Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)

You're one of the first ten employees, you're the first product manager it was. When you joined, the founders kind of didn't really have an idea figure out yet. When they landed on an idea and then ended up being wrong, ended up not working. Six weeks after you joined, there was a pivot. I mean no, we didn't really have like a solid product yet. We would have like ten to fifteen meetings every day with like potential customers. I was hired as a first product manager. I set in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were gonna build. Which was confusing because I was a private manager, so I was supposed to start building it. And so at some point it was kind of like I have to ask, What exactly are we doing here? And that ended up like pivoting us around to cloud security. So things started to click a little bit more. You started seeing enthusiasm. Can you talk about just like what that phase was like? We really felt the type of questions change, right? Silly, the call sounded like Like again, how are you pricing this or when can we start doing a POV? I think naturally as human beings, you have a bias to look for affirmation versus like a bias to look for what you don't want to hear. You started as an engineer, you moved into product, and now you're in marketing, which is not a traditional path. I had a ton to learn about with marketing. But what I knew really well was

Today, my guest is Roz Herzberg. Roz is chief marketing officer and VP of product strategy at Wiz. Before moving into marketing, Roz was an engineer and then for most of her career was a product manager. Prior to Wiz, Raz led security products in Microsoft, including Azure Sentinel, and at Wiz she moved from VP a product to CMO. If you haven't heard of Wiz, it's not only the world's fastest growing security company,

It's also the fastest growing software company in history. Hitting a hundred million AR just eighteen months after founding. And then just under five years after founding was rumored to be exploring an acquisition by Google for over$23 billion. Even more wild, as you'll hear in our conversation, the team initially went in circles on what they wanted to build, and it took them a while to actually land on the idea that is basically the most intense product market fit of any B2B company ever. In our conversation, Ra shares what signals told her and the team that the original idea wasn't going to work.

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