SaaStr AI on Wednesdays: Live with the CMO of Wiz

live. I'm gonna pin myself and some of our panelists. Hold on real quick. Okay, sweet. Welcome back. We took a short break from these actually to do SAS Re:Invent. I was gonna say last month, but now it's July. So back in May, super fun. We're doing London in December. We're doing a lot of AI stuff in between now and then. We're gonna talk about AI a bit with Raz. A lot of topics to get into. So for—

I'm—

we're just going to jump right in, 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 Hedzberg. She is the CMO of Wiz. Roz, thanks for joining us today.

Thank you for having me.

Yeah, great to have you. I know you've been a longtime reader of the SaaStr content and a consumer of it. So this will be great to see yourself coming up on Saastr.com now. There is a lot we want to get into, but just for introductions, right? As, because folks are still joining and, and just to help warm, warm, warm up the room, the room a bit. Um, for those who don't know Raz'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, Raz 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? Like, 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. So I mean, 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 2.5 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, like, 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 mean, I knew what pipeline was, but like very high level, right? I've never heard of like PM or PR agency, like nothing. What they didn't know is I knew our business inside out. So like building the product for the first 2, 2 and a half 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 Wiz. Like, I helped, you know, what is the first deck? What does a successful POV look like? I knew the customers and the product and, and our business inside out, but I knew nothing about marketing. Um, yeah, what did you—

but 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 data set did you focus on initially? Like, what did you try out? I'm sure your brain initially is, what can I optimize, right? What can I hack? And so, 'cause 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 things you attacked?

Yeah, it's, it, I think not knowing marketing really shaped the way I came to think about it. 'Cause 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. They 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. Cool.

That's a good one. It's, um, one of the points you brought up, um, and something we talk a lot on SaaStr, I know Jason M. Lemkin has some takes on this as well, is how, 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?

Because it is, and also like, sorry, as a maybe second tail part of that question is sometimes security is like a little bit boring. So like, I, you know, based on, I guess just two-part question there. One, how much being technical and knowing the product helped, right? You talked about it a bit. Maybe you could share a bit more. 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's a little bit, you know, traditionally a bit more boring than selling like a marketing or now an AI piece of software.

Yeah, it's, 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 because I was just trying to make people hear about me, right? So like, whatever it needs, I want to stand out. I want to look different so that if you see Wiz somewhere, you remember it and you can come back to it because 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 things that really most of the marketing was done on, like, scaring people. Like, 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 want to sound different. I want to look different and I want to make it fun. Like, I know it's funny for my audience, right? 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 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 a meditation app for cyber practitioners. It has like guided meditation sessions because cybersecurity is stressful with like really deep cyber jokes, right?

Yeah.

That's 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 they 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 because 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 a product. That is because you're caught up in your own doing. I mean, even as you know, like even I like Instagram, right? I'm never going to read a blog about the new Instagram feature. Right. 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?

Yep. I know we're jumping around. I don't know what the exact agenda is. Can I ask another question? I'm curious about Raz from a marketing perspective. It seemed to me as an outsider, again, not an expert, that Wiz had a either direct or close competitor called Lacework, and Lacework ultimately was not successful, right? It ultimately was not. You guys almost bought them, right? Um, but the marketing really seemed strong. Like, like, from a lay perspective, it seemed like they were everywhere, right? They were directly competing. Um, lessons learned when you have a competitor that obviously is inferior, objectively speaking, but man, is the marketing strong? Like, because that does happen, right? You could— it is not— I mean, you can, you can out-market others, right? And you can market beyond your product's capability, your competitive. I thought they did a good job positioning themselves in the market beyond their competitive positioning.

Interesting. First of all, I have a lot of respect for Lacework. I mean, we have to remember Lacework started many years before Wiz. Many years before with. So I do think of them like as pioneers in the cloud security domain. I have a lot of respect for Lacework. Being successful is hard and there's so many different things that have to go right, to your point. And marketing is one of those things for sure, but it's not the only thing at all. I mean, I think, you know, being on the product team, I think, I think you naturally underplay how important marketing is. Being on the marketing team, you might underplay how important the product is. But the reality is like building a successful company is so insanely hard because everything has to be good. So you can't have like only one outshine the other, but you really need, you know, like you need, you know, we talk about those things, but like the reality of companies is to build a very successful company, you need a very strong HR function, right? Like you need a very strong corp dev function. You need, I mean, you need everything to be top notch. And so I think just looking at it from an outbound marketing perspective, Yes, will— can you build an insanely successful company without having a really good marketing function? No, but it, but it's not enough on its own. So I think that's where those things came into play. Yeah.

