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Google to buy Wiz for $32B

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Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#91
post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

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

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

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

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#92
post #65

This is probably a dumb question, but what does all cash mean? Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders? What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google sh…

Part of the acquisition process is putting together a “funds flow” which is simply a model that lays out how much $ each shareholder gets and then also you collect all the wire details, etc. But anyway, it can be a bit surreal seeing how much cash will be deposited into various accounts once the deal closes

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#93

biggest Google acquisition yet or what?

Yes. The company’s previous biggest deal was its $12.5bn acquisition of Motorola Mobility in 2012, which it sold two years later for $2.9bn. [0] [0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/mar/18/google-pa...

Motorola was bought for patents to defend Android, it was a clear win.

Wiz is much harder to understand.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#96
post #65

This is probably a dumb question, but what does all cash mean? Does it literally mean that they are putting $32bn in Wiz's bank account (or probably some kind of escrow, who knows) which then gets dispersed to their shareholders? What usually happens otherwise? Would they do partly google stock, etc? And each shareholder gets some kind of multiple? (you get your N amount of Wiz shares X .72 = your number of google sh…

They say that's an all-cash purchase. So it seems that they really put $32bn in the bank account.

Ultimately they are buying the shares of all existing shareholders. Wiz tells Google who the shareholders are after all triggers of options to shares are resolved. Then Google wires each shareholder after the signatures are complete. No money should go into Wiz bank account. 10-25% of the cash is held back to make sure the company and key employees fulfill promises made as part of the transaction.

Re: Google to buy Wiz for $32B

#98
This seems like a silly and ridiculous acquisition. Surely for $32 billion almost any security technology could be replicated? You could hire several thousand best in class engineers and build whatever Wiz has in house… buying this almost makes it seem like Google has no idea how to build new innovative products, which I guess a lot of people already think.

For Instagram and WhatsApp it was the user base and growth that was being bought, which is much harder to acquire than some random B2B saas security software.

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