18 ms·

Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

245 points by uger 2y ago

jmsflknr 2y ago
Originally covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042004
- urnotdang 2y ago
  [flagged]
worthless-trash 2y ago
This is great news ! I use wiz for my home lighting and automation, I'm so glad that google did not buy it due to its habit of killing things that I find useful. I want my hardware to last longer than the current decision makers employment. Edit: hah, the site becomes available AFTER i submit so now I can read it.
- CaveTech 2y ago
  This is not the same Wiz.
  - samspenc 2y ago
    Didn't realize there was a WiZ that specializes in home lighting https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us Per their About Us page, they are an "IoT platform for smart lighting solutions and smart services" and "offer people connected lighting".
    - Marsymars 2y ago
      That's actually the only "wiz" I was familiar with in the tech space. They're Philip Hue's budget line for the past 5 years and they've got various partner brands (most the notably Walmart house brand) that use their smart platform.
- rando_person_1 2y ago
  How are you using a cyber security platform for home lighting/automation?
- HaZeust 2y ago
  This is wiz.io BUT I appreciate the enthusiasm
immortal3 2y ago
After the acquisition, I think Wiz would have to only focus on Google Cloud which might be a major limiting factor in the company's future. But other than that, It surprises me that, a $23B offer is rejected from the perspective of Employees. IPO won't provide the same level of liquidity opportunities. I have used Octa and it's a decent platform, not a magical one. Creating a similar platform for Google Cloud should be feasible with the level of Google resources.
- dmitrygr 2y ago
  > It surprises me that, a $23B offer is rejected from the perspective of Employees HA! Who asked them? I've never seen a startup ask the employees whether to take an acquisition offer.
  - satvikpendem 2y ago
    Yep. I'm pretty sure just the C suite made this decision unilaterally.
    - mlyle 2y ago
      The board makes the decision, but needs management to make things work either way, so management has a pretty big voice, too.
- cen4 2y ago
  Cause their founders are already Billionaires. Can you imagine Billionaires reporting to the average corporate robot at large corp?
  - ergocoder 2y ago
    Which founder is a billionaire? What is their net worth?
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
ds 2y ago
Far more likely is Google was not willing to complete the deal and was pulling the plug after looking at internal data. Wiz, fearing the bad press of Google backing out rushes to tell journalists that THEY are walking away because they are worth more. Wiz's valuation is insane. Most people havent even heard of them. I think it was a > 60x ARR multiple on this deal. Id actually be kinda pissed if I was a google shareholder and they went through with it. Something very strange is going on with Wiz. My gut tells me if they ever IPO to go big on puts.
- danpalmer 2y ago
  While I don't have any comment on this instance, in general I think it's easier to hype the public markets who have limited information than it is to type a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition, even if ultimately the latter is still a case of public market valuation through the acquiring public company. This is particularly true in the current age of extremely hype driven retail investing.
  - generic92034 2y ago
    > a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition I bet those people rarely get promoted for preventing an acquisition, though. Probably that is why we see so many crazy acquisitions, in general.
    - danpalmer 2y ago
      At the SVP level, sure, but at the IC level, I doubt any accountant gets promoted for saying "looks fine", whereas highlighting details that superiors can use to make a decision like this might be something that gets you promoted. This is a misunderstanding I think many non-googlers have, thinking people only get promoted for launches (or in this case acquisitions). It's more nuanced than that: people get promoted for impact and while launches are one obvious form, you can sell pretty much anything useful as impact if you can show how it's useful. In the case of M&A, avoiding a bad acquisition, if you can justify it, would be impact.
mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
Sometimes it's not about the money, it's actually about systems security and the level of which you actually want to build, deploy, and protect great products and infrastructure. 23 billion is a LOT of money. Looking forward to see how the IPO plays out.
- chii 2y ago
  > Sometimes it's not about the money it's always about the money.
  - mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
    Yeah now that I think about it I realize how many times I've said that to people.
  - blitzar 2y ago
    Whenever somebody says to you "it's not about the money" or "i'm not doing this for the money" It's (entirely) about the money.
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    Well, Wiz's founders reportedly made $10-$30 million each on the Adallom sale. It might be about the money but it's not like they need it.
    - linearrust 2y ago
      > it's not like they need it. The love of money isn't driven by need. It's driven by want.
    - chii 2y ago
      > it's not like they need it. you dont know that. when you start getting high networth, you end up comparing yourself to the _even higher_ networth people.
- deleted 2y ago
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justahuman74 2y ago
Can they just buy all the shares on the open market then?
- djbusby 2y ago
  That won't be all the shares of the company, just a lot of them. And doesn't give you the control like an acquisition would.
- blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
  If you mean before the IPO, it depends on the stock plan of the company. They may have clauses that prevent trading on secondary markets. I don’t think this is fair to employees personally, but it is the norm for companies to have various abusive forms of control over the options they grant employees.
- refurb 2y ago
  Once it IPOs? Wiz might not mind at that point. But if they did mind, it would be a hostile takeover. The way Wiz can prevent it is by approaching their largest shareholders and asking them to help prevent it.
- runevault 2y ago
  Depends on what % of the company is put on the market. Could Google buy every available share if they are willing to spend enough money? Sure. But if there are not enough shares on the market to give them a controlling interest they still can't hostile takeover that way.
- creer 2y ago
  Relatively few shares will be on the open market. If these few shares are sought after (bought by Google), the price will go way higher as more shares are bought out by Google. It's possible to mount actions where things are kept "quiet" and "hard to notice" (See Hermes vs LVMH a few years ago in France) - but even then it can fail (it did). Overall no, you can't buy the whole company at anywhere close to the stock market "market cap". It "works" when the acquirer gets control (enough shares to eventually vote out the current board leadership.) What sometimes does work is to make a formal offer to buy all the shares that are presented, at some price quite a bit higher than the current market price. Sometimes that works. Occasionally that works for very little above the current market price.
