September 18, 2025

#129 - $32B Lessons: Building CTO Teams, Rapid Innovation, and Staying Customer-Connected with Solal Raveh

48 minutes

What Wiz's $32B acquisition teaches about scaling CTO teams, rapid innovation, and customer-centric leadership

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What does it take to build a company worth Google's $32 billion acquisition? Solal shares the hard-won lessons from scaling technical teams during one of the fastest-growing security companies in history.

Key leadership insights from the episode:

• CTO Office Evolution: How Wiz split technical leadership into 3-4 specialized tracks focused on domain expertise rather than geography

• The Geographic Cloning Failure: Why hiring locally for technical roles created dissatisfaction and duplication instead of excellence

• Remote Team Success: Building global CTO teams around container security, API infrastructure, and runtime protection expertise

• Incubation Philosophy: Moving from building teams to rapid POC development - like their 3-hour response to the Shy Hulud NPM exploit

• Customer-Centric Engineering: How every CTO team member stays connected to customer challenges rather than waiting for inbound requests

• Innovation Metrics: The challenge of measuring incubation success vs finished features, plus P99 performance tracking for enterprise readiness

• People-First Leadership: Why focusing on people and customer problems trumps pure technical automation

• Security Industry Insights: Making security "not scary" through gamification and community engagement

Technical Context (18% of episode):

• Agentless API scanning that maps entire cloud environments in minutes vs weeks

• Graph database visualization of attack paths from code credentials to AWS admin access

• Risk contextualization: Why a CVSS 9.9 vulnerability on unused images can wait, but the same vulnerability across 10,000 live VMs demands immediate action

• AI agent "Mika" that correlates threat intelligence with specific infrastructure data

Chapters:

[01:49] - What makes Wiz worth $32 billion: People and technology combined

[04:08] - Technical architecture: Agentless scanning to graph databases to agent validation

[10:56] - Personal journey: From assembly coding to customer-focused engineering

[14:18] - CTO office structure: Splitting technical leadership into specialized domains

[17:30] - Three-fold CTO mission: Foresight, gray areas, and team incubation

[19:35] - Evolution from team building to rapid POC development

[23:30] - Security industry paradigm shifts: Vulnerabilities, identities, and AI challenges

[25:30] - Log4Shell response: Community support and agentless advantage

[34:17] - Major failure: Why geographic CTO team cloning doesn't work

[40:09] - CTO metrics challenges: Measuring innovation vs finished features

[43:16] - Missing hands-on work: The balance between leadership and building

[45:44] - Time travel advice: Focus more on people than automation

...more

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By Tobias Schlottke - alphalist CTO Podcast

66 ratings