Marketing in the Age of AI with Wiz's CMO Raaz Herzberg

It's such an evolving landscape. And so I want to be humble here and say, like, I don't think I know anything. But if I had to share my perspective, I think when I say superstar, I never thought about it from being, you know, a super hyper domain expert, but rather being a person that is extremely curious and just gets the job done. And I think that type of personality thrives right now in the AI landscape. One of the things as CMO I did a lot because again, the product is so like the domain is so technical. And one of the things that was so important to me is that every security person that reads something or hears something that comes out of Wiz is like, oh yeah, like they know what they're talking about. I would spend so much of my time like reviewing things, making sure that everything's like accurately technical. Now I built like a super easy GPT that we call like the Wiz spell checker that is used by every single person in the organization. What it does is it makes sure that it's like according to our brand and tone of voice, like you write a customer email, you put it there, technically accurate, uses the right gerund.

So it checks every customer communication. I think it's great if it does. I'm a super fan.

It helps you like write everything, right? But I still believe that at the end of the day, the people who are most successful are hungry and curious people. Because to your point, I really don't know anything. Like the tools I used 6 months ago are not the tools I use today.

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We're gonna talk about AI a bit with Roz. Lot of topics to get into, but we will start with a quick background and introduction. So for those who don't know today's guest with us today, we've got Roz Hesburgh. She is the CMO of Wiz. Roz, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me. Great to have you.

For those who don't know Roz's background formally, maybe you read it a little bit with the announcement of the Google intent to buy Wiz, but for those who don't know, Roz was actually appointed CMO of Wiz with a product background. So no prior experience in marketing. Just by way of introduction. How did that go? How did that actually work? Just as like, I feel like that's a good place to start off for the day.

Yeah, it's still going. Yes, just for context, like, being the CMO at Wiz was my first marketing role. At the time, I joined Wiz as one of like the first 5 employees, and I joined as a first product role. And for the first 2 and a half years of Wiz, I led the product organization. And I still remember the day that our CEO, Asaf, asked me to kind of take over the marketing function, and my answer was like, "No, what are you talking about?" I mean, just to put it into context, I have never been on a go-to-market org before, right? Like, I was always on the engineering side. I did not know the first thing about marketing. I mean, when I took the role, I have never heard the term MQL or I knew what Padlin was, but like very high level, right? They've never heard of like PM or PR agency, like nothing. What they didn't know was I knew our business inside out. So like building the product for the first 2, 2.5 years, what I did was, you know, work with customers from the beginning. I sold to a lot of customers. In some ways, like I helped shape the selling process in Liz. Like I helped, you know, what is the first step? What does a successful POB look like? I knew the customers and the product. And our business inside out, but I knew nothing about marketing.

I mean, Wiz blew up, right? I mean, but in general, I think it did like 1 to 100 in 18 months or 20 months or something like that. How did you, as an engineer turned marketing, what like dataset did you focus on initially? Like, what did you try to— I'm sure your brain initially is, what can I optimize, right? What can I hack? And so, because I'm actually seeing this more and more often, more and more folks are approaching marketing from an engineering perspective. So what were the first couple of things you attacked?

I think not knowing marketing really shaped the way I came to think about it because I knew exactly what I was trying to solve. Our problem at that time was nobody heard of Wiz at all. Nobody heard of Wiz. We had great product-market fit, right? But what would happen to us is we would meet a customer, right? It's a big enterprise. We would meet a customer and we would, you know, have a great first meeting and they would be like, oh my God, this looks so good. I wish I heard about it like 3 months ago when I just signed with one of your competitors. I did not know this existed even. And that's like, you know, it's like a knife to your heart because we know that had he heard of us, had we been part of that process, we believe that he would have bought Wiz, right? So our pain point was nobody heard of Wiz. So I did not know anything about marketing, but I came into Wiz like, okay, what are all the things I can do? To solve that problem. I just want the right person, like, I want security buyers. Wiz is a security product. I want security buyers, I want cybersecurity buyers to hear about Wiz and ideally know that Wiz does cloud security so that if they need something for cloud security, they think of Wiz. That was the problem I set to solve. I was not focused on building pipeline because I did not even know I was supposed to be focused on that. I was just, like, thinking in terms of how do I solve this problem as fast as I can? Whatever it takes.

