The Exchanges

Q And your one metric to determine your success of your North Star is?

A 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 critical 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. And we give them tools, of course, like we, 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, it, 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 it's really hard to fix the thing. So, 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. Most Wiz customers are in the zero criticals club. We even send them, like, Cool swag, just like you have the sweatshirts, Zero Criticals Club. We make it fun and simple. Like, it's not a complex, what am I going to do as an enterprise security product? Okay, get to Zero Criticals. Th…

AI assessment note: “the metric we care about is how many customers are in the zero critical club”

Q ability that you have. Can I ask, I think people get it very wrong when they say you don't learn from your successes. I think we just don't study our successes in the same way we study our failures. When you think about the best marketing decision you made at Wiz, what would that be if I ask you that, and what do you reflect on or take from that?

A It's a good question. I think for us, the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts about being out there with something super weird and unique. The first decision I actually made after I took the marketing role, already we had space in, in RSA, which is like the super ball of cyber companies. So it's like this huge conference where you pay a lot of money to get, you know, a booth. So like, Five meters on five meters of something, you paid like, I don't know, a ton of money to get that. And we already had that space, right? And I just took over the role, and our problem at the time was that nobody's ever heard of us. Nobody heard of Wiz. Although we had amazing product market fit, that was a problem. So I decided to be like, okay, I've been to this conference a gazillion times. I spent most of my career in cybersecurity. Everything's like gray, blue, dark, scary. I said, let's do a Wiz of Oz booth. And make it super weird. So the thing literally looked like Wiz of Oz. It was like this big hot air balloon. There was like a yellow brick stone, and I paid some actors from San Francisco to dress up like the Wiz of Oz characters and spend the day there. You know, compared to the price you pay for that small space, it's nothing. Doing something yellow and weird doesn't cost more than doing it black and boring, and bringing actors is like 400 dollars a day. …

AI assessment note: “the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts”

Q ability that you have. Can I ask, I think people get it very wrong when they say you don't learn from your successes. I think we just don't study our successes in the same way we study our failures. When you think about the best marketing decision you made at Wiz, what would that be if I ask you that, and what do you reflect on or take from that?

A It's a good question. I think for us, the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts about being out there with something super weird and unique. The first decision I actually made after I took the marketing role, already we had space in, in RSA, which is like the super ball of cyber companies. So it's like this huge conference where you pay a lot of money to get, you know, a booth. So like, Five meters on five meters of something, you paid like, I don't know, a ton of money to get that. And we already had that space, right? And I just took over the role, and our problem at the time was that nobody's ever heard of us. Nobody heard of Wiz. Although we had amazing product market fit, that was a problem. So I decided to be like, okay, I've been to this conference a gazillion times. I spent most of my career in cybersecurity. Everything's like gray, blue, dark, scary. I said, let's do a Wiz of Oz booth. And make it super weird. So the thing literally looked like Wiz of Oz. It was like this big hot air balloon. There was like a yellow brick stone, and I paid some actors from San Francisco to dress up like the Wiz of Oz characters and spend the day there. You know, compared to the price you pay for that small space, it's nothing. Doing something yellow and weird doesn't cost more than doing it black and boring, and bringing actors is like 400 dollars a day. …

AI assessment note: “the best marketing decision I've made early on was trusting my instincts”

Q Um, that's very funny. You said that Microsoft was the best school, I wrote it down because I have terrible memory at my age where I was, best school for enterprise and for scale. What did you learn from Microsoft when it comes to enterprise and scale that you think is so important to how you've won at Wiz?

A 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 the product and on the engineering side, your mental state is either this works for infinite scale or it doesn't work. If something works for, like, 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 sense, in a way that, you know, we've never had to refactor things. We've built for the scale we have today. That, 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. It'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, start it and have a company that stays so relevant for so many years. It's insane. So you have …

AI assessment note: “that mindset was there from day one because of how we're used to building in Microsoft”

Q When we think about the biggest mistake, what was that biggest mistake?

A I have a hard time pinpointing to, to one mistake. I mean, I think if I look at it at a broader company level, the, the one time where we made something that was a major shift for us was very early on. We started initially from like a very different idea, and we pivoted to what is now Wiz. It was the early days when we had this idea around 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. And I think we were kind of convincing ourselves that it was something they were interested in. And we got feedback like, oh, it's interesting. We'd love to talk again, but we couldn't get to that next step. And I think that was at the beginning, like until we pivoted, I felt like that was a big learning of, of a mistake where we were kind of trying to push something hard without really feeling, you know, the pullback, but we were maybe convincing ourselves a bit that we were feeling the pullback. So that I think learned me that when there's an area that there's a lot of friction or something, maybe not to push harder.

AI assessment note: “we were kind of trying to push something hard without really feeling, you know, the pullback”

Q 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?

A Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name we had. I mean, a staff or 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, 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, that's a T this team understands enterprise. And 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. 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.

AI assessment note: “Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name we had.”

Q listen, this customer really wants this, and it's, it's a big problem for them, they'll pay us a lot of money, should we do it? And it's, 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?