Centigonal 2y ago
Founded in 2020, with a $23B valuation, aiming for $1B ARR? CloudFlare is worth $26B and had ~$1.3B revenue last year. Something's fishy here.
- oceanplexian 2y ago
  Look at their financials, CloudFlare might be popular among the HN crowd but the stock is massively overvalued. At the end of the day they are a commodity CDN that somehow can’t run a profitable business.
  - ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
    And now with their bad hiring practices and shady business deals they might not be popular among HN crowd for long too.
  - jppope 2y ago
    Yeah nah... they have great products and their primary business is allowing them to enter markets where other companies can't compete. The valuation is based on potential not the business as it stands today. And to your point they are popular with the HN crowd which is usually a strong indicator.
    - deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
  - foolswisdom 2y ago
    I think GP's point is that wiz's valuation makes even less sense.
  - dilyevsky 2y ago
    I did look at their financials - 77% gross margin with 30% revenue growth. Much higher than “commodity cdn” can command. If they cut marketing and r&d they’d be bagging half a b a year in profit but they are investing in growth as they should because it’s working
flynapse 2y ago
Major respect. I can only wonder what it feels like to possess that intense confidence. The appeal of 'a bird in hand' would almost certainly overwhelm most of us.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
jimt1234 2y ago
Why settle for a measly $23B, when a successful IPO will get them 10x that?
- 0x500x79 2y ago
  There are a lot more factors that they will be subject to in an IPO that I think they could have avoided through this deal. IPOs/Stock market has not been kind to companies that do not have great margins and the current rumor mill has Wiz spending quite a lot in infrastructure costs to power their platform (a lot of it is built on Neptune and snapshot data transfer/processing is costly). At the end of the day there were a lot of employees up and down the organizational chart that would have been very happy with this deal. So I wish that we could see the inner workings of what went wrong. The constant rumor mill around Wiz keeps turning, and one starts to ask if there are nefarious actions at play.
shrubble 2y ago
Could it be cold feet or fallout from the Crowdstrike debacle?
walterbell 2y ago
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc > [Cyberstarts] has a portfolio of only 22 companies whose combined value is $35 billion. Five of these companies are unicorns, first and foremost Wiz, which seems to be breaking all the rules of growth and success and setting new standards in the industry.. In all three of his funds, Ra'anan shows an internal rate of return of more than 100%, an unusual figure even for the best funds in the world.. The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund.. The whole CISO advisory committee issue has gotten out of hand for corporate America. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjpwti2dr https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjpwti2dr > Wiz announced two months ago that it had raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total funding to $1.9 billion.
- leereeves 2y ago
  The first link alleges that Cyberstarts pays kickbacks to CISOs who buy their products. Is that legal?
  - windexh8er 2y ago
    It's definitely not uncommon. Illegal? Should be, the question is how they got paid and for what. There are so many C-level shills these days, it's sickening.
    - lmeyerov 2y ago
      Everything is securities fraud, so a payola consortium pumping Wiz through funding rounds sounds bad. Wiz is great, so the question is if they are > $23B great, and how they got there. And more so, why would a gov prosecutor bet on this case over others, or a private investor who has shares & reputation at risk. OTOH, maybe The Honest Services Statute where CISOs violate their fiduciary duty by prioritizing security/risk budget & focus to a VC paying them. I don't see most impacted companies making this public vs a warning or voluntary resignation. It clearly happens a lot, but the only successful prosecution I remember was at Netflix: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executive-sentenced-30-months-bribes-and-kickbacks-netflix-vendors https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv... . A funny thing is the VC is doing all this semi-officially: many but not all of the illegal bits go away - the gov has less to prosecute on when everyone files their taxes accurately !
mupuff1234 2y ago
From the start this seemed more like a PR move from Wiz than a real offer.
blindriver 2y ago
Lots of companies have regretted passing up on an acquisition, especially one this large and of a company this young. My bet would be that this company is making the same mistake as Yahoo, Groupon, etc.
- mirzap 2y ago
  A lot of them didn't, ie, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix, Snapchat. I wonder if this rejection is related to the CrowdStrike incident. Are they expecting or already experiencing a significant influx of new clients? I'm unsure if their services overlap, just curious.
  - joedwin 2y ago
    tbh, Google itself rejected the acquisition.
    - stairlane 2y ago
      How do you know?
  - rapsey 2y ago
    Snapchat is still not profitable and doing very poorly in the public market.
    - zaguios 2y ago
      The offer was for $3 billion. They are worth $24 billion today… In absolutely no world would have taking that offer been the right decision.
nothrowaways 2y ago
23B is a staggering number for a 4 year old cyber security startup with 900 employees
- onion2k 2y ago
  As with most things in tech, time served is pretty much irrelevant. If you do something valuable fast you can build a lot of value quickly.
  - 4gotunameagain 2y ago
    You can build a lot of perceived value, as we've learned from so many acquisitions becoming hot potatoes a few years down the run.
- llm_trw 2y ago
  That's 800 employees too much. The reason why tech sucks these days is because everyone over hires and empire builds.
  - qeternity 2y ago
    Sales. They have huge ARR after a few short years because it’s a sales org with a few engineers scattered about.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      So not a tech company. Fair enough.
      - PartiallyTyped 2y ago
        Are cloudflare, azure, and AWS not tech companies?
  - sofixa 2y ago
    Too much to build the product, but you need researchers (check out their blog), marketing, sales, solutions engineers, support, legal, accountants, etc.
warbaker 2y ago
and nobody beats them!
ssl-3 2y ago
I feel like I am uninformed. Can someone provide some background? Who in the fuck is Wiz, and why in the fuck might anyone think that they're worth 11 figures?
- SJC_Hacker 2y ago
  I've been waiting for the Silly Valley insanity to stop for about the past 15 years, but its like its been permanently stuck in 1999 mode. With a few brief hiccups like Juicera and Theranos. I guess VCs just don't have anything better to do with their money, than throw it at a wall of shit and see what sticks
