Polite Interest Is Not Demand: How Wiz Found Product-Market Fit, and Then Made Some Noise

Raaz Herzberg joined Wiz as its first product manager. The company was founded as Beyond Networks, with an idea of doing network security, just as the world shut down for COVID in March 2020. The founders and the first five engineers all had cloud security backgrounds, but this time they wanted something different. Without a real product yet, their days were filled with ten to fifteen calls with potential customers, mostly CISOs, using a deck that explained the idea.

Herzberg says the remote-everything moment turned out to help. Executives were at home with no travel or meetings, and the Tel Aviv team could not have flown anyway, so back-to-back calls were possible. She adds that even her mother told her it was a bad time to join a startup. The calls felt good, she says, because people kept saying the idea sounded interesting and they would love to hear more.

After a couple of weeks of listening in, Herzberg still could not say exactly what they were going to build, even though she was supposed to start building it with the dev team. She assumed everyone else understood, and finally asked what exactly they were doing in the details. That opened a deep discussion. Customers had no incentive to say they did not follow, and she suggests they assumed a smart team was building something interesting. The team realized it was listening for positive reinforcement rather than real enthusiasm, and that led to the pivot to cloud security.

Herzberg says the type of questions changed once the team found the right idea. Customers asked how it would be priced and what it would cost, when they could start a proof of value (POV) and how long it would take, or said they knew exactly who to connect the team to internally. Those were the indications the team learned to look for. She notes that founders naturally have a bias toward looking for affirmation over what they do not want to hear.

Lenny Rachitsky summarizes it as people pushing for a next step rather than just saying it sounds awesome. Herzberg agrees and adds that in B2B you ultimately have to reach the team that will test and deploy the tool. That requires real passion for wanting it right now. Merely cool does not count.

Herzberg says she believed she was the only one who did not understand, and that it takes courage to say so. Some founders retell the story as her coming to them with a push to rethink, but she insists that was not how it felt to her. Today, she says, "I don't understand" is her favorite question and she says it many times a day. She credits Wiz's flat culture, where voices are heard regardless of seniority, and says it matters that the founders were open to rethinking when she said it.

Rachitsky connects this to LinkedIn CPO Tomer Cohen's phrase, "We may be wrong, but we're not confused." Herzberg agrees and adds that if something is not easy to understand, it probably needs more chewing. She says admitting confusion is a learned skill, and that she has become more comfortable being vulnerable over her career.

The decision to return to cloud security came out of a roughly five-hour discussion among all the founders, which Herzberg says has not happened since. Cloud security was the area they knew best, and they felt the problems there were big and strong. After the switch, she says, even Zoom conversations felt different. Once they found the right path it was easy to distinguish from the wrong one, because customers began sending strong signals and asking to start a POV.

She recalls the first request for a POV, from a Fortune 10 company, when the product was barely started. The team wanted to buy time and to learn what the customer would connect, so they sent a long list of technical questions. She feared it would scare the customer off, but the answers came back filled in a day later. Her lesson was that she did not want to push anyone into a POV without commitment, and that one should not be afraid to get pull from the customer.

Because things moved so fast, the founders ended up selling before they had a sales team and closing contracts themselves. Herzberg says they learned a lot, and that when they hired their first salesperson they could say they had already sold a couple of million. Her broader advice is that hoping to hire a first product marketer or a first salesperson to fix a gap rarely works. If the core group cannot do something once, end to end, an outsider is unlikely to solve it.

Herzberg describes her path from engineering to product to marketing as unplanned. She says her only strategy has been to follow good people. Two and a half years into Wiz, with clear product-market fit and a functioning sales team, marketing was still a weak spot. Wiz would win POVs against competitors, but customers often said they wished they had heard of Wiz before signing with a competitor.

The CEO, Assaf, asked her to lead marketing in a freezing server room, and her first response was that she was cold and had work to do. She had never been part of go-to-market and did not know the word pipeline. She spent the weekend listening to podcasts and talking to CMOs, then decided to give it a try. What persuaded her was that after product-market fit and a sales organization, brand becomes a block to scale, because even in complex B2B purchases people are still people.

She also offers a metaphor of heat moving through a company. Early on the heat is in the product kitchen, then it moves to engineering, then to sales once there is something to sell, and finally to marketing when salespeople ask for more pipeline. She says she naturally follows the heat. Rachitsky adds that companies tend to put their best people where help is needed most.

At her first board meeting ever, two months into the role, she presented the changes she had made. She says she was an untraditional marketer because she did not really know marketing, but she knew the problem Wiz solved and the cloud security audience. Her plan was to take chances and make a lot of noise because nobody had heard of Wiz. She thinks that is what board member Shardul Shah of Index Ventures meant when he said he would introduce his marketing leaders to her, though she calls him kind.

Asked why CMOs often do not work out, Herzberg says it is a very hard role that depends on deep trust with the founding team. Marketing is highly visible and represents something the founders care about, and one bad ad can break trust. She also thinks it is very hard to succeed at a company like Wiz without understanding security and the product. The job is also diverse, spanning performance marketing, brand and design, and events, with little in common between them.

