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Assaf Rappaport, the co-founder and CEO of cloud security startup Wiz, said that turning down a $23 billion offer from Google was “the toughest decision ever,” but justified it by saying the company can get even bigger and reach $100 billion because cloud security is the future.

“I think we did the right choice,” Rappaport said on Monday at the annual TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

“We believe it’s bigger, definitely bigger than endpoint, bigger than networks, so the opportunity to become a 100 plus billion dollar company is there. We believe that the company that is going to…own cloud security in the world is going to be a 100-plus billion dollar company,” he added. “I’m not sure it’s going to be Wiz, but if we do the right things, and we execute, I think it’s…in our hands.”

Even then, it was not an easy decision to make, as he had to think about Wiz’s investors, as well as its employees.

“I was super nervous,” he admitted. But it was he and his co-founders who made that call. “At a healthy company with a healthy relationship with investors, it’s always the founder’s decision.”

At the time Wiz had turned down the $23 billion offer from Alphabet, Google’s parent company, the four-year-old startup founded by former Israeli military officers had a private valuation of $12 billion.

The startup had raised $1 billion from investors led by Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed Venture Partners, and Thrive Capital. After that cash infusion, the company called itself “the world’s largest cybersecurity unicorn.

“Saying no to such humbling offers is tough, but with our exceptional team, I feel confident in making that choice,” Rappaport said in an email to Wiz’s employees at the time, according to TechCrunch.

The CEO admitted that it also had other offers, though none as big as Google’s. Asked if Amazon was among them, Rappaport said only that “it’s not a unique position” for startups in Wiz’s position to be having other discussions.

Wiz has been one of the fastest-growing cybersecurity startups in recent years. This month, the company hit $500 million in annual recurring revenue, and hopes to double that to $1 billion in 2025, according to Roy Reznik, Wiz’s co-founder and VP of R&. Reznik argued that hitting that goal is a prerequisite for an IPO, which the company promised its employees after turning down Google’s offer.

When asked about Wiz’s M&A strategy, Rappaport said that even though the company made two acquisitions in the last year — startups Gem and Rafft — in general, the company is risk-averse.

“Having the money doesn’t mean that you need to be active,” Rappaport said. “We’re a 1,500-people organization, so almost every acquisition is a tremendous culture that’s coming and might affect [Wiz’s culture,]” he added.

Boosted by investment, immigration and tourism, Spain’s economy is set to record better growth than even the US

Spain is set to surpass the US to become the world’s fastest-growing major advanced economy this year, expanding at more than three times the pace of the Eurozone as a whole.

Economists polled by forecasters Consensus Economics expect GDP data this week to show Spain is on course to grow 2.7 per cent this year, fuelled by a combination of immigration, tourism, foreign investment and public spending.

The IMF, which includes Spain alongside G7 states in its outlook for large advanced economies, is more bullish. The fund last week said it expects a 2.9 per cent expansion, slightly higher than the 2.8 per cent figure it predicted for the US.

The Eurozone’s fourth-largest economy is leading a divergence that has become the region’s most marked economic trend this year. The region’s biggest economy, Germany, and other richer, northern countries, such as the Netherlands, have struggled to grow. Meanwhile, traditionally weaker, southern states, such as Spain and Greece, have performed well.

Spain’s third-quarter GDP figures are out on Wednesday morning, shortly before data for the region as a whole.

Opposition politicians in Spain and some economists say there is a flipside to the country’s growth story, noting GDP per capita is growing more slowly than headline GDP.

This is partly because 700,000 working-age immigrants have entered the workforce over the past three years, according to Funcas, a savings bank foundation. They have helped to lift its overall population from 47.4mn to nearly 49mn, but many are employed in low-skilled, low-paid jobs.

At the same time critics of the Socialist-led government say too many Spanish families are struggling with the high cost of living and that too little has been done to alleviate acute shortages of affordable housing.

Spain’s headline growth is forecast to slow to 2.1 per cent next year, but its strength remains a fillip for Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez, who is eager to claim credit and bolster the country’s international standing.

“I can say that Spain is living an extraordinary moment,” he said last week. “Our country is experiencing great success.”

Although Spain’s economy was slower to recover from the impact of Covid-19 than many of its peers, it is now 5.7 per cent bigger than it was in 2019 while the Eurozone as a whole has expanded by 4.2 per cent.

Funcas estimates increased government consumption — including pandemic-related support and public-sector jobs — accounted for 59 per cent of that growth.

Juan Bravo, economy chief for the opposition People’s Party, said: “When growth is based on public spending that you can’t maintain in a country with a high debt-to-GDP ratio, somebody should be concerned.” Spanish government debt is equal to 102 per cent of GDP, according to the IMF.

Investors, however, are not perturbed. In the sovereign bond market, the gap between the yields on Spanish and German government debt — a measure of how much riskier Spain is seen as — is at its lowest level since January 2022.

Spain’s 10-year bond yield, now 2.98 per cent, has fallen below France’s. Richard McGuire, head of rates strategy for Rabobank, said that partly reflected France’s yawning budget deficit, which is set to hit 6.1 per cent this year, as well as Spain’s “positive fundamental performance”.

