20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg

Raaz Herberg is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. As one of the first 10 employees, Raaz has helped scale the business from nothing to a multi-billion-dollar ARR business. Before Wiz, Raaz was a Senior PM working on Azure at Microsoft. AGENDA: 03:51 What No One Knows About The Early Wiz Days 09:08 Most Effective Marketing Wiz Ever Did? Lessons from it? 24:11 How Wiz Mastered Enterprise Sales and Product Development 39:12 The Value of Proof of Concept an Why Everyone Gets Them Wrong 44:23 Why The Best Leaders Give More Equity Than They Should 52:55 The Impact of COVID on Business Operations 01:01:33 What in AI is No One Talking About That Everyone Should Be? 01:07:29 Why Does Raaz Think Custom Tools Will Dominate the Enterprise?

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is where we sit down with the best minds in marketing and brand to discuss how to scale the biggest brands in the world. Well, joining me today, we have one of the best marketing minds in enterprise, Raz Hursberg. Raz is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company ever. As one of the first 10 employees, Raz has literally held so many different roles in the company and has helped scale Wiz from nothing to a multi-billion dollar ARR business. But before we dive into the show today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation.

• 0:42Harry Stebbings?

  Thousands of fast-growing businesses, including Nasdaq, Angel List, Doodle, and Coda, trust SecureFrame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, MIST standards, and more. Backed by top-tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes' list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024, G2's Best Software Awards for highest satisfaction products, and a recipient of the 2024 Cyber Security Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more today at SecureFrame.com. And once SecureFrame locks down compliance, Pendo makes sure your product truly lands with customers.

• 1:26Harry Stebbings?

  Whether it's the software you build or the software you buy, your tech stack should be creating results, not creating roadblocks. Well, Pendo's no-code software experience management platform makes your software better with tools to see where users get stuck, guide them with in-app messaging, and constantly improving your UI. It's so easy that over 14,000 businesses use Pendo to increase revenue, lower costs, and reduce risks. Businesses love the control, engineers love the freedom, everyone wins. Start for free today at pendo.io/20product. And after Pendo shows you what users need, Miro helps your team bring those ideas to life. You know what kills momentum? It's not a lack of ideas, it's the chaos between the idea and action.

• 2:10Harry Stebbings?

  Actually executing on it. My fund was stuck in this loop. Great investment theses, endless partner alignment calls, scattered deal memos across 10 different tools. We were moving at the speed of bureaucracy, not at the speed we needed to to win deals. Then we started using Miro's innovation workspace and honestly, it changed how we operate. So here's what clicked. Miro AI doesn't just give you a blank canvas to dump ideas. It actively helps you structure your thinking. We used it to synthesize founder interviews and diligence notes, pull out key patterns and turn them into an actual investment memo in hours, not days, and speed is really important. Miro's AI sidekicks review your work like a seasoned GP would,

• 2:52Harry Stebbings?

  pointing out gaps in your thesis and suggesting what to dig into next. And when we needed to map out portfolio strategy, Miro generated frameworks and visual roadmaps right from our board. No switching tools, no waiting. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's Miro, M I R O dot com. You have now arrived at your destination. Roz, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while. I've heard many good things from Doug across the years. So thank you so much for joining me.

• 3:25Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I'm so excited to be here. I am genuinely a very big fan of the show.

• 3:28Harry Stebbings?

  That is very, very kind. I was literally just saying to you, it's great that we have these studios. It's so lovely to be in person. But I remember starting as like an 18 year old on Skype and I had very little idea of what I was doing. And I felt like a bit of an imposter and I, I wanted to just start with, when did you feel like an imposter?

• 3:47Speaker 01

  I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career and I also don't try to fight it. I kind of embrace it. I think a lot of people feel like imposters. I feel like an imposter every day. It's part of the motivation. I also think sometimes people think they know more than they know. I'm never at that problem. I always feel like I know probably less than they know and I'm never complacent about anything. I'm always paranoid about everything. I've kind of learned to embrace it. I never feel. Confident, I always feel like an imposter in every single thing I've done through my career. Whether I was well-prepared, not well-prepared, whether it was something that should have been a walk in the park or not, I feel the same way.

• 4:22Harry Stebbings?

  What should have been a walk in the park? You've got this incredible purview for being one of the first 10 employees. What should have been a walk in the park in the early days of Wiz that wasn't?

• 4:33Speaker 01

  I mean, even things I do today. For example, today, after our conversation, I'm meeting like six or seven customers at the Wiz offices. I've done thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those types of meetings and conversations. And in the early days of Wiz, we were selling in millions of dollars in error before we had salespeople at all. So I was also like leading deals and everything. So I've done a gazillion of those, but I'm still nervous before them. And nothing feels like a walk in the park. I'll read the prep correctly, I'll think about it ahead of time. I've never lost a deal at Wiz, but I'm always afraid of that happening. So nothing feels like a walk in the park to me, regardless if I've done it a million times, if I haven't done it a million times, just nothing.

• 5:12Harry Stebbings?

  This is why I'm so glad that we don't send the schedules ahead of time, because you say things and then I just want to go off on tangents. Millions in error without salespeople is not a thing that any startup really achieves. What did you do to allow yourself to be in that position, do you think?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  I think Wiz had an incredible product-market fit early on, meaning the value that the product brought to customers was very clear. It was a combination of product-market fit and also we were solving something that was a big problem. It wasn't like a small problem for our customers. Like for customers, for security teams, there's a before Wiz and after Wiz moment. We're solving a big problem for them. Like we're solving cloud security. If you're a security team and a dev team and you're building things in the cloud, how do you secure them? That's what we solve for. It's a big problem. And the product had very strong product-market fit. And also from day one at the product, and I started as the first product manager. So my first role at Wiz was leading the product team. We always believed that time to value is value.

• 6:09Speaker 01

  And so the way Wiz works is very fast, meaning you connect this to your environment and it's an enterprise security product. So those things are expected to take months and months and months for deployments and things until you see value. But in Wiz, literally, you get value in like 15 Minutes. So I think the combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem, like solving cloud security, and we started at, you know, the beginning of COVID. So it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before because everybody were moving even faster to the cloud. So it was a combination of all of those three things that just kind of made it roll much faster than we expected. I mean, I was doing legal, TNCs. I remember myself doing things I never imagined in a million years I'd be doing,

• 6:51Speaker 01

  but the product market was just so strong that customers were pulling. We didn't expect it to happen so fast. And so we were always behind on, really, everything in the company we were behind on, right? Because nothing went at the pace you'd expected to go. So by the time we had our first salesperson was already rolling.

• 7:06Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's one of the joys of starting a business and being so early. It's like doing Ts and Cs and doing legals and doing all the things that you had no idea how to do. I remember searching on Google for how to create an invoice. And that's why I would always encourage my children to start a business early and do that. So I totally agree with you. You said you've never lost a deal as well. That, I mean, like Raz, I don't want to be rude, but it's been quite a few years to never have lost a deal. What do you put that down to? It's not just product. Like, what do you think makes you so good where you haven't lost a deal?

• 7:37Speaker 01

  It's funny because I never think of it in the sense of I'm so good that I've never lost a deal. I'm just very, very afraid of failing. And again, I'm never complacent. So every deal, I feel like it's, you know, like my life depends on it. I've had one case, like a year and a half into Wiz. So when they say I was on a deal, what does it mean, right? In the early days, I was literally like the person on a deal. Then, you know, the first two years of Wiz, I think every huge customer or something, either myself was on it, or Inan, our co-founder and VP of Product was on it, or Ami or CTO was on it. And you're kind of like, you own making it happen, right? You own that everything will go fine. I remember a year and a half into Wiz, there was this one customer, of course, I remember the name, I just can't share it, where I talked to them and I had the initial call with them and they already had a competing

• 8:21Speaker 01

  solution, which is fine. We are in a very, Wiz came into an existing market. So most of the customers we talked to had an existing solution before. So it was fine, but I couldn't convince them on That thirty minute call that what we had was so special like they weren't convinced by that one call that what we had was so special that they should look further into it. And I was devastated after that call and I spent two years getting that customer. We got that customer at the end, but I mean, I can't have it. It's like, I think it comes with the imposter syndrome question. It's like, I feel like every failure might be that discovery of the imposter.

• 8:56Harry Stebbings?

  How do you categorize yourself? Because you're this wonderful hybrid of like a product person, of like a salesperson, of a brand mastermind. How do you categorize yourself of what you are and what you identify with?

