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Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

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Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#201

Post by ignoramous »

teractiveodular wrote: post #61
ssl-3 wrote: post #34

I feel like I am uninformed. Can someone provide some background? Who in the fuck is Wiz, and why in the fuck might anyone think that they're worth 11 figures?

Instead of old-school installing agents to run on your VMs Crowdstrike style, with all the maintenance, performance and crash-the-world risks that entails, with Wiz you can clone your EBS volumes and examine them for vulnerabilities at your leisure. It's a neat party trick, but I'm also not convinced it's worth 11 figures.

> It's a neat party trick, but I'm also not convinced it's worth 11 figures.

Depends on just how many CISOs they can sell anything to (iow, whether Gili Raanan has invested or not): https://www.theinformation.com/articles/how-a-former-sequoia...

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#202

Post by sailingparrot »

Centigonal wrote: post #13

Founded in 2020, with a $23B valuation, aiming for $1B ARR? CloudFlare is worth $26B and had ~$1.3B revenue last year. Something's fishy here.

Valuations have always been more about potential than about current state in startup world. Wiz is 4 years old and already at $350M ARR, that's a meteoritic rise.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#203

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

taspeotis wrote: post #91
daghamm wrote: post #86

Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? It's not like Google is after they client list, they would probably limit them to Google services after acquisition anyway.

> Can someone explain to me how a young security company with few employees can be worth millions? I assume you meant to say billions, since this is a $23B offer they turned down. If I had to positive spin on the valuation: it's chump change if Wiz (who seem to be a very capable cybersecurity firm) are able to integrate themselves deeply into Google's infrastructure and secure it up the wazoo, since a 5% cost to Goog…

> cf. Crowdstrike's share price after some bad news: they are down 30% over the last five days.

The stock is recovering. Traders have short memory. By the end of the year, it'll probably be $400 unless there's a huge class action against them that starts looking really bad for them.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#204

Post by 0cf8612b2e1e »

danpalmer wrote: post #87
generic92034 wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition I bet those people rarely get promoted for preventing an acquisition, though. Probably that is why we see so many crazy acquisitions, in general.

At the SVP level, sure, but at the IC level, I doubt any accountant gets promoted for saying "looks fine", whereas highlighting details that superiors can use to make a decision like this might be something that gets you promoted. This is a misunderstanding I think many non-googlers have, thinking people only get promoted for launches (or in this case acquisitions). It's more nuanced than that: people get promoted fo…

If only that were the case. I can think of many instances where someone pushing for a bad deal/acquisition/product were rewarded for the visible outcome. Killing a bad idea is incredibly valuable, but I am struggling to think of an instance where that was used to justify kudos. Especially if you are the one who torpedoes a big wigs initiative.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#205

Post by is_true »

oceanplexian wrote: post #24
Centigonal wrote: post #13

Founded in 2020, with a $23B valuation, aiming for $1B ARR? CloudFlare is worth $26B and had ~$1.3B revenue last year. Something's fishy here.

Look at their financials, CloudFlare might be popular among the HN crowd but the stock is massively overvalued. At the end of the day they are a commodity CDN that somehow can’t run a profitable business.

They have a lot of products.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#206

Post by WrongAssumption »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #78
dilyevsky wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did look at their financials - 77% gross margin with 30% revenue growth. Much higher than “commodity cdn” can command. If they cut marketing and r&d they’d be bagging half a b a year in profit but they are investing in growth as they should because it’s working

Cloud flare will still be the internet in ten years, while Amazon will just be Walmart,

Strange take on AWS.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#207

Post by flowheel »

glandium wrote: post #144

I was like "how the f* is a website builder possibly worth $23B" and then I realized Wiz is not Wix. And then I realized Wix has a market capitalization of $9B, and I'm still WTF.

Hahaha you'd be surprised how much demand there is out there. Wix's market cap is $10b +/-

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#208

Post by fatnoah »

generic92034 wrote: post #75
danpalmer wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

While I don't have any comment on this instance, in general I think it's easier to hype the public markets who have limited information than it is to type a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition, even if ultimately the latter is still a case of public market valuation through the acquiring public company. This is particularly true in the current age of extremely hype driven retail investing.

> a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition I bet those people rarely get promoted for preventing an acquisition, though. Probably that is why we see so many crazy acquisitions, in general.

> a bunch of people doing due diligence on an acquisition

Granted, it was nowhere near this scale, but I've gone through this process as the head of Engineering for the company being acquired. At that point, the business had already decided to acquire, so the process felt more about finding any red flags and/or identifying reasons to adjust the price.

For the process itself, the company looked at nearly everything over the course of a few months. Every detail of finances, sales, tech, operations, etc. was scrutinized, culminating with 16 hours (4 for business and 12 for tech/ops) over two days of standing in front of a room with 30 people.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#209

Post by neurotixz »

thegrizzlyking wrote: post #79

Most likely reason is FTC. Wiz integrates with big 4 cloud providers. No way FTC is allowing Google to take control. JD Vance's nomination and support for current FTC chair(Lina Khan) doesn't help. Current FTC is good(personal opinion) from anti trust point of view but maybe bad for startup exits[0]. [0] https://x.com/ID_AA_Carmack/status/1812978264484552987

Wiz has tons of competitors, and Microsoft is one of them, so are Palo Alto Networks, Tenable, Crowstrike, SentinelOne, etc... Wiz is definately a leader but are in no way a monopoly, so I do not see this as an FTC play to stop the deal.

Re: Google-Wiz deal fizzles out, company will pursue IPO

#210

Post by [deleted] »

krembo wrote: post #187
glandium wrote: post #144

I was like "how the f* is a website builder possibly worth $23B" and then I realized Wiz is not Wix. And then I realized Wix has a market capitalization of $9B, and I'm still WTF.

Fun fact: both founded by Israelis and have their R&D centers in the country.

[deleted]
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