Apparently Israeli media is reporting that the price is so high that the government is requesting the founders will pay their taxes in USD and not Israeli Shekels in fear that such a large foreign exchange transaction will affect the exchange rate. ( Which is already unusually low and hurting exporters)
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.
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.
The name “Calcalist” is indeed a play on “Economist” (it is not a proper Hebrew word, but fuses the Hebrew word for economy “calcala” with the English suffix for a professional work “ist”.
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.
How can a word come from the Bible? It must have existed before the Bible in order to have a meaning inside of it. Or did you mean to write it came from Aramaic?
I mean that it already appears in the Bible, in old Hebrew (which is close to, but isn’t exactly Aramaic), with the meaning “to feed and provide” - and I did not find any documentation about how it formed (or came into) Hebrew.
Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.
FYI, Wiz investor and current Wiz board member Gili Raanan, head of Israeli VC Cyberstarts, has been (credibly) accused of paying bribes to major CISOs for buying software from their portfolio companies like Wiz.
This is well known in cybersecurity circles. I mentioned here[1] a couple years back that I know CISOs who've had to clean up big messes because their predecessor was on the Cyberstarts payroll, but on the bright side I also know a couple of those predecessors who were fired for it.
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.
About 20 years ago I quite liked the idea of becoming a CISO - the CIO I worked for at the time talked me out of it - saying that the role would largely involve being ignored then, when something inevitably did go wrong, you'd get sacked.
The board of a Fortune 1000 financial services company just fired the CISO and Deputy CISO because they did too good a job cataloging all of the risk in their infrastructure. Now that it's documented and defensibly quantified, the company is somewhat obliged to do something about it, and the board was not thrilled.
Not a lawyer but this looks like a grey area and since it's public it can be assumed everyone is trying to do it.
I worked for F500 and one of the VPs was pushing some IT vendor solution that didn't really fit, after so much implementation pains and half working product release the said VP left the company... To become a board member of that IT vendor.
It's almost certainly not legal (it could probably be tried as fraud), and it definitely is a breach of contract for the CISO. I'm not claiming it happened, I have no idea, just commenting on the legality of the claimed acts.
Israel is not an ethnicity. They still have 25% Arab Israelis- a leftover from the days when the founders were still building a secular European style country.
They treat them as second class ofcourse. And it is essentially a manageable minority- they are politically sidelined in the Knesset.
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 an 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).
> 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.
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.
I was part of the mandiant acquisition, and half of us were laid off a year after we joined Google. Many of the remainding mandiant members were let go in random 'org changes' layoffs afterwards. Let's see if they treat Wiz any differently.
The cynic in me says it will join the graveyard after the acquisition depreciates or it does not bring in as much money as someone at Google will think it should.
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.
The majority (all, I'd say) of those are 15 years (and more) in the past by now. Not sure about Waze, well, looks like I was wrong, they were only acquired in 2013, so it's "only" 13 years in the past for them.
Gmail was an acquisition? I thought it was internal? I remember them launching as an invite only (how i got mine) and it went from there. What is the story?
After alphabet demoted waze from being an independent company and turned it into part of google's overall maps organization, alphabet needed another israeli company to take over the W spot.
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.
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.
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?
Luck here isn't referring to some invisible dice roll whose randomness can not be explained or is just a correlation (like no rain on your wedding day would be), it's refers to variables that the person can not influence. Being born into a rich family is lucky for that baby, and the baby can't have done anything about it.
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.
Google is a public company so in some way they have gone public.
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.
> 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".
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.
> 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.
Yes, but a founder deciding to be acquired means they wish to stop having operational control and intend to cash out and exit.
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.
Partially. The issue is capital - even Wiz largely raised thanks to Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Index Ventures. American funds are much larger and are able to finance later stage rounds. Most Israeli VC funds end up financing earlier rounds and can't neccesarily participate in later rounds and thus have an incentive to exit earlier.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
Despite commenting on this literally five seconds ago in the sibling comment, I hadn't made the connection that if "vav" is V, then using "vav vav" is like "VV" which is like "W". I wonder if this is a real thing.
