Transcript
[00:00:00] Victoria Melnikova: Hi everyone. Welcome to Dev Propulsion Labs, our podcast about the business of developer tools. I’m your host, Victoria Melnikova. I’m the head of new business at Evil Martians and I am super excited to introduce today’s guest. Please meet Michael Grinich, CEO, and founder of WorkOS. Hi Michael.
[00:00:24] Michael Grinich: Hey, thanks so much for having me.
[00:00:25] Victoria Melnikova: How are you?
[00:00:26] Michael Grinich: I’m doing great.
[00:00:27] Victoria Melnikova: Great. So I’m wearing this hat because it represents what you stand for and it’s says, enterprise ready. What does it mean to be enterprise ready in 2025?
[00:00:40] Michael Grinich: Yeah, those are our highly coveted enterprise ready hats. Being enterprise ready really encapsulates what it, what you need to do to add to your product or your company.
Mm-hmm. In order to grow up market and sell to bigger customers. So anybody that’s building a new. Company, whether it’s, you know, an app for designing things or [00:01:00] communicating or a developer platform. At some point, if you want to expand your business, you’ll wanna sell to bigger and bigger customers, to enterprises, essentially.
And there’s a bunch of things you need to add to your service to do that. It’s really stuff around security and compliance, maybe how you do pricing or sales or packaging. So that transition that companies make as they go up market, we talk about that in terms of becoming enterprise ready.
[00:01:22] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. And
[00:01:23] Michael Grinich: WorkOS the startup that I.
Founded is technology that helps people do that. Mm-hmm. So it’s, it’s actually a developer, API that brings a lot of those features to your app, so you can do it faster.
[00:01:33] Victoria Melnikova: So we’re talking oath, we’re talking SSO, like what are we talking? What are the features that people need to get? Yeah.
[00:01:41] Michael Grinich: SSO is often the one that people really think of.
Mm-hmm. When they think about becoming enterprise ready, it’s often the first thing you need. What I mean by that, it’s the first time that your growth will be blocked because you’re missing a feature. Mm-hmm.
[00:01:52] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. So
[00:01:52] Michael Grinich: there’s a bunch of other stuff, but. Really common is a company launches. They get a bunch of users.
There’s the first kind of bigger deal [00:02:00] they wanna close, and they’re, you know, the company’s excited about doing it. And then someone on their security or procurement team or something says, well, we gotta have SO, we gotta have single sign on. And that means they have to be able to log in with their company’s identity system, their corporate identity system.
So they’ll say it’s, it’s not okay just to sign in with our Google account or with a email address and password. We need to connect it to Okta or Azure ID or, or different systems. And Workwise helps you do that. But it’s really just one of the things, there’s a lot of other things, you know, authentication, provisioning accounts, automatically connecting to directory systems mm-hmm.
To automatically create and, and, and delete accounts permissions, access control, role-based access control, R back. Then it just keeps going. There’s stuff around logging and encryption and, and integrations. So SSO is usually the first sort of moment. If someone’s asking you for SSO, it’s a very good sign for your business.
Yeah. It usually means you’re gonna have like real customers, real product market fit, but only if you [00:03:00] can get them that feature so they can actually use and adopt the product.
[00:03:03] Victoria Melnikova: Do you need SS sofa work with
[00:03:05] Michael Grinich: You do. Yeah. You don’t have to have it if you’re on. Using our platform. If you’re a developer just getting started, you can just sign in with your, you know, Gmail account or whatever.
But we serve a lot of big companies today. You know, our infrastructure powers, enterprise features for opening ai, andro, perplexity cursor. Mm-hmm. Versal, web flow plaid, so many of these larger organizations where they also care about security. Mm-hmm. So yes, you can actually sign in to WorkOS with SSO.
Mm-hmm. To put ss o in your app, you actually. Dog food. The whole product is WorkOS is powered by WorkOS.
[00:03:39] Victoria Melnikova: So when it comes to 2025, specifically with, you mentioned cursor, perplexity, whatever you name it, those big companies, they’re obviously AI first. Does your offering change to accommodate that AI first wave of startups or I guess startups that are serving enterprises?
[00:03:59] Michael Grinich: It’s kind of [00:04:00] surprising. In the sense that WorkOS is not a new company. It was, we started working on this almost seven years ago. Mm-hmm. So, which, which in the tech world is like a lifetime, you know? And yet this year we found ourself at the center of all these different AI businesses. Mm-hmm. You know, companies that have been growing explosively fast, kind of disrupting categories, whether it’s the major AI labs or these kind of new vertical AI products like Cursor or Sierra.
What we built at WorkOS even before, was sort of backwards looking.
[00:04:30] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. Like
[00:04:31] Michael Grinich: we were building infrastructure that people used to have to build in-house.
[00:04:34] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:04:35] Michael Grinich: So in the previous era of SaaS companies like Dropbox or Slack, they built all this stuff themself. Mm-hmm. And so we’re just building that as infrastructure.
It turns out it’s super relevant for AI companies and I’ve been trying to figure out why for the last year, and I think I, I think I figured it out. First of all, AI businesses are actually just all B2B software companies. They sell a different product. They’re powered by ai. But ultimately, if you know, if you kind of [00:05:00] kind of peel it back, they are providing business software to other companies.
They sell it as B2B software. It just happens to be ai. Mm-hmm. And so the same type of requirements that previously were applied to B2B software now exist for AI companies. It’s not like crypto where that was super different or consumer. They’re all B2B. The second thing is. These companies grow faster, they grow upmarket sooner in their lifecycle.
[00:05:23] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. And
[00:05:23] Michael Grinich: so in the previous era, you know, like say Slack or Dropbox, you know, they waited five or six or seven years mm-hmm. To actually go after Enterprise. We’re seeing today these AI businesses go after Enterprise within six to 12 months. Yeah. Pretty much immediately. And that, that’s a new thing. So, so there’s a urgency for them to scale.
And then third of all, you know, the AI products themselves touch a lot more sensitive data. So if going back to the previous example, like Figma or Dropbox or Airtable Yeah. You know, IT departments would say, okay, you can use that, but just don’t put any sensitive data into it. Don’t put any customer data, [00:06:00] you know, use Figma, but don’t put our secrets mm-hmm.
In that. And you could do that Figma, you just draw rectangles. You can use it for, for, for designing stuff. But these AI products. They only work if you connect them to everything.
[00:06:12] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:06:12] Michael Grinich: They’re only useful if you can give it a lot of context and then they become super useful if you can give them the ability to make decisions and take actions and build automation.
The whole thing around agents, right? Mm-hmm. It’s like they have to be able to do stuff, and so as soon as you give an AI product access to a bunch of stuff, and then the ability to do a lot of actions, it suddenly becomes a super high security concern. Not only do these products grow faster into the enterprise, not only do they do it sooner in their lifecycle, they’re also scrutinized by security and it much more heavily.
