Google closes deal to acquire Wiz
wiz.io
Previously: Google to buy Wiz for $32B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518 - March 2025 (845 comments)
wiz.io
This would be the first time taxes are paid in a different currency in Israel history.
Pretty wild that it's such a large acquisition it can affect a nation's monetary policy.
However, it is just an expanded version of Ynet’s business/economy section, and Ynet is probably the closest equivalent to USA Today or The Sun.
The English word comes from "calculus", meaning, apparently, pebble, because original counting was done with pebbles.
(I had to look both up. Thanks for asking)
Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.
Several words, like the infamous "shibboleth" won't be inherited, or their meanings may wildly differ.
There are multiple founders getting billions of dollars each. It's not so unreasonble to fear what could happen if daily trading volume suddenly had a significant increase from them collectively dumping billions of dollars onto the market on the same day to settle the tax bill.
Calcalist did a deep investigation into it: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc
Cyberstarts is the most blatant offender, but to be fair, VC has turned into the next rung on the career ladder for CIOs/CISOs, whose role is otherwise generally terminal (unlike e.g. COO or CMO). So a lot of deals get done now just on giving CISOs a path into VC. It's more subtle than Gili's way, and just as effective.
It can be a rough gig.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/iainmartin/2024/10/28/this-vc-b...
> Two security executives told Forbes they rejected overtures from Raanan’s team after hearing about the firm’s “menu” of compensation. “I was completely aghast. It was against my principles,” one said.
If they don’t, they risk destroying the very advantage that made Wiz valuable in the first place.
https://jemima.design.blog/2021/02/08/generic-tech-company-a...
everything has a price.
Pessimism is so lame and uninteresting for discussions
Edit: meant gmaps
As a Wiz user, it is a a really good product and I can't say this for a lot of the security stuff that is out there.
And lastly: remember that Google is an advertising company with hobbies.
Is that the kind of integration you are refering to?
It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
Then Google will buy them too.
Israeli VCs tend to be uninterested in IPOs in general - too much of an operational headache and it's difficult to exit a position quickly.
In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control. It's basically the "Rich versus Kings" dichotomy [0].
Edit: can't reply
> you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power
Investors do not like that - they want some degree of operational control in order to right the ship if needed.
In the early 2010s, IPOs like Tesla and Facebook were on terms that gave outside investors little control on operations and that's why Musk and even Zuckerberg to a certain extent can choose to reorient to a new boondoggle with little-to-no investor pushback.
In 2026 if you want to IPO, it will be on the terms of JPMC, GS, etc who are underwriting the IPO.
In a private company, it's easier for an investor to offload or get bought out of their position if the founder wants to maintain operational control.
> While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show
In publicly listed companies, it is magnitudes more difficult to build a board that is aligned with you at a personal level versus in a private company because both the board and strategic shareholders will act as checks against you.
> If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise
An acquisition happens when both the founders and investors want to exit, and has less operational overhead and due dilligence versus going thru the process of an IPO in the US.
> This is counterintuitive to me
Well, that's the reality. This is why Stripe, Databricks, and others have remained private for so long despite having hit IPO-level metrics years ago. If you're already generating high 9 to low 10 figures a year in revenue, you can remain private indefinetly and as a founder you would be able to give yourself a compensation package comparable to a public company, but with much less oversight and stress.
> Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets
Significantly less capital.
"Big" funds like YL Ventures, Cyberstarts, and JVP only have an AUM of $800M, $1.4B, and $1.9B respectively.
And if you were going to IPO in the US anyhow, why would you even invest in an Israeli fund, which wouldn't have enough people with experience for an IPO.
And the handful of Israeli IPOs that happened like SentinelOne or CyberArk weren't that successful.
This is counterintuitive to me.
If you’re acquired, you’re giving up ownership and you tend to lose operational control unless you have agreements in place that say otherwise.
With an IPO it seems like you have a better chance to retain control: you can control the share allocations going into an IPO to give you solid voting power. While you’re accountable to a board of directors and theoretically accountable to stockholders, in reality management often runs the show, at least until the board runs out of patience with bad earnings.
You don’t really see companies under $10 billion going public anymore. That may continue to be the case, but it’s terrible for entrepreneurs.
Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets?
That's also true of an acquisition. Even more true of an acquisition, I'd say.
An IPO isn't an easy exit strategy - it takes years to become S1 ready and it takes years to sell off your equity stake if you were using an IPO only to exit.
That's why if you want operational control you fight hard to remain private as long as possible, and if you want to exit you M&A yourself. This makes IPOs only useful if you need to raise more capital than is available in the private market.
The system working as intended.
“Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel
> Thiel is an idiot
Sounds more like he's selfish, perhaps to an unusual degree. Monopoly is great for the monopolist. For everyone else? Not so much.
A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money
This is an extraordinary claim. What is your extraordinary evidence?
Why didn’t it rain today? Good luck! Why was Michael Jordan so skillful at basketball? Just good luck. Why is Linux better than Windows? Good luck! Why did VMS fall off? Bad luck. Why does 2 + 2 = 4? I guess just good luck.
These are all laughably incurious, superstitious answers. Other factors must be at play. Yes, identifying them may require hard thinking and concentration.
Otherwise, what is democracy other than selecting the luckiest? We already had strange women lying in ponds distributing swords for that — and much cheaper and quicker to boot.
> Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.
We’ve likely all known people who were book smart but didn’t have good walking-around sense. Everyone knows others who make poor or destructive choices. The interpersonal skills, soft skills, and emotional intelligence being dismissed in this thread as mere “luck and connections” may be severely lacking. The person may have poor mental health or addiction.
