Wiz

“Basically Wiz found that they were able to do a single git push of a file and gain access to every single repository hosted on the platform.”

“Because their sales leaders although tough are incredible, you know, medic disciples who develop the crap out of their people and hold them accountable, and that's what I'm looking for.”

“Wiz had a world-class sales organization under Dolly Rogic.”

“The big exits will solve it, right? The whizzes and the, I mean, we thought whizz was big. Now we have cursor. Now I'm going to win the bet of a hundred billion dollar exit in the next year.”

“I'm, Confident that five years from now, I, I'll be able to show you, I'll be able to demonstrate another team that, you know, showing that actually wheeze was a slog and they can move much faster and they've done whatever it is.”

“Look, it's not a secret that, you know, we at Cyberstarts we have sold secondary shares at companies like Weez early on. By the way, I regret, I sold every single share at Weez. I regret it because, you know, if I sold it right now, I would make I would, Show …”

“The company I was the seed investor for that company together with Doug Leone from Sequoia and Sherdul Shah from Index Ventures. And together we created a syndicate of twenty million dollars that Value the company at around, I think the number was sixty six mi…”

“For every product that you sell there are Four personas that you need to care about. The person who has the pain, the person that has the authority to buy solution like you're selling, the person that is the user that actually uses the product day to day, and …”

“The first four quarters, if I'm Remembering correctly, they sold a million dollar, and then two million dollars, and then eight million dollars in the third quarter, and then twenty four million dollars in the fourth quarter.”

“I've never lost a deal.”

“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 …”

“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”

“My only marketing ever role has been as part of Wiz.”

“And we have the same size of space and place at that conference every year. And it brought in like four X more leads”

“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 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.”

“Humor is something that naturally connects People more than fear.”

“Our first paying customer was a fortune 10 company.”

“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.”

“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.”

“And so most of our logins are from development teams.”

“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…”

“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…”

“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.”

“To this day, Roy, our co-founder and VP of engineering, writes code.”

“There's no managers for managers. There's no long documents.”

“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.”

“TodayWiz is the security solution for most of the frontier labs.”

“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.”

“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.…”

“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.”

“50% of Wiz's users at the time were software developers, not security people.”

“I think they'd almost never, they turned one customer in the course of all the time between when they started the company and when we were looking at this round.”

“And so Wiz was Closing on these like very healthy six figure deals in a matter of weeks or months, which was just unprecedented. You know, normally you have small deals and fast cycles. You can have big deals and slow cycles, which had more or less figured out…”

“Wiz is the only one I've seen do it successfully, where they started in the enterprise.”

“I think it's probably the reason why Wiz was acquired by Google for like thirty two billion dollars which is Google's biggest acquisition ever.”

“You know, we just sold a company to Google, which is Wiz, the security company.”

“One is they used their fundraising as a brand tool, which is, you know, it has its pros and cons, but they kept raising Many, many different rounds kept raising their valuation, and that's a very dangerous game, by the way, but for them, they were able to pull…”

“And then they asked him, well, why? And he said with both of them, that time to value was almost immediate. I had spent very little effort to see an immense amount of value. So I think that was the key factor for them and for us as well.”

“Yeah, I look at companies like MongoDB, companies like Wiz, or, you know, Dolly Rogic, you know, or Cedric Pesh. Those guys built world-class sales organizations. They developed those people. There's grind in a lot of those young people that they've developed.…”

“The ability to research and find vulnerabilities, this is kind of the bottleneck of the security space, ok? Because vulnerabilities are what allow threat actors to move from, you know, lower trust to higher trust environments”

“Within a week, almost 10% of organizations were using DeepSeq.”

“It was a very, ah, what I would say, typical exposure that exposed a lot of sensitive data, but yet, ah, if we look historically, there were similar incidents, for instance, with Microsoft releasing a token that had access to sensitive data in, you know, a buc…”

“That's happening. That's happening. We've seen live cases.”

“It's rare, like to get the time to value and the ASP is really rare.”

“Whiz we backed when it had zero revenue, so it's a big price, but you know, we loved everything we saw, including team.”

“Largest shareholder in Figma, largest shareholder in Dream Games, largest shareholder in Wiz you know, second largest shareholder in Scale.ai, Revolut.”

“Wiz, which was obviously a, you know, 30, thirty one billion dollar outcome, you know, the GDP of the country. And it returned a third of Insight's fund.”

“I think if Wiz gets approved, I think Every other large Mac seven company is going to see a green light in regards to making big, splashy acquisitions again, which is a good thing.”

“You look at the Wiz deal, There's a 10% breakup fee there. Largest breakup fee ever for an M&A transaction.”

“I mean, but in general, I think it did like one to a hundred in 18 months or 20 months or something like that.”

“I was not focused on building pipeline because I did not even know I was supposed to be focused on that. I was just like thinking in terms of how do I solve this problem as fast as I can?”

“Security products. Typically were like black and red type of thing that really most of the marketing was done on like scaring people. Hey, I will help you prevent this bad thing from happening. And as an actual technical practitioner, first of all, it's never …”

“Even as, you know, like, even I like Instagram, right? I'm never going to read a blog about the new Instagram feature. So why would somebody who does not use my product read the blog about my features, right?”

“One of the things we, that works really well for us right now is Really releasing they're called CTFs in the cybersecurity world, but releasing really complex challenges that teach people how to do security hands-on. Like, you can think of them almost like web…”

“Today, in Wiz, the marketing team is actually structured untraditionally. So, like, about a year ago, I actually split the marketing org so that the field marketing org is under the sales org. Because to me, it's so attached to regional and to sales, and it's …”

“Every person has to say like, what am I doing with AI and show cool things to the team. And we've been doing that for at least over a year.”

“Now I built, like, a super easy GPT that we call, like, the whiz spell checker that is used not by marketing. It's used by every single person in the organization. What it does is it makes sure that it's, like, according to our brand and tone of voice.”

“I look at the number and I want it to grow exponentially, meaning you have to go over 20% quarter by quarter. I want to see, like, you know, touch points and attribution and pipeline. Oh my God, there's so many ways to measure it. I just want it to grow expone…”

“No, see those are one part of it, but at the end of the day, my best friends are the users. They're the ones that at the end of the day have to love the product, have to use it, have to talk about it in their communities. So absolutely. It's not just, we don't…”