Dec 12, 2025 · 1h 16m · 20growth
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
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
Raz Herzberg, CMO and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, explains how Wiz achieved record-breaking hypergrowth by combining product-centric marketing, infinite enterprise scale design, extreme customer alignment, and cutting-edge internal AI innovation.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Harry holds 26% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Harry as informed peer 4.1 Guest teaching 5.2 Guest disagreement 2.1 Harry pushing back 3.0
speaking balance: gold is Harry, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 40:36 Absolute rejection of customer-company misalignment
Raz flatly rejects Harry's premise that what is best for a customer can ever diverge from what is best for the company, stating 'Even if you think it's true, I think you're wrong.'
Hardest push from Harry ▶ 40:46 Benchmark Uber counterexample pushbackHarry refuses Raz's claim that customer and company interests are always aligned, offering a detailed venture capital counterexample of Benchmark selling its Uber stake against founder wishes.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 57:19 Reframing the difficulty of the CMO roleWhen Harry provocatively claims most CMOs are not good, Raz reframes the topic by breaking down the immense organizational scrutiny incoming CMOs face compared to product executives.
Harry holds his own ▶ 22:18 Citing John McMahon on enterprise careHarry demonstrates high domain expertise in enterprise sales leadership by quoting veteran CRO John McMahon to validate Raz's empathy-driven sales philosophy.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Harry as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Harry pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Embracing Imposter Syndrome and Customer Interactions | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Harry opens with a personal anecdote about starting as an 18-year-old on Skype feeling imposter syndrome to invite Raz to discuss her own vulnerabilities. Raz enthusiastically agrees, noting she embraces paranoid drive and never feels entirely confident. | |
| Early Hypergrowth and Shortening Time-to-Value | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz explains Wiz's early hypergrowth, attributing it to immediate time-to-value (15 minutes) and solving cloud security at the onset of COVID lockdowns. | |
| Deal Persistence and Raz Herzberg's Interdisciplinary Background | 3 | 4 | 1 | 2 | Harry asks about Raz's claim that she has never lost a deal. Raz clarifies that her fear of failure drives immense persistence rather than arrogance, and describes her interdisciplinary background in CS and fine art. | |
| A Product-Centric Philosophy on Startup Marketing | 4 | 5 | 2 | 2 | Raz details her shift from leading product to marketing, emphasizing that marketing errors are easily reversible unlike product technical debt. Harry listens closely while guiding the product vs marketing distinction. | |
| The Wizard of Oz Booth: Taking Unconventional Risks | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz describes creating a Wizard of Oz themed booth at RSA for $400 in actors, driving 4x leads compared to conventional dark cyber branding. | |
| Early Product Marketing Misconceptions and Company Pivots | 3 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz candidly admits her early ignorance of product marketing and reflects on Wiz's early pivot away from network security after sensing subtle market friction. | |
| Brand Building vs. Pipeline Attribution in Enterprise | 4 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Raz argues that pipeline attribution metrics are often misleading, arguing instead that unquantifiable brand affinity is what truly warms enterprise sales rooms. | |
| Empowerment Selling vs. Fear-Based Cybersecurity Sales | 5 | 5 | 4 | 4 | Harry challenges Raz by asking whether fear-based marketing is necessary to inspire sales urgency. Raz firmly rejects fear tactics, and Harry brings up CRO John McMahon's quote on customer care. | |
| Starting Upmarket and Leveraged Founder Experience | 4 | 6 | 2 | 3 | Raz details how Wiz landed a Fortune 10 customer first, attributing this ability to the founding team's six years at Microsoft building for extreme enterprise scale. | |