A question I want to incorporate here from the audience, which I think is a good one, just on finding early traction in marketing and a little bit about maybe we can share what's working now a bit is One, how did you find the right buyers initially?

Right.

I think really the question from the audience here is a lot of channels seem to have degraded. We've, we've talked about that a bit on SaaStr. So maybe let's tackle that first and then we'll do a follow-up on maybe what's working now.

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 2 days 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. And 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 you know, 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 we talked about a little bit in the backstage before folks joined. How did you build out that team, right? Like, who were the first 10 hires that you made? I don't— and maybe you can share how big your marketing team is now currently at Wiz, but like, who were the first 10 people? What did you 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 and those were just like kind of— I mean, I had a lot of thoughts on projects that could resonate to my community. For example, what I just mentioned, right? Like I'm doing this of like CTF. I needed somebody that was able to take a complex project end to end, like you need engineering, you need design, you need. So I hired that team of like brilliant people, Tom Orbach, some of the best marketers out there that are just like doers. They do a ton of crazy, 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 hires. 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 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 mean, 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 a marketing org. So I think there's a lot of ways to structure marketing teams.

Yeah, I've got kind of— Jason, you might have a follow-up. There's one follow-up I want to quickly ask is you mentioned doers. I know a lot of marketing teams sometimes will say, okay, I need a strategist. I feel like that is going away. That's like a very antiquated way now of thinking about who to hire in marketing. But just because there's so much AI now, like I don't know how you did this in the early days, or maybe how you think about it now, but when you're hiring, how do you separate, especially with marketers, like marketers like to market themselves. It's like salespeople, they like to sell themselves when they're, you know, going out for a job. Like how do you separate a marketer who's a doer versus a marketer who's a strategist?

It's a very good question. I am in general obsessed with hiring. I am like, I think, I think you got me. I think the most important thing is like to have the right people on my team and having like 5 excellent people on my team is better than having like 50 okay people on my team. I think the thing that helps me is like when I ask people about problems they solved or projects or things they've built, it's like you can kind of sense how much they go into details. People who like design the project or a process, they will kind of stop at some level of details. But people who really solved something completely can talk to you about every small detail in it, like every tiny detail. So, so that, that I think works really well for me.

Yeah.

How much?

Because you just said you're obsessed with hiring. How much time do you spend hiring and recruiting right now?

Well, depends on the— like, well, it really varies, but, but it's, it's an important task, like at least, at least a couple of hours a week. And I take it very seriously. Again, bringing somebody to a team where I really look at my team as like an A-team. I think it's critical to have the right people on board. And I'd rather spend, I will never hire out of urgency ever. Like I would rather spend 4 months looking for the right person, just me personally.

Can I ask a somewhat related question if we're on the, constructing the function of marketing. What I've seen, Ross, just relatively recently with hypergrowth companies, right? Like, 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, I mean it, I mean, 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 if you don't have a tight connection, then, I mean, let's put it this way. If our CRO started building a shadow marketing org, then I think it's, 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. So I mean, if I was a CRO and I was unhappy, I might have done just that.

I'm not so much for, I, I mean, you have so much great experience. 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, 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. Like 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's just a new theme because I mean, 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 mean, I think it makes— like, 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 that's part of it. Like, it is a very, very, very diverse role. Like, there's so many things in marketing and, you know, marketing is not even just in the marketing org. 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, 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 try 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 of 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 of 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.

Yeah.

And so that's why I'm like, that is what we do. So in my mind, that's the focus and it's not broken up into those like categories. So bluntly, in a sense, I hear it.

There's interesting when you said you don't do field anymore. What is that? I, when I was at re:Invent, it had to have been 40% security, right? Multimillion-dollar booths. I haven't been to RSA since pre-COVID, right? But what do you mean by that?

Sorry to cut you off. I meant exactly that. It's an unstructured, like it's an untraditional structure. Like a year ago I broke off the field marketing org, which reported to me as a CMO, and it now reports to our sales leaders. Exactly.

