Wiz broke records on the way up — fastest to $100M ARR, one of the most talked-about companies in cybersecurity — and it did it with a communications team you could count on one hand. Rachel Ratchford, Senior Director of Communications at Wiz, runs that team. In this episode of The Narrative, she gets into what actually drives Wiz's narrative (hint: it's not press releases), why category creation is an outcome not a strategy, and how she rebuilt her own relationship with the comms function after a crisis of faith about whether PR was just noise.

This is a conversation about doing more with less, cutting everything that doesn't move the needle, and building comms as a growth engine — not a support function.

Topics Discussed:

• Category creation vs. customer obsession

• The 80/20 rule of comms

• Why Wiz largely ditched the press release

• What's actually resonating with media right now

• How to build (and use) an agency relationship that actually works

• The media landscape shift

• Team structure philosophy

Comms Lessons for Founders & Leaders:

1. If you can't answer "why are we doing this?" — don't do it. Rachel's 80/20 filter is ruthless: "If somebody asks me, Rachel, why are we doing this? And my answer sucks, then we just don't do it." With a lean team, ruthless prioritization isn't optional — it's the strategy.

2. Category creation is an outcome, not a brief. "If you focus on the love, not the label, that's a better strategy." Wiz didn't set out to own CNAPP. They identified a real gap, built for it, and let the market catch up. Companies that lead with an acronym are building for the analyst spreadsheet, not the customer.

3. Ditch the press release. Own your own channel. Blog posts over wire distributions. No AP style restrictions, no wire fees, real SEO, trackable data, and a story instead of an announcement. When comms drives people to assets you own, it becomes a growth function — not a cost center.

4. Don't hire an agency before you hire a comms lead. "You can only be so successful if your client is enabling you." Agencies need a dedicated partner embedded in the business. Founders or CMOs don't have bandwidth to be that partner — and without it, even a great agency can't perform.

5. Research teams are an underused comms asset. The Wiz research team operates as a media partner — patient, technically fluent, and trusted by reporters directly. When researchers can pitch stories with credibility and comms can translate them for a general audience, you get coverage that neither could produce alone.

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