Assaf Rappaport was running late for school. To those who knew the 18 year old best, this truancy was nothing new. The consummate generalist had earned a reputation for spreading himself too thin—he was always busy with a friend, a new extracurricular, maybe a school trip. Rappaport describes his role in his family with characteristic middle-child-of-five wryness, “I’m the one that everybody was generally upset with, not answering the phone, not being available, not being there. So the disappointment, that’s my role.” But even for him, this absence was noteworthy because he wasn’t just late for school by a matter of minutes. He had missed the entire first week. 

This time, though, Rappaport had an unassailable excuse for his tardiness to the Jerusalem campus of Hebrew University: It had been government mandated. The summer after graduating high school, he began a rotation in Talpiot, an elite military program for Israel’s top students in math and science, one that would set him up to complete his compulsory service in a unit of his choosing. It was an opportunity that shocked him—“I always felt like my admission was by mistake, I always had imposter syndrome”—and one that he couldn’t pass up, even if it meant that he was a full week behind in his university studies before they even began. Luckily, he could lean on his new best friend, Yinon Costica, whom he’d met during his rotational program and who had managed to matriculate on time. “I missed the day when you created your curriculum for the year,” Rappaport remembers, “so when I arrived on campus I found Yinon and I told him, ‘I’m just going to join your classes for the day.’” Costica had chosen computer science, so Rappaport did too. 

The two soon reunited with Roy Reznik and Ami Luttwak, also alumni of the military rotational program. The teenagers were drawn to each other because they were the kind of friends who constantly pushed each other in new, challenging directions but in a way that felt expansive—and fun. When they reconnected on campus in the fall of 2002, they quickly became inseparable. But no amount of early closeness could’ve led them to predict that nearly two decades later they would come to feel like a family, one that trusted each other enough to leave lucrative, stable positions during the height of a global pandemic to make a bet on building something new. And they certainly couldn’t have imagined that within four years of launch, that new project would become the go-to cloud security platform for 45% of the Fortune 100. That early aughts autumn, all they knew was that they’d been lucky enough to find a group of kindred spirits whom they enjoyed and admired in equal measure. And that with each other’s help, they’d at least survive freshman year.

***

Costica and Rappaport slipped into a crowded bar down a side street in the Former French Concession neighborhood of Shanghai. The duo had ended up in China on a bit of a whim. It was late 2009, and Costica had been stationed in Singapore for a few months on a military rotational program. Rappaport, eager for a change of pace from his own Israel-based service, proposed that they take a trip to Shanghai during his week off. A few weeks later, they landed in Pudong airport with no agenda; by day they explored different Shanghai neighborhoods; by night, they drank, made friends, and wondered what their futures might hold. Sipping his drink, watching so many other young, seemingly carefree people do the same, Rappaport felt something that he hadn’t in the seven years since he’d graduated university and joined Israel’s premier cybersecurity unit, the 8200. He felt at ease.

“So why don’t you just do a full semester here?” an American woman asked Rappaport, snapping him out of his reverie. Rappaport wanted to tell her the truth—that his story about being a university student was a cover, that this was the first relaxing trip that he’d taken in nearly a decade, and most of all, that he wished he had the flexibility to say yes to just such an offer. Instead, Rappaport replied with a noncommittal “maybe,” while thinking to himself, I can’t even tell you that I’m in the Israeli army, much less intelligence. “That was a moment of realizing, oh, we’re not really as free as we thought,” remembers Rappaport.  

Something shifted when he got back to Tel Aviv. Returning to his post in the 8200, one he’d once cherished so much that he opted to stay well beyond his mandatory service, suddenly felt limiting. He wasn’t feeling regret about the time he’d served. “My team was seven people, and we won the Israel Defense Prize for our project,” says Rappaport. “It’s truly magic that seven of us could engineer something that might save lots of lives. The impact is unheard of.” But now, Shanghai had given him a taste of something else worth exploring. “I felt like, oh my god, I need to see the world, I need to get out of Israel,” says Rappaport. His ticket out: a consulting job at McKinsey.

