When Google agreed to buy Israeli cloud security company Wiz earlier this year and carried out the search giant’s biggest acquisition, it threw a $32 billion bucket of water at the idea that Mega-Deal Drought would stay here.
In March, Google agreed to pending regulatory sign-offs for a five-year-old startup that was roughly comparable to Iceland’s gross domestic product last year. Today, the acquisition exists as an early litmus test of the Trump administration’s willingness to expensive major technology mergers and acquisitions.
For Wiz Cofounder and Chief Technology Officer Ami Luttwak, this moment feels like a Déjà‑vu. The same founding team sold their last outfit, Adallom, to Microsoft in 2015.
Founded in March 2020, With crashed in the pandemic, which scraped workloads from on-plame server racks and pushed them into the cloud almost overnight. The crew said they were pivoted from their network exposure to cloud security, and recorded $100 million in annual recurring revenue within 18 months.
Now I realized that the company is riding even more in the wilderness.
The ability to write artificial intelligence code has transformed all developers into functional factories. However, Luttwak says that the new surge in attack surfaces has overwhelmed and overwhelmed most security teams. Luttwak’s answer? If the builder can “vibe cord” the app in an hour, security should be vibrated immediately.
In an interview at Business Insider’s Headquarters in New York City, we asked Luttwak about building a company through the pandemic, new technology paradigms, and part of the cloud security of engineer workflows. He refused to answer questions about Google’s planned acquisition.
This Q&A has been edited for clarity and length.
Is this roughly the same team between the first startup and the Wiz?
Basically, they are on the same team. A team is what makes a company and defines how it operates. It’s not a specific direction or idea.
When we left Microsoft, we didn’t know what we wanted to build. “We have the opportunity to go back together, so let’s do it.”
You started with a different service, right?
We started networking and then started Covid Hit, but no one wanted to talk about future network architectures. “How can you help me now?” We had to pivot, but we want to pivot. That’s the fun of a startup – finding the real problem, not the theoretical ones you think exist.
Cloud security was already a mature market at the time. There were hundreds of solutions in the market. When I go to a concert, the crowd is full and it’s like, “It’s too late here, there’s no way I can get closer to the stage.”
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However, in reality, there was no solution that actually solved the real problem. There was a marketplace to help customers manage the cloud securely, but what businesses actually needed was all the security they had in the cloud.
The first year saw recurring revenues of $14 million per year. This was 10 times more than expected.
With has grown as part of many companies moving to the cloud. How does pandemic disruption compare to what is happening with artificial intelligence now?
We were the first remote. We were able to hire the candidate we wanted. We managed to get the customers we wanted. This really helped us in the sense that large companies had no advantage over us.
The pandemic has accelerated. AI changes things.
You need to forget everything you’ve done so far and approach security very differently. The reason is simple. Everyone can build very quickly.
I speak as fast as before. It’s not just the number of applications that are increasing, but the number of people in the company that can build things up.
The history of security in businesses was much more centralized. “Do you want to make something? Come to us. I’ll tell you what to do.” It’s approaching like a building inspector. In today’s world, builders can “atmosphere” something in an hour. And every security professional has hundreds of developers.
The challenge for us is to work together as security teams and developers to help our business move quickly. Engineers conflict with security. They said, “I don’t have time for that. I’ll deal with it later.”
Security is critical to businesses, but is still considered second-rate within engineering.
It’s second-rate, but boring.
If you want to build an application, think about how cool it is. Are you thinking about security?
They say security must be democratized – self-service. Simplify complexity so that anyone can own security. If you build it, you need to own it. That’s not the other way.
We need to find a way as an industry to allow vibe security as well as vibe security while you are doing it.
What should you do?
It should be designed to be easy to use. I’m glad I was able to use the iPhone – it wasn’t just a feature. Previously, you should be able to make it available to anyone who needs to be an expert.
Perhaps we are looking at some of the same challenges as employment. It throws boring talent, but it’s a shocking job. How has your pitch to candidates evolved over the years?
There’s no need to explain to the technician why cyber is cool. Good and bad, we are people who find problems before the bad guys come.
We’re only five years old and we’re admitting people say, “You’re not a startup anymore.” I tell them, I’m in my 40s. Decide whether you are young or not. We still feel like we are a startup.
What have you been asking customers lately?
I’m trying to deal with two different pressures. Some customers expect to use AI smarter, while some customers fear the risk of saying “don’t use it at all” in our contract.
There is a lot of discussion with customers. I try to tell them there’s no way to commit to it. You may receive a support email and a summary will be performed.
We are highly regulated entities, but we are also expected to run very quickly. The challenge is how we can leverage AI internally without putting our data or customers at risk.
I’ve read about the amount of code written by AI on Google or Microsoft, and it seems to be a showboat.
We don’t know the real impact on productivity yet, that’s the truth. The amount of code generated does not mean that it can take powerful engineers from complex systems.
We are beginning to build different pipelines: internal flows for employees and external flows for products. Support Automation is an entire team of teams that connect to sensitive systems and perform extremely complex analyses.
That’s why it accelerated during the pandemic. You are riding AI waves now. Are you worried about AI native generations of cloud security startups who come to eat your lunch?
Every company on the surface of the globe feels that it has a risk to its business. If they feel safe, then they are probably even less secure.
AI is just as smart as the data you give it. Our advantage is to understand your environment better than anyone else. We’re like Google Maps. There are lots of traffic, satellites and business layers. You need all the layers to ask how long it will take to go to the restaurant.
There are all the layers. Understand code, network, identity, secrets, applications, malware, and exposure. So there is data. Now, for us, it’s all about enabling security teams to use their data in an AI-friendly way.
