The cloud and AI security vendor made some key decisions early on that set itself up for the unprecedented acquisition deal with Google announced Tuesday.
The cybersecurity industry has never seen a startup like Wiz before — a statement that was just as true last week as it is today, with Google announcing a deal to acquire the surging five-year-old company for $32 billion.
There are a multitude of reasons why Wiz — both as a company and as a planned acquisition for Google Cloud’s burgeoning security business — are entirely unprecedented.
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But the secret to Wiz’s success might not actually be much of a secret at all (I wrote about it last year).
According to one of the investors who knows Wiz best, CEO Assaf Rappaport and his team made a series of choices early on that positioned the cloud and AI security vendor for the almost absurd growth pace it has seen — with annual recurring revenue hitting $500 million last year and looking to cross $1 billion this year.
After launching Wiz in 2020, the founders quickly “made a number of critical decisions that set themselves up to be really different,” said Shardul Shah, a partner at Index Ventures who helped to lead Wiz’s Series A funding round in 2020 and has served on its board since then, in an interview with me a year ago.
“From the get-go, they knew what it meant to build an enterprise grade solution — everything from the product to how one makes a customer feel [as] an enterprise grade solution,” Shah told me. “Second, they understood what the business’ requirements were — around agility, as an example — and were able to construct a solution relevant for that problem.”
After that, he said, Wiz’s founding team made some product development decisions that were crucial: “They built a product that had really special ergonomics.”
“The product is simple, but it’s not simplistic. It can deliver value to an individual [and also] to teams and organizations very rapidly — which is really hard balance to strike without eroding the value proposition to any one of those stakeholders,” Shah said.
“To pull this off, they definitely made some decisions from an architectural perspective that were extraordinarily valuable, including [on the] graph-based database — but again, with an eye toward building a platform with multiple products that could be used in concert,” he told me. “To deliver against that, they were really opinionated about their org design and how they could enable an engineering team to move quickly with high quality in parallel — all while scaling the business extremely rapidly in a competitive environment.”
In other words, Wiz brought a “combination of market demand, the product engineering opinions that we’ve talked about and go-to-market execution I think are the contributors to why Wiz grew from zero to $350 million of ARR in three and a half years.”
Or, to update the comment for today’s announcement, from zero to $32 billion in potential market value in five years — a feat we may not see again in the cybersecurity industry anytime soon.
