Gili Raanan
speaker
558 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Mar
Gili Raanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
I believe that in any field where there's relatively uniformity of buyers, that's applicable. I would assume it's applicable for fintech, it's applicable for gaming, maybe even applicable for medical devices. But you need a fairly active ecosystem, not just from end users' perspective, but also from an M&A perspective. That's important as well, because not all your companies would go public.
In the past 12 months, we've sold five portfolio companies at cumulative value of $2.5 billion. That's important as well.
Achieving amazing returns has always been super hard. It would continue to be hard. But I believe that with everything said earlier about the perfect storm in cybersecurity, the introduction of AI and the way it's going to redefine cybersecurity, I believe that the opportunity is there. Obviously, the quality of the talent we see is always getting better.
And that's what keeps me so optimistic, just to see the endless stream of smart, eager, hardworking young individuals who are determined to build the next solutions.
I always speak with founders about their superpowers. What do they perceive as their superpower? What makes them confident that they can win the game? When you speak with a founder, speak with an individual for a good hour, you've got a fairly good perspective of what you think is their superpower. And it's fascinating to listen to the way they perceive themselves.
And I found out that some of the best founders are completely unaware to their superpowers. They are so natural in that they don't mean to use them. They are just so great at that. And a superpower can be anything. A superpower can be simply the type of person that people are dying to be their friend. You don't notice that. You think that that's a gift everyone has.
You don't realize that this is your gift and that what paved you the way to be successful. In many cases, the superpower they claim they have is not necessarily the real superpower they have, but it shows you the way they view their weaknesses. Because the superpower they are aware of, they pay attention to, they had to develop it. And they had to develop it in compensation for something else.
So that tells you a lot about the person ahead of you.
First of all, congratulations. You're a fast learner. That's great. Few things, but I would say, let's take self-confidence. It's one answer I would give. I'm sure this is something I've developed over time. I wasn't natural in that. It took time. And it was as compensation to a very insecure child that grew up in a small town
in Israel that didn't feel really appreciated for his talents and didn't feel that he's part of something bigger. And I think only when I was 13, for my bar mitzvah, I got a Commodore 64 computer. That opened up a whole new world for me. I started to get to know people with the same mindset.
Speaking about the 80s, I hopped on a bus and went to computer geeks gatherings in Tel Aviv when I was 14 or 15. And I think that only when I joined the Israeli NSA when I was 18, I really found out that I'm part of something bigger. I felt that I belong to that group of people. So it took time to develop that self-confidence.
Beforehand, there was always a gap between the way I felt about myself and the type of feedback I got from the people around me.
My endless hunger. I'm never happy. I'm never satisfied with whatever I achieve. I always look at the next step. I finish climbing on one peak of the mountain. I immediately look beyond that mountain and look for the next peak to climb. It's very daunting because I tell myself it would be nicer if I could just take a rest and enjoy the view from the peak of the mountain I just climbed.
And I find very little satisfaction in that.
Making impact on people that I really care about. The founders I partner with are people that I really care about. My partners at CyberStarts, Leo, Emily, Hila, Adam, are people that I care about. Trying to leverage the past 35 years of being in the different sides of cybersecurity, going through so many different experiences to really make impact on their life.
WIS in many ways is the front window type of use case for the cyber starts recipe for building an important company. And for me, the WIS story really holds many of the key ingredients for building an important cybersecurity company. I'll talk about a few elements. I hope that I'll do that in the right order.
But most importantly, I think it's picking a really important pain point and getting the perfect product market fit. If you look at Wiz, the four founders, Asaf, Ami, Roy, Non, I think that the Wiz journey started eight years ago. Before founding Wiz in 2012, there was just a bunch of young guys, 27, 28 years old, straight out of the army.
Asaf had spent maybe a year with McKinsey, but really inexperienced team. And they started Adelon. a cloud security company, and that journey was quite short.
In three years, they sold the business to Microsoft, joined Microsoft in 2015, and spent five years at Microsoft building the Microsoft cloud security business, brought it to a decent size of a billion dollars in revenue, and then they left Microsoft in 2020. And at that point in time, they were the most experienced team, in my view, worldwide in running a cloud security business.
And they started a company, which wasn't called Wiz, it was called Beyond Networks. And they had a very, very different idea. They thought to go and secure satellite offices with secure one access, et cetera, you know, some sort of... a business that never took off.
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