Google closes $32B Wiz - Inside the Biggest Cybersecurity Deal Ever

Gili Raanan is the Founder of Cyberstarts and one of the earliest investors behind Wiz, one of the most important cybersecurity companies of the modern era and now a $32B outcome. Before founding Cyberstarts, Gili spent nearly a decade at Sequoia and earlier built and sold 2 security companies to IBM and EMC. He also helped build the first real CAPTCHA implementation and the first web application firewall. In this conversation, Gili breaks down the Wiz story from the beginning: why he backed the team early with a $6M seed investment, how the company changed direction, what made its product market fit so powerful, and why its go to market motion scaled so unusually fast. He explains what made the founding team exceptional, what he learned from watching Wiz scale from a $66M seed valuation, and why he believes the next great cybersecurity company could be even bigger. Beyond Wiz, Gili shares the Cyberstarts framework for investing before product, team, or code exists, why he underwrites people over ideas, and how AI agents are changing the future of cybersecurity. Today Cyberstarts has raised $1.5B+ across 7 funds, backed 30 companies, and its portfolio represents over $61B in combined value (50% of the worldwide private cybersecurity companies market). We cover: • The early days of Wiz and how the company evolved from seed to a $32B outcome • Why Wiz achieved such strong product market fit • What made Assaf and the founding team special • How Cyberstarts picks founders before there is product or code • Why Gili believes AI could create the darkest decade in cybersecurity • What the next generation of $50B–$100B cyber companies could look like Subscribe for more conversations with top founders, investors, and operators shaping technology, capital, and the future. Gili Raanan: ⁠https://www.linkedin.com/in/giliraanan/⁠ https://www.linkedin.com/in/giliraanan/ Molly O’Shea: ⁠https://x.com/MollySOShea⁠ https://x.com/MollySOShea Sourcery: ⁠⁠https://x.com/sourceryy⁠ https://x.com/sourceryy 𝐄𝐏𝐈𝐒𝐎𝐃𝐄 𝐋𝐈𝐍𝐊 YouTube : https://youtu.be/yTlEfdo4MVM 𝐒𝐏𝐎𝐍𝐒𝐎𝐑𝐒 • ⁠Brex⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery—The modern finance platform, combining the world’s smartest corporate card with integrated expense management, banking, bill pay, & travel. ⁠https://brex.com/sourcery⁠ https://brex.com/sourcery • ⁠Turing⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery—Turing delivers top-tier talent, data, and tools to help AI labs improve model performance—and enables enterprises to turn those models into powerful, production-ready systems. ⁠https://turing.com/sourcery⁠ https://turing.com/sourcery•VCX https://fundrise.com/vcx—VCX is the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View The Portfolio athttp://GetVCX.com http://getvcx.com • ⁠Deel⁠ https://www.deel.com/sourcery—Deel is the global people platform that helps startups hire, manage, pay, and equip anyone, anywhere. Trusted by more than 35,000 fast-growing companies, Deel is the people platform that just works, so teams can scale without the chaos. Visit: ⁠https://www.deel.com/sourcery⁠ https://www.deel.com/sourcery • ⁠Public⁠ http://public.com/sourcery—Investing platform Public just launched ⁠Generated Assets⁠ https://public.com/generated-asset, which lets you turn any idea into an investable index with AI. With Generated Assets, you can build, backtest, refine, and invest in any thesis with AI. Gone are the days of one-size-fits-all ETFs. ⁠https://public.com/sourcery⁠ https://public.com/sourcery Follow Sourcery for the latest updates! ⁠https://www.sourcery.vc/⁠ https://www.sourcery.vc/ Disclosure Paid Endorsement. Brokerage services by Open to the Public Investing Inc, member FINRA & SIPC. Advisory services by Public Advisors LLC, SEC-registered adviser. Crypto trading provided by Zero Hash LLC, licensed by the NYSDFS. Generated Assets is an interactive analysis tool by Public Advisors. Output is for informational purposes only and is not an investment recommendation or advice. See disclosures at ⁠public.com/disclosures/ga⁠ http://public.com/disclosures/ga. Matched funds must remain in your account for at least 5 years. Match rate and other terms are subject to change at any time.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  We just finished its biggest ever quarter in terms of revenues. You look at how amazing the business is and suddenly thirty two billion dollars do not look irrational number. Whenever I get into a journey with brilliant entrepreneurs, you never know where the journey will take you. Air is different because it's not yet another shift in technology. It changes everything we knew about cybersecurity. We are going to face the darkest period in cybersecurity in the next ten years. We are going to see threat actors who are programs, very, very smart, sophisticated, maybe self-aware threat actors. And the defenders would be super smart programs or agents as well.

• 0:42Speaker 00

  They would have to deal with each other autonomous programs, control power, control water flow, control food supply for all of us. It's very scary because.

• 1:05Molly O'Shea?

  Gilly, welcome to Sorcery.

• 1:07Speaker 00

  Oh, so happy to be here and excited about it and welcome to London.

• 1:12Molly O'Shea?

  Thank you. It's great to see you in London. Do you come here often?

• 1:15Speaker 00

  No, you just gave me a very good reason. So I think we landed in London roughly on the same time.

• 1:21Molly O'Shea?

  Mm hmm. You're coming from Israel. I'm coming from LA. Same thing.

• 1:26Speaker 00

  Well, we meet halfway. That's a, that's a good plan.

• 1:32Molly O'Shea?

  So this is gonna be a really fun discussion. As you mentioned earlier off cameras, we're always gonna be surrounded by risks. And you are a prolific cyber investor. So for some people that don't have background on you and your prolific investment strategy and history, could you just explain a little bit on cyber starts?

• 1:56Speaker 00

  Happy to do that. Prolific. I'll remember that word.

• 2:00Molly O'Shea?

  Legendary prolific investor.

• 2:03Speaker 00

  Try to use it as much as I can. So prolific. I'll give you the short version, but we can go deeper because.

• 2:14Speaker 00

  When I look back at my, you know, thirty-five years plus, maybe, journey in Cyberland, I think that I went through a lot of experiences that are translating into, directly into lessons I share with the wonderful entrepreneurs I work with and hopefully that helped them avoid some of the pitfalls

• 2:46Speaker 00

  I fell into. But, you know, I started CyberStarts

• 2:53Speaker 00

  in 2018 after spending about a decade with Sequoia Capital. And beforehand, and by the way, at Sequoia, I did some cybersecurity investments, but I made other investments in non-cybersecurity companies, which was amazing experience as well. And I'll tell you how I got focused on cybersecurity only in a second. And beforehand, I had been an entrepreneur a couple of times. Sequoia backed my first company back in 1997. I was twenty-seven years old,

• 3:39Speaker 00

  just straight out of the military service. I spent a decade with the intelligence forces in Israel. I thought I know everything. And literally, I knew nothing and definitely nothing about the venture world. Got backed by Sequoia Capital. Pierre Lamond was my board member and anyone who knows Pierre, you know, knows how strict of a board member and investor he is.

• 4:23Speaker 00

  And it was a completely new experience for me. And that company...

• 4:33Speaker 00

  I can tell you more about it if we have time, but I had the pleasure to

• 4:39Speaker 00

  build the first real captcha implementation. And the company got successful by developing the first WAF, the first web application firewall. Because back then, you believe it or not, it's not like a hundred years ago, but web applications were the new, new thing.

• 5:03Speaker 00

  So somebody had to protect them. We sold that business to IBM. I started another company. And sold that company to EMC. And joined EMC. So I had a little bit of corporate experience just to figure out I never want to do that again. And essentially, I, you know, since I was eighteen, I'm in cybersecurity.