• 9:09Speaker 01

  I like everything. I've always liked everything. I've always found everything interesting. I mean, I studied computer science in like one of Israel's best like tech universities. But then in parallel, I also studied arts and like the best art school, they're both in the same city in Israel. So I've always liked everything. And I always say that for me, it doesn't really matter what I'm working on. I just really want to do it with a team of extremely talented people I look up to. And I really don't care what the domain is. That's what drives me.

• 9:41Harry Stebbings?

  You said, especially when it came to marketing, you said this before, I hire people who don't want to be marketers. Can you talk to me about that, what it takes to win in marketing today, given that product centricity that you have?

• 9:53Speaker 01

  I'm not a marketing expert. I know very little about marketing. My only marketing ever role has been as part of Wiz. I don't think I could do marketing at any other company. I think it comes from really, really knowing the domain, really knowing the customers, really knowing the pain points, really knowing the tech, really knowing the before and after the Wiz brings to organizations. I think when we think of marketing at companies and startups, it comes with all those scary words and terms and pipelines and MQLs and SQLs and like a ton of things where for me, because I didn't know marketing, actually, I had the privilege of being removed from that and being like, what are we trying to solve, right? I have a product, I can explain to you in English very clearly why it's amazing and what is the before and what is the after of using the product.

• 10:37Speaker 01

  And I feel confident that if you try your product out, it's going to be incredible and I know who's buying my product. So it's just about how do I tell that to the right audience that's buying my product? And then I'm I'm gonna use any channel in my possible imagination and I'm happy to try anything to make it work, right? And the thing about marketing is you don't have to be so careful. I came from product and in product you have to be very careful, meaning every decision you make, it's forever. You take the most expensive resource of a company, engineering time. You put it on building something. You put that something into your product. Now, let's say it's not a great feature or let's say only 2% of your customers are using it. You can never take it away. If the 2% of customers isn't like a Fortune 10 company, it's there forever.

• 11:20Speaker 01

  And every new thing you're gonna build into their product from now until eternity, you have to take into account that other thing, an other area in the product. Making a mistake on what you build is big for me, right? So when you're in product, you really have to think through things through. Marketing for me is almost the opposite. That's why it's so fun. Again, the problem is pretty simple. I need to explain this thing to the right audience. I know my audience, I know what I need to explain. Now, you can try anything, as weird as it gets, as stupid as it gets. If it doesn't work, we won't do it again. You don't have to maintain it, it's not there forever. So for me, marketing is is also just about people who can be creative, think of a solution and be amazing at execution. Just think of something, execute it, let's try something else tomorrow.

• 12:02Harry Stebbings?

  The joy also of today is that people's attention is so fleeting that actually people forget things a lot faster than they used to. And what was interesting today is not interesting tomorrow, literally. And so I completely agree with you there in terms of the flexibility or error ability that you have. Because I think people get it very wrong when they say you don't learn from your successes. I think we just don't study our successes in the same way we study our failures. When you think about the best marketing decision you made at Wiz, what would that be if I ask you that? And what do you reflect on or take from that?

• 12:33Speaker 01

  It's a good question. I think for us, the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts about being out there with something super weird and unique. The first decision I actually made after I took the marketing role, already we had space in in RSA, which is like the super ball of Cyber companies. So it's like this huge conference where you pay a lot of money to get, you know, a booth. So like five meters on five meters of something. You paid like, I don't know, a ton of money to get that. And we already had that space, right? And I just took over the role and our problem at the time was that nobody's ever heard of us. Nobody heard of Wiz, although we had amazing product market fit. That was a problem. So I decided to be like, okay, I've been to this conference like a zillion times.

• 13:18Speaker 01

  I spent most of my career in cybersecurity. Everything is like gray, blue, dark, scary. I said, let's do a Wiz of Oz booth and make it super weird. So the thing literally looked like Wiz of Oz. It was like this big hot air balloon. There was like a yellow brick stone and I paid some actors from San Francisco to dress up like the Wiz of Oz characters and spend the day there. You know, compared to the price you pay for that small space, it's nothing. Doing something yellow and weird doesn't cost more than doing it black and boring. And bringing actors is like $400 a day. So it wasn't more expensive, but there was a chance of people being, what is she doing? Like, this is so weird. And I was just coming into the role.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  So a lot of people were looking at what I was doing inside the company because I've never done this before, but I just decided to roll with it. I didn't ask a lot of people for their opinion. I just rolled with it and we have the same size of space and place at that conference every year. And it brought in like 4X more leads and everybody, because everybody came to see what, what is that company? It didn't say anything except Wiz of Oz. So I think that taught me a bit about not doing things the classic way, trusting your gut, not being afraid to be different. And it taught me that lesson that that's okay in marketing. It's not that okay in product, by the way, but in marketing it's fine because let's say that this booth would have been the weirdest thing ever. Okay, I would have never done it again and people would have rolled their eyes at me,

• 14:44Speaker 01

  but there's no harm there for good or something. I'm not ruining something.

• 14:48Harry Stebbings?

  I said that you don't learn as much maybe from successes or we don't study them as much. If we look at a mistake that was made on marketing, what was the biggest mistake that you made on marketing?

• 14:59Speaker 01

  I think one of my biggest mistakes early on was that I had no real understanding of product marketing and its role. I spent my career on the engineering and product side, never on the go-to-market side. And product marketing is this weird animal that's in-between. And being on the product side, I was never sure, I mean, I almost thought of them as ignorantly, right? That was because I was ignorant about their role, but I thought of them almost like the team that writes the blogs, you know, when you launch something. That's really, that was my perception, and I couldn't have been more wrong. And I joke about it today with my head of PMM, Zhang, which is incredible, the smartest woman on this planet, and she remembers the day I met her at Wiz.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  And at that point, I was still on the product team, I had nothing to do with marketing. And I kind of asked her, "So your job is writing the blogs, right?" That's what I was, that was my perception of product marketing.

• 15:52Harry Stebbings?

  What did she say?

• 15:53Speaker 01

  She felt the gap. I couldn't have been more wrong. And I've learned how much of an important function it is to bring something to market. And I've been very humbled by being able to learn a lot from her as well about the role.

• 16:07Harry Stebbings?

  When we think about the biggest mistake, what was that biggest mistake?

• 16:11Speaker 01

  I have a hard time pinpointing to one mistake. I mean, I think if I look at it at a broader company level, the one time where we made something that was a major shift for us was very early on. We started initially from like a very different idea, and we pivoted to what is now Wiz. It was the early days when we had this idea around network security. Wiz was actually called at the beginning, "Beyond Networks." And we would talk to CISOs, security teams, and we would kind of pitch them on this network idea. And I think we were kind of convincing ourselves that it was something they were interested in, and we got feedback like, "Oh, it's interesting, we'd love to talk again." But we couldn't get to that next step. And I think that was at the beginning, like, until we pivoted, I felt like that was a

• 16:55Speaker 01

  big learning of a mistake, where we were kind of trying to push something hard without really feeling, you know, the pullback, but we were maybe convincing ourselves a bit that we were feeling the pullback. So that, I think, learned me that when there's an error, that there's a lot of friction or something, maybe not to push harder.

• 17:11Harry Stebbings?

  You said about the Wizard of Oz exhibition element. That's an event. Events is a big kind of brand marketing and kind of performance marketing in some ways exercise for a lot of enterprise companies. What channel do you think is massively underrated? And what do you think is massively overrated?

• 17:29Speaker 01

  I think brand is underrated, meaning people spend a lot of time doing things that will impact a number on the board deck, like pipeline numbers. And having now learned this whole domain from the inside, pipeline numbers are, it's very hard to know what they mean. I mean, I always think about when like the board members look at the pipeline numbers, like every company measures attribution so differently. It's, and you work really hard to change a number and you, you can build a team that's like obsessed with that number. But at the end of the day, I think sometimes things that are very hard to quantify, like brand, are actually the things that matter most. I think people buy things and at the end of the day, I think enterprise is also people buying things. It's a person at the end that buys something. And the brand matters a lot.

• 18:13Speaker 01

  I mean, when you now go to buy a phone, you don't start comparing the specs, right? You just know what you're gonna buy because you're like, well, that's the best one. I think it's not that different for anything, for enterprise software, for anything. But making brand investments, sometimes it's impossible to quantify them. And when I say brand, just to be very clear, I'm not talking about a big sign on the San Francisco highway. I'm talking about any effort that makes your company seem very knowledgeable or an expert in their domain to your audience. And that could be a gazillion things that are very hard to measure. And we spend a lot of our effort on those types of things and I have no way of tying it back to a number. And I don't really care because I think that's what really matters.

• 18:53Harry Stebbings?