| Designing Product Systems for Infinite Scale | 4 | 5 | 2 | 3 | Harry asks if designing for infinite scale hampers engineering velocity. Raz clarifies that scale is a design mindset that eliminates future refactoring rather than slow code delivery. | |
| Managing Customer Feature Requests Against a North Star | 5 | 5 | 3 | 6 | Harry pushes back on the concept of product 'North Stars', calling it fluffy. Raz grounds the concept, explaining it means strict boundary discipline regarding which problems Wiz owns. | |
| Core Operational Metrics: Zero Criticals and Developer Login Rates | 4 | 6 | 2 | 2 | Raz outlines Wiz's two core operational product metrics: the Zero Criticals Club and developer login rates, explaining why driving developer adoption creates defensive moats. | |
| Proof-of-Value (POV) Strategies in Enterprise Sales | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz explains proof-of-value strategies in enterprise sales and stresses treating enterprise clients as long-term partners rather than transactional targets. | |
| Long-Term Alignment, Overuse Policies, and Capital Needs | 6 | 5 | 5 | 7 | When Raz asserts customer interests always align with company interests, Harry vigorously counters using Benchmark's forced sale of Uber stock as evidence of divergence. Raz maintains product companies differ from venture funds, and Harry presses on cash-strapped startup realities. | |
| Equity Generosity and Co-Founder Trust | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz discusses CEO Asaf Rappaport's equity generosity, noting that owning a smaller piece of a massive pie is far superior to owning a large piece of nothing. | |
| Shifting Organizational Bottlenecks Across Growth Stages | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz uses the metaphor of 'heat in the kitchen' moving across departments from product to sales enablement and eventually to brand awareness as the company scaled. | |
| Wiz Culture: Execution, Adaptability, and Flat Hierarchies | 5 | 6 | 4 | 5 | Harry brings up Revolut founder Nik Storonsky's view that culture is bullshit compared to winning. Raz reframes culture as team execution style, flat hierarchy, and hands-on doers. | |
| Building During COVID Lockdowns and Global Operations | 4 | 5 | 1 | 2 | Raz reflects on building Wiz during strict COVID lockdowns in Tel Aviv and discusses whether international founders need an immediate New York HQ presence. | |
| The 'Wiz Way' and Unconventional Executive Leadership | 5 | 7 | 4 | 5 | Harry bluntly states he thinks most CMOs are not very good. Raz rejects the dismissive framing, educating Harry on why incoming CMOs face extreme political scrutiny and defending marketing as intuitive human connection. | |
| Working with Top-Tier Venture Capital Partners | 5 | 5 | 3 | 3 | Raz praises top VC partners Shardul Shah and Doug Leone for their thoroughness. In the quickfire section, she debates whether AI will expand or shrink engineering headcounts. | |
| Internal AI Innovations: Creating 'Marilyn' Go-to-Market Bot | 4 | 6 | 1 | 2 | Raz shares how she co-built 'Marilyn', an internal multi-agent AI sales bot that eliminated traditional enablement friction across global offices. | |
| The Future of Off-the-Shelf SaaS vs. Custom AI Systems | 5 | 6 | 3 | 4 | Harry asks if custom internal AI builds herald the death of SaaS. Raz explains why non-technical GTM teams cannot easily build custom software due to technical data integration walls. |
Statements from this episode (34)
Wiz delivers enterprise security value within 15 minutes of deployment
“We always believed that time to value is value, and so the way Wiz works is very fast, meaning you connect this to your environment, and it's an enterprise security product, so those things are expected to take months and months and months for deployments and …”
Wiz leadership personally handled every major deal during its first two years
“Then, you know, the first two years of Wiz, I think every huge customer or something, either myself was on it or in on our, Co-founder and VP of product was on it, or AMI or CTO was on it”
Wiz CMO Raz Herzberg had zero marketing experience before taking the role
“My only marketing ever role has been as part of Wiz.”