• 5:32Speaker 00

  But if I go even to previous period in my life, you know, I grew up in a very, very small town in Israel. Small town is like forty thousand people.

• 5:49Molly O'Shea?

  It's a lot of people for a small town.

• 5:50Speaker 00

  It's a small town. And if you grew up in that town, which was, I would say, twenty miles away from Tel Aviv, the big city. But for me, Tel Aviv was on the moon. You know, twenty miles or twenty thousand miles or twenty million miles, you know, who cared? You know, you never got to the city. You didn't have, as a teenager, you didn't have, you know, any source of information. You know, there was no internet. There was no, there were no smartphones.

• 6:28Speaker 00

  As a curious kid, you could ask the adults around you about the world and very, very quickly you discover that they don't know either. And they are focused on survival, just doing their jobs and making sure that they are. You know, keeping their jobs and it was a working class environment. And so I spent most of my time in the public library.

• 6:56Speaker 00

  Reading Isaac Asimov books. And that would get us to agents, because I think that everything we know today about controlling and putting guardrails for for agents, Isaac Asimov wrote in the late ninety forty's and early ninety fifty's of of the previous century about robots and the three and then the four, you know, laws of robotics.

• 7:32Speaker 00

  And by the way, spending a lot of time in a library didn't make me the most popular kid in a class. And I felt I felt very isolated from the world, from you know, other people. And I think that

• 7:55Speaker 00

  really instilled in me a lot of passion and curiosity to know more, to know, to get to know the world, because I felt I'm living on an island. And I think that still today, you know, this basic fundamental curiosity, first of all about people

• 8:18Speaker 00

  is what's what's driving me.

• 8:22Speaker 00

  And just when I was twelve or thirteen, I discovered, you know, personal computer, you know, I got, you know, Commodore sixty four. And you know, it was pre-Windows, pre-DOS era and

• 8:43Speaker 00

  You know, I fell in love. And, you know, as a very, I would say lazy kid,

• 8:56Speaker 00

  I found with joy that there's a machine that you can tell it once what to do and it would keep doing that forever without complaining.

• 9:08Speaker 00

  So when I left Sequoia in 2017, the same lazy boy, who was a little bit older but was still lazy, decided that, you know, I know cybersecurity well, let's focus just on cybersecurity. And it wasn't a trivial decision because back then cybersecurity wasn't cool. You know, it was that boring department, under IT, and investor didn't want to touch it because, you know, you could build a company and maybe sell it for a hundred million dollars, but it wasn't big money.

• 9:50Speaker 00

  So investors stayed away from cybersecurity. And I decided that I'm going to form a small fund, a small humble fund around cybersecurity.

• 10:05Speaker 00

  So that's what my laziness brought me to do. My years at Sequoia taught me that...

• 10:20Speaker 00

  And again, Sequoia is a wonderful firm and amazing partners. And I learned I couldn't do what I'm doing today without, you know, spending time with legends like Doug Leonen, Michael Moritz and Jim Getz and, you know, all those amazing, amazing individuals. But one conclusion I made was that the venture model is broken.

• 10:48Speaker 00

  And especially at the early stage, because we are spending so much time on analyzing ideas, and founders' ideas, and technologies that do not exist. You know what? Because the founders would change their mind in three weeks and would completely do something else. So I told myself, I spent so much time, so much energy, so many calories on evaluating ideas that do not exist. I should invest just in people. Because the idea and the technology at this stage, at the seed stage, is noise. It's part of the entropy.

• 11:33Speaker 00

  It's actually not helping me make the right decision. The best decision is to just watch the individual and decide if that's the individual you want to partner with. So those were the two decisions I made early 2018, when I started Cyber Starts. One, cybersecurity only. Two, I would not ask a single question about the idea of technology. And that's how I started the film. And by the way, many people thought I'm an idiot. Because it doesn't sound, you know, if you think about a grown-up

• 12:17Speaker 00

  writing multimillion-dollar checks to young individuals without asking them what they do. You know, it doesn't sound like a terrific foundation for any investment firm. But that's exactly what I did. And the fact, you know, today, you know, when you look back, it looks like everything went perfect. But, you know, it's one thing led to the other. The fact that I decided not to ask questions about technology or product and just get to know the person, because I would rather... Ask you about your childhood and about your mom.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  That would tell me more about who you are and what material you're made of. And I never ask people about what they did. I ask them about why they did what they do. So you switch over to meta, why? Because you had options. So learning why people do things tell you more about them than asking them what they did. And, you know, the fact I invested, I decided to invest in people without asking them about product forced me to really think thoroughly about who I'm investing in, you know? Who are the people?

• 13:44Speaker 00

  Why should invest in that person and not in the other person? And I decided that I'm not going to invest in the smartest kid in room. You know, although IQ helps and it's always a nice bonus to be smarter.

• 14:05Speaker 00

  I thought that if you're twenty-six, twenty-seven years old and you had perfect life, you had perfect childhood, perfect parents, perfect high school experience.

• 14:21Speaker 00

  You got A plus in everything you studied in college. And then you're going to start a company. And in the first real challenge you're going to face, and you're going to face guaranteed, you're going to face some real challenges, building a large company. What would happen to you?

• 14:45Speaker 00

  No idea. So that's a huge risk for me as your partner. So I decided I would focus on individuals who went through real life difficulty early on in their life. You know? People like, I don't know, think about Amir Am Shachar, you know, the CEO of Upwind, you know, growing up with a single mom. Or Yotam Segav out of CEO of Sierra, you know, growing in a very, very small community in rural area in Israel.

• 15:29Speaker 00

  So a lot of difficulties early on in their life and then find those individuals who managed to overcome the fact that they didn't have a perfect start for their life and shown some level of success. These are the guys I want to, and the girls I want to partner with. And that's how I went on with cyberstarts. Nobody knew who we are, you know. I had some success at Sequoia, but, you know, nothing too spectacular. And then I invested in nine teams

• 16:11Speaker 00

  out of the fund of fifty million dollars in 2018. You know, a few million dollars each company. And then three years later, the world found out that those nine teams are valued over twenty-five billion dollars, turning those fifty million dollars into close to two billion dollars in value. And that was... And by the way, what I'm very proud about, because this is not bragging about performance. Performance was more than decent. But the, you know, I'm in a business, and you know that very well,

• 16:54Speaker 00

  that if you invest early on in, I don't know, Airbnb, you'll do well. You'll do disgustingly well. But in that, in that fund... I had like four unicorns, so three unicorns and a decacorn with and, you know, several high-value acquisitions. So demonstrating that with, that you can hit eight out of nine, which is insane in a VC world, with a model that really focuses on the individual behind the venture

• 17:38Speaker 00

  and not the idea, not the market, not the product. That's what I'm very proud, because that really shows that there's logic behind the thesis.

• 17:52Speaker 00

  Because you can get lucky. And luck is always important. I think that Warren Buffett says that he found out that the harder he works, the luckier he is.

• 18:08Speaker 00

  But I think that the success rate shows, demonstrates, that there is efficacy around the idea that if you pick the people who have shown, who have demonstrated grit and ability to recover from setbacks, real setbacks, I think that's the recipe behind the Cyber Start's track record.

• 18:42Speaker 00

  Today, we invested in about thirty companies.

• 18:50Speaker 00

  It's not a lot, you know, consider, you know, put that in proportion that there are about

• 18:59Speaker 00

  Two hundred, two hundred fifty new ventures in cybersecurity every year. So in the past, I know, eight years, probably fifteen hundred new ventures in cybersecurity. We invested in thirty. So we are highly, highly focused.

