Alphabet in Talks to Buy Cloud Security Firm Wiz for $33B | Hacker News Reader

Alphabet in Talks to Buy Cloud Security Firm Wiz for $33B

bloomberg.com

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.

You wonder if Wiz is having second thoughts about IPO just as we go into recession

What recession?

> What recession?

There are increasing signals of an upcoming recession, but with Trump's unpredictability there is a lot of uncertainty...

https://www.nbcnews.com/data-graphics/recession-warning-sign...

An article like this gets published a few times a year, every year in the last 50 years. Some years it comes true!

Maybe anti-trust concerns plus a massively more amenable administration and DOJ? Biden + big tech was always an uneasy marriage at best.

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

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.

They used to acquire/acquihire a ton of smaller startups, but that stopped for the past 4 years due to a different FTC.

It always looks like they don’t know what to do with the products after acquisition.

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.

Certainly not. Doubleclick is much of the backbone of google advertising to this day.

Picasa (Lifescape) became Google Photos

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.

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.

> 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.

Wiz is an incredible product that I was hoping would go public and become a fairly independent powerhouse

How hard is to create company like Wiz?

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

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.

Very difficult. There's a reason why they're worth this much to Google.

Instead it'll get shut down, such is the Google/Alphabet way.

That's $10B more than they offered last year. Not bad if you're holding Wiz shares.

https://archive.ph/w7YYW

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?

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.

As a total outsider, what makes Wiz so valuable? Why was the company as successful as it was?

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.

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

If they dont call it G-Wiz afterwords i'm disappointed in google's culture.

What will they do with it and why do they want it so badly?

GCP.

There’s been quite a few security related acquisitions in GCP. Someone must believe it to be their edge.

gosh, they should fix their UI first. 8GB of RAM while trying to create new API key is not cool.

Add it to Google cloud to compete with Microsoft.

Microsoft does have really compelling offering from management PoV. They have Identity Provider, endpoint protection, cloud policy scanning, whole mess of 365 stuff along side their cloud. GCP is probably losing deals to that story.

As Azure Ops person, it’s poorly integrated story sometimes but good story is good story.

GCP doesn't lose deals to Microsoft because of a lack of security offerings. They lose because Microsoft has deep, rich ties to most big corps in the US and Europe.

When I worked for a software company that could be deployed on every cloud (and across multiple for the same client), I was shocked at the demand for Azure, even back when they were way behind AWS and GCP in terms of offerings.

Alphabet/Google have GCP, VirusTotal, Chronicle, and Mandiant under their umbrella already.

The Chrome sale will pay for something like this it seems.

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