  So what are your biggest lessons then on how to do that brand marketing successfully for founders who are going, I'm shooting in the dark here, given I have no attribution, I have no performance to tie to this. I don't know if it's good.

• 19:04Speaker 01

  You know, it's funny, I also think that when you have the numbers, you also don't know when it's good. I think every marketing leader that was ever fired had green numbers on his pipeline. You know what I mean? It's like, what does this number even mean? You put a target, you hit the target, you're not selling, right? So the team is frustrated. So the numbers also don't mean something when they're good. So the numbers are just not the way to quantify it. For me, I feel it from the ground up. When we had challenges around marketing, you would feel it because you would walk into cold rooms. Simply put, you would walk into a room and you would... Start from zero. You would start from explaining who you are, where did you come from? What is Wiz? Who the founders were. I would walk into those rooms. I knew the room was cold. It's very different when you walk into a warm room. And so the question is, how do I make the rooms warm?

• 19:46Speaker 01

  Meaning when I meet my specific audience, and our product is an enterprise product. So I know the group of people I'm selling to. I mean, any enterprise product, right? Let's take the Fortune 500 companies. It's 500 companies. Whether you're selling to the CIO, the CTO, the, in my case, the CISO. You're selling to a person in that company's. So we end up with like 500 people, right? That need to hear your name somehow. So anything that makes them hear my name will make the room and the meeting warmer. So that you can feel from the ground. You feel from your sales team. As a marketer, I work for the sales team. Once they say, oh my God, the marketing here sucks, I'm doing a really bad job. And it doesn't matter if my telephone number is green or it's red. They know if they're being out marketed. They know if the room is hot or if the room is cold.

• 20:29Harry Stebbings?

  I'm struggling with one thing there, which is like, when you were talking about the creativity you have for the Wizard of Oz. I loved it. And I thought of Seth Godin, who's a famous marketer. He talks about the purple cow, which is it's better to be different sometimes, and it's the best way to stand out. But then when you talk about the Fortune 500 and the CISOs and the very serious enterprise customers, I picture a lot of founders listening to this going, I worry that by being different, I look less mature, I look less serious and formal than my competitors, and they won't take me seriously. What would you say to that?

• 21:02Speaker 01

  I don't worry about it. And I think it's proven itself. That's what Wiz sells. We sell to CISOs at enterprise companies. I don't think people are looking for more scariness, formalness. I mean, your role is stressful enough. It's okay. You can have fun with it. And I think also humor is something that naturally connects people more than fear. I've never experienced people not taking it seriously. I also think it's not just about the fun and the jokes, right? The fun and the jokes are like one part of it. The Wizard of Oz is one part of it. But the second part is really making sure that you brand yourself as an expert in your domain. It doesn't mean it can't be fun in the way. You can be an expert and make it fun, right? You can say the smartest thing.

• 21:43Speaker 01

  And you can give the best content and you can be the first person to explain deeply when a new vulnerability hits everybody at the same time. You can be the first and most valuable resource to them. It doesn't mean you have to do it in black and red. People are smart, right? I mean, we're selling to smart people. They're not confused by something as shallow as the color. So I've just never worried about it. And I also don't think I've ever as a person been off put by somebody being for me, if somebody walks into a room and they're super smiley and they make jokes, I don't take them less seriously. Quite the opposite. So I've truly never really worried about it and I think it's proven itself.

• 22:18Harry Stebbings?

  I got told a brilliant one the other day by the sales leader, John McMont. He's been CRO of five public companies. And he said, no one cares how much you know until they know how much you care.

• 22:29Speaker 01

  I agree a hundred percent with that. I agree a hundred percent with that. And that's why I feel like you have to connect on a human level. And you know, in our domain, cyber companies, a lot of them have connected to the realm of fear, scaring you from something bad happening. Like if you're selling a security product, scaring you that if you don't use my product, you're going to have something like a security incident or something. I just generally don't like fear-based connections. And I feel people connect better on empowerment, on humor. And I also think it connects more to what we do. We help organizations build things in the cloud. That's for me, it's empowerment. It's not scaring them from something bad.

• 23:03Harry Stebbings?

  I love that. Does selling fear not inspire urgency?

• 23:08Speaker 01

  It does probably inspire urgency. I mean, a lot of cyber companies have been very successful with those tactics. It just doesn't inspire me or us. And it's not really authentic for our brand and for our product at all.

• 23:18Harry Stebbings?

  But I guess, you know, for a lot of founders listening, they're told like, find that pain point and then really press on it for the customer base and go, you know that feeling when you X and that pain point then is illustrated. And it's the same fear-based selling. How would you advise them on how to turn traditionally fear-based selling into empowerment-based selling and how you approach that?

• 23:38Speaker 01

  For me also, fear-based selling in our domain is not giving customers and teams enough credit because no one product can solve for all of your problems. So there's also to me just something not authentic about fear-based selling. I definitely think it's critical to know your pain point, to know how you address it, but it can be on the positive side. I mean, and Wiz, the pain point is super clear, but it's now about how does a product enable you to do better, to be positive, to be confident. It's not, when you hit a pain point, it doesn't need to come from a negative place of scaring you about it. It can also become from a positive place of, let's resolve this together, which I think is just also more realistic when you're a customer of something, when somebody

• 24:21Speaker 01

  tries to sell you something. You don't want them to be scaring you. You want to feel like they're enabling you, like they're giving you something. So for me, it's just not an either-or.

• 24:31Harry Stebbings?

  We spoke about the 500 customers that really matter, or the kind of Fortune 500s that we've always focused on. A lot of founders are asking the question, should I start an enterprise? Do I have to start earlier and then scale up? If we were in a hypothetical situation where you're advising me as an angel investment, and I'm asking you that question, should I start early and scale up, or can I just go in at the top? What would you recommend, knowing all that you know now?

• 24:57Speaker 01

  It's a hard and tricky question. Wiz started upmarket. Our first paying customer was a Fortune 10 company.

• 25:04Harry Stebbings?

  Wow.

• 25:05Speaker 01

  That is very unusual.

• 25:06Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think enabled that?

• 25:08Speaker 01

  I think we had something that's part of our DNA, which is critical here. Wiz was founded by four of the most incredible people in this universe, right? The staff, our CEO, Roy, our VP of Engineering, Inan, our VP of Product, and Ami, our CTO. And Wiz is not their first company. So before Wiz, they sold their first company to Microsoft. And instead of leaving Microsoft after a couple of years, like most founders do, they ended up staying for six years and leading all of the Azure security products. That's also where I'm at the theme. I led Azure Sentinel, which is one of the Microsoft security products. And Microsoft is just the best school in the world for enterprise and for scale. So in Wiz, from day one, everything We built, we had that perspective of scale.

• 25:52Speaker 01

  We put into the product features that at the early days, we built out our role-based access system into the product. It's something that typically products, at some point, they want to sell to an enterprise and then they want to implement that and then they have to go back and like break all their infrastructure to make it work. We started with that. It's weird, but we were like wired for that type of scale and mindset. And I also think security specifically, it's a specific market, security, right? My knowledge is very limited to my market, but in security, I've always felt you want to buy things from the place your bank buys things from. You know what I mean? Like you want to buy insurance from the place your bank buys insurance from. So if you manage to actually help the most complex enterprises in the world, the most

• 26:34Speaker 01

  heavily regulated and complex organizations in the world adopt you, then your way down market becomes so much easier. So it's definitely not a move that will work for everybody or is easy and it's definitely very unusual, but it is what worked for us.

• 26:49Harry Stebbings?

  Legitimate question. Do you think you'd be able to sell into such prestigious customers if you had not had the prestigious backgrounds that you did? When you walked through that selling company to Microsoft and then the incredible duration that all of you had at Microsoft, if you're a 24-year-old founder, do you think you have the luxury of doing that enterprise start?

• 27:11Speaker 01

  Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name we had. I mean, a Saffir CEO, which is now very well-known, it's not like he would walk into a room and people would know who he was. It's not, nobody heard our name. So it wasn't about the credits or the, or the brand. But I think the knowledge we had from working with enterprises at Microsoft and from helping enterprises solve complex security problems, I think that's what helped us when we were having a conversation with an enterprise customer, make him feel like, okay, that's a, this team understands enterprise. And when you understand enterprise, you know that it's also just never really about the product. It's about really understanding how you integrate into their processes, their workflows, their complexity of the environment. So I don't think it was the fact that we had Microsoft written in our background.

• 27:56Speaker 01

  And I also think that despite the fact that our founders led Azure Security, it's not like their names were well-known or something, but it was really that knowledge of how to work with enterprises and how to talk to them that made the difference.