  - boguscoder 2y ago
    Im afraid its been 25 not 15 years since 1999 ;(
    - ncruces 2y ago
      Whoosh… that's the entire point you missed right there.
      - blobbers 2y ago
        … what was the point? I missed it too!? VCs returns looking like power law investment in the back end / mud on wall in the front end of a fund? Or that the author has been waiting for VC investment to stop? I don’t understand what he’s trying to suggest.
        ncruces 2y ago
        The dot-com bubble? Which ballooned in the late 90s, then burst, with investment not returning to 1999 levels for about a decade (also thanks to the 2008 financial crisis). Their point is that we've been stuck in 1999 for 15 years, and not the decade before that. Disagree all you want, but “it's been 25 years since 1999, you fail at math” makes no sense as a rebuttal.
xyst 2y ago
[flagged]
resist_futility 2y ago
>Wiz’s founders previously built security startup Adallom, raised money from Sequoia and Index and sold the startup to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015. Copy, Paste and ask for 70 times more?
- krembo 2y ago
  Totally different business, problem and solution. You should read abit before commenting like that.
temporalparts 2y ago
I think there's some behind the scenes drama. It takes a LOT of time and investment from both sides to build up to a $23B offer. I wonder if there was something some Alphabet exec did to piss off the founders. Or Wiz was stringing Alphabet along to hype up the IPO.
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
olalonde 2y ago
> The company hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after 18 months That's fast... Is that 18 months after launch or literally 18 months after starting development?
- mylastattempt 2y ago
  Your quote from the article, is a link to another article, which provides the answer: > The cybersecurity software vendor said in August that it reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue after selling its product for just a year and a half. So that's 18 months after formal launch. Since we don't have their financial statements, you can only guess wether this is the value of signed deals or a review of actual recognized revenue for those 18 months. I suspect the first.
globular-toast 2y ago
Why would Google even consider this? They're an advertising company and haven't really made any money from anything but advertising. What would they do with this?
- animuchan 2y ago
  I suppose they'd add this to the GCP family of products, same as Apigee.
- krisgenre 2y ago
  Maybe this was about advertising after all ;). I now know there is a company named Wiz.
- KoftaBob 2y ago
  The proportion of their revenue that comes from segments other than advertising is growing. I would imagine like most companies, Google/Alphabet wants to diversify their source of revenue/profit over time. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-googles-revenues-by-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
- sebastiennight 2y ago
  Adding a cloud security offering to your existing "cloud infrastructure" suite makes sense. Buying a strategic complement where you can multiply the company's ARR overnight by integrating with your own suite makes sense. Or commoditizing this complement by offering it for free as a differentiator to competitors (Azure, AWS) would also make sense. Plenty of options to choose from.
newusertoday 2y ago
sometimes it works snapchat rejecting facebook offere which is worth more now, sometimes it doesn't groupon rejecting googles offer.
KoftaBob 2y ago
Fun fact: > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all of whom previously founded Adallom > Adallom was founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, who are former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)
- johnpython 2y ago
  [flagged]
  - golemiprague 2y ago
    [dead]
  - yoavm 2y ago
    what is American about them?
- xenospn 2y ago
  8200 veterans are highly sought after, and you can probably get a blank check from any VC if you have that on your resume.
thegrizzlyking 2y ago
Most likely reason is FTC. Wiz integrates with big 4 cloud providers. No way FTC is allowing Google to take control. JD Vance's nomination and support for current FTC chair(Lina Khan) doesn't help. Current FTC is good(personal opinion) from anti trust point of view but maybe bad for startup exits[0]. [0] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1812978264484552987 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1812978264484552987
- titanomachy 2y ago
  If they’re actually worth anything near $23B they can just go public. I’m sure they’ll be fine haha
- neurotixz 2y ago
  Wiz has tons of competitors, and Microsoft is one of them, so are Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Crowstrike, SentinelOne, etc... Wiz is definately a leader but are in no way a monopoly, so I do not see this as an FTC play to stop the deal.
  - disgruntledphd2 2y ago
    I think the antitrust argument is more about preventing Big tech from getting even bigger rather than directly related to Wiz.
shmatt 2y ago
I have to take the other side than most comments here. Most of the coverage about the Wiz offer called out that this was an odd way for them to end up in - as the founders openly talked about waiting for that $1b ARR since almost day one To me it feels like Google was trying to put pressure on employees and any other non board option holders. There were dozens of articles and analysis of exactly bow many new millionaires / billionaires will be minted after the sale in Israel
- sofixa 2y ago
  > that this was an odd way for them to end up in - as the founders openly talked about waiting for that $1b ARR since almost day That doesn't mean much. I've worked at a company that kept taking about "our goal is to reach magic number X" and etc. until one they announce a sale. Situations change, business plans evolve, and money talks.
daghamm 2y ago
Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? It's not like Google is after they client list, they would probably limit them to Google services after acquisition anyway.
- taspeotis 2y ago
  > Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? I assume you meant to say billions, since this is a $23B offer they turned down. If I had to positive spin on the valuation: it's chump change if Wiz (who seem to be a very capable cybersecurity firm) are able to integrate themselves deeply into Google's infrastructure and secure it up the wazoo, since a 5% cost to Google's share price for reputational damage caused by GCP getting r00ted would be ... 5% of Google's 2.25T market cap ... $112.5B. cf. Crowdstrike's share price after some bad news: they are down 30% over the last five days.
  - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
    > cf. Crowdstrike's share price after some bad news: they are down 30% over the last five days. The stock is recovering. Traders have short memory. By the end of the year, it'll probably be $400 unless there's a huge class action against them that starts looking really bad for them.
    - taspeotis 2y ago
      I had a quick look and it seems to have recovered nominally today - 2% at most. If you look at the 5D and 30D view it seems to have taken a beating and is now flat.
      - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
