Technology
When a large company is after a popular startup, the decision to sell is not clear-cut

Last month, rumors first emerged that Google was pursuing cloud security startup Wiz, and a suggestion of $23 billion was on the table, the most lucrative offer ever made to a startup. There were a lot of moving parts before the deal finally fell through, and it’s fair to ask: What are the mechanics behind putting a big deal like this in motion, and the way does a startup determine whether to sell or not?
We spoke with Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of Harness, a developer tools startup that has raised about $575 million and made a variety of small acquisitions along the way. While Bansal has no direct knowledge of the Google-Wiz negotiation process, he experienced the adulation of a large company when Cisco got here in after his previous startup, AppDynamics. Cisco ultimately bought the company just days before it went public in 2017 for $3.7 billion.
He says there are three aspects at play in deals like this. The first is how serious the offer is, and whether it’s concrete or simply exploratory. In the case of a private company like Wiz, it’s likely to be exploratory at first, since there’s not as much public details about its funds as there can be with a public company.
Bansal says that when he was going through the AppDynamics negotiations with Cisco, he had recently filed his S-1 with the SEC, and all of his financial cards were already on the table. “So for an acquirer, acquiring a private company that’s on the IPO track and a few days away from an IPO is fundamentally no different than acquiring a public company,” he says. “All the information they need is there, and they don’t have to worry about whether they’re missing something, or whether the information isn’t clean, verified, or audited.”
Once you’ve got determined how serious the company is, you wish to investigate whether it’s a good fit. “The second factor in any type of courtship that happens is why are you merging companies? Is it interesting? Is it exciting?” You also need to consider what is going to occur to your employees and your products: Will some employees lose their jobs? Will products be discontinued or canceled?
Finally, and maybe most significantly, the economics of the deal need to be examined to see if it is sensible and represents good value for shareholders. From Wiz’s perspective, this was a huge offer (assuming the rumored amount was accurate) that was 46 times current ARR and 23 times projected 2025 ARR. However, Wiz believed it could be higher to remain a private company.
In Bansal’s case, when Cisco courted him, he was in the middle of his company’s IPO tour. It took a few days for the company to go public, but even with the information Cisco could analyze, there have been ongoing discussions, and it wasn’t easy for Bansal to surrender his baby, even when the price was right in the end.
Both firms knew they’d a strict deadline. Once the IPO happened, it was over. The negotiations ended with three offers, and after they ended, Cisco got the company. “Ultimately, it comes down to what’s best for all the shareholders in terms of risk and reward. It’s about what’s the risk of being independent versus the reward of selling,” Bansal said.
The first offer was according to the IPO value and was easy to reject. The second was higher, but after discussing it with the board, Bansal again said no. “Then they came back with a third offer, and in the third offer it made sense, from a risk-reward perspective, for our shareholders to sell the company.” And they sold at a range of two.5 to 3 times the IPO valuation.
It’s easy to think that with billions of dollars at stake, the decision to sell can be easy, however it really wasn’t. “It wasn’t an easy decision on our part. It sounds like ($3.7 billion) is a very easy decision.” But he says you’ve to survey your investors, your fellow executives, your board members — they usually all have different interests, and also you’re trying to make the right decision for everybody involved.
Wiz thought it was higher to stay independent. In AppDynamics’ case, with the pressure of an IPO looming and a good deal on the table, the company eventually decided to accomplish that. “So for us to independently get to a valuation of two and a half, three times our IPO valuation, we would need at least three years of good execution,” he said. “And there were a lot of unknowns, a lot of risks for the company, like what’s going to happen in the next three years.”
But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t regret it, regardless that he remodeled 300 of his employees millionaires with the deal and his personal wealth. When he looks back on the moment of the announcement, he realizes that it’s entirely possible he could have made that much money, or much more.
“I always wonder what AppDynamics could have become if we had gone to IPO. There are a lot of unknowns, and hindsight is 20/20, but if you look back, we sold the company in 2017, and the years after that sale, post-2017, were some of the best boom years in tech, especially for B2B SaaS,” he said. He ultimately could have made more cash, but he began Harness as a substitute and is joyful constructing a second company.
It’s necessary to note that Wiz’s offer stays mired in rumors, so it might or may not be that big. But if it were, the founders may also regret not getting Wiz the value it could have had if it had taken the big money and run.
Technology
The latest model AI Google Gemma can work on phones

