[ds]

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 shareholder and they went through with it.

Something very strange is going on with Wiz. My gut tells me if they ever IPO to go big on puts.

[dboreham]

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.

[heraldgeezer]

Crowdstrike is enterprise only.

Do you know of Active Directory? Most have no idea, even though it is a Windows Server feature from 2000.

Some will live a life and even work not knowing.

[dingaling]

AD is fairly well known due to its relationship with LDAP and Kerberos.

Samba can act as an AD DC.

[RandomThoughts3]

AD is incredibly more popular than Kerberos despite part of it using the protocole. Microsoft is everywhere in the corporate world and most people know of AD but have never heard of neither LDAP nor Kerberos.

And to be honest, it's fairly understandable. AD manages to be somewhat turnkey while doing the same thing on Linux systems is a major pain.

[ykonstant]

What is the usual way of doing this on Linux systems?

[RandomThoughts3]

OpenLDAP and SSSD via PAM. It’s - well - let’s leave it at not very nice to put in place. It does the job once there however.

I am fairly convinced that Redhat, Novel and Oracle probably have a nice interface on top of it all to make it manageable and therefore have a vested interested in keeping it as awful as possible for the rest of the world.

[bombcar]

Every time I've ventured into it I ended up using Samba to pretend to be Active Directory vs LDAP + Kerberos ...

[forrestthewoods]

I don't know what Active Directory, LDAP, Kerberos, or AD DC are. I've at least heard of Active Directory though! The programming industry is vast. I've never touched webdev so I don't know countless things that most programmers know.

[heraldgeezer]

Best part is, Active Directory, is not webdev related at all. :)

[teqsun]

Active Directory, is not webdev related at all.

If you work on internal company systems in a Microsoft environment it often can be.

[gregors]

It can be when you're supporting AD authentication on an intranet site. I did a bunch of these for government type web apps. Not the most fun to be sure.

[ilrwbwrkhv]

Yup the world is big and even though we think we have heard stuff, there are more things beyond that. For example, I know a dev who makes mobile apps and clears 500_000 / month in profit and yet their app isn't really "popular". It is crazy.

[exikyut]

Huh, cool.

What sector is the app in, what are some other interesting (non-identifying) aspects of the app that stand in contrast to revenue? Is that in ads, or does the app have in-app purchases et al?

[xenospn]

The only way to make that much of money is with dating apps, IMHO. There’s a million out there and some of them make really good money in certain niches.

[gustavorg]

You are going to say what the app is, right? right?

[supportengineer]

Through sales, subscriptions, or ads?

[rob74]

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...

[kuzmanov]

This is exactly how I felt as a shareholder. There is no real reason to pay this much and it seems like Google is the one that walked away from the deal.

[pjc50]

Shareholder in Wiz, or Crowdstrike?

[nar001]

Google wasn't trying to buy Crowdstrike, so Wiz

[underdeserver]

Eh, more likely OP is a shareholder of Alphabet.

[xyst]

A company built during the pandemic, likely peaked following the Solar Winds aftermath.

yup, overvalued

[danpalmer]

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.

[generic92034]

> 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.

[fatnoah]

> 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.

[danpalmer]

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 for impact and while launches are one obvious form, you can sell pretty much anything useful as impact if you can show how it's useful. In the case of M&A, avoiding a bad acquisition, if you can justify it, would be impact.

[0cf8612b2e1e]

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.

[xmprt]

I think the argument is that it's much easier to show impact when you go with the flow and launch a product or complete an acquisition no matter how shitty. It's a lot harder to get promoted for saying that you need to delay launch by 6 months because of some metrics or details even if that would eventually prove to be the right decision.

[grogenaut]

Having done compartmentalized (I wasn't on the team acquiring) technical due diligence two times, my job had nothing to do with if the acquisition was a good idea or not. My job was to vet if they had what they were saying they had or if it was all smoke and mirrors. As others have said, the decision was already made to buy them, I was just vetting that we were buying what we thought we were buying. I also would look for the smouldering tech debt and cost out moving to our tech platforms (AWS). And I'd answer risk but not IP questions for the acquiring manager.

The only way I'd tank a deal was by identifying that it was in fact smoke and mirrors.

[qaq]

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

[solatic]

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 other competitors.

[thriftwy]

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.

[pjc50]

I think this is just a representation of where the money is in the world. Two things:

- stocks are called stocks for a reason, they're not flows. $60bn is effectively an estimate of all future profits of the company over its lifetime

- Crowdstrike generates a return by charging enterprises huge amounts of money to feel secure and tick security boxes (Actual security is questionable). Big enterprises have a lot of money to waste, but they feel they're getting a return on it

- hardly anyone outside Ukraine gets a specific return from backing Ukraine. The same goes for all sorts of other worthy projects of the "end world hunger" kind - there's huge benefits, but not to the people actually spending the money.

[falcor84]

>stocks are called stocks for a reason, they're not flows

Indeed, and of course we have Kalecki's famous quip that economics is "the science of confusing stocks with flows"

[qaq]

Pretending that being geopolitical superpower has no direct economic benefits is just silly. If USD lost the status of world's reserve currency it would have pretty catastrophic consequences for US economy.

[pjc50]

How do I, as an individual investor, capture the return of sending a shell to Ukraine?

