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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

#91

Post by taspeotis »

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 Google's share price for reputational damage caused by GCP getting r00ted would be ... 5% of Google's 2.25T market cap ... $112.5B.

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

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

#93

Post by thriftwy »

solatic wrote: post #81
qaq wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well realistically if they have a chance to take on Crowdstrike they might not be wrong to walk away.

On the one hand, even with the post-crash dip, CRWD has a $60.9 billion market cap, there's certainly marketshare to be taken from them. On the other hand, Wiz doesn't have an endpoint protection product (which is what failed for CRWD). They'd have to build one from scratch, which requires dedicated talent (engineers with kernel experience) that they might not have. If anyone is going after CRWD it'll be one of their…

These numbers sound like a complete out of world fantasy to me. CRWD has a product that the user is not going to notice, best case. Now you said Wiz doesn't even have that one (what does it have then?)

And their valuation is on par with the whole annually Western support of Ukraine. A country at war and with 30M people in it. That for some completely invisible product.

It is also 17 millions of these most expensive brand new 155m artillery shells.

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

#94

Post by rob74 »

dboreham wrote: post #19
ds wrote: post #7

Far more likely is Google was not willing to complete the deal and was pulling the plug after looking at internal data. Wiz, fearing the bad press of Google backing out rushes to tell journalists that THEY are walking away because they are worth more. Wiz's valuation is insane. Most people havent even heard of them. I think it was a > 60x ARR multiple on this deal. Id actually be kinda pissed if I was a google shareh…

Add me to the haven't heard of them list. Mind you I almost hadn't heard of Crowdstrike and they managed to brick the world.

I hadn't heard of either Wiz or Crowdstrike before... while reading the article I was thinking "$23B? Probably AI! And called Wiz? Yeah, must be AI...". Turns out I was wrong after all...

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

#95

Post by shmatt »

I have to take the other side than most comments here. Most of the coverage about the Wiz offer called out that this was an odd way for them to end up in - as the founders openly talked about waiting for that $1b ARR since almost day one

To me it feels like Google was trying to put pressure on employees and any other non board option holders. There were dozens of articles and analysis of exactly bow many new millionaires / billionaires will be minted after the sale in Israel

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

#96

Post by nshelly »

pwdisswordfishd wrote: post #77
walterbell wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

https://old.reddit.com/r/cybersecurity/comments/1c1s9r2/wiz_... > Wiz combines a graph search for asset management with agentless vuln and malware scanning that clones EBS volumes and scans them on their infrastructure. That's a great combo for vuln management, but has some downsides like delays between scans and cloud costs. They have a sensor with solid detection rules, and are okay at a bunch of other stuff like c…

This sounds uselessly crippled, as it's not going to catch malware that doesn't drop anything to disk, or that adequately cleans up after itself if it does.

I would assume they could also dump memory, i.e. `/dev/mem`. Agreed they would need to also do frequent memory snapshots, but lots of malware will also run in the background waiting indefinitely, and often as the same name as common Linux processes but different hashes.

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

#97

Post by rapsey »

mirzap wrote: post #57
blindriver wrote: post #25

Lots of companies have regretted passing up on an acquisition, especially one this large and of a company this young. My bet would be that this company is making the same mistake as Yahoo, Groupon, etc.

A lot of them didn't, ie, Facebook, Google, Twitter, Netflix, Snapchat. I wonder if this rejection is related to the CrowdStrike incident. Are they expecting or already experiencing a significant influx of new clients? I'm unsure if their services overlap, just curious.

Snapchat is still not profitable and doing very poorly in the public market.
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