A lot has been written over the past few days about Google’s acquisition of Wiz for $32 billion. Given its historic scale — the largest cybersecurity acquisition ever — I feel compelled to share a few personal reflections. Not because I was on the inside, but because I had the rare opportunity to witness Wiz’s trajectory from Day 1, while at AWS.
For context, I joined the AWS Startups team in 2020, just a couple of months before Wiz was founded. From that point forward, my journey in the cloud and cybersecurity space became deeply tied to theirs. I had the privilege of engaging with the company’s leadership, working alongside their teams, and witnessing their meteoric rise from the sidelines. What follows is not a technical analysis, nor a market breakdown — but rather a personal reflection on what makes Wiz, well… magical.
The Origins: A Track Record of Outpacing the Industry
Wiz’s founding team — Assaf, Ami, Roy, and Yinon — had already achieved the kind of success most entrepreneurs can only dream of. They previously founded Adallom, which was acquired by Microsoft just three years after its inception. At the time, none of them had turned 30.
But Microsoft didn’t just acquire Adallom’s product. They entrusted its founders with building and leading the company’s Security R&D efforts in Israel. Assaf became General Manager of Microsoft Israel, and the team was given a blank canvas to rethink Microsoft’s entire security posture — at a time when Microsoft Security was still largely on-premise, legacy-driven, and generating under $3B in annual revenue.
Fast forward a few years, and Microsoft is now the world’s largest cybersecurity vendor, with over $20B in ARR — much of that growth driven by the very cloud-native thinking that the Adallom team brought with them. That was not a coincidence.
Culture Clash — and Culture Shift
I’ve heard many stories about those early post-acquisition days at Microsoft — a kind of culture clash between the “old guard” and the scrappy, fast-moving Adallom team. The newcomers brought a very different energy: merit-based, anti-status-quo, and unapologetically fun.
That mindset — one that celebrates excellence, talent, and speed over hierarchy or politics — didn’t just make Microsoft Security a magnet for top-tier PMs and engineers. It created a generation of cyber leaders. Over the years, I’ve heard dozens of founders and executives tell me that their careers were launched because Assaf or someone on the team “spotted them,” and pushed them to reach their full potential and grow as leaders.
It wasn’t about titles or tenure. It was about merit — and the relentless pursuit of building great things.
Enter 2020: A Brave Leap into Uncertainty
In early 2020, despite sitting at the very top of the cyber world at Microsoft, Assaf, Ami, Roy, and Yinon decided it was time to saddle up again. After leading multi-billion-dollar P&Ls and serving thousands of enterprise customers, they fell in love with a problem that felt both urgent and unresolved: cloud security is broken.
They incorporated Wiz (originally called BeyondNetwork) in March 2020 — just as the world went into lockdown. What initially felt like a bold move quickly became a giant question mark. Why leave cushy, high-impact jobs in the middle of a global crisis?
But like the best problem-solvers, they embraced the chaos. With every CISO and executive suddenly working from home — and surprisingly available for a Zoom call — they leaned in. Thanks to Cyberstarts’ Sunrise process, they ran a blitz of over 150 CISO conversations in just a few weeks.
This is where Wiz began to shine.
Wiz is arguably best-in-class when it comes to turning customer voice into product. Their speed of iteration, relentless product-customer feedback loop, and rapid fine-tuning allowed them to hit product-market fit in record time. All of this while defining a new market category — and just as digital transformation was accelerating at unprecedented speed due to COVID.
Blitz Mode: The Relentless Rise
From that point on, Wiz became unstoppable.
They captured the hearts and minds of Fortune 500 CISOs and made security feel not just robust, but elegant. With a bold product vision and an uncompromising focus on execution, they didn’t just ride the wave of cloud transformation — they led it.
It was a blitz. Wiz broke every record in the book — including the fastest time to $100M in ARR. From the sidelines, it was nothing short of astonishing to watch. They always wanted more, took on bigger and riskier challenges, and embraced responsibility at a pace most startups would never dare.
I remember year after year at AWS re:Invent: they were everywhere. Crushing their numbers, landing massive Marketplace deals, expanding their cloud footprint, grabbing prime speaking slots, catching the attention of AWS leadership at the highest levels. They were — and still are — insatiable.
But here’s what stood out the most: their competitive fire was matched only by their refusal to compromise on quality. Whether it was the people they hired, the product they shipped, or the values they upheld — it always came back to excellence. And somehow, despite their meteoric rise, they remained grounded. Year after year, they still felt like the same people. The same company. Just hungrier, sharper, and more driven.
They worked relentlessly to stay ahead — to push forward and crush any illusion that building or competing with Wiz was going to be easy.
They didn’t just win. They did it their way. 🎵
A Source of Pride — and Light
That’s what makes me so incredibly proud of this team and this milestone. We all, in Israel, feel beyond proud of what Wiz’s resounding success.
It’s fair to say the last few years in Israel have been deeply challenging. And yet, through it all, Wiz has remained unwavering — committed to winning amidst adversity, to shining a light in dark times, and to never losing sight of what truly matters: our hostages, our democracy, our country.
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