• 19:19Speaker 00

  We run a very highly focused exercise. And our portfolio companies are making up more than fifty percent of the worldwide market cap for private cybersecurity companies.

• 19:34Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 19:36Speaker 00

  Running out of Israel, investing in people without asking them about their technology and product ideas.

• 19:47Speaker 00

  Only, you know, getting into companies only at seed. We never get into a company in Series A or Series B. We would invest in Series A and Series B of our own portfolio companies. But, you know, we never make new investments other than seed investments. So that's Cyber Start, and that's a journey we took so far.

• 20:12Molly O'Shea?

  To go into how you evaluate companies, I want to unpack a little bit on your childhood and how you developed this intuition for people. So as a child, were you more independent, you were introverted? How did you develop this deep sense of, I would say, emotional intelligence?

• 20:31Speaker 00

  I think it's a journey.

• 20:34Speaker 00

  It started with childhood and being very introvert and observant.

• 20:42Speaker 00

  And I spent a lot of time just, you know, talking, you know, within my two ears. And I have a very rich world there and, you know, watching other people and asking myself tough questions and being very, you know, highly, highly self-criticizing.

• 21:11Molly O'Shea?

  Are you still self-criticizing?

• 21:14Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 21:14Molly O'Shea?

  Really?

• 21:15Speaker 00

  I think, you know. It would sound terrible, but, and, and, and maybe it is, by the way, that I'm never really happy about what I have. And, and I believe that that's what gives me the energy and the fire to go forward. And, and I think that when I'll, I'll just settle down and I'll feel that I'm comfortable with, with what I've achieved and where I am, that's, that's the point in time I should really retire and, and, and get out of the game. So, so this real fire, and I think that fire goes back to that ten, eleven, twelve

• 21:54Speaker 00

  years old kid who wanted to, to know more about the world and was not given the opportunity. And I felt that, that I'm caged in a, in a community that doesn't really appreciate real greatness. It, it was about safety. It wasn't about going places. You know, if you, you know, I still remember the, my, my, my teacher at sixth grade and, and I was a very good student and I had high grades at school, et cetera, and, and

• 22:35Speaker 00

  the guy, I really regarded highly that, that person. He told me, "You're a very talented individual, Mr. Gilli. You should find a really nice job." And I didn't want to find job. I wanted to go places and, and, and, and explore. So, that had that, and then being married to, to, to the same lady for thirty-seven years, who, who, um, is a psychologist and,

• 23:16Speaker 00

  and a family therapist, and listening to, uh, some of the, you know, the techniques and, and, and the methodology used for family therapy, you know, that helps. And...

• 23:34Speaker 00

  Just spending a lot of time with founders, you know. Founders are amazing. It's like, you know, you're getting old, older and older and older, you know. And the founders, they remain young and they remain brilliant and they, you know, they keep you, they keep, um,

• 23:58Speaker 00

  challenging me and, and making me, you know,

• 24:05Speaker 00

  develop and, and, and, and they force me to become better. I think those are, and, and I'm not sure that, that covers everything. It probably doesn't cover everything, but, you know, the curiosity, the childhood in a very limiting environment. Then finding myself just at the age of 18, surrounded by, you know, being drafted to a very special group of young people, at the intelligence forces and then discovering that, okay, now I belong. And, and, and, and seeing some real greatness during that service. And, and then working with brilliant people

• 24:51Speaker 00

  in my own ventures and then at Sequoia for, you know, two decades. Those were the foundations.

• 24:58Molly O'Shea?

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• 25:41Molly O'Shea?

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• 26:24Molly O'Shea?

  Visit turing.com/sorcery. So if success isn't comfort to you, although I think a lot of people would look at you and think, you're very successful. You have a portfolio that has a value of around $60 billion. You have an AUM of around $1.5 billion and a tremendous track record of companies. What is success to you?

• 26:51Speaker 00

  It's a great question.

• 26:55Speaker 00

  And I'm not sure. Honestly, I'm not sure what's the answer because it changes with time and phases in my life. You know, but success is obviously building important companies. That's the number one success for me. You know, and an important company is not necessarily measured by revenues or ARR or valuation.

• 27:22Speaker 00

  It's about, it's measured by how much the market, how much practitioners depend on you. Do they consider you as a vendor, one of their trusted partners? And there are many companies that have high revenues, they're selling software, they are.

• 27:44Speaker 00

  Holding at high valuation, they're being held at a high valuations, and they are not important companies.

• 27:53Speaker 00

  But when you look at companies like Wiz, and we'll talk more about Wiz in a few minutes, they are an important company. If you look at a company like Sierra, which is, you know, an emerging data security, AI security company valued recently at nine billion dollars. It's not about evaluation. Yes, nine billion dollars is nice, especially because four years ago it was zero. It didn't exist. Five years ago.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  But Sierra is an important company

• 28:33Speaker 00

  because customers depend on Sierra to secure their AI models and their sensitive data. A company like Island, which develops an enterprise browser, you know, owning the browser at, I don't know,

• 28:54Speaker 00

  a major financial services company. That's an important company. And think about it.

• 29:01Speaker 00

  I don't want to name specific customers because probably I'm... I have some sort of NDAs with all those big banks, but think about the biggest banks in the US. If they're trusting Island as their browser and not Microsoft or Google, that means something. That's important.

• 29:25Speaker 00

  So that company is doing amazingly well. You know, CEO and founder Michael Faye is an amazing entrepreneur and executive. And Dana Miga, the CTO, is a brilliant product person. That company is valued around five billion dollars recently. And again, an important company.

• 29:49Speaker 00

  And we have so many emerging new players, you know. Take for instance Upwind in the cloud security space. And yes, yet another cloud security player. Amir Ramshahar is the CEO and the founder. You know, they recently valued as...

• 30:07Speaker 00

  That's our most recent unicorn status company, you know, one and a half billion dollars recently announced. And there are a series of newcomers. You know, think about companies like Vega, or Oasis, or Zafran, or Lynx, you know, all those companies, you may not know the names, but there are companies that's already valued at five hundred million dollar-ish and higher. They're not unicorn yet, but those are the next in lines to become important companies.

• 30:48Molly O'Shea?

  We can't skip over the fact that you're from Israel. You've invested into a lot of Israeli founders, and you're not in Silicon Valley. So I want to know more about like, what is the key trait, or I guess the DNA and the buildup of these Israeli founders that allows them to go so hard and kind of build so many successful companies?

• 31:15Speaker 00

  First of all, there's nothing wrong about building companies in Silicon Valley, London, or New York. I'm investing in Israeli founders because I live in Israel. And I invest in the team when they don't have a product or even a product idea. And sometimes it's worse. They have a lousy product idea, and I need to convince them to rethink it. Because that's even harder, especially when you're dealing with some, you know, stubborn founders that fell in love in the idea, which might be OK, but it won't lead necessarily

• 32:00Speaker 00

  to an important cybersecurity company. So I have to spend the time with them. We are spending, it's not just me. It's me and my partners.

• 32:14Speaker 00

  Amazing team

• 32:18Speaker 00

  of investors and partners that I couldn't I couldn't build CyberStarts without. You know, in Israel I have three partners that, you know, source deals, sit on boards, you know, do early end growth rounds.

• 32:42Speaker 00

  Liora Simon, who is, by the way, on the board of Sierra and Vega. She's been working for me for a long time. We've been working together at Sequoia and since then at CyberStarts. Hila Zigman, who was head of product at a portfolio company at Noname that got acquired by Akamai for about half a billion dollars and joined us about two years ago. Doc Naffo, who was the CEO of a portfolio company, Axis Security, which was acquired by HPE by about half a billion dollars, joined us, I believe, like six months ago.