Yeah. To sort of an extreme degree. And that has, I think, created this perfect storm where they all need sort of what we’ve built very fast in their life cycle. Mm-hmm. And so despite Workless being sort of a pre AI company and we’re kind of selling. The best, you know, pickaxes and shovels or whatever, like the gold rush to these AI [00:07:00] businesses.
It’s awesome. I mean, one of my favorite things about this job is the customers we get to work with. Yeah. And I always tell my friends like the second best thing to working at Cursor or working at OpenAI or Perplexity is, is to have them as customers. ‘cause you get to see a little bit into each one and partner with them, become friends with them.
So I feel very, very fortunate and. Very proud of what we built, helping, you know, these companies grow faster.
[00:07:24] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. And you have a user conference, which is called Enterprise Ready Con, and I don’t how for, how many years have you had it?
[00:07:31] Michael Grinich: We just did it a couple weeks ago. Yeah. For the second time. Yeah. For the second time.
Yeah. Yeah. And it, it grew quite a bit. Last year it was 60 people. Yeah. This year it was, I think almost 400 people.
[00:07:40] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:07:41] Michael Grinich: So who knows next year.
[00:07:43] Victoria Melnikova: So I attended this year’s conference and I loved it. The speaker lineup was great. The merch was great. Actually, the bag makes for a perfect diaper bag, so if you’re a mom in San Francisco, go to the Fresno.
Ready. We have a few more.
[00:07:57] Michael Grinich: You can come by our office. We have a, we have some, a few left. [00:08:00] Yeah. Not too many though. Be, don’t have any of the blue ones left.
[00:08:02] Victoria Melnikova: Yes, I have the blue ones.
[00:08:03] Michael Grinich: Everybody loved the blue ones. We, I’m gonna sell it in in a couple of years. I’m gonna make some, have a few. Were texting me begging for the blue ones.
Yes. Yeah,
[00:08:09] Victoria Melnikova: the blue bag is great. It fits a lot of stuff. It’s just like a very, very high quality merch. And in general, I felt like everybody I spoke to was some kind of a builder. You know, maybe a developer or a young founder that inspires to move up market with their tool, whatever it was. So in general, I see this trend of user conferences.
It’s important once you reach a certain stage. It’s a statement that you need to make in sf almost. Is it worth it for you? Like, what is the biggest goal for the conference? What? Why are you doing it?
[00:08:44] Michael Grinich: Last year we did it for the first time and nobody on our team had ever done anything like that before.
Yeah. You know, a few of us had attended conferences, but not even spoke, spoken up, something that big. But we felt really compelled to tell this story around [00:09:00] enterprise readiness. You know, the people that work on this stuff at most companies don’t get celebrated. No one really gets promoted for doing it.
It certainly doesn’t get talked about on stage. It doesn’t, you know, exist in a limelight, but it’s really important. It’s a really, really important foundational technology.
Yeah.
And so the initial idea for the conference was how do we surface this and create a community around people that are actually building this stuff.
[00:09:24] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:09:25] Michael Grinich: Last year, I think what we found this year, when we started thinking about what speakers to bring and, and you know, how the world had changed. Was what we were talking about earlier, like Work West is the center of this stuff around ai.
Yeah. And
so the conversation shifted from just how do we help you add SSO to your app or permissions or you know, encryption or, or fraud detection or these things that you need, of course.
But it shifted into more about how AI is changing the world of enterprise software. And when we say, when I say enterprise software, enterprise is kind of a dirty word. It’s kind of boring. What [00:10:00] I really mean is like software at the work workplace. Yeah. Software that people use to get stuff done. So not games, not consumer products, not like food delivery, which are all great, but software that people actually use as tools.
Yes. And I think that actually is the reason why it gathered more people and why it was so exciting. And the people that came are all themselves trying to build tools or platforms or infrastructure or new products leveraging AI in this like hugely mm-hmm. Disruptive moment. Like the AI stuff is really.
Flipping over every stone. It’s, it’s creating so much opportunity. And so despite, again, kind of this enterprise ready idea, maybe in the previous era was not as exciting. Now we found it. It’s in the middle of the conversation.
[00:10:37] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:10:37] Michael Grinich: And I think that’s why we’re able to gather so many, so many folks together for that event.
[00:10:41] Victoria Melnikova: I was watching you talk from five years ago about overcoming the enterprise chasm. So from your early adopters to your enterprise customers, there is a big gap. And the faster you overcome that gap. Whatever that means, the higher are your chances to dominate [00:11:00] that category.
[00:11:01] Michael Grinich: I talk about it as the Enterprise Chasm.
That talk is crossing the Enterprise Chasm, and I gave it at GitHub
in 2018. No, 2019 or something.
It’s like before COVID. I remember I was like, I made the talk like the day before and I was like practicing in the middle of the night. Yes. But it’s like the thesis of the company. Yeah. It’s like all the ideas around it.
And I had just observed that there were companies that either crossed it, crossed this chasm. Mm-hmm. This proverbial chasm Well. Then they would end up winning the whole market. ‘cause kind of when you can win enterprise, it gives you lasting power in the category. The revenue is really sticky. The customers stay around, they expand and it lets you continue to innovate on the product or platform.
Mm-hmm. And keep going broad.
Yeah. You
know the reason GitHub is still so successful is ‘cause they were able to capture enterprise and that has fueled additional growth and expansion
Yeah.
For, for their product over long periods of time. And then I also saw companies that didn’t do it. Essentially get beat [00:12:00] by people that did.
[00:12:01] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. And
[00:12:01] Michael Grinich: their products would kind of like wither away or not get momentum. You know, an example from many years ago was Trello. Yeah. You remember like Trello was a product. It was this amazing like. Kind of project management tool that small teams would use to get stuff done. It was like, I remember running my first startup on Trello.
Yeah. You know, the whole thing. But they failed to really go after Enterprise and figure out how to sell the larger organizations. Trello just like, didn’t work really for big companies. Mm-hmm. And they ended up selling it to Atlassian, becoming part of that instead of, you know, Trello becoming the next, you know, slack or GitHub or something like that.
So companies, I, I, I kind of argue in that talk that they should try to cross it really quickly and do it very intentionally, but also that it’s. Historically been very challenging to do. It’s required a lot of technology, investment and time.
[00:12:45] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:12:45] Michael Grinich: And my hope is that WorkOS can help close that gap.
Yeah. You know, make it easier.
[00:12:49] Victoria Melnikova: So for WorkOS it means that you take some of that security, responsibility, reliability, responsibility onto yourself, right? Because you are [00:13:00] basically completing the puzzle with some things that are a deal breaker for a startup. If SSO doesn’t work. Like bad news, you know? So what does it mean for you to take on that responsibility?
How does it translate to the principles of WorkOS what are the standards that you kind of like set for your product?
[00:13:23] Michael Grinich: Yeah, it’s definitely a big responsibility. You know, providing any type of in infrastructure for other companies is, is certainly a big responsibility because the idea here is developers just can hand it off to you and the best.
Case is they just don’t have to think about it. You know, they’re like, I just don’t wanna ever think about this. You’re, you solve it through an API and then once I call the API, it’s done. It’s outta my brain. To achieve that though is really challenging, and I think one of the hard things about our product right now in the market is we’re accelerating, you know, we are shipping a lot of new products and features.
