Summary
Highlights
Ami Luttwak, CTO and co-founder of Wiz, introduces Wiz as one of the largest cloud security companies, having achieved significant growth in less than three years. He highlights that Wiz works with over 30% of Fortune 100 companies and aims to fundamentally change cloud security, which he believes has been 'broken'. The core issue is the tension between development and security teams, stemming from cloud's rapid evolution and the inadequacy of traditional security approaches.
Luttwak explains Wiz's approach: to understand the true risk in an environment by consolidating information from various siloed security tools. Instead of focusing on individual vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, Wiz identifies 'toxic combinations' – pathways an attacker would use – and tells developers the most critical issues to fix. He shares that Wiz raised $600 million and reached $100 million ARR in 18 months, emphasizing their pride in working with major cloud environments across AWS, Azure, and GCP.
Luttwak recounts his and his co-founders' long history, having founded a previous startup, Adallom, which was acquired by Microsoft. After leading cloud security at Microsoft, they recognized a fundamental problem in the industry. While other companies focused on niche markets, Wiz aimed to tackle the existing, competitive cloud security market, realizing that competitors weren't solving the right problem: 'If I have one hour, what should I fix right now?'
Wiz's culture is highly hands-on, with managers, including the CEO and CTO, actively involved in 'doing' the work. This approach extended to customer discovery, where the team performed assessments, manually investigating customer environments. Luttwak shares an anecdote about finding a critical vulnerability (a VM with easily breakable credentials and external IP access) that no existing product could detect, leading to the insight for Wiz's 'toxic combination' approach.
Luttwak emphasizes that existing tools were addressing individual issues like vulnerabilities or misconfigurations, but not the overarching question of 'if I have one hour, what should I fix right now?'. Wiz adopted 'zero-based thinking' to solve this core customer problem. They prioritized engaging with customers before building the product, showcasing ideas through slides, and only started development once there was clear demand and interest in pilots. This approach, while stressful, allowed them to validate their solution and build what customers truly needed.
Luttwak shares a low point: starting Wiz in early 2020, just as the COVID-19 pandemic hit. This period of uncertainty and isolation initially seemed like the worst time to launch a company. However, he reflects that the 'quiet' brought by the pandemic, free from constant travel and excessive noise, actually allowed the team to focus intently on product development and customer engagement, enabling them to scale significantly.
Wiz's rapid growth was attributed to merging their startup experience with the 'build for scale' mindset learned at Microsoft. They adopted a strict discipline: if a feature cannot scale 100x from day one, it isn't implemented. This ensures that even in early stages, the product is robust enough for enterprise adoption, preventing frustration and enabling long-term growth. This principle applies to all activities, ensuring scalability is an ingrained thought process.
Luttwak identifies his superpower as a CTO as 'storytelling' – bridging technology and customer needs by crafting technical narratives. He believes the CTO's role is to articulate the current problem, how it will be solved, and the future direction of cloud security. He also describes the CTO role as one of continuous self-exploration and reinvention, constantly adapting to the company's evolving needs, be it focusing on post-sales, customer support, or technical enablement.