Tourism, a pillar of Spain’s economy, explains part of its growth with the country on course to beat last year’s record of 85mn visitors. But Carlos Cuerpo, economy minister, has stressed the exports of services other than tourism are growing faster.

While tourism is expected to generate €90bn of income in Spain’s balance of payments in 2024, other services exports are set to generate €100bn, Cuerpo said last week. They include activities for overseas clients ranging from banking to engineering services to IT consulting as well as universities that host international students.

Spain has also been the world’s sixth-largest destination for foreign direct investment projects since 2019, according to fDi Markets, a Financial Times-owned database that tracks greenfield announcements. In the renewable energy sector, one of the country’s forte’s, it secured 77 new projects last year, ranking joint first globally with the US.

But Raymond Torres, director for macroeconomic analysis at Funcas, noted investment overall — as measured by gross fixed capital formation — is barely rising. The reason, he suggested, was that many Spanish companies have a bleaker view of the country — and its fractured politics — than foreign counterparts.

“In comparative terms globally, Spain is not badly placed,” Torres said. “But of course a Spanish investor, especially a small company, doesn’t think about the international comparison. He reasons according to his own vision of things and perceives much more directly all the political uncertainties.”

Although Spain’s unemployment rate of 11.2 per cent is still high, it boasted a record 21.8mn people in employment in the third quarter of this year. Funcas calculates that over the past three years immigrants have filled 40 per cent of all new jobs created.

Adrian Prettejohn, an economist at Capital Economics, said higher immigration had “ensured that labour has not been as significant a constraint on production as it has been elsewhere in the Eurozone”, helping businesses to keep a lid on wage growth but also boosting individual consumption.

However, the largest numbers of immigrants are working in sectors such as agriculture, hospitality or construction, where worker productivity is low.

Ignacio de la Torre, chief economist at investment bank Arcano, said Spain’s reliance on immigration meant it was experiencing “quantity growth” driven by job-filling rather than quality growth.

“Quality growth would imply an increase in productivity that would lead to an increase in GDP per capita and hence a better standard of living,” he said. “Germans are more productive than Spaniards, they have more income, so they live better and can work fewer hours.”

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ByteDance chief Zhang Yiming leads country’s ‘rich list’ with $49bn fortune

The number of China’s dollar billionaires has fallen by more than a third in the past three years, according to a “rich list” compiled by research group Hurun, as government crackdowns, weakness in parts of the economy and depressed equity markets take their toll.

Since hitting a peak of 1,185 in 2021, Hurun said the number of dollar billionaires had been reduced to 753, with the 36 per cent decline exceeding a 10 per cent fall in the renminbi’s value against the dollar over the same period.

In the past year alone, the number of dollar billionaires in China declined by 16 per cent, when the renminbi depreciated only 2.5 per cent against the dollar.

The list has also undergone rapid churn, Hurun said, with older entrepreneurs such as property developers making way for newer members such as Zhang Yiming, head of ByteDance.

The 41-year-old founder of the company that owns viral short-video platform TikTok and its Chinese equivalent Douyin has for the first time become the nation’s richest person, with a fortune of $49bn, Hurun said, despite his company being targeted by the US government.

Zhang deposed “bottled water king” Zhong Shanshan. The 70-year-old had topped the list for the past three years, but his main business Nongfu Spring saw its share price drop 40 per cent after being accused on social media of being “pro-Japan”.

The rich list also included Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwanese entrepreneurs.

The “list has shrunk for an unprecedented third year running, as China’s economy and stock markets had a difficult year”, said Rupert Hoogewerf, chair of the Hurun Report.

The list’s estimates of fortunes were made at the end of August and do not account for a sharp stock rally in September after China announced a monetary stimulus package.

The downturn in the number of super-rich comes as the old guard of wealthy real estate developers has been decimated by a collapse in China’s once-booming property market.

China’s ecommerce billionaires have been badly hit by crackdowns but have proven more resilient. Pony Ma, the founder of Tencent, the company behind the ubiquitous superapp WeChat, ranked third on the list, and Colin Huang, the founder of Pinduoduo and Temu, was fourth.

Chris Xu Yangtian, founder of international clothing platform Shein, was ranked 76th with $7bn in wealth.

“The new generation of entrepreneurs in China are much more international than their predecessors,” Hurun said in the report.

Alibaba’s Jack Ma, who topped the list in 2020 but disappeared from public view that year after the government cancelled the blockbuster initial public offering of his financial group Alipay, was ranked 10th this year.

Hurun said 15 per cent of the rich list lived outside mainland China, in Hong Kong, Macau or Taiwan, while 30 members lived in the US and Singapore, with the Asian city-state becoming increasingly popular as an offshore haven for China’s billionaires.

The richlisters also retained political influence, with about 7 per cent being members of China’s top political advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, or its rubber-stamp parliament, the National People’s Congress.

Smartphones and new-energy entrepreneurs were also more prominent on the list than 10 years ago, including Robin Zeng, head of lithium battery maker CATL, Li Zhenguo of solar-panel maker Longi, Lei Jun of smartphone maker Xiaomi and Frank Wang from drone maker DJI.