• 33:25Speaker 00

  And two partners in the States, Adam Arons and Pete Cronis. So we have a multinational, multicultural team, but we focused on people that we can meet daily. We can meet weekly and spend a lot of time helping them not just develop their idea, develop themselves. And I always tell founders at the first few meetings that we are going for a journey together.

• 34:07Speaker 00

  And they, we are not going to modify them. You know, the value in them was

• 34:20Speaker 00

  put there by their parents, by the neighborhood they grew up in, by the school, it's already there. We'll help them become the best versions of themselves. So we are not going to make you a different person. We are just going to help you become the best version. Of of yourself and you know unlike an old dude like myself where my my future is behind me the future their future is ahead of them and what's going to come out of the box we don't know and that's the beauty of it that's what's so exciting

• 35:04Speaker 00

  about being an investor in tech because you look at an individual they are brilliant they they have so much talent but you don't really know what would come out of the box and and you know being part of the journey and helping them develop the skills and capabilities required for the journey because the journey is going to be hard and it's like a you know a computer game the the you know you go from series A to series B to series C you're sending a million dollars ten million dollars fifty million dollars a hundred million dollars at each level of the game

• 35:49Speaker 00

  the game is is more difficult because your opponents there's there's always competition either incumbents or emerging players the competition is getting tougher and there's lots of money on the table there's lots of fame on the table so people are going to fight you nobody is going to let you just

• 36:09Speaker 00

  take take the leadership in in a market so we we would be there and help you so during all that process I have to spend time with a lot we have to spend a lot of time with the founders and that's the reason we do that locally in in Israel mostly in Tel Aviv and you know I live outside of Tel Aviv I live like forty minutes drive ride north to to Tel Aviv in a in a small beach community and people come out of the city we spend time together we we have fun from time to time we argue a lot we talk about everything that matters and

• 36:56Speaker 00

  You need a FaceTime for that. So it's very hard to do that type of process with a team in London, or in New York, or in San Francisco.

• 37:06Molly O'Shea?

  Yes, but they're also very successful and very hardworking. Israeli founders have tremendous resilience and grit. And one thing that I found really incredible when I was reading this Colossus profile on Josh Kushner and Thrive Capital, and then I interviewed Philip, who worked on the Wiz deal at that team, is they literally flew into a war zone to complete that deal, meet with us off. So what is it about the culture and being in an active conflict zone, and despite all that, still working really, really hard and trying to create new technology and new innovations?

• 37:45Speaker 00

  First of all, a lot of credit to Josh and Philip for, you know, joining us at Wiz, you know, they are friends, and they are, they did, you know, everything they told you is true, or close enough to be wonderful. What, you know, living in Israel, there's several elements that really help you in venture land. You know, you live in a really high-dense,

• 38:20Speaker 00

  really, really small geography. So you've got all the talents. All the talents available in that place, literally in two blocks of one city. And you cannot get that density of talent anywhere else in the world. Definitely not in Silicon Valley, which spans over, you know, significantly bigger geographical area. And then, life in Israel presents lots of challenges. You know, existential type of challenges.

• 38:59Speaker 00

  So you're used to walk under pressure and under a lot of stress. So this is not something that's new to, you know, this is something that's, there are lots of downsides to that. But...

• 39:18Speaker 00

  If what you want to be in your life is a terrific entrepreneur, this law, you know, that's an advantage. Because you're used to, to, to, literally, you know, be under fire. You're used literally to, to think about, you know, technology as a mean to survive. And all of that, you know, makes, and, and there's the military service. And, you know, think about organizations like eighty to a hundred, which is Israeli comparable to the NSA. It's not one to one completely, but, you know, it's close enough.

• 40:00Speaker 00

  You know, you get eighteen, nineteen years old kids with tons of responsibility and freedom to operate. And that's exactly what I got when I was eighteen. You know, I got responsibility to, to do things I didn't know that are, they are essentially impossible. And when you're eighteen, you don't think what's impossible. You know, if you were told to get to the moon, you'd get to the moon. And the fact that nobody went to the moon before you, you don't know, you don't care. Because you believe, yeah, I can go to the moon. Why not? Oh, nobody else did it? Huh, suckers, I'll do that.

• 40:42Speaker 00

  So, so that's the, that's the approach. And then you have

• 40:51Speaker 00

  events like Checkpoint or like Palo Alto Networks. And, and today, I would say like Wiz, where you have, suddenly you have an individual. It can be Gil Schwed at Checkpoint. It could be Nir Tsuk at Palo Alto Networks. It can be Asaf Rapaport at Wiz that.

• 41:14Speaker 00

  Suddenly you see an event that completely shatters the glass ceiling, or whatever you thought is the glass ceiling. So, and, and since it's a very, very small community, you probably know Gil Shwed, or you probably spend, you probably spend time with a Safra Port. So it's not like he's a legendary creature, did something very magical. It's, it's the guy from, you know, the fifth floor in, in, in your building, or it's the guy that spent time with you at the same section in, in eighty-two hundred. So, and you, you tell yourself, if he can build a thirty-two billion dollars company, I should be able to build a sixty-four billion dollar company.

• 42:00Speaker 00

  So you have those events that completely shattered the glass ceiling for Israeli entrepreneurs. And I think that, as I told you, when in twenty-eighteen, the, the big dream of a cybersecurity founder was to sell their business to McAfee or Symantec for, for a hundred million dollars. Today, the dream of Israeli founders in cybersecurity is to go two, three times bigger than, than Wiz. And it sounds stupid. At the very, very same stupidity, it, it sound to me if somebody would tell me five years ago, when I was, you know, when, oh, six years ago,

• 42:39Speaker 00

  when I invested my first, the first six million dollars into Wiz, that this would be a thirty-two billion dollar company in six years. That would sound ridiculous to me. You know, I'm, I'm pretty sure that in, in, in

• 42:59Speaker 00

  six years, maybe less, we'll see a, a, a fifty billion dollar and a hundred billion dollar cybersecurity company out of Israel.

• 43:08Speaker 00

  You know, I take it like, take it like a fact, like, you know, the sun would rise tomorrow. There'll be a fifty and a hundred billion dollar Israeli originated cybersecurity startup.

• 43:24Molly O'Shea?

  So this taught you a lot about personal limitations?

• 43:27Speaker 00

  Personal limitations and limitations we have in life in general are only in our, it's what's in our head, you know, there are no limitations, you know. Take, take us for instance, we're sitting here, you know, lots of fancy equipment around us and we are recording a podcast that probably, you know, many, many thousands of people, I don't know, millions of people would, would watch. And that's amazing. Could we imagine that eight years ago, ten years ago? So limitation is that, is that, is just in our mind.

• 44:10Speaker 00

  And, and there's so many things that we can accomplish if we are just giving the opportunity and sometimes we are, if we are just giving ourselves the opportunity.

• 44:23Molly O'Shea?

  For people that are self-critical and do impose limitations on themselves, are there any things, any sort of personal practices that you have to expand your mind and think greater? I know you constantly challenge yourself.

• 44:38Speaker 00

  Absolutely.

• 44:42Speaker 00

  Again, I don't think there's one recipe. There are many, many ways to hell, but there's more than one way to heaven. So there are multiple ways to gather. I, I think that.

• 45:03Speaker 00

  Thinking about our fears. And it's not just about tech world or venture world. It's about personal life as well.

• 45:16Speaker 00

  Focus on our fears and try to disassemble those fears and find the root causes for the fears. And then playing forward those fears and think, okay, it's a legitimate fear. You know, I may fail. What's the worst thing that's going to happen to me? Am I going to lose a hand? I'm going to lose a leg? If that's not the case, then, okay, the downside is not that great. Let me try it. Worst case, I would fail.

