20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg
Timestamps are as accurate as they can be but may be slightly off. We encourage you to listen to the full context.
Podcast Summary
This episode features Raz Herzberg, Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. (03:51) As one of the first 10 employees, Raz shares insights from scaling Wiz from zero to a multi-billion dollar ARR business, transitioning from product management to marketing leadership. The conversation covers enterprise sales strategies, the importance of product-market fit, and how Wiz achieved millions in ARR before hiring salespeople. (09:08)
• Main themes: Enterprise marketing strategy, product-market fit optimization, scaling from startup to enterprise leader, and the intersection of product and marketing in B2B SaaSSpeakers
Raz Herzberg
Raz Herzberg is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. As one of the first 10 employees, Raz has helped scale the business from nothing to a multi-billion-dollar ARR business. Before Wiz, Raz was a Senior PM working on Azure at Microsoft, where he gained deep enterprise experience that proved crucial to Wiz's success.
Harry Stebbings
Harry Stebbings is the host of 20 Growth and founder of 20VC, one of the world's leading venture capital podcasts. He focuses on interviewing the best minds in marketing, brand, and scaling to discuss how to build the biggest brands in the world.
Key Takeaways
Embrace the Imposter Syndrome as Motivation
Raz admits he always feels like an imposter and has learned to embrace this feeling rather than fight it. (03:47) This constant sense of not knowing enough keeps him motivated, paranoid about performance, and prevents complacency. Rather than viewing imposter syndrome as a weakness, successful professionals can leverage it as a driving force for continuous improvement and learning. The key is channeling that nervous energy into thorough preparation and relentless execution.
Product-Market Fit Enables Enterprise Success Without Traditional Sales
Wiz achieved millions in ARR before hiring salespeople due to extraordinary product-market fit combined with solving a critical problem. (05:34) The product delivered value in 15 minutes rather than the months typically expected for enterprise security solutions. When product-market fit is strong enough, customers will pull rather than be pushed, creating natural demand that reduces the need for extensive sales infrastructure in the early stages.
Brand Marketing Outweighs Performance Marketing in Enterprise
Raz believes brand marketing is massively underrated compared to pipeline-focused performance marketing. (17:31) In enterprise sales, decisions are made by people who need to trust and recognize your company as experts in their domain. The goal is to turn "cold rooms" into "warm rooms" where prospects already know your reputation. Brand investments are harder to quantify but create the foundation for all other marketing efforts to succeed.
Different Company Stages Require Stress Focus Shifts
The "heat in the kitchen" moves between different areas as companies scale - from product challenges in early days, to sales execution, then to marketing and brand awareness. (46:57) Understanding where the primary stress point should be at each stage helps leaders allocate resources and attention appropriately. Rather than trying to optimize everything simultaneously, focus intensely on the area that's most critical for your current growth stage.
Enterprise Success Requires Infinite Scale Thinking from Day One
Building for enterprise means every product decision must work at infinite scale, not just for current customers. (28:11) This Microsoft-learned principle prevented Wiz from accumulating technical debt and needing costly refactoring later. While this might seem to slow velocity, it actually increases speed long-term by eliminating the need to rebuild features and systems as you scale to larger enterprise customers.
Statistics & Facts
- Wiz achieved millions in ARR before hiring any salespeople, demonstrating exceptional product-market fit in the enterprise security space. (05:00)
- Wiz's first paying customer was a Fortune 10 company, which is extremely unusual for startups that typically start with smaller customers and scale up. (25:07)
- Cloud environments grow 30-40% year over year, creating natural expansion opportunities for cloud security companies like Wiz. (42:36)
