Our journey with Wiz – the world’s fastest-growing startup and now the largest private tech acquisition in history at $32 billion – has been anything but a typical client-agency story. It goes back to 2015, when the founding team was still at Adallom, on the brink of a landmark acquisition by Microsoft. Wiz wasn’t even on the whiteboard yet.

Every PR expert, no matter their background or experience, knows the routine: you get a brief about a product launch, an executive hire, or a strategic funding round. You draft an engaging press release, go through rounds of editing, and finally have a version you’re happy with. You set up a newswire (another outdated PR premise worth challenging), and hit “send.” To everyone. At once. Then, you wait and hope for the best.

Like any great pitch, I’ll start this blog post with the good news - reporters need great stories as much as you need coverage. Your pitch is the bridge that brings the two together - and if it’s well constructed, you could make it past the stormy waters of non-stop breaking news.

The idea to establish a PR agency in New York came from one of our major clients—a successful, media-savvy entrepreneur who, over the course of three years, parted ways with three U.S.-based PR agencies. The blame, of course, wasn’t solely on the agencies, but the bottom line was clear: hours of conference calls, presentations, messaging documents, and work plans led to minimal media exposure—almost none.