How Wiz hit $100M ARR in 18 months selling to enterprises (Yinon Costica, Cofounder @Wiz)

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What does it actually take to go from zero to $100M ARR in 18 months in enterprise cybersecurity, a category that's supposed to be slow, high-friction and hard to sell?

I'm joined by Yinon Costica, co-founder and VP of Product at Wiz. Wiz reached that bar faster than almost anyone, then sold to Google for $32 billion.

We talk about the early days of the company, including why their first idea wasn't the right one, how customer conversations pushed them from network security into cloud security, and the moment they realized some companies were willing to pay seven figures to solve this problem.

Yinon also explains how Wiz built an enterprise sales engine without losing the product-first DNA that made the company move so fast.

We get into how they shortened sales cycles, why developers became a key adoption metric, and how the "zero critical" concept turned security work into something customers actually wanted to complete.

We also discuss how Wiz operates internally: why decisions stay close to the people doing the work, how the team chooses what not to build, and how they shifted toward AI across the company in a matter of months.

In this episode, we cover:

• Why Wiz's first idea didn't survive customer discovery
• How they found a problem customers were willing to pay millions to solve
• How to sell to large enterprises while keeping the product simple
• Why developer adoption matters more than security-team logins
• How "zero critical" helped drive product usage inside customers
• What it takes to move really fast internally
• How Wiz approached the shift to AI inside the product and the company
• Why studying success can be more useful than studying mistakes

Enjoy the episode.

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[00:00] Introduction
[01:53] Building with co-founders of 25 years
[07:08] What Wiz really does
[08:30] $100M ARR in 18 months
[09:34] The pivot to cloud security
[11:59] Why AI today looks like cloud in 2020
[15:37] Shortening enterprise sales cycles
[20:54] Buyers vs users
[23:22] The "zero critical" gamification
[25:17] The hardest job: saying no
[34:34] Building a product for many customers
[37:30] Wiz's flat operating model
[40:18] Feature teams as their own product
[42:54] Shifting the company to AI
[45:11] Embedding AI into the product
[53:46] Keeping the culture inside Google
[57:54] Learn from success, not failure

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