That's a good one. One of the points you brought up and something we talk a lot on SaaStr, I know Jason has some takes on this as well, is how technical do you need to be, right? So Wiz is a fairly technical product. Obviously you had, you had more of the technical background than maybe a more traditional CMO would have had. Like, how do you feel like that also helped make it work, right? And then how did you maybe evolve that to say, okay, now that I know I have to own this marketing function, how can I actually make that exciting? Because security is a little bit traditionally a bit more boring than selling like a marketing or now an AI piece of software.

Yeah, it's a really good question. So again, I go back to like the core problem. Nobody heard of us. And so my solution to that was making it exciting, like I wanted to stand out 'cause I was just trying to make people hear about me, right? So, like, whatever it needs, I wanted to stand out. I wanted to look different so that if you see it somewhere, you remember it and you can come back to it 'cause it stands out so much. And being in the security domain for— being technical, but specifically being in the security domain and being a security practitioner, I knew how everything else sounded and looked like. Security products, typically were like black and red type of thing that really most of the marketing was done on like scaring people. Hey, I will help you prevent this bad thing from happening. And as an actual technical practitioner, first of all, it's never what I want to hear. It's just not. I like to hear like positive things. I don't like people stressing me out. My job is hard enough. And also because I understand the reality of how complex it is to protect an organization, that also never resonated well for me. So, what I was able to do was kind of like take those two things and be, "Okay, I wanna sound different, I wanna look different, and I wanna make it fun." Like, I know what's funny for my audience. I know the jokes, I know the inside jokes, I know like where they read, I know what they like to read. So, how do I kind of combine those things to make it fun and stand out? And specifically talk to them. Like, for example, right, like, you know, in April's day, we, April's Fool's Day, we did like, we released the meditation app for cyber practitioners. It has like guided meditation sessions because cybersecurity is stressful with like really deep cyber jokes, right? That's a funny thing that can get shared within my audience. And it's just like weird. It's like out there and it's funny. It's like deep and good. So, Those are the types of things I did to stand out fast, but also catch exactly my right audience. And the second thing was like, I knew I was really focused on grabbing attention, 'cause that was my problem. So I always thought like, what is interesting for my audience? You know, I don't believe it's ever hearing about product. That is because you're caught up in your own doing. Even as, you know, like even I like Instagram, right? I'm never gonna read a blog about the new Instagram feature. So why would somebody who does not use my product read the blog about my features, right? So it was more about, I know it's interesting for my audience because I am my audience. Yeah. And how do I like release things fast that speak to them?

Just on finding early traction and marketing and a little bit about maybe we can share what's working now a bit is how did you find the right buyers initially?

Yeah, it's a really good question. I do think that obviously a lot is changing and a lot is also changing fast and a lot is still changing. So, definitely, I don't have, like, all the answers, but I think it's important to always be attached to today and tomorrow, and I don't think, like, today's ahead. I still think that a lot of the core principles we incorporated is, at least for our audience, which is a very deeply technical audience, right? I'm selling, like, a very technical product for security people, for engineers, you have to go very deep. So shallow content was never enough, but really deep content still requires a lot of work, and it's not something that can be easily automated around, but you really need that core expertise. For example, one of the things we— that works really well for us right now is really releasing— they're called CTFs in the cybersecurity world, but releasing really complex challenges that teach people how to do security hands-on. Like, you can think of them almost like websites that are like security riddles, teaching you cybersecurity, but making it fun and engaging and gamifying it. There's a lot of work that goes into it. It's like very deep content. Those things always work for me because I think the reality is you are truly just giving somebody really good value, and you're speaking in their language, and you're being very specific in what you do. And that I feel still works for me really well. And it does, it is able to, it is able to shine in the sea of SEO-type generated content, which I agree is now overflowing.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Especially because AI has made content creation both easier and harder. As you were just related to, as you were building out the marketing function at Wiz, because how did you build out that team, right? Like who were the first 10 hires that you made? What did you have have them do to build out this function?

