Building Wiz: The Fastest-Growing Startup in History with Raaz Herzberg
- Aisha Washington
- 1 day ago
- 7 min read
Wiz became one of software’s most remarkable growth stories by reaching $100 million in annual recurring revenue just 18 months after it was founded. Yet its original concept was not the product that produced this success. The company began under a different name, pursued another security problem, and changed direction only after its early team recognized that polite customer reactions were not evidence of genuine demand.
In a conversation on Lenny’s Podcast, Wiz CMO and VP of Product Strategy Raaz Herzberg recounts the company’s formative decisions. As one of its first ten employees and its first product manager, she had a close view of the pivot, the search for product-market fit, the founders’ early sales work, and the later effort to build a distinctive global brand.
From an Unclear Idea to a Cloud Security Company
Wiz’s founders had extensive cloud security experience, including leadership roles at Microsoft. Nevertheless, the company they initially called Beyond Networks focused on network security. The team held as many as 10 to 15 conversations with prospective customers each day, presenting its thinking and gathering reactions before it had a fully defined product.
The meetings appeared encouraging. Customers said the proposal sounded interesting, and the founders’ expertise made the concept credible. Herzberg, however, saw a troubling gap: after listening to the conversations, she still could not clearly explain what the company intended to build.
At first, she wondered whether her own lack of understanding meant she was unsuitable for the job. When she finally voiced the problem, it opened a more consequential discussion. The team realized it had been treating friendly comments as validation instead of searching for signs of urgent demand.
That distinction led the company back toward cloud security, where the founders possessed unusual expertise and customers faced immediate, substantial problems. According to Herzberg, the atmosphere changed quickly. The team had greater clarity, and customer conversations began generating stronger signals.
The episode illustrates a vital principle of discovery: credibility can earn a meeting, but it can also disguise an unconvincing proposition. Experienced founders are particularly capable of making an idea sound plausible. The real question is whether customers are motivated to act.
Measuring Demand Through Customer Behavior
Herzberg argues that early-stage teams should listen beyond compliments. People are inclined to be encouraging, especially when speaking with founders they respect. Statements such as “That sounds smart” reveal far less than questions about price, deployment, timing, or internal approval.
Wiz noticed product-market fit emerging through a change in customer behavior. Prospects began asking what the product would cost, how it could be implemented, and whether their technical colleagues could evaluate it. Some wanted to arrange a proof of value or introduce the team responsible for deploying security tools.
These actions mattered because they imposed costs on the customer. A prospect who schedules technical work, recruits colleagues, or allocates time to an evaluation is demonstrating more than curiosity.
Wiz deliberately tested this commitment. Before beginning one early proof of value, the team sent the prospective customer a demanding technical questionnaire. Adding friction might seem counterproductive, but the customer returned the completed document the next day. That effort provided persuasive evidence that the problem was important and the evaluation was real.
The broader lesson is to seek customer pull rather than manufacture momentum through relentless pushing. Useful indicators include:
involving the people who will test or operate the product;
completing substantive preparation for an evaluation;
discussing purchasing mechanics and budgets;
committing time to a proof of concept or proof of value.
Friction is valuable when it reveals motivation. Removing every obstacle may increase participation while making it harder to distinguish serious buyers from agreeable observers.
Why Saying “I Don’t Understand” Can Change a Company
Herzberg’s question about the original product direction also reveals something about Wiz’s culture. Admitting confusion can feel risky, particularly when everyone else appears confident. In this case, the uncertainty was not hers alone; speaking openly allowed the group to confront ambiguity that others had also sensed.
She credits the founding team’s relatively flat structure with making that possible. Ideas were not accepted merely because they came from the most senior person. Team members could challenge assumptions and ask for a clearer explanation.
Healthy organizations do not require everyone to agree, but they do need people to understand what is being decided. A team may choose the wrong answer and correct it later. Remaining confused is more dangerous because confusion prevents coordinated learning.
Leaders can support this kind of candor by treating requests for clarification as useful information. If an intelligent colleague cannot explain the strategy, the message may be incomplete. What looks like an individual comprehension problem can be an organizational communication problem.
Founders Should Learn the Motion Before Hiring for It
After the pivot, Wiz’s founders handled sales themselves. They secured early contracts and reached several million dollars in revenue before bringing in the first salesperson.
Herzberg’s interpretation is not that founders must perform every function indefinitely. Rather, they should avoid hiring someone to solve a problem they have not yet learned to solve. Without firsthand knowledge of the sales motion, leaders may struggle to select the right hire, define the role, or judge whether the new process is working.
Founder-led selling also keeps early learning close to the people shaping the product. Objections, implementation concerns, and buyer language can flow directly into product decisions. Once the motion becomes repeatable, a dedicated organization can scale it with far better context.
