Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg

We were looking for positive reinforcements, but not really listening intently to signs of deep enthusiasm, and that ended up pivoting us around to cloud security

You will never know your limit if you don't try

I deeply believe that we're doing something super special in Wiz, and I think the company is in such an interesting place of hyperscaling, while keeping an authentic, flat, enabling culture

I'm okay with being pretty sure I'm going to fail at something, and still attempting it. I'll just give it a try

We live inside our own bubble. Every time you write something, don't assume knowledge about Wiz or deep knowledge about the market

The idea is simple: if something starts getting too complex, then take a step back. It's too complex; it's not the right solution

In some ways, marketing has no cost, no technical debt. If I post a video today that no one likes, nothing happened. There's no maintenance to it. So try everything

When it works, it works, and you do know when it works… don't be too afraid to get the pull from the customer. It's okay—you need that pull from the other end as well

If something is not easy to understand, then maybe it needs a bit more chewing on it

Wiz is a very flat organization. It's not about seniority; it's really about driving impact. Everybody can have a seat at the table

My mom used to say, 'If you brush your teeth and there's a bit of blood, then you need to brush harder there.' Friction is good

I was hired as the first product manager… and I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing, because I was supposed to start building it

I think naturally, as human beings, you want to get affirmation from the other side. So you actually, you have a bias to look for affirmation, versus a bias to look for what you don't want to hear

We really felt the type of questions change. Suddenly, the call sounded like, 'Wait, how are you pricing this? When can we start doing a POV?'”

If the founder can't do it, who has the most context and passion and motivation, it's unlikely an employee's going to be able to do it

I really felt like if, in the early days of the company, finding product market fit is a major block for the company… then, building a sales organization becomes a major block

The heat moves within the organization… from product to engineering, then to sales, and then finally to marketing when you're looking for scale

It's hard to get the courage to say, ‘Actually, I don't understand.' But by now in my career, it's my favorite question

If you feel something's too complex, it does mean it's probably not the right solution

It's a hard job being a CMO. You are the one representing something deeply meaningful to the founding team, and you're always visible—one wrong ad can break trust

I was hired as a first product manager. I set in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing because I was a product manager, so I was supposed to, you know, like start building it in some ways. Like go to the dev team and start building it. And that was like a point where I felt like, I don't know what we are talking about exactly

I think naturally as human beings, you want to get affirmation from the other side. So you're actually, you have a bias to look for affirmation versus like, a bias to look for what you don't want to hear. That's just natural being a person

It was almost like a long like five hour discussion with all the founders where we decided to like move away from that pivot to cloud security, which is what we really... and someone's like, no best, that's our background. That's what we did before. And we felt the problems there was so big and so strong

I explicitly remember that first conversation where it was like, okay, let's do a POV. It was a fortune 10 company, a really big company. And we had, you know, a beginning of a product. We wanted to buy some time until we actually start the POV. And so just because of that, we kind of said, okay... So we put this like, long list of technical questions... and I was super scared to remember standing that email and being like... but actually, it came back filled a day later

If you can't do it one time into end and you're like the core core core group, the chances of just bringing somebody from the outside to solve that problem, it's wishful in some ways. But it never ends up that way

So two and a half years into the company, basically a staff our CEO asked me if I was willing to take on marketing. Originally I thought was I remember he he like you know like knocked on my like bother me while I was working on my computer. And I and we went into this like super cold room. It was like when you are fast-running startup, all of the rooms are always full. You know what I mean? So we went to do this like server room, which is freezing cold. And I was in the middle of something you told me I think you should leave the marketing org now

I think the thing that convinced me to do it was that in some ways I really felt like if in the early days of the company like finding product market fit is like a major block for the company and then like building a sales organization becomes a major block for the company. I felt like we were at the point where you have to figure it out to scale

Everything you do in marketing is very visible. I mean, and you're kind of touching something that matters so deeply to the founding team. And you're the one like representing it to the world. So it's very hard to build that trust and it's very easy to break it because like one bad ad or something that one of the founding team will say like, oh, this is not us. This is like not what I mean. This is not the right thing. It breaks the trust really easily

So instead of doing like a classical cyber booth, I decided to say, okay, let's scrap our booth and do a Wiz of Oz booth, which literally looked like a Wiz of Oz booth and we had actors like Dorothy and like all those things like hanging around there and it looked nothing, nothing like any booths in the show, which is a cyber security show. Things are like red and black and like people with hoodies and we decided to take it completely opposite approach