A Product Market Fit Show | Startup Podcast for Founders
00:06:42 · S1
And super founders tend to, because they've been through it, not make the avoidable mistakes, which drastically increases they're odd success. Now in their case , it's not just that they're also complete subject matter experts when it comes to cybersecurity because even after they get acquired by Microsoft, they work there for five years and they work on the cloud team. And so they're looking at things that are related to cloud, things that are related to security. And now at this point, by the time that they go out and they start whiz in 2020, they've been doing that for eight years and they've seen both sides. They've seen the startup side, they've sold into several different companies, then they saw the Microsoft side and they sold to enterprises, spoke with CISOs and CTOs of many different enterprise companies. So they understood the space, they understood the problem , they understood the customers. It's honestly impossible to overestimate just how important a team is. And what comes to mind to me is this quote I heard literally just the other day by this guy, David Ogilvy, which says , if each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs. But if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, we shall become a company of giants. And if you start with a founding team that is so strong already and then you just keep the bar there or try and move it up with each hire, you end up with a team that can execute flawlessly. And that's what they did. 'cause the last thing is insane discipline. Even though these guys had been in the cybersecurity space for eight years, even though they knew things inside and out when they started working on Wiz, they didn't just go into it and start building, they still did customer discovery and the best type of customer discovery. They went in, they did assessment with customers, they used the existing tools in existing environments and they found actual issues. And the CTO in an interview talks about how he found like this virtual machine that was running a server that had access to an external ID and how that presented an end to end risk. And what he realized was that there was no solution because they were all siloed that actually understood that end-to-end risk and that could prioritize so that teams could address that entire end-to-end risk.
00:08:35 · S1
And that was almost like the aha moment. But that to me is part of insane discipline because it takes discipline to have been in an industry for eight years and still go to first principles and still try to identify core problems instead of just assuming that you know what a solution might look like. The other thing, they started by solving these things manually and presented a pitch deck to customers
00:08:55 · Pablo Srugo
[00:08:55] S2: So they knew that they had clear demand before they went out and built it. The other point of extreme discipline, this is something I never heard before, but the CTO talked about what one of the things that he learned at Microsoft was they wouldn't build anything unless they could deploy to over a hundred million users. And so when they went out and build Wiz and spoke with customers and understood the problem sets, they decided they would not build a feature unless it was a totally scalable feature that they could put into production and that would work across the board. And that kept the bar exceptionally high in terms of where they spend their time, an insane level of focus and of discipline that led them to create a product that scaled so fast. The final piece, and I have to mention it because even if you have all the ingredients, you always need this kind of tailwind to have these exceptional extreme outlier stories. And for them, one of the big ones was actually Covid. They started this in early 2020, they quit Microsoft, they go to conferences like February, 2020 and the world turns upside down, which at first obviously was one of the scariest things that could happen to them, but it turned out to be a tailwind. And the reason is a tailwind is twofold. First of all, it gave them time to go heads down and full build mode. But the second piece is it actually made selling easier. Because if you remember in those early days of Covid, a lot of enterprises had more time on their hands and they started to use that time to look for and analyze new products. Not only that you could sell to enterprises fully online through Zoom calls 'cause there was no way to sell any other way. So that drastically lubricated their ability to sell and was one of the reasons, of course, combined with everything else, why they were able to go from zero to a hundred million in 18 months and why now they're doing a half a billion dollars in a RR and are likely to get acquired for $23 billion in what would be the biggest exit of a VC-backed company in history. I just gave you content that you liked so much, you actually listened to the end. And guess what? You didn't pay a single dollar. Not only that, I didn't even put any ads in your face, so you just got a bunch of content for free. And now that I've delivered that value, I'm asking for something in return.
00:10:56 · Pablo Srugo
Open your app, open Apple podcast, open Spotify, open, whatever app you use to listen to this and hit that follow button. It's actually gonna help you because it's gonna help you make sure you don't miss out on the next episode, which you like so much that you listen to the whole thing.