Product decisions are permanent because deprecating features wastes expensive engineering time
“I came from product, and in product you have to be very careful, meaning every decision you make, it's forever. You take the most expensive resource of a company, engineering time. You put it on building something. You put that something into your product. Now…”
Wiz's Wizard of Oz-themed RSA booth generated 4x more leads
“And we have the same size of space and place at that conference every year. And it brought in like four X more leads”
High-risk experimentation belongs in marketing, not product development
“It's not that okay in product by the way, but in marketing it's fine because let's say that this booth would have been the weirdest thing ever. Okay. I would have never done it again. And people would have rolled their eyes at me, but there's no harm there for…”
Wiz was originally named Beyond Networks and focused on network security
“Wiz was actually called at the beginning Beyond Networks, and we would talk to CISO security teams, and we would kind of pitch them on this Network idea.”
Wiz invests heavily in unquantifiable brand efforts over pipeline metrics
“And we spend a lot of our efforts on those types of things, and I have no way of tying it back to a number. And I don't really care because I think that's what really matters.”
Every fired marketing leader had green pipeline metrics when they left
“I think every marketing leader that was ever fired had green numbers on his pipeline.”
Humor connects with enterprise cybersecurity buyers better than fear
“Humor is something that naturally connects People more than fear.”
Wiz landed a Fortune 10 company as its first paying customer
“Our first paying customer was a fortune 10 company.”
Enterprise sales is about workflow integration, not the product itself
“When you understand enterprise, you know, that it's also just never really about the product. It's about really understanding how you integrate into their processes, their workflows, their complexity of the environment.”
Product features that fail at infinite scale should never be built
“If something doesn't work at an infinite scale, it doesn't work. You never put it in there for the first place.”
Wiz has never needed product refactoring due to its scale-first design
“That's a mindset that, from the early days of Twiz, made us build everything in a sense, in a way that, you know, we've never had to refactor things. We've built for the scale we have today.”
Wiz should have expanded into adjacent product areas sooner
“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.”
Cloud security is hard because developers own infrastructure while security owns risk
“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.”
Most Wiz platform logins come from developers, not security teams
“And so most of our logins are from development teams.”
Early Wiz enterprise deals included unlimited usage terms still honored today
“I made the worst deals in the universe. It's like, to this day, there are salespeople in Liz that hate me because some big customer has, like, A terrible, unlimited thing I gave them in the early days, because it's not about trying to win on the revenue from t…”
Enterprise software startups need large seed rounds to absorb overage costs
“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.”
Wiz CEO Asaf Rappaport was intentionally generous with employee and investor equity
“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…”
The Wiz founding executive team has worked together for roughly 20 years
“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.”
Wiz co-founder and VP of Engineering Roy Reznik still writes code
“To this day, Roy, our co-founder and VP of engineering, writes code.”
Wiz operates without middle management layers or long strategy documents
“There's no managers for managers. There's no long documents.”
Hypergrowth startup employees must evolve their roles every three to four months
“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.”
CMO Raz Herzberg claims marketing is intuitive and less complex than engineering
“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 i…”
CMO Raz Herzberg claims marketing attribution in B2B SaaS is complete bullshit
“I think pipeline numbers and attribution, I think attribution and the whole discussions around attribution is complete bullshit.”
Google Gemini's cybersecurity capabilities surpass all previous AI models
“Another example, Gemini, the new Gemini, right? His capabilities around specific years on security are much better than any model we've seen before.”
The total number of engineers will increase over the next 10 years
“More. I just think the definition of, like, what is an engineer even will broaden, but I think we, if an engineer is somebody who builds things, and I would kind of argue that that's the beauty of engineering. That's what I love in engineering. I think that is…”
Wiz is the security provider for most leading AI frontier labs
“TodayWiz is the security solution for most of the frontier labs.”
Wiz's marketing team stopped growing headcount because AI 50x'd designer output
“I don't need to grow anymore in people. Cause like what the designer can do now, one designer can do 10 X more output, if not 50 X more output.”
Wiz built an internal AI sales bot used daily by every salesperson
“Marilyn is our internal go to market chat bot, and it's a multi-agent system I'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.…”
Custom internal AI tools require real engineers, not vibe coding
“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, an…”