The Twenty Minute VC (20VC): Venture Capital | Startup Funding | The Pitch
20Growth: How Wiz Built a $30BN Brand in Enterprise | What Worked vs What Was a Mega Failure: Lessons Learned | Why Marketers Make the Worst CMOs & What To Look for in Growth with Raaz Herzberg
12 Dec 2025
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
This is 20 Growth with me, Harry Stebbings. Now, 20 Growth is where we sit down with the best minds in marketing and brand to discuss how to scale the biggest brands in the world. Well, joining me today, we have one of the best marketing minds in enterprise, Raz Herzberg.
Chapter 2: What insights can we gain from the early days of Wiz?
Raz is the Chief Marketing Officer and VP of Product Strategy at Wiz, the fastest growing cloud security company ever. As one of the first 10 employees, Raz has literally held so many different roles in the company, and has helped scale Wiz from nothing to a multi-billion dollar ARR business.
But before we dive into the show today, SecureFrame empowers businesses to build trust with customers by simplifying information security and compliance through AI and automation.
Thousands of fast-growing businesses, including Nasdaq, AngelList, Doodle, and Coda, trust SecureFrame to expedite their compliance journey for global security and privacy standards such as SOC 2 and ISO 27001, CMMC, NIST standards, and more.
Backed by top-tier investors and corporations like Google and Kleiner Perkins, the company is among Forbes' list of the top 100 startup employers for 2024, G2's
Chapter 3: What was the most effective marketing strategy implemented by Wiz?
best software awards for highest satisfaction products and a recipient of the 2024 Cybersecurity Excellence Awards, something I definitely never got in school myself. Learn more today at secureframe.com. And once SecureFrame locks down compliance, Pendo, make sure your product truly lands with customers.
Whether it's the software you build or the software you buy, your tech stack should be creating results, not creating roadblocks. Well, Pendo's no-code software experience management platform makes your software better with tools to see where users get stuck, guide them with in-app messaging, and constantly improving your UI.
It's so easy that over 14,000 businesses use Pendo to increase revenue, lower costs, and reduce risks. Businesses love the control. Engineers love the freedom. Everyone wins. Start for free today at pendo.io forward slash 20 product. And after Pendo shows you what users need, Miro helps your team bring those ideas to life. You know what kills momentum? It's not a lack of ideas.
It's the chaos between the idea and actually executing on it. My fund was stuck in this loop.
Chapter 4: How did Wiz achieve success in enterprise sales and product development?
Great investment theses, endless partner alignment calls, scattered deal memos across 10 different tools. We were moving at the speed of bureaucracy, not at the speed we needed to to win deals. Then we started using Miro's innovation workspace, and honestly, it changed how we operate. So here's what clicked. Miro AI doesn't just give you a blank canvas to dump ideas.
It actively helps you structure your thinking. We used it to synthesize founder interviews and diligence notes, pull out key patterns, and turn them into an actual investment memo in hours, not days. And speed is really important. Miro's AI sidekicks review your work like a seasoned GP would, pointing out gaps in your thesis and suggesting what to dig into next.
And when we needed to map out portfolio strategy, Miro generated frameworks and visual roadmaps right from our board. No switching tools, no waiting. Help your teams get great work done with Miro. Check out Miro.com to find out how. That's Miro, M-I-R-O.com. You have now arrived at your destination.
Chapter 5: What common mistakes do people make regarding proof of concept?
Raz, I'm so excited for this. I've wanted to make this one happen for a while. I've heard many good things from Doug across the years. So thank you so much for joining me.
Absolutely.
Chapter 6: Why do great leaders give more equity than expected?
I'm so excited to be here. I am genuinely a very big fan of the show.
That is very, very kind. I was literally just saying to you, it's great that we have these studios. It's so lovely to be in person. But I remember starting as like an 18-year-old on Skype, and I had very little idea of what I was doing. And I felt like a bit of an imposter. And I wanted to just start with, when did you feel like an imposter?
Chapter 7: How did COVID impact Wiz's business operations?
I always feel like an imposter. It's never left me throughout my career, and I also don't try to fight it. I kind of embrace it. I think a lot of people feel like imposters. I feel like an imposter every day. It's part of the motivation. I also think sometimes people think they know more than they know. I'm never at that problem.
I always feel like I know probably less than I know, and I'm never complacent about anything.
Chapter 8: What AI trends are currently overlooked that should be considered?
I'm always paranoid about everything. I've kind of learned to embrace it. I never feel... confident. I always feel like an imposter in every single thing I've done through my career, whether I was well-prepared, not well-prepared, whether it was something that should have been a walk in the park or not, I feel the same way.
What should have been a walk in the park? You've got this incredible purview from being one of the first 10 employees. What should have been a walk in the park in the early days of Wiz that wasn't?
I mean, even things I do today, for example, today after our conversation, I'm meeting like six or seven customers at the Wiz offices. I've done thousands, if not tens of thousands, of those types of meetings and conversations. And in the early days of Wiz, we were selling in millions of dollars an hour before we had salespeople at all. So it was also like leading deals and everything.
So I've done a gazillion of those, but I'm still nervous before them. Nothing feels like a walk in the park. I'll read the prep correctly. I'll think about it ahead of time. I've never lost a deal. It was, but I'm always afraid of that happening. So nothing feels like a walk in the park to me, regardless if I've done it a million times, if I haven't done it a million times, just nothing.
This is why I'm so glad that we don't send the schedules ahead of time, because you say things and then I just want to go off on tangents. Millions in ARR without salespeople is not a thing that any startup really achieves. What did you do to allow yourself to be in that position, do you think?
I think Wiz had an incredible product market fit early on, meaning the value that the product brought to customers was very clear. It was a combination of product market fit and also we were solving something that was a big problem. It wasn't a small problem for our customers. For customers, for security teams, there's a before-Wiz and an after-Wiz moment. We're solving a big problem for them.
We're solving cloud security. If you're a security team, a dev team, and you're building things in the cloud, how do you secure them? That's what we solve for. It's a big problem. And the product had very strong product-market fit. And also from day one, the product, and I started as the first product manager. So my first role at Wiz was leading the product team.
we always believed that time to value is value. And so the way Wiz works is very fast, meaning you connect this to your environment, and it's an enterprise security product. So those things are expected to take months and months and months for deployments and things until you see value. But in Wiz, literally, you get value in like 15 minutes.
So I think the combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem, like solving cloud security, and Wiz started at at the beginning of COVID. So it was even a bigger problem than it ever was before, because everybody were moving even faster to the cloud.
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