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**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, multiple years. |
**Michael Grinich:** \[20:00\] ...Box probably had those features. They probably had features around -- I'll just give you like one example. So if you're using a tool online, and you're using it with potential customer data, or just even your company data, and you get sued. Like, anyone sues you. Any sort of lawsuit. D... |
So this is a feature inside of like corporate Gmail, where they can just say, "Hey, save everything that has says this word, or has this name in it. Just in case." And that's called legal holds; it's used for e-discovery if it goes to trial. If you don't have this feature, it doesn't matter how shiny your pixels are, o... |
So that IT group - it's a small group, it's a small number of people, but they have a lot of power and sort of a big voice within companies... And companies reach this point, and startups reach this point where they have to make a decision one way or the other. And my hope with WorkOS is that we can help push that off ... |
But even from the perspective of like building a marketing team, or a sales team, or thinking about enterprise, the companies that don't do it, unfortunately, long-term they don't succeed. They kind of flame out or sell out. Whereas the companies that do embrace it and figure out that balance end up doing really well. ... |
**Break**: \[22:26\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So, do you position work less as a featureset for enterprise applications, is it an enterprise enablement for scrappy startups? Who uses WorkOS, who should we use WorkOS? Is it like a "Everybody should use it, and you should never write these features yourself"? Obviously, you're probably biased, be... |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, everybody should use it, and pay for it in triplicate, of course... \[laughs\] |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Michael Grinich:** No, I think the right audience is people -- earliest is really after you get product-market fit. So you don't need WorkOS when you're just trying to figure out what features to build. And product-market fit isn't like a single point in time; it's kind of a spectrum as to when it starts to happen...... |
For example, we have a customer who hasn't even launched publicly, still an invite, and they have a bunch of like SMBs and startups using it, and then Airbnb wanted to use their product, the team there. And so suddenly, now they have to go through Airbnb's IT team. And they're not thinking about enterprise yet, the sta... |
We also work with much larger companies, like companies who don't want to maintain this stuff, and want to keep expanding. But I would say the earliest -- sometimes people think the brand new YC startup should use WorkOS... And today, that's not really the case. People, I would say, use it after product-market fit. But... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** What's the low-hanging fruit in terms of integrations? I know you said single sign-on before... So obviously, if you need to authenticate with Auth0, or Okta, or some of the well-known providers out there... I think Google's even one of them, just because they're obviously part of that... I think Ap... |
\[28:13\] So what are some of the low-hanging fruit in terms of - you've got product market fit; what are some of the earliest features that you enable, that can make your enterprise-ready? Obviously, single sign-on, directory syncing... What are some of those features? |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, single sign-on is the first one. And specifically, authenticating with SAML-based identity systems. So the things you were mentioning around signing in with GitHub, or signing in with your Google account - these are often kind of social login experiences, or individual logins... So just kind ... |
And so they'll say, "Hey, we don't want you to sign in through GitHub anymore. We want you to sign in through Okta. Or like Azure AD, Azure Active Directory. Or this custom-built SAML system that we have. Or this thing from VMware, or CyberArk." There's all these different systems out there. But usually, the way people... |
Around that time also, sometimes they'll ask about kind of compliance and security at the company. People often adopt WorkOS around the same time they start thinking about SOC2 compliance. So we don't help companies with SOC2 compliance. There's a bunch of products out there, like Vanta, or Drata, or Secureframe, which... |
And then the third thing companies will ask for usually is a thing for user management - automatic provisioning and deep provisioning. Because if you can imagine a company like Uber, that has hundreds, or I guess thousands of employees now, they're not going to manually add or remove users. They want to connect it with... |
Those are just a few of them. If you want to see the whole list, it's actually pretty easy to figure out; just go look at what's in Slack Enterprise, what's in Dropbox Enterprise, what's in Asana Enterprise. You'll look at those bullet points on the pricing page, and they'll pretty much be the same across different pro... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. Essentially, this is the ultimate way to not have to build these features yourself. I think even whenever you got your initial funding, it was like "We're the Stripe for X." \[unintelligible 00:31:07.07\] you can say "I'm the Stripe for X." It's usually ambitious, and potentially a good idea,... |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, they've done all right... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, they've done pretty good. |
