What Wiz's $32B acquisition teaches about scaling CTO teams, rapid innovation, and customer-centric leadership Tradegate Direct: Europe's most direct online broker – trade for free, efficiently, and directly on the stock exchange. Trade directly here 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