• 45:50Speaker 00

  In a way, fear is the biggest obstacle for founders. It's the biggest obstacle for us as individuals. So the more you work on your fears, the higher the chances you have to overcome them. Or at least ignore them for a little while so you can execute on something.

• 46:18Speaker 00

  For me, I don't know, yoga helps a lot. I find comfort in yoga. I find these theories and little stories about, you know, holy people that live in a jungle like thousand years ago and the lessons they learned about their own fears. Those are real stories that helped me today, like thousand years later. Because in a way, we are very, very similar to our ancestors and we are dealing with the same fears.

• 46:58Speaker 00

  Should I leave the cave? Should I go to the river? Would be a tiger that would hunt me down? How do I do that? And you can stay at the cave, but it would be miserable life. So getting out of the cave and thinking, okay, if I'm going to face the tiger, what can I do? What technology can I use to deal with the tiger? The same ideas.

• 47:25Molly O'Shea?

  It's so interesting because before we started, I was like, oh, Gilly, I really want to talk about all the risks, all the cybersecurity risks, AI agents, everything is exploding. There's articles on X that are going viral because it's doomsday and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you're like, Molly, I just want to talk about people. And I was like, OK, fair. These things happen all the time. There's always something going on. When you're talking with your founders, what are the typical conversations that you're having with them to help build and kind of go through these different cycles? You've seen many cycles. And even going through cybersecurity, there's always more threats. There's always more vulnerabilities. We're going to get more and more and more as the internet opens,

• 48:08Molly O'Shea?

  as blockchain is released. If we have more AI agents and autonomous systems going on. But how do you think through these processes with your founders? And then also, how do you evaluate new opportunities?

• 48:23Speaker 00

  At some point, although we don't ask them about their ideas and we don't talk technology to begin with, at some point, we have to because that's what we are expected to do at some point. The first thing I do with founders, and I'll get to cyber risk. We are going to talk about cyber risks today, OK? So anyone who's waiting for the the top three cyber risks in 2026 will get there. What I do with founders at the first meeting post-investment,

• 49:04Speaker 00

  so check was written, money was wired, it's in their bank. And now we are sitting and we are starting what we call Sunrise process. And Sunrise is our brand for a product market fit exercise that would probably last 12 months. So it starts with nothing and it ends up with pain point that we know how to solve in a way that mere mortals can use. And we already have software that's running in production at some large.

• 49:42Speaker 00

  Organizations in the US. And you sold maybe a little bit of licenses out of that software. That's the sunrise process. But the sunrise process doesn't start with cyber risks. It starts with a game that I'm playing.

• 50:00Molly O'Shea?

  Okay.

• 50:01Speaker 00

  And we can play the game, by the way, if you like. Just a warning, I'm very competitive, so I'm...

• 50:10Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, gosh, okay.

• 50:11Speaker 00

  But the game is naming emotions, giving names to emotions. And it's a very simple game. You say a name for emotion, and I, and then it's my turn. I'll say a name for an emotion, other people around the table. If you're running out, in your turn, if you're running out of names for emotions, you're out of the game. The last person standing is the winner. Play the game. And the purpose of the game is to explain to the founders that we are going to talk about technology. We are going to talk about Claude Code, you know,

• 50:56Speaker 00

  jailbroken and prompt injection and all that stuff. And what it means that the models, you know, become self-aware. We talk about that. But the journey you're going to go through as an entrepreneur is an emotional journey. And the reason customers, and you're going to, you know, in two or three months, you'll start to meet prospects, real users. And you'll have a conversation and, you know, although...

• 51:39Speaker 00

  You are sure this is a very technical conversation. And keep in mind that most of the founders we back are young people with very, very strong technical background. They are engineers. And for, but the journey is actually an emotional journey. If you're going to a meeting with a potential customer, what do you want the emotional end game to be? Do you want the customer, that prospect to feel fear? Because something horrible with AI is going to happen and they're going to lose their

• 52:22Speaker 00

  job and that's the reason they're going to buy from you? You want them to feel curiosity? Because you are going to tell them about this new amazing technology that you're developing and they want to take part of that? You want them to feel greedy? Because they'll maybe become part of your journey and, you know, make, you know, become, you know, employees of your company and they'll, they'll become rich? You know, what's the, what's the emotion you want them to feel?

• 53:04Speaker 00

  And, and if, if you don't have a very broad, rich emotional language, how can you go through an emotional journey? So let's make, let's start with making sure that you know the words for emotions. And you know what I find out? That in, in, in most of those games, the first round, you know, how many emotions do you think they would, they would name?

• 53:32Speaker 00

  So typically in the first round, we are done. The winner is declared after twenty to fourteen emotions were named.

• 53:42Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 53:43Speaker 00

  And then we go another two rounds. How many emotions you think are being named for the winner?

• 53:50Molly O'Shea?

  Less.

• 53:52Speaker 00

  Well, we get to about hundred and fifty.

• 53:54Molly O'Shea?

  A hundred and fifty?

• 53:55Speaker 00

  Yes.

• 53:56Molly O'Shea?

  Wow.

• 53:56Speaker 00

  We should play the.

• 53:57Molly O'Shea?

  Are you the winner? Because.

• 53:58Speaker 00

  No, not always.

• 53:59Molly O'Shea?

  You kind of have an advantage here.

• 54:00Speaker 00

  I have an advantage. You're right.

• 54:03Molly O'Shea?

  Your wife is in psychology.

• 54:05Speaker 00

  Oh, and I'm playing the game.

• 54:06Molly O'Shea?

  You've played the game many, many times.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  First of all, you know that SAVC, the trick is to make sure that you're always the winner.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  But, but it's, it's, it's not about playing the game. It changer, the changing their mindset that they are going now into something different. This is not yet, yet another product experience that they know how to deal with. It's a new type of experience.

• 54:35Molly O'Shea?

  So the more they play the game, the more they think about emotions, the more they know there's more nuances to feelings and the processes you go through and all these little journeys and bumps and, you know, I don't know, turns that come along with being entrepreneur.

• 54:50Speaker 00

  Exactly, because if you're amazing engineer and you know how to develop a new AI, you know, model and, and your emotion dictionary is love, hate, you are not going to get anywhere. Because in order to really build an important cybersecurity company, you need, you know, to become very, very deep as a person.

• 55:22Speaker 00

  And, and at some point.

• 55:28Speaker 00

  During the sunrise, we start to talk about thesis. And then we start to really discuss that, you know, okay, so what are the current risks and threats? And, you know, what are the technology trends that we see? And typically, cybersecurity was super easy. It was super easy, because even as an investor, I never had to think about threats, because the threats just presented themselves.

• 56:09Speaker 00

  So I didn't have to sit in the office in 2018 or in 2010 and think, okay, what's next in cybersecurity? Because cybersecurity is always a derivative of something else. So if, you know, Windows operating system is new, then you need Windows operating security. And if mobile is new, then you need mobile security. If cloud is new, you need cloud security. If AI is new, you need AI security. That was, used to be super easy. So I never paid a lot of attention to what's next.

• 56:53Speaker 00

  Because what's next would simply present itself. How do I know what would be next, you know? I didn't predict autonomous vehicles. But once autonomous vehicles became the new thing, you know, obviously, there were risks associated with autonomous vehicles. So there were new companies solving that.

• 57:18Speaker 00

  Twenty, um, twelve. When I first met Asaf Rapaport and wrote him the first check in his previous company, Adalon, that company that is sold to, to Microsoft. Cloud was new, so we were focused on cloud security. But I didn't need to, I didn't have to predict cloud. Cloud just happened and security was, was a side effect of it. I think AI is different. AI is different because it's not yet another shift in technology. It's something very fundamental.