Her biggest insight about early marketing is how different it is from product. In product, less is more: a feature costs engineering time, adds complexity and in B2B can never really be taken back. Marketing has no maintenance or technical debt, so a video that flops can simply be replaced by another tomorrow. She decided to use that to her advantage and try everything to make noise.

Just before RSA, which she calls the Super Bowl of security, she scrapped the standard cyber booth for a Wiz of Oz booth with actors, in a show full of red, black and hoodies. She also moved the brand from dark to pink, bright blue and optimistic, centered on magic rather than fear. She was scared it could be a failure or a hit, but five times as many people stopped by as the year before, in the same space and for the same cost. Wiz now does themed booths every time, which she says other cyber companies still do not.

Herzberg says she thought she would fail at nearly everything she has done, including joining Wiz, where she was sure the talented team would find out she was not the right fit. She does not believe being more confident is a real option for her. What grew in her instead is being okay with being pretty sure she will fail and attempting it anyway, which she says releases you a bit.

She traces this to her mother, who believed you should invest energy where you are less confident rather than where you are already good. Herzberg was a very shy child who would have happily read in her room, but her mother made her swim and meet other kids. Her mother used to say that friction is good, comparing it to brushing harder where your gums bleed, and she ranked hard work and courage above talent.

Rachitsky links this to the early customer questionnaire: friction can show that someone is genuinely committed. Herzberg agrees, saying inertia is always easier, and that friction means someone has put something extra in. She adds a breakup analogy, that because not breaking up is easier, choosing to do it must be the right decision.

Looking back from marketing, Herzberg says she did not appreciate how critical marketing and product marketing are. In a technical domain you can be far from an ordinary person in your market, and marketing bridges that gap. Inside product you can work with things that are fuzzy or gray, answering a question with "not exactly, but it can do this", but a message that has to scale cannot work that way. It has to be crystal clear, especially as the company grows.

Her example is jargon. Security people use acronyms like CSPM and would classify the product as CNAPP, Cloud Native Application Protection, but buyers search Google for "cloud security solution". When you live deep inside a domain, she says, you can be remote from the buyer by accident, and these lessons only clicked once she saw things from the marketing side.

She calls her approach the dummy explanation. Everything Wiz writes should assume no knowledge of Wiz, its product or the market, because customers do not live in the company's bubble. She says that even the Wiz graph database, a core innovation, should not be named that way in copy, since there is no reason a common person would know it. She reminds herself daily that she is in a bubble and her audience is not, and that when a team is sick of its website headline, customers may have only just learned it ten months ago.

Asked about the four co-founders, Herzberg calls them an incredible team with a unique story. Wiz is their second company together, after Adallom, which was sold to Microsoft, and they previously served together in the Israeli army. She says they have known each other for roughly twenty-two years. They have complete trust, each owns a clear domain, and that is why decisions are made very fast.

She believes the defining part of Wiz's culture is that people do not have to work hard to influence strategy or get a seat at the table. The founders believe in giving everyone a chance to have impact regardless of title or experience, and they will give trust and let you try. That openness goes back to being able to say "I don't understand", she says, and it produces loyal employees who feel part of what is being built.

In the contrarian corner, Herzberg offers a view on confidence. As a woman in tech she says she hears a lot about imposter syndrome and building confidence, but her approach has been different and, for her, more effective. She feels like an imposter and suspects most people do. Her advice is to embrace it but not let it stop a decision, and if someone turns you down because you think you are not good enough, that is on them.

Rachitsky adds that when you take on a new role you really are an imposter in some ways, since you have never done it before, and that this is normal. Herzberg says she had not heard that framing but loves it. Her point is that you will never know your limits if you do not try.

Herzberg recalls that her marketing ramp-up came from asking which companies do marketing well and what the people behind them did. She looked at every talk by the CMO of Gong, for example. She does not like how most security companies market, mostly through fear, so she worked backward from brands she loves rather than from other security vendors.

Asked for her life motto, Herzberg says it is keeping it simple. If a product feature, an answer or something in life feels too complex, she says, that probably means it is not the right solution. Sometimes you need to take two steps back and come back later to find a simple way out. Rachitsky ties this back to the early pitch that was too complicated for anyone to understand.

On the rumored acquisition interest from a company whose name rhymes with Loogle, she says she cannot address specific offers, though Wiz has received many over the years. She says the founders, employees, customers and board all believe staying independent lets Wiz become one of the biggest security companies in the world. Cloud is a fast-growing market, she says, growing 20 to 30 percent a year, with only an estimated 15 to 20 percent of infrastructure there today.

She adds that security is a market of leaders, like buying insurance, so you want the best one, and that this is why brand matters so much. Wiz is considered the cloud security company in many ways, she says, and it is theirs to lose. She says nobody at Wiz is anywhere near ready to give that up.