We announced some stuff at our conference and new stuff. [00:14:00] Yes. We also have. Got a lot more customers this year using WorkOS Yes. You know, just in the last, you know, nine, 12 months, you know, companies like Rept and Base 10 and Synthesia and Stack Blitz and you know, like tons of other ones have either migrated or started just adopting WorkOS from other products.
And then all of our customers from last years are growing too. Yes. So this is compounding growth and all the while we need to provide this like really, really resilient infrastructure for any single company. You know, they, they might not worry about if their app goes down a little bit every year.
Yeah.
‘cause their end customers are fine with that. But when you provide an infrastructure layer, whether it’s a database or a CDN or you know, runtime, you have to be better than all of your customers. Mm-hmm. You have to be a step up than everyone. And so that requires a different level of mindset around infrastructure and reliability engineering.
[00:14:51] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:14:52] Michael Grinich: That most, most people are not familiar with at other companies. I regularly have people join WorkOS and. You know, developers were like, well, this should be fine. Like, we [00:15:00] had a whole conversation around we’re we’re working on some database version upgrades, you know? Yeah. You know, use open source databases, but, you know, as part of that, we want to continue upgrading them to keep security updates and releases.
And the team was like, okay, you know, we’re looking at doing this and it’ll be, you know, a five to 10 minute downtime.
Yeah.
And in a normal company, that’s totally fine. You schedule it, you do it in the middle of the night on like a Sunday night or something, and it goes down. You just. Push the database up.
And for us, you know, we started talking about that, we’re like, absolutely not acceptable. And there’s not a lot of stuff off the shelf for doing online major database version upgrades. ‘cause very few companies actually need to do this.
[00:15:39] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:15:40] Michael Grinich: And so I think just the, the constraints around the business make it harder.
But I think also for me as an engineer, that’s a lot more interesting.
[00:15:47] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:15:47] Michael Grinich: Because you tell the team like, no, you need to go do this thing, not. Only, you know, 0.01% of companies have to do, but that’s where the true fund engineering is, is when you push the boundaries. So I think it’s, it’s this double-edged sword where it’s a big challenge of the organization.
Yeah. But it’s [00:16:00] also, you know, a place where we can drive excellence and, and the unique, unique aspect of building it at scale for
[00:16:07] Victoria Melnikova: companies. Mm-hmm. So now that you need to accommodate all of this growth of your customers and acquisition of new customers, you need to grow your team. And it becomes more challenging, I guess, to, to find talent because.
Your network is not infinite, right? At some point you approach a point where you don’t know any more engineers who are, you know who you could hire, and I know that WorkOS is distributed. You have an Office N sf, but you also have folks all over. How do you approach hiring now? Do you need to hire a lot?
Is it, does it feel like the control is still there for the quality and the standard that you know, you adhere to?
[00:16:49] Michael Grinich: I have always found hiring hard across my career. I can’t think of a single time where it was easy, you know? Yeah. Or, or effortless. I, I suspect that only happens with companies that [00:17:00] have crazy runaway success.
I was, I was talking to some friends that work at Open AI and friends that work at Cursor, and they can hire whoever they want, you know? Yeah. But maybe there, it’s a little bit easier. It’s certainly challenging, I think, to find people also that are like really interested and excited to work on these types of problems.
Mm-hmm. I think we hire people like engineers that are kind of like plumbers.
Yeah.
They really want, you know, like plumbing as a technology has actually saved more lives than any other technology ever made. More than medicine, more than transportation, more than, you know, hospitals or anything. It’s plumbing.
It’s like, you know, clean cities. It’s what it actually, what, it’s what lets cities exist, the ability to bring in fresh water and exhaust. Waste. But plumbers, we don’t really celebrate. There’s no monuments to plumbers in the world, right? No. There’s no statues in the town square to the, the plumbers union.
And so you need to find people that find that that derive a lot of self-worth and value out of that experience. But they don’t need to kind of have the public accolades. They don’t need to [00:18:00] be constantly on stage. The the prima donnas. In the, the theater kind of metaphor. It’s like the people running the lighting.
Yeah.
Right. The people backstage making the show happen that you never see. Right. Yeah. So we hire a lot of people like that. The people that find that type of work really satisfying. Mm-hmm. That kinda get their kicks through the experience of other people succeeding on the platform. Supportive roles. So that’s culturally important.
We’ve been a distributed company, you know, since the beginning. Mm-hmm. Like literally since the first, first day at work. Os we pre COVID, we built it in that fashion. And I live here in San Francisco. I, I love California. I just love San Francisco. I got, you know, went surfing on Sunday. Yeah. I went skiing and stuff.
But we have people all over. We actually don’t have that many people here in the city. In our office here, we primarily use for meetings with customers. Yes. We’re doing a MCP meetup tonight with like a couple hundred people will probably show up and eat pizza and, you know Yeah. Demo stuff. And then we use it for team members that wanna come together and have meetings and mm-hmm.
Bring convergence of teams [00:19:00] together. San Francisco, the climate here is great, so we can do it whenever, you know, people can come hang out in February and it’s beautiful. And so this is kind of home based. We’re actually opening an office in New York. Nice. Beginning of next year. Similar reasons. Yeah. A lot of customers there and a lot of, a lot of activity.
But I think being remote as well has allowed us to, you know, hire people that might be in different regions. Mm-hmm. And then people can work at this company for long periods of time.
[00:19:23] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:24] Michael Grinich: You know, we regularly have people that work at WorkOS for many years. Like they move between. States.
[00:19:30] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:19:31] Michael Grinich: They get married, they have kids, they sell their house and move somewhere else, you know?
And, and I think that’s actually very important because the institutional knowledge about what we’re building is so, mm-hmm. So key as an infrastructure company, like there’s such depth and, and kind of like aggregated smoothness of our platform or depth in it has been accreted over many, many years. This is not like a build it quick vibe, code, throw it out, go from nothing to a hundred million in revenue.
Six months in a new [00:20:00] category. This is like, you know, thousands and thousands and thousands of bugs that we’ve fixed.
Yeah. For
our, you know, many, you know, millions of end users in our platform, we’re approaching having a hundred million users tracked inside of our system, which is a lot of, a lot of people, you know?
Yeah. A lot of, lot of users. And so being able to have people that can work at the company and can like really dig in for many years and have a long career. Yeah. You know, solving really hard problems. I think we’ve also set it up to be able to do that. Do that as well.
[00:20:29] Victoria Melnikova: How do you manage to do it remotely?
[00:20:31] Michael Grinich: There’s definitely tradeoffs, so I think anyone that says like remote is better than in person for 110, you know, a hundred out of a hundred, you know, situations. That’s not true. There’s a lot of things that, in terms of if you’re, I think if you, especially if you’re building a consumer product where really rapidly iterating, changing direction all the time.