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.
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?
It's pronounced the same as in English. Wiz, Waze, Wix. It's written with "double vav" in Hebrew, not just a single vav which would make it read as Viz.
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.
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
lol
Let me tell you something even more worrying, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft already have larger engineering centers in Israel than most of Europe.
And over 90% of their workers served in the IDF! And many more in Israeli Intelligence! and they're also mostly Jewish!
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.
It makes me think of the 1978 movie "The Wiz" starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Despite the big stars, it isn't generally regarded as a very good movie. Maybe updating "The Wizard of Oz" with disco music wasn't a good idea after all.
Apparently Israeli media is reporting that the price is so high that the government is requesting the founders will pay their taxes in USD and not Israeli Shekels in fear that such a large foreign exchange transaction will affect the exchange rate. ( Which is already unusually low and hurting exporters)
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.
Average daily USD-NIS trading volume (per Bank of Israel: https://www.boi.org.il/en/communication-and-publications/pre... ) is on the order of magnitude of about $15 billion.
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.
I was curious about this claim and dug up this article from (as far as I understand it), Israel's version of The Economist
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjggcekq11g
The name “Calcalist” is indeed a play on “Economist” (it is not a proper Hebrew word, but fuses the Hebrew word for economy “calcala” with the English suffix for a professional work “ist”.
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.
Is it etymologically related to "calculate" or is it a coincidence?
Seems to be a coincidence - the Hebrew word comes from the Bible (old testament), and means "the feeding, and generally providing of needs".
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)
How can a word come from the Bible? It must have existed before the Bible in order to have a meaning inside of it. Or did you mean to write it came from Aramaic?
Hebrew is a reconstructed language. Whilst some roots will predate the Torah, most won't.
Several words, like the infamous "shibboleth" won't be inherited, or their meanings may wildly differ.
I mean that it already appears in the Bible, in old Hebrew (which is close to, but isn’t exactly Aramaic), with the meaning “to feed and provide” - and I did not find any documentation about how it formed (or came into) Hebrew.
Which means of course m, that it was already in use before the Bible was canonicalized.
FYI, Wiz investor and current Wiz board member Gili Raanan, head of Israeli VC Cyberstarts, has been (credibly) accused of paying bribes to major CISOs for buying software from their portfolio companies like Wiz.
Calcalist did a deep investigation into it: https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/b1a1jn00hc
This is well known in cybersecurity circles. I mentioned here[1] a couple years back that I know CISOs who've had to clean up big messes because their predecessor was on the Cyberstarts payroll, but on the bright side I also know a couple of those predecessors who were fired for it.
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.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40487846
About 20 years ago I quite liked the idea of becoming a CISO - the CIO I worked for at the time talked me out of it - saying that the role would largely involve being ignored then, when something inevitably did go wrong, you'd get sacked.
The board of a Fortune 1000 financial services company just fired the CISO and Deputy CISO because they did too good a job cataloging all of the risk in their infrastructure. Now that it's documented and defensibly quantified, the company is somewhat obliged to do something about it, and the board was not thrilled.
It can be a rough gig.
Not a lawyer but this looks like a grey area and since it's public it can be assumed everyone is trying to do it. I worked for F500 and one of the VPs was pushing some IT vendor solution that didn't really fit, after so much implementation pains and half working product release the said VP left the company... To become a board member of that IT vendor.
Too late now!
:)
I for one am shocked that an Israeli VC might behave unethically
How is this even legal? I'd think even basic conflict of interest rules between vendor and purchases would stop this.
It's almost certainly not legal (it could probably be tried as fraud), and it definitely is a breach of contract for the CISO. I'm not claiming it happened, I have no idea, just commenting on the legality of the claimed acts.
[flagged]
Israeli isn’t an ethnicity, it’s a nationality. Conflating the two doesn’t do anybody any favors.
Israel garnered a reputation for giving safe harbor to legally spurious businesses like NSO Group.
Mostly due to genocide
Israel is not an ethnicity. They still have 25% Arab Israelis- a leftover from the days when the founders were still building a secular European style country.
