Panorays, the product is confidence under suspicion

Erel joined Panorays as Chief Marketing Officer in October 2024. The company helps organizations manage third-party cyber risk: the sprawling exposure created when a business depends on vendors, and those vendors depend on more vendors. The category is a marketer's stern examination. Buyers are security professionals. Easy claims invite difficult questions. Fear gets attention but soon becomes exhausting. The durable story has to connect technical evidence, business context, remediation, and the practical ability to keep working with outside partners.

This is familiar territory in a new suit. Third-party risk management is another complicated system with imperfect handoffs, noisy data, and human judgment at the center. The marketer's task is to make invisible dependencies visible without pretending that visibility alone fixes them. Panorays describes a loop of assessment, monitoring, prioritization, and remediation. Erel's own operating arc has followed a similar rhythm: find the friction, give it a shared language, connect the responsible teams, and make the next action easier to see.

At InfoSec 2026, Panorays put him on stage to discuss AI trends and the balance between innovation, governance, and security. It is a particularly current version of an old growth problem. Companies want the speed before they fully understand the dependency. AI tools arrive through official procurement, enthusiastic employees, embedded vendor features, and shadow systems. The opportunity is obvious. The supply chain beneath it is less courteous.

Erel's public profile presents him as a marketing leader, speaker, and advisor. That combination makes sense. Operators build a model in one company; advisors test whether it travels; speakers discover whether it can survive a sentence. The useful ideas become simpler without becoming simplistic. The weak ones enjoy a brief life in a slide deck and are never seen again.

Growth is a people problem wearing a data badge

The distinguishing detail in Erel's story is not a single exit, campaign, or metric. It is recurrence. Again and again, he has entered software businesses where the category must be explained while the commercial system is still being built. He writes about the mechanism. He talks about the people. He measures the consequence. Then the title broadens and the problem becomes more intricate.

That recurrence also explains the streak of play in his public voice. He writes warm farewells, jokes about events, and joined Panorays colleagues for an early Black Hat basketball game that supported the Women's Society of Cyberjutsu. Professional seriousness does not require the emotional palette of a server rack. In fact, the people asked to navigate uncertainty may benefit from a leader who remembers that work can contain affection, humor, and a decent jump shot.

The polished startup will always have its uses. Customers need confidence, recruits need a story, and investors prefer their graphs facing northeast. But Erel's career makes a case for respecting the workshop behind the showroom. Growth happens there, among the rough edges: in the naming of a bottleneck, the rebuilding of a handoff, the moment a team recognizes itself in the strategy, and the decision to leave one calendar square empty until a better answer arrives.

Now the workshop is cybersecurity, and the disorder belongs partly to everyone else: suppliers, software dependencies, AI services, and the vendors behind the vendors. It is an apt next chapter for someone who has spent years translating systems that look orderly only from a distance. The job is still to turn complexity into motion. The stakes have acquired sharper teeth.