{"id":173103,"date":"2025-12-07T23:54:11","date_gmt":"2025-12-07T23:54:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/173103\/"},"modified":"2025-12-07T23:54:11","modified_gmt":"2025-12-07T23:54:11","slug":"i-can-retire-with-peace-nir-zuk-says-palo-alto-networks-finally-achieved-his-20-y","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/173103\/","title":{"rendered":"\u201cI can retire\u2026 with peace\u201d: Nir Zuk says Palo Alto Networks finally achieved his 20-y"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cI recently announced that I\u2019m going to retire from Palo Alto Networks. And the reason for that is that I think that Palo Alto Networks has finally achieved the vision that I set 20 years ago,\u201d founder Nir Zuk recently told Sequoia Capital\u2019s Crucible Moments podcast<\/a>. <\/p>\n

Zuk said he could step away because the original blueprint he drew 20 years earlier of a single, unified cybersecurity platform spanning every major defensive category an enterprise might need, was finally complete.<\/p>\n

\u201cRecently we announced the 25 or so billion dollar acquisition of a company called CyberArk, which is in the identity space\u2026 And that to me completes the platform,\u201d he said. Palo Alto Networks, he argued, now delivers \u201cnetwork security, endpoint security, security operation center, automation and control and cloud security, identity and access management.\u201d<\/p>\n

He continued, almost catalog-style, to emphasize what had been accumulated across two decades: \u201cWe went into AI security\u2026 into email security\u2026 into vulnerability assessment and vulnerability management. We have all the major components\u2026 that an organization would need in order to achieve their cybersecurity goals, which is what I set to do 20 years ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Then came the line that captured the moment\u2019s emotional weight.<\/p>\n

\u201cAnd now I can retire from Palo Alto Networks with peace,\u201d Zuk said. He added that he was confident he was leaving behind \u201ca company with all the products and all the technology that it needs with a great management team led by Nikesh and the company in a great financial state.\u201d<\/p>\n

Zuk explained what he sees as the only viable survival strategy in an industry where yesterday\u2019s advantage can evaporate overnight.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy advice to startups that are being disrupted\u2026 or you\u2019re being disrupted by a shift in market dynamics like the cloud, like AI\u2026 my advice to you is embrace the disruption,\u201d he said. \u201cIf you don\u2019t embrace the disruption, you will end up like companies that didn\u2019t embrace the disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

He cited examples with characteristic bluntness: \u201cIn our case, if you end up like Check Point\u2026 in the case of cell phones, you end up like Nokia that was disrupted by Apple and later Google. You will get killed by a disruption.\u201d<\/p>\n

The principle, he insisted, was both painful and necessary: \u201cAlways embrace a disruption despite that disruption\u2026 hurting your business for the short term. If you do it right, you will get out of it on the other side much stronger.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ironically, or perhaps fittingly, that philosophy is the same one that shaped Palo Alto\u2019s most turbulent period under CEO Nikesh Arora.<\/p>\n

Arora himself recounted what it was like to enter Zuk\u2019s world as an outsider.<\/p>\n

He recalled joining the company as \u201cthe black sheep candidate,\u201d admitting on the podcast: \u201cI had no idea about cybersecurity. I thought there were two different words, \u2018cyber\u2019 and \u2018security.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

But Arora soon realized the company\u2019s architecture, built for a pre-cloud era, was structurally unprepared for what was coming.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe didn\u2019t know how to talk cloud security,\u201d he said. \u201cWe didn\u2019t know how to sell cloud security because we didn\u2019t have a product\u2026 we have to think as if we were born in the cloud. \u2018If you were born in the cloud, how would you do a firewall?\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

His answer was the now-famous \u201cspeedboats\u201d strategy: empower the acquired companies that had beaten Palo Alto in emerging categories, and let them run. <\/p>\n

The purchase of CyberArk added to a long list of acquisitions in Israel, joining the likes of Talon Cyber Security and Dig Security, which were acquired for a combined $1 billion in 2023.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe acquired company\u2026 beat us in the market with less resources,\u201d he said. \u201cSo maybe those people should be part of Palo Alto driving that strategy, not people who\u2019ve been trying and failed at Palo Alto.\u201d<\/p>\n

It was expensive. \u201cWe did take our operating margins down\u2026 for the first two or three years,\u201d he acknowledged. But the shift created the cloud, operations, and automation platforms that Zuk now cites as foundational elements of the \u201ccomplete platform.\u201d<\/p>\n

Looking back, Arora called 2018 \u201ca crucible moment,\u201d a point where the company deliberately abandoned stability to pursue long-term scale. The goal, he said, was to become \u201cthe first at-scale evergreen cybersecurity company in the world.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"\u201cI recently announced that I\u2019m going to retire from Palo Alto Networks. And the reason for that is…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":173104,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":{"0":"post-173103","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173103","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=173103"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/173103\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/173104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=173103"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=173103"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=173103"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}