People Over Product: What Really Makes Cybersecurity Startups Succeed - Episode 66, Alison Eastaway, Push Security

In this episode of the Cyber Security Matters podcast, hosts Harry Baldwin and Matt Rose sit down with Alison Eastaway, VP of People and Culture at Push Security. Alison brings a refreshingly pragmatic perspective to the often-overlooked human infrastructure behind high-growth startups and shares why, in cybersecurity especially, the team really is everything.

Alison's career is anything but conventional. Having started working at 14 in Australia and bypassed a traditional university route, she's built her expertise through hands-on experience across telco, hospitality, advertising tech, HR tech, and now cybersecurity, including a formative stint at screen, which was later acquired by Datadog. Throughout the conversation, she shares hard-won insights on hiring for culture fit in remote-first organisations, navigating today's complicated talent market, and why the best thing a great candidate can do in a first interview is simply avoid scoring an own goal.

Key Topics:

• How Alison fell into cybersecurity and what drew her to the industry's pragmatic, low-BS culture
• Why she views her proudest professional achievement not as the Datadog acquisition, but as the Screen team group chat that still pings years later
• The "culture as a savings account" philosophy and why you need to invest before you need to draw on it
• The unique challenges of building and maintaining culture in fully remote or distributed teams
• The state of the talent market right now: why it's a buyer's market for employers, and what candidates can do to stand out amid AI-generated application noise
• Practical interview advice including why a first interview is really about not scoring an own goal
• How to handle having multiple offers on the table (and the smart question Alison always asks candidates first)
• What candidates switching from big companies to startups need to get right and the language mistakes that give them away
• Career advice for anyone looking to enter cybersecurity or move into a people and talent function

Guest Bio:

Alison Eastaway is a senior people and talent leader with extensive global experience across high-growth startups and scale-ups. She has led recruitment, people operations, and organisational development across Europe, the US and beyond, with leadership roles at companies including Poolside and screen the latter acquired by Datadog in 2021. Alison is currently VP of People and Culture at Push Security, where she leads global people strategy in support of long-term business growth.

About neuco:

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