Wiz - the end AND the start of an Era
Wiz today has 2,000+ employees. That number is striking considering it had just 40 employees 5 years ago:
The second largest acquisition by Google Cloud before Wiz was Looker. At Looker, I was the 30-something employee, and when I try to visualize the progression from having a CEO lending his car to help move employees across town (true story), to having that same CEO manage an army of thousands 95% of whom he/she does not know, I ask myself if there really is such a difference between Product companies that VCs like to fund and the Services business model.
A 2,000-employee organization after 5 years sure does seem a lot more like a services organization than a product company. For context, Dropbox, which has 3x the ARR revenue, has just 1.5x the # of employees - and that’s an 18-year-old company.
But Wiz is not the only one. Look around, and almost every Series C+ enterprise company looks similar. Every VP / Director is an ex-hyperscaler employee, whose sole job is to come into the new start-up and hire like a machine. At Looker, my teammates and I had a name for our 50-year old VP: The Robot. He did not manage us, he did not lead us - 90% of the interaction was centered around interview schedules and occasional reorgs.
And yet, it is quite possible that this is not what companies are going to look like in the future:
Wiz - the end of an era
Just like Wiz 5 years ago, another company currently with ~40 employees is Anysphere (Cursor.ai). Cursor is three years into its journey with 40 employees, and it is now making $150K in ARR, almost 1/4 of Wiz revenue with 60x fewer employees.
Like Wiz, Cursor.ai started with a team of 4 founders. 4 founders with an average age almost 1/2 of that of the Wiz founders. Age is not the only difference. GTM playbooks are quite different, too. And yet, one can imagine that at their ultimate successful adoption, both product companies look roughly similar: strongly embedded inside enterprise organizations through both technology and relationships (i.e. account management + customer success + professional services).
The striking difference in ARR/employee perhaps highlights not only the background of founders, but also the eras:
Old Era: Experienced Execs leading armies of ICs
New Era: Flat orgs with significant mid-level contributors
The idea is that while relationships will continue to matter, one person can and will be able to handle more.
Shifting tides of ARR/employee - What’s old is new again.
Flashback to 11 years ago: I got hired at Looker as a Data Scientist. Surprise—they didn’t need one. What they needed was someone to solve customer problems. So, I became the first person in Looker’s Professional Services.
For the next two years, I wrestled with two competing internal visions for scaling the team:
Option 1: Scale wide
- Hire more, but increasingly less competent specialists, each handling fewer customers.
Option 2: Scale deep
- Focus on expertise, solve scale problems with smart internal and customer-facing tools.
Leading by example, I was Team 2. While others juggled 1-2 customers, I had 16 concurrent customers, and over two years, 50+ companies such as AbleTo, Carta, Credit Sesame, DigitalOcean, Peloton Cycle, Procore, Plaid, Strava, Wise