YouSaid · the spoken record

Raaz Herzberg

lines on the record: 82
first: 2025-12-12
most recent: 2025-12-12
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“I think more teams should do it. But I think the reality is if you don't have engineers, and when they say engineers, I mean engineers. I don't mean like 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. 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, 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 the smart thing to do. But you need to give them another tool.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, sorry, I went into a rail here. No, no, I love this Wow, I have a long answer. Can I give a long answer? Yeah I think one of the interesting things for me spent my career on the engineering side in product side and 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 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 CO coming to me because the board came to him and being like, you have to make yourself more efficient with AI. Go 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...”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Sack 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. No, 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 over content, you know, the internal slacks, all the discussions, all the compete, everything is in English, but that's not even a problem now, right? All they do is talk through Maryland and he is an LLM, so he talks Joe.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 Wizards that will hear this episode will laugh and they'll know what I'm going to say now, is something I call Marilyn. Marilyn 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 a better ratio of impact to effort. So this is 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 sales team daily. 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 with, the case studies, blah, blah, blah, our product, technical documentation connected to our internal.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“10x more applications. You have people in their 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. On 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 what a designer can do now one designer can do 10x more output, if not 50x more output.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I feel like one of the things that we are, I think there's so much luck in every journey, in every company. Luck in 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 to protect the applications they build in cloud. Over the past year and a half, everybody's building your applications. Our domain has changed and we needed to make sure that we were 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? 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 too hard on myself. Probably, but it's really hard to know where to put that line. Because if you're not hard on yourself, then do you really get pushed to extreme? I don't know the answer.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You never know. Never know. It's hard to say. We were looping all the way back to the beginning of the conversation. So hard to know.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it would have like such a big relief knowing that I wouldn't get fired. Being able to call my early self and be like, you're going to be in five years in, you're going to be in Wiz. 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. 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 know.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think most of the numbers people look at are not that meaningful. You're tracking things, you're showing impressions, you're showing 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 consci of if it's working, if it's not working.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think 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 low-level languages. But is it really different? 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 cite 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“More. I just think the definition of what engineer 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. Just think the definition of what is an engineer might be questionable in the future.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 errors 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. That's a reality we're in. I mean, those things improve on a daily so fast.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh, he 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, it's 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. So you have to everyday look into those things.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think pipeline numbers and attribution, I think attribution and the whole discussions around attribution is complete bullshit.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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?”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The whole point is showing things to people who are not whiz 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have done anything as controversial. And also, of course, anything it 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 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 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 a really bad idea. I don't care. Bring the CMO. Like, I'm fine with my product role, right? So it gave me a lot of freedom. Imagine if I was not that, right? I was coming from the outside as an experience CMO. Of course it was.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's a lot of openness to just not doing things this traditional way. We call 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, obviously I leave 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 SEF trusts his instincts and the rest of the founding team.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We started from the US market. It's just the biggest market in the world for enterprise products. So for us, we started 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 Revolt. There's amazing things happening here too. But I think it is important to be where your market is”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Without needing to do all the travel. And I think it really helps 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 multiculture company, but Wiz is mostly a US company. Like our headquarters in New York, our base is in New York. But it's definitely a company where we have advantages of that multiculture.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. 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 Word. 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. We were able to compete with companies that had salespeople in every region in the US. 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's enabled us to have the speed and scale.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's such an interesting question because it's not just that we were not a Silicon Valley company. We started with just when COVID started.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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 our 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 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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? 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 a 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 with. 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Saying that culture is bullshit, it's just a bit of a semantic. Like when you say culture, what do you mean? 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 who work 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. We were a company who was unsuccessful. 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 I 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. At the beginning, it's like, will this be okay? Am I going to get fired tomorrow? That was the feeling for me. I still oftentimes feel that feeling still, but”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No. It was not easy. That's what I'm saying. It's like the heat's 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 structure? How do we suddenly bring on somebody who wasn't like living this day 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 was nobody's heard the name whiz 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 of Wiz when we signed four years with your competitor two months ago. So the heats moved to marketing. So in different times in the company, the heat feels to me like it's moving and every phase in the company.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Like in the early days of the company, the first year that 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 where to build 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. 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 million dollars. So here salespeople sell this.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think definitely there was 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 experienced. 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 a software 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, whether 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 gives employees, being generous with the equity 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 WIS. 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 percent 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 overusing my product. And I am paying for that because my cogs are related to the size of the environment I'm scanning. So you could make a business decision, right? And we've had finance 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Look, you're in the 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 they 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 interest. 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Universe for me, I'm dying to have the 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, 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 to hard. I'm not going to close a 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 when somebody really gave me the attention of going through a POB 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 that will be.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 over 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 nit group. So I think there's less cheating than you think there is, meaning for me it would be, okay, find the one.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“People blocking and being from outside the security team because that's how I know I'm really driving change and impact. SaaS products are easy to deploy and they're easy to replace, but that's not easy to replace.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Wag just like you have the sweatshirts at Criticals Club. We make it fun and simple. It's not a complex what I'm gonna do as an enterprise security product? Okay, get to zero criticals. That's a 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? 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 in 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 you really care about. Why do I really care about those two metrics? Most of my customers being on zero criticals, most of the...”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 this to a very complex cloud environment in an organization and we find risks and we try to help security 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 CR 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 organization and it has made you more secure. Many security products and challenges like you buy them and then it's like a shelfware or it's really hard to fix the thing. So helping teams actually be 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”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no. 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 sell 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.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. So I think those are places where, in retrospect, we could have been more open.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Not the right way, but if I talk to them about it enough, we'll find the right way because it's in my domain and I 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 it was 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 refactors because it had to match that North Star and that scale.”
2025-12-12 · The Twenty Minute VC · 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 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source