Yeah, so I built what I still to this day call like the growth marketing team. Those were like my first personal hires. So, I hired that team of like brilliant people, some of the best marketers out there that are just like doers. They do a ton of crazy things, like people who made things go viral in whatever domain. I was not looking for cyber experts. I know cyber. I needed people that know how to make things like go viral and deliver them end-to-end. So, that was like my first hire. It was like those kind of like doers on the growth marketing team. It's not a traditional function, I think, but to this day, it's very, very impactful. I also brought design completely in-house. So, there was like a lot of contractors. I just, I really love design and I think it's a core part of a company and an identity. So, I brought the design team in-house. Today in Wiz, the marketing team is actually structured untraditionally. So, like, about a year ago, I actually split the marketing org so that the field marketing org is under the sales org, which, because to me, it's so attached to regional and to sales, and it's not that domain-specific, and everything that's, like, domain-specific reports to me. So, it's a very untraditional structure, which, again, marketing is so diverse. I have to say, somebody who has not come from marketing, it was always so confusing to me that everything has to live, you know, like nothing is that similar to anything else within the marketing org. So I think there's a lot of ways to structure marketing teams.

If we're on the constructing the function of marketing, what I've seen, Roz, just relatively recently with hypergrowth companies like Wiz, and I've seen this a lot is I am seeing more and more CROs and revenue leaders build what I call parallel marketing organizations. Like they're tired that either marketing is getting me the wrong type of leads, right? Or I need more enterprise and marketing's giving mid-market, or I just need— and they are not— I haven't seen any CROs say, hey, I want to take over brand collateral and building booths. Okay. I've yet to see that, but I am seeing more and more CROs build a parallel marketing org, mostly around demand. And I don't just mean hiring SDRs. I mean, building a parallel org. Have you seen that? Have you thought about whether those lines should blur or change when there's hypergrowth?

Very interesting. I think blurry lines are a good thing. I mean, I have to say in Wiz, I think we've always had a lot of blurry lines. I think really being involved in sales processes, which I am still to this day involved in deals, I think it's meaningful. It's really meaningful. It keeps you in touch with the sales org in a very meaningful way. I can understand why, let's put it this way, if our CRO started building a shadow marketing org, then I think it's a great learning opportunity for me. I believe people should do whatever they need to succeed. So, it's a good chance to understand like, what are they doing that the marketing team did not do? But it doesn't matter. I think there's many ways of having structures in orgs, and I think orgs are very different. So, not necessarily seeing it as a problem. I think it could be a good opportunity. At the end of the day, I work for the sales team. That's how I see it in B2B, right? I do. I work for the sales team. Either I'm helping them close deals and get customers, or I'm not helping them close deals and get customers. I mean, if I was a CRO and I was unhappy, I might have done just that.

It's not so much that I— some of it's probably unhappiness, right? What I'm seeing as, as the best just grow faster, right, is a recognition. Look, the reality is some CMOs are more passionate about certain functions than others, right? Some, maybe for, from an engineering background, you may love the quantitative side. You may love campaigns and demand gen and staring at spreadsheets. There are CMOs who are great at brand and Wiz is so big today. You could probably just do brand, right? Because that's your goal is to reinforce deals. Like you get into deals, right? There are CMOs who love field as crazy as it is. They love, they know that they, they're really good at events and their competition isn't. So they know that 40% of pipe in the enterprise. So they just hustle field. But they ignore smaller customers. Like, I've never seen a CMO that's great at field and great at, like, the low end. So what I'm seeing is CROs say, listen, let's keep everybody in their lane. And I'm gonna backfill my org. And if you're good at content or event or fields or brand or demand gen, I'm gonna do the other stuff. You're a CMO, you don't like getting out to events, I'm gonna do it myself. Like, I'm gonna get on the road. It, it's just a new theme because it, I just think most CMOs have like 2 or 3 things they like to do. And the rest they sort of hand off to their team or are mediocre at.