• 28:08Harry Stebbings?

  They weren't like, oh, ASAP, frappaport.

• 28:10Speaker 01

  No.

• 28:10Harry Stebbings?

  Take our money, take our money.

• 28:12Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 28:12Harry Stebbings?

  Um, that's very funny. You said that Microsoft was the best school, I wrote it down because I have a terrible memory at my age, right? Best school for enterprise and for scale. What did you learn from Microsoft when it comes to enterprise and scale? That you think is so important to how you've won at Wiz?

• 28:30Speaker 01

  At Microsoft, when you build something into the product, even the tiniest feature, you have to think about it working for the biggest organizations in the world, for the biggest call deployments in the world. If something doesn't work at an infinite scale, it doesn't work. You never put it in there for the first place. So every small decision you make on the product and on the engineering side, your mental state is either this works for infinite scale or it doesn't work. If something works for like some customers or customers up to an X in whatever size, complexity, so it doesn't work. So that's a mindset that from the early days at Wiz, made us build everything in a way that, you know, we've never had to refactor things. We've built for the scale we have today.

• 29:14Speaker 01

  That mindset was there from day one because of how we're used to building in Microsoft. And the second thing, that's like on the product side. And I think on the go to market side, I just think Microsoft has such a deep culture of enterprise sales and what it means to sell to enterprise. And like seeing that machine from the inside, it's amazing. It's such an amazing company. I mean, you know, the big companies, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, truly, they're so successful. Think about what it takes to start, start it and have a company that stays so relevant for so many years. It's insane. So you have to be humble and I think we've learned so much from seeing that machine in Microsoft.

• 29:51Harry Stebbings?

  You said there about kind of the infinite, starting on the product side, the infinite scale needed and if it doesn't work at infinite scale, then it doesn't work. Does that prohibit velocity? Because it means it has to be perfect in many respects. And does that prohibit quick and dirty getting stuff out there and shipping fast?

• 30:09Speaker 01

  I've never seen a team develop with more velocity than the development team at Wiz. I don't think it's a trade-off with velocity. I think it's almost a mindset. It doesn't mean that you have to make things to be perfect. It just means that when you had the initial idea or approach to implementing something or approach to building a feature, you did not just think about the customers you have today. Let's take a simple example, right? Let's say I have, I show you your infrastructure in a graph. And let's say now I work with customers who have a hundred machines. It can be a very pretty graph, right? And actually, if people develop it, it doesn't, it's not shorter. It's just, you decided to develop this visual of showing them all of their machines on a graph. But if one day you meet a Fortune 10 customer and they're going to have 50,000 machines, then now your graph looks idiotic.

• 30:52Speaker 01

  And we've all seen idiotic graphs in products. So it's just the mindset of not doing it from day one because you're like, well, it's not going to work for an infinite scale. So from day one, it's not the right thing to build. So I don't think it's about the velocity. It's just about the decisions you make are more conscious at the beginning, which at the end saves us a lot of time because technical debt can kill teams. And it's something that accumulates fast. And that's also a learning, I think, we, we had in Microsoft. So if you have those things in perspective from day one, you just kind of eliminate a lot of that mess later on.

• 31:24Harry Stebbings?

  What product decisions do you need to make on day one to eliminate technical debt accruing over time?

• 31:30Speaker 01

  It's exactly, I think, that. Will it work for infinite scale? If you're not sure it will, then don't do it right now because we don't want to hit that problem later. And there's, there's many small things like that, that you make decisions on every day as a product manager. You're like, yeah, what's going to solve this for this customer right now? And like, whatever, I just need to win like those five POCs right now. But it's a question, can you think about a solution that will solve for them, but in a way that will also solve for the future?

• 31:56Harry Stebbings?

  Can you help me on that one? Because I have a lot of founders say to me, listen, this customer really wants this. And it's, it's a big problem for them. They'll pay us a lot of money. Should we do it? And it's, it's a luxurious position to be like, no, stay true to your principles and don't do it. And some of the best companies are founded off the back of that. How do you advise me and other founders who are in that situation?

• 32:17Speaker 01

  It's a tricky line. It's a tricky line. I felt genuinely for us. We always treated customers, and we still treat customers, and I also just truly believe this about customers, that they are a core part of the Wiz team when it comes to growing in the market. Your customers are your strongest voice. We also always treated them that way when it came to product decisions. So if a customer asks me for something, something that's super accustomed to them, or something I'm not sure I can build in a way that's generic, or something that doesn't align with my North Star, either he wants something that's not in Wiz's domain at all, at all, like not even close to our domain. In which case, there's a misunderstanding here because if you communicate what you're trying to solve for, and we know what we're trying to solve for, like we own cloud security, we own security, everything you build around the cloud.

• 33:02Speaker 01

  If it's not in that direction, then we have a communication problem, and we shouldn't have even gotten here. Or it's a real problem in my domain, and then maybe the way he wants me to solve it is not the right way, but if I talk to him about it enough, we'll find the right way because it's in my domain and they care about it. So that's how we've always moved. It's in this balance. And a lot of things we did build for customers, but there were things that were aligned to that North Star, and we never built them without the knowledge that it could scale for everybody. And so that's one of the things that actually made execution at Wiz and development super fast because everybody's building always towards one North Star, and there's no one-offs that you regret, and there's no reef factors because it had to match that North Star and that scale.

• 33:44Harry Stebbings?

  Was there ever a time when products let you down, and what did you learn from that?

• 33:50Speaker 01

  I think the beautiful thing is you constantly feel that way, right? When you build a product, it's not perfect, it's always missing a million things, and always there's so much more you can do, especially when you solve a big problem. I think in Wiz, we had areas that in earlier phases of the company, it didn't make sense for us to expand into from a product perspective, but over time, we grew into it. And so those are places where I think sometimes we were, maybe we were very cautious about that North Star, and if we went backwards, it would have been more clear to me that we should have said, oh yeah, we're going to expand there, but we still really weren't sure we were. So I think those are places where in retrospect, we could have been more open.

• 34:25Harry Stebbings?

  Can I be honest? I kind of hate the North Star analogy. It's a bit like kind of the fluffiness of culture. And so I just, I didn't mean that rudely at all.

• 34:33Speaker 01

  No, no.

• 34:34Harry Stebbings?

  But like, what does that actually mean? Like a North Star is like we own cloud security. Is that the North Star?

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, for me, it's not fluffiness. When I say North Star, I mean, we know exactly what we're trying to solve for our customers. We're not confused about it. I know who I sell to. I sell to security and development teams. And I know what they solve for them. I help them secure every application they build and they run in the cloud. So everything under that, I care about. Everything not under that, it's out of my scope a bit.

• 34:58Harry Stebbings?

  And your one metric to determine your success of your North Star is?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  If you're talking about product metrics, and I'll go into the specifics, there's two metrics I care about. One is, we have this thing we call zero-criticals club. Meaning, we are a security product. So you connect us to a very complex cloud environment in an organization, and we find risks. And we try to help security and development teams understand the risks and resolve them, and be efficient in it. And we give them tools, of course, like we connect to the code, we open PR and everything. But the metric we care about is how many customers are in the zero-criticals club. Meaning, they've seen critical risks, and they keep them at the zeros, they resolve them. That's number one metric for us, because it means that not only is a product really being effective, it has drove change in your organization, and it has made you more secure.

• 35:45Speaker 01

  Many security products, the challenge is like, you buy them, and then it's like a shelfware, or it's really hard to fix the thing. So helping teams actually beat zero-criticals is a major metric for us. And we track the number of customers who are in that club. Most with customers are in the zero-criticals club. We even send them like, cool swag, just like you have the sweatshirts, zero-criticals club. We make it fun and simple. Like, it's not a complex, what am I going to do as an enterprise security product? Okay, get to zero-criticals. That's the first mission. So that's one metric we really care about. How many people are in the zero-criticals club? Second metric is, we look at how many people log into the platform, and what team they're from. And the challenge we solve for is a multi-team challenge. I never like to talk about cyber, because it's so boring for most of the universe. But in high level, right?

• 36:29Speaker 01

  The reason that securing cloud applications is so hard is because the people who can actually solve the problems are the developers. They own the infrastructure. But security owns the risk. So it's like, it's hard to build a program and a system that works. That's what Wiz brought into the market. And we look at the number of people logging into Wiz that are not from a security team. And so, most of our logins are from development teams. And that's the second metric I really care about. Why do I really care about those two metrics? Most of my customers being on zero-criticals. Most of those people logging in being from outside the security team. Because that's how I know I'm really driving change and impact. And you know, SaaS products are easy to deploy, and they're easy to replace. But that's not easy to replace.