        Yeah, I think the slight uptick was people believing it will make a full recovery and buying the stock since it's on a heavy discount.
kats 2y ago
Good for Google.
daghamm 2y ago
For those of you who - like me 30 minutes ago - have no idea what Wiz does and what CNAPP is: https://pulse.latio.tech/p/wtf-is-cnapp https://pulse.latio.tech/p/wtf-is-cnapp
- e12e 2y ago
  Thank you. I think that deserves a submission by itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049942
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
anon5278525283 2y ago
Today's (relevant) SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/investment-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/investment-2
drumhead 2y ago
This is positive for Google. Spending $23bn on a company of that size was insane. Shareholders are probably relieved.
- jsiepkes 2y ago
  > Shareholders are probably relieved. Don't think so. Google has a relatively good track record for acquisitions. So I don't think they were really worried.
  - hello_moto 2y ago
    Google today isn't what Google used to be
Kostchei 2y ago
As a user of Wiz (and I like what I get from them) ,I am relieved . 1. huge valuations are bad for customers- that investor cash has to come back from somewhere 2. Google has a habit of subsuming products into their stack and either sunsetting them or holding them so close that nobody uses them (beyondcorp etc) *spelling
mihaic 2y ago
Over a certain threshold, all software companies seem to degenerate into sales companies. Honestly, I'm just mildly shocked of the $23B valuation for a product that I'd expect to have taken waaay less than 1% of that in dev costs. What I'm more shocked is that Google decided they can't build the same thing themselves. Maybe I don't understand the complexity of the product?
- llm_trw 2y ago
  >What I'm more shocked is that Google decided they can't build the same thing themselves. Faang is where amazing engineers go to produce nothing of value.
  - Ygg2 2y ago
    Hey, some of that non-value is actually negative! See ads.
  - Ragnarork 2y ago
    I disagree, a lot of value is created at FAANG by those amazing engineers. It's the free and open source tools and frameworks, though.
    - llm_trw 2y ago
      A lot of value is also created by drug dealing giving out free hits, or Microsoft giving free windows licenses to universities back in the day.
- dinobones 2y ago
  Apparently they’re used by 40% of the Fortune 100. At a generous 20xARR valuation this is still 1b ARR. 1 billion / 40 = annual revenue of $25M from each contract. Hwat. Help it make sense.
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    They probably have customers outside Fortune 100.
trhway 2y ago
Israel's GDP is $500B+ . So Google's offer would bring 4%+ of one year's GDP into Israel. And these guys refused it. One can wonder what the government would think here :)
- underdeserver 2y ago
  Thankfully, Israel is a free country and the government can't force you to sell.
  - trhway 2y ago
    Not necessarily force. Government can do a lot toward either direction - facilitating or blocking a deal. And when somebody comes with a boatload of money noticeable on the scale of your GDP, the government would hardly stay neutral. Just look at all the circus around Foxconn in Wisconsin for example and that is much smaller scale wrt. US GDP.
    - underdeserver 2y ago
      Well, seems they did stay neutral. To be fair the Israeli government is somewhat preoccupied right now.
  - dunekid 2y ago
    >Thankfully, Israel is a free country and the government can't force you to sell Not so sure about the force per se, but NSO group has been pretty much a bargaining chip in securing the support for the State from autocratic nations around the globe.
- qeternity 2y ago
  Most of the shareholders are not in Israel.
  - trhway 2y ago
    You seem to be half-way right. Wiz took 1.9B total. The last 1B was on $12B valuation and the previous rounds, except series A where i don't see data, were also under 10%. So, yes, the investors probably own about a half.
jwally 2y ago
> saying no to such humbling offers is tough Minor pet peeve: misuse of the word "humbling". A $23B offer is not humbling (on my planet at least). Humbling would be turning this offer down and then failing to get enough interest to generate an ipo.
- n4r9 2y ago
  You might be right. On the other hand, Rappaport might be humbled thinking about how fortunate circumstances and others' hard work has led to this offer. He could be thinking "gosh, I do not feel I deserve that".
- guywithahat 2y ago
  I was confused when I read that. 23B is a ginormous number, especially considering the CEO's previous exist. 23B is a flattering number, it's not humbling
glandium 2y ago
I was like "how the f* is a website builder possibly worth $23B" and then I realized Wiz is not Wix. And then I realized Wix has a market capitalization of $9B, and I'm still WTF.
- nikanj 2y ago
  Wix has over $1.5B annual recurring revenue, so a market cap of $9B makes sense. You and I might not use them, but it is a real business, not just a hype bubble.
  - rurban 2y ago
    My non-IT wife is using wix for her homepage. She loves it, I never heard of it before. 9B sounds okish. But wiz? There are reading like Mossad/Unit 8200. And who wants to have them in their backend? Worse than Cloudstrike, which sounds like CIA to me.
    - xenospn 2y ago
      Sounds like a lot of people do.
    - underdeserver 2y ago
      Almost every real cybersecurity company in the world has ex-Unit 8200 / Mossad employees. As well as ex-NSA and other intelligence agencies. You gotta know what you're up against to defend properly.
- gnrlst 2y ago
  Thought the same until I saw your comment. For those in the same boat: Wiz, Inc. is a cloud security startup.
- krembo 2y ago
  Fun fact: both founded by Israelis and have their R&D centers in the country.
  - deleted 2y ago
physicsguy 2y ago
Wonder if it got downvalued during due-dilligence...
DrScientist 2y ago
I feel like there is an opportunity for a startup that protects you from the risks associated with your security vendors :-)
tzury 2y ago
A screenshot of the internal mail https://x.com/mikeeisenberg/status/1815644472945819788?s=46 https://x.com/mikeeisenberg/status/1815644472945819788?s=46
heraldgeezer 2y ago
[flagged]
prng2021 2y ago
Lina Khan is our modern day superhero. She may be losing most of her lawsuits against big tech, but she has clearly struck fear in stakeholders on both sides of every tech acquisition.
RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago
I am not quite sure I understand what was in it for Google. Google already has a world class security team, maybe one of the best in software. What would they gain by this acquisition? 23 Billion is enough to pay 2000 engineers 1 million USD TC for more than 10 years.
llmblockchain 2y ago
How much value do companies get out of these "enterprise security" companies? I've always thought they were the modern equivalent to commercial virus scanners that come with Windows.
- scient 2y ago
  A lot. Quite different in technology as well. None of these new tools really work just off of signatures.
- jazzyjackson 2y ago
  With incoming CMMC requirements to do business with DoD, being able to write a check to be in compliance with regulation is life or death for government contractors.
arjvik 2y ago
Just leaving this here: https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
yjkk 2y ago
[dead]