I think it makes a lot of sense. I also said like our structure is not traditional. I don't do field anymore. I mean, and I think it's part of it. Like it is a very, very, very diverse role. Like it, there's so many things in marketing and it's not even just in the marketing or like, I would argue that as a B2B enterprise product, our salespeople own a lot of the brand. Like at the end, they meet the team and it's about how they interact and how they behave and you know, the culture that they put out there. If I'm like a very fun and approachable brand, but then, you know, you meet my salesperson and you have a really bad experience, it does not matter. So the whole thing to me is like one task for the company. I just, I personally, to, I mean, I know being outside of the marketing org, right? I know how almost like scary it was to hear CMOs talk because they would use all those things like, like the demand gen and the top of funnel and like, Brand versus this versus that. And I mean, now I know all those terms, but I still try not to think about them too much. I mean, at the end of the day, if you don't split it into those categories, then the problem CMOs have to solve for is I want to make sure the right buyers hear about me and feel positively about me, and that should help the sales process. And so that's when, like, that is what we do. So in my mind, that's the focus and it's not broken up into those like category so bluntly in a sense. Like a year ago, I broke off the field marketing org, which reported to the CMO, and it now reports to our sales leaders.

That's interesting right there. You broke it off, right? It reports, right?

Exactly.

Exactly. Because I really felt that, like, first of all, I feel personally, I think being a very successful field marketer has more to do with having very tight alignment with your regional sales director. I mean, that's the KPI for me is are they happy with them? And the way I like hire field marketers was to ask the regional sales director, have you worked with somebody you liked before? Because that will make it successful. So, like, in some ways, I did not have a lot to give there, right? Like, it's not something I felt like it's so important for them. I want the sales org to choose them and like them and work with them. I will still give the content. I will still tell them how the event should look like, what to do, like, but it's more important that they work closely together. Things are very regional. So in my mind, that belongs with sales. It also works that way when you hire, like you hire X salesperson in Y region, you get the field marketers that'll like put it there. Yeah.

Well, that is interesting. It makes sense if the, if the CRO is up for it, right? You have to make sure you have a great VP there because there's no way a CRO wants to go into the minutia of, of ordering the popcorn cart for a, They just want to influence pipeline and maybe generate leads, right? That's all they care about.

Yeah. But also, of course, it's not like they went anywhere. We were there to build a good VP there and like to, to make that work. But yes.

Just one nerdy question on it, because we could spend, but I do think that's a really interesting story. Just from a budget perspective, when you move it over from marketing to sales, does that become part of, does sales get more heads and more budget? Does it stay in your budget? Like, how did you guys just figure out how to allocate 'Cause even at Wiz of Scale, budget's fixed, right? It's going to be some percent of revenue that you get to spend.

Yeah, moved it over with the heads in the budget, of course.

Well, the budget too, right? So yeah, not everyone wants to release, not every CMO wants to release any budget. There are fiefdoms out there in the world. There are a few folks who run fiefdoms and the last thing they wanted to do is release any budget.

You know, I do think that one thing that can be underplayed in the fact that I didn't start it with as a CMO is that I exactly have always had a bit of the privilege to not live and die on metrics and have a lot of trust. So, I'm, I was never afraid to let go of budgets or numbers or be, or saying, you know what, this measurement of pipeline, I know it looks good for my team, but I actually think it's like completely meaningless and I'm gonna focus my energy on what I actually think closes deals and help sell Wiz, because that's what I'm here for, it enables you to do things very differently. I think it's very hard as marketers to work because you have to like gain that trust and you have to show the numbers, but in a lot of ways, they can also lead you in the right direction sometimes. So, that's another core advantage I had by not starting as a CMO, but by starting from a place where I had all the trust in the world by the exact and founding team because I was almost like part of that before I took over the marketing role.

