Palo Alto Networks

No single number decides. Layers can disagree — that's the point. New to this? →

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  you can actually put it in a perimeter defense product like ours or Cloudflare has one or other firewalls have one. You put the patch there. It's a virtual patch, so any attacker trying to access that vulnerability gets stopped at the perimeter because we know what they're looking for.

• neutral prediction Nikesh Arora

  most likely the answer is somewhere in the middle. I'm going to have to get bare metal, yes. Most likely I'm going to get from either a hyper scalar or a cousin of a hyper scalar, or somebody's going to be stitching, you know, sleeves of compute from around the world to meet my needs.

• bearish assessment Nikesh Arora

  I'm a buyer. I'm a taker of terms, not a dictator of terms. It's very hard to go and dictate terms anywhere because yeah, sure, you can make any plans you want, but those plans are you know, you talk to Jensen, he can't give you chips till 2028. You talk to you know, when you get land power and shares and shells. So, it's very hard to go say yes, I can go build my own data centers, but it's kind of an empty threat.

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  six, eight years ago when I came to Palo Alto, I shut down all data centers. I said, 'We cannot run a global data center sort of footprint at the scale, speed, and reliability as I could probably rent it from hyperscalers.'

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  we'd like to embrace AI as quickly as many of the startups. And we've gone through all the understanding, all the analysis, open source versus cloud models, and we preference open source open weight because it allows us to modify the weights and train them.

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  We found out about this a few days ago. We scanned everything in our infrastructure to make sure that there were no issues. We made sure that our products had patches available for our customers who deploy them. So there's two ways to solve this problem. One, you can go in and patch the vulnerability. You can go in, find the code, patch what has been given to you by PHP, and make it work. The other is you can actually put it in a perimeter defense product like ours or Cloudflare has one or other

• neutral prediction Nikesh Arora

  But most likely the answer is somewhere in the middle. I'm going to have to get bare metal, yes. Most likely I'm going to get from either a hyperscaler or a cousin of a hyperscaler, or somebody's going to be stitching, you know, sleeves of compute from around the world to meet my needs in the hope that I'm going to migrate to something more resilient and more robust over time.

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  Eight years ago, when I came to Palo Alto, I shut down all data centers. I said, we cannot run a global data center sort of footprint at the scale, speed, and reliability as I could probably rent it from hyperscalers. And life was great. And suddenly what's happened is, in the current sort of incarnation of where we are, compute is highly dear. It's very hard to find compute in the world, period. So I'm a buyer. I'm a taker of terms, not a dictator of terms.

• neutral assessment Nikesh Arora

  The challenge we have is, it's very hard to find a global, resilient, highly available inference provider outside of the hyperscale community right now.

• neutral assessment Nikesh Arora

  And we preference open source, open weight, because it allows us to modify the weights and train them. And something which most people don't talk about is it allows us to interrogate the chain of thought. Because over time, what's going to happen is all of those enterprises are going to need explainability, auditability,

• bullish prediction Unattributed

  I think you know companies like PaloAlto Networks I think the investment in this space um what I heard in DC this week with some Fortune50 CEOs are very worried about cyber defense. That means they're going to start to make this their number one priority to address at the board level. That means the budgets for cyber defense are going to go through the roof.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  i think palo alto network says a lot of acquisitions a lot of these like what i'll call single and doubles you might call them tucking acquisitions under a billion in revenue way under lena khan's radar she's got bigger fish to fry you know and and frankly you know like it's kind of boring and you're not going to get any headlines going after this israeli cyber company that's trying to make people safe and it's a little billion dollar acquisition 500 million dollars who cares

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  they did not list a price. They called the deal strategic on the Palo Alto network side. GeekWire did report that the transaction was for more than 500 million, but we don't have anything more concrete yet.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  The founder of Palo Alto network spoke at the all in summit last year. And he really explained how he really courts founders and puts those founders in charge, in charge of their units. And if there was a unit doing that internally and they go buy one, they take the unit head who is getting beaten by the independent and say, that's your new boss.