**Michael Grinich:** They've done pretty well. I mean, they're a huge inspiration to us, in terms of their -- also, I think I share a lot of similar sentiment around the focus on design, and brand, and experience, and like really building for developers... Even though what we're building is enterprise infrastructure st... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[31:54\] It's something that worked out for everybody else, too. I think being able to easily transact is a great thing on the internet; it was challenging. PayPal was there... It's still challenging with PayPal... There's a lot of politics around who you choose, and who you use, or whatnot, when i... |
**Michael Grinich:** One of the cool things about Stripe I've always thought is they're with you when you kind of get your first customer. You integrate Stripe, you're building your product and business, and they're right there with you when you kind of get that first charge that comes through, and you get notified... ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** How do you keep in touch with customers? Either you yourself as CEO and founder, or just corporately as a company. How do you maintain that relationship with customers? |
**Michael Grinich:** That's a great question. A whole bunch of different ways. One thing that we have is a change log that we publish, and we put a lot of stuff into that. We ship stuff really, really fast. And so that's a really good way for people just to follow along what we've been building and shipping, week by we... |
I also spend quite a bit of time talking to people over Twitter. I find that a lot of developers are on Twitter; not the enterprise IT guys necessarily, but people who are like building stuff, thinking about products, a lot of entrepreneurs and founders are on Twitter... And Hacker News as well. That's where we launche... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, yeah. We launched in like March of 2020; kind of one of the weirdest times for launching a new startup. And then I think lastly, we do it through Slack. So we have today several hundred shared Slack channels with other companies. And through those we can -- we actually give support through sl... |
I recently had a founder ask me -- they were talking about a customer, and the customer wanted access to their financials... And I was like "No, you don't do that. You don't give someone like a customer your P&L." But another one was asking for like a multi-year discount agreement, with a discounts. I was like "Oh, yea... |
So it's not just talking with customers of ours. I feel like it's actually just engaging with the wider kind of startup community. Oh, and the last thing is like a lot of stuff's still in-person. I live in San Francisco, and despite the rumors of the death of the city, I think it's still a hot -- |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is it still thriving? |
**Michael Grinich:** I think it's pumping. I think it's doing great. Yeah, even in the past couple months, there's been a lot of events, and it really feels like it's recharged in a big way. So it'll be a good summer, a good spring and summer. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. Anytime there's big change, that can sometimes bring big change, and what better way to embrace big change in your life than to announce somebody else's big change, which is "Hey, SF isn't a fun place anymore. It's gone downhill" or whatever. And then obviously, there's a \[unintelligible 00:3... |
**Michael Grinich:** I think maybe all the people that didn't want to work very hard all went to Miami... Or New York, I don't know. They wanted to go hang out. I think the people that are still here are definitely grinding builders. It's pretty galvanizing, I would say, right now. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Right. |
**Michael Grinich:** But that's just me throwing shade at those two places... I love New York. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[36:09\] For sure. Well, you've got some shade thrown your way, so... It's owed. It's owed. We'll allow it. How do you find the joy, I suppose, in what you do? I mean, obviously, you get to help people get their first customer, maybe navigate some weird language in contracts, things like that... Bu... |
**Michael Grinich:** I think it is pretty fun, yeah. I mean, so far. It's an interesting question. There's different levels to it, I think, as to why it's enjoyable or fun. I would say it's not always fun. It definitely is work. And I think one of the hard things actually about being a founder and an entrepreneur is yo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Is that right? |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Congrats. |
**Michael Grinich:** So I've been driving forward sales, and doing that -- I've been doing sales. And I'm not like an expert sales, a VP of sales person... But I've sort of figured out how to do it for our type of business, and for what we needed. But I don't get to continue to do it to the point of mastery. I hand it ... |
And so you have to love the process, I think, of like constantly handing over your Legos, giving away your Legos to other people... And the job for me is actually somewhat the WorkOS his product, what we're going to build there, but actually for me it's building the company. It's kind of like building the machine that ... |
And then I think the other counterpoint here is I just really like building tools and platforms for people. There's a certain kind of satisfaction from creating something and giving it to someone else, and then it enables them to create another thing, that you could have never thought of, or you would have never built ... |
My favorite product, I think of all time, is actually AWS. Not because I think it's particularly well built or well designed, but the impact that AWS has had, the amount of leverage that it's given people is astounding. There's businesses that exist because of AWS, that would have never been built or never been even st... |
I guess, kind of backstage... Sometimes I use the analogy of like - WorkOS, and the people we hire at the company, and all that, we're not really the people on stage, with the spotlight on them, singing the Prima Donna. We're kind of like the people that run the soundboard; that are supporting the opening act, or suppo... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, by no means was I trying to downplay the level, but you have to admit that enterprise tends to bring this -- or even the word, it's kind of like "Boring..." Now that I'm even saying that, there's that stigma out there. And I think you have to address this; and I think you addressed it perfectl... |
\[40:20\] I love example you gave there, which is like as soon as you get good at it, you essentially hand it over to somebody else, or you try to. And if you're not, then you're probably not growing. And that is kind of surprising... I didn't expect you to say that, that you just hired your first salesperson. One, tha... |
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