Wiz followed customer pain instead of its original idea

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 8:51

   Were people, you guys had this amazing track record, but I imagine at some point you start reaching out to investors again. And you have this idea that you've workshopped with customers. I heard that you spent a lot of time speaking to customers and that ultimately it entirely changed your idea. So it's, you know, in the inside, back then we felt like it's the worst time to start a company. In the inside, it was actually a very unique time to start a company, especially in cloud, especially in cyber.

2. 9:20

   Because something remarkable was happening back then. everyone all of the enterprises that looked at the cloud as a playground as a cool shiny new cool thing but not as a strategy during COVID they actually changed their mind right and they realized that cloud has to be the way to go the way to do business because otherwise we cannot be at the office so what do we do and I think that this moment in time was unique to basically go back to customers and ask them, okay, so what do you need?

3. 9:56

   And we started with this idea of networking. By the way, everybody said that it's a great idea, but when you double-click into it and you start asking questions like, okay, what do you do with it? Where would you deploy this? Which team will own this? What's the budget that you will allocate to it? So all of these questions become, I don't know. And then you're like, okay, maybe this is not the best thing to build right now, But everybody pointed us back to the cloud security challenge. Visibility, I don't understand, you know, what do I actually have in the cloud? I don't know how to secure it. The gap between engineers and security engineering, very capable, leveraging new technologies all of the time in cloud, moving very fast.

4. 10:43

   And then, you know, one security person needs to catch up and be, you know, a remarkably professional in all of the technologies in order to secure it. It's an impossible challenge. And we realized that the pain is more than a technology pain. It's a process and people pain more than anything. And that was basically when we said, OK, we've talked to so many customers. By the way, nobody could have, you know, described Wiz the way we eventually built Wiz.

5. 11:16

   But everybody went back to the same pain point of, I don't want to block the business. The cloud is happening. We are an enterprise customer. We have many security requirements. We want to do it the right way. Help me. So this is where the genesis of Wiz. And when you released the product, you scaled so quickly from a million to a hundred million ARR in 18 months. It seems like it was such an obvious problem in retrospect, like how did the incumbents miss this?

6. 11:48

   It's a great question. I think first, it's a perfect storm in a way. And I know we're going to talk about AI probably later on, but everything that I say about cloud, you... can replace with AI and it's applicable today but back then I think we had the perfect storm in the sense that many customers were going into cloud many wanted to invest they didn't need the education so they had the budget they had the will to go into that project and the other side of it is that when we built it we built it as if we were you know like like at Microsoft we built it for scale we built it for enterprises so when when the perfect storm happened and everybody realized that um we can solve a problem in a way that was not solved up until then in that manner we could scale with the need in the market and that's that's great and the reason that i think

7. 12:46

   the market missed that is because we tend to rotate over on the technologies And, you know, when I look at myself, back at Microsoft, we've also built cloud security. And I was under the impression that it's a solved problem because the technology existed and we know what it needs to secure the cloud and we provided the tools. But I think that what we missed is the process and the people that are actually using it.

8. 13:18

   And Wiz came out with this concept of democratizing cloud security in the sense that, you know what, as security, you don't need to do everything. You need to provision the tools. And if the tools are good enough in describing the problems and in prioritizing them, you can just give the developers the information and they will go and fix it. So we created a whole new process for organizations that unlocked immense capacity and speed of innovation.

9. 13:49

   And I think that this is the thing that maybe, looking back, we did very differently. And again, technology assisted it.