An interview with early Waze investors Yahal Zilka and Ehud Levy on why they invested, the impact of Google's acquisition on Israel's tech industry, and more
The disregard for map companies, the dilemma between BlackBerry and iPhone, the indifference on the part of Tim Cook …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Waze story has been retold from inside twice before: former CEO Noam Bardin gave his own accounting of life under Google after the deal, covering autonomy, hiring and distribution in a 2021 reflection reflecting on his years at Google, and Google Geo's Christopher Phillips laid out the product direction for Maps and Waze in late 2022. What this interview adds is the money side — early backers Yahal Zilka and Ehud Levy explaining the original thesis behind backing a map startup everyone else dismissed.
The timing matters because the acquisition-as-endpoint model the interview celebrates is under strain: in 2024 Wiz walked away from a $23B Google acquisition offer to pursue an IPO instead, making the investor view of the Waze exit a useful baseline for what Israeli founders are now choosing not to do.
First-order effects
- Zilka and Levy supply the investor-side record of the deal — why they backed a mapping company against prevailing skepticism about map businesses, and what the BlackBerry-versus-iPhone dilemma and Tim Cook's indifference meant at the time.
Second-order effects
- Google's absorption of Waze became the reference case for Israeli exits — but Wiz's decision to reject Google's offer and IPO shows the next generation of Israeli founders weighing a different path than the one Waze took.
Third-order effects
- If the Wiz pattern holds alongside the Waze precedent, Israel's ecosystem shifts from selling scale-ups to US acquirers toward building companies that stay independent to listing — changing what venture returns in the region depend on.
The trend: Israeli startups are moving from acquisition by US tech giants as the default endpoint toward independent paths to public markets, with the Waze-Google deal as the founding case study and Wiz's rejected offer as the counterpoint.