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nsoonhui · 5 months ago
Any circumstances change that prompted Alphabet and Wiz to redo the deal?

I am not aware of what are the exact roadblocks that stopped the deal last year, and it isn't clear from the article that they have been removed.

23 billion is already a huge sum, so more money than that isn't likely to cause a change of heart, I guess.

sylens · 5 months ago
You wonder if Wiz is having second thoughts about IPO just as we go into recession
kadushka · 5 months ago
What recession?
shmatt · 5 months ago
10 Billion Dollars / 50% more value for the employees stock is a big deal though. I know this might be unheard of but I think the CEO understood the value and wanted to end up with a deal that made even later hires a life changing sum

There were a lot of haters on HN and elsewhere when he turned down $22B, let’s see others demand 50% higher valuation in front of the alphabet board and actually get it. He literally just believed in the product

I mean even now this thread is slowly filling up with conspiracy theories on how they agreed to 50% MORE money only because they’re about to crash. Come on…

They wanted a respectful offer from Google, they didn’t get one, now they got one. The fact the companies kept talking after the last round of press shows that there is substance in the product

Imagine you just smeared Google in the global media, and they call you the next day trying to get back together

hyperbovine · 5 months ago
Maybe anti-trust concerns plus a massively more amenable administration and DOJ? Biden + big tech was always an uneasy marriage at best.
noleary · 5 months ago
This spurred me to look up a list of Google/Alphabet's historical acquisitions.

I remembered that YouTube was M&A, of course, but I'd forgotten all about some other companies that Alphabet bought over the years:

* Motorola

* Nest

* DoubleClick

* FitBit

* Waze

* DeepMind

* Boston Dynamics

Other things I totally forgot existed, like Songza and Picnik, wound up under Alphabet at some point.

For some reason, Alphabet doesn't intuitively feel like a very acquisitive company, but they clearly are very active.

manquer · 5 months ago
They are not ? Most of your references are more than a decade ago, (alongside Apple) compared to peers like Microsoft they are very much do not have acquisition culture .

Mandiant is only large acquisition in the last 10 years > $1B which is very small stakes in todays VC ecosystem.

Compare that to MS they have bought GitHub, LinkedIn, Activison, Nuance, Zenimax all well over $5B . Combined these alone is $100-120B, MS has also done plenty of mid budget buys too.

Even more B2B/traditional tech like IBM (redhat, Hashicorp etc) or salesforce have been more active too.

ipsum2 · 5 months ago
They used to acquire/acquihire a ton of smaller startups, but that stopped for the past 4 years due to a different FTC.
42lux · 5 months ago
It always looks like they don’t know what to do with the products after acquisition.
islewis · 5 months ago
It's because the motivation for these acquisitions doesn't have much to do with product. It's just a way to extinguish outside talent and innovation that could disrupt down the road.
jonny_eh · 5 months ago
Picasa (Lifescape) became Google Photos
shanemhansen · 5 months ago
Don't forget:

Writely: Google didn't make Google docs.

Android: Google didn't make Android.

Alphabet is great at marketing themselves as makers. But what they really excel at is finding great ideas in the wild and making them mediocre.

mschuster91 · 5 months ago
> Alphabet is great at marketing themselves as makers. But what they really excel at is finding great ideas in the wild and making them mediocre.

Mediocre for users that is. For the stock price, quite the contrary. $GOOG has about tripled in market cap in five years (start 2020: 50 USD, today 166 USD).

That is why acquisitions at this scale should be banned, period, no exceptions, and existing megacorps be broken up. Android has gotten so large and dominant, not even Amazon can run their own OS any more, much less any truly FOSS alternative, and there's no market pressure at all that would force Google to combat shit like deceptive ads in Play Store games. Google Search has gone utterly down the drain in usability but again, there's barely any competitor left and it's unviable to start one. Google Chrome still is the fastest browser around, its engine powering everything but Safari and Firefox, and the latter is all but gone in market share because again, Google's cash coffers fund development with which no one can compete.

A free market actually requires some sort of regulation to make sure competitive pressure can exist, and the behemoths are so large that effects of scale and network / vertical integration exert a completely unhealthy pressure on both users and the few suppliers that remain.

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sylens · 5 months ago
Wiz is an incredible product that I was hoping would go public and become a fairly independent powerhouse
magundu · 5 months ago
How hard is to create company like Wiz?
sylens · 5 months ago
If you haven’t used it I would try and kick the tires through your company. It’s a pretty powerful tool to put multiple cloud providers under a single pane of glass and normalize security terminology across them. And that’s before you get into the automations, the remediation, the optional Code and Defend add-ons, and more
nunez · 5 months ago
Very very hard

There are many companies trying to imitate them but fail either on design, performance, scalability or some combination of the three.

Also, Wiz is a marketing and sales MACHINE.

nunez · 5 months ago
Very difficult. There's a reason why they're worth this much to Google.
esskay · 5 months ago
Instead it'll get shut down, such is the Google/Alphabet way.
redeux · 5 months ago
That's $10B more than they offered last year. Not bad if you're holding Wiz shares.
alberth · 5 months ago
For those that have used Wiz, what makes it so great?

It's one of the fastest growing enterprise saas company ever in history.

But why?

gpi · 5 months ago
It covers a lot of ground and integrates with everything under the sun. Once you let the tool loose you need to hire a team to perform the actual discoveries and remediations.
8f2ab37a-ed6c · 5 months ago
As a total outsider, what makes Wiz so valuable? Why was the company as successful as it was?
inhumantsar · 5 months ago
Think sensor fusion for all the hardware and software in your company funneled into a great UI that manages to balance ease of use, intelligent automation, and powerful searching/graphing capabilities.

We trialed it at my last company. It managed to impress the CEO and my security team at the same time for vastly different reasons.

bane · 5 months ago
This sounds like the same sort of stuff Palantir has been up to. https://www.palantir.com/warpspeed/

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