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Comment by larodi | Hacker News Reader

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Is “they were bought because they’re Israeli intelligence” the new “Jews control the banking system”? Please update, I’m somehow missing the residuals from both :(

if you read all the previous Wiz related threads, you'd know that the elders of zion had decided to finance their world domination efforts through selling companies that start with W to Google

I’m not really sure what you’re trying say, but I would assume Waze’s valuation came from some combination of their user base, their crowdsourced data (to know where there is an object in the road, or a car stopped on the side of the street, for example), and their algorithms, which I remember finding far more accurate than anyone else’s back then.

Well, you tell me what their valuation comes from. given Google already had a maps service, acquired earlier. Perhaps the prospect of having everyone's data while they move is a nice thing to have.

Not sure why people are so offended by the citation from Wikipedia, though. It seems like a bait, but is not - is an actual quote. I didn't make up this text - it is the first paragraph. Besides to me it implies s.o. who knows how to value data made a big company crowdsourcing and also collecting data 24/7 and knew how to sell it.

Or perhaps a company doing crowdsourced navigation is a new thing in 2013? You tell me, I'm just stating the facts.

You're going to have to be more explicit for me. Can you elaborate? And are you suggesting that Wiz and Waze had a similar implied advantage? Or just the names being similar reminded you?

I really dont' care about the names, but given this massive valuation and the value of asset from security perspective, I can see some similarities. Of course 1.2 bn in 2013 is not 36bn in 2025... but still seems (to me at least) a massive over-valuation if you consider the workforce size, or the fact this company sells nothing (explicitly at least), but only collects data.

So I guess this data was either super useful, or it was a way to take some money out from the corpo in a very convenient way. But I can tell you there are hundreds of map companies which crowdsource one way or another, and dozens if not more navigation companies, and none was similarly valued in 2013.

MapBox is valued at 1.2b in 2023, though it's much more influential than WAZ for the whole GIS market (which is 0.8 in 2013 money perhaps). Carto is valued at roughly $350m, TomTom, a market leader is at $500m iin 2025, so you tell my how Waze is 1.2bn at time of acquisition in 2013, having had zero technical or other innovative contribution for the geomatics or gis or web cartography? It was created to avoid road closures in Jerusalem or Tel Aviv?

I mean - let's put this in perspective for a moment, and somebody tell me why was Waze priced at 1.2bn if not for its founders and its very useful crowdsourced data.

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