Top 10 Unexpected Learnings from Scaling Wiz From $0 to The First $100M ARR with CRO Colin Jones and Sam Blond
"I thought I had 60 days to get the value proposition right. In the end, we had roughly 4."
“I thought I had 60 days to get the value proposition right. In the end, we had roughly 4.” – Colin Jones, CRO Emeritus at Wiz
You may have seen the news that Google is making its biggest acquisition — by far — of Cloud and SaaS security leader Wiz for a stunning $32 Billion (!). And it’s even more impressive than that. As it’s just 5 years after founding. Woah.
In just 5 years Wiz has crossed $500m ARR, and as they were crossing the first $100m ARR, their first CRO Colin Jones joined Sam Blond on CRO Confidential did a deep dive on the learnings. It’s an incredible look back on scaling and more:
Colin Jones, first Chief Revenue Officer at Wiz. Colin joined Wiz in February 2021 when the company was near zero revenue. A Philadelphia native, Colin started his professional career as a Business Development Representative (BDR) 14 years ago and worked his way up to his current role as CRO. His background includes extensive experience in the cybersecurity space, beginning at Big Fix where he “fell in love with security” and at Duo Security. Colin oversaw Wiz’s unprecedented growth from $0 to $100M ARR in just two years, helping the company achieve a $10 billion valuation and “decacorn” status by 2023. He now serves as President of Sublime Security.
1. Radical Transparency in Growth Planning
While most revenue leaders deliberately “sandbag” forecasts to ensure they can over-deliver, Colin Jones did the exact opposite at Wiz. He actively approached the CEO to push for dramatically higher targets and accelerated headcount expansion beyond the original plan. As Colin describes it, “I went to the CEO and asked to generate more revenue and hire more people, which is counter-intuitive to the standard approach where revenue leaders may sandbag to over deliver and crush numbers.”
This counter-cultural approach created organizational alignment around hypergrowth by establishing transparent, ambitious targets rather than hidden, conservative ones. The result was a 5x increase over initial projections – growing from an $8M revenue target to $40M actual results – driven by a belief that market demand justified the investment. This approach required immense trust from the CEO to invest millions ahead of proven results.
2. Distributed Teams Were a Feature, Not a Bug, Even on GTM Team
The pandemic forced a distributed model with teams spread across Denver, Colorado, and Tel Aviv. Rather than seeing this as a liability, Wiz leveraged it as a strategic advantage — even in its sales team.
Colin explains: “The team faced challenges, including operating in a distributed environment, aligning time zones, and creating a new pattern of working, which led to late nights and early mornings, but ultimately allowed them to build, grow, and scale simultaneously.” This distributed structure created intentional communication patterns that might not have developed in a single office. It normalized virtual collaboration from day one and allowed the company to tap into global talent pools rather than limiting hiring to specific geographies. The distributed nature also forced discipline in documentation and knowledge sharing that supported their hypergrowth, turning what could have been a limitation into a competitive advantage.
3. Demand Was the Ceiling, Not Cash
Unlike most startups that struggle to generate sufficient pipeline, Wiz faced the opposite problem: “The company had a problem with managing high demand, having calendars full of demos and struggling to find time for team meetings outside of customer interactions.”
This unexpected dynamic completely inverted their growth bottleneck – the constraint wasn’t generating demand or securing funding, but scaling the sales team fast enough to capture the overwhelming market opportunity. This realization led to a fundamental shift in strategy, allocating resources to hiring and onboarding rather than lead generation. The transcript describes how “the bottleneck was having a lot of demand but not enough sales resources to adequately serve it,” forcing them to rapidly expand the sales organization to prevent market opportunity leakage.
4. Customer Calendars as Growth Indicators
While most SaaS companies rely on complex attribution models and pipeline analytics, Wiz found their most reliable growth indicator in something much simpler: calendar density.
Colin observed that “everyone’s calendar was full of customer calls,” providing an immediate, tangible signal of product-market fit. This practical, observable metric drove more decision-making than sophisticated dashboards or forecasting models. Calendar density became both a lagging indicator of market interest and a leading indicator of potential revenue bottlenecks. The overflowing calendars revealed both the strength of market demand and the operational limitations of their current team structure, prompting strategic shifts in resource allocation. This simple yet powerful signal helped Wiz respond to market opportunities more quickly than competitors relying on processed data that might be weeks old.
