How we grew and scaled to a $32bn exit in 5 years (Josh Reiner, VP of Wiz)

0:00Hello and welcome back to the Scaling Europe show. I'm Seb Johnson. I'm here with Josh. Josh is VP at Wiz looking after EMEA. So Josh, thank you so much for joining me. How are you doing today? I'm doing fantastic. I appreciate you having me. It's my absolute pleasure. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, for those who would have heard the name Wiz but are not quite sure what it is that, you know, you guys do. Can you touch a bit about, you know, the core product offering? Yeah, sure. So Wiz has this core belief that we want to protect and secure everything that you build and run in the cloud.

0:33Ami, who is one of our co-founders, I think uses it and summarizes it best. He uses the word context all the time. So there's lots of tools and solutions out there that can tell you what's wrong. But what the context that Wiz provides, it gives you the priority of what you need to go fix it. So having the prioritization of where your most critical gaps are, WIS provides a context to help you resolve those. One of the cool things about WIS is over half our customers are in the zero critical club, we call it, where they've identified their biggest problems and they've remetered them down so they're in zero criticals.

1:10It's a metric that we track quite regularly. Well, that's amazing. Can you touch a bit about your role specifically? So what it is that you look after at WIS? Yeah, absolutely. So I run the go-to-market and field operations for Wiz across Europe, Middle East, Africa, and Latin America, and responsible for representing the brand as we build out this critical piece of Wiz's core business. Amazing. And how has Wiz been able to grow so fast? I mean, it's a relatively young company by most comparisons, but it seems to have grown faster than any other cloud security platform there is out there. What is it that has been able to supercharge this growth?

1:51Yeah, I think we turned six in March. So I think every major company has to have a few things, few critical ingredients to be successful. Obviously, the addressable market you have to go after has to be significant in size. You have to solve a major problem to accomplish in getting into that TAM. And I think one of, I mean, Wiz went from fastest zero to a hundred and now we're over 500 million ARR. I think one of the catalysts that came in is twofold. One, obviously the pandemic created a lot of organizations writing and building applications in the cloud because of the necessity of running and growing their business.

2:32And then obviously one of the major catalysts, when a major vulnerability happens like Log4J, I think that was a big catalyst for Wiz and companies needing to have immediate disability of the exposure to that. It fell right into Wiz's core sweet spot of quickly identifying where you're exposed and prioritizing those. And I think the third piece of it is the company itself. I mean, Wiz has, you know, five core values. And a lot of companies have core values, but we truly live and breathe by them. And one of the core values is, you know, act confident, stay humble and work together. When Log4J came out, for example, I mean, people were working around the clock to help our customers identify their exposures to resolve it.

3:15And if you start providing customer value and quick visibility so they can triage, yeah, you get a lot of friends quite quickly in that. And I think that was a catalyst to build the platform pillar customers for us. I think the last piece that really, and Roz was just on Harry Stepping's podcast, and I know you just had Harry on as well. and one of the things that she talked about is our four founders came from Microsoft. So Microsoft had acquired their first company. So everything that they built at Wiz was like enterprise grade. Like how do we work with the biggest, most complex organizations to start?

3:53So it's not, you know, you don't have a PLG motion or a product-led growth motion kind of moving up market. They started in the top of the market to solve the most complex problems with the biggest. So I think if you've got a rock solid product and you've got an event like Log4J is just one example of many vulnerabilities that hit, it can be a catalyst of scaling quite quickly. No, and that makes total sense. I've definitely heard that the product is phenomenal. I want to touch on your role is specifically across Europe. And I think based on your career, I think you've been building or setting across Europe for a number of years now.

4:28Correct. You know, cross-whiz, you know, is there a view that Europe is in some way different? Other kind of cultural specific nuances about selling software in Europe that maybe some of your colleagues selling in the Middle East or North America experience differently? Are there differences in sales cycles as if it's about teams? I'd love to get them like, what's it like to scale, you know, what has been a phenomenal success story in the tech space in such a short space of time? What has it been like to do that across Europe specifically? Yeah, it's one thing that I'm extremely passionate about.

5:03I reference Henry Kissinger's line, when you want to call Europe, who do you call? In the US, it's one country. And in Europe, there's 37 countries. We sell to a vast majority of them, but they're all their own countries. They all have their own regulations, their own tax constraints, their own nuances of doing business in that. So I think, first of all, if you're a US-based company, you have to realize that it is a combination of countries, not just other states that go into it. So having, and I'll use WIZ as a real example, when WIZ started, they focused on the US market. That's where the biggest addressable market was.

5:45That's where the large cloud providers were. That's where the AI companies were. That's where the large financial institutions. So they started in the US and as a result, Europe kind of grew ad hocly kind of by leads and interests. When I first came here, the majority of the leads that we worked on were inbound leads, people raising their hands, very proactive cloud-based companies. But there wasn't a go-to-market strategy pulled together. There wasn't a true operational model. So I think if you want to expand into Europe, you have to have just a really good understanding of all the inner complexities that go along with it and eyes wide open.