A It'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 Wiz 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 accustomed 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, in which case there's a misunderstanding here, because if you communicate what you're trying to solve for, and we know what you'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. And a lot of things we did build for customers, but there were things that were aligned to that North Star…

AI assessment note: “we never built them without the knowledge that it could scale for everybody”

Q Do you believe that people are destined for a certain stage of company? You know, kind of traditional management advice. There's people, ah, there's a zero to one person, and there's, ah, this type of person. Do you believe that?

A 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 it was, 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, are 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 to stay at a company that changes so much.

AI assessment note: “I guess it depends on how adaptable you are as a person.”

Q Um, that's very funny. You said that Microsoft was the best school, I wrote it down because I have terrible memory at my age where I was, best school for enterprise and for scale. What did you learn from Microsoft when it comes to enterprise and scale that you think is so important to how you've won at Wiz?

A 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 the product and on the engineering side, your mental state is either this works for infinite scale or it doesn't work. If something works for, like, 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 sense, in a way that, you know, we've never had to refactor things. We've built for the scale we have today. That, 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. It'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, start it and have a company that stays so relevant for so many years. It's insane. So you have …

AI assessment note: “your mental state is either this works for infinite scale or it doesn't work.”

Q Totally 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?

A I think definitely there's a user advantage to having done something the second time. I see it in the, in the Wiz executive team all the time. They, 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. 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, it's something super unique that's ingrained also in our culture in many ways.

AI assessment note: “definitely there's a user advantage to having done something the second time”

Q is very, very kind. I was literally just saying to you, it's great that we have these studios. It's so lovely to be in person, but I remember starting as like an eighteen-year-old on Skype, and I had very little idea of what I was doing, and I felt like a bit of an imposter, and I, I wanted to just start with, when did you feel like an imposter?

A I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career, and I also don't try to fight it. I kind of embrace it. I think a lot of people feel like imposters. I feel like an imposter every day. It's part of the motivation. I also think sometimes people think they know more than they know. I'm never at that problem. I always feel like I know probably less than I know, and I'm never complacent about anything. I'm always paranoid about everything. I've kind of learned to embrace it. I never feel Confident. I always feel like an imposter in every single thing I've done through my career. Whether I was well prepared, not well prepared, whether it was something that should have been a walk in the park or not, I feel the same way.

AI assessment note: “I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career”

Q Final 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?

A 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 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 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 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. TodayWiz 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 tenx faster because people write code tenx faster. There's tenx more applications. You have people in every 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. Then the other end, AI gives us tools to build the company in new ways. Like my team, There's errors in…

AI assessment note: “our problem area is just becoming more and more and more interesting and insane”

Q This is why I'm so glad that we don't send the schedules ahead of time, because when you say things, and then I just want to go off on tangents. Millions in ARR without salespeople is not a thing that any startup really achieves. What did you do to allow yourself to be in that position, do you think?

A I think Wiz had an incredible product market fit early on, meaning the value that the product brought to customers was very clear. It was a combination of product market fit, and also we were solving something that was a big problem. It wasn't like a small problem for our customers. Like for customers, for security teams, there's a before Wiz and an after Wiz moment. We're solving a big problem for them. Like we're solving cloud security. If you're a security team and a dev team, and you're building things in the cloud, How do you secure them? That's what we solve for. It's a big problem, and the product had very strong product market fit, and also from day one at the product, and I started as the first product manager, so my, my first role at Wiz was leading the product team. 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 things until you see value, but in Wiz, literally, you get value in like, 15 minutes. So I think the combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem, like solving cloud security, and we started at, you know, the beginning of COVID. So it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before, becau…

AI assessment note: “short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem”

Q Do you go to CMO dinners? Do you not engage with CMO communities? Do you not know?

A No, no, I, I generally don't. I, 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 get, constantly get fired because it's like, Imagine if I didn't have the repertoire I had with the 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 a CMO. Like, 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 they 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. So 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…

AI assessment note: “No, no, I, I generally don't. I, I really don't know”

Q listen, this customer really wants this, and it's, it's a big problem for them, they'll pay us a lot of money, should we do it? And it's, 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?

A It'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 Wiz 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 accustomed 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, in which case there's a misunderstanding here, because if you communicate what you're trying to solve for, and we know what you'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. And a lot of things we did build for customers, but there were things that were aligned to that North Star…

AI assessment note: “we never built them without the knowledge that it could scale for everybody”

Q 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?

A Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name we had. I mean, a staff or 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, 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, that's a T this team understands enterprise. And 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. 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.

AI assessment note: “Yes, with a caveat. I don't think it was about the name”

Q This is why I'm so glad that we don't send the schedules ahead of time, because when you say things, and then I just want to go off on tangents. Millions in ARR without salespeople is not a thing that any startup really achieves. What did you do to allow yourself to be in that position, do you think?

