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Raaz Herberg is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest-growing cloud security company in history. As one of the first 10 employees, Raaz has helped scale the business ...
Raaz Herzberg, CMO and VP Product Strategy at Wiz, shares how the company scaled from zero to multi-billion dollar ARR by starting upmarket with Fortune 10 customers, prioritizing brand over traditional marketing metrics, and building for infinite scale from day one. Key insights include why marketing attribution is overrated, how to sell enterprise without salespeople, the importance of fast time-to-value, and why generosity with equity creates bigger outcomes. Raaz also discusses building custom AI tools internally and why most SaaS marketing best practices are actually bullshit.
Raaz discusses the critical early pivot from a network security idea (Beyond Networks) to cloud security, selling millions in ARR before hiring salespeople, and the importance of strong product-market fit. She explains how Wiz's 15-minute time-to-value and solving a massive problem during COVID enabled rapid growth without traditional sales infrastructure.
Raaz shares the story of creating a Wizard of Oz themed booth at RSA conference that generated 4x more leads than traditional approaches. She explains why brand matters more than pipeline metrics, how to connect with enterprise buyers through humor rather than fear, and why marketing attribution is mostly meaningless.
Raaz explains how the founding team's Microsoft experience enabled Wiz to start upmarket successfully. She details the critical mindset of building for infinite scale from day one, why this doesn't slow velocity, and how to make product decisions that eliminate technical debt rather than accumulate it.
Raaz defines Wiz's product North Star through two key metrics: customers in the Zero Criticals Club (resolved all critical security risks) and percentage of logins from development teams vs security teams. She explains why these metrics matter more than traditional SaaS metrics and how they indicate real organizational change.
Raaz shares tactical advice on breaking into enterprise accounts: use investors for intros, obsess over the first customer, make terrible deals if needed, and let the product speak through fast POVs. She emphasizes that enterprise is a small group of people who all know each other, so reputation matters more than marketing tricks.
Raaz explains why she believes most CMOs struggle, why she doesn't engage with CMO communities, and why marketing is 'not that complicated.' She argues that marketing is intuitive, over-complexified, and that coming from product gave her freedom to take risks without career concerns about being a 'real' CMO.
Raaz describes building Marilyn, an internal multi-agent chatbot used daily by the entire sales team, with just one part-time engineer. She explains why go-to-market teams struggle to build custom tools despite AI's potential, the organizational walls between engineering and GTM, and why this represents the future of scaling sales teams.
Raaz shares CEO Asaf's philosophy of being generous with equity because a small piece of a big pie beats a large piece of nothing. She discusses Wiz's culture of doers, flat organization, and how the founding team's 20 years of working together creates immense trust and eliminates ramp time.
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
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