{"id":8489,"date":"2026-06-24T13:37:17","date_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:37:17","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/?p=8489"},"modified":"2026-06-24T13:37:45","modified_gmt":"2026-06-24T13:37:45","slug":"cyber-founders-beware-the-poison-pill-of-high-valuations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/forbes.co.il\/e\/cyber-founders-beware-the-poison-pill-of-high-valuations\/","title":{"rendered":"Cyber Founders: Beware The \u201cPoison Pill\u201d Of High Valuations"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Everyone is talking about the $90 billion M&A wave that hit the sector in 2025: Google\u2019s $32 billion purchase of Wiz, Palo Alto Networks\u2019 $25 billion buy of CyberArk. People love to talk about those, but almost nobody talks about how few companies can actually write<\/em> those checks. Except Ofer Wolf.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As Akamai\u2019s SVP and General Manager of Enterprise Security, Wolf sits on the buy side today. But he got there as COO of Guardicore, the Israeli startup Akamai bought in 2021 for roughly $600 million. It makes his reading on the market less theoretical and more one from actual memory. \u201cI can see the picture from the three sides: the entrepreneur side, the investment side, and the potential acquirer side,\u201d he told me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

What he sees from all three is a market punishing founders who raise at prices the buyer pool can\u2019t support. \u201cThere are fewer than five companies that can do constant acquisition of over a billion,\u201d he said, calling the Wiz-type deals an exception, not the rule. \u201cMost of the acquisitions in cybersecurity, which is a fragmented market, are limited to hundreds of millions of dollars, usually.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s what he called \u201cthe poison pill\u201d: raise too high, and you haven\u2019t built a war chest, you\u2019ve actually shrunk your buyer list to almost nobody. \u201cYour valuation decision has set the future of the company to be a different future,\u201d Wolf told me. \u201c[It\u2019s] probably the most strategic decision that is overlooked.\u201d His advice isn\u2019t to dream smaller, or only aim for the IPO – rather, it\u2019s to prepare a few plans and act accordingly. \u201cYou need to have in the back of your mind another plan B, plan C\u2026 because eventually, most of the cybersecurity companies, the successful ones, were acquired by somebody.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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