A I think Wiz had an incredible product market fit early on, meaning the value that the product brought to customers was very clear. It was a combination of product market fit, and also we were solving something that was a big problem. It wasn't like a small problem for our customers. Like for customers, for security teams, there's a before Wiz and an after Wiz moment. We're solving a big problem for them. Like we're solving cloud security. If you're a security team and a dev team, and you're building things in the cloud, How do you secure them? That's what we solve for. It's a big problem, and the product had very strong product market fit, and also from day one at the product, and I started as the first product manager, so my, my first role at Wiz was leading the product team. 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 things until you see value, but in Wiz, literally, you get value in like, 15 minutes. So I think the combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem, like solving cloud security, and we started at, you know, the beginning of COVID. So it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before, becau…

AI assessment note: “combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy”

Q Do you go to CMO dinners? Do you not engage with CMO communities? Do you not know?

A No, no, I, I generally don't. I, 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 get, constantly get fired because it's like, Imagine if I didn't have the repertoire I had with the 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 a CMO. Like, 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 they 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. So 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…

AI assessment note: “No, no, I, I generally don't. I, I really don't know hardly any CMOs.”

Q Do you believe that people are destined for a certain stage of company? You know, kind of traditional management advice. There's people, ah, there's a zero to one person, and there's, ah, this type of person. Do you believe that?

A 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 it was, 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, are 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 to stay at a company that changes so much.

AI assessment note: “I guess it depends on how adaptable you are as a person.”

Q is very, very kind. I was literally just saying to you, it's great that we have these studios. It's so lovely to be in person, but I remember starting as like an eighteen-year-old on Skype, and I had very little idea of what I was doing, and I felt like a bit of an imposter, and I, I wanted to just start with, when did you feel like an imposter?

A I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career, and I also don't try to fight it. I kind of embrace it. I think a lot of people feel like imposters. I feel like an imposter every day. It's part of the motivation. I also think sometimes people think they know more than they know. I'm never at that problem. I always feel like I know probably less than I know, and I'm never complacent about anything. I'm always paranoid about everything. I've kind of learned to embrace it. I never feel Confident. I always feel like an imposter in every single thing I've done through my career. Whether I was well prepared, not well prepared, whether it was something that should have been a walk in the park or not, I feel the same way.

AI assessment note: “I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career”

Q So 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? Cause there's the two variables that you can switch.

A Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely not in, in your area of business of investing, and I'll, 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, 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 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 a big part in something small.

AI assessment note: “I'm definitely not in, in your area of business of investing”

Q Final 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?

A 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 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 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 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. TodayWiz 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 tenx faster because people write code tenx faster. There's tenx more applications. You have people in every 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. Then the other end, AI gives us tools to build the company in new ways. Like my team, There's errors in…

AI assessment note: “our problem area is just becoming more and more and more interesting and insane, and that for me is incredibly exciting”

Q And your one metric to determine your success of your North Star is?

A 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 critical 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. And we give them tools, of course, like we, 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, it, 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 it's really hard to fix the thing. So, 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. Most Wiz customers are in the zero criticals club. We even send them, like, Cool swag, just like you have the sweatshirts, Zero Criticals Club. We make it fun and simple. Like, it's not a complex, what am I going to do as an enterprise security product? Okay, get to Zero Criticals. Th…

AI assessment note: “there's two metrics I care about. One is we have this thing we call zero critical club”

Q When we think about the biggest mistake, what was that biggest mistake?

A I have a hard time pinpointing to, to one mistake. I mean, I think if I look at it at a broader company level, the, the one time where we made something that was a major shift for us was very early on. We started initially from like a very different idea, and we pivoted to what is now Wiz. It was the early days when we had this idea around 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. And I think we were kind of convincing ourselves that it was something they were interested in. And we got feedback like, oh, it's interesting. We'd love to talk again, but we couldn't get to that next step. And I think that was at the beginning, like until we pivoted, I felt like that was a big learning of, of a mistake where we were kind of trying to push something hard without really feeling, you know, the pullback, but we were maybe convincing ourselves a bit that we were feeling the pullback. So that I think learned me that when there's an area that there's a lot of friction or something, maybe not to push harder.

AI assessment note: “I felt like that was a big learning of, of a mistake”

Q Totally 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?

A I think definitely there's a user advantage to having done something the second time. I see it in the, in the Wiz executive team all the time. They, 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. 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, it's something super unique that's ingrained also in our culture in many ways.

AI assessment note: “definitely there's a user advantage to having done something the second time”

Q Funny, I interviewed Nick from Revolut, and he was like, ah, 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?

A I mean, saying that culture is bullshit, it's just a bit of a semantic. Like when you say culture, what, what do you mean? You know, it's, 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “I do think that in some ways winning and executing fast It's high stakes.”

Q Funny, I interviewed Nick from Revolut, and he was like, ah, 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?

A I mean, saying that culture is bullshit, it's just a bit of a semantic. Like when you say culture, what, what do you mean? You know, it's, 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, 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.

AI assessment note: “I do think that in some ways winning and executing fast... generates a team”

Q So 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? Cause there's the two variables that you can switch.

A Yeah, I'm, I'm definitely not in, in your area of business of investing, and I'll, 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, 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 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 a big part in something small.

AI assessment note: “it's okay if I own a smaller percent of the pie.”