245 points by uger 2y ago

jmsflknr 2y ago

Originally covered here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042004 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41042004

urnotdang 2y ago
[flagged]

worthless-trash 2y ago

This is great news ! I use wiz for my home lighting and automation, I'm so glad that google did not buy it due to its habit of killing things that I find useful. I want my hardware to last longer than the current decision makers employment. Edit: hah, the site becomes available AFTER i submit so now I can read it.

CaveTech 2y ago
This is not the same Wiz.
- samspenc 2y ago
  Didn't realize there was a WiZ that specializes in home lighting https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us https://www.wizconnected.com/en-us Per their About Us page, they are an "IoT platform for smart lighting solutions and smart services" and "offer people connected lighting".
  - Marsymars 2y ago
    That's actually the only "wiz" I was familiar with in the tech space. They're Philip Hue's budget line for the past 5 years and they've got various partner brands (most the notably Walmart house brand) that use their smart platform.
rando_person_1 2y ago
How are you using a cyber security platform for home lighting/automation?
HaZeust 2y ago
This is wiz.io BUT I appreciate the enthusiasm

immortal3 2y ago

After the acquisition, I think Wiz would have to only focus on Google Cloud which might be a major limiting factor in the company's future. But other than that, It surprises me that, a $23B offer is rejected from the perspective of Employees. IPO won't provide the same level of liquidity opportunities. I have used Octa and it's a decent platform, not a magical one. Creating a similar platform for Google Cloud should be feasible with the level of Google resources.

dmitrygr 2y ago
> It surprises me that, a $23B offer is rejected from the perspective of Employees HA! Who asked them? I've never seen a startup ask the employees whether to take an acquisition offer.
- satvikpendem 2y ago
  Yep. I'm pretty sure just the C suite made this decision unilaterally.
  - mlyle 2y ago
    The board makes the decision, but needs management to make things work either way, so management has a pretty big voice, too.
cen4 2y ago
Cause their founders are already Billionaires. Can you imagine Billionaires reporting to the average corporate robot at large corp?
- ergocoder 2y ago
  Which founder is a billionaire? What is their net worth?
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]

ds 2y ago

Far more likely is Google was not willing to complete the deal and was pulling the plug after looking at internal data. Wiz, fearing the bad press of Google backing out rushes to tell journalists that THEY are walking away because they are worth more. Wiz's valuation is insane. Most people havent even heard of them. I think it was a > 60x ARR multiple on this deal. Id actually be kinda pissed if I was a google shareholder and they went through with it. Something very strange is going on with Wiz. My gut tells me if they ever IPO to go big on puts.

danpalmer 2y ago
While I don't have any comment on this instance, in general I think it's easier to hype the public markets who have limited information than it is to type a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition, even if ultimately the latter is still a case of public market valuation through the acquiring public company. This is particularly true in the current age of extremely hype driven retail investing.
- generic92034 2y ago
  > a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition I bet those people rarely get promoted for preventing an acquisition, though. Probably that is why we see so many crazy acquisitions, in general.
  - danpalmer 2y ago
    At the SVP level, sure, but at the IC level, I doubt any accountant gets promoted for saying "looks fine", whereas highlighting details that superiors can use to make a decision like this might be something that gets you promoted. This is a misunderstanding I think many non-googlers have, thinking people only get promoted for launches (or in this case acquisitions). It's more nuanced than that: people get promoted for impact and while launches are one obvious form, you can sell pretty much anything useful as impact if you can show how it's useful. In the case of M&A, avoiding a bad acquisition, if you can justify it, would be impact.

mrinfinitiesx 2y ago

Sometimes it's not about the money, it's actually about systems security and the level of which you actually want to build, deploy, and protect great products and infrastructure. 23 billion is a LOT of money. Looking forward to see how the IPO plays out.

chii 2y ago
> Sometimes it's not about the money it's always about the money.
- mrinfinitiesx 2y ago
  Yeah now that I think about it I realize how many times I've said that to people.
- blitzar 2y ago
  Whenever somebody says to you "it's not about the money" or "i'm not doing this for the money" It's (entirely) about the money.
- underdeserver 2y ago
  Well, Wiz's founders reportedly made $10-$30 million each on the Adallom sale. It might be about the money but it's not like they need it.
  - linearrust 2y ago
    > it's not like they need it. The love of money isn't driven by need. It's driven by want.
  - chii 2y ago
    > it's not like they need it. you dont know that. when you start getting high networth, you end up comparing yourself to the _even higher_ networth people.
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justahuman74 2y ago

Can they just buy all the shares on the open market then?

djbusby 2y ago
That won't be all the shares of the company, just a lot of them. And doesn't give you the control like an acquisition would.
blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
If you mean before the IPO, it depends on the stock plan of the company. They may have clauses that prevent trading on secondary markets. I don’t think this is fair to employees personally, but it is the norm for companies to have various abusive forms of control over the options they grant employees.
refurb 2y ago
Once it IPOs? Wiz might not mind at that point. But if they did mind, it would be a hostile takeover. The way Wiz can prevent it is by approaching their largest shareholders and asking them to help prevent it.
runevault 2y ago
Depends on what % of the company is put on the market. Could Google buy every available share if they are willing to spend enough money? Sure. But if there are not enough shares on the market to give them a controlling interest they still can't hostile takeover that way.
creer 2y ago
Relatively few shares will be on the open market. If these few shares are sought after (bought by Google), the price will go way higher as more shares are bought out by Google. It's possible to mount actions where things are kept "quiet" and "hard to notice" (See Hermes vs LVMH a few years ago in France) - but even then it can fail (it did). Overall no, you can't buy the whole company at anywhere close to the stock market "market cap". It "works" when the acquirer gets control (enough shares to eventually vote out the current board leadership.) What sometimes does work is to make a formal offer to buy all the shares that are presented, at some price quite a bit higher than the current market price. Sometimes that works. Occasionally that works for very little above the current market price.