> If USD lost the status of world's reserve currency it would have pretty catastrophic consequences for US economy

.. but for everyone at once. Collective action problem. You've argued why it's in the interest of the US government to tax people and send shells to Ukraine, but this is not an argument for Blackrock to divert VC funding to individual armored brigades.

[qaq]

It's hard to make a leap from war to company valuation. Also Ukraine support is highly inflated number. If say Ukraine gets supplied with an old design MLRS rockets from US that was slated to be replaced in a few years and had very limited shelf life remaining the number counted is not the market cost of that old rocket (which would be a few 100K) but the 3 mil new top of the line replacement thing that US is producing for itself and Ukraine will never see.

[sofixa]

Crowdstrike does endpoint security (user's PCs and servers too for checkbox ticking reasons).

Wiz does cloud security. The same thing as Crowdstrike, but runs in your cloud environment (AWS/GCP/Azure) to detect issues there.

Different customers, different profiles, different costs and prices.

[thriftwy]

I just don't see why that should have $23B market cap as opposed to $230M. A small team can challenge them with similar product.

[wrsh07]

Because they're making 500mm arr

At the very least I would expect to see a 5 billion market cap, and if their growth rate is good (4 year old company, seems to be) it should be higher than that

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-startup-wiz-went-from-zero-to-a...

[hello_moto]

Throw ... CRWD into that pool of Cloud workload competitor...

https://www.crowdstrike.com/platform/cloud-security/cwpp/

That BSOD also impacting instances of Windows in AWS, Azure, and GCP.

[borski]

Wiz does not do endpoint security. Different products entirely.

[qaq]

They certainly have resources to expand into that if needed

[borski]

It is an entirely different problem with almost nothing in common with their existing product, and there are a ton of incumbents, some of whom are even quite good (Carbon Black, SentinelOne, etc)

[qaq]

There were quite a few of those when CrowdStrike entered there is always room there.

[borski]

You’re trying to prove a point with no point. Yes, anyone can build anything. There is always room for more contenders when there are existing incumbents. The sky is still blue, and the grass is still green.

But it would make no sense for Wiz to do that, as they don’t have any “secret sauce” as it comes to endpoint security. They haven’t solved the problems that took Crowdstrike down.

It is not in their wheelhouse. It would be a waste of money and time.

Could they? Sure. Should they? Definitely not. It’s a commoditized space at this point, unless they have some new ideas which, if they did, they’d have already begun discussing.

Carbon Black did well because it turned endpoint security on its head. Not because it was a “better AV”

My $.02

[toomuchtodo]

They’d be competing with Crowdstrike, SentinelOne, Microsoft Defender, and Trend Micro not to mention existing CNAPP/CSPM offerings that have an agent for cloud runtime security as well as other cloud runtime security focused startups.

Adding a runtime security and EDR offering is not going to get them to a $23B valuation.

[qaq]

Sure and many others but outside of CrowdStrike most are not very competitive and being a fresh entry has it's benefits.

[borski]

“Fresh” is the key word. You need to have fresh ideas, and I am certain Wiz doesn’t, as it relates to endpoint security.

I agree Crowdstrike sucks. I’ve been beating that drum for the better part of a decade.

Building a “new crowdstrike” by a different name won’t win.

[fullspectrumdev]

Endpoint is an incredibly crowded market, difficult to break into unless you really have a solid USP.

[deycallmeajay]

Not yet…

[chatmasta]

They’ve had some really nice writeups but I always thought they were your generic security firm doing some bug hunting. Recently I happened upon their domain submissions to HN and saw they raised $1b+ and was like wtf? What do they actually do? I mean what are their products that people pay for?

Maybe there are obvious answers to these questions, but if a company is worth $23bn I’d expect that as somebody in the industry, I could answer them without doing in depth research.

This is exactly the kind of gut feeling of “something’s off” that I’ve learned to pay attention to.

[walterbell]

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 cloud log threat detection and sensitive data detection. They've basically pushed what you can do without an agent to the limit.

[chatmasta]

> clones EBS volumes and scans them on their infrastructure

Crowdstrike: “you just install a kernel module with ring zero access and we’ll make sure you’re protected”

Wiz: “hold my Red Bull…”

[golemiprague]

From the explanation here it sounds completely opposite concept, they download the server and check it rather than doing the checks on production environment

[chatmasta]

Yeah, I was thinking more about the risk of data leaks.

[pwdisswordfishd]

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.

[nshelly]

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.

[qeternity]

You would need an agent to do this. Cloning EBS won’t dump memory.

[stefan_]

The people who have /dev/mem and run this garbage must form a complete overlapping circle.

[wrsh07]

Where are you getting >60x??

> For Wiz, a $23 billion sale price was irresistible. Google would value the startup at 46 times the $500 million in annual recurring revenue it currently generates, a person familiar with the matter said.

https://www.wsj.com/tech/how-startup-wiz-went-from-zero-to-a...

I'm very curious about what due diligence found, but we aren't likely to get more info until we see their s-1

[helsinkiandrew]

> Far more likely is Google was not willing to complete the deal and was pulling the plug after looking at internal data

Wouldn't it be more likely that they would have lowered their offer after seeing the internal data - perhaps so much that Wiz would certainly walk away.

[raldi]

Wouldn't they be giving up a huge breakup fee if that were the case?

[sulam]

No, breakup fees are post term sheet.

[vlovich123]

Maybe not if the breakup fee is forfeited if due diligence reveals fraud? Not sure.

[moandcompany]

The Groupon of 2024?