Assaf Rappaport took a leap of faith when he left Microsoft after four years at the tech giant. And it just so happened that he took that jump in March 2020.
Of course, upending his life to embark on his own project coincidently during lockdown proved nerve wracking. “It felt like the most horrible decision ever,” Rappaport said at Fortune’s Brainstorm Tech conference in 2024.
Part of the problem was that Rappaport was departing a role and company that he truly enjoyed. “I was on the mothership,” Rappaport said. “I truly, I love Microsoft. I had a great job, great impact on security,” he continued.
Even so, Rappaport was feeling like it was time for a change. He had done everything he needed to do at Microsoft, after all.
“My first flight back from Redmond [Washington], I wrote on a napkin a list of what I wanted to do at Microsoft, what was important for me to accomplish,” he told Forbes. “When I finished the napkin, I left the job.”
Ready for his next adventure, he went on to co-create and become chief executive at Wiz, a cloud security company. The only problem? No one wanted him. “Nobody picks up the phone, nobody answers us,” he explained to Fortune of his time trying to get Wiz off the ground in the heat of the pandemic.
But the timing was surprisingly serendipitous. He said in hindsight, “if you pinpoint a time in history, probably March 2020, that’s the time to start a cloud security [company].” In part, they were not inventing the wheel but refurbishing it, taking cues from tech companies that had laid the ground before them.
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“The advantage that we had is learning from the mistakes of the others,” he said.
What felt like an error in judgment has paid off tremendously for Rappaport. Alphabet announced Tuesday that it plans to buy the cybersecurity firm for $32 billion—$9 billion more than its previous offer last year—set to boost the tech giant’s in-house cloud computing. If closed, the-cash transaction will become Google’s most expensive acquisition in its history.
“Wiz and Google Cloud are both fueled by the belief that cloud security needs to be easier, more accessible, more intelligent, and democratized, so more organizations can adopt and use cloud and AI securely,” Wiz CEO Assaf Rappaport said in a blog post.
A version of this story originally published on Fortune.com on July 19, 2024.
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