Mm-hmm. Or being in person is better, I think also. Culturally it is easier to align people in person. Yeah, we’re just human creatures, you know, it’s like [00:21:00] dating people over the phone doesn’t work very well. It’s like we just kind of need to be in person together and, and you know, we’re like tribal, so there’s definitely downsides of it.
And with WorkOS you know, we grew up a lot during COVID. We started remote before COVID, but many other companies were remote. You know, during, during COVID. We have built the whole organization though, in this way to be remote. Mm-hmm. So I was, I was actually reflecting, it’s like a month or two ago, we had a bunch of people at our SF office.
Yes. We were working on a project and there was a whiteboard. So someone got up and started, you know, drawing the whiteboard and they handed me the, the marker to do something. I realized I had not drawn on a whiteboard for the entire history of the company, which is crazy. You know, I used to use the whiteboard all the time, but that’s just not in our toolbox.
It’s not in our lexicon. We use different ways that, you know, we use FIG o, we use documents, we use notion and stuff, and so I think it’s actually just the starting conditions. Mm-hmm. Of how you build up the organization, how you communicate, how you make decisions, how people come together and bond. Then there is no replacement for people getting together in [00:22:00] person too, for that connection.
So we still do that regularly. You know, we had most of our team together during our conference. Yes. Which was great. But I think if you, if you build up the whole machine to operate in that way, you can do incredible things with it. And some of the, some of the biggest technology projects ever to have been built.
Were built in the remote fashion. You know, I think about like the Linux kernel.
[00:22:24] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. Like
[00:22:25] Michael Grinich: the thing that we all depend on, you know, it’s like open source software that was built remote, you know, like Ruby on Rails.
Yeah.
That wasn’t built in an office. There was no like in-office culture for that. Right.
It was, it’s a, it’s a product of the internet. It, so I think WorkOS is very much like, like an internet native company. Mm-hmm. Or like we, we would only exist because the internet can exist. We wouldn’t exist without that. That’s the type of customers we s serve as well. And so even with this office, we’re still very much like built as a remote company.
Mm-hmm. We just need to have a home base for people to come together around and, and have space for [00:23:00] that. And also, we have so many customers in San Francisco. Candidly, I got kind of sick of. Going and trying to meet customers that are spending like, you know, millions of dollars a year with us at like a Pete’s Coffee or something.
Yeah. Yeah. I was like, maybe we should have an office where they can
Yeah. You
know, come hang out and, and, and dig in with them to figure out their roadmap and what we’re building with them. So for anyone that’s watching this that wants to come work at our office or hang out, kinda have an open door policy for that.
And we do a ton of events there.
[00:23:27] Victoria Melnikova: What’s your work looking like day to day?
[00:23:30] Michael Grinich: Yeah, I’m pretty involved hands-on with the team. So, and I’ve, I’ve always operated in that way. You know, we have a very flat organization. Mm-hmm. So not a lot of like layers of management, not a lot of, you know, random executives.
And so someone recently called me up on the team. They called me a full stack, CEO, which I, I don’t really know what that means, but I kind of like it. I think what they meant was that I can, I jumped between kind of the engineering architecture, the product side, and then I also spend a lot of time with our [00:24:00] customers.
Mm-hmm. Architecting our sales team and our messaging and our marketing kind of work across, across the stack. So I get pretty involved, you know, days are sort of thematically organized. Mondays I’m usually meeting with our management teams. Mm-hmm. Kind of organizing the whole business. Tuesdays I spend going deep with product teams and meeting with engineers.
Wednesdays is is usually around marketing, customer growth type of work. Events that we’re doing, spend a lot of time recruiting and hiring. So I’ve gotten very good at context switching. And then I, I work a lot, you know, I, I, um, spend a lot of time, you know, after five o’clock
[00:24:34] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:24:34] Michael Grinich: Meeting developers at I, not just our own events at our office, but I love going and seeing what other people are building, going to other events.
Yeah. Just yesterday I was at the Cerebral, cerebral Valley conference. They did? Yes. Which is great. Had dinner with some of those guys afterwards. Tonight we’re doing the thing at our office, so. There’s just so much stuff happening right now and I’m fully immersed in it and and really enjoying it.
[00:24:56] Victoria Melnikova: Do you feel like it fills your cup like this amount of work [00:25:00] and because I know that, I can imagine that now is a very hot time for work with us and it’s kind of like the fear to me is an opportunity can be there, you know, because there’s just so much going on and you have to act fast to kind of dominate the market.
Do you feel that pressure or it feels more like a calm, you’re just cruising, you’re just enjoying, you know what’s going on, and there is not, not such pressure on you.
[00:25:30] Michael Grinich: I, I would say like, like both to some degree when I was in college. At MIT, we used to say this thing, it was, it was like drinking from the fire hose and there was actually in one of the buildings, there was a water fountain with like a fake fire hose that was like connected to it.
You know, it’s this like metaphor because it’s just overwhelming. You just can’t do it. Yeah. You know, you, like anybody, regardless of your capacity, you’re gonna be overwhelmed. And there’s an element of that right now. I mean, every day there’s like infant number of things I, I want to do or mm-hmm. I [00:26:00] can do, or events to go to or things to work on.
And so something I’ve, I’ve spent a lot of time trying to work on and think about is the selection of where to spend time and the prioritization. So you don’t just purely spread yourself thin. I do think that most people could put more in and get more out, like you can learn to have more capacity.
Mm-hmm.
[00:26:20] Victoria Melnikova: To be able to
[00:26:20] Michael Grinich: work. I think a lot of people, they exhaust their capacity a certain number of hours per day. And they’re sort of like, that’s it, that’s all I can do. But I think it’s actually a muscle.
[00:26:28] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. That
[00:26:29] Michael Grinich: you can learn how to do more stuff or how to recharge, or how to have, you know, a lot more depth.
And it’s, if you think about it like that, you know, rather than saying, I’m lifting these weights and that’s all the weight I’ll ever be able to lift. And more like, maybe I can get a little bit better and better each day, or go a little bit deeper or be a little bit more focused or jump into a meeting and have a, be really focused and short, you know, and think about that as a craft.
You can, you can get more out of it. Certainly right now. In the tech world is the, it’s the most exciting, biggest change I’ve ever seen in my career. I mean, I started [00:27:00] doing startup stuff around 2013, kind of started interning at companies when I was in college, you know, 2009, 2008. Mobile. I built a lot of mobile apps back then and iPhone stuff.
What’s happening right now, and especially in San Francisco mm-hmm. Is like by far the biggest transformation ever. Yeah. It’s, it’s absolutely thrilling. I just feel it’s, it’s, I, I’m very convinced it’s gonna be like the most exciting technology moment of my career. Mm-hmm. Right now, the, the change that’s occurring and the effect that it’ll have over the next 10, 20 years.
Right. It’s just so cool. Like we have figured out how to make computers sort of act like humans. Yeah. And to speak to them and it’s. It’s a breakthrough in terms of technology, architecture and human computer interaction and, you know, scale and, and just all this, all this stuff together, right? It makes the mobile moment look like this small little thing, you know, in terms of the, the breakthrough.
