Raaz Herzberg: evaluation

Transcript context

…When we started, it wasn't even Wiz. The company was literally officially founded as Beyond Networks, because there was this idea of, "Hey, we want to do something in the network security space." Actually, myself and the founding team, and also, the other five engineers that started with us, we actually all came from a background of building cloud security products before, but this time it was like, "Okay, we actually don't want to do cloud security, we want to do network security." What happened was in those initial few weeks, it also, we started was literally, exactly, Wiz was founded together with COVID. It was that March when the whole world shut down. Suddenly, everything went terribly, terribly strange on all of us. That's when Wiz started. So it was like, our days looked like talking to 10, 15 customers. Wiz is a B2B product, the buyer is the CISO, the people, the person that owns basically security for the entire company. So we would have 10 to 15 meetings every day, with potential customers. At the time, we didn't really have a solid product yet, but we had an idea, and the deck explaining our idea, and what we're going to build, and why. We were all a very technical group of people, and especially, our founding team, a staff, our CEO at Wiz. Before Wiz, he led the entire division of all of the Microsoft cloud security products. So they're very, very impressive, very technical, very well known and respected in the industry. And so, we would join a call, and kind of present and walk through our idea, and the person on the other end would be like, "Oh, it sounds interesting. Oh yes, sounds interesting, we'd love to hear more. Yes, perfect. Sounds interesting, we'd love to hear more." And you finished calls with a good feeling, like the person said, "Oh yes, interesting, interesting." But like you said, I was hired as a first product manager. I sat in on those calls, sometimes officially participating, sometimes, even, not officially participating, but listening on all of the calls, and I finished a couple of weeks of that, which is a lot of calls, I think, two weeks or something. I still did not exactly understand what we were going to build, which was confusing, because I was a product manager, so I was supposed to start building it, in some ways, go to the dev team and start building it. And that was a point where I felt like, "I don't know what we are talking about exactly." Now, I really thought, "I don't know what we're talking about. I thought they all understood what we're building, and I thought every customer we had in the call, understood that we were building." It's just that I did not understand what we were building. At some point, it was like, "Okay, I have to ask. What exactly are we," like, In the details, right? Not in describing a big problem, in a high level, big potential approach to solving it, but what exactly are we doing here? ke, "Okay, I have to ask. What exactly are we," like, In the details, right? Not in describing a big problem, in a high level, big potential approach to solving it, but what exactly are we doing here? And I think that that ended up opening a really deep discussion of, "Okay, wait, maybe we are telling a bit of a broad story, and maybe the person on the other end is not going to tell you." They're not incentivized to tell you, "You know what? I don't know what you're talking about." It's really, I guess they felt a bit like me in some ways, and they were like, "Oh, it's a really smart group of people. I'm sure they're building something interesting." So yeah, interesting. They're not incentivized to really dig, deep dive into the problems, right? So I think that opened up a discussion for us, and we kind of understood that we were listening in the wrong way, maybe, that we were looking for positive reinforcements, but not really listening intently to signs of deep enthusiasm, and that ended up pivoting us around to cloud security. There's so much to learn, just from the short story, and I want to get into what you started hearing that made it sound like, "Okay, wait, maybe this is a better idea." But first of all, just the fact that you're doing 10 to 15 calls a day, you said?…

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