Wiz's $32B GTM Playbook

This is meta, but I really hate the way this post is written. It&#x27;s full of the &quot;startup cool&quot; aesthetic, which I&#x27;m really averse to.<p>The main elements of the aesthetic that I can pinpoint are things like everything being a superlative (&quot;security leaders&quot; instead of just &quot;people who work in security&quot;, &quot;legendary investors&quot; instead of just &quot;experienced&#x2F;well-known investors&quot;), the bullet format, heavy use of buzzwords when more everyday words would do, etc.<p>It comes off as trying to elicit a fake &quot;let&#x27;s all get hyped up and build unicorn moonshots wooo&quot; feeling.

&gt; Of course, in retrospect, Wiz had many key ingredients working in their favor:<p>&gt;Strong, proven founding team (Adallom founders + Microsoft Cloud Security Leadership) Great, sticky product Solving deeply felt pain point(s) Timing (founded just as the world goes remote due to COVID-19 + cloud boom) Legendary investors + network effects (Sequoia Capital, Cyberstarts, Index Ventures etc.) Lots of early funding ($480M+ within a year of emerging from stealth ) Relentless execution<p>Why is nearly half a billion in funding so far down on the list?<p>That’s probably the most important factor here

My favourite part of this was 10-15 calls a day with potential buyers, and they kept changing what they were offering until responses went from “that sounds cool” to “when can I get a PoC?” presumably without a line of code being written.<p>Having launched a couple of dead startups that started with several months of writing code first, this way definitely sounds better.

&gt; Lots of early funding ($480M+ within a year of emerging from stealth )<p>&gt; By May 2023, ARR reached $200M, and by February 2024, it was $350M<p>There is little substance about how the invested money was absorbed and how that absorption led to such an ARR. Did it pay for integrations and hand holding for each contract? Or was it used to bluntly bribe the CISOs to use their product?

For some reason Google&#x27;s early large acquisitions were amazing, but its later large acquisitions have not been. YouTube and DoubleClick were absolutely key to Google. And Nest seems pretty critical until you notice that Google is slowly letting its lead in home automation slip the last 5 years or so - I guess a strategy shift occurred?<p>But HTC, Motorola, Waze, Fitbit were definitely not amazing. All sort of died within Google. I guess Waze might have been an acquisition to just keep it from competing, so it was destined to die a slow death.<p>I&#x27;d say the jury is out on Mandiant.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbinsights.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;google-biggest-acquisitions-infographic&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.cbinsights.com&#x2F;research&#x2F;google-biggest-acquisiti...</a>

Don&#x27;t forget having a VC who allegedly bribes CISOs to use your product!<p>See <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;updates.techforpalestine.org&#x2F;wiz-and-google-the-deal-that-wasnt&#x2F;#:~:text=when%20you%20dig%3F-,Bribes,-Apparently%20bribes.%20Yes" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;updates.techforpalestine.org&#x2F;wiz-and-google-the-deal...</a>

I am missing something big here. How and why did they raise 480 million dollars in a year for a cloud security product? It doesn&#x27;t sound like a capital intensive business to me. Is that all going to employees?

i always feel that stories are written from the public facts. but what about the private facts, connections etc which are never told and might be the real secret?

I&#x27;m still not entirely sure what exactly they were selling during the first year to get to that $100M ARR. Most customers expect to get quite a bit of functionality for $millions.

This seems to be a very marketing-heavy view of things. It would be good to know what they actually did better in security, if anything, in a substantive way, or if it was indeed all dashboards and exciting colour choices.

He forgot to mention that founders are all veterans of Unit 8200, the signals intelligence division of the Israeli military.

The post tells that the product should be explained, yet does not explain what that company does.<p>Looking at wikipedia I also dont know what are their products.

Is CSPM real, or is this just some BS that sounds good to middle management and ticks of some &#x27;security&#x27;-checkboxes?

I have no idea what is their playbook by reading this. I have no idea what they even do, reading this.<p>Maybe it&#x27;s not written for me.

What’s there to &quot;dEcOdE&quot;? They received a mega shit ton of seed investment, super aggressive acquisition&#x2F;acquihire strategy, monopolized the market (so to speak), then gets gobbled up by big G for a $32B (G cut so many jobs to get the leverage necessary to fund this acquisition).<p>Could G have _competed_ in the same space without Wiz? Yes.<p>Could other cloud providers have done the same from a first party perspective rather than rely on a shitty third party product suite? Yes.<p>&quot;Journalism&quot; like this make me lose faith in this industry. There’s no &quot;secret sauce&quot;. There’s nothing special. It’s the same old tired formula that billionaire class have been using:<p>1) extract as much value from labor<p>2) prep company for unicorn by getting investor buddies in an investment frenzy<p>3) buy up other smaller companies to appear bigger<p>4) then wait for some fossil at big tech to take the bite and reap massive returns for the bois<p>This is more of a finance bro piece to be honest.

This is not Wiz the smart lighting company.