It's a pity going public isn't worth it anymore.

The system working as intended.

“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.

A combination of being in the right place at the right time and connections to people with money

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.

Then Google will buy them too.

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

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.

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.

Interesting, why is this more true of Israeli VC's as opposed to VC's in other markets?

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.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43399077

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41092039

Is that the kind of integration you are refering to?

If they don’t, they risk destroying the very advantage that made Wiz valuable in the first place.

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.

      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

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Letter_frequency

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I wonder if there are antitrust lawyers watching this closely. Would be really interesting to get their perspective on this.

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...

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.

Google Security Center Wiz Google Agentic Wiz Security

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

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GP2X_Wiz

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

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.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43398518