Assaf Rappaport took a leap of religion when he left Microsoft after 4 years on the tech large. And it simply so occurred that he took that leap in March 2020.
In fact, upending his life to embark on his personal mission coincidently throughout lockdown proved nerve wracking. “It felt like the most horrible decision ever,” Rappaport stated at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech convention in 2024.
A part of the issue was that Rappaport was departing a task and firm that he actually loved. “I was on the mothership,” Rappaport stated. “I truly, I love Microsoft. I had a great job, great impact on security,” he continued.
Even so, Rappaport was feeling prefer it was time for a change. He had executed the whole lot he wanted to do at Microsoft, in any case.
“My first flight back from Redmond [Washington], I wrote on a napkin a list of what I wanted to do at Microsoft, what was important for me to accomplish,” he informed Forbes. “When I finished the napkin, I left the job.”
Prepared for his subsequent journey, he went on to co-create and grow to be chief govt at Wiz, a cloud safety firm. The one downside? Nobody needed him. “Nobody picks up the phone, nobody answers us,” he defined to Fortune of his time making an attempt to get Wiz off the bottom within the warmth of the pandemic.
However the timing was surprisingly serendipitous. He stated in hindsight, “if you pinpoint a time in history, probably March 2020, that’s the time to start a cloud security [company].” Partly, they weren’t inventing the wheel however refurbishing it, taking cues from tech firms that had laid the bottom earlier than them.
“The advantage that we had is learning from the mistakes of the others,” he stated.
What felt like an error in judgment has paid off tremendously for Rappaport. Alphabet introduced Tuesday that it plans to purchase the cybersecurity agency for $32 billion in a deal—$9 billion greater than its earlier supply final yr—set to spice up the tech large’s in-house cloud computing. If closed, the-cash transaction will grow to be Google’s most costly acquisition in its historical past.
“Wiz and Google Cloud are both fueled by the belief that cloud security needs to be easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and democratized, so more organizations can adopt and use cloud and AI securely,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport stated in a weblog put up.
A model of this story initially printed on Fortune.com on July 19, 2024.
Extra on Wiz and AI:
- Wiz founders’ daring guess: Rejecting Google’s authentic supply results in $32 billion buyout deal—and $9 billion in additional money
- Contained in the AI expertise wars the place analysis scientists get multimillion-dollar inventory grants and wooed by Mark Zuckerberg
- Google proclaims its reply to DeepSeek: A brand new light-weight AI mannequin for telephones and laptops
This story was initially featured on Fortune.com