Centigonal 2y ago

Founded in 2020, with a $23B valuation, aiming for $1B ARR? CloudFlare is worth $26B and had ~$1.3B revenue last year. Something's fishy here.

oceanplexian 2y ago
Look at their financials, CloudFlare might be popular among the HN crowd but the stock is massively overvalued. At the end of the day they are a commodity CDN that somehow can’t run a profitable business.
- ilrwbwrkhv 2y ago
  And now with their bad hiring practices and shady business deals they might not be popular among HN crowd for long too.
- jppope 2y ago
  Yeah nah... they have great products and their primary business is allowing them to enter markets where other companies can't compete. The valuation is based on potential not the business as it stands today. And to your point they are popular with the HN crowd which is usually a strong indicator.
  - deleted 2y ago
    [deleted]
- foolswisdom 2y ago
  I think GP's point is that wiz's valuation makes even less sense.
- dilyevsky 2y ago
  I did look at their financials - 77% gross margin with 30% revenue growth. Much higher than “commodity cdn” can command. If they cut marketing and r&d they’d be bagging half a b a year in profit but they are investing in growth as they should because it’s working

flynapse 2y ago

Major respect. I can only wonder what it feels like to possess that intense confidence. The appeal of 'a bird in hand' would almost certainly overwhelm most of us.

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jimt1234 2y ago

Why settle for a measly $23B, when a successful IPO will get them 10x that?

0x500x79 2y ago
There are a lot more factors that they will be subject to in an IPO that I think they could have avoided through this deal. IPOs/Stock market has not been kind to companies that do not have great margins and the current rumor mill has Wiz spending quite a lot in infrastructure costs to power their platform (a lot of it is built on Neptune and snapshot data transfer/processing is costly). At the end of the day there were a lot of employees up and down the organizational chart that would have been very happy with this deal. So I wish that we could see the inner workings of what went wrong. The constant rumor mill around Wiz keeps turning, and one starts to ask if there are nefarious actions at play.

shrubble 2y ago

Could it be cold feet or fallout from the Crowdstrike debacle?

walterbell 2y ago

https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc > [Cyberstarts] has a portfolio of only 22 companies whose combined value is $35 billion. Five of these companies are unicorns, first and foremost Wiz, which seems to be breaking all the rules of growth and success and setting new standards in the industry.. In all three of his funds, Ra'anan shows an internal rate of return of more than 100%, an unusual figure even for the best funds in the world.. The first sales come from the loyal CISOs who work with the fund.. The whole CISO advisory committee issue has gotten out of hand for corporate America. https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjpwti2dr https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjpwti2dr > Wiz announced two months ago that it had raised $1 billion at a $12 billion valuation, bringing the company’s total funding to $1.9 billion.

leereeves 2y ago
The first link alleges that Cyberstarts pays kickbacks to CISOs who buy their products. Is that legal?
- windexh8er 2y ago
  It's definitely not uncommon. Illegal? Should be, the question is how they got paid and for what. There are so many C-level shills these days, it's sickening.
  - lmeyerov 2y ago
    Everything is securities fraud, so a payola consortium pumping Wiz through funding rounds sounds bad. Wiz is great, so the question is if they are > $23B great, and how they got there. And more so, why would a gov prosecutor bet on this case over others, or a private investor who has shares & reputation at risk. OTOH, maybe The Honest Services Statute where CISOs violate their fiduciary duty by prioritizing security/risk budget & focus to a VC paying them. I don't see most impacted companies making this public vs a warning or voluntary resignation. It clearly happens a lot, but the only successful prosecution I remember was at Netflix: https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executive-sentenced-30-months-bribes-and-kickbacks-netflix-vendors https://www.justice.gov/usao-ndca/pr/former-netflix-executiv... . A funny thing is the VC is doing all this semi-officially: many but not all of the illegal bits go away - the gov has less to prosecute on when everyone files their taxes accurately !

mupuff1234 2y ago

From the start this seemed more like a PR move from Wiz than a real offer.

blindriver 2y ago

Lots of companies have regretted passing up on an acquisition, especially one this large and of a company this young. My bet would be that this company is making the same mistake as Yahoo, Groupon, etc.

mirzap 2y ago
A lot of them didn't, ie, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix, Snapchat. I wonder if this rejection is related to the CrowdStrike incident. Are they expecting or already experiencing a significant influx of new clients? I'm unsure if their services overlap, just curious.
- joedwin 2y ago
  tbh, Google itself rejected the acquisition.
  - stairlane 2y ago
    How do you know?
- rapsey 2y ago
  Snapchat is still not profitable and doing very poorly in the public market.
  - zaguios 2y ago
    The offer was for $3 billion. They are worth $24 billion today… In absolutely no world would have taking that offer been the right decision.

nothrowaways 2y ago

23B is a staggering number for a 4 year old cyber security startup with 900 employees

onion2k 2y ago
As with most things in tech, time served is pretty much irrelevant. If you do something valuable fast you can build a lot of value quickly.
- 4gotunameagain 2y ago
  You can build a lot of perceived value, as we've learned from so many acquisitions becoming hot potatoes a few years down the run.
llm_trw 2y ago
That's 800 employees too much. The reason why tech sucks these days is because everyone over hires and empire builds.
- qeternity 2y ago
  Sales. They have huge ARR after a few short years because it’s a sales org with a few engineers scattered about.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    So not a tech company. Fair enough.
    - PartiallyTyped 2y ago
      Are cloudflare, azure, and AWS not tech companies?
- sofixa 2y ago
  Too much to build the product, but you need researchers (check out their blog), marketing, sales, solutions engineers, support, legal, accountants, etc.

warbaker 2y ago

and nobody beats them!

ssl-3 2y ago

I feel like I am uninformed. Can someone provide some background? Who in the fuck is Wiz, and why in the fuck might anyone think that they're worth 11 figures?

