Wiz Said No to $23 Billion and Got $32 Billion

On July 22, 2024, Assaf Rappaport sent his company an email saying Wiz was walking away from $23 billion.

Google had been in advanced talks to buy the cloud security company he founded in January 2020, for a price that would have been the largest acquisition in Alphabet's history. It was roughly double the $12 billion valuation Wiz had raised at in May, two months earlier.

Rappaport's note was short. He told employees the company had chosen "to continue on our path to building Wiz," then named the next two targets out loud: $1 billion in annual recurring revenue, and a public listing. "Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice."

TechCrunch published the note in full that day. Three months later, on the Disrupt stage, Rappaport called it "the toughest decision ever." He said he was "super nervous," and that he had to weigh the company's investors as well as its employees. Then he said the sentence that explains how the call got made at all.

"At a healthy company with a healthy relationship with investors, it's always the founder's decision."

The call belonged to him and his co-founders. A founder under that kind of pressure usually reasons forward from the offer: is $23 billion enough? Enough compared to what?

A number has no scale until you've written down the thing you're comparing it to.

Wiz had written that thing down. Rappaport, Ami Luttwak, Yinon Costica and Roy Reznik had built Adallom together, sold it to Microsoft for $320 million in 2015, then ran Microsoft's cloud security group.

They founded Wiz in January 2020. Nine months after the first line of code they had a $100 million Series A from Index, Sequoia, Insight and Cyberstarts. Eighteen months in, they announced $100 million in ARR, a run Wiz still describes as the fastest to nine figures any software company has made.

So when Google's bankers arrived, the destination was already written. Own cloud security. $1 billion ARR. Then public.

Here's what that buys. Under an offer like that, most founders try to build the argument live, with the acquirer's timeline running and a board that wants an answer by Friday.

Money is a measurement, and a measurement without a target is just a bigger number than last quarter. Write the target first, and the comparison takes an afternoon, because one side of the equation was settled in writing back when settling it was cheap.

Most of these conversations leave no trace. A partner asks whether you'd ever consider selling. An investor floats a bridge. Someone offers a term sheet with a liquidation preference you'll still be explaining in a decade.

The room empties, the notes capture action items, and the reasoning evaporates.

Three lines after the call is enough. What was asked. What you decided. What has to be true for that to hold.

Do it forty times and you stop learning about individual decisions and start learning about your own calibration: which calls you make too fast, where your urgency beats your patience, how often your 80% turns out to be 60%. Memory never produces that feedback. It edits toward an outcome it already knows.

Nine months after the first no, on March 18, 2025, Wiz signed a definitive agreement to be acquired by Google for $32 billion in cash. $9 billion more than the offer Rappaport had turned down.

The European Commission cleared the deal unconditionally in February 2026 and it closed on March 11. Wiz is part of Google Cloud now.

Most founders will never see a $23 billion call, and every founder makes decisions with the same shape: a hire you'll defend in a year, a price you'll revisit in six months, a partnership you'll explain to a board.

The record is the advantage. Write the reasoning down while it's cheap, and future-you can say no without rebuilding the case from a memory that's already started editing itself.