• 37:05Harry Stebbings?

  Totally get that and I really appreciate the drill down there because it's not fluffy at all when you highlight it like that. I do just want to make sure that we continue on the enterprise element because I think so many founders also make just terrible mistakes going into enterprise. When you sit down and advise me, what are the biggest mistakes that founders make and you see other founders make on enterprise selling, selling to those Fortune 500s that you're like, oh no, don't do that, don't do that?

• 37:30Speaker 01

  You know, for example, I think you can spend a lot of time on marketing and marketing channels, but I'm not sure that's really the right way of breaking into those accounts. At the end of the day, it's a list of accounts and it's a small group of people. Also, when you think of all of the CIOs of Fortune 100 companies, all of the CMOs, all of the CISOs, they all know each other, they all switch companies, they work in that company, tomorrow they work in, it's a small knit group. So I think there's less cheating than you think there is. Meaning, for me, it would be, okay, find the one, find the one company that you can get into a room with. And how do you get into a room with it? That's where you mentioned Doug from Sequoia, like we work with Sequoia with Index, we use our investors often, in many cases, to introduce it. So find the room you can get into, find that

• 38:12Speaker 01

  one executive you can be introduced to, and do a really, really, really good job of solving his problem for his team. At the early days, I mentioned that we were selling before we even had salespeople. I made the worst deals in the universe. It's like, to this day, there's salespeople and whiz that hate me because some big customer has like a terrible unlimited thing I gave them in the early days. Because it's not about trying to win on the revenue from that first enterprise customer at all. It's about really solving their problem, doing an amazing job for them, and then having them introduce you to two more people with, hey, they've done a good job for us. You know what I mean? It's a small group of people. So there's no tricks and magic. It's really being obsessive about getting them real value. They're very smart people and they see a lot of vendors and a lot of companies. So how

• 38:57Speaker 01

  do you actually deliver real value for them?

• 38:59Harry Stebbings?

  Do you do pilots? How do you advise founders on pilots?

• 39:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do POVs. And one of the things that we've done on the product perspective is pay a lot of time and attention to time for value, meaning time for value for us is value. We're not an enterprise product where it takes months to show value. Literally, we spend so much time on the product side to make sure that that experience of connecting with your environment, even if you're a huge enterprise, and seeing value takes less than an hour. So that makes the whole POV process run faster. There's no long cycles, there's no complexities. We kind of let the product speak for itself. So it's like, okay, connect with your environment. We see the environment, we see the issues. Does this bring value to your team? If it doesn't bring value, by the way, that's the most interesting conversation for me to have in the universe, so I can only win here.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  When somebody really gave me the attention of going through a POV process with me, I can only win. And I always tell customers, I think the best thing is for you to try, connect this to your environment. If you see value, amazing. If you don't see value, this will be the most interesting conversation in the universe for me. I'm dying to have this conversation and to understand where are my gaps, so I can only kind of win here. So we really believe in proof of values. Also, we, in many cases, customers just connect their entire environment to us as a proof of value. We never think about it twice. That's another thing about enterprises. It's a long-term partnership. Again, it's a small group of people. It's a partnership. I'm fine with having somebody use my product. I'm not like, you know, I'm not going to push them too hard, I'm not going to close the POV if they didn't go into negotiations on time. No, like, I really think of it as a partnership, and I only have things to win by partnering with an enterprise customer.

• 40:30Harry Stebbings?

  Has there ever been a time when what's best for the customer is not what's best for the company?

• 40:36Speaker 01

  I don't believe that can be true. I generally don't believe it can be true. Even if you think it's true, I think you're wrong. Like, even when you think you have a case like that, I think you're wrong.

• 40:43Harry Stebbings?

  Well, I can paint you a case.

• 40:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, paint me a case.

• 40:46Harry Stebbings?

  If we take my business, venture, and then investing in companies. You are my customer as the founder.

• 40:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 40:52Harry Stebbings?

  And there are times when it is opportunistic or best for me to sell my position when it is not best for you. What's best for the customer is not what's best for me. I will take an example, which is a benchmark selling their position in Uber. It's best for the firm and rational to sell the position.

• 41:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 41:11Harry Stebbings?

  And make money for their LPs, but it is not best for the founder, who may feel slighted, it may damage the story publicly. There's a divergence.

• 41:20Speaker 01

  Look, you're in a very tough business. I'm in the business of helping customers. You don't always have your incentives 100% aligned with your customers, but I don't think that's true for product teams. I think it's a very, very, very different business. I also think that if you think about even your example over a very long term of time, I'm not sure it's not the best thing. Because when you sold your position, something was logical there for you, right? So you're reflecting something real to the entrepreneur, like something real made that happen. So it doesn't mean that it's really a bad thing for them in the long term, even in your example. But I also think it's very different when you're building a company or building a product. The goal of your company, the goal of your product is serving customers.

• 42:03Speaker 01

  So you never have misalignment in interests. Even sometimes when you feel like you do, you really don't. I'm very adamant about it. And so I really feel that always being attached to what's best for the customer, even if it means that in the short term, we'll always make the decision of the customer. And I would argue that in the long term, it's good for us. I can give concrete examples, right? I mean, let's say, for example, you buy Wiz. When you buy Wiz, you pay us based on the sizing of your cloud environment. Now, cloud environments change a lot. And cloud grows like 30 to 40% year over year. And oftentimes, a company would buy X units, but just their engineering teams, I mean, it just grows faster than they expected. So now they're like overusing my product. And I am paying for that because my COGS are related to the size of the environment I'm scanning.

• 42:47Speaker 01

  So you could make a business decision, right? And we've had finance business leaders ask us, "Well, you should go back to the customer now because they're underpaying you." And you could ask them to renew in the middle of the year, in the middle of their contract. So you would get that gap. And that gap can be pretty significant sometimes. It's a decision you can make. But I would argue that although it might seem like your interests are not aligned, it's wrong. You should always be aligned to the customer because it's a long-term business and you want to be the best partner for them. So you can sometimes take short-term revenue or short-term winnings. But I would always argue that as a product company, it's not the long-term winning thing. And always being there for the customer is a smart thing.

• 43:26Harry Stebbings?

  So I would argue you're right in a perfect world. But in an imperfect world where you do not have funding and you are not as well capitalized. Sometimes you have to revenue optimize them in the short term to keep the lights on. Like you mentioned Doug and you mentioned something amazing, you always have great investors and high valuations, which were fantastic and well deserved. But if you're a struggling, scrappy startup, sometimes that cogs difference is what keeps you alive.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  I think that's why enterprise startups, companies who build enterprise product, often even their seeds are big.

• 43:58Harry Stebbings?

  That's interesting. Do you need a big seed to do enterprise well?

• 44:01Speaker 01

  Yes. I mean, if I answer just based on my gut and my experience, then I think it's very hard to be successful at building an enterprise company without having a bit of those long pockets, exactly for the reasons we just talked about. I mean, it's a partnership and you're dealing with people who have huge challenges. It's very hard to be an executive that owns something like security or engineering or IT at big organizations. So you need to be a good partner for them. They have many, many options and their job is hard. So I'm sure it's possible, but I think there's a reason most of those companies raise big seeds.

• 44:36Harry Stebbings?

  So if we talk about raising big seeds, just help me out here. Do we just dilute companies more earlier? Or do we just have higher prices because there's the two variables that you can switch?

• 44:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm definitely not in your area of business of investing. And I'll say one thing that I've learned from Asaf and Asaf is CEO. Asaf is very generous with everything, meaning he always says it's okay if I own a smaller percent of the pie. If the pie is no pie, what do you care if my percent was big and the no pie, you know what I mean? So he's always very generous. He's like, either this will be a very, very big thing. And in that case, even a small part of it will be very, very big or it won't be. And so I always remember his true approach of being generous with everything. Being generous with the equity he gives employees, being generous with the equity he gives investors. And it's because he believed from the get go, he's going to build a big pie. And if it's a small pie, who cares? It's a trade off, right?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  I mean, there's something to be said about this optimistic approach of being generous and believing you're going to build something big. So even a small part of it will be bigger than the big part in something small.

• 45:40Harry Stebbings?

  Totally agree and I love that generosity built in. When you think about investing and working with founders today, do you inherently rotate around second time founders having had the experience that you have?