For two years, McKinsey provided just the diversion Rappaport needed, exposing him to new countries and new problems to solve. But he lacked the ability to implement solutions and make the impact he had so relished during his military service. So when Luttwak approached him proposing that they build something of their own, Rappaport accepted. “Founding a company means doing everything. If you’re not going to do it, nobody’s going to do it.”

In the summer of 2012, for the first time in over a decade, Rappaport found himself functionally jobless, a state of being that the self-described expert at “going on well-defined paths” remembers took some adjusting. “It never feels right when you start a company,” he adds. But just like when he was 18 years old starting university, Rappaport was not entering the unknown alone. Reznik had also responded to Luttwak’s aspirational siren song, and Costica, still finishing up his service, would join shortly thereafter, further tethering the foursome together as they dove into the entrepreneurial void. Because of Rappoport’s experience with McKinsey, the team decided that he would assume CEO duties for their nonexistent company. Luttwak would be CTO, and Reznik would lead R&D. Now all they needed was an idea.

“We’re very different, but that’s why it works,”

Assaf Rappaport

***

Rappaport retreated to his bedroom in the apartment he shared with Luttwak in central Tel Aviv after another afternoon of unsuccessful brainstorming. By now it was the fall of 2012 and a few months into the year they’d given themselves to start up, and they still had nothing. Gradually, it dawned on the founders that their elite military service gave them an edge over any other collection of twentysomethings in one particular realm: cybersecurity. But even then, lightning took its time to strike. “We thought, SharePoint is the biggest content management system in the world—so let’s do SharePoint security!” remembers Rappaport. His boyfriend at the time wasn’t impressed. He suggested Rappaport “call [the] company ShareShit because you’re doing shit for SharePoint.” (They’re no longer together, though they’re friends. “But I’m not taking name ideas from him,” says Rappaport.)

Months played out in a groundhogian cycle of daily conceptualizing, pitching, rejection and repeating. “Every day you have an idea at the moment you’re falling to sleep that you’re already pretty sure is bad. You wake up, you’re trying to convince the others, they’re killing your vision, and you know they’re right,” he says. “We were very good at bad ideas.” But still, the team remained cautiously optimistic. “From the outside, lots of people would say, ‘Oh, you’re doing a startup, what’s the idea?’ And in our mind, the idea doesn’t really matter,” says Rappaport. “The real question is, ‘Do you have a good team?’ That’s the only thing that matters because ideas will come, and ideas will change. But if you have the right team, eventually everything will align.” 

Despite still lacking anything concrete, the team started attracting unsolicited funding interest. Word had gotten out in Tel Aviv’s startup ecosystem that a collection of 8200 graduates were cooking something up in the security space. “I knew that most of the successful Israeli cybersecurity founders come out of 8200,” says Sequoia partner Doug Leone. For many investors, the prospect of backing multiple 8200 alumni in a single company was irresistible. 

The interest, however, wasn’t mutual. “We were very afraid of raising funds from venture capital firms,” says Rappaport. “We believed that VCs take great teams with great ideas, and then they bring in professional CEOs to take over.” So when Gili Raanan, Sequoia’s Israel-based partner, came knocking, Rappaport exercised the powers of obfuscation he’d honed through years of army intelligence service (and being a middle child of five with a reputation for being too busy). “We basically just avoided them when they would call us, or we would say we’re too busy,” says Rappaport. 

This tactic worked until it didn’t. “Raanan kept calling until one day he said, ‘Assaf, I don’t believe you. I’m sure you have one hour in the next two weeks,’” remembers Rappaport. Bullshit detected, he agreed to a meeting, which he ended up skipping (“I’m very good at avoiding”). When Raanan called that evening to ask why, Rappaport was finally honest with him about not wanting funding. Raanan tried once more, this time giving the founders a taste of their own medicine. “Well, I don’t want to invest in you, so that’s a fit!” he told Rappaport, continuing: “Look, in three days, Doug Leone is coming to Israel. I want you to meet him. One day you’re going to come to Silicon Valley, and knowing Doug will be helpful for you. He can open doors for you. So just meet him one-on-one.” Finally, Rappoport agreed. 