SJC_Hacker 2y ago
I've been waiting for the Silly Valley insanity to stop for about the past 15 years, but its like its been permanently stuck in 1999 mode. With a few brief hiccups like Juicera and Theranos. I guess VCs just don't have anything better to do with their money, than throw it at a wall of shit and see what sticks
- boguscoder 2y ago
  Im afraid its been 25 not 15 years since 1999 ;(
  - ncruces 2y ago
    Whoosh… that's the entire point you missed right there.
    - blobbers 2y ago
      … what was the point? I missed it too!? VCs returns looking like power law investment in the back end / mud on wall in the front end of a fund? Or that the author has been waiting for VC investment to stop? I don’t understand what he’s trying to suggest.
      - ncruces 2y ago
        The dot-com bubble? Which ballooned in the late 90s, then burst, with investment not returning to 1999 levels for about a decade (also thanks to the 2008 financial crisis). Their point is that we've been stuck in 1999 for 15 years, and not the decade before that. Disagree all you want, but “it's been 25 years since 1999, you fail at math” makes no sense as a rebuttal.

xyst 2y ago

[flagged]

resist_futility 2y ago

>Wiz’s founders previously built security startup Adallom, raised money from Sequoia and Index and sold the startup to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015. Copy, Paste and ask for 70 times more?

krembo 2y ago
Totally different business, problem and solution. You should read abit before commenting like that.

temporalparts 2y ago

I think there's some behind the scenes drama. It takes a LOT of time and investment from both sides to build up to a $23B offer. I wonder if there was something some Alphabet exec did to piss off the founders. Or Wiz was stringing Alphabet along to hype up the IPO.

deleted 2y ago
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olalonde 2y ago

> The company hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after 18 months That's fast... Is that 18 months after launch or literally 18 months after starting development?

mylastattempt 2y ago
Your quote from the article, is a link to another article, which provides the answer: > The cybersecurity software vendor said in August that it reached $100 million in annual recurring revenue after selling its product for just a year and a half. So that's 18 months after formal launch. Since we don't have their financial statements, you can only guess wether this is the value of signed deals or a review of actual recognized revenue for those 18 months. I suspect the first.

globular-toast 2y ago

Why would Google even consider this? They're an advertising company and haven't really made any money from anything but advertising. What would they do with this?

animuchan 2y ago
I suppose they'd add this to the GCP family of products, same as Apigee.
krisgenre 2y ago
Maybe this was about advertising after all ;). I now know there is a company named Wiz.
KoftaBob 2y ago
The proportion of their revenue that comes from segments other than advertising is growing. I would imagine like most companies, Google/Alphabet wants to diversify their source of revenue/profit over time. https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-googles-revenues-by-segment/ https://www.statista.com/statistics/1093781/distribution-of-...
sebastiennight 2y ago
Adding a cloud security offering to your existing "cloud infrastructure" suite makes sense. Buying a strategic complement where you can multiply the company's ARR overnight by integrating with your own suite makes sense. Or commoditizing this complement by offering it for free as a differentiator to competitors (Azure, AWS) would also make sense. Plenty of options to choose from.

newusertoday 2y ago

sometimes it works snapchat rejecting facebook offere which is worth more now, sometimes it doesn't groupon rejecting googles offer.

KoftaBob 2y ago

Fun fact: > Wiz was founded in January 2020 by Assaf Rappaport, Yinon Costica, Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak, all of whom previously founded Adallom > Adallom was founded in 2012 by Assaf Rappaport, Ami Luttwak and Roy Reznik, who are former members of the Israeli Intelligence Corps’ Unit 8200 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wiz_(company)

johnpython 2y ago
[flagged]
- golemiprague 2y ago
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- yoavm 2y ago
  what is American about them?
xenospn 2y ago
8200 veterans are highly sought after, and you can probably get a blank check from any VC if you have that on your resume.

thegrizzlyking 2y ago

Most likely reason is FTC. Wiz integrates with big 4 cloud providers. No way FTC is allowing Google to take control. JD Vance's nomination and support for current FTC chair(Lina Khan) doesn't help. Current FTC is good(personal opinion) from anti trust point of view but maybe bad for startup exits[0]. [0] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1812978264484552987 https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1812978264484552987

titanomachy 2y ago
If they’re actually worth anything near $23B they can just go public. I’m sure they’ll be fine haha
neurotixz 2y ago
Wiz has tons of competitors, and Microsoft is one of them, so are Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Crowstrike, SentinelOne, etc... Wiz is definately a leader but are in no way a monopoly, so I do not see this as an FTC play to stop the deal.
- disgruntledphd2 2y ago
  I think the antitrust argument is more about preventing Big tech from getting even bigger rather than directly related to Wiz.

shmatt 2y ago

I have to take the other side than most comments here. Most of the coverage about the Wiz offer called out that this was an odd way for them to end up in - as the founders openly talked about waiting for that $1b ARR since almost day one To me it feels like Google was trying to put pressure on employees and any other non board option holders. There were dozens of articles and analysis of exactly bow many new millionaires / billionaires will be minted after the sale in Israel

sofixa 2y ago
> that this was an odd way for them to end up in - as the founders openly talked about waiting for that $1b ARR since almost day That doesn't mean much. I've worked at a company that kept taking about "our goal is to reach magic number X" and etc. until one they announce a sale. Situations change, business plans evolve, and money talks.

daghamm 2y ago

Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? It's not like Google is after they client list, they would probably limit them to Google services after acquisition anyway.

taspeotis 2y ago
> Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? I assume you meant to say billions, since this is a $23B offer they turned down. If I had to positive spin on the valuation: it's chump change if Wiz (who seem to be a very capable cybersecurity firm) are able to integrate themselves deeply into Google's infrastructure and secure it up the wazoo, since a 5% cost to Google's share price for reputational damage caused by GCP getting r00ted would be ... 5% of Google's 2.25T market cap ... $112.5B. cf. Crowdstrike's share price after some bad news: they are down 30% over the last five days.
- Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
  > cf. Crowdstrike's share price after some bad news: they are down 30% over the last five days. The stock is recovering. Traders have short memory. By the end of the year, it'll probably be $400 unless there's a huge class action against them that starts looking really bad for them.
  - taspeotis 2y ago
    I had a quick look and it seems to have recovered nominally today - 2% at most. If you look at the 5D and 30D view it seems to have taken a beating and is now flat.
    - Sohcahtoa82 2y ago
      Yeah, I think the slight uptick was people believing it will make a full recovery and buying the stock since it's on a heavy discount.

kats 2y ago

Good for Google.

daghamm 2y ago

For those of you who - like me 30 minutes ago - have no idea what Wiz does and what CNAPP is: https://pulse.latio.tech/p/wtf-is-cnapp https://pulse.latio.tech/p/wtf-is-cnapp

e12e 2y ago
Thank you. I think that deserves a submission by itself: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049942 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41049942
deleted 2y ago
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anon5278525283 2y ago