• 45:51Speaker 01

  I think definitely. There's a huge advantage to having done something the second time. I see it in the Wiz executive team all the time. They know what good looks like and they know what bad looks like. And I think that there's a reason that experience is experience. I mean, I think that comes with a ton of advantages, obviously. So it's like if you have the same team that has done it once or not done it once. Also, they're literally the same team. All of them founded another company and sold that company and then worked together for six more years. They've been working together for like 20 years. So it also comes with just an immense amount of trust. It's something super unique that's ingrained also in our culture in many ways.

• 46:28Harry Stebbings?

  I think it's one of the most damaging things when you have people who've never worked together, finding their fit, and it just takes so long to find. And then you bring new people in and it takes ramp time and then they don't work out and there's like a year loss there. And I think there's so much benefits to be had from the historical knowledge of working together in that way. Can I ask you, you've seen so many different stages of Wiz, from literally first 10 employees to acquisition now. What was the most challenging stage?

• 46:55Speaker 01

  At every point in the company, somewhere else is super challenging. I have this analogy where I try to explain to people. A lot of people ask me about the move from like product to taking on marketing. I feel like at different phases of the company, the stress is somewhere else. So it's like in the early days of the company, the first year, the heat in the kitchen. The kitchen that was burning was the product side, right? Because we had engineers and the challenge was like, okay, tell us what it built and build something that customers want. That's a lot of stress, right? I would not sleep thinking about, are we building the right thing, the product? We pivoted, it was, you know, the heat was there in the first year until we found the feeling that we had product market fit.

• 47:38Speaker 01

  And then we sold for a couple of million dollars and now you, we brought her for a sales team. And now the heat is there. Because now it's like, hey, we sold for a couple of million dollars. So here, salespeople sell this.

• 47:46Harry Stebbings?

  Was that easy? Here, salespeople sell this.

• 47:49Speaker 01

  No, it was not easy. That's like, well, that's what I'm saying. It's like the heat moved there because suddenly you're like, okay, wait. But like the way I sell it, it doesn't mean that that's the exact way that they can sell it. So how do we build something a bit more structured? How do we suddenly bring on somebody? Who wasn't like, living this day in and day out, right? And we enabled them to be able to sell it. So the heat kind of moved to, okay, now make the sales engine work in some way. And then after like two and a half years, we were at this point where, okay, our first salespeople were being successful, we were trying to grow the sales team. But now the problem is nobody's heard the name Wiz. And everybody were, like, all the salespeople were complaining and all of the rooms were, to my first metaphor, cold. We would come into a room and they would be like, this looks amazing, wish we heard

• 48:32Speaker 01

  of Wiz when we signed, you know, four years was your competitor two months ago. So the heat moved to marketing. So in different times in the company, the heat feels to me like it's moving. And at every phase in the company, the stress, the hard decisions, the challenges, they move a bit. And it's a constant movement.

• 48:50Harry Stebbings?

  When did the kitchen feel the hottest?

• 48:53Speaker 01

  I think the early days of the company, where it was before we pivoted to cloud security and we were thinking through this networking idea. To me, on a personal level, that was the feeling where I felt most on fire. Wiz at that time was not a successful company. We were just getting started and we were a company who was unsuccessful. Like, we were trying to talk to people about something and it felt like it wasn't resonating enough. And I was the first product manager. I was in charge of telling the engineers what to build and how to build. And I wasn't sure what to build or how to build. And I wasn't sure even understood what we need to build because the conversation was so unclear. So to me, that felt like the most on fire. There's also something about having a winning feeling, that once we had strong product market fit, we had that winning feeling.

• 49:37Speaker 01

  That makes everything else a bit easier. At the beginning, it's like, will this be okay? Am I gonna get fired tomorrow? That was the feeling for me. I still oftentimes feel that feeling still, but at the early days, it was hardest.

• 49:50Harry Stebbings?

  Funny, I interviewed Nick from Revolut and he was like, our culture's bullshit. It's all about winning. If people win, they care about two things. They care about personal development. When you're winning, you grow personally probably more than ever. And financial development, and you financially develop when you're winning. Do you agree with that over-rotation on winning and that leads to culture?

• 50:10Speaker 01

  I mean, saying that culture is bullshit, it's just a bit of a semantic. Like, when you say culture, what do you mean? You know, it's, there's a way that things get done in the company. There's a type of people who work at a company. The type of people that work at your company really matters, right? At the end, you have a lot of people working in your company, and you need people from a specific type. So, to me, that's what culture is about. So, I think it's really important, the type of people you have on your team. I do think that, in some ways, winning and executing fast, it's high stakes. It's very hard to work at a company like Wiz. So, I think it generates a team of people from a specific type. And if that's culture, I think it's very important. I think nothing is more important than our team.

• 50:47Harry Stebbings?

  Is there a non-obvious belief or trait that you think is important to what makes someone who works at Wiz work at Wiz?

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Wiz is very much a culture of doers. We don't have a lot of meetings. We don't have strategy discussions, nothing of that. It's a culture where you own something. You own the results of it. There's clarity on what you're supposed to do. Do it. I mean, there's no way that somebody on my team will come to me and start telling me that that team in the organization, because of them, he's unable to do his job. Like, what do you mean? Just do it. I mean, we have this culture of getting things done, and we have a pretty flat organization. To this day, Roy, our co-founder and VP of Engineering, writes code. That's the culture. It's a culture of people that are hands-on, doers. We all take customer calls.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  I mean, that is a type of people that are successful at Wiz. You have to be comfortable with being hands-on. There's no managers for managers. There's no long documents. You have to be comfortable with doing things heads-on.

• 51:51Harry Stebbings?

  Do you believe that people are destined for a certain stage of company? You know, kind of traditional management advice. There's people, "Oh, there's a zero-to-one person." And there's, "Oh, this type of person." Do you believe that?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  I don't know. I guess it depends on how adaptable you are as a person. I mean, definitely the job changes a lot. And at Wiz, I always felt like because the growth of the company was so fast. If you wake up today and what you do in your day is exactly or very similar to what you were doing three months ago or four months ago, you're definitely not doing the right thing. It doesn't add up. The company has changed so much. So I think it's more about are people adaptable? Some people are very adaptable and happy to constantly change and switch things around. You can see it on the people on your team that are like the first one to look into something, adopt a new technology, suggest something. Some people are very comfortable being that and so they can grow with a company. I mean, I've grown with a company. I always say maybe at some point I won't be the right person.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  But I mean, so far, we've adapted. Maybe at some point, we won't be able to adapt any further. And then I think there are people that are just less comfortable with change. So for them, definitely, it's going to be harder to stay at a company that changes so much.

• 52:59Harry Stebbings?

  Speaking of kind of the change, what's required to work at Wiz. You said about kind of the doers and the not maybe having so many meetings. In all honesty, I instantly thought to the American love of meetings. I don't like meetings either. I don't like brainstorming sessions. I think nothing comes out of a brainstorming session. My question to you is, do you think that Wiz has benefited from not being a Silicon Valley company? And how do you think that's impacted the company?

• 53:23Speaker 01

  It's such an interesting question because it's not just that we were not a Silicon Valley company. We started with like just when COVID started.

• 53:31Harry Stebbings?

  That is nuts, isn't it? I mean, it's not that long ago.

• 53:34Speaker 01

  Not that long ago, 2020, but literally March 2020. It's like we started with COVID together. And at the first year of the company, six months, it was when everything suddenly was on literal lockdown. There was something terribly scary about it because we were all leaving very good jobs in Microsoft. At a point where people were like, there's going to be no money in the world. This is like, nothing is going to happen. But it actually ended up being incredible for us. First of all, we had nothing to do in the first year of Wiz, the team, except work, like nothing. We were all in lockdown. All we did was work for a year. Then the second thing is it enabled us to do things without flying around so much. You know, we were able to compete with. With companies that had salespeople in every region in the US. Nobody knew we were sitting at our home in Tel Aviv.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Like, I would take calls at like 2 AM. Nobody knew where I was. I could have been in New York as well. So it enabled us to have the speed and scale without needing to do all the travel. And I think it really helped us in the early days. It really helped us to just not be impacted by not being in Silicon Valley. Because it didn't matter where you were. And that enabled us to run faster and also to kind of continue without changing that. I think there's differences and I think it's a very multicultural company. But Wiz is mostly a US company. Like, our headquarters are in New York. Our base is in New York. But it's definitely a company where we have advantages of that multicultural.

• 54:59Harry Stebbings?

  Does your HQ have to be in New York? I'm not saying specifically for you. I'm asking more for the European and the Israeli founders who are listening. Because obviously, we have Project Europe, which invests in amazing young founders. There was like, do I have to have an HQ in New York? Does it have to be there?