• bullish endorsement Unattributed

  maybe they were given equity in power. Equity in Palo Alto networks, which has been doing fantastic.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  if you look at palo alto networks and all these cyber security firms and how amazing they're doing the cash over there is just a beast and he's been buying up all these you know um disparate uh cyber security firms

• bullish assessment Joe

  we're not just a feature and that we're truly a product and independent business.

• bullish prediction Joe

  if we can be the market creators and market leaders in this space, then we can start to grab the biggest customers in the world. And as long as you grab those, there's pretty high switching costs.

• bullish fact_claim Joe

  our video infrastructure is the most performant that exists for any asynchronous video recording and sharing.

• bullish assessment Saji Vikrama Sekhara

  If I were to compare that to scientists, now scientists will really push the envelope when it comes to the methods and techniques they use in the lab for doing science, the design of the experiment. Things like CRISPR, right? Those are amazing step functions that have, you know, come out since I was in the lab, you know, and they're wonderful and move science forward in a breakthrough type way. But more or less the way everyone works together in life sciences is based on paper, email, spreadshee

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  Benchling was founded back in 2012. And they sell cloud software to biotech research and development. Sounds really boring. And sounds really profitable to me.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  in a founder like Tim's companies. He's a killer.

• bullish endorsement Jason Calacanis

  Congratulations to the team

• neutral prediction Jason Calacanis

  I give them four years. It's typically what happens in these acquisitions. You get the golden handcuffs for four years

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  for the people who invested at $500 million valuations who did that Series C, it's kind of a bummer, right? Because they barely doubled their money

• bullish fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  Palo Alto networks looked at it said, Hey, this company's got 50 million, 40 million, whatever it had in revenue, 80 million. We have a thesis that we could 10x that revenue, let's take it out before they go public, let's take it out for other people find out about it.

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  they sell the company for 800 million

• neutral fact_claim Jason Calacanis

  this company's got 50 million, 40 million, whatever it had in revenue, 80 million.

• bullish assessment Jason Calacanis

  They probably sold close to the top of the market.

• neutral assessment Jason Calacanis

  didn't quite hit unicorn status. But I'm going to say close enough.

• neutral fact_claim Unattributed

  At the time, Expanse had recently raised a $70 million Series C at a $500 million valuation. And just over a year after joining the podcast, Tim sold his company to Palo Alto networks, and they paid around 800 million in the form of cash stock and what's called equity awards.

• bullish assessment Roelof Botha

  they wow they're one of the most important security companies

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  we have 62 000 customers with firewalls who have been analyzing their data for the last 17 years and in the last four years more so we have customers with you know 14 million plus endpoints on various different technologies so we're collecting first party data and delivering ai outcomes that's on the precision ai side and i think that's hard to beat if you haven't been doing it if you haven't been collecting data many of our competitors haven't i'd say there's probably four out of 3 000 who have

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we're collecting 75 terabytes in our own in our own instance at pala alto we connect four petabytes a day across our customers

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  i think you know we're going to talk about ai but we did a big analyst here on friday and we try to distinguish uh or try to figure out if this term will hold i call it precision ai versus generative ai so if you're if you're in your tesla you don't want it to hallucinate oh i thought that was a good turn that's kind of like life i'm on somebody's lawn i'm on zucks lawn that's right

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  four five years ago when i joined palo alto we were an 18 billion dollar company we were in one swim lane today like you said we're now a 70 plus billion dollar company we play in three swim lanes and our big underpinning and our big pivot five years ago was to focus on collecting good data across the enterprise and applying ai so we at any point in time we have about a thousand plus machine learning models that run underlying our ai product to solve the problem

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  what we've done is we basically said we're going to watch every bit floating through your infrastructure and we'll tell you if it's good or bad so we collect 75 terabytes of data a day at palo alto we analyze that we take those 80 000 alerts make them 200 events if they're real so we basically flipped it to an ai problem

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  fantastic so it's no longer reacting to what happens that customer a to protect the next 999 customers this is you know you've got patient zero here yes and you are doing experiments on them and you're seeing if they're inoculated or not and it's all happening in a virtual environment so there's you know no harm is coming to it um yeah but i think i think we're going to have to work hard