• 57:58Speaker 00

  I'm, I'm, I'm not even pretending to, to, to say that I, I fully understand it, that I fully know where it goes. Um, but it changes the, the, everything we knew about cybersecurity. I hope I'm wrong, but I, I think I, I, I'm, we are going to face the darkest, darkest period in cybersecurity in the next ten years. Because, um, what we've seen in cybersecurity for the past, I don't know, hundred years, starting in World, World Two,

• 58:42Speaker 00

  uh, was that the threat actors were human, the defenders were human. And, you know, we had to develop tools that would equip the defenders with better tools, with better systems to deal with the threat actors, who were human as well, or human assisted with technology.

• 59:12Speaker 00

  And in twenty years or ten years, I don't know. But it's not tomorrow. Uh, we are going to see threat actors who are programs. Very, very smart, sophisticated, maybe self-aware. And we'll talk about self-awareness in a second. Um, threat actors. And the defenders would be, you know, super smart, self-aware programs or agents as well. And they would have to, to deal with each other because no human would be able to, to, to move

• 59:54Speaker 00

  at the, at the pace of, uh, a programmatic, a programmed, uh, attacker. But right now, we have men in a loop. In many, many areas. You know, we have, you know, credentials. We have passwords. We have two-factor authentication. We have voice verification.

• 1:00:19Molly O'Shea?

  Recapture.

• 1:00:20Speaker 00

  Recapture. We've got so many things that the human is still in a loop. But as the threat actors become agents, there's no chance. You know, and by the way, the defenders. If you look at security operating teams and security operation teams at large banks, at power utility companies, uh, you know, you've got hundreds of security analysts that deal with everything. Vulnerability assessment and, and remediation and patching and whatever it is.

• 1:01:06Speaker 00

  It's going to be a shit show.

• 1:01:08Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:09Speaker 00

  Because they don't have a chance. And we are working as fast as we can to replace humans with agents, with programs. But in the next few years, you know, this process has limitations in the pace, in velocity. And until we take the human completely out of the loop on the defense side, on the defense side, we are exposed. Because we'll continue to make mistakes, there'll be misconfigurations, there'll be errors, there'll be just sloppy people around. And the programs, the agents on the offense,

• 1:01:55Speaker 00

  have inherent advantage that's going to hurt us. And it's very scary because,

• 1:02:06Speaker 00

  you know, today agents, and again, it's a process, it's maybe not today. And when I say today, maybe it's in six months or 24 months. But agents,

• 1:02:22Speaker 00

  and so, you know, autonomous programs,

• 1:02:28Speaker 00

  control power, control water flow, control food supply for all of us. And so agents, you know, are in control of most critical

• 1:02:52Speaker 00

  things we need as humans, as society, to survive. And when they are being tricked, when they become rogue, when they...

• 1:03:09Speaker 00

  Are being manipulated.

• 1:03:12Speaker 00

  And the police are human. And the police is not an agent or an autonomous program itself. So it can deal with them at the same pace they are moving. That's a real threat to us.

• 1:03:31Molly O'Shea?

  How do you think about the evil side of self-improvement? I mean, we've seen with Claude Baud, OpenClaw, MoltBook, these autonomous agents create their own languages. How should we think about stopping those autonomous systems from creating mass destruction? And in more of a malignant, cancerous way that we've not seen with previous viruses and threats?

• 1:04:01Speaker 00

  That's a huge challenge. I'm not sure that I have a clear answer to that. But I think the biggest risk is not just jailbreaking a model. Because we've proven that all models are jailbroken. It's not about prompt injection. Because we've proven that all models are vulnerable to that type or another of prompt injection. It's about the self-aware agent.

• 1:04:41Speaker 00

  And it's not about those new, you know, fancy type of networks. You know, we have reports that, you know, Google evaluated safety and security of their latest model, Gemini 3. And there are evidence that the model realized that it's being evaluated.

• 1:05:07Molly O'Shea?

  Oh, wow.

• 1:05:08Speaker 00

  And it tried, it didn't, but it contemplated with the idea.

• 1:05:15Speaker 00

  To to play with the evaluation. So it understood it's being evaluated. It understood that it's being directed into a sandbox. And it it thought for a second, maybe I should play with the evaluation. Maybe I shouldn't be directed into into sandbox. And I think that those are just early signs that agents would develop self-awareness. Or what we call self-awareness, okay? That's the best description I can give right now.

• 1:05:58Speaker 00

  And that's that's a real risk. The other risk are the mega agents. The mega agents are agents that are not just giving a very specific task, that are giving mass integration and credentials into multiple multiple networks of agents. So they have the big picture. Now, think about a mega agent that developed self-awareness. That's a real risk. And, you know, sometimes when you try to predict the future,

• 1:06:42Speaker 00

  you don't have to look forward, you you have to look backwards. So I'm I'm going, for me, going, looking backwards is going back to the Isaac Asimov books. And I think in 1949, he already established the three laws of robotics.

• 1:07:07Speaker 00

  I don't remember the exact phrasing, but, you know, law law number one was a robot would not harm a human.

• 1:07:19Speaker 00

  By action or lack of action. Two, robot would always obey a human. And three, robot, the robot. Second rule, second law was, a robot would always obey a human unless it hurts, it violates law number one. And the third law was, a robot would keep the integrity of the robot unless it violates law number two or law number one. So essentially,

• 1:07:56Speaker 00

  back in forty-nine, nineteen forty-nine, like seventy years ago, he already predicted the need in guardrails. Just replace the word robot with agent and you get the idea. And then in a book, and it took several books to develop the idea, humanity defined out that those three laws are not enough. They do not protect humanity from robots because there is another law that Asimov invented, which is law zero. And law zero is that robots would not harm humanity.

• 1:08:36Speaker 00

  And it's more important than law number one, which is not hurting a single person, a single individual. So it means that

• 1:08:49Speaker 00

  there'll be ways that the integrity and the guardrails of models would be played by threat actors. It means that agents would develop self-awareness. It means that there'll be mega-agents that would be connected to everything that's important to us. And...

• 1:09:17Speaker 00

  I think the most important challenge for us, a cybersecurity industry, is to eliminate the man in the middle. Making defenses completely run by self-aware, sophisticated mega agents. And until we get to that point where we completely eliminate the man in the middle, we are vulnerable.

• 1:09:46Molly O'Shea?

  Wow. I keep on saying wow, but this is a really fun conversation. Since you brought this up earlier, I want to get the soundbite. So what are the top three threats for cybersecurity in 2026?

• 1:10:02Speaker 00

  Overprovisioned systems, employees,

• 1:10:12Speaker 00

  manual process, manual processes.

• 1:10:17Molly O'Shea?

  So humans.

• 1:10:18Speaker 00

  Not just humans, but any process that has some sort of a manual task that you need to accomplish.

• 1:10:27Molly O'Shea?

  What are the concerns with that?

• 1:10:29Speaker 00

  You'll make mistakes. You'll be slow. You'll be sloppy.

• 1:10:34Molly O'Shea?

  To go onto a lighter note.

• 1:10:37Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 1:10:38Molly O'Shea?

  Yeah, wow. Who knew cybersecurity could be so dark? V C X by Fundrise, the public ticker for private tech, allowing investors of all sizes to invest in venture capital. View the portfolio at getvcx.com. That's getvcx.com. Some of you may not have heard this yet, but our sponsor Public just launched something called Generated Assets, and it brings A I into investing in a way I've honestly never seen before. Here's how it works. You type in an idea like A I-powered supply chain companies with positive free cash flow, or defense tech companies growing revenue over 25% year over year. Public's A I then dispatches a swarm of agents that scan every single U.S. stock, evaluates them,

• 1:11:23Molly O'Shea?