It grows “open” AI Google, Gemma, grows.
While Google I/O 2025 On Tuesday, Google removed Gemma 3N compresses, a model designed for “liquid” on phones, laptops and tablets. According to Google, available in a preview starting on Tuesday, Gemma 3N can support sound, text, paintings and flicks.
Models efficient enough to operate in offline mode and without the necessity to calculate within the cloud have gained popularity within the AI community lately. They will not be only cheaper to make use of than large models, but they keep privacy, eliminating the necessity to send data to a distant data center.
During the speech to I/O product manager, Gemma Gus Martins said that GEMMA 3N can work on devices with lower than 2 GB of RAM. “Gemma 3N shares the same architecture as Gemini Nano, and is also designed for incredible performance,” he added.
In addition to Gemma 3N, Google releases Medgemma through the AI developer foundation program. According to Medgemma, it’s essentially the most talented model to research text and health -related images.
“Medgemma (IS) OUR (…) A collection of open models to understand the text and multimodal image (health),” said Martins. “Medgemma works great in various imaging and text applications, thanks to which developers (…) could adapt the models to their own health applications.”
Also on the horizon there may be SignGEMMA, an open model for signaling sign language right into a spoken language. Google claims that Signgemma will allow programmers to create recent applications and integration for users of deaf and hard.
“SIGNGEMMA is a new family of models trained to translate sign language into a spoken text, but preferably in the American sign and English,” said Martins. “This is the most talented model of understanding sign language in history and we are looking forward to you-programmers, deaf and hard communities-to take this base and build with it.”
It is value noting that Gemma has been criticized for non -standard, non -standard license conditions, which in accordance with some developers adopted models with a dangerous proposal. However, this didn’t discourage programmers from downloading Gemma models tens of tens of millions of times.
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(Tagstransate) gemma
Technology
Trump to sign a criminalizing account of porn revenge and clear deep cabinets

President Donald Trump is predicted to sign the act on Take It Down, a bilateral law that introduces more severe punishments for distributing clear images, including deep wardrobes and pornography of revenge.
The Act criminalizes the publication of such photos, regardless of whether or not they are authentic or generated AI. Whoever publishes photos or videos can face penalty, including a advantageous, deprivation of liberty and restitution.
According to the brand new law, media firms and web platforms must remove such materials inside 48 hours of termination of the victim. Platforms must also take steps to remove the duplicate content.
Many states have already banned clear sexual desems and pornography of revenge, but for the primary time federal regulatory authorities will enter to impose restrictions on web firms.
The first lady Melania Trump lobbyed for the law, which was sponsored by the senators Ted Cruz (R-TEXAS) and Amy Klobuchar (d-minn.). Cruz said he inspired him to act after hearing that Snapchat for nearly a 12 months refused to remove a deep displacement of a 14-year-old girl.
Proponents of freedom of speech and a group of digital rights aroused concerns, saying that the law is Too wide And it will probably lead to censorship of legal photos, similar to legal pornography, in addition to government critics.
(Tagstransate) AI
Technology
Microsoft Nadella sata chooses chatbots on the podcasts

While the general director of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, says that he likes podcasts, perhaps he didn’t take heed to them anymore.
That the treat is approaching at the end longer profile Bloomberg NadellaFocusing on the strategy of artificial intelligence Microsoft and its complicated relations with Opeli. To illustrate how much she uses Copilot’s AI assistant in her day by day life, Nadella said that as a substitute of listening to podcasts, she now sends transcription to Copilot, after which talks to Copilot with the content when driving to the office.
In addition, Nadella – who jokingly described her work as a “E -Mail driver” – said that it consists of a minimum of 10 custom agents developed in Copilot Studio to sum up E -Mailes and news, preparing for meetings and performing other tasks in the office.
It seems that AI is already transforming Microsoft in a more significant way, and programmers supposedly the most difficult hit in the company’s last dismissals, shortly after Nadella stated that the 30% of the company’s code was written by AI.
(Tagstotransate) microsoft
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