Maybe we should examine as an industry why so many mediocre men get elevated to positions of incredible power and run great businesses into the ground.
Luck (primarily) and connections. We feel psychologically safe believing there is some determinism _in the world_. But there's none. Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.
> It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
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.
> In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control.
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.
The problem is if you go public as a small company, it can be hard to survive. You need to meet expectations every time you do an earnings call or watch your stock get crushed, and it’ll never be given another chance. The burdens are also a lot higher in terms of the cost.
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.
The lack of competition is at this point choice American politicians and the voters. They should be breaking up mega corporations or at least taxing them at really high rates.
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.
Google SecOps (Chronicle) is becoming quite popular among the cybersec world. I think eventually there should be an integration play. It is also a way to create wedge into AWS and Azure customers.
The interesting part is that Wiz built its success largely on being cloud-agnostic. If Google keeps it that way, it becomes a strategic window into AWS and Azure workloads.
If they don’t, they risk destroying the very advantage that made Wiz valuable in the first place.
Interesting fact regarding the sale. Because the founders are about to receive $2.4B US, Israeli tax authorities got involved, and the tax on the sale as exception will be paid in US dollars directly without converting to shekels due to concerns it might crash the US/NIS exchange rate (with $US already historically low).
There aren't that many Alphabet acquisitions[1] that start with "W", compared to all the companies that start with "A":
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
Normalizing these counts with respect to English character frequencies that appear in text[2], the top three unexpected company initials appear to be "Q", "J", and "P".
Wix too. Very interesting that founders of Waze and Wix have Unit 8200 pedigree and Wiz co-founder was part of an elite recruitment program in the IDF. On account of the mandatory draft, it was bound to happen but those three companies have very similar names as well.
Everyone in Israel who is entrepreneurial tries to self-select into 8200 - it's the equivalent of American high schoolers who want to enter VC and tech entrepreneurship targeting CS@Stanford.
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.
It's the same in the US as well - if you join the right divisions and units and take advantage of educational programs with the GI Bill, you will open a lot of doors professionally speaking.
It has vav which gets transliterated as v, u, o, or w. How does the average modern Hebrew speaker pronounce these company names in a sentence? Vix, Vayz, Viz? Is the "w" transliteration an example of Latin to Hebrew transliteration but not vice-versa?
Is it possible the foreignness makes ‘W’ appealing as it signals cool modern tech alignment or something?
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.
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.
> 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.
No reactions beside: monopolies are bad for innovation and why we cannot have nice things. You might hear some people say "but these big companies innovate". They were mostly done innovating two decades ago, now they just snuff out innovation and acquisition is one of their main tools.
well if you are waiting for the monopolies to be broken don't wait they will not be broken monopolies are here to stay, capitalistism for the rich and socialism also for the rich they best thing you can do is be rich yourself
Wiz customer here, when fully implemented it provides an incredibly detailed and comprehensive view of your infrastructure.
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.
Probably a diversification play and a play to see out bigger contracts. If you've worked in the FEDRamp space, you may be aware that Wiz (last a checked, a year or so ago) is one of the few and possibly ownly player certified to operate in FedRAMP Medium/High deployments operating with the technology it does (eBPF instrumentation).
Thats the entire purpose, the reality is that large corporations are increasingly “multi cloud” and Google wants to have an offering for them and for companies that are on AWS and Azure to be able to move some of their workloads to GCP.
AWS and GCP also made a joint announcement about multi cloud networking for a similar reason
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.
If you think Google is capable of making a singular coherent decision on a topic like this, you're dreaming. There's likely multiple competing visions.
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.
> 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
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
The competing Google features are not a distinct product with its own name, but rather many separate features one can enable, like container image scanning. Collectively, it doesn't do all that Wiz offers, but it's still there.
Congrats to to the Wiz team. Wiz is amazing. But, ugh, joining Google will result in less competition and all that entails. Not great for customers.
It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
> will result in less competition
The system working as intended.