5. Founders Remained Customer-Facing Daily
Even as they reached massive scale, Wiz’s technical founders maintained direct, daily customer engagement: “Founders and executives spend time with customers every single day, as it is their responsibility to understand what customers are going through and how their world is changing, which is especially important in the dynamic cloud market.”
This wasn’t just for major deals or quarterly business reviews – it was a fundamental operating principle that persisted “from day one to day one thousand.”
The founders’ deep technical expertise from their previous company (Adallom, which sold to Microsoft) allowed them to engage with security practitioners as peers rather than vendors. This consistent customer immersion ensured product development remained tightly aligned with evolving market needs, avoiding the common disconnect between founders and customers that often emerges at scale.
6. 5x Revenue on 5x Headcount
Wiz achieved the rare feat of maintaining per-employee productivity while scaling exponentially. The transcript reveals they grew from a planned “22 people in the revenue organization” to “over 100 people” while simultaneously increasing revenue from an $8M target to “around $40M.”
This 1:1 ratio of headcount to revenue growth defies the typical efficiency decline during hypergrowth phases, where companies usually see diminishing returns on each new hire. Most scaling companies experience some productivity dilution as they add more layers and complexity, but Wiz maintained consistent per-employee output throughout their hypergrowth phase. This remarkable efficiency came from their selective hiring approach through trusted networks, rigorous onboarding, and operational infrastructure that allowed new hires to become productive quickly rather than experiencing the typical ramp-up inefficiencies.
7. Planning Happened in 60-Day Cycles, Not Annual Plans
Rather than relying on rigid annual planning, Wiz implemented what Colin calls “milestone-based planning” with continual adjustments every 60 days.
Colin notes “milestone-based planning is essential, where objectifying outcomes and milestones makes it a no-brainer to move forward.” This iterative approach allowed them to react to market conditions in near real-time, reallocating resources based on observed patterns rather than theoretical forecasts. Colin explains that “the plan evolved throughout the year due to the market’s response, and it was not a single major re-forecast, but rather an iterative process with continuous adjustments to the goal post based on the analysis of trends and patterns.” This adaptive planning model proved essential in their hypergrowth environment, where annual plans would have quickly become obsolete. Their 60-day planning rhythm created organizational agility that competitors with traditional annual cycles couldn’t match.
8. Success Required Early Over-Investment in Ops
Unlike the typical pattern where companies under-invest in operations until problems become unavoidable, Wiz proactively “over-invested” in sales operations from the beginning.
The GTM team adopted a deliberate strategy of “recruiting candidates from the founder’s network, including sales leaders, operations people, and support staff, to over-invest in the operations part of the business while driving demand on the sales side.” This early infrastructure investment enabled them to scale without the quality degradation that typically accompanies rapid growth. By building operational capacity ahead of revenue, they avoided the common trap of having sales capabilities outstrip the organization’s ability to deliver and support those sales. This approach created a foundation strong enough to support their explosive growth “from zero to a hundred, literally” without sacrificing customer experience or creating internal chaos.
9. Channel Strategy Evolved to 100% Partner-Led
While most companies start with direct sales and gradually add channel partners, Wiz made a decisive strategy shift to a fully partner-led model.
“The company transitioned from a hybrid direct channel model to 100% channel, which is a result of how customers want to buy.” This comprehensive pivot wasn’t driven by an arbitrary channel strategy but emerged organically from customer buying preferences. Colin explains that “the company has found itself in a position where partners understand the value they can provide, and they are bringing pipeline to the company, which is a huge investment area, specifically in channel-sourced and generated pipeline.” This partner-centric approach diversified their pipeline sources while aligning with enterprise procurement preferences, creating a multiplier effect on their go-to-market reach without proportional increases in sales headcount.
10. Trust Was Built Through Admitting Pricing Mistakes
Wiz took the counterintuitive approach of quickly acknowledging errors in their pricing models.
“Establishing trust can be achieved through honesty and delivering results,” including examples where admitting mistakes, “such as miscalculating a pricing model, and making it right” actually deepened customer relationships. This radical honesty approach recognized that in security specifically, trust is the foundation of all customer relationships. Colin explains that “building a brand is crucial, and in every interaction, there’s an opportunity to either build or break trust, which is particularly important in the domain of security where trust is a significant component of the brand.” By owning pricing errors rather than defending them, Wiz created deeper trust precisely when most vendors would lose it – during pricing discussions – forming the foundation for long-term partnerships rather than transactional relationships.