When he walked into the meeting a few days later, he was surprised to discover that Doug wasn’t alone. A handful of additional Sequoia team members had joined at the last minute—a show of enthusiasm on the VC’s part that Rappaport interpreted as something of an ambush. So Rappaport decided to make his pitch as uninvestable as possible. “I only shared about our team and our market—nothing about our business plan, because if they didn’t know how much I was going to raise, they couldn’t make a decision,” he says. (The lack of a business plan was part strategy, part necessity, as the founders were still working through the finer points of creating one.) For an hour or so, Rappaport spoke to his love and deep respect for his co-founders, their professional alignment, and their profound cybersecurity expertise gleaned from many years spent in one of the world’s most elite intelligence units. He left the meeting satisfied that he’d not burned a single bridge while still dodging potential VC involvement. But the next day, Leone called him with an offer. 

Sequoia wanted to invest $5 million, and they were convinced for exactly the same reason that the founders, still largely idea-less, were bullish themselves. “We made the offer based on our belief in the founding team, made up of people who have worked together and who knew the space inside out,” remembers Leone. “While the company was still getting off the ground, I argued that these guys are gonna figure it out.”

In the hours after hearing from Leone, the trio moved through the natural stages of being offered unexpected millions: disbelief, hilarity, shock and eventually, acceptance that this was worth taking seriously. They fell back on their tried-and-true tactic in moments of uncertainty, reaching out to trusted friends—in this case, other 8200 alumni who had worked with Sequoia. These connections assured them that the VC would act in good faith and could offer them practical support and guidance. “It took me until late night to figure out that, well, this might actually be a good offer to us,” says Rappaport. A week later, they accepted, and Adallom, the cybersecurity business still lacking a business plan, was born.

***

Seven years after Adallom’s founding, in early 2020, Rappaport, Reznik, Luttwak and Costica again found themselves around a table in central Tel Aviv, brainstorming. In that one way, very little had changed for the friends. But by almost any other metric, everything had. Adallom, which helped enterprises secure their SaaS products, had been acquired by Microsoft in 2015 for $320 million. The Adallom founding team, along with Costica, who had joined them as VP of product, were enlisted to lead Microsoft’s newly minted Cloud Security Group after the acquisition. In less than a decade, they had gone from jobless buddies to aspirational co-founders to successful acquirees to lead technologists within Microsoft’s giant tech ecosystem. And now, after five years of growth, leadership and learning (and relative stability) within Microsoft, the team again felt a pull towards the entrepreneurial. 

The team left Microsoft with intentions to build something new in network security. Just like their first foray into company-building, their idea wasn’t fully formed, but their confidence in each other was unshakable. Rappaport now had a decade’s worth of evidence that their friendship translated to profound professional chemistry, with each contributing something unique and essential. “We’re very different, but that’s why it works,” says Rappaport. He saw Luttwak as the visionary—“You tell him to imagine five years from now how something will go, and his vision will be super accurate. That’s his superpower.” Costica was the opposite—“He knows exactly how to execute what should happen in the short term.” Rappaport saw Reznik as an amazing people person and leader. “He knows how to build amazing engineering teams and how to create energy,” says Rappaport. His own essential contribution? “I feel like today my superpower is to make sure that I’m the most stupid person in the room.” 

The foursome’s bond became that much more essential to their success (and sanity) when a global pandemic started just weeks into brainstorming. “I vividly remember my mother expressing concerns that we were making a grave mistake for leaving our stable positions at Microsoft during such turbulent times,” remembers Rappaport, who for once didn’t just chalk up her concerns to Jewish motherly worrying. “It did feel like the worst timing imaginable,” he remembers. “Financial markets were in turmoil, and the lockdowns introduced an unprecedented level of uncertainty and disruption.” 

