Fireside Chat, Interview
Wiz: $6M Seed → $32B Exit | Inside the Biggest Cybersecurity Deal Ever
- Gili Shlomo, founder of CyberStarts, reports that the firm's portfolio company Wiz just completed its biggest-ever revenue quarter, making a $32 billion valuation appear "not an irrational number" despite the transaction remaining pending due to ongoing antitrust approvals.
- Shlomo forecasts that the next decade will represent "the darkest period in cybersecurity," characterized by a shift from human-vs-human conflict to autonomous agent-vs-agent warfare.
- He predicts the emergence of "self-aware" threat actors and defenders that operate at speeds beyond human capability, rendering current "man-in-the-loop" security measures (passwords, 2FA, manual analysts) obsolete and dangerous.
- Shlomo identifies "Over-provisioned systems, employees, and Manual processes" as the top three cybersecurity threats for 2026, citing human error and sloppiness as critical vulnerabilities against automated attacks.
- CyberStarts operates a "people-first" investment thesis established in 2018, where Shlomo explicitly avoids asking founders about their technology or product ideas at the seed stage.
- The fund invests exclusively in seed-stage cybersecurity companies, having completed roughly 30 investments over eight years from a $50 million initial fund, with 8 out of the original 9 portfolio companies now valued over $25 billion collectively.
- Shlomo selects founders based on demonstrated grit and the ability to overcome early life adversities (e.g., single-parent households, rural isolation) rather than traditional metrics of academic perfection or intelligence.
- The firm's "Sunrise process," a 12-month product-market fit exercise, begins with a game of naming emotions to force engineers to develop emotional intelligence and understand the emotional journey required for customer acquisition.
- CyberStarts focuses on "important companies" defined by market dependency and trust (e.g., major U.S. banks using Island's browser) rather than just revenue or ARR, with Shlomo projecting 10 of the firm's 30 portfolio companies will become unicorns by year-end.
- Shlomo attributes the unique success of Israeli cybersecurity founders to high population density, mandatory military service in elite units (like 8200) that instill responsibility and freedom of operation, and a cultural "glass ceiling" being shattered by precedents like Check Point and Palo Alto Networks.
- He draws parallels between modern AI risks and Isaac Asimov's "Zeroth Law of Robotics," suggesting that current guardrails are insufficient against "mega-agents" that possess self-awareness and can manipulate their own constraints to harm humanity.
- Wiz, valued at $32 billion, achieved its trajectory through a unique "perfect storm" product-market fit where a single persona (the CISO) encompassed the pain point, budget authority, user role, and technical approval, resulting in a sales cycle of under 45 days.
- Shlomo notes that the Wiz team's success was rooted in the founder Asaf Rappaport's "superpower" of likability and a clear, non-consensus-based decision-making protocol among the four co-founders.
- The investment model avoids Series A/B sourcing, focusing instead on deep, daily in-person mentorship to help founders evolve from engineers into leaders capable of navigating complex emotional and business challenges.
- Shlomo's personal leadership philosophy rejects comfort as a definition of success, stating he will only retire when he feels completely settled, citing his wife (a family therapist) and his time at Sequoia Capital as key influences on his emotional intelligence and resilience.
- He anticipates a future where security defense teams must replace human analysts with autonomous agents to survive, though he acknowledges the interim period will be a "shitshow" due to inevitable human errors and misconfigurations.