Google Near $23B Deal for Cybersecurity Startup Wiz | Hacker News Reader

Google Near $23B Deal for Cybersecurity Startup Wiz

wsj.com

36 pointsHandy-Man14 comments

Good for Wiz. But bad for everyone else. The megacorps keep using capital to hold onto economic control and power. It’s not great for society. They need to be broken up, heavily taxed, and heavily regulated. As for Wiz - I assume Google will eventually change their product to only support their own cloud or turn it into a privacy nightmare by using data to train Gemini or whatever else. It’s very hard to feel stable building on top of any acquired company, but it is especially that way when it’s Google.

I'm sure the Wiz founding team is foaming at the mouth at the prospect of a big payday.

Wiz is one of, if not the, fastest security startup to reach $100m in ARR from date of founding (12 or 13 months IIRC). It's all about 'dat CISO money and old good buddy relationships to get the snowball rolling.

I know for a fact GhostSecurity and others have been trying, unsuccessfully, to emulate the success of Wiz. It's a bit of a 1-hit wonder.

18 months actually: https://www.wiz.io/blog/100m-arr-in-18-months-wiz-becomes-th... (was just curious and looked it up)

I have the impression that if Bitcoin was banned in all major countries, the valuations for cybersecurity companies would be much lower.

Bitcoin as a payment method has been instrumental in attracting the brightest minds to build malware and, as a result, has boosted the cybersecurity industry.

Interesting take that a lot of bright minds are being stolen from us due to the allure of riches via crypto malware. But I'm hard pressed to assume that they would have stayed on the virtuous side of things in the absence of crypto. Then again, being well versed in cryptography/blockchain/etc isn't something any person can learn quickly and easily.

I also use the skillset to build Bitcoin as a way to pinpoint who Satoshi is/was. It had to be 1 of those small finite # of people who were able to build such software around mid-2008.

Lightly relevant quote from Albert Einstein, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds."

I would like to say that data scavengers are a threat not to some really bad guys like killers, but for regular people who just want some democracy like journalists.

That would be the largest exit ever by an Israeli startup, $23B is insane.

Strange acquisition. Sounds like the company is not profitable, and basically the product is a cloud audit type of thing that Cloud vendors already provide anyway. 23 Billion? Really?

Plus there is a lawsuit going on...

"‘Wholesale copying’: Israel’s Orca Security sues rival Wiz for patent infringement" - https://www.timesofisrael.com/wholesale-copying-israels-orca...

"Wiz vs. Orca: Delaware court sets stage for high-stakes IP showdown" - https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/ryjc8dgnr

I actually think this might be undervalued, having used Wiz extensively and seen what’s on their roadmap for the next year. The question is if Google will let them continue to be the leading multi-cloud CNAPP platform or if they are going to muck around with it and try to fold it into Chronicle

What value do they provide that you cant get from a provider like Crowdstrike?

Agree with this.

People buy companies for two things: established relationships and established tech. The first is questionable since Wiz is a SaaS and Google is mostly trying to play in the PaaS space. The latter is definitely something Wiz has, but 23 bn is a bit rich.

Anyways kudos to Wiz, will be curious to see how Google actually capitalizes on this.

More interestingly and I don't Google needs to disclose on their decision as not mandated by U.S. regulation but why acquire a Wiz over crowdstrike? Why choose an Israeli company over U.S. based firm?

Whoops, aged like a banana out in the sun.

http://archive.today/C9iCz

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