Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building"

Shardul Shah, Partner at Index Ventures, was one of the first checks into Wiz — the Israeli cybersecurity company Google acquired for $32 billion. It wasn't luck. It was a decade-long relationship with the founders, a willingness to wire money on conviction alone, and a philosophy that treats risk calculus as a fool's errand.In this conversation, Eric sits down with Shardul to unpack how the Wiz deal actually came together, what Google really bought for $32 billion, and why mid-sized acquisitions almost always fail. They get into how Index thinks about doubling down across funds, why Shardul refuses to invest in a founder he's only met over Zoom, and what he saw in the Wiz founders a decade before anyone else was paying attention.They also talk about what's next — the categories Shardul is hunting, the founders he's already betting on, and why he thinks everything that happened with Wiz should stretch every entrepreneur's sense of what's possible.Eric Newcomer covers the inner workings of startups and venture capital.

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Shardul Shah — "I wired the money before knowing what they were building" is an episode from Dead Cat by Eric Newcomer | newcomer.co.

This episode is 00:56:01 long.

This episode was published on Mar 20, 2026.

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