They treat them as second class ofcourse. And it is essentially a manageable minority- they are politically sidelined in the Knesset.
Sam Altman is Jewish, but he isn’t Israeli.
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 an 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).
Interesting, where did you hear about this?
https://www.calcalistech.com/ctechnews/article/hjggcekq11g
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.
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.
They very likely will continue being cloud-agnostic, just like they did with Mandiant Consulting.
Google has quite a bit of support for other clouds already. The managed Kubernetes in Gcloud can run workloads on other clouds, for example.
They all pretty much support cloud agnostic WIF any which way at this point. With that out of the way, the rest gets easier.
Are they going to call it G-Wiz?
hopefully not Gizz
Maybe WiG?
wAIz would be confusing to me
haha this is the thread i didn't know i came here for
5 Years later - "Google to shut down Wiz"
"Google CEO Mr. Gemini to shut down Wiz, execute employees - stopped by heroic employee!"
This is the way
Getting old is seeing every single successful platform be bought out by one of the big ones.
theres a famous painting about this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_Devouring_His_Son
That, but in Corporate Memphis tech-company art style
https://jemima.design.blog/2021/02/08/generic-tech-company-a...
It’s beautiful
“Corporate Memphis tech style” is funny because it’s colloquially known as “globohomo”. Not homophobic, btw, think “homogenous”
> successful platform be bought out by one of the big ones.
everything has a price.
Joins the graveyard in 6 months tops
I was part of the mandiant acquisition, and half of us were laid off a year after we joined Google. Many of the remainding mandiant members were let go in random 'org changes' layoffs afterwards. Let's see if they treat Wiz any differently.
The cynic in me says it will join the graveyard after the acquisition depreciates or it does not bring in as much money as someone at Google will think it should.
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.
we don't need to be pessimistic about every other thing.
When it comes to Google it’s not being pessimistic, it’s just being realistic.
Maybe for most of their acquisitions (but I don’t know). But they do get acquisitions right: YouTube, android, double click, Waze…
The majority (all, I'd say) of those are 15 years (and more) in the past by now. Not sure about Waze, well, looks like I was wrong, they were only acquired in 2013, so it's "only" 13 years in the past for them.
And more relevant, Mandiant.
Or Apigee. Or Looker. These comments are tiring.
The best of them all.
Edit: meant gmaps
Gmail was an acquisition? I thought it was internal? I remember them launching as an invite only (how i got mine) and it went from there. What is the story?
Its boring though?
Pessimism is so lame and uninteresting for discussions
[dead]
Are you not entertained?
6 months is even generous and optimistic
This is such BS… Google also bought YouTube for a bargain price early on… and that is far from the only successful purchase that Google has had
https://killedbygoogle.com/
You're right, I'm giving it 5 years
After alphabet demoted waze from being an independent company and turned it into part of google's overall maps organization, alphabet needed another israeli company to take over the W spot.
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
Which is basically a way to do React without it being React
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
What is that animation of the cloud on their home page, tapping and blocking a cloud
I don't know, but it makes me uncomfortable
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.
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.
> Luck (primarily)
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?
Luck here isn't referring to some invisible dice roll whose randomness can not be explained or is just a correlation (like no rain on your wedding day would be), it's refers to variables that the person can not influence. Being born into a rich family is lucky for that baby, and the baby can't have done anything about it.
Connections... It was always like this..
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
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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.
Thiel is not an idiot.
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.
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
So are drug dealers
Google is a public company so in some way they have gone public.
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.
> 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".
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.
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.
> In most cases an IPO isn't worth it for founders because an IPO means you lose operational control.
That's also true of an acquisition. Even more true of an acquisition, I'd say.
Yes, but a founder deciding to be acquired means they wish to stop having operational control and intend to cash out and exit.
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.
> 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?
I would assume VC's are dominantly US-based, and US-based VC's tend to be able to weather the landscape of American markets better than foreigners.
