Gili Raanan
speaker
558 appearances
2 recordings
2 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard 28 Mar
Gili Raanan’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Mar 2026 with 1.
Appearances
And at Beyond Networks, we looked at the customer feedback and it was an important problem for customers, but it didn't have a very important ingredient, which is it was important, it wasn't urgent.
And at the early stage, as much as you like to go after large market size and important pain point, the most important thing in my mind is to go after an urgent pain point that generates sense of urgency. And the sense of urgency is almost everything you need as a small venture, because that means that things would happen fast for you. You get to more customer engagements. You learn faster.
You improve faster. You'll be able to build your revenue faster. And we didn't have that with the secure one access idea. And the Wizz team was smart enough to really pivot into a space they knew very well, which is cloud security. And we named the company Wizz.
And we ran our Sunrise program, which is all focused on getting feedback, making sure we understand the pain point, building the right solution that mere mortals can use. And three months later, they had a product, which would generate a sense of urgency. They spoke with customers, and those potential customers, prospects, wanted to bring them in.
And then I learned a very important lesson about the four customer profiles. When you sell a product, you're going to face four personas. The person that has the pain point, that has the problem. The person who has the budget to pay for a solution to solve that. The person that has the authority to decide on the product or solution.
And the fourth person is the person that would actually use the product. Now, as a startup, if those four personas map into a single person in real life, that's a mega hit. And that was the case of Wiz.
If those four personas are mapped into four real people, there's one real person that has the problem, one real person that has the budget, one real person that has the authority, and a fourth person that actually used the product, don't do that. go and pivot. And if you map into two people, that would be a very nice company. If you're mapped to three people, that's a borderline.
You may or may not like to pursue that. So for Wiz, it was a single person. It was the CISO. The CISO has the problem that the CISO, the chief information security officer, had the authority to decide on a cloud security solution. They obviously had the budget. And most importantly, they had the AWS credentials. that enabled them to really deploy the product.
So Wiz was able to do something very unique just because all those four personas mapped into one real life person and Wiz built a really cool technology. They managed to build a product that during the first call with a prospect, they could ask for the AWS credentials and within the call show them real value for their own organization, not in a demo environment.
And that really accelerated things for Wiz. And in three months, we faced one major dilemma. We could go for a low entry point price product to get a lot of logos and build with from the ground up, bottom up, or what people in Silicon Valley call PLG, product-led growth, or go after very large deals, enterprise deals to begin with, and grow the ARR top line.
Unlike the common wisdom within Silicon Valley, we decided to go for the large deals, scrap PLG, and go for real enterprise deals to begin with. We thought that by growing our top-line ARR, we would be better off. We would have real commitment by highly sophisticated customers. We would attract attention from outside investors. We would attract attention from top go-to-market talent.
And that would enable us to build a significant business. And while we spent the first 12 months building a product, the next four quarters were quite unusual. The company closed a million dollars in ARR in the first quarter of selling the software. $2 million, I think $8 million, and then $25 million in the fourth quarter.
It was an incredible company from the moment we actually launched our go-to-market for those three reasons. Focus on the urgent, not the important. Build a product that has a terrific product market fit for one person, one real person that owns the budget, the authority, and the ability to use the product. And we went and sold that to large organizations at a high price point.
That actually was an old lesson I learned at Sequoia many years ago, that the expensive deals, the pricey companies are pricier from day one. They're always expensive. They're expensive at the seed round, they're expensive at the A round, they're expensive at the B round. The worst reason for a venture capitalist to pass on an opportunity is for price, because it's part of those companies' DNA.
Pick a company. All of those companies were expensive. Airbnb was expensive. Instagram was expensive. So if you're going to pass on an opportunity just because of price, you're going to pass on all the good companies.
Yes, Wiz was super expensive to begin with and attracted a lot of attention and became the fastest unicorn, the fastest company to go to $100 million, the fastest company to get to $500 million. And this year, when we get to a billion-dollar ARR, it's probably going to be the fastest SaaS company to get to a billion-dollar ARR. But that's part of the DNA. It's a fast company.
Watching that just convinced me that as an investor, a high price company is actually a good thing, not a bad thing, if justified.
The productivity at Wiz, if you look, was second to none. And when I looked at the number of engineers relative to the number of products and the number of capabilities we delivered annually. It was amazing. And when I look at the way we source engineers, there's always a debate. How do you pick the best engineers? And who are the best engineers for your business?
And I discussed that with Roy Resnick, the VP of R&D of Waze, one of the co-founders, one of the four co-founders. And he had a super special way to source engineers. He would not just source smart engineers who has been in good companies beforehand, terrific education, et cetera. He would source people that their hobby is writing code.
He would source people that on a weekend, assuming they are married and have kids, if they have a couple of hours of quiet time, they would not go reading or watching a Netflix series or listen to music. They would go and write code. Those are the people you like to hire. When you have 100 of these guys, it's like having 300 or 400 terrific engineers.
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