And so I am really just trying to take it like day by day. Mm-hmm. Week by week in that, I mean, and just. Keep my eyes [00:28:00] open and try to be like fully plugged in when I go on trips, you know, other places. And like I was, last week I was like in both Seattle and New York for a couple conferences and I just like couldn’t wait to get back Yeah.
For all the stuff that was happening here. Yeah. In the city and, and to, to kind of be part of the people that are also excited about that. Mm-hmm. So I’m not really doing a lot of other stuff. I went for a bike ride the other day. Like at cycling, you know? Yeah. And I had to like, take the cobwebs off of my, literally from my garage or like
[00:28:29] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:28:30] Michael Grinich: Cobwebs on it, because I haven’t been, been using it this summer.
[00:28:33] Victoria Melnikova: But you mentioned you surf.
[00:28:34] Michael Grinich: I go surfing. Yeah. Yeah. The conditions on Sunday were excellent. I try to pull myself away for that, but it’s, you know, it’s tough. Just, and, and not because I feel this like compulsion to be part of it, or like I’m, you know, the, it’s like a pressure in that way.
Yeah, yeah, yeah,
yeah.
But it’s more like. You know, being part of this like thing that’s happening in the world
[00:28:57] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:28:58] Michael Grinich: Is just so exciting and [00:29:00] thrilling. I mean, it’s, it’s, I, I feel so fortunate to be in the position to be able to do this. Mm-hmm. And so, so lucky that WorkOS as a company is relevant in this.
Like, it’s, it’s really not obvious that like we would’ve been relevant in this AI wave during, during moments of transformation and disruption. Mm-hmm. Most companies are not relevant. That’s the default. Yes. You know, and so the fact that we are at least in some way are very relevant to them, and we have a shot at being part of it, is, is such a good, you know, stroke of luck.
And so I’m really just trying to get every drop of juice out of that lemon, you know, that I can right now. So I’m not sleeping very much, but I’m, I’m having a blast.
[00:29:41] Victoria Melnikova: I mean, it sounds wonderful and every time I sit here and I get to speak to a founder like yourself, I. Get this kind of like energy, you know, vibes.
Like what are the vibes? And you have this very calm energy. I wish, I hope it translates through the cameras. It’s like, I think only [00:30:00] servers have this, you know, because when you learn how to work with an ocean that doesn’t obey necessarily, you know, you, there’s this like strong calmness about it. Surfers have this, have this, yeah.
Surfing
[00:30:15] Michael Grinich: is like that. You know, you can’t. You can’t really get mad at the ocean.
[00:30:18] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:30:19] Michael Grinich: You know, like you can’t blame the ocean. You can’t, like, you’re just a small part of the whole thing that’s happening.
[00:30:27] Victoria Melnikova: Yes.
[00:30:27] Michael Grinich: Right. Like you are, you’re really at the, at the whim of the power of the ocean and the waves and what’s occurring and you just choose like small things that you do as part of it, but really you’re a small piece of that equation I think.
I think the world is kind of like that. Like you can control the things you can control, but the mistake becomes trying to. Control things you can’t, or getting upset by things that you can’t control. Yeah. One of the things you learn as well is like when you get, you know, kind of a, a wave comes, comes a top you, you just need to sort of like let go.
[00:30:55] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:30:56] Michael Grinich: You can’t really fight it. You can’t, you don’t want to get like super flustered. [00:31:00] You don’t wanna panic. You know, it’s, it could still be a dangerous situation, but you just wanna like, let yourself go through, go through it. Mm-hmm. And, and save your energy for the things you can control. And just let the wave pass over you and then, you know, hopefully try to catch the next one.
I think there’s a lot of stuff like that when things are tumultuous in the world. Mm-hmm. You can certainly focus on the things that you can change and put a lot of energy into that, but you know, like ocean goes up, ocean goes down, tide comes in, tide out. Like you don’t control that. You can’t change,
[00:31:31] Victoria Melnikova: but you get to enjoy the waves.
[00:31:32] Michael Grinich: Right. Right. And the important thing is just being like present mm-hmm. In the moment and just like being fully kind of awake in that experience. Yeah. Mm-hmm. I think that’s. So my favorite part about surfing is you just kind of go out and you’re just like, I almost enter this like flow state. Mm-hmm. Like, get back to my car.
I’m like, no time has passed. It’s just been existing out there. And to me that’s, that’s kind of this like nirvana state to get to. Mm-hmm. Yeah.
[00:31:54] Victoria Melnikova: Let’s go back to the early days of work as Sure.
[00:31:57] Michael Grinich: Surfing back to Enterprise sa.
[00:31:59] Victoria Melnikova: Now [00:32:00] looking back at how we launched it, it feels like a very measured strategy. So you build in stealth for a couple of years, right.
Then you. Got traction. You raised money, then you raised again, and it all looks like something that is very well measured. You build something that people need. You got reassurance from the market that it’s so, you raised money, you grow like very simple. Looking back at it wasn’t that simple or. It actually didn’t feel like that.
It’s so straightforward and it was hard and it was, you’re losing sleep over it. How was it building workwise?
[00:32:41] Michael Grinich: A bit of, probably a bit of both. Yeah. Any company is a struggle, you know, and I was joking with a friend recently. The the only thing that’s harder than a company that’s like really struggling, that’s like excruciatingly challenging to make it grow.
The only thing that’s harder than that. Is a company that’s really succeeding. [00:33:00] It turns out it gets harder when it starts working. I, I used to think it got easier. I don’t know why, but I don’t know. Like people write blog posts about things failing. They don’t write about it succeeding. So I was like, it must be easier when you succeed.
That is not, not the case. It, it actually gets harder. I think looking backwards, all the, the dots kind of connect and the story like
[00:33:17] Victoria Melnikova: mm-hmm.
[00:33:18] Michael Grinich: Cohesively makes sense. And with any business like, you know, that’s successful in the sense of gathering momentum, there’s always like a survivorship bias for it.
It’s like that, you know that picture of like the airplane with the, the red dots on it? Yes. And Frank calls it like the pepperoni airplane. It’s like survivorship bias right around it. And so there, there’s that element of it as well. So it was very challenging and there were like really hard times in the company as we were growing and scaling or it wasn’t evident, we would kind of break out that.
There would be this disruptive wave that we could capture.
Yeah.
That we would be able to disrupt large incumbents, you know, like, like competitors that are, that are established companies, you know, that, that seem strong, but then ended up being weak. So there’s a lot of [00:34:00] stuff like that. Mm-hmm. I think it was challenging, but one thing Absolutely.
That hasn’t changed, we got Right. Which I kind of felt right at the moment we launched was like the, the story of the company. The whole enterprise ready thing. Yes. The SSO stuff. You know, we launched on March 17th, 2020. I remember really clearly. ‘cause it was during the like crazy COVID lockdown like in San Francisco.
Yes. You couldn’t leave your house. It was just, and we were gonna launch at this conference like a few weeks later.
[00:34:26] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:34:27] Michael Grinich: And I was like, well, we have to launch. The conference got canceled, you know? Yeah. And I was like, what do we do? And so we launched the company that, that day through like Twitter and Hacker News.