Got it. Let me, um, take you a different way. Curious what you're thinking today, because this is probably the number one question everyone has, right? How do you think AI is going to change the roles of specific marketing functions over the next 6, 12, 18 months? I mean, we're already seeing it's faster. I mean, we already Every time, like, look, we're tiny. Okay. But every time someone's left, broadly speaking, we've replaced them with AI.

Interesting.

In marketing, in what we call marketing. How dynamic do you think it is? What jobs do you think are at risk? Right? How are you thinking about how it will change the human side of marketing?

Yeah, it's a good question. And really, I have to say, like, I don't feel anywhere near a marketing expert, right? So, like, truly, I am I'm still very new to marketing and sales.

We're all still learning.

Still learning, right? I really think that, I mean, if I look at my own team, right, which is the only thing I really understand and know about, if I look at my own team, every single person on my team has dramatically transformed the way they work. And that was also something that I would not compromise on. Like, when we do team meetings, right, when we do, like, quarterly summaries where people present what they worked, every person has to say, like, what am I doing with AI and show cool things to the team. And we've been doing that for at least over a year. So, it upscaled the capability of people to be effective 100x. I mean, I've definitely, honestly, I've slowed hiring, but I think amazing people are just now 100 times more amazing and 100 times more effective, but I still need the amazing people. I never had or believed in like big teams and hiring a lot of people for, I was always about like, I think a superstar can do so many things, and now a superstar can do really endless amount of things. Yeah. So that's how I see it.

So superstars for sure, right? But in my limited experience, sometimes the folks that were superstars in 2021 are not always superstars in the age of AI. Do you think you can reskill people? Like, a lot of folks are talking about reskilling go-to-market people in the age of AI. But honestly, just between us and whoever's watching on streaming, I think reskilling is tough. I don't— I just showing up with a recipe that you got on ChatGPT to your marketing team doesn't count as being an AI native. We had a CMO summit at SaaStr Annual this year. I mean, come next year, we had hundreds and this Amelia led it. It was the quiet theme backstage. I don't know if I'm reskilling myself enough. I don't know if I may. I can go deploy Clay and buy some tools and that's great, but I don't, I'm not sure I understand this stuff.

It's such an evolving landscape. And so I want to be humble here and say, like, I don't think I know anything, but if I had to share my perspective, I slightly disagree there, right? Like, I think when I say superstar, I never thought about it from being, you know, a super hyper domain expert, but rather being a person that is extremely curious and just gets the job done. And I think that type of personality thrives right now in the AI landscape. One of the things as CMO I did a lot, because again, the product is so, like, the domain is so technical, and one of the things that was so important for me is that every security person that reads something or hears something that comes out of Wiz is like, "Oh yeah, like, they know what they're talking about." I know from being on the other side that oftentimes, I would read something and it would not be the right tone of voice, right? Like, you can see that the person writing it was not using the right jargon, like the inside jargon. So, I would spend so much of my time, like, reviewing things, making sure that everything's, like, accurately technical. Now, I built, like, a super easy GPT that we call, like, the Wiz spell checker that is used not by marketing, it's used by every single person in the organization. What it does is it makes sure that it's, like, according to our branded tone of voice. Like, you write a customer email, You put it there, technically accurate, uses the right year of billing. So, I think—

It checks every customer communication? Well, I think it's great if it does. I'm a super fan.

It can help. Yes. It helps you like write everything, right? And it also makes sure, for example, like one of the key things is, is, uh, one of our brand core principles is being humble. Like, I will never tell somebody, let's say I lost, let's say we lost a deal. I never want an AE to write and be like, I want them to write back and say like, We'd love to learn more. Like, we wanna learn from you, right? So, this also helps me with those types of things. So, you can build a tool and give it to everybody, and you can do that with AI tools today like you could have never done before, but I still believe that at the end of the day, the people who are most successful are hungry and curious people. 'Cause to your point, I really don't know anything. Like, the tools I used 6 months ago are not the tools I use today, and the tools that we'll use 2 months from now will be new tools. And in every subdomain, there's so much to discover that they just need curious people who are not afraid to like figure it out. And that, I think those people thrive.

What percent of folks do you really think are that curious?

A lot. A ton. And with—

I don't.