But to the team’s surprise, unexpected benefits started to emerge from that moment as well. They rented a cramped office space in central Tel Aviv—their own miniature tech-cum-COVID bubble—and started making calls. With a deep cybersecurity rolodex from years in the field, they started to line up meetings with security specialists and chief information security officers (CISOs) at companies of all sizes. “Because of the COVID shift to virtual platforms, meetings with potential clients or investors that would have once taken weeks to arrange could now be conducted within hours or days,” says Rappaport. “The circumstances paradoxically enabled us to move faster than ever.” 

Early conversations with these CISOs helped the founders refocus away from network security and onto the emerging cloud security space (as well as a whimsical, if a bit more industry-agnostic company name, Wiz—“We had to like it, but it also had to be as generic as possible because it’s truly painful to change your name with the IRS if we needed to pivot again,” says Assaf). But their new approach came with its own set of challenges. “There were already years-old cloud security incumbent startups that had raised hundreds of millions of dollars,” says Rappaport. Though being a little late to the party wasn’t all bad. “You have the ability to see all the things that others have been doing wrong and to rebuild them,” says Rappaport.  

The first aspect they wanted to rebuild was the fractured nature of cloud security products. “It was like, OK, there are cloud containers, let’s have container security, we have serverless, let’s have serverless security,” says Rappaport. “These were all very niche and point solutions that eventually didn’t add up to a cohesive system that worked for companies.” In contrast, the foursome set out to build “one product with one technology stack to solve not just some of the functionality but all of it.” 

The founders started hiring, getting even more of the old gang back together from Adallom and Microsoft to become their earliest “Wizards.” Like a reverse “Field of Dreams,” they were again less concerned with building a specific thing than with surrounding themselves with the right team with whom to build. Fortunately, their earliest hires felt similarly. “It was pretty hard for me to leave Microsoft, especially because their idea wasn’t 100 percent focused,” remembers Wiz’s VP of R&D, Osher Hazan, “but there was something magical that dragged me in. It was the founding team and the rest of the early developers. It was a belief that if the people are good, the rest will follow.” 

Space constraints—the team was operating out of a two-room office—meant that everyone, regardless of job function or title, worked out of the larger room, reserving the smaller room for ongoing CISO conversations and sales calls. This put product people right next to their engineers, gave the engineers insight into the sales process, allowed sales to easily rope technical specialists in on client calls, and put leadership in dialogue with their newest hires. Transparency and interdepartmental context was built into the nascent company’s DNA. “Everyone worked in the early days like we were one team. No titles, no hierarchy, just work together to get it done,” remembers Hazan. Close relationships with many of their CISO connections meant this feedback loop extended beyond the internal team. “Those quick loops together with the customers made it feel like a joint effort to figure out what this product needed to be. I think that really helped to lay down some really big stones as the base of Wiz’s product,” says Hazan.    

“It did feel like the worst timing imaginable.”

Assaf Rappaport

Another crucial observation emerged from these exploratory conversations. They realized that their competitors’ shortcomings weren’t just technological, they were dispositional. “Building effective cloud security organizations is bigger than technology, it’s a change of mindset,” says Rappaport. As he saw it, it wasn’t just the point solutions their competitors were offering that were siloed, it was also the security vulnerabilities themselves. A proper solution required more insight into how different vulnerabilities were connected. Mirroring Wiz’s own internal modus operandi, it also required a shift toward greater companywide transparency and interdepartmental communication about those vulnerabilities and strategies for remediation. Understanding the full context of one’s cloud, Rappaport was convinced, was the key to keeping it secure.