That was it. And I remember it was like on the top page of Hacker News, alongside like all this crazy COVID stuff. And people in the comments were like, this is awesome. I would love to use this. And there was no like weird snark, you know? Yeah. Of people being like, oh, I could do this. It’s open source. Or This isn’t even valuable.
Or like, who are these clowns? People were like, this is amazing. I’ve had to build this before and I never wanna do it [00:35:00] again. I can’t wait to use this for my next project. And so quite early on, I think the problem statement and the kind of like core value of the company resonated really strong with developers.
That didn’t mean that that’s not success, that is the opportunity to, to succeed. Mm-hmm. But I think that set us up to just like, the challenge after that was just execute and deliver on this thing. And it’s still like a long time horizon to do that, to be trusted and, and build up the, the actual technology itself.
Yeah. But there was sort of a light where I was like, okay, if we nail this, I think it could be really meaningful. Mm-hmm. And big so. So there were early signs, I think of, of excitement and success and, and that continued the motivation, but also it’s just like really challenging. I mean, I, years ago I fired our whole marketing team.
Yeah.
And, and it wasn’t, I, I wasn’t proud of like, having to do that. I mean, it’s, it was, it was really disruptive and we hired a bunch of really great people and what ended up happening is I thought we were gonna be more of an enterprise sale focused [00:36:00] company.
Yeah.
And then it turned out we were much more developer led.
And I was just totally wrong and I had hired this like marketing team with totally the wrong skills and I was like, you can’t, you can’t really get ‘em to switch. Yeah. It’s kind of a totally different skillset, you know, it’s like hiring firmware engineers and you actually need web engineers or something and, and so we gave them good severance and they went and worked to else good places, but there’s been like decisions like that that we were totally wrong and really challenging to navigate.
But at the end of the day, the thing we’ve stayed focused on is the developer experience and this problem of enterprise readiness. Just making sure every, every single day is a good day for customers. And I think that is the, that’s what connects it. Looking backwards. Mm-hmm. That’s the through line.
[00:36:39] Victoria Melnikova: I also like to ask this because I’m just very curious.
What does it feel like to have product market fit?
[00:36:46] Michael Grinich: People sometimes say like, you, you know it, if you got it or something, which is not helpful. Um, that’s the statement you’re like, it’s like make something people want. It’s like, oh, genius. I was planning to make something people didn’t want. So product market fit, how to, [00:37:00] how to determine it.
I have a new definition for it, and to me, product market fit. What, what it feels like is you can continue to make seemingly fatal mistakes like boneheaded mistakes, where you’re like, certainly this mistake will do us in. We hired the wrong executive. We had this issue, we went down, we like screwed up this thing.
We launched the wrong feature. This customer hates us. You know, blah, blah, blah. Like this competitor emerged. Someone’s trying to clone our shit. You can continue to have these things that feel like they’re just gut punches that are gonna kill you, and yet the market pulls you to succeed. You live to play another day.
It’s like the Mario Star. You know? You get the star and like you can’t be killed. I think that’s not totally true. You can be killed, you should be paranoid. Like I’m just paranoid about it all the time. Even now, I just continue to be like amazed at the things we can survive and succeed. Because there’s this like force behind the company.
Mm-hmm. And I think, I think that’s the feeling of [00:38:00] product market fit. You can say it’s people spreading it through word of mouth or other people using, you know, using it in ways you didn’t expect or growing a certain number month over month or something like that. But in terms of like the idea of the company in the early customer base, I think it really has to do with there being like durability around the narrative.
Durability around the core utility you provide. And so it’s, it’s so valuable that people are willing to overlook all those things that you do, that you do wrong, or mistakes you make. And then your job as the entrepreneur or the team building it, or the company is to continue to like eliminate those things that are going wrong.
Mm-hmm. You cannot continue to have downtime. Certainly not, but you have the opportunity to fix it. Mm-hmm. Because they don’t leave, you know, hopefully as you continue to grow on scale. And, and your job is just like race the clock to make it as durable as possible and, and continue to grow.
[00:38:54] Victoria Melnikova: Do you still remember your like, first big client?
[00:38:58] Michael Grinich: Oh yeah. I remember all [00:39:00] of our early customers, two of them that I’m really grateful for have been longtime customers. One of them is Webflow and the other is Versal. So Webflow is a very, very early customer and I, I had emailed the CTO of co-founder Bryant like on a Friday and I was like, Hey, your support site said SSO is coming soon.
I know you guys don’t have it. I have this thing, you guys could add it. Here’s the API docs. Do you want to use it? And he like literally built it over the weekend.
Wow. During like a
hackathon came into his team on Monday and said, Hey, we have SSO now. And Webflow was, was early. I mean, they were, they were like, maybe I, I think like $5 million in revenue.
Four or five. Now they’re like over 200. You know, they’re really skilled. So that was really a fantastic just quick example of like a, a developer being able to quick integrate it, and he, as the CTO had all the authority to do it too. He wasn’t writing code every day. So that was a sign that our APIs were actually really simple and easy to use and easy to understand.
Versel had a very similar kind of rapid integration, but then also, you know, that [00:40:00] team, especially back then was just so focused on great developer experience. Mm-hmm. That they gave us so much amazing product feedback. I remember there was a summer. I think it was like the summer of 2021 where like every week there would be like two or three small things that Versal would tell us, like, oh, there’s this small bug, or a small thing, and we would drop everything to go fix it.
We called it versal driven development. We had the Slack channel. We just like relentlessly tried to improve it. And so not only were those great early customers for us in terms of, you know, growing the business and partnering with them and all that. But, but in terms of helping us improve our product and helping give that feedback, all of the other customers we have have benefited from, you know that.
So if Bryant or Guillermo are watching this, thanks to them and their team, yeah.
[00:40:47] Victoria Melnikova: What advice will you give founders that are starting out today? Or maybe even, let’s focus on founders that are approaching enterprise sales. What would be one piece of advice that you would give them?
[00:40:59] Michael Grinich: Well, I think [00:41:00] product still.
Still drives everything, even in the enterprise. If you go talk to a lot of salespeople, marketing people, finance people, they’ll talk all about like how you de sell, how you can sell, and different acronyms and different techniques and you know, bant, you know, budget, authority, need timing, or medic or med pick or these different like methodologies for selling.
But at the end of the day, none of that, none of that stuff works unless you have a great product. Most of those people, those salespeople join after companies have product market fit. So they’ve actually never seen, they’ve never worked at a company pre PMF. There’s no need for a CRO at a company that’s pre PMF.
Right. So they just don’t know. They just dunno how to see it. You’re talking about opening a restaurant? Yeah. And someone’s like, oh, the menu design’s really, really important. And you’re like, well, what about the food?
[00:41:49] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:41:50] Michael Grinich: Shouldn’t the food be good first? And then we could figure everything out. But if you’re talking to like a menu person, you know, they’ll only know about that.