“Competition is for losers” - Peter Thiel
Thiel is an idiot
>> “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.
But very rich...
One has very little to do with the other, contrary to popular belief. Exhibit A from 338 BC: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutus_(play)
Rich!= smart
Maybe we should examine as an industry why so many mediocre men get elevated to positions of incredible power and run great businesses into the ground.
Luck (primarily) and connections. We feel psychologically safe believing there is some determinism _in the world_. But there's none. Studies show that you can have 140 IQ and still end up homeless if circumstances are poor.
The same way mediocre men have been elevated for thousands of years.
A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money
Connections... It was always like this..
surely you can make a couple billion from mothing given you are so smart
Who said you need to be great in an area to tell the difference between competent and incompetent?
While it helps, it doesn't take a genius to tell the difference. Picking the great from the great apart, that'd be another story all together.
Someone else will rise to compete.
Then Google will buy them too.
> It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.
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.
[0] - https://www.hbs.edu/faculty/Pages/item.aspx?num=38550
> In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control.
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.
The problem is if you go public as a small company, it can be hard to survive. You need to meet expectations every time you do an earnings call or watch your stock get crushed, and it’ll never be given another chance. The burdens are also a lot higher in terms of the cost.
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.
> 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.
Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets?
The lack of competition is at this point choice American politicians and the voters. They should be breaking up mega corporations or at least taxing them at really high rates.
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.
This isn't a new observation [0] but this means Google will now have two Wizes, since Wiz is also the name of their internal web framework [1].
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43399077
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41092039
This is the announcement of the completion of an acquisition that began a year ago.
Google SecOps (Chronicle) is becoming quite popular among the cybersec world. I think eventually there should be an integration play. It is also a way to create wedge into AWS and Azure customers.
There already is an integration with SecOps: https://www.wiz.io/integrations/google-security-operations and https://docs.cloud.google.com/chronicle/docs/soar/marketplac...
Is that the kind of integration you are refering to?
These offerings are to pull customers to GCP. That is what Google is paying for because they couldn't get the traction organically.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47337644
The interesting part is that Wiz built its success largely on being cloud-agnostic. If Google keeps it that way, it becomes a strategic window into AWS and Azure workloads.
If they don’t, they risk destroying the very advantage that made Wiz valuable in the first place.
Extra shade thrown at MoltBook (listed first) which was recently acq by Meta.
For a second I thought it was Woz who was joining Google…
I thought it was WiZ of the lightbulbs fame. Figured they were going all in their smart home approach. But yeah, the other Wiz makes more sense.
Maybe someone typod in an email "I want you to buy woz" the i and o are next to each other on the keyboard. ;)
Interesting fact regarding the sale. Because the founders are about to receive $2.4B US, Israeli tax authorities got involved, and the tax on the sale as exception will be paid in US dollars directly without converting to shekels due to concerns it might crash the US/NIS exchange rate (with $US already historically low).
Didn’t this happen a long time ago?
Wiz joins Waze & Waymo.. there's something suspicious with the letter W here :)
There aren't that many Alphabet acquisitions[1] that start with "W", compared to all the companies that start with "A":
Normalizing these counts with respect to English character frequencies that appear in text[2], the top three unexpected company initials appear to be "Q", "J", and "P".[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency
Wiz and Waze are both Israeli companies. Not that suspicious, I think it probably just sounds better in Hebrew.
Wix too. Very interesting that founders of Waze and Wix have Unit 8200 pedigree and Wiz co-founder was part of an elite recruitment program in the IDF. On account of the mandatory draft, it was bound to happen but those three companies have very similar names as well.
Everyone in Israel who is entrepreneurial tries to self-select into 8200 - it's the equivalent of American high schoolers who want to enter VC and tech entrepreneurship targeting CS@Stanford.
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.
Network effects wasn't what I considered although I should have.
It's the same in the US as well - if you join the right divisions and units and take advantage of educational programs with the GI Bill, you will open a lot of doors professionally speaking.