• 55:12Speaker 01

  Like, we started from the US market. It's just the biggest market in the world for enterprise products. So for us, we start from that market. So it makes sense to be where your market is at. Europe is a bit of a different question. There's also a big market here. By the way, Wiz also has a very big London presence. One of our co-founders lives here and we have engineering here. And London is an amazing place for startups. You mentioned Revolve. Like, there's amazing things happening here too. But I think it is important to be where your market is.

• 55:38Harry Stebbings?

  I just always am asked by founders, like, hey, is it possible to sell into it? And how do we think about that? You know, I think about Eleanor Pigment, who has like an amazing engineering team in France. And then she has her sales team in the US. And she runs the company from Paris, but she sells into the US. And it's always just a question for me of like, gosh. I always feel a weight of responsibility when advising young founders. And so to what extent does it have to be? Final one before we do a quick fire. What does no one know about Wiz that everyone should know that has contributed to your success?

• 56:09Speaker 01

  Interesting. I think there's something ingrained in Wiz to being open to not do things in a traditional way. I mean, I think people sometimes can look at Wiz from the outside and it looks like this golden company, you know, like all the right things in the book, like the right VCs and second time founders. But I think there's actually a lot of openness from the inside to do things in a non-traditional way, not do things the way they're always done just because they're always done. At every point of the company, we've made so many decisions like that that have led to different outcomes. I mean, for example, like, obviously, I lead marketing. I've never done that before. It's a weird thing to do from the CEO's perspective, right? I mean, obviously, he had suggestions and pressures

• 56:53Speaker 01

  to bring experienced CMOs, and he decided not to. And that's something that is core to the culture. It's like, a staff trusts his instincts and the rest of the founding team. And so there's a lot of openness to just not doing things this traditional way. We call it sometimes the Wiz way. And we also make a gazillion mistakes along the way, but there's openness to doing things in your own way.

• 57:14Harry Stebbings?

  I don't think most CMOs are very good. Do you agree?

• 57:19Speaker 01

  I don't know a lot of CMOs.

• 57:21Harry Stebbings?

  Do you go to CMO dinners? Do you not engage with CMO communities? Do you not?

• 57:27Speaker 01

  No. No, I generally don't. I really don't know hardly any CMOs. I don't know. I do think that marketing is a challenging domain because you need to have a lot of trust to do it correctly. And it's just a hard role to get into. I mean, I couldn't imagine myself going to be a CMO at a different company. It seems to me like such a hard role. I totally get why CMOs get constantly get fired because it's like, imagine if I didn't have the repertoire I had with the team and the complete trust they had in me. And also, honestly, I didn't really care about taking risks because I'm not a CMO and my role is not marketing. So at the beginning, I was like, whatever. I was asked to do this. If the Wiz of Oz is

• 58:10Speaker 01

  a really bad idea, I don't care. Bring a CMO. Like, I'm fine with my product role, right? So it gave me a lot of freedom. Imagine if I was like, not that, right? It's coming from the outside, doesn't experience CMO. Of course, I wouldn't have done anything as controversial. And also, of course, anything I would have done would have been looked at by every executive. And people are so sensitive because it's like what you put out there in the world. So it's just a hard role to be successful in, in general. I don't know how you come into an organization as a CMO and you be like, it's insane to me. So I just think they have a very, very, very, very, very hard job. And I also think marketing, I feel bad for saying it, but I also think marketing is not that complicated.

• 58:51Speaker 01

  I mean, it's not like engineering where, you know, our VP of Engineering, he has so much deep, deep, deep knowledge in the domain. I just don't believe it's that way for marketing. I think people overly complex that, but at the end of the day, it's an intuitive thing. You can look at something, you can look at something that Wiz does in marketing, and you can tell me if it's good or bad, and you will be correct because you're a human being and I'm trying to grab your attention. And the, the whole point is showing things to people who are not Wiz's customers. So you have really good intuition about it. That will be completely different if I show you something like a piece of code or part of our security product. So I think marketing is also just not that complex. So we can be more open to how we think about hires there.

• 59:34Harry Stebbings?

  I love the way when you say something that you think is controversial, you like lower the volume of your voice.

• 59:41Harry Stebbings?

  It's like your whisper. Final, final one, I promise, but when we actually were prepping for this show, you said Shadul Shah at Index, and I think Doug Leoni is two references. And I know them both very, very well for years. When you think about advice to founders, either that you've learned from them or on how to work with the best investors in the world, what would you say, having had the experience you have with Shadul and Doug, two people I respect immensely?

• 1:00:08Speaker 01

  It's such an insane privilege to be able to see how those people operate. And to see, they are very thoughtful. They are very able to clearly express opinions, but it's always very well backed up. And I think that is something that to me is very inspirational. It's like, we talked at the beginning of the conversation, right? People like Sherdul and Doug, they could allow themselves probably to never dig deep into anything and just say what they have on top of their mind, but they don't. They are really well thought. Everything they say is well researched and they understand deep things about the company. That for me, I'm always awed by how much they can understand from the outside and how much insight they can bring.

• 1:00:52Speaker 01

  So I think it's really inspiring to see people who are at the top of the top of the top of what they do. The biggest names in their domain that still have that discipline. And still are very thoughtful about the way they operate and the advice they give. So it's very inspirational. I never felt like, you know, I'm like a nobody. I've never felt looked down at. I felt like I was getting advice at like eye level.

• 1:01:19Harry Stebbings?

  We're gonna do a quick fire. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay?

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:24Harry Stebbings?

  You said it's not that complex marketing. What's one best practice in SaaS marketing that's actually completely bullshit?

• 1:01:32Speaker 01

  I think pipeline numbers and attribution. I think attribution and the whole discussions around attribution is complete bullshit.

• 1:01:40Harry Stebbings?

  Love it. What's the one marketing metric you think founders obsess over? And this is other than pipeline, that doesn't matter as much as people think.

• 1:01:50Speaker 01

  Most metrics don't matter, in my opinion, as much as people think. I think you should find a way to measure what you believe in will be the closest indicator to warm rooms.

• 1:01:59Harry Stebbings?

  What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months?

• 1:02:02Speaker 01

  Oh, I change my mind all the time. Wow. I think AI is definitely an area. Where there's been so much discussion in the early days of is this just hype? Will this actually change things? Well, this, it's every single day I'm changing my mind about more and more things. Then like, yeah, we should just do it differently now. I mean, every day you can wake up today and the capabilities have changed. And things you could not have done six months ago, you think AI, you can now do them. So you have to every day look into those things.

• 1:02:29Harry Stebbings?

  Can you give me an example?

• 1:02:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, of course. I mean, for example, one of the teams I own is brand and design. And the algorithms have improved so much when it comes to generating graphics based on your own guidelines. Like, a year ago, you could have done it, but it would be like, eh, results. Six months ago, it would have been like, good results. Now it's excellent results, and it changes daily. Another example, Gemini, the new Gemini, right? His capabilities around specific areas on security are much better than any model we've seen before. So I believe that right now, you have to be a person that can wake up every morning and change his mind. And that's the reality we're in. I mean, those things improve on a daily so fast.

• 1:03:07Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think we will have more or less engineers in 10 years' time?

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  More. I just think the definition of like, what is an engineer even will broaden. But I think we, if an engineer is somebody who builds things, and I would kind of argue that that's the beauty of engineering, that's what I love in engineering. I think that is just becoming a bigger category of people, and so I think it will just be more. I just think the definition of what is an engineer might be questionable in the future.

• 1:03:32Harry Stebbings?

  Does AI take code away? Like, does it remove engineers from code? You know, we had Matt Mayor from Base44 on the show, who I loved, I thought he was great. But he was like, I want to never show code to anyone. Like, we should never have code as a visual.

• 1:03:47Speaker 01

  I think that in general, when we talk about coding, right, like, also when you say coding. So Python is very different than how they used to code, right, in like, low-level languages, so. But is it really different? I mean, so maybe we'll have, you know, so Python is this, and now we'll have the same thing that Python was to a very low-level language. Maybe we'll have the next thing. Sure. But I think the concepts of understanding core engineering principles is what enables you at the end to build complex systems and debug and understand how to build. So I think those concepts, I mean, in general, I side computer science. Most of what you do in that degree is not code. It's learning the fundamentals of algorithmic thinking, and, I mean, I think those are principles that help. They helped me in marketing, so I'm sure that whatever coding will be, they're gonna help.

• 1:04:32Harry Stebbings?

  What do you think, I like this one, what's the biggest lie marketers tell CEOs, and why?

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  I just think most of the numbers people look at are not that meaningful. So you're tracking things, you're showing impressions, you're showing like a lot of green things. I just don't know how meaningful that is. And I think marketing is a thing that you can have a very strong hunch of if it's working, if it's not working.

