Wiz

Wiz was founded in March 2020, just as the world shut down due to COVID-19. The founding team—led by Asaf, a former Microsoft cloud security leader—came from a background building cloud security products. Interestingly, their first instinct was to avoid what they knew best. "We actually don't want to do cloud security," they decided. "We want to do network security." The company was officially incorporated as "Beyond Networks" with this initial thesis.

Roz Hersberg, hired as the first product manager, joined a founding team of roughly 7 people with no clear product roadmap. The founders had a vision and a pitch deck, but no certainty about what they'd actually build. What they did have was access to decision-makers. With everyone locked down at home and no travel possible, enterprise CISOs—the customers they needed to reach—suddenly had time to take meetings.

The team's daily rhythm became relentless: 10 to 15 customer discovery calls per day with potential buyers. For two weeks, Roz sat in on these calls, expecting clarity to emerge. It didn't. After each call, customers would say "that sounds interesting" and "love to hear more," but something felt off.

Roz did what few people have the courage to do: she admitted she didn't understand what they were building. "I was hired as the first product manager, and I sat in on those calls," she recalls. "I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing because I was a product manager. So I was supposed to start building it." She pushed back directly: "What exactly are we doing here?"

This vulnerability unlocked something crucial. The founding team realized they'd been telling a "broad story" that felt vague to both themselves and their customers. Customers, being polite to what seemed like a capable team, weren't incentivized to say "I don't know what you mean." The team was searching for affirmation rather than listening for deep enthusiasm.

Six weeks after launch, the team had a five-hour discussion with all the founders and pivoted entirely back to cloud security—the space they originally wanted to avoid but the market urgently needed.

The shift was immediate and visceral. "The room felt so different," Roz remembers. Instead of polite interest, customers began asking concrete questions: "How are you pricing this?" "When can we start a POV?" "Who on my team should I connect you to?" The quality of engagement had fundamentally changed.

One early POV with a Fortune 10 company proved instructive. Wanting to buy time to build, the team sent a long, technical questionnaire listing all the information they needed. Roz was terrified they'd scare the prospect away. Instead, the prospect filled it out completely within a day. This taught her a critical lesson: real enthusiasm looks like pull, not push. Customers who are genuinely interested will do extra work. You don't have to convince them to take the next step; they're pulling you forward.

The founders closed deals themselves—a couple million in revenue—before hiring a single salesperson. This meant they deeply understood the sales motion and could train their first sales hire from a position of proven success rather than theory.

The failed initial pivot into network security taught the team the importance of listening for signals of genuine need, not politeness. Roz's vulnerability in saying "I don't understand" unlocked the team's ability to course-correct. The pandemic's lockdown, initially seen as catastrophic for a startup, became an asset: CISOs were available and reachable in ways they normally wouldn't be.

Once the pivot to cloud security happened, everything accelerated. The team's technical credibility (Asaf had led all of Microsoft's cloud security products) combined with genuine customer pull created a powerful flywheel. Early customers were committed partners, not tire-kickers.

Wiz achieved $100 million in ARR within 18 months of founding—the fastest growth rate in software company history. Within five years, the company reached over $500 million ARR and was rumored to be exploring acquisition by Google at a $23 billion valuation (which it declined).

Roz transitioned from VP of Product to Chief Marketing Officer, charged with solving what she saw as the company's next inflection point: awareness. Despite having product-market fit and a functioning sales team, customers were signing with competitors because they'd never heard of Wiz. Her non-traditional marketing approach—focusing on brand and standing out rather than traditional pipeline metrics—involved bold moves like transforming Wiz's booth at RSA (the major security conference) into a "Wizard of Oz" themed experience that drew five times more traffic than the previous year. She embraced a product manager's opposite instinct: in marketing, there's no maintenance cost to experiments, so try everything and iterate rapidly based on what works.