And it’s certainly important at scale. Mm-hmm. You know, as, as you grow and scale. So the [00:42:00] product is the number one thing. Always. You have to really nail that with the market, the message around it, the story that should be compelling.
[00:42:07] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm. From
[00:42:08] Michael Grinich: the founder to the customer in any sort of sale, whether it’s a self-serve thing or an enterprise thing.
And you really gotta, really gotta nail that. I think the way to do that, and it, again, it sounds obvious and I kind of hate this like pithy startup voice, these, these one-liners. Make something people want. I love YC and all that, but I just think it’s funny, but it really goes back to talking to users.
Yeah.
Talk to users. And it’s, again, you, you would think like, well of course I’m gonna talk to users. Of course I would talk to my customers. It’d be crazy not to, you know, duh. But I have observed with myself, with my team, with companies I’ve Angel invested in with friends, startups, that engineers have the tendency to.
Exhaust every other possibility before talking to customers. We like building stuff. We like coming up with ideas. We feel like we’re so clever, we’re [00:43:00] smart, we’re creative. We see connections like, Ooh, I got it. I’ll go build, build, build. And then the building is fun.
Yeah,
it’s really enjoyable. You’re in the creative craft and the thing that screws that up, the wrench in that system of that good feeling is those pesky users that give you feedback.
Nothing destroys a good flow state, like talking to a user and having them tell you like, uh, I don’t, I don’t know this thing. It’s really useful. And so the reality is like no product design or no product idea survives contact with the market.
[00:43:31] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:43:32] Michael Grinich: You have to test it. It doesn’t matter how clever you are, how smart you are, and I think you have to create.
A practice around testing it. We, this is one thing we’ve developed at WorkOS is actually for new things we build, it’s institutionalized how we go talk to users and get feedback. Mm-hmm. Because it’s not just you do it once, you have to do it all the time. Every time. And I get really concerned anytime I talk to founders and I’m like, who have you shown this to?
And then we’ve been building in stealth, you know, we talked about WorkOS having built in stealth, you know, early on. Yeah. First year or two, but [00:44:00] that whole time I was talking to users.
[00:44:02] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:44:03] Michael Grinich: I was, I was yelling it from the top of the mountain tops. I was getting my investors to introduced me to people.
I was meeting founders. I was everywhere. We just didn’t publicly launch. There was no public signup. You know, there was no website for it, but we were out talking about it with everybody. Mm-hmm. It was not a secret to get feedback on that. And so I think that, you know, product is number one. But the second thing is, you know, if you, if you can just force yourself to constantly talk about users.
It’s this algorithm that will like burn out the bad ideas and it’ll let you converge to the good ones. You will find the good ideas. Mm-hmm. If you go talk to people, it’s in inevitably go talk to a hundred users. You will figure out the things that they actually have pain for. You’ll get better asking questions like a better at, you know, revealing the truth of the market.
You just have to force yourself to do it. It’s almost like meditation and people are like, meditate and you’ll feel better and you’re like, you sit for once or twice and you’re like. Oh God, this is like a blow to bologna, you know? And like I don’t [00:45:00] feel any different. But if you force yourself to do it, you know, day after day, week after week, eventually you’ll feel this, this change in you.
Mm-hmm. And I think understanding what are the things that you should do as a individual, as a founder, as a team, to create that repeated pattern for excellence down the line. You know, they say like, excellence is not something done once. It’s something that’s repeated over a long period of time. I think at the end of the day, like this simple bit around talking to users mm-hmm.
Is actually really profound. And it sounds obvious, but there are so many things that push us against doing it, and it’s so challenging to actually like, maintain it as a top thing. Even today with work oes, like it’s, it’s just, it’s wild to me how important it is and yet how it feels like everything pulls against it.
[00:45:42] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah.
[00:45:43] Michael Grinich: Yeah. And so I think there’s, there’s something magic in that.
[00:45:45] Victoria Melnikova: So even today when you talk to users, you get some revelations as
[00:45:49] Michael Grinich: to always, always, always, we do a lot of stuff internally with new product ideas we’re building or, you know, design docs essentially, that people share. And, and even when there’s things [00:46:00] that I’m totally confident a hundred percent this is gonna be a fit, I’ve heard it from people, if, if an engineer or a team puts it together and we ask like, what users have you talked to around this?
And if they say. You know, we haven’t really talked to anyone, but, but we have all this stuff. It’s like, Nope, nope. Go talk to users. It doesn’t matter. You know, we’ll just do this meeting again next week. Go talk to five or 10 companies. And because we build for developers, they’re accessible to us, they wanna talk, you know, you can go find ‘em.
They’d be like, Hey, do you have 10 minutes? I just wanna show you this quick thing. I’m gonna hit record in Zoom, take the transcript and granola, put it in the doc. You know, we’ll actually have some, some data points, but I always learn new things talking to people. Always, always. No matter how clever I think I’m being or how creative I think I am, it’s being clever is a very good feeling.
It’s like a feel, pride around it. Cozy. Yeah. It’s a comfortable place to be. If you were clever as a child, you were celebrated by adults, and so it’s also this, like self-worth is built into it, and so it’s hard to give that up to have the potential or the opportunity that you might [00:47:00] be wrong.
[00:47:00] Victoria Melnikova: Yeah. It’s
[00:47:01] Michael Grinich: like a, it’s like inviting and criticism.
Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s not a good feeling necessarily. The thing I care more than preserving that feeling in my ego is trying to make the best thing for people and really get in front of them. And when you talk to users, you’re not asking them, is this good or not? Or What do you think we should build? You know, it’s not that it’s still your job to come up with the thing, but you should be doing it in service of them all the time.
Mm-hmm. And the goal should be to make them feel really good, not to make you feel good. This is, this is actually a very important distinction I find where people sometimes think the. If you’re trying to create a beautiful and elegant product, the experience you have through making it mm-hmm. Should be really good and beautiful and elegant and nice, and that’s totally not the case.
Yeah. The process to create a beautiful and elegant product, or a great experience, or an amazing song, or a great building or whatever is excruciatingly painful.
Yeah.
And it requires like constantly throwing stuff away and arguing and being like at your limit and then going a little bit further and it’s just.[00:48:00]
It’s hard. It’s like it’s, it’s just this like thing that requires so much tenacity and commitment and grit to it, and then you have the opportunity to create something great. But I think inviting in that criticism and trying to get, get into the real world as fast as you can by talking to people, get real about it, get out of your head, get into that actual universe.
I still find that challenging to do, and I, and I suspect it’ll be challenging for my entire career. But the other side of it, once you do get it connected with those people and you see their eyes get excited and you, and you’re, you figure out how to be almost like a detective to figure out what pain they have or what you’re solving.
To me, the feeling of that is so satisfying. Mm-hmm. That it, it overwhelms the, you know, this challenge of it, how, how painful it is. It’s the greatest re reward you can have.
[00:48:48] Victoria Melnikova: It’s very cool. So I had Zana Rocha Oh yeah. A few weeks ago. Yeah. And he used to work at WorkOS Yeah. Yeah. And he said something like, I want to fail faster.