Today's (relevant) SMBC: https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/investment-2 https://www.smbc-comics.com/comic/investment-2

drumhead 2y ago

This is positive for Google. Spending $23bn on a company of that size was insane. Shareholders are probably relieved.

jsiepkes 2y ago
> Shareholders are probably relieved. Don't think so. Google has a relatively good track record for acquisitions. So I don't think they were really worried.
- hello_moto 2y ago
  Google today isn't what Google used to be

Kostchei 2y ago

As a user of Wiz (and I like what I get from them) ,I am relieved . 1. huge valuations are bad for customers- that investor cash has to come back from somewhere 2. Google has a habit of subsuming products into their stack and either sunsetting them or holding them so close that nobody uses them (beyondcorp etc) *spelling

mihaic 2y ago

Over a certain threshold, all software companies seem to degenerate into sales companies. Honestly, I'm just mildly shocked of the $23B valuation for a product that I'd expect to have taken waaay less than 1% of that in dev costs. What I'm more shocked is that Google decided they can't build the same thing themselves. Maybe I don't understand the complexity of the product?

llm_trw 2y ago
>What I'm more shocked is that Google decided they can't build the same thing themselves. Faang is where amazing engineers go to produce nothing of value.
- Ygg2 2y ago
  Hey, some of that non-value is actually negative! See ads.
- Ragnarork 2y ago
  I disagree, a lot of value is created at FAANG by those amazing engineers. It's the free and open source tools and frameworks, though.
  - llm_trw 2y ago
    A lot of value is also created by drug dealing giving out free hits, or Microsoft giving free windows licenses to universities back in the day.
dinobones 2y ago
Apparently they’re used by 40% of the Fortune 100. At a generous 20xARR valuation this is still 1b ARR. 1 billion / 40 = annual revenue of $25M from each contract. Hwat. Help it make sense.
- underdeserver 2y ago
  They probably have customers outside Fortune 100.

trhway 2y ago

Israel's GDP is $500B+ . So Google's offer would bring 4%+ of one year's GDP into Israel. And these guys refused it. One can wonder what the government would think here :)

underdeserver 2y ago
Thankfully, Israel is a free country and the government can't force you to sell.
- trhway 2y ago
  Not necessarily force. Government can do a lot toward either direction - facilitating or blocking a deal. And when somebody comes with a boatload of money noticeable on the scale of your GDP, the government would hardly stay neutral. Just look at all the circus around Foxconn in Wisconsin for example and that is much smaller scale wrt. US GDP.
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    Well, seems they did stay neutral. To be fair the Israeli government is somewhat preoccupied right now.
- dunekid 2y ago
  >Thankfully, Israel is a free country and the government can't force you to sell Not so sure about the force per se, but NSO group has been pretty much a bargaining chip in securing the support for the State from autocratic nations around the globe.
qeternity 2y ago
Most of the shareholders are not in Israel.
- trhway 2y ago
  You seem to be half-way right. Wiz took 1.9B total. The last 1B was on $12B valuation and the previous rounds, except series A where i don't see data, were also under 10%. So, yes, the investors probably own about a half.

jwally 2y ago

> saying no to such humbling offers is tough Minor pet peeve: misuse of the word "humbling". A $23B offer is not humbling (on my planet at least). Humbling would be turning this offer down and then failing to get enough interest to generate an ipo.

n4r9 2y ago
You might be right. On the other hand, Rappaport might be humbled thinking about how fortunate circumstances and others' hard work has led to this offer. He could be thinking "gosh, I do not feel I deserve that".
guywithahat 2y ago
I was confused when I read that. 23B is a ginormous number, especially considering the CEO's previous exist. 23B is a flattering number, it's not humbling

glandium 2y ago

I was like "how the f* is a website builder possibly worth $23B" and then I realized Wiz is not Wix. And then I realized Wix has a market capitalization of $9B, and I'm still WTF.

nikanj 2y ago
Wix has over $1.5B annual recurring revenue, so a market cap of $9B makes sense. You and I might not use them, but it is a real business, not just a hype bubble.
- rurban 2y ago
  My non-IT wife is using wix for her homepage. She loves it, I never heard of it before. 9B sounds okish. But wiz? There are reading like Mossad/Unit 8200. And who wants to have them in their backend? Worse than Cloudstrike, which sounds like CIA to me.
  - xenospn 2y ago
    Sounds like a lot of people do.
  - underdeserver 2y ago
    Almost every real cybersecurity company in the world has ex-Unit 8200 / Mossad employees. As well as ex-NSA and other intelligence agencies. You gotta know what you're up against to defend properly.
gnrlst 2y ago
Thought the same until I saw your comment. For those in the same boat: Wiz, Inc. is a cloud security startup.
krembo 2y ago
Fun fact: both founded by Israelis and have their R&D centers in the country.
- deleted 2y ago

physicsguy 2y ago

Wonder if it got downvalued during due-dilligence...

DrScientist 2y ago

I feel like there is an opportunity for a startup that protects you from the risks associated with your security vendors :-)

tzury 2y ago

A screenshot of the internal mail https://x.com/mikeeisenberg/status/1815644472945819788?s=46 https://x.com/mikeeisenberg/status/1815644472945819788?s=46

heraldgeezer 2y ago

[flagged]

prng2021 2y ago

Lina Khan is our modern day superhero. She may be losing most of her lawsuits against big tech, but she has clearly struck fear in stakeholders on both sides of every tech acquisition.

RcouF1uZ4gsC 2y ago

I am not quite sure I understand what was in it for Google. Google already has a world class security team, maybe one of the best in software. What would they gain by this acquisition? 23 Billion is enough to pay 2000 engineers 1 million USD TC for more than 10 years.

llmblockchain 2y ago

How much value do companies get out of these "enterprise security" companies? I've always thought they were the modern equivalent to commercial virus scanners that come with Windows.

scient 2y ago
A lot. Quite different in technology as well. None of these new tools really work just off of signatures.
jazzyjackson 2y ago
With incoming CMMC requirements to do business with DoD, being able to write a check to be in compliance with regulation is life or death for government contractors.

arjvik 2y ago

Just leaving this here: https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html https://paulgraham.com/corpdev.html

deleted 2y ago

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yjkk 2y ago

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