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

23:30And 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? 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 with the pain point is super clear, but it's now about how does the product enable you to do better, to be positive, to be confident.

24:08It'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 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. 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 at enterprise?

24:41Do 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? It's a hard and tricky question. We started Upmarket. Our first paying customer was a Fortune 10 company. Wow. That is very unusual. What do you think enabled that? 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?

25:17The staff, our CEO, Roy, our VP of engineering, Inon, 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 team. 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.

25:52We 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.

26:25You 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 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. 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 walk 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?

27:12Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name we had. I mean, a staffer 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 their name. So it wasn't about the credits 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, this team understands enterprise. And when you understand enterprise, you know that it's also just never really about the product.

27:46It'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. 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. They weren't like, oh, Asaf Rappaport, take our money, take our money. That's very funny. You said that Microsoft was the best school, I wrote it down because I'm terrible memory at my age, best school for enterprise and for scale.

28:21What did you learn from Microsoft when it comes to enterprise and scale that you think is so important to how you've at Wizz? 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 cloud 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 on the product and on the engineering side, your mental state is either this works for infinite scale or it doesn't work.

28:56If something works for 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 of Twiz made us build everything in a way that we've never had to refactor things. We've built for the scale we have today. 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.

29:33It'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 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. 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?

30:09I've never seen a team develop with more velocity than the development team it was. 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 show you your infrastructure in a graph. And let's say now I work with customers who have 100 machines. It can be a very pretty graph, right? And actually, if people develop it, it's not shorter.

30:40It'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. 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.

31:12And it's something that accumulates fast. And that's also a learning, I think, 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. What product decisions do you need to make on day one to eliminate technical debt occurring over time? 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 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?

31:46And like, whatever, I just need to win like those five POCs right now. But it's a question. Can you think about the solution that will solve for them, but in a way that will also solve for the future? 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 a big problem for them. They'll pay us a lot of money. Should we do it? And 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?

32:16It'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 whiz 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 custom 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.

32:52In 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. 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.

33:20And 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 toward one North Star. And there's no one-offs that you regret. And there's no weird factors because it had to match that North Star and that scale. Was there ever a time when product let you down? And what did you learn from that? I think the beautiful thing is you constantly feel that way, right?

33:53When 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're 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.

34:22So I think those are places where, in retrospect, we could have been more open. 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. But like, what does that actually mean? Like North Star, it's like we own cloud security. Is that the North Star? 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 I solve for them.

34:51I 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. And your one metric to determine your success of your North Star is? 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.

35:23And 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 critical 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. Many security products, the challenge is like you buy them and then it's like a shelfware or 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.

35:57Most Wiz customers are in the zero criticals club. We even send them cool swag, just like you have the sweatshirt, zero criticals club. We make it fun and simple. 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?

36:29The 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 in a system that works. That's what WIS brought into the market. And we look at the number of people logging into WIS that are not from a security team. And so most of our logins are from development teams. And that's the second metric you really care about. Why do I really care about those two metrics? Most of my customers being on zero criticals, most of the people logging in being from out to the security team, because that's how I know I'm really driving change and impact.

37:00And, you know, SaaS products are easy to deploy and they're easy to replace. But that's not easy to replace. 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.

37:29Don't do that. 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. It's a small group of people. Also, when you think of all of the CIOs of Fortune 100 companies, all of the CTOs, 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, OK, find the one. Find the one company that you can get into a room with.

38:02And 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 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 are salespeople in ways that hate me because some big customer has like a terrible unlimited thing I gave them in the early days.

38:32Because 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 was, 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 do you actually deliver real value for them? Do you do pilots? How do you advise founders on pilots? Yeah, we do POVs.

39:03And 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.

39:36We 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. 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 the conversation and to understand where are my gaps.

40:01So 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 going to push them too hard. I'm not going to close the POV if they didn't go into negotiations on time. No, I really think of it as a partnership. And I only have things to win by partnering with an enterprise customer.

40:30Has there ever been a time when what's best for the customer is not what's best for the company? I don't believe that can be true. I generally don't believe it's going to 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. Well, I can paint you a case. Yeah, paint me a case. If we take my business, venture, and then investing in companies, you are my customer as the founder. 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.

41:02I will take an example, which is a benchmark selling their position in Uber. It's best for for the firm and rational to sell the position 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. 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.

41:41Because 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. 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.

42:20And 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 clogs are related to the size of the environment I'm scanning. So you could make a business decision, right?

42:49And we've had finance business leaders ask us, well, you should go back to that 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.