6:23And kind of looking at some of the questions that we want to go through today, you know, one of them that I'm a big believer in is, you know, how do you scale in the most effective way? And if, you know, being from the U.S. and I've been over in the U.K. now for about six years, one of the things that I try to just kind of, you know, put it in perspective, in the U.S. if you're a company and you start, you generally start with the coasts, you know, East coast, west coast, then you kind of congregate to Chicago and you start managing the other regions as you grow out. So if you're Chicago, you're covering other Midwest cities.

6:59And like Minnesota, for example, is a big, where more Fortune 500 companies are based. And if you try to call on those remotely, it's challenging. It's always better to be in those geos because there's nuances to every market. Those nuances are just exasperated in Europe Because when you leave the UK and you go call on France, for example, you have to speak a different language. There's different regulations that exist, data sovereignty, taxes. I always joke if you try to be an English-based attorney trying to deal with a French-based attorney, those two cultures just clash just naturally. So having people in the geos and in the region is really, really important.

7:38I think the other piece, and this is where Wiz, we kind of had a bit of a head start, even though we've more than doubled our footprint here in the last 18 months. You know, having a base foothold in the UK and then having our second strongest foothold of number of people in Dock region, we had some of the pillar logos in account. So we were able to grow and expand on those. But when we entered into France and we entered into Spain and we entered into the Benelux region and the Nordics regions, like those were net new raw regions that you have to be committed to doing that. So as you scale, you're going to have to use, I know you worked at Deal in the past, you have to use companies like that to get people on the ground, to get your entities established, to be able to conduct business.

8:24So I highly recommend any company coming into Europe has advisors helping them with what do I really need to do to get the right resources in place to do it efficiently? Because it's a challenge because you're dealing with different countries. How have you managed, I guess, your go-to-market function? Because you talked about the importance of having people kind of boots on the ground. You talked about having like a base in DAC and here in London. And, you know, have you seen success selling to some of the more countries on the periphery, whether it's in the Nordics or maybe in Spain and Italy, Southern Italy?

8:58How do you manage to tap into those markets? Yeah, it's you. Again, you have to build your business plan to go take a forward looking stance. So if you want to enter into Europe from a U.S.-based company, most times out of 10, you enter in the U.K., in London. Very similar language, easy to get into. And then you start spreading out. But I think the real critical thing there is what is your product market fit? Where are you going after? What are the TAMs of those markets? How many people should I put on the ground in those markets? And what is a realistic timeframe for your average deal size and cycle to go?

9:34So we made big investments in Spain, in France, in Amsterdam to cover the Benelux region, in the Nordics to start spreading out and putting people in those grounds. but then having the realistic expectation that those regions are emerging regions and they're going to take time to produce revenue. And so what is your ideal customer profile that you're going after? What are the average sales cycle durations that you have to plan for? And then I think one of the other things that you have to be really cognizant of, in the US, it's a lot easier to hire and quite frankly, fire people and build teams.

10:13So many countries over here, Europe does a really good job of protecting their employees. And there's a lot of regulations. So there's a three-month notice period a lot of times to get people on board. So when you want to go enter into some of these countries, you have to set expectations back to, I'm assuming your founding headquarters is in the US. But regardless of where they are, here's the expectations of getting these markets up and running. It's going to take from you releasing the requisition to even the most fantastic recruiters and salespeople in the world, they still have a three-month sales period.

10:47So getting through that interview cycle, getting the right team in place, then getting them on board, then getting them ramped. You have to factor in those equations because they will affect when your expectations of them being productive is going to be. I think a lot of companies and a lot of people underestimate that and I think it's something you have to go in eyes wide open up what are really the realistic time frames for being productive in Europe and other other things like that you know that the ability to hire and fire quickly it's one of the things I speak to a lot of founders about who are both here in Europe and in the US is the ability to to like to hire and fire quickly because sometimes there's a bad fit and you just need to move on quickly sometimes you need to ramp up a team very very quickly and you can't always wait three months for top talent other things like that that you know of, you know, either in cultural aspects of American tech culture or business culture that you think we need to do a better job of here in Europe to help our tech companies scale?

11:41Yeah, and I've come across many of them. And I'll use a real example. When I first came here, we were marketing and doing a big webinar. And the registrations for Europe was a tenth of what it was in the US. And so that's a major flag for me because I'm like, what did we do differently in the US than we did here? And we ran the same campaigns in both. But the reality is we lack so much more data in EMEA and truly understanding who our customers are, who are the ideal personas that we want to target. And just having that database to market to and digital marketing and broad marketing and even outbound personal marketing and selling.