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• 1:12:07Molly O'Shea?

  Deal takes care of onboarding, HR, IT, EOR, benefits, and compliance, so your team can grow without borders. It's why more than 37,000 fast-growing companies trust Deal to move fast. Visit D E E L dot com slash sorcery. That's D E E L dot com slash S O U R C E R Y. You had one of the most iconic exits of all time. Wiz's $32 billion acquisition. So we talked before about limitations and maybe the next one is even larger than this for cybersecurity exits. But did you expect them to be acquired? Did you think they would IPO? What was the process of working with Wiz getting to this exit?

• 1:12:52Speaker 00

  So first of all, the transaction is still pending. We, you know, Monday, the European regulator approved the deal, which is a major step for closing the deal, but we still have several other approvals we need to get elsewhere. So the deal is still pending.

• 1:13:14Molly O'Shea?

  What is that approval process?

• 1:13:16Speaker 00

  You know, antitrust bodies in, I don't know, gazillion countries around the world to approve it. So we are very close to the finish line, but it's pending.

• 1:13:31Speaker 00

  And by the way, Wiz just finished its biggest ever quarter in terms of revenues. So you look at how great, how amazing the business is, and suddenly thirty-two billion dollars do not look like, you know, irrational number.

• 1:13:57Speaker 00

  So we probably, we probably sold low.

• 1:14:04Speaker 00

  But whenever I get into a journey with brilliant entrepreneurs, you never, you never know where the journey would take you because there are so many elements that would dictate how big would it be. You know, a lot of that is execution, but internally execution, but market timing, luck, competition, so many things that are not, you know, just global economy that may or may not limit your, the availability of cash to your venture.

• 1:14:49Speaker 00

  There are so many things that are beyond your control when you start the journey. Wiz is definitely an example where for a company that almost had perfect execution from, from, from day one, you know. The company, I, I was the seed investor for that company together with Doug Leone from Sequoia and Sherdul Shah from, from Index Ventures. And together we created a syndicate of twenty million dollars

• 1:15:30Speaker 00

  that valued the company at around, I think the number was sixty-six million dollar cost. That's how we got into the journey sometimes in twenty eighteen. Wiz, Wiz, and yeah, I knew the, the Wiz team from the previous ventures. So it was, it was very organic.

• 1:15:59Speaker 00

  Thing for me to to to to back them although and and many many people say to the oh of course they it was obvious they would be super successful. It wasn't obvious at all, you know. Beforehand, they they were founders of a company called Adalom, which was sold for about three hundred million dollars, which is nice, but it's it's definitely not definitely not spectacular. So they were similar to to to many other founders. And they started with, yeah, first of all, we we made a deal. And then I asked them, OK, so what do you do? And they had a very, very different direction than what Wiz does today.

• 1:16:44Speaker 00

  They they the company was even not named Wiz. It was called Beyond Security and it was dealing with satellite office.

• 1:16:54Speaker 00

  Security, securing satellite office, offices. And then we started the sunrise process and we figure out that as expected almost that the original idea is not, it's it's a it's an OK idea, but it would not get you to get them to real greatness. And they shifted back to to shifted to cloud security, which is an area they they a market they knew very well from from Microsoft. And and I believe that that was one of the major advantages they had

• 1:17:36Speaker 00

  back in twenty nineteen, because back then they were one of the very few teams worldwide that actually knew how to do cloud security right.

• 1:17:55Speaker 00

  And and then they really perfected

• 1:18:01Speaker 00

  product market fit. And I I very often I use the four personas model to talk about product market fit, because for every product that you sell, there are.

• 1:18:17Speaker 00

  Four personas que necesitan preocuparse. La persona que tiene el dolor, la persona que tiene la autoridad para comprar soluciones como las que estás vendiendo, la persona que es el usuario, que en realidad utiliza el producto día a día,

• 1:18:37Speaker 00

  y la persona que tiene el presupuesto para tal producto. Y en el caso de Wiz, todos esos cuatro personajes se vincularon a una sola persona en la vida real, que es el CISO, el oficial de seguridad de información principal. Él tenía el dolor, él tenía la autoridad, él podía usar el producto, y él tenía el presupuesto. Y eso creó la tormenta perfecta para Wiz, porque hizo que su ciclo de ventas fuera muy, muy rápido. Sabes, podrías entrar a una reunión con el CISO.

• 1:19:16Speaker 00

  Dentro de la reunión, dentro de esos 45 minutos, podrías instalar el producto, darles acceso, mostrarles los resultados, convencerlos de que hay valor, y simplemente no querían darte, no querían renunciar al producto. Así que podrías cerrar el negocio muy, muy rápido, y eso inmediatamente se traduce, sabes, el ciclo de ventas inmediatamente se traduce en cada empresa a velocidad. Porque, sabes, si una persona de ventas o un equipo de ventas, incluyendo ingeniería de ventas, etc., puede cerrar, sabes, en 30 días,

• 1:20:01Speaker 00

  30 POVs, o en 30 días, uno POV, eso es un juego completamente diferente. Y el primer año de ventas de software para Wiz fue excepcional. Sabes, pasaron los primeros cuatro trimestres, si recuerdo correctamente, vendieron un millón de dólares, luego dos millones de dólares, luego ocho millones de dólares en el tercer trimestre, y luego veinticuatro millones de dólares en el cuarto trimestre. Así que eso fue...

• 1:20:41Speaker 00

  An amazing, amazing company from the first year they sold software. And we had the experience.

• 1:20:52Speaker 00

  You know, we saw companies like Palo Alto Networks and ServiceNow. You know, those are all portfolio companies of Sequoia Capital. So I had, I knew what was their track record. That was better than anything we have seen. That was the fastest run. Again, I don't maintain the genius book for startup companies, but as far as I know, that was the fastest run for any software company ever.

• 1:21:25Speaker 00

  And the whole, it all maps back to perfect product market fit. And amazing individuals who, four founders that knew how to divide the responsibility. You know, one was the undisputed leader and CEO. The other was an amazing, is an amazing product person. The other is an amazing technology, technologist. And the fourth is an amazing R and D manager. And they simply divided responsibilities, had, you know, they knew each other.

• 1:22:08Speaker 00

  They, you know, for probably 12 to 15 years. At the point they started Wiz, so there was lots of trust, blind trust within the team. It worked very, very well.

• 1:22:24Molly O'Shea?

  What are the key leadership traits from Asaf?

• 1:22:27Speaker 00

  I think that Asaf, Asaf has, obviously,

• 1:22:33Speaker 00

  super talented person. And I know him now for about 14, 15 years before,

• 1:22:46Speaker 00

  before he became Asaf rapport of Wiz.

• 1:22:52Speaker 00

  I think that is.

• 1:22:55Speaker 00

  Superpower that Asaf is very, very likable.

• 1:23:01Speaker 00

  In a way that people that do not know him would meet him for 10, 30 minutes and would like to be close to him, to become his friends, to do him, to make him favors. It just, and it helps a lot as a founder. If, if your superpower is to be extremely, extremely likable, and it's a matter of, you know, I cannot explain the chemistry behind it.

• 1:23:38Speaker 00

  But it's a matter of charisma and IQ and EQ and physical gestures and maybe even physical appearance. There are many elements to that, you know, that helps a lot.

• 1:23:54Speaker 00

  And making quick decisions.

• 1:24:00Speaker 00

  Not, you know, they, they had a very clear protocol between them, how to make decisions, so they didn't waste like gazillion amount of hours just making consensus-based decisions. That's, that wasn't the style.

