Douglas Leone’s Post

When Assaf Rappaport and I first met in 2013, he thought I was Don Valentine. That might be why he took the meeting. After realizing I wasn’t Don, he still gave me a shot which led to Sequoia Capital leading the earliest rounds in Assaf’s first company, Adallom, and then his second company, Wiz. Assaf, Yinon C., Roy Reznik, and Ami Luttwak have always been special. With Adallom, they proved to be ambitious founders who could execute at scale. After selling the company to Microsoft and working there for years, they were ready to start something new and hungry to build it bigger than last time. This gave Sequoia and Gili Raanan the conviction to co-lead Wiz’s first investment round when there was no clear idea or product yet. Shortly after we partnered with Wiz, the team hit on the insight that cloud security needed a simpler, agentless architecture for an increasingly complex digital world. Once the vision for Wiz became clear, there was no stopping them. The team strategically leveraged their Israeli time zone, working 9-5 on the product and then working late into the night on sales calls to the U.S. and Europe. Wiz reached $100 million in ARR in just 18 months, faster than any software company in history. Today Google announced its intent to acquire Wiz. This milestone marks the start of an exciting new chapter. Wiz and Google Cloud share a vision to improve security by making it easier and faster for organizations of all types and sizes to protect themselves, end-to-end, across all major clouds. This will help spur the adoption of multicloud cybersecurity. We couldn’t be prouder of Assaf, Yinon, Roy, Ami, and the entire Wiz team. It’s been an honor to be your partner for over a decade. Thank you for letting us be a part of your journey. https://lnkd.in/gWSNCSsK