12:24The other piece that we have constraints over here that I'd love to find ways to get around or be more effective at, you know, GBPR and the rights and compliance and protectivity of our people really restrict a lot of that aspect of it. So you can't have a peanut butter spread approach where you run a marketing campaign in the US and expect to have the same success in Europe because of the constraints that I just listed there. But those are things that if we want to be more successful as a major geography of companies, we have to find ways to be better at accomplishing those goals. Got it. Yeah, it's one of those things I think is always such an interesting topic because American tech is just phenomenal.

13:09And I want to get on to another point, which is related to this, which is about risk culture. So a lot of people I speak to talk about how it's so much easier to sell to U.S. enterprises and startup scale-ups because they have a much higher tolerance for risk and are willing to buy from new providers, right? It doesn't matter if you haven't been around for 30 years. It doesn't matter if you've only raised 20 million or 200 million. People are much more willing to try and test new tools. Has that been your experience or Wiz's experience more generally across Europe? Has there been a very noticeable difference in the appetite of companies, enterprises, anyone willing to try and test a tool like Wiz compared to other regions of the world?

13:49It 100 % is much more conservative. And even when you get into, people love the technology. And one of the great things about WIZ is it provides value almost instantly into the environment. But even with a lot of struggles or pain from an organization where there's a known vulnerability, there's still a lot of constraints around requests for proposals or RFPs that get into the process. You have to use our paper. The change resistance is something that is much harder over here, I would say, is a general statement. Obviously, it varies by country, but the risk tolerance is higher here. The business case and the justifications that go into making a purchase over here seems to be much more thorough and thought out.

14:39I think that kind of goes to your point where it's, I don't want to, I always hate using the term, it's much more relationship in the US and it's much more, you know, business case and methodically driven over here. But there is, that's a real reality of where we come in. So it's one thing to have a problem, but it's how do you quantify that problem and how do you justify that financial metrics to that problem? So aligning that sales process for us has been key in how we go to market to make sure that when we do go to market, that we go to market and we quantify the problem, the current state, the 2B state, and the value that we provide, and then how we can quantify that because there's a lot more rigor in that.

15:18But a lot of that has to do with data resilience and sovereign cloud, a lot of the other constraints. In the US, again, it's one country, so you don't have the same restrictions on that. In other countries, you have major organizations that do pan EMEA, that do global companies in nature. Data sovereignty is a real thing. So when they start looking at our solution, those are other constraints that they may not have as big a constraints that you would have in the U.S. And has that changed at all? You know, the news of the Google acquisition, which is obviously still pending approval and is still, you know, undergoing.

15:53but yeah having that sort of the brand like google who are really interested and want to want to buy was does that help in conversations now in europe does that help kind of credentialize and qualify you as a really serious player well it didn't hurt i can tell you that i was joking you know and when my father-in-law knows who i work for now because of the google acquisition and the brand awareness and recognition but also to your point just the validity of this is a major solution that's being used by the world's top organizations. I mean, prior to Google, you know, Wiz, I mean, we have over 50 of the Fortune 100.

16:30So it's, we are established brand. So in the security space in particular, and I know that's kind of where we start, it's a very tight knit community to begin with. So a lot of the global organizations do talk and do share. So we had a lot of that, but Google coming in and giving the ultimate validation of, yes, we're going to, we're going to, you know, acquire, jointly acquire Wiz. Yeah, it was a major validation point that absolutely helped brand awareness and also probably more of a comfort level of, okay, I'm going to do business because this organization has been validated. Yeah, and AmazeTotal says, what was it like, you know, have things changed culturally?

17:09Was it an amazing moment for internal staff? You know, has it been, I don't know, what's it like to go through something like that, the news coming out and now this waiting period? Have you had to keep the team motivated and say, we're going to keep pushing, we're going to keep growing? Was it just like a big celebration when the news broke? What was that like? It was, I think I used it for about a week. People were like, wow, this is crazy. We had been on a journey to IPO and go, and then Google came in. So I think there was a little bit of shock and awe that this is really, really cool and a validation exercise.

17:47And then very quickly, you know, we got back to work because, you know, it's that happened in March and, you know, it'll be in 2026. Hopefully the acquisition will close. So it's not an immediate thing. So we have to go continue to run and build and grow our business. And, you know, the intent is for us to do that. We're always going to be multi-cloud. We're always going to be growing and supporting the needs of our customers. Because I think 98 or 99 % of the Fortune 100 are multi-cloud. that's our strategy and that won't deviate. So yes, it was a great validation of our company. It was a great validation of the problem in the market that we're going after.

18:26And obviously an accelerant to a large degree. I mean, Google is well known. Some of the best, I mean, right now in what Google is doing, I think industry-wise is being validated as some of the best moves within AI, within cloud. So yeah, I think the wind's going to be at our back, assuming and if that happens, I think it's going to be a massive accelerant. Amazing. Look, it sounds fantastic. I'm really excited to see the journey carry on. But look, Josh, thank you so much for taking the time to speak to me. I've really enjoyed it. Absolutely, Seb. It's been a pleasure. I appreciate you having me on board.