Raaz Herzberg on How Wiz Hit $30BN Without Fear-Based Selling

Millions in ARR Before Hiring a Single Salesperson

Wiz didn't follow the playbook. The company hit millions in ARR without a sales team. Not through some clever growth hack, but because the product had 15-minute time to value in a category where customers expect months-long deployments.

Raaz Herzberg, one of the first 10 employees and now CMO, was doing legal contracts and terms and conditions herself. She led deals personally. The product-market fit was so strong that customers pulled the company forward faster than the team could hire.

We always believed that time to value is value. You connect this to your environment and literally, you get value in 15 minutes. The combination of having very short time to value, being very easy to deploy, and solving a very big problem made it grow much faster than we expected.

— Raaz Herzberg

Their first paying customer was a Fortune 10 company. Not a startup. Not an SMB they could upsell later. They started at the top because the founding team—who'd spent 6 years leading Azure security products at Microsoft—knew how to build and sell for infinite scale from day one.

Why She Hires People Who Don't Want to Be Marketers

Raaz came to marketing from product. She'd never held a marketing role before Wiz. That turned out to be an advantage, not a liability.

Instead of optimizing for MQLs and SQL pipelines, she focused on a simpler question: how do I explain this product to the right audience in a way that makes them want to try it? She believes every pipeline metric is suspect anyway—every fired marketing leader had green numbers on their dashboard.

I know very little about marketing. I don't think I could do marketing at any other company. It comes from really, really knowing the domain, really knowing the customers, really knowing the pain points, really knowing the tech, really knowing the before and after that brings organizations.

— Raaz Herzberg

Her approach: hire creative people who can execute fast. Marketing isn't like product, where every decision lives forever in your codebase. You can try something weird, and if it fails, you just don't do it again. No technical debt. No maintenance burden.

She proved this at RSA, the Super Bowl of cybersecurity conferences. Every booth was gray, blue, dark, and scary. Wiz showed up with a full Wizard of Oz theme—yellow brick road, hot air balloon, actors in costume. It cost the same as a boring booth but generated 4x the leads. Nobody had heard of Wiz before. Afterward, everyone came to see "that company."

Brand Is Underrated, Pipeline Numbers Are Overrated

Raaz doesn't believe in attribution. Not because she's anti-data, but because she thinks every company measures it differently and the numbers rarely mean what executives think they mean.

Her metric is simpler: does the sales team walk into warm rooms or cold rooms? If a CISO already knows who Wiz is before the first call, marketing is working. If the rep has to start from zero—explaining the founders, the company, the category—marketing is failing.

I think brand is underrated. People spend a lot of time doing things that will impact a number on the board deck, like pipeline numbers. But making brand investments, sometimes it's impossible to quantify them. And I don't really care because I think that's what really matters.

— Raaz Herzberg

When she talks about brand, she doesn't mean billboards on the 101. She means any effort that positions Wiz as an expert in cloud security. That could be being the first to publish deep analysis when a new vulnerability drops. It could be humor. It could be a booth that looks nothing like the competition.

The Fortune 500 is only 500 companies. If you're selling enterprise software, you're selling to maybe 500 people. Anything that makes them hear your name makes the next meeting warmer.

Fear-Based Selling Doesn't Inspire Her (Even in Cybersecurity)

Most cybersecurity companies sell on fear. Use our product or you'll get breached. Raaz deliberately rejected that approach, even though it works for competitors.

She thinks fear-based marketing doesn't give customers enough credit. No single product solves all your problems. Pretending otherwise isn't authentic. Instead, Wiz focuses on empowerment—helping security teams build confidently in the cloud.

Founders often worry that being different makes them look less serious to enterprise buyers. Raaz has never seen that play out. Humor and expertise aren't mutually exclusive. You can explain a complex vulnerability and make people smile at the same time. CISOs are smart enough to tell the difference between substance and style.

The proof is in the results. Raaz has never lost a deal she personally led at Wiz. Not because she's unnaturally gifted, but because she treats every conversation like her life depends on it. She's paranoid. She still gets nervous before customer meetings, even after thousands of them.

Building for Infinite Scale From Day One

The Wiz founding team spent 6 years at Microsoft after selling their previous company. That wasn't typical founder behavior—most leave after a year or two. But staying taught them how to build for infinite scale.

At Microsoft, if a feature doesn't work for the biggest cloud deployments in the world, it doesn't ship. That mindset carried over to Wiz. They built role-based access controls on day one, something most startups retrofit painfully later when they try to move upmarket.

Raaz's biggest mistake early on was underestimating product marketing. She thought PMMs just wrote launch blogs. She was wrong. Now she credits her head of product marketing, Zhang, as one of the smartest people she works with. Product marketing bridges the gap between what you build and how you sell it—especially at enterprise scale.

The lesson: starting upmarket isn't about having a prestigious background. It's about understanding enterprise complexity well enough to have credible conversations. When a Fortune 10 CISO talks to you, they need to feel like you've solved problems at their scale before. Wiz had that from the Microsoft years. A 24-year-old founder could do it too—if they've done the work to understand how enterprises actually operate.