Palo Alto Networks

“Palo Alto isn't going to go acquire 10 companies, right, in the next year. They might acquire a couple. Same with all these other, like, large acquirers.”

“Look at all the stuff that Palo Alto bought. A lot of those companies had two to three million dollars of AR getting sold for two, three, four hundred million dollars, right?”

“At Palo Alto, you know, I was very, very And thrilled by the idea of doing consumer cybersecurity. And we actually spent a few years trying to build a product. And then we realized that was a bad idea, but we invested resources. But then, like I said, you know…”

“The hardest part was being stupid. Like, you know, I don't understand. I did not understand anything about cybersecurity.”

“Our view on acquisitions is we buy innovation, we buy product, we buy early, because if you buy later, you're paying multiples for revenue, which I don't believe in.”

“So we bought 19 companies the last five years, right? We had no pride of, you know, it's like back to the dose of humility. Somebody else did it better. Let's go bring them on board. And then the difference we made was we said, we'll let them run our business …”

“The fact that I have better operating margins because I was able to deploy AI internally is not going to make me a better competitor to somebody else unless, you know, maybe I'm using cash generated from it as a better competitor.”

“Or Palo Alto Networks, where we went into that IPO with the exact same ownership position as one of our co-investors. We ended up generating More than a billion dollars more than them because we were more patient, and so sometimes it really pays off.”

“So I think there'll be a ton of fast acquisitions as agent security solutions emerge, you know, and people will be doing, if they're smart, and I think those two companies are extraordinarily smart, they'll be doing acquisitions long before it's quote certain …”

“You have, I mean, Palo Alto, CrowdStrike, Cloudflare, Datadog, Palantir, all these companies trade above 15 times NTM revenue again.”

“We've been hiring people only through hackathons now, right? And we see natural attrition of two percent, give or take a month, and we just replace them with people who actually are AI savvy people who are from hackathons. Give me 12 months, I'll have sort of …”

“We ran it against our code. We discovered it finds bad stuff much faster than humans can. We found in six weeks what would have taken us five to six years.”

“We're prolific buyers of companies because I'm constantly paranoid that we have built it. Somebody else is going to build it. So we better go acquire it and find the team to go get it done.”

“So it's got to find a way of transforming 20,000 people over the next two years in that direction.”

“Sometimes what happens is you confuse effort with wanting to get the outcome. Because I spent a lot of time and effort trying to get it. Then you feel like when you get it, you better take it because you put all the effort in. And he says, you haven't spent a …”

“I don't want to build a lot of software that is proprietary to me for things that should be available for everyone. I don't want to build an AI marketing stack. I don't want to build an AI HR stack. I don't want to build an AI ERP stack.”

“Let me put Palo Alto, it solves the problem that 20 different companies do together on one platform.”

“Now we have a hundred and fifty million sensors in the world where we stand at the gate protecting our customers.”

“So meet my chief AI officer who was probably a researcher at some amazing university before and has low execution skills. So until I can get my leadership to understand and agree the extent of the AI challenge and the AI opportunity, we're not going to make pr…”

“We have a used judiciously model for tokens. It's not a free-for-all. Free-for-all sounds like you can go token max the hell out of it. We have to use it judiciously, and we keep track of it to see what people are doing. And if we find somebody who's using it …”

“Rumor has it, agents are going to be important. If agents are important, they're going to need identities. They need to be treated like privileged identities, so that's our thesis.”

“The average time to patch a vulnerability, a zero-day vulnerability found in the wild is 55 days.”

“I think in the last eight years, we've bought north of 40 companies, and I want to say 75% have worked, 25% haven't.”

“So when people tell me, oh, OpenAI is going to eat my lunch, or Mythos is going to eat my lunch, guess what? There are no perimeter security scenario, which means I still need to block the bad guy. They need to be the ingredient in my product. They're not goin…”

“I'm talking about the context needed to train the ecosystem, which means I've got every customer case that ever happened at Palo Alto getting transcribed.”

“Now we found 14,000 vulnerabilities in open source in the last 14 weeks, testing open source packets.”

“The only problem is I only have 1200 customers who bought and deployed it. I need to get the rest of the world to go buy it and deploy it.”