Wiz founder thought leaving Microsoft was the "most horrible decision ever."

Fortune

Wiz founder Assaf Rappaport told Fortune Brainstorm Tech in 2024 that leaving his job at Microsoft years ago "felt like the most horrible decision ever." It paid off; he just sold his startup to Google for $32 billion.

Transcript

00:00In the first couple of months, it felt like the worst timing ever to start a company.

00:04I left Microsoft on March 2020, and it felt like the most horrible decision ever.

00:08Like, you know, I was in the mothership.

00:10I truly, I love Microsoft.

00:11I had a great job, great impact on security, and decided to leave, by the way, with the

00:17founders that I have.

00:19And then we're living a perfect time in March 2020, and then nobody picks the phone.

00:22Nobody answers us.

00:24In hindsight, maybe Philip will agree with me that if you pinpoint a time in history,

00:29probably March 2020, that's the time to start a cloud security.

00:32But I would say that the advantage that we have, as I said, Wiz didn't start cloud

00:37security with Wiz.

00:38Actually, a decade before was that.

00:40I think that one of the advantages that we had is like learning from the mistakes of

00:45the others.

00:45And that's kind of the ability to use the cloud-native abilities, actually, to solve

00:52the cloud security problem, which sounds like now very easy to understand, but it wasn't

00:56the case when we started the company.

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