• 1:04:54Harry Stebbings?

  What do you know now that you wish you'd known when you started as one of the first 10 employees? You can call yourself up the night before and say, Raz, you should know this.

• 1:05:04Speaker 01

  I think I would have had a, I would have had like such a big relief knowing that I would, I wouldn't get fired. Like having, being able to call my early self and be like, you're gonna be in Wiz. Like five years and you're gonna be in Wiz and the team is gonna think highly of you. I think would have been like such a relief for the first couple of years of the company. Where I think I was a lot in my head about it. And I think that would have been such a big relief, honestly. I think that's the most important thing I would have wished I'd known.

• 1:05:31Harry Stebbings?

  I get you, but did that drive you to be as good as you are?

• 1:05:34Speaker 01

  You never know.

• 1:05:35Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:35Speaker 01

  You never know. It's hard to say. That's all, we were looping all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. It's so hard to know.

• 1:05:41Harry Stebbings?

  I, I, so many people are like, I wish I'd known that it would have all worked out. And it's like the feeling that it wouldn't work out is what drove people to make it work out.

• 1:05:49Speaker 01

  Absolutely, but it's also about like the prices you pay. So it's, I don't know, it's a combination there somewhere.

• 1:05:54Harry Stebbings?

  Do you think you're too hard on yourself?

• 1:05:55Speaker 01

  What's too hard? I mean, I'm definitely hard on myself, but.

• 1:05:58Harry Stebbings?

  Well, you're very hard on, like, I'm hard on myself, but I do give myself some credit. I don't feel you give yourself any credit, no offense.

• 1:06:06Speaker 01

  I, I don't know to be any other way. And it's kind of like what you've said that, well, how much of that is what drove me to what I've been able to do in my work life? So it's hard to know if I was like too hard on myself. Probably, but it's really hard to know where to put that line. It's like, if you're not hard on yourself, then do you really get pushed to extreme? It's, I, I don't know the answer.

• 1:06:28Harry Stebbings?

  Final one. What are you most excited about in the next one to two years? I think no one knows what's gonna happen in five to 10 years, so who knows?

• 1:06:36Speaker 01

  Wow, I feel like one of the things that we are, I think there's so much luck in every journey, in every company. Luck and timing. I think AI met us at Wiz at the most incredible time where the future is. Just first of all, think about how much our domain has changed. We help organizations protect the applications they build in cloud. Over the past year and a half, everybody's building applications. Our domain has changed and we needed to make sure that we're at the front of that. How do we help companies secure those applications? And it's been so inspiring to see us go through that transformation. Today, Wiz is the security solution for most of the frontier labs. That's an insane accomplishment for us. And the future, we don't know it, but it's constantly keeping. It's fun now, right?

• 1:07:20Speaker 01

  Like, we're on the edge of our seats. It's like, how do you secure the building, the applications building of tomorrow? Building software has also, is now going 10x faster because people write code 10x faster. There's 10x more applications. You have people in every organization now generating applications, people who would have not been able to do that before. So it's like, our problem area is just becoming more and more and more interesting and insane. And that for me is incredibly exciting. And then the other end, AI gives us tools to build the company in new ways. Like, my team, there's errors in my team. I don't need to grow anymore in people. Because like, what the designer can do now, one designer can do 10x more output, if not 50x more output.

• 1:07:59Harry Stebbings?

  What tool has had the most impact?

• 1:08:01Speaker 01

  Internally? We build a lot of custom things. I think one of the things about AI is that building a custom system is not as hard as it used to be. And you know, the core models are the core model. So for example, one of my personal projects that I'm extremely excited about, and everybody in like, in Wiz that will hear this episode will laugh and they'll know what I'm going to say now, is something I call Maryland. Maryland is our internal go-to-market chatbot. And it's a multi-agent system I've built with one engineer. I've never had something I've built that had like, a better ratio of impact to effort. So this is like, me and one engineer as like, a part-time thing for him. And it's a tool that's being used now by every person on the sales team daily.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

  So it's a multi-agent system that's represented by one agent, Maryland, that's connected to our internal docs. Our internal docs, meaning all the compete materials, how do you position Wiz, the case studies, blah, blah, blah. Our product technical documentation, connected to our internal Slack channels, connected to product. telemetry and connected to the wide internet. And it basically helps you with anything you need to do from a go to market perspective. So it's like, oh, I have this pilot and the customer is asking me about this competition. How do I answer this? Or how does this connection work? Or anything, they just use that chatbot. And it's changed how I think of scaling go to market teams. And it's changed how I think about enablement, which is another thing I never fully believed in in organizations. Now you don't need to enable everybody on everything.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Just like if something is relevant to your customer and you're the salespeople, it will bring it to you with the right content you need. Or another example, we just opened our offices in Tokyo earlier this year. We have like 20 salespeople in Tokyo now. They speak obviously Japanese, but all of our content, you know, the internal slacks, all of the discussions, all the compete, everything is in English. But that's not even a problem now, right? All they do is talk through Marilyn and he is an L M. So he talks Japanese to them. And I don't even know how it would have scaled without it. So I'm very excited about the future.

• 1:09:57Harry Stebbings?

  I have to ask this one, sorry. And that is the final one.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  I went into a rail here.

• 1:10:01Harry Stebbings?

  No, no, I love this. And this is directly on the back of it, which is like, given the effectiveness of that as an internal tool that you've built yourself, which is amazing. Do you think that we will see the end of SaaS in many ways like people predict? And people will build their own software like Marilyn in a much more prominent way?

• 1:10:20Speaker 01

  Wow, I have a long answer. Can I give a long answer?

• 1:10:22Harry Stebbings?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  I think one of the interesting things for me, having spent my career in the engineering side and product side, then moving a bit to the go to market side. The thing is, I was able to access an engineer and be like, okay, we're going to build this, right? Because I kind of come from the other side of the house. You know what I mean? If I was like a sales leader or the person who leads enablement for us, or somebody on the go to market side, like was a traditional go to market background. I don't manage engineers. I've never managed engineers. So my ability to build something like that is pretty much zero. I don't really have those resources. So what do I have? I have my C E O coming to me because the board came to him and being like, you have to make yourself more efficient with A I. Go make A I happen. And you don't have one engineer and you don't really even deeply understand.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  No offense to anybody, right, but like when you're not from that background, many people think that those companies that they buy solutions from, the SaaS companies, giving all those like SDR solutions and everything, they think that they train things on their database, things that are not the reality when it comes to how LLMs work, right, they're not trained on anything. So you only have the capability to go and buy something, that's why everybody's in the market now. You don't really understand in the company that's selling you something, what is the core models and what is the wrapper, but you're getting a lot of value because you don't really have the opportunity to even understand how to start building something like this yourself. So I think there's just a traditional like wall there in organizations, which just makes

• 1:11:49Speaker 01

  it very hard for go-to-market orgs, despite them being the bigger part of the org and the part that spends most money and the part that has the most in place, it's very hard for them to do something like to build a tool for themselves.

• 1:12:00Harry Stebbings?

  So you don't think we'll see sales teams, marketing teams, building tools in the way that people say, replacing a lot of off-the-shelf tools?

• 1:12:08Speaker 01

  I think more teams should do it, but I think the reality is, if you don't have engineers, and when I say engineers, I mean engineers, I don't mean like people who can write a script or use like in an application, because the challenge is that actually giving a custom system like the one I've described, access to your data, it's not easy. So you can't be somebody that's vibe coding something. You need an actual engineer and a buy-in from your engineering, security, IT teams, and that is very hard for a team that has never built product to get. So I think over the long term, it makes sense for companies to do it. I definitely think that we've been able to save ourselves a lot of SaaS requests that asked us for millions of dollars, and I can give you names of specific products after,

• 1:12:51Speaker 01

  and just build it internally, but there's this wall in the company where it's like, if you're asking your go-to-market team to get efficient, the only tool they have is buying SaaS products right now. Give them another tool, I think that's a smart thing to do, but you need to give them another tool.

• 1:13:03Harry Stebbings?

  I totally get that and agree with you on the complexity that we don't see. The most viral tweets that we have are when it's like, "SaaS is over," and then you have like mail, or we had a guest the other day say it, and it's exactly that, which is there's so much complexity that you don't see. Raz, this has been fantastic. Thank you so much for joining me. Thank you for putting up with my wayward conversation on Topaz, but you've been amazing.

• 1:13:23Speaker 01

  This was so much fun and thank you so much for having me.

• 1:13:28Harry Stebbings?

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