Are you using determinism in the automata theory sense or some other?
Competition is for losers, is a way to say to go and compete in a super crowded market where it is impossible to differentiate yourself is not going to make you a winner.
But usually people are called idiots because they don’t swallow the progressive propaganda wholesale.
Instead, it looks like all the existing incumbents will just continue to rule over society. They have capital, monopolies, and the moats of distribution channels and contracts with their current customers. There is no fair competition - they’ll just replicate your clever product easily.
I wish people would remember the stock markets were invented for companies to raise funds, not for the private investors to cash out. The public should be allowed to invest in new companies, not just the rich.
Most funds lose money on early stage investing.
Allowing non-accredited investors to enter the privete capital is great for experienced investors like me because we can offload assets to less discerning and less experienced casual investors, but this is truly risky for the vast majority of individuals.
Hell, even in my own personal portfolio I stick with ETFs and call it a day because returns are good enough without active risk management.
> so in some way they have gone public
M&A is not an IPO. By that standard any acquisition by Crowdstrike or PANW is an "IPO".
Google Security Center Wiz Google Agentic Wiz Security
They grossly overpaid if they aren't keeping it cloud agnostic. It's impressive software, but if it's only compatible with GCP it will not survive in this space.
AWS and GCP also made a joint announcement about multi cloud networking for a similar reason
https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/networking-and-content-delivery...
I'm curious how much of that information is going to pass between Wiz and Google Cloud product/sales. It's effectively x-ray vision into some huge workloads running on their competitors.
Apparently the cybersec bigwigs at our company love it, but for me I have to write a detailed explaination why another 'incident report' the clueless cybersecurity guys keep bothering me with is actually nonsense.
There are a lot of cybersecurity people that really know nothing about actual security and just rely on what their tools tell them. And products like Wiz love to "prove" their value by raising tons of red flags.
This is especially true for vulnerability management, which is basically Boy-Who-Cried-Wolf as a Service. The entire CVE ecosystem used to be great, but now it's turned into resume-driven-development where people exaggerate the severity of a vulnerability in order to have a CVSS 9.8 on their resume.
I wonder if there are antitrust lawyers watching this closely. Would be really interesting to get their perspective on this.
https://www.reuters.com/world/google-secures-eu-antitrust-ap...
That said: the goal with Google M&A remains the same as always. Take competition off the board. I don't know this company or how they compete with Google, but 80% chance that's the play.
They are culturally incapable of merging other people's tech into their own stack and have both the tendency to rewrite everything from scratch on their own bespoke technologies and also internal engineering teams that will bristle at having a foreign body invade their cathedral.
You could say it would be talent acquisition but most everyone who comes from a startup walks as soon as their golden handcuffs loosen and they can find something else to do. Going from startup to Google is usually torturous.
Been through this 15 years ago. I don't think anything has changed.
I don't think that's true here (what is the competing google product exactly?) or generally in cloud acquisitions, that generally buy into their platform missing features
I bet someone has actually studied the effect of leading letters in startup names and funding & acquisitions, I vaguely seem to remember a story about it in the past.
Like how ‘X’ attracts marketing and typographic knuckle-draggers in English, or how all our AI companies have butthole logos for reasons that only make sense if you understand the underlying companies and culture.
There's 5 of them, two of which happen to have been acquired by Google. Fair to say it's likely a coincidence.
Interestingly, they all use "vav vav" as the start of their Hebrew names. "Vav" is the hebrew letter for V, so it's kind of like using VV to represent W.
Maybe you're right, and it's a stylistic thing! My knowledge of Hebrew ends in Hebrew school, and that mostly focused on blessing and prayers over startup naming.
In any case, I'm pretty sure it's just a coincidence, I don't think it's a stylistic thing, unless I'm missing something.
In Israel, the university you attended matters less than the unit you served. For example, if you want to become a senior politician, you join Sayeret Matkal and if you want to become an academic you end up in Talpiot (which the founders of Wiz are alums of).
8200s success is largely due to a couple early exits by 8200 alums (Gili Raanan, Nir Zuk, Shlomo Kramer) who were biased in recruiting from their unit. 8200 alums aren't better or worse than other Israelis - they just have a better network.
And Israel has multiple SIGINT and offensive/defensive cybersecurity units, all of whom created similar networks as well.
1 2
1 6
1 @
28 A
15 B
8 C
18 D
6 E
10 F
10 G
4 H
9 I
5 J
5 K
8 L
14 M
8 N
10 O
22 P
4 Q
13 R
27 S
12 T
3 U
5 V
9 W
1 Y
8 Z
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
But it was subject to regulatory approval, that's been completed now.
But companies who uses Wiz.io know that Wiz is dead as of now. Google will merge it into its cloud platform and slowly stop supporting AWS, Azure.
Things never change, only company's name change.
> See how the Wiz protects cloud environments from code to runtime.
So long as "everything" everybody runs is "in the cloud", huh?
Not even remotely true in the real world.
I give it 5 years
Here's my full thread on it: https://x.com/paulbiggar/status/1902329587050148068
And over 90% of their workers served in the IDF! And many more in Israeli Intelligence! and they're also mostly Jewish!
Spooky stuff, our ads will never be safe now
You've got to love how spewing such casual bigotry against random people doesn't ring any alarm bells for people like this Paul person. I'm sure he considers himself a "progressive" lol.
Sort of like Wix... Wix also an Israeli company with an odd sounding name (although better then Wiz).