Nov 17, 2024 · 1h 5m · lennys-podcast
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
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Raaz Herzberg, CMO and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, breaks down the tactical frameworks and contrarian strategies behind Wiz's record-breaking climb to $500M+ ARR, covering customer discovery pivots, founder-led sales, messaging simplification, and unconventional B2B marketing.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Lenny holds 26.7% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Lenny as informed peer 3.3 Guest teaching 5.4 Guest disagreement 1.0 Lenny pushing back 0.0
speaking balance: gold is Lenny, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 54:03 Raaz rejects the conventional narrative around confidence
Raaz directly challenges standard corporate discourse about boosting self-confidence, insisting that trying to eliminate imposter feelings is unrealistic and individuals should instead embrace being an imposter and act anyway.
Hardest push from Lenny ▶ 1:02:08 Lenny presses on the rejected multi-billion acquisitionLenny pushes past corporate talking points to directly ask Raaz why Wiz walked away from a rumored twenty-three billion dollar acquisition offer to remain private.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 45:25 Raaz breaks down the flaw in technical product communicationRaaz explains the fundamental disconnect between engineering/product teams and buyers, showing how internal acronyms like CSPM/CNAPP confuse markets that simply want clear cloud security solutions.
Lenny holds their own ▶ 2:52 Lenny recaps Wiz's historical benchmarks against top SaaS peersLenny demonstrates deep market mastery by citing exact ARR milestones, acquisition offer rumors, and comparative growth metrics against other hyper-growth SaaS giants like Deel and Ramp.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Lenny as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Lenny pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Lenny Rachitsky Introduces Raaz Herzberg and Wiz | 5 | 1 | 1 | 0 | Lenny opens with extensive background on Wiz's unprecedented growth milestones and the rumored Google acquisition. Raaz playfully deflects the Google rumor before affirming the rest of the timeline. | |
| Sponsor Message: WorkOS Enterprise Authentication | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | Sponsor segment reading ads for WorkOS and Rippling. Host-side interactive metrics are zeroed. | |
| Pivoting from Beyond Networks to Cloud Security | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz walks through the earliest weeks of Beyond Networks, explaining how doing 10 to 15 customer calls a day revealed that polite feedback was masking a lack of genuine customer clarity. Lenny listens and prompts for the pivotal signals. | |
| Identifying Real Customer Pull and Buying Intent | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz explains the psychological trap of confirmation bias when listening to prospects and how real pull manifested as aggressive pricing and POV questions. Lenny synthesizes the key takeaway about prospects demanding next steps. | |
| Creating a Culture of Clarity and Vulnerability | 4 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Raaz gently corrects the lore around her pivot intervention, noting she wasn't strategically assertive but genuinely thought she was the only confused person in the room. Lenny quotes LinkedIn CPO Tomer Cohen to validate her vulnerability principle. | |
| Validating Product-Market Fit Through Customer Commitment | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Raaz shares an early tactic of sending an exhausting questionnaire to buy time, discovering that customer willingness to endure friction is the ultimate validation of demand. Lenny validates the pull framework. | |
| The Value of Founder-Led Sales in Early Growth | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz explains why founders and early core team members must execute the end-to-end sales cycle themselves before delegating to outside hires. Lenny reinforces this heuristic with typical revenue milestones for early sales hiring. | |
| Transitioning from Engineering and Product to CMO | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz narrates the unexpected moment CEO Assaf asked her to take over marketing in a freezing server room, detailing how she overcame initial resistance by recognizing brand as the next scaling constraint. | |
| Following the Heat: Bottlenecks in Startup Scaling | 3 | 5 | 0 | 0 | Raaz outlines the mental model of 'following the heat' across product, engineering, sales, and marketing as the company's operational bottlenecks migrate during rapid scaling. | |
| Bringing Domain Expertise and Empathy to B2B Marketing | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny cites board member Shardul Shah's high praise regarding Raaz's first board meeting. Raaz explains how being a deep domain practitioner and native cybersecurity customer allowed her to bypass traditional marketing playbooks. | |
| Building Founder Trust and Managing Marketing Complexity | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Raaz breaks down why CMO tenures are notoriously short, arguing that high visibility, fragile founder trust, and multi-disciplinary org management make the role uniquely treacherous without deep domain immersion. | |
| Standing Out in Cybersecurity with Creative Branding | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Raaz highlights the fundamental contrast between product (high maintenance cost per feature) and marketing (zero maintenance on failed experiments), illustrating it with Wiz's bright pink branding and theatrical Wizard of Oz booth at RSA. | |
| Embracing Failure and Finding Growth in Friction | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz shares her childhood philosophy taught by her mother that friction and discomfort matter far more than innate talent. Lenny connects this mindset back to her earlier tactic of testing client commitment with friction. | |
| Translating Technical Nuance into Clear Buyer Messaging | 3 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Raaz explains that product managers often tolerate ambiguity, whereas marketing requires black-and-white simplicity. She cites how technical acronyms like CSPM or CNAPP alienate prospective buyers who search for basic terms like cloud security. | |
| Breaking Out of the Bubble with Dummy Explanations | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Raaz articulates the 'dummy explanation' principle: internal teams tire of their messaging long before prospects have absorbed it. She advises resisting the impulse to change branding simply because the internal team is bored. | |
| Wiz's Founding Team Dynamic and High-Trust Culture | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny asks how Raaz established strategic influence alongside four founders with decades of shared history. Raaz credits Wiz's unusually flat, trust-first culture that rewards impact over hierarchical tenure. | |
