Lenny's Podcast: Product | Career | Growth
Building Wiz: the fastest-growing startup in history | Raaz Herzberg (CMO and VP Product Strategy)
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You're one of the first 10 employees, you're the first product manager, was when he joined the founders kind of didn't really have an idea figured out yet. When they landed on an idea and then ended up being wrong, ended up not working. Six weeks after he joined there was a pivot. The time, you know, we didn't really have like a solid product yet. We would have like 10 to 15 meetings every day with like potential customers. I was hired as the first product manager. I set in on those calls. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing because I was a private manager. So I was supposed to start building it. And so at some point that 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. He started seeing enthusiasm. Can you talk about just like what that phase was like? We really felt the type of questions change, right? So the call sounded 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 for what you don't want to hear. You started as an engineer. You moved into product and now you're marketing, which is not a traditional path. I have a ton to learn about marketing with what I knew really well with. Today, my guest is Ross Herzberg. Ross is chief marketing officer and VP of product strategy at Wiz. Before moving into marketing, Ross was an engineer. And then for most of her career was a product manager. Prior to Wiz, Ross led security products in Microsoft, including Azure Sentinel. And it was she moved from VP of 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 100 million ARR just 18 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 while, 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, Ross shares what signals told her and the team that the original idea wasn't going to work, and that what changed in their conversations when they finally found product market fit, why she moved into marketing, and what she wished she knew as a product leader from her new marketing lens. Also, her perspective on marketing and what marketing people often get wrong, and why CMOs often fail. Also, something she calls the dummy explanation, why you need to pay attention to where the heat is within your organization. She shares her most contrarian take on leadership, and so much more. This was such a fun episode, and there's so much to learn here for product leaders, for marketing leaders, and for founders. If you enjoy this podcast, don't forget to subscribe and follow it in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Ross Herzberg. Ross, thank you so much for being here. Welcome to the podcast. Thank you for having me. So I want to start by giving a little context on Wiz for folks that aren't super familiar with the company. You launched just under five years ago at this point. Within 18 months, you all hit 100 million ARR, which is the fastest growth rate in history of any software company. It's faster than the two other companies I've had on the podcast that also claim to be the fastest growing software companies deal and ramp. You guys do even faster. I read that you are at over 500 million ARR now. I know it's also not confirmed, but a certain company that rhymes with legal offered to buy you guys for $23 billion, and you all turn that down, decided to stay private. Also, something like 50% of Fortune 100 companies are customers of Wiz. Is there anything I missed anything I got wrong? I've never heard of that nugel company, but under the back. Okay, great. We're going to come back to that. What's even crazier is in spite of that. When you join the company, you employ something like number seven. Yeah, we kind of started the founders and the first six, seven employees, we just started once. This episode is brought to you by WorkOS. If you're building a SaaS app, at some point, your customers will start asking for enterprise features like SAML authentication and skim provisioning. That's where WorkOS comes in, making a fast and painless to add enterprise features
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