Right. I want to get to [00:49:00] the know faster, because that’s how I learned the truth. And it’s, I can see where, where this is scattered from. Very cool. Yeah.
[00:49:08] Michael Grinich: Yeah. He and I, he, he worked at work with us for, for a bit and, and. Those are some of the best, best months I’ve had working at this company. It was great.
Nice.
[00:49:16] Victoria Melnikova: So we actually arrived at our final question, which sounds like this. What makes you feel great about what you’re doing today?
[00:49:24] Michael Grinich: I think it, again, it goes back to the customers. My job, like the skills I have, the opportunity I have to build this company. Like I’m not making the music that I listen to or like the food that I eat.
I don’t grow it, you know, I don’t work on the city that I live in. You know, I don’t, I don’t. Books or poetry or other things, like the thing I know how to do is kinda make software and, and make this kind of piece of software that’s like this thing that people don’t usually see. But I feel like there’s this element of just being connected to the things that ha are happening in society and connected to the world.
That’s the thing we [00:50:00] all seek. I, I think, is, is this relevance to like, feel important to be part of this like human experience of what This experiment, of what we’re all doing together?
[00:50:08] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:50:11] Michael Grinich: I think it comes back to being able to do that for other companies that are pushing forward this growth. Like today, cursor just announced that they’ve, you know, RAI raised a ton more money.
Yeah. They’re over a billion run rate as a company. It’s insane. Yeah. I, I’m so in awe of, of, you know, Michael and, and that team there and you know, they use WorkOS and I don’t know if they’ll use it forever. I hope so. But they might not. But I know for like a period of time, at least in the past, like right now mm-hmm.
In the last year, a year or two, we have played like a really small part of that.
Yeah.
I won’t take credit for anything that they’ve done as an organization. They, they deserve all the credit of the win. But I feel it’s satisfying to have just been a very, very, very small part of their journey.
[00:50:55] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:50:55] Michael Grinich: And just done a little bit that I could to help them grow.
And I think that’s the [00:51:00] same feeling I have for Anthropic and Open ai. Yeah. Perplexity and, and Versal and Webflow and these other businesses that I can be a little bit of a nudge for everybody else’s business. Mm-hmm. And to me, if I can do that, you know, sometimes people want the big blowout success.
They want the. It’s like the firework going off that’s big and burns bright and everyone sees it and you’re like, you know, you’re famous. I can see why there’s an appeal to that, but I think the thing I found to be more like satisfying mm-hmm. Is this like continued small push. Mm-hmm. That’s like in the background, that’s just like making things just a little bit nicer for everyone.
And the ultimate version of that is people don’t notice it. It just disappears. Like to me that’s. Perfection in a product is not something that you pay attention to. Mm-hmm. Perfection as it disappears into the background. It is a thing that’s so natural to human, the human experience, the world, the creative spirit that it, that it disappears.[00:52:00]
You know, the best instrument, the best cello is the one that becomes part of the body and bu part of the, the person, the cello and human are the same thing. And I think the, the pursuit of building that and doing that for a small amount for these other businesses. Mm-hmm. That is the thing that’s like the most, uh, once I tasted that a little bit, I was like, I just wanna do that every day.
Mm-hmm. As much as I can. Just a little bit every day. And I think right now with this opportunity in the AI world, we have a chance to do that for this like enormous set of new companies existing and for whatever comes next.
Yeah. Too.
And that, I just feel so grateful. It’s such a privilege to be able to do that.
And. You know, to be trusted by these other businesses. Mm-hmm. It’s a, it’s an immense, immense privilege. So,
[00:52:41] Victoria Melnikova: sounds like a life mission.
[00:52:43] Michael Grinich: I think so. I think I’ll just, you know, keep doing this. I, I think it’s part of your career is like to find a thing that you’re, you know, you’re good at doing mm-hmm. That matches your skills, you’re able to do.
But I think another part of it is, is honestly to find a thing that you, like, you find satisfying, you find rewarding. You know, it’s, it’s like finding foods when you eat [00:53:00] them that you feel good.
Yeah. You
know, it’s not, it’s different foods for different people, different things. Agree in different ways and.
I think I’ve sort of found the work food that I like and whether it’s this company or another one or something else, you know, I work on, I think it’ll always have that characteristic. And I think our goal as a organization now growing is just to find other people that feel that same way. Mm-hmm. Like the organiza that the staff that we’ve hired, the people we’ve brought together are like all people that have the same kind of flavor profile.
They all want the same kind of thing. And so there’s this really strong cohesion culturally around that.
[00:53:35] Victoria Melnikova: Mm-hmm.
[00:53:36] Michael Grinich: And I can tell you to do it by yourself can be fun. I used to work on open source stuff and stuff by myself, but to do it as part of a group of other people that all have it, it’s really cool.
Mm-hmm. It’s, it’s really, really. Someone asked me recently, they’re like, so are you gonna sell the company? Or, you know, what’s your plan? Yeah. I was like, never in a million years. Like, it’s just why would I, I, I, I’ve, I’ve discovered this like, magical, magical thing. How could you, you couldn’t tear that from [00:54:00] my hands if you tried.
Yeah. You know? Yeah. So I’m, I’m thrilled with all the success we’ve had in the last few years, and especially the last couple years. The team’s done an amazing job, but I am extraordinarily excited for the stuff we have in the future. I just like cannot wait.
[00:54:14] Victoria Melnikova: I’m very happy for you.
[00:54:15] Michael Grinich: Thank you.
[00:54:16] Victoria Melnikova: Finally, I want to provide you the stage to invite people to use work oas.
So just go sign up and do it, and then it will disappear. Yeah,
[00:54:25] Michael Grinich: and, and you know, the best thing I, I hear from people is like, I used it. It’s great. I don’t have to think about this anymore. And then their business takes off. Yeah. It succeed. So that’s what, if you have questions, you can DM me on Twitter or X the Everything app.
And then also if you’re in the Bay Area, come to, come by our office, come to our events, we are doing another MCP night. Which is our third, one of these like big flagship events. It’s gonna be on December 10th in San Francisco. Nice. It’s gonna be amazing if people are listening to this. David, the creator of CP, is gonna speak, he’s gonna be there.
Nick Cooper from OpenAI. We’ve got people demoing from, [00:55:00] from super base, from from Google. Paul Irish is gonna come show off some of the Google Chrome nice MCP stuff, so it’s gonna be a blast. Oh, I’m gonna, it’s gonna be a party too, so please Don. I’m,
[00:55:11] Victoria Melnikova: yeah, I’m
[00:55:11] Michael Grinich: welcome. Sure. Yeah, yeah.
[00:55:12] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you Michael.
[00:55:13] Michael Grinich: Thanks so much for having me.
[00:55:15] Victoria Melnikova: Thank you for catching yet another episode of Deaf Propulsion Labs. We at Evil Martians transform growth stage startups into unicorns, build developer tools, and create open source products. If you are a developer tool needs help with product design development or SRE, visit evil martians.com/dev tools.
See you in the next.