When an early Wiz engineer decided to visualize this idea of context in a graph, Rappaport noticed it on his monitor as he walked by. “What is this?” he asked, taking in the visualized connectivity between systems and vulnerabilities. It was an “Aha!” moment. “Without context you can just say, ‘We found a vulnerability,’” says Raz Shaked, head of DevOps at Wiz, “which is what the old security tools were doing. But now we could connect all those security aspects into one product and visualize it. We realized that this completely changes the way you think about cloud security.” 

The Wiz team reconnected with Sequoia. Though they still didn’t have an actual product, at least this time they had a proven track record. “It was very clearly a team bet,” remembers Sequoia partner Bogomil Balkansky. “We knew Assaf from before. And from their conversations with CISOs, it became obvious to them that nobody had actually built the authoritative product in cloud security. The opportunity was still there.” Sequoia, in addition to Cyberstarts, invested in April 2020. By October, a product had been built. By the end of the year, the team had closed $3 million in sales.

***

“Holy shit, how many favors am I gonna owe people by the time I’m done with Wiz?” Leone remembers thinking just a few months into 2021. Rappaport was relentless. “He would just constantly ask me for introductions to customers, constantly ask me to help him close deals in major accounts where I happen to know someone.” Not a week would go by without the one-time VC skeptic reaching out to Leone for some kind of sales-related support. “It was a pain in the ass,” Leone laughs, “but I do urge CEOs to do that.”

That doggedness didn’t stop with Rappaport. In their first year, largely still operating out of the small office space in Tel Aviv, the team would often work around the clock. They leveraged their time zone to their advantage, building Wiz’s product during Israeli working hours and making sales calls with potential customers in the U.S. at night. “In the beginning, we all felt like founders,” Shaked remembers. “We all felt responsible for the company. That was meaningful,” he says. When they worked late, it was with clear purpose, remembers Hazan. “We would have a big call with a customer that required multiple job functions, or we had a delivery to another client the next day. We were always focused on efficiency. If someone was asked to join a call, it was because they were really needed,” he says. 

“We made the offer based on our belief in the founding team, made up of people who have worked together and who knew the space inside out.”

Doug Leone

Wiz’s rapid growth wasn’t just a result of their all-hands-on-deck mentality. They had pioneered a new approach to cloud security that did away with the need for pieces of software called “agents,” which only provided visibility into a single aspect of an organization’s cloud security. In contrast, Wiz’s new “agentless” approach gave customers insight into their entire cloud environment all at once, visualizing this context using methods like cloud image analysis, log file analysis and API connections. In addition to being less cumbersome, Wiz gave security specialists the ability to prioritize more pressing threats and understand how one issue might precipitate others down the road. This new approach also reduced management overhead and negated the need for constant agent maintenance, an increasingly complex task as cloud environments expanded in size and complexity. It was revolutionary for customers. “It’s like you never had Google before,” says Shaked, “and then someone just gives it to you.”

Best of all—at least from a sales perspective—when potential customers provided Wiz with read-only access to their cloud infrastructure, Wiz’s product had the ability to crawl their infrastructure in real time, providing a window into security exposures and misconfigurations and how they were all connected. “In 15 minutes, it basically started providing value for customers, showing them results that would kind of light up like a Christmas tree, making very clear all the things that are wrong in their cloud infrastructure,” says Balkansky. “This made for a very sexy demoable product.” A sexy, demoable product coupled with pioneering technology and an indefatigable team put Wiz on a surefooted path to success. Just how successful, nobody was quite prepared for.     

***

By March of 2021, only a year after their pandemic launch and with just 65 employees, Wiz raised a $130 million Series B funding at a $1.7 billion valuation. They hit $100 million in annual recurring revenue after 18 months, becoming the fastest software company ever to reach that milestone. And the growth has yet to slow. The company raised three additional rounds of funding in October 2021, February 2023, and May 2024, culminating in $1 billion Series E funding at a valuation of $12 billion. It’s an eye-popping figure and correspondingly rapid ascent for any company—one you could argue is a reflection of the growing ubiquity of cloud computing, an increased focus on security and the rise of LLMs and generative AI in the cloud. 