Well, 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 felt personally, I think being a very successful field marketer has more to do with having very tight alignment with your regional sales director.

Mm-hmm.

I mean, that's the KPI for me is, are they happy with them? And the way I like to hire field marketers was to ask 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 should you— but I don't need— 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 marketer. So like, put it there.

Yeah, well, that is interesting. So you raised your hand and said, listen, this is better off living in sales. You still own the same number overall. I assume your KPIs didn't materially change, though. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It makes sense 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 ordering the popcorn cart for— they just want, they just want to influence pipeline and maybe generate leads, right? That's all they care about.

Yeah. But also, of course, like, you know, it's not like we're— it's not like I 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? Because even at Wiz of Scale, budget's fixed, right? It's going to be some, some percent of revenue that you get to spend.

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

Well, the budget too, right? So, 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 a new budget.

You know, I do think that one thing that can be underplayed in, in the fact that, you know, I didn't start it with as a CMO is that I exactly have always had a bit of the privilege, right, 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 going to focus my energy on what I actually think closes deals and helps 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 founding team, because I was almost like part of that before I took over the marketing role.

Got it. Let me Take it a different way. Curious what you're thinking today, because this is probably the number one question everyone has, right? As you know, what, 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 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.

And then marketing and what we call marketing. What do you— how dynamic do you think it is? What jobs do you think are at risk? Right. How do you— 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 still very marketing.

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 work, 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 100, like 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, but, 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, can do so many things and now a superstar can do really endless amount of things. Yeah. So that's how I see it.

Do you think you can, 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, right? 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 the 221 people here and whoever's watching on streaming, I think reskilling is tough. I don't— I just showing up with it, with it, with a recipe that you got on ChatGPT to your marketing team doesn't count as being an AI native, I don't think. Right. I think more folks are struggling with this than— 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'm AI. I, 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.

Yeah.

And I mean, first again, I, I have to say like it's, it's such an evolving landscape as well. And so I'm, I wanna 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, extremely curious and just gets the job done. And I think that type of personality thrives right now in the AI landscape. And, you know, I'll give you an example from one of the teams that One of the people on my team that uses AI in the most innovative way is my head of design, my head of brand and design, Roy. He is a designer. You would kind of think like, you know, this is like as remote from him as it gets, right? Like he's like a designer, like he draws things. But if you have the hunger to learn and that curiosity, the amount of work you can do is endless. So I do think at the end, like you said, tooling, retooling the I agree. Like, I think it's hard to push people, tell them to use things. You need to have somebody just curious to want to do the best he can, and then he kind of finds his way around things better than I could ever teach. So it's an average, right? There are tools that I have built for the entire org and for the entire company to make it easy for them to adopt. Like, I'll give you an example. One of the things that 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, right? 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 spellchecker 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 brand and tone of voice, like you write the customer email, you put it there, technically accurate, uses the right jargon.

So 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 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 want to 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. 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. 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, 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. Well, I, I, I believe you, you're much more successful than me.

I wanna believe like a lot of people are this curious today, but I feel like it might only be like 10 or 15%.

Well, well, oh, that's very possible.

Yeah.

But when you hire, you hire for that 10 and 15%. I mean, yeah, look, I hiring, I, I said, I said it at the beginning, I am obsessed with it. Yeah. Because I do think there's no nothing around it. Like I wanna 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 Wiz, 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.

Yeah. Let me— okay. Just, just because I have you for— 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, 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. Oh my God, the sales guy that, that, that, that barely knows how to spell Wiz, right? The marketer that just makes infographics all day. I don't— I think the customers are too smart in the GPT era. We won't— I just 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. But to be fair, so how do we enable our GTM teams to—

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.

CRO.

CRO. That's even worse.

CRO. Not a brand new term.

It's not 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. That's why you need people who have that.

Mediocrity is easy to automate today. That's the, in the AI world, right? That's the thing. You might as well automate mediocrity.

Exactly. Yeah.

Did you work on enablement at all as CMO? And if, if so, like, How did you set a bar? Like how smart the sales team had to be about going back to this point? And I think I can help. How do you know? I think everyone thinks they do a good job of this, but I'm not saying you didn't do— I mean, Wiz crushed it. I'm not sure we do as good a job with enablement as we think we do, or training. I don't— I don't— I'm not sure that our— these— all the sales reps I talked to the last 12 months are experts.