I believe you.

You're much more successful than me. I want to believe like a lot of people are this curious today, but I feel like it might only be like 10 or 15%.

Well, oh, that's very possible, but when you hire, you hire for that 10-15%. I mean, look, I, hiring, I said it at the beginning, I am obsessed with it because I do think I know nothing around it. Like, I want to hire for that 15% and I'm willing to do whatever it takes to hire for that 15%. And honestly, I want to say that in Wids, we've always been focused from day one on hiring people that are humble, have a growth mindset, and are obsessed with growing. And, you know, we have, of course, like the privilege of being able to hire for that, but that has always been a key priority.

So let me ask you related to this, because I just think the world is changing, right? Expectations for marketing and sales. I was on a sales call this week for an AI tool where I'm a power user. I've been a user since day one. This is a company that's 2 years old. I've been a customer for like 20 months.

Okay.

So I know this product pretty good. Okay. But I don't actually know the new enterprise edition. That's coming out. And I got on a, on a call, a Zoom with the head of sales, and I just instantly knew the product better than he did. Everything. It was 80 minutes of torture. And my point of the story is we could, I mean, it's pretty funny, is I think before AI, you might tolerate this. You'd roll your eyes. I think the customers are too smart in the GPT era. We won't, I guess, can't tolerate that. I can't tolerate a marketer a GTM, a salesperson that's not smarter than me. I just can't stand it anymore.

I agree.

So how do we enable our GTM teams to be— I think they have to be smarter than their customers in 2026.

I think they always have to be smarter. I think from day one, like, I never aim for mediocrity, honestly. So you're right. Like, I think there is— I think the bar is getting higher, right? But I also think that you should never aim that low. So like, in my opinion, like that salesperson who joined the call with you, right? That was never okay. It was not okay before AI. And I agree with you. That's the thing. I think like mediocrity now is not hard to automate.

Yeah. Could I ask one last— I know we're jumping around a million. Going back in the early days, you said your number one job was folks loved Wiz, but no one had heard of Wiz despite the media growth. For things like brand marketing, awareness, getting out there, How do you measure it? How do you measure it as a touch? How do you measure it in attribution? How do you measure its contribution to pipeline in sales? You know, I think all of us go through— if when we're first-timers, we're initially skeptical of a lot of this stuff, we're like, oh my God, billboards, the dumbest thing in the world, right? And then you realize, like, they work, like, because they're a touch. They are, you know, if you're doing them right. And so how do you— how did you measure it? Measure its contribution, that kind of stuff on the, on the quantify it.

Yeah, I think because I came over to marketing from an engineer perspective, people really expected me to be like so obsessed with the numbers and not care about brand when actually in reality, I kind of felt like the thing that will actually help me close deals is the brand side, like people hearing about us, hearing good things. First of all, I'll say that To this day, I'm involved in deals and I, you could sense it changing very easily over time. Like, when I started, we would walk into a room and it was cold, right? Like, you would start from zero. You would have to be like, hi, I'm Wiz, we are a cloud security company. And then over time, you feel that the worms get, the room gets warmer, right? Now you walk into a room, it's warm and your AEs feel it too. So there's also measurements that are not just numbers, but when it comes to numbers, I track a couple of things. First of all, my audience, my buyer, the budget at the end comes from CISOs, the senior executive that owns a security budget. They are a lot on LinkedIn. Like, I track how well we do on LinkedIn, how fast do we grow. I need that exponential growth on LinkedIn. That's a good indication for me for brand because I can see the amount of buyers that are subscribing to my content there. Then I have the other type of people, the people who actually use Wiz, like the, I mean, at the end you'll have a CISO approve the budget or approve the project, but there's going to be a team of cloud security engineers and a team of engineers actually testing the product. So, for them, I measure different things, like that specific community, the InfoSec community, it's on Twitter. It's in different communities, it's in mass, like I measure those things as well. So, I don't only look at the high-level, like data and touchpoints, but I also measure some key indicators that for me, just always have to show exponential growth. I look at the number and I want it to grow exponentially, meaning you have to grow 20% quarter by quarter.

