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Comment by aswerty | Hacker News Reader

Wiz seems to only be about 4 years old, as per wikipedia. That valuation in such a short amount of time surely must be some kind of record? Or am I missing something?

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~5 years by now. But there is a bit of fine print. The founders all founded another cloud security company in 2010, which was acquired by Microsoft. They were all graduates of Israel's famous Unit 8200. So while the literal company was founded in 2020, it is very likely a lot of both the knowledge, expertise and quite possibly product was already in development before it.

yes, every 8200 founder i know already has the next product ready to launch in alpha the day after the time limit on their previous acquisition runs out

You joke, but something similar happened at my old company, and I suspect it's relatively common for serial entrepreneurs.

The founders, who are now flush with cash, time and ideas; are quickly speedrunning the steps creating their previous company, in the same market, but now with more access to capital and employees from their previous company who would rather work for a startup than a large conglomerate, while fixing all the mistakes from their previous venture.

I 90% meant that it was the skills, industry knowledge and connections/reputations they built before Wiz, but it is true that most companies are conceived and planned far ahead of their actually registrations. Sensible people don't exactly just quit their jobs and start a company in a few days. They conceive, do research, discuss and (I suspect in Wiz's case) prototype before they commit. Its definitely a smart move, there's a very real valuation and PR advantage if you delay your actual founding, so your time to X revenue looks shorter.

Not sure if it's a very wise move to hire foreign intelligence offers and give them access to the core of your tech products and to the customers data.

Probably the entire company's purpose is to gain access to secrets.

Anyway, Chomsky claims that there's 0 distinction between USA and Israel, so if you see it from that point of view, it makes little difference.

A dumb conspiracy theory. Israel has mandatory conscription (barring some cases), and many of the smart ones are recruited into Unit 8200. It's not surprising that they go on to start cyber companies once conscription ends, given that's a major focus of the Unit.

"But Chomsky said so!"

So you think they shouldn't be trusted because they have ties with a foreign nation or they should be trusted because their foreign nation is really a puppet state of your nation?

It's unclear to me what you're thinking besides the wish to troll.

"conspiracy". When you meet employees of such companies they brag about it and sometimes even do special tricks through their contacts to impress you.

For me it's enough that if Chinese intelligence officers were founding software security companies, I'd not use the product. It's the same idea for Israel. Conscription just makes it worse, because more of their citizens are then suspect.

Not supporting people who take part in the crime of persecution, is a nice side effect.

only 2 out of 3 are 8200 alumni.

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