As one of tech’s most high-profile breakout success stories in recent years, Wiz faces lofty expectations. “The challenge as a leader will continue to be, ‘Does Assaf have the maturity and patience to understand that running at a hundred miles an hour can expose you to things because you haven’t the time, luxury, and sometimes, the wherewithal to slow down and think?’” says Doug Leone. Personally, he remains confident that Rappaport and his co-founders are up to the task, in part because the burden of those expectations is shared equally. “The way they work together is remarkable, they finish each other’s sentences,” says Leone.

Their investors also credit their success, in part, to the founders’ history of operating at scale. “They stayed at Microsoft long enough not only to observe but to be part of the big machine that Microsoft is,” says Balkansky. Their employees credit the economy and pragmatism of their leaders’ decision-making. “In general, when we hear about a new round of funding being raised, we trust our leadership, we trust that it’s because the company needs the funding to explode—to do more things necessary to accomplish our goals. And actually nothing changes, and we just keep running ahead,” says Hazan.

Rappaport continues to credit the relational alchemy that gave him the confidence to build something great before he knew for certain what it was, which now extends beyond the founding team to all of their employees. “The Wizards are the sole architects of our extraordinary growth trajectory and have been the driving force behind our success,” he says. Hazan attests to this belief from Wiz’s leadership. “We continue to feel that this is all of our company,” he says. “The founding team has discussions together with us about the right way to grow and recruit and even acquire new companies, trying to understand how we scale in a healthy way, keeping our standards, keeping our core values.” It’s a growth strategy that comes naturally for a company built on relationships with a product built around transparency and context. Most of all, it’s a mindset predicated on trust in a world increasingly dominated by fear and skepticism—the kind that comes from decades of familiarity and friendship. 

***

In July 2024, rumors started to swirl about a potential Wiz acquisition. Alphabet was reportedly offering the four-year-old company $23 billion, making it the search giant’s largest potential acquisition to date. Days after the news leaked, Rappaport sent an email to his team. “Wizards, I know the last week has been intense, with the buzz about a potential acquisition,” he wrote. “While we are flattered by offers we have received, we have chosen to continue on our path to building Wiz. Let me cut to the chase: our next milestones are $1 billion in ARR and an IPO.” Rappaport didn’t offer much by way of explanation—none of the potential antitrust-related concerns or misaligned negotiations. Instead, he provided a simpler rationale: “Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice.”

Rappaport is more convinced than ever that his team is capable of executing his ambitious vision for Wiz. He wants to transform what started as a vague idea, grew into a graph, and gradually became a cloud security platform into the essential operating system for the cloud. Shaked puts it this way: “Every day there is something new in the cloud. Let’s talk a little bit about AI—without the context and visibility into the cloud about how new technologies like AI pose potential security risks, companies won’t use them. Or they’ll use them in a manner that might hurt them later,” he says. “We’re looking for Wiz to be something that you cannot adopt a new technology in the cloud without.” Balkansky sees Wiz as “a company with boundless ambition. I would expect them to be like the next Palo Alto Networks. Nothing short of the next essential security platform.”  

Rappaport understands the challenges that come along with ambition at this scale. “Look, it’s hard to be at Wiz. It’s hard to grow a company like this and not ask yourself, ‘Is this real?’ When is somebody going to knock on the door and say, ‘Hey, this is too large for you, you need to move on?’” he says. But he continues to navigate those challenges by relying on the approach that’s served him as CEO from the start. “We started Wiz with just the four of us but then focused on surrounding ourselves with the right people to take it and to scale it,” he says. “I think that the most impact that you have is putting great people together and letting them interact with each other. And we’re still doing this. We’re just four years old and still figuring a lot out. But I think doing it with your friends and the people that you truly trust and love, that’s what keeps us building the strength of the team. It’s what keeps us going.”