Partially. The issue is capital - even Wiz largely raised thanks to Sequoia, Insight Partners, and Index Ventures. American funds are much larger and are able to finance later stage rounds. Most Israeli VC funds end up financing earlier rounds and can't neccesarily participate in later rounds and thus have an incentive to exit earlier.
Maybe, or Wiz will suddenly appear on the graveyard just because reasons? Who knows :)
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.
As a cybersecurity guy...
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.
Nope. Darktrace is crap verging on fraud. Wiz actually solves tangible CSPM and runtime issues.
Can you give an example? Because I'm currently unable to understand the point of this product.
>>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.
Wiz got "unconditional" approval from the EU. I think this was the last step holding up the acquisition.
https://www.reuters.com/world/google-secures-eu-antitrust-ap...
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.
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
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
Make it easy to use google cloud and plug into google ai
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".
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.
Despite commenting on this literally five seconds ago in the sibling comment, I hadn't made the connection that if "vav" is V, then using "vav vav" is like "VV" which is like "W". I wonder if this is a real thing.
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.
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?
It's pronounced the same as in English. Wiz, Waze, Wix. It's written with "double vav" in Hebrew, not just a single vav which would make it read as Viz.
Yes, but it’s fair to say that this is a foreign language vowel even though we do not have problem to pronounce
tysm
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
How am I supposed to feel about this news? I don't know, sometimes I just don't understand.
Didn’t this happen a long time ago?
It was announced almost a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518
But it was subject to regulatory approval, that's been completed now.
Wasn't this acquisition just a bit money laundering operation from Israel?
We'll never know but it's quite likely that is the case: https://updates.techforpalestine.org/wiz-and-google-the-deal...
Nope, but you might want to check your sources if that's what you've been told.
This is starting to look like the emperors new clothes.
Congrats!
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 mean, good on the cofunders, they will never see that much money again in their lives.
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.
> to help every organization protect everything they build and run.
> 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.
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.
why do this when they sold the domain business to squarespace?
Any bets on when it hits https://killedbygoogle.com/ ?
I give it 5 years
This is the announcement of the completion of an acquisition that began a year ago.
Google to buy Wiz for $32B - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518 - March 2025 (845 comments)
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. ;)
Extra shade thrown at MoltBook (listed first) which was recently acq by Meta.
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I thought it was about home automation at first https://www.wizconnected.com/
Same--I was worried my lightbulbs might be deprecated!
As I mentioned at the time, the Wiz acquisition is the largest transfer of Israeli intelligence operatives into Big Tech in history.
Here's my full thread on it: https://x.com/paulbiggar/status/1902329587050148068
lol Let me tell you something even more worrying, Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft already have larger engineering centers in Israel than most of Europe.
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
Oy vey!
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.
This guy has quite a history, no surprise. Check his twitter.
Link doesn't work
It seems to be working for me.
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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.
Great company, bad name. Pretty sure the company name was chosen by a non-native English speaker since it's an Israeli company after all.
Sort of like Wix... Wix also an Israeli company with an odd sounding name (although better then Wiz).
What's wrong with the name Wiz?
Nothing wrong with Google taking a Wiz
It makes me think of the 1978 movie "The Wiz" starring Diana Ross, Michael Jackson, and Richard Pryor. Despite the big stars, it isn't generally regarded as a very good movie. Maybe updating "The Wizard of Oz" with disco music wasn't a good idea after all.
That movie was based on the stage musical, FWIW.
I actually like the concept behind it. It just doesn't have "this is going to be a success" vibes.
Getting your cloud 'wiz wit' in Philadelphia would mean having melted cheese on it.
Whizz is onomatopoeia (well, ish) for urinating in English
And "Witz" means "joke" in german.
Yeah, but it’s pronounced differently. Germans are bad at English pronunciation. A couple of examples: BBQ ~> „barbicue”, Pampers ~> „pempas”.
Wichs also means ejaculate. Wix even had an ad where they made fun on “wichser” (Masturbator) on German TV.
Billy Whizz is rhyming slang for Jimmy Riddle.
Nothing because Nobody Beats the Wiz.
I’m the wiz, I’m the wiz! And noooooobody beats me!!!