| Embracing Imposter Syndrome Rather Than Forcing Confidence | 4 | 6 | 2 | 0 | When prompted for a contrarian perspective, Raaz pushes back against mainstream confidence-building advice, arguing people should openly accept feeling like imposters and act regardless. Lenny provides an affirmative summary. | |
| Lightning Round: Book Recommendations from Hospitality to Netflix | 3 | 5 | 1 | 0 | Raaz recommends Danny Meyer's Setting the Table and Reed Hastings' No Rules Rules, then explains how she reverse-engineered B2B marketing by studying top-tier consumer and enterprise brands like Gong. | |
| Lightning Round: Favorite Show, Daily Tools, and Simplicity Motto | 3 | 4 | 1 | 0 | Raaz defends The Wire as the greatest television series, shares her love for magnetic notebook pen holders, and outlines her guiding heuristic that unnecessary complexity always signals an incorrect solution. | |
| Staying Independent to Lead Cloud Security | 4 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Lenny inquires about turning down massive acquisition interest. Raaz lays out why Wiz remains committed to independence, emphasizing the massive untapped market where only 15-20% of enterprise infrastructure has migrated to the cloud. |
Statements from this episode (20)
Wiz was originally founded as Beyond Networks to build network security
“The company was literally officially founded as Beyond Networks because there was this, like, idea of, hey, we want to do something in the network security space. Actually, myself and the founding team, and also the other, like, five engineers that started wit…”
B2B buyers default to polite positive reinforcement rather than honest feedback
“Maybe the person on the other end is not gonna tell you, like, they're not incentivized to tell you know what, I don't know what you're talking about. It's really, I guess they felt a bit like me in some ways, and they were like, oh, it's a really smart group …”
Wiz founders conducted 10 to 15 customer discovery calls daily in 2020
“So yeah, we took like 10, 15 calls a day, back to back.”
Real B2B customer pull shows only through pricing and POV questions
“Suddenly the call sounded like, wait, again, how are you pricing this? How much will this cost? Or wait, like, When can we start doing a POV? How long is a POV? Or somebody would, like, finish the call and be like, okay, I know exactly who I need to connect yo…”
Enterprise startups should never push reluctant customers into free trials
“I don't want to push somebody into a POV if he is not committed to me at this stage. I mean, it's not a well-built product. It's gonna be a journey we take together, so they need to really want it. I need that commitment from the other side. I'm not trying to …”
Wiz's founders closed a couple million in ARR before hiring salespeople
“And then when we hired our first sales hire, it was also like, look, like, we sold a couple million of this, so you, for sure, as a salesperson,
right, like, you kind of give that confidence.”
Founders must execute functions end-to-end before hiring external specialists
“It's like, if you can't do it one time, end to end, and you're like the core, core, core group, the chances of just bringing somebody from the outside to solve that problem, it's wishful in some ways, but it never ends up that way.”
Complex B2B enterprise software purchases are heavily driven by brand
“Like at some point of every product, people start looking really heavily at brand, whether we think that way or we don't. Like when I buy my iPhone, I have no idea how it really is compared to an Android phone. I did not look at the specs. I truly have no idea…”
Startup bottlenecks shift from product to engineering, sales, then marketing
“In the early, early days when we just started with, I remember I felt like the heat was in the product kitchen because it's like everybody's waiting to have something people want to start doing something. Right. And then they felt like, okay, you start underst…”
Early marketing should prioritize rapid audience awareness over pipeline mechanics
“What is the end to the goal of having the right people hear the right thing about my company, ASAP, versus a ton of, like, I don't know, a ton of, like, kind of traditional aspects of building pipelines and different things I really did not know how to do at t…”
Cybersecurity startup CMOs cannot succeed without a deep security background
“I really don't know how somebody that does not come from a
From a security background could kind of be successful deeply in this type of a role for a company like Wiz, because it is really about understanding your customers and it is really about understanding…”
Marketing leadership uniquely combines completely uncorrelated disciplines and functions
“When you're a marketing leader, you manage, like, you manage performance marketing, which is a numbers game. You manage designers and brand, and then you manage, like, events and field. Like, there's nothing in between those things that is deeply correlated, a…”
Product mistakes create permanent technical debt; marketing experiments carry zero downside
“If you decide to build a feature in a product, then A, you're taking engineering time, which is the most valuable resource in every company, in my opinion, and B, in some ways, you can never take it back. Like it's complicated your product. Even if one custome…”
Wiz's themed RSA conference booth 5xed year-over-year foot traffic
“The amount of people that stopped by our booth was like five times the amount of people that stopped by the year before, and it's the exact same space, the exact same investment, because you invest in the space, but also ever since we do themed booths, like, e…”
Product messaging must be crystal clear to scale go-to-market operations successfully
“The further you get away from like the core, like engineer, then product, then in order for the messages to move correctly, they have to be crystal clear... When you try to scale your message, you can't. Like it gets lost in translation. You have to be crystal…”
B2B buyers search for simple terms rather than technical industry acronyms
“If you ask our product people and engineers, like, what is our, where does our product fall in terms of category? It would be like CNAP cloud native application protection. But if you go over and you, like, look at Google, like, people are not Googling that wo…”
Internal teams get sick of brand messaging long before customers grasp it
“Every time somebody says, oh, we haven't changed our color for so long, or our website's headline, it's like, or, you know, a lot of, like, a lot of those things, for me, it's like, you're the only one that is sick of it, right? Your customers are just learnin…”
Wiz's four co-founders have worked together for over 22 years
“Before, Wiz is actually their second company together. So before Wiz, they founded Adalom, which sold to Microsoft. That's how they all ended up in Microsoft in the first place. And even before that, they all worked together in the Israeli army. So they've kno…”