You know, it's so interesting because I'm, you know, I mentioned the original challenge I came into was like nobody heard of us, but the company has changed obviously so much. And one of the challenges is really like, how do you grow your team successfully? Like, how do you enable teams? I think I try to— I think it's a very hard problem and a very strategic problem because again, those are the people that you will end up talking to, just like you said, like at the end of the day, you join the call. That's the most important thing that happened to your interaction with that brand. Now, I try to— I do think that there's a lot of similarities, like the simplification of what I try to do with marketing is like simplify it, make it very clear what Wiz does, why, why is it helpful? That simplification is also really important now internally, like to onboard people, make it fun, make it simple, make it easy to consume. I also think there's a lot of, you know, things we are kind of stuck on. I mean, I can't expect people now to watch an hour-long training. I just don't think it's realistic. I think people are not used to it. I'd rather have like short 5-minute explanations that you can pull on demand. Like, I can't learn everything, but I want it to be very easy to consume and to be fun and to be quick. So I'm very interested in enablement and I partner super closely with our enablement team. And a lot of what my PMM team does, like my product marketing team, is actually that, like help enable also internally. So it's very critical and a very big challenge.

Yeah. Could I ask one last— I know we're jumping around, Amelia. I know there's a few questions maybe you could summarize from the chat. Before we run out of time.

Yeah.

Going back, I know we're, but this just is so interesting. Going back in the early days, you said your number one job was folks loved Wiz, but no one had heard of, heard of Wiz despite the media or growth, right? 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, I think all of us go through, if for 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, cuz they're a touch. They are like, like, you know, if you're doing them right. And so how, how do you, how did you measure it, measure its contribution, that kind of stuff on the, on the quantify it?

Yeah. You know, I, 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 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, the senior executive that owns a security budget. They are a lot on LinkedIn. Like I tracked how well we do on LinkedIn, how fast 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, I want to say 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, right? What's the— what do you think the quality bar is? Right. 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, 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. I mean, 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 a tool you do not use? I mean, 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 mean, I've heard of SaaStr. 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?

Yeah, it was interesting what you just said. And, 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—

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?

And 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, 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— I mean, 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 in broader content and in 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 to learn 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 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 want to buy it from those experts in cloud security, and then you read all about the product. But I don't think I'm going to like bring a lot of people in by writing all day about my product.

No, no, for sure. It's just fun to ask these questions. That makes sense. I just sometimes, though, when you want, when you 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 hole. Like, it's fascinating, right? I'm just picking one out from, from, 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—

That's the KPI, grow the audience. Right.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

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

Now, CISOs are one part of it, but at the end of the day, my, my best friends are the users. I mean, 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, it's, 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. Yeah.

And is that— do you try to like— for sure. And maybe that, maybe that's, that's the answer, right? But, you know, 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 IPO, right? They have, 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 just 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.

Cool. No, it's super helpful.

Ros, I know you've probably gotta jump soon. We've had so much good audience, like, chatter interaction. So honestly, come back anytime to SaaStr, either virtually or in person. Let me just ask you a last, maybe to tie everything together and just, like, wrap it up and trying to 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 the early days. That is truthfully, I think, you know, we feel like everything is in cloud and everything is AI. And in reality, like 90% of the workloads in the world are not on cloud even. So we 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 technologies.

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

That is definitely how I feel. I feel like we've had a great start, but we're just starting.

No, I, no, I can't, no, I think that's, no, I think that's 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. And every single person you hire should be your best hire ever. And unless you leave an interview very excited, like excited, like I wish this person was here right now, like, you know, he lifted the energy in the room or in the Zoom, whatever, 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, that's great. We all have to try and strive to get to that bar. I think we all lower the bar at times. So I think it's good advice. Thanks so much for doing this. Maybe we'll have you back and maybe next time you can walk everybody through your hiring process. I'm sure they, I, it's one of those things I know that sounds boring on paper, but I actually think people would like love it because they want to know how you're finding the best of the best. So Thanks so much for doing this, um, again.

So it's terrific.

Yeah, very fun.

Thanks everyone for joining.

We'll see you again next Wednesday live. So see you then.