Yeah.

Once they, like, you know, touchpoints and attribution and pipeline, oh my God, there's so many ways to measure it. I just want it to grow exponentially, really. Every time you have a new sales leader, you measure it differently, whatever it is, I want it to grow 20% quarter over quarter. I just want it not linear. That's what I want.

Yeah, it is. It's interesting just because folks are obsessed with it that the first thing you brought up was that the CISOs are all on LinkedIn. What's the, um, what do you think the quality bar is? You have to add some value. LinkedIn, there's just so much content by the same time, right? And what's the bar? How do you think about adding enough value, or what does it take to build that, that those eyeballs from CISOs on LinkedIn? What have you learned?

Yeah, being different, being a domain and your expert, like really bringing value, really, and not selling anything. Again, I'm trying to talk to people. Who have not yet bought my product. So obviously talking too much about my product is not interesting. Like, how interested are you in hearing about the tool you do not use, right? Like, not a lot, right? But like, if I know your domain and I bring you truly the best and deepest content in your domain, by the way, like you are doing very successfully, right? I've heard of Faster.ai. Why have I heard about it? Why do I listen to the episodes, right? Like, I think it's genuinely, truly good content, right? That is what makes me subscribe. It is sometimes as simple as that. So how do we deliver really deep content?

You know, it's interesting what you just said, and maybe you were oversimplifying, which is fine, but it's interesting when you talked about content that folks who aren't your customers want to see. Why is that? If you add value to your existing customers, Like they're going to like CISOs are friends. They have their own communities. They get together for dinners, right? They're going to sell Wiz for you as much as you are yourself. Why would you? I'm just, I'm just secure. I don't, I don't have an opinion, but why would you want to bias your content so much on prospects versus existing customers?

Um, just because like they're still the same people. So almost like, let's say that's true. Like I have a group of 100 CISOs and out of them, like 50 are Wiz customers.

Yes.

I'd still rather use the bigger denominator, which are like mark— like really get good value to people. And also, I have to say, I also think as customers, you're still not really interested in— when I build a product, I'm in my own echo chamber. So, for me, Wiz is super, super interesting, right? But realistically, if I'm a user, I have so many things going on in my universe, right? So, even for Wiz customers, I think there's something interesting and broader content and deep security content. So, for example, we have the best security content in the world when it comes to protecting cloud environments. Like, you want how to secure cloud environments? Truly, we have the best content in the world. That is important. It's deep. It's by top security researchers in the world discovering new things. It's by building, coding websites and coding training. So, to me, that is, like, a better way of of giving my expertise. Unless you want to buy a cloud security product right now, then my content is not, you know what I mean? Like, I would rather that when the time is right, you would be like, "Oh, I wanna buy it from those experts in cloud security," and then you can read all about the product. But I don't think I'm gonna, like, bring a lot of people in by writing all day about my product.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] No, no, for sure. At least I, I've, it's just fun to ask these questions. That makes sense. I just, sometimes though, when you want when you are a leader, seeing something really detailed like how Wiz is implementing MCP, right? It may be very interesting. It shows you're a leader. It shows— or a new product extension, even though I'm not even— I'm not even a customer today. That shows that it's the kind of attention and these are the things I'm interested in learning more about, these specific pieces versus broad content of how artificial intelligence is creating more threats. In security, like sometimes it's vague stuff that marketers put out to, again, going a couple steps back to smart buyers, you roll your eyes. I want to hear, okay, MCP is really interesting. MCP is also a security risk. Like just generally speaking, how is Wiz thinking about maybe one of the hottest topics in enterprise software? It has MCP itself, and yet MCP is like this weird whole, like, It's fascinating, right? I'm just picking one out from the Wiz library, but, um—

It's a very good point, and I think it's exactly that intersection, right? You also started from like, what is most interesting right now, right? And then what's your perspective on it, whether it's a perspective or a security perspective, but that is the right thing to be talking about. Hence, you see, you see the blog, but don't get me wrong, it's of course like a balance. I mean, we also post a lot about the product and everything in it, but it's always this balance of like, how do I always grow my audience? That is what I'm trying to do at the end. I mean, we are still like—

That's the KPI, grow the audience, right?

Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. And how do you, sorry, we can keep going out, but it's just so interesting when you wanna grow your audience and CISOs obviously the bullseye, right? How do you think about other stakeholders in the organization and marketing to them?

No, CISOs are one part of it, but in the end, my, My best friends are the users. They're the ones that at the end of the day have to love the product, have to use it, have to talk about it in their communities. So, absolutely, it's not just, we don't market just for the buyers. We market for the users at the end. That's almost like the most important element.

[Speaker:JASON M. LEMKIN] Yeah, and is the, do you try to like, for sure, and maybe that's the answer, right? But is that, is it, you've got DevOps teams, you've got end security teams, you've got folks just managing cloud accounts that you, that are in Wiz, right? They've got probably different types of content that they're interested in and different ways to measure community size, right? It's a, it's a different number. Like Figma just filed the IPO, right? They have their end users, they have designers, and they have all different stakeholders and they're measuring growth for each of those constituents, right? Sometimes it's hard to target all 4 or 5 with one set of LinkedIn content.

I don't know, for sure. That's this one community that lives in one, one space, like security engineers live in a different place and you have a completely different set of things for them. It's not just one group of audience and one content stream or one approach. It's everything together.

Well, no, it's super helpful.

Roslyn, I know you've probably got to jump soon. We've had so much good audience, like, chatter interaction. So, honestly, come back anytime. Just ask for either virtually or in person. Let me just ask you a last, maybe to tie everything together and just like wrap it up and try and give folks a little bit of advice to tie into some of the audience comments that have come in. So you've talked about marketing, you talked about being very involved in sales, in field, being, you know, obsessed with recruiting, trying to find that 10 to 15% that you want to hire. That's like the very best that do know AI. That are doing interesting things with AI on their own already, regardless of what Wiz is doing. Since in the last year, right, like Alphabet from Google agreed to buy Wiz for $32 billion, which is quite an accomplishment. So let's end on a high note. Congrats on that. But just to tie that into the next phase in a very SaaS-style way, like what do you— what are you thinking about in this next phase?

Right?

Like obviously things have changed a lot. You've been an early employee of Wiz, you've been on the entire journey so far. What are you thinking about? And I know you'll probably say you're not an expert, you don't have all the answers, but just give us, you know, your best either gut feeling or intentions on where do you see this going? You could talk about marketing or product or sales. You're involved in everything, right? Like, where do you see this going now in the next evolution of Wiz?

I think we're still In early days, that is truthfully, I think we feel like everything is in the cloud and everything is AI, and in reality, like 90% of the workloads in the world are not on cloud even. So, just like we're so early in the journey, AI is only pushing teams like faster and faster to the cloud and to adopting new technology.

I love how $32 billion, you're like, I'm just getting started.

That is basically how you feel. I feel like that we have a great start, but we're just starting.

I think that's great. Any parting advice? Because I know we talked a little bit about it, but we have so many founders. There are a lot of marketers on today and a lot of sales folks, but any last advice for founders that are trying to hire that great 10 to 15%?

Wow. I think it's not compromising. You sometimes feel like, okay, I'll just bring in somebody. Like, it's the most important thing. I just want to take this off my plate. Yeah. No, it's like a wedding. You have to build your A-team. It's forever. Like, and every single person you hire should be your best hire ever. And unless you leave an interview very excited, excited, like, I wish this person was here right now. Like, you know, he lifted the energy in the room or in the Zoom, don't get him. Like, no, really, like, don't compromise.

That's a compromise everybody makes, right? Well, it's been 3 months.

So don't, don't compromise. The right person will come. There's so many talented people, truly. I love it.

Well, thanks so much for doing this. I think that's great. We all have to try and strive to get to that bar. I think people lower the bar at times, so I think it's good advice. Thanks so much for doing this. So thanks so much for doing this again. So—

It's terrific. Yeah.