Wiz’s progression suggests a practical order: first discover urgent demand, then prove that customers will pay, and only then build the machinery for repeatable acquisition.
Following the Organizational “Heat”
Herzberg describes growth as a sequence in which the company’s most important constraint keeps moving. Early on, the “heat” was in product discovery because the team needed to decide what to build. It then moved to engineering as Wiz raced to make the solution work.
Once the first customers arrived, sales became the constraint. After the company established product-market fit and salespeople could reliably sell the product, attention shifted again—this time to marketing, pipeline generation, and awareness.
Herzberg recommends placing strong people where the organizational heat is greatest. Static ideas about functions and career paths can be less useful than asking which unsolved problem now limits the company.
Her own career reflects that approach. She began as an engineer, moved into product leadership, and later accepted responsibility for marketing despite having no conventional CMO background. She studied the discipline, spoke with experienced marketing leaders, and relied on her deep knowledge of the customer, market, and product.
Building a B2B Brand People Would Notice
Herzberg believes brand matters in enterprise software because buyers do not evaluate products through specifications alone. Familiarity, trust, and emotional associations influence which vendors enter a shortlist and which ones feel safe to champion internally.
For Wiz, the immediate challenge was awareness. At the RSA security conference, most exhibitors used the dark colors and ominous visual language associated with cybersecurity. Wiz abandoned that convention and created a bright Wizard of Oz-inspired booth with theatrical elements and performers.
The purpose was straightforward: people who had never heard of Wiz needed a reason to stop and ask what it was. Herzberg says the booth attracted roughly five times as many visitors as the previous year. The company continued developing its colorful, optimistic identity, and other security vendors began experimenting with less conventional presentations.
She contrasts this freedom with product development. A software feature consumes engineering capacity and may create years of maintenance. Many marketing experiments are cheaper to reverse. A campaign can fail without becoming permanent infrastructure, giving marketers room to test bold ideas quickly.
This does not mean every unusual campaign is strategically sound. Novelty works only when it earns attention from the right audience and remains connected to the company’s identity. Wiz’s theatrical approach succeeded because it made an unfamiliar name memorable in a visually repetitive market.
Marketing Depends on Trust and Domain Understanding
Herzberg portrays the CMO position as both broad and unusually exposed. Marketing represents the company publicly, so an inaccurate campaign or poorly judged advertisement can rapidly damage trust with founders. The leader must also coordinate disciplines that require different skills, including brand, design, events, field marketing, and performance marketing.
Her product and security background gave her an advantage: she already understood the problem, the buyers, and the language of the market. Her account suggests that marketing leadership cannot be separated from product truth. A polished campaign cannot compensate for a weak understanding of what customers value.
The relationship with founders is equally important. Because public messaging is visible and subjective, marketing requires enough trust to experiment while remaining aligned with the company’s core position.
Clear Language Is a Scaling System
Moving from product into marketing changed how Herzberg thought about communication. Inside a technical team, people can tolerate shorthand, acronyms, and partially formed ideas because shared context fills the gaps. At scale, those gaps become distortion.
Product marketing acts as a bridge between what the product does and what the market can readily understand. That requires seeing the offering from the perspectives of users, buyers, and sellers—not solely from the viewpoint of its builders.
Herzberg favors what she calls a “dummy” explanation: an account simple enough for someone outside the company’s specialist bubble. The phrase is not an insult to the audience. It is a reminder that customers do not spend every day immersed in Wiz’s terminology.
For example, an internal team may naturally use an acronym such as CSPM, while a buyer is more likely to think in terms of finding a cloud security solution. Effective messaging begins with the customer’s vocabulary and level of familiarity.
The principle applies beyond marketing copy. Strategy, positioning, onboarding, and sales enablement all improve when teams eliminate unnecessary assumptions. If a message cannot survive outside the room where it was created, it is not ready to scale.
Courage, Friction, and the Permission to Fail
Herzberg connects many of her career choices to a willingness to attempt things she expected might not work. She accepted product and marketing responsibilities without feeling fully qualified, viewing possible failure as a tolerable cost of growth.
Her point is not that confidence guarantees success. It is that becoming comfortable with uncertainty creates more opportunities to learn. Difficult work—and the friction it produces—can be evidence that a person or organization is stretching beyond existing strengths.
That same logic runs through Wiz’s story. The company challenged its initial strategy, asked customers to demonstrate commitment, let founders learn sales directly, and used conspicuous marketing in a conservative category. Each decision risked discomfort or failure, but each also produced clearer information.
Wiz’s rapid rise is therefore more useful as a study in disciplined learning than as a formula for hypergrowth. Its early team did not simply move fast. It learned to distinguish courtesy from commitment, confusion from clarity, and attention from genuine market pull.