43:26So 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 some of the amazing investors you have. You always have, frankly, great investors and high valuations, which were fantastic and well-deserved. But if you're a struggling, scrappy startup, sometimes that cogs difference. It's what keeps you alive. I think that's why enterprise startups, companies who build enterprise product, often even their seeds are big.

43:58That's interesting. Do you need a big seed to do enterprise well? 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 seats.

44:36So if we talk about raising big seats, just help me out here. Do we just dilute companies more earlier or do we just have higher prices? because it's the two variables that you can switch. 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 our 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 in 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.

45:10And 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? 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 and something small.

45:40Totally 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? I think definitely there's a user's 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.

46:13All 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. I think it's one of the most damaging things when you have people who've never worked together finding that 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 lost there. And I think there's so much benefits to be had from the historical knowledge of working together in that way.

46:45Can 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? 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 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 to build and build something that customers want.

47:24That's a lot of stress, right? I would not sleep thinking about, are we building the right thing, the product? But 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. And then we sold for a couple of million dollars. And now we brought her for a sales team. And now the heat is there. Because now it's like, okay, we sold for a couple of million dollars. So here salespeople sell this. Was that easy? Here salespeople sell this. No, it was not easy. 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.

47:58So 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 enable 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.

48:32Wish we heard of Wiz when we signed, you know, four years with 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. When did the kitchen feel the hottest? 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.

49:08We 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 that makes everything else a bit easier.

49:39At 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. It's funny, I interviewed Nick from Revolute 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? I mean, saying that culture is bullshit, it's just a bit of a semantic.

50:13Like when you say culture, what do you mean? You know, 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.

50:44And if that's culture, I think it's very important. I think nothing is more important than our team. Is there a non-obvious belief or trait that you think is important to what makes someone who works at Wiz work at Wiz? 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.

51:20Like, 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. 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. Do you believe that people are destined for a certain stage of company? You know, kind of traditional management advice.

51:56There's people, oh, there's a zero to one person and there's, oh, this type of person. Do you believe that? 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 Twiz, 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, 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.

52:31You can see it on the people on your team that are like the first one to look into something, adopt 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. 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. 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.

53:07In 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? It's such an interesting question, because it's not just that we're not a Silicon Valley company. We started Wiz just when COVID started. That is nuts, isn't it? I mean, it's not that long ago. Not that long ago, 2020, but literally March 2020. It's like we started with COVID together.

53:39And 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.

54:10You know, we were able to compete with companies that had salespeople in every region in the U.S. Nobody knew we were sitting at our home in Tel Aviv. Like I would take calls at like 2 a.m. 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.

54:50But 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. 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 invest in amazing founders. They're always like, do I have to have an HQ in New York? Does it have to be there? 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.

55:19So 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 Revolt. There's amazing things happening here too. But I think it is important to be where your market is. I just always am asked by founders, like, hey, is it possible to sell into it? And how do we think about that? I think about Eleanor Pigment, who has an amazing engineering team in France. And then she has her sales team in the US.

55:49And 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 say, 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? 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.

56:37At 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 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 whiz way. And we also make a gazillion mistakes along the way, but there's openness to doing things in your own way.

57:14I don't think most CMOs are very good. Do you agree? I don't know a lot of CMOs. Do you go to CMO dinners? Do you not engage with CMO communities? Do you not know? 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 constantly get fired because it's like, imagine if I didn't have the repertoire I had with a team and the complete trust they had in me.

58:01And 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 a really bad idea, I don't care. Bring a CMO. I'm fine with my product role, right? So it gave me a lot of freedom. Imagine if I was like, not that, right? I was coming from the outside as an experienced 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.

58:31So 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. 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 it, 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.

59:13And you will be correct because you're a human being and I'm trying to grab your attention. And the whole point is showing things to people who are not with 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. I love the way when you say something that you think is controversial, you like lower the volume of your voice. It's like a whisper. Final, final one, I promise. But when we actually were prepping for this show, you said Shardul Shah at Index and I think Doug Leone as two references and know them both very, very well for years.

59:55When 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 Shardul and Doug, two people I respect immensely? 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, about people like Sher Dool 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.

1:00:38They are really well thought. Everything they say is well researched and they understand deep things about the company that for me, it's, I'm always awed by how much they can understand from the outside and how much insight they can bring. So it's, I think it's, 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 it.

