Good morning.
Maybe some dreams weren’t meant to die. Last week, Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport sat on stage at the Fortune Brainstorm Tech conference amid rumors that Google parent Alphabet was about to buy his four-year-old cybersecurity startup for $23 billion. “If you asked any founder, definitely in the cyber space, two years ago, ‘Hey what’s your dream?'” he said. “I’m going to be unicorn, and then I’m going to become a public company” would have been the likely answer. But, he added, “the dream, a bit, has changed, and they’re seeing other options—and that pushes the market into consolidation.”
Or maybe not. On Monday, Rappaport sent a memo to employees, saying he’d turned down “offers we have received” and would instead pursue an IPO. Arriving on the eve of Alphabet’s earnings, the letter's timing suggested talks had continued up to the last minute.
So what happened? Several factors could be at play. Those reviewing the deal may have decided that it risked running afoul of antitrust regulators—a concern that reportedly killed Alphabet’s potential acquisition of Hubspot, too. Big Tech isn’t beloved on either side of the aisle right now. The massive IT outage caused by CrowdStrike, a Wiz competitor, may have changed the calculus. Or Rappaport may have decided that his company would be better positioned to achieve its goals as a public company.
Back in 2017, two days before his company AppDynamics was due to go public, founder Jyoti Bansal agreed to let Cisco buy it for $3.7 billion. Bansal has since launched two other companies and a VC firm, but he explained to me last night why he regrets making the Cisco decision. “Did we maximize our value? Probably not,” he says. “Our competitors who were our size at that time, like Datadog, became much more successful.”
Bansal doesn’t fault Cisco, which he says “did a great job of retaining people” and leveraging the company’s technologies when it bought the company. “But after two or three years, it’s just different.”
“I think about what we could have done there if we’d stayed independent.”
Equally important, he argues, there’s a public value in being a publicly-traded entity. “I believe companies should go public because broader society should be able to benefit from the value creation that happens through innovation.” Bansal said. “You create more accountability, more responsibility, more liquidity for your employees, more investors…It’s a healthier way to operate.” And, when markets are booming and the wind is at your back, it can be a better way to grow. That, too, can change.
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Diane Brady
diane.brady@fortune.com
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