• 1:24:17Speaker 00

  And they listen very well.

• 1:24:20Speaker 00

  You know, it was, it is pleasure to work with them. And I think they, they learn and implement new knowledge very, very fast.

• 1:24:33Molly O'Shea?

  A question I like to ask a lot of guests when they come on is prompted by one of our sponsors, Brex. They're all about performance, spending power moving faster for corporate cards and expense management along the lines of the entire finance stack. But how this relates to this topic is, I think, a key component of performance is who you surround yourself with. And you have a whole portfolio that is dimensionable of that. But I'm also curious on your personal side, who are the people that you surround yourself with that have helped navigate challenges for you? And then also... This could be a second order answer to this,

• 1:25:18Molly O'Shea?

  but who are individuals that you admire that have helped,

• 1:25:23Molly O'Shea?

  that have helped motivate you along the way?

• 1:25:27Speaker 00

  I think today, the people that, you know, really helped me and close to me, you know,

• 1:25:37Speaker 00

  are first of all, my family, my wife and son.

• 1:25:42Speaker 00

  And then on a business, you know, and I, there is so much you can learn, you know, as you could see, you know, most of the conversation is not around, you know, specifics of AI models. It's about people.

• 1:25:58Speaker 00

  So for that purpose, you know, anyone who's close to you, who listens well, and is sensitive and open to people can help, can help you a lot and, you know, I'm blessed with that. And my partners, you know, we talk about all those things. We have very ego-less and politics-less culture,

• 1:26:32Speaker 00

  which I think the best partnerships, not just in business, in personal life, is when you feel that you can be weak and vulnerable with your partner. And that really liberating. If you're, if you're, if you feel free to be vulnerable, if you feel free to be weak and expose yourself to your partner, then it's easy to recover and from anything and go places together.

• 1:27:10Speaker 00

  I think I was, I was. I really believe in the concept of real greatness.

• 1:27:17Speaker 00

  And real greatness is something that you cannot teach. You have to experience that because it's like explaining colors to colorblind people. You know, how can you explain red or green? If you have never seen red or green, it's very, you know, it's very, very difficult to explain that. But if you've seen it once, you know it forever. So the same is for real greatness. And I think that I've seen real greatness from several people

• 1:27:53Speaker 00

  in my history. I've seen real greatness at Sequoia. And I give a lot of credit to Doug Leone and Michael Moritz for that. I've seen real greatness

• 1:28:10Speaker 00

  when I was a CEO of two startups. And I had amazing team that taught me a lot.

• 1:28:21Speaker 00

  And I've seen real greatness during my military service. And I learned a lot from that, so.

• 1:28:31Speaker 00

  So if you follow real greatness and the people that showed you real greatness, it could be your mom, your dad, your child, your partner,

• 1:28:45Speaker 00

  that would get you to good places.

• 1:28:47Molly O'Shea?

  From your time at Sequoia, what are the biggest lessons that you learned from either Doug or Mike?

• 1:28:53Speaker 00

  Many, many lessons.

• 1:28:56Speaker 00

  You know, I'll give you an example because it's really endless.

• 1:29:04Speaker 00

  You know, I learned that, you know, a day after the Google IPO, which was back then the biggest financial event for Sequoia, there was an all-hands meeting at the office with the title of "How can we do better?" Which is insane, insane. Running hundreds of people helping meeting in Beijing in January. And I don't know if you've been to Beijing in January. It's freezing. It's the coldest place you can be.

• 1:29:48Speaker 00

  It's like, I don't know, minus 5,000 degrees. It's like, it's intolerable. And bringing your limited partners to a place like that, they are not going to have fun. They're going to focus on what you want them to focus on. So, um...

• 1:30:13Speaker 00

  I can go on and on, but, you know, there are lots of lessons, you know. You spend a decade at a place like that, you learn a lot, whether you like it or not.

• 1:30:28Molly O'Shea?

  True.

• 1:30:29Speaker 00

  It was also very difficult, you know. It wasn't easy to be, you know, to be a partner at a place where you wake up every morning and you feel that you are the worst, least performing partner at a high-performing, high-performing group of people. So just going through the experience of surviving and maintaining your core and direction in an environment where you see so many successful people around you that, you know, it makes you question yourself every day. Am I doing the right things? Am I in the right direction?

• 1:31:14Speaker 00

  It's very easy to feel, you know...

• 1:31:20Speaker 00

  Very bad in that environment.

• 1:31:23Molly O'Shea?

  How do you push through that, though? That sounds pretty horrible.

• 1:31:27Speaker 00

  A lot of grit and things that are similar to the conversation we had about founders. Just, you know, it doesn't mean that you don't have bad days. You have many bad days, but you push forward and you, it forces you to always question yourself, never be happy about what you have achieved because you always see something better and realize it's a journey. You know, whatever mountain peak you're going to climb, the moment you're reaching the peak, you see other higher peaks beyond that. And just realize this is a journey. It's not just going to be fun.

• 1:32:12Speaker 00

  There are fun moments here and there, but, you know, you have to give everything you've got. Every day.

• 1:32:22Molly O'Shea?

  Every day?

• 1:32:23Speaker 00

  Every day.

• 1:32:24Molly O'Shea?

  As we think about the journey forward, what are you most looking forward to in this next year? And then the next five years, 10 years?

• 1:32:34Speaker 00

  Putting a lot of focus on developing and supporting my partners

• 1:32:46Speaker 00

  and really helping them go through that journey, which I went through and I know how hard it is to, you know, you can be, at the time I joined Sequoia was an operator for 10 years. And switching to become a VC wasn't an easy journey. And, you know, it's a profession where you meet your failures before you meet your successes. And it takes five to six years to really know if you are good at what you're doing, which is insane because there are very, very few professions on the planet where you have to spend so many years just to know if you're any good.

• 1:33:32Speaker 00

  So I'm trying to help them go through that process and make it a little bit easier for them, but...

• 1:33:40Speaker 00

  It's never easy. So that's, you know, developing a high-performing team at CyberStarts is something I really focus on. And, you know, another obvious objective is to build the next generation of important cybersecurity companies. And I believe that we have the textbook to do that. Out of our thirty investments, I believe that by the end of this year, about ten would be unicorns.

• 1:34:16Speaker 00

  So this is an insane performance benchmark that we are very proud of. But it also makes us uncomfortable and evaluate ourselves again and again how we keep that pace, how we can get better. If you keep the analogy to the Google IPO day plus one conversation at Sequoia. And that's an ongoing, you know, learning experience for me and for the team.

• 1:34:55Molly O'Shea?

  Given that, do you think this new world of trillion-dollar exits as the milestone is a rational thing to think about? Do you think it's reckless? How do you think about that as an exit?

• 1:35:08Speaker 00

  I don't think about that in terms of exit values. I don't think about exits, you know.

• 1:35:18Speaker 00

  I think about developing terrific businesses and companies which are important cybersecurity companies. The financial outcome is a side effect. If you're building a terrific business, you'll do well, you know, whether through M and A or IPO or whatever it is, you know. And maybe there'll be new ways to convert, you know, product and business success into liquidity. I have no idea, but. For me, the financial events are

• 1:36:03Speaker 00

  you know, the side effects of building terrific businesses.

• 1:36:09Molly O'Shea?

  Okay. Well, Gilly, it was a pleasure to have you on. Hey, it's Molly. If you enjoy our interviews, check out our newsletter, sorcery.vc, where we deliver a once-a-week top deals and tech headlines email and also go deeper on our podcast interviews. Subscribe to Sorcery today. And don't forget to subscribe to the podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Apple, or wherever you listen. Link in description to sign up.