• bullish endorsement David Friedberg

  oh wow you're doing that in the lab right now so you're training it how to be the greatest black hat so that you can now be two steps ahead of the hackers using this so we are giving them the

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  our plastics moment was cloud

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we used to spend 12 of our revenue on r d i said that's not enough that's that's the amount of money that you spend if you're sort of you're milking your last cash cow

• bullish prediction Nikesh Arora

  we did that by effectively building three cyber security platforms which are sort of in the early stages and i think our best one is still ahead of us because we were able to build an ai based cyber security platform which suddenly with all the conversation around generative ai and ai has suddenly become center stage for us

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  we've convinced our customers are going to be evergreen

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  we turned the whole company around into what i call a cyber security innovation engine

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we have 19 products that are in an enterprise there's a single magic quadrant where you have to be you know people buy you if you're good we're the third company in tech ever after ibm or microsoft we have been in so many magic coordinates ever

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we now play in three out of the four biggest swim lanes in cyber security

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we bought 17 companies all in cloud security and ai in the last five years

• neutral assessment Nikesh Arora

  we're in the security business customers have to believe we solved their problem

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  look we did inherit i did inherit 5 000 people and um some of them have moved on because we've been transforming the company we have hired possibly north of 14 000 people in the last five years

• bullish assessment Chamath Palihapitiya

  If you look at what Nikesh Arora was able to do at Palo Alto Networks, it's incredible. I mean, in eight years, he's created $80 billion of value.

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  So there you have, we have a product that watches all these apps and make sure that what you're using, what you're uploading is not being sent to dangerous apps. Or if you don't want your employees to send it, it will block you. The other one, which is kind of interesting is that I think almost every company is experimenting with deploying LLMs internally because they all want their favorite proprietary chat interface. And there, you need to be careful because you can, what you used to do with S

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  The biggest contrast for us is we like to buy a product which we can integrate and sell to customers. We have a go-to-market engine. We like to keep it the way it is. I think if I'm going to buy a company at eight to ten times revenue, I'm just overpaying for customers and sales. I have all the customers already. Why would I pay eight to ten times revenue to buy a customer I already have it on a different product? So I'd rather buy the product, use my go-to-market capabilities, go sell them to t

• neutral fact_claim David Sacks

  And when you started, it was at... 20. 20. 20.

• bullish fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  When I joined Palo Alto, we were in two. We're in 24 right now, in the top right.

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  If you come to Palo Alto, we'll take your equity away first. We'll say, I'm going to give you back one and a half times your equity just saves me for three years.

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  we've done that 19 times. We had 7 out of 10 we've gotten right.

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  So why don't we buy the guy who's worth a billion dollars? We'll be number one. We'll be leading the market. We have brute force that go to market. We'll go use that. And we're probably going to slow them down a little bit because they're a larger company. So we'll compensate for slowdown with go to market that we bring to them and we'll let them lose.

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  If you can go into a sector where there's no demand problem, you can look at it and say, what did everybody get wrong? Well, everybody sort of lived in their swim lane. So we were in our swim lane. We did one thing. There are five swim lanes in the cybersecurity. In six years, we looked forward and said, where is the world going to? It's going to the cloud. There's a bunch of AI. That was our sort of plastics moment, cloud and AI. So we said, let's not go reinvent the past. So one of the things

• bullish assessment Nikesh Arora

  And it's a subsector of technology with the most amount of fragmentation. Look around, you know, Benioff, I think it's going to be able to build a platform for Salesforce. You have ServiceNow, you have Workday. There's no cybersecurity platform. You sit there and say, this is a phenomenal opportunity. One. Two, it's a company that's fully public, so I don't have to deal with voting controls and founders who have to deal with, which have different motivations. It's an evergreen sector. The more w

• neutral fact_claim Nikesh Arora

  it's a $180 billion industry on an animal basis. The largest market share is 1.5%, which is us.

1. 2028-02-10 if we can be the market creators and market leaders in this space, then we can start to grab the biggest customers in the world. And as long as you grab those, there's pretty high switching costs. · Prediction · confirmed

VentureSignalScore 47.6/100 for palo-alto-networks, composed from 3 of 4 components (ai_infra formula), discounted ×0.88 for 60% signal coverage