I'm sure the Room 641A employees have an excellent professional network, but I'm still going to judge them on a personal level.
Unlikely, since modern Hebrew doesn't have a letter for "w".
It has vav which gets transliterated as v, u, o, or w. How does the average modern Hebrew speaker pronounce these company names in a sentence? Vix, Vayz, Viz? Is the "w" transliteration an example of Latin to Hebrew transliteration but not vice-versa?
Is it possible the foreignness makes ‘W’ appealing as it signals cool modern tech alignment or something?
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_companies_of_Israel#W
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.
Oof, you got me there!
They could put up a page for all three acquisitions, under "www".
W = Winners, it's just science ;)
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.
Also wankers, just saying...
Title should be: Wiz Waz
RIP Wave
Good time to remember that Wiz' VC was accused of paying bribes to CISOs to buy their portfolio's software (of which Wiz is one).
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.
No reactions beside: monopolies are bad for innovation and why we cannot have nice things. You might hear some people say "but these big companies innovate". They were mostly done innovating two decades ago, now they just snuff out innovation and acquisition is one of their main tools.
well if you are waiting for the monopolies to be broken don't wait they will not be broken monopolies are here to stay, capitalistism for the rich and socialism also for the rich they best thing you can do is be rich yourself
I don't understand Google's play here. Does it want Wiz to be a unique offer for GCP customers? or they will keep it cloud agnostic?
Wiz customer here, when fully implemented it provides an incredibly detailed and comprehensive view of your infrastructure.
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.
Is this like Darktrace?
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.
Nope. Darktrace is crap verging on fraud. Wiz actually solves tangible CSPM and runtime issues.
>>It's effectively x-ray vision into some huge workloads running on their competitors.
I wonder if there are antitrust lawyers watching this closely. Would be really interesting to get their perspective on this.
Probably a diversification play and a play to see out bigger contracts. If you've worked in the FEDRamp space, you may be aware that Wiz (last a checked, a year or so ago) is one of the few and possibly ownly player certified to operate in FedRAMP Medium/High deployments operating with the technology it does (eBPF instrumentation).
Google has really been expanding into DoD lately. I think they're realizing it's a large part of why AWS is so big and Azure is still alive.
Thats the entire purpose, the reality is that large corporations are increasingly “multi cloud” and Google wants to have an offering for them and for companies that are on AWS and Azure to be able to move some of their workloads to GCP.
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...
>or they will keep it cloud agnostic?
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.
I'm really hoping this means GCP Security Command Center quickly gets subsumed by Wiz
you mean there will now be three products instead of two
Google Security Center Wiz Google Agentic Wiz Security
If you think Google is capable of making a singular coherent decision on a topic like this, you're dreaming. There's likely multiple competing visions.
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.
> 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
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
The competing Google features are not a distinct product with its own name, but rather many separate features one can enable, like container image scanning. Collectively, it doesn't do all that Wiz offers, but it's still there.
It's true that Cloud has behaved a bit different from Classic Google
Make it easy to use google cloud and plug into google ai
Congrats!
Not to be confused with Google’s existing product called Wiz.
Or the Wiz IoT company, which seems like something Google might assimilate into Nest, but they didn't.
Or the GP2X Wiz handheld (which will be forever what comes to mind first for me )
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz
I thought so too at first, which would make sense as Nest does everything except lighting...
I'd argue an internal framework isn't a "product", but the confusion is real.
Didn't this happen a year ago? [0] Or did this deal just take a year?
[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518
Did you read the article? First line: "Nearly a year ago, we shared that Wiz would be joining Google."
Who reads articles these days?
Just the bots so that HN posters can ask them for slop replies to stuff they don't understand.
Wasn't this acquisition just a bit money laundering operation from Israel?
Not related to my https://uxwizz.com xD
I thought it was about home automation at first https://www.wizconnected.com/
Same--I was worried my lightbulbs might be deprecated!