Building Demand: Insights from Wiz's Founders

Name: Building Demand: Insights from Wiz's Founders
Uploaded: 2025-04-09T09:58:31+00:00
Duration: 1 min 49 s
Channel: Jason M. Lemkin
Description: In this brief dialogue, the speakers discuss how Wiz’s founders generated early, organic demand by tapping into their practitioner networks. They…

9 Apr 2025 · 2 min

Watch on YouTube

1:49

In this brief dialogue, the speakers discuss how Wiz’s founders generated early, organic demand by tapping into their practitioner networks. They practiced founder‑led customer discovery, reaching out to peers facing similar challenges, presenting their evolving solution, and gathering feedback over a 6‑12 month period. This iterative loop shaped an enterprise‑ready product that differed from the company’s later direction. The conversation emphasizes a corporate philosophy of listening before speaking, asking thoughtful questions, and continuously refining the product based on network insights.

Chapters

Where was this demand coming from? It was very organic and it's a credit to the approach our founders took, right? Like as practitioners prior to, like, so they took this approach of let's go show other like-minded practitioners who are dealing with this set of challenges what we're up to and get feedback and iterate. And so they built this enterprise class ready to go out of the box solution as a result of collecting and applying feedback over a period of, 6, 9, 12 months. And so the initial direction of the company and the product is very different than what Wiz is today. And I think it's a testament to, you know, not only our co-founders, but a corporate philosophy of we should always be listening first and asking questions more than speaking. And so when I see the— when I saw the initial demand, some of it was misunderstood, some of it was dated because the conversation had transpired months prior and they weren't actually aware of what we were doing now or how we had evolved. But I think just through network and interaction and asking really thoughtful questions, we were able to create a pool of demand through our network, just, just sitting down and calling people that we worked with or we knew or whatever and just saying, hey, let us show you what we're up to. Let us try to explain it. And then hopefully you can help make us better.
Again, this theme of leveraging network. Um, it sounds like that was done at the founder level, um, uh, when it comes to demand gen, customer acquisition, generating calls to learn about, uh, problems that potential customers were facing. And then founders would go back and design the solution over time based off of what they would learn.