1:01:16I felt like I was getting advice at like eye level. We're going to do a quick fire. So I say a short statement. You give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Yeah. You said it's not that complex marketing. What's one best practice in SaaS marketing that's actually completely bullshit? I think pipeline numbers and attribution. I think attribution and the whole discussions around attribution is complete bullshit. Love it. What's the one marketing metric you think founders obsess over that, and this is other than pipeline, that doesn't matter as much as people think? Most metrics don't matter, in my opinion, as much as people think.

1:01:53I think you should find a way to measure what you believe in will be the closest indicator to warm rooms. What have you changed your mind on in the last 12 months? Oh, I changed 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? Will this, every single day, I'm changing my mind about more and more things. And I'm 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 using AI, you can now do them.

1:02:27So you have to every day look into those things. Can you give me an example? Yeah, of course. I mean, for example, one of the teams I own is Brandon 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, 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 years 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.

1:03:03And that's a reality we're in. I mean, those things improve on a daily so fast. Do you think we will have more or less engineers in 10 years time? More. I just think the definition of like, what does 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. Does AI take code away?

1:03:34Like, does it remove engineers from code? You know, we had Matt Mayo 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. 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? And like, low-level languages. 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.

1:04:05Sure. 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 studied 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 help me in marketing. So I'm sure that whatever coding will be, they're going to help. What do you think? I like this one. What's the biggest line marketers tell CEOs and why? I just think most of the numbers people look at are not that meaningful.

1:04:42So 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. 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. I think I would have had such a big relief knowing that I wouldn't get fired. Like being able to call my early self and be like, you're going to be in ways like five years in, you're going to be in the list and the team is going to 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.

1:05:25And 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. I get you, but did that drive you to be as good as you are? You never know. Yeah. You never know. It's hard to say. That's all that we were looping all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. It's so hard to know. 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. Absolutely. But it's also about like the prices you pay. So it's, I don't know, it's a combination there.

1:05:54Do you think you're too hard on yourself? What's too hard? I mean, I'm definitely hard on myself. You're very hard on me. I'm hard on myself, but I do give myself some credit. I don't feel you give yourself any credit, no offense. 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. Cause like, if you're not hard on yourself, then do you really get pushed to extreme? It's, I don't know the answer.

1:06:28Final one. What are you most excited about in the next one to two years? I think no one knows what's going to happen in five to 10 years. So who knows? 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 Wizz 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.

1:07:03How do we help companies secure those applications? And it's been so inspiring to see us go through that transformation. TodayWiz is the security solution for most of the frontier labs. That's an insane accomplishment for us. In the future, we don't know it, but it's constantly keeping... It's fun now, right? We're on the edge of our seats. It's like, how do you secure the building, the applications building of tomorrow? Building software 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.

1:07:36So it's like, Like our problem area is just becoming more and more and more interesting and insane. And that for me is incredibly exciting. Then the other end, AI gives us tools to build the company in new ways. Like my team, there's areas 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. What tool has had the most impact? 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 models.

1:08:12So, for example, one of my personal projects that I'm extremely excited about, and everybody 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 our sales team daily. So it's a multi-agent system that's represented by one agent, Marilyn, that's connected to our internal docs, our internal docs, meaning all the compete materials, how do you position with the case studies, blah, blah, blah.

1:08:54our 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 organizations. organizations.

1:09:23No, you don't need to enable everybody on everything. 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, the internal slacks, all of the discussions, everything is in English, but that's not even a problem now. All they do is talk through Marilyn and he is an LLM, So he talks Japanese to them. And I don't even know how he would have scaled without it.

1:09:56So I'm very excited about the future. I have to ask this one. Sorry. And that is the final one. Sorry, I went into a rail here. No, 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 that people predict and people will build their own software like Marilyn in a much more prominent way? Wow. I have a long answer. Can I give a long answer? Yeah. I think one of the interesting things for me, having spent my career on the engineering side and product side, then moving a bit to the go-to-market side.

1:10:32The 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 CEO coming to me because the board came to him and being like, you have to make yourself more efficient with AI.

1:11:02Go make AI happen. And you don't have one engineer. And you don't really even deeply understand. No offense to anybody, right? But when you're not from that background, many people think that those companies that they buy solutions from, the SaaS companies giving all those 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.

1:11:44So I think there's just a traditional wall there in organizations, which just makes 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 you build a tool for themselves. 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? 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 people who can write a script or use 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.

1:12:26So 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, 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.

1:12:59Give them another tool. I think that's a smart thing to do, but you need to give them another tool. 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 have a guest the other day said it. And it's exactly that, which is 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 Top Ace, but you've been amazing. This was so much fun and thank you so much for having me. But before we leave you today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation.

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