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**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, it's good to reflect in those moments, to take some time and just think about it and kind of sit with it... And in those moments oftentimes I like to think about the people that kind of believe in me; that they're not necessarily disappointed, that making mistakes is part -- I mean, obviously... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Sure. Be perfect. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah. And I called a couple of my investors and I told them, I was like "Hey, this thing happened." So it's just like if you hear about it, here's why. And these people are great. You should hire them at your other portfolio companies, right? They're great folks. But I think for me, a feeling is ju... |
\[01:34:01.12\] It's a big privilege for someone to invest in your company. They really are giving you capital and being like "Make good decisions. Go forth and make good decisions." And that's just a huge privilege, a huge responsibility. I think that's the thing that becomes the higher stakes and just weighs on you m... |
But I think you just think like "Okay, this is part of the process. They expected me to make some mistakes, and what they're betting on is their belief that I can recover from those mistakes, and make the right call the next time, or help evolve it and kind of move the ball forward." And making mistakes is okay as long... |
And so with the marketing team, what did we do? We said, "Okay, well, we're not going to do it that way again. We're not just going to repeat that. Let's take a different angle at it, or think about it in a different way." And for us, what we did is really reorient around developers, and said, "Hey, how can we really m... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. |
**Michael Grinich:** But there's no trick for that. I don't know. It sometimes still gets to me, and I've gotta -- I live next to the park in San Francisco, and occasionally I just need to go -- just close the laptop, and I go look at the ducks... \[laughs\] And just go sit out there and look at the geese, and... There... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. So you said it was a few years ago? |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, this was a couple of years ago, I think. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** So you have the hindsight essentially, right? That's 20/20. So you can kind of see differently now, than you could have then. In the moment it's very micro; what's happening now, how's this today? And then now you have the macro view, which is much further out much, more zoomed out... And I've gotta... |
**Michael Grinich:** \[01:38:10.02\] We're definitely stronger on the other side of that, as a company. I think it's something we learned about ourselves, and learned about what we're going to do next. And it's more information for us as a company. And most decisions are like that. I think that's really what advances t... |
I don't think there's any secret to it. It's just that these fundamentals are hard to have discipline around, day in and day out. It doesn't get easier as you get bigger, or you go faster. But you've got to be willing to miss some, and I think this is one of the hardest things as companies get bigger, is they get more ... |
It's tough, it's really tough. And I think this is probably one of the challenges for me over the next few years at the company. We're at this transition point where we're supporting hundreds of customers, and expanding, and all that... We're gonna become more conservative over time around building new stuff, kind of s... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Congrats. |
**Michael Grinich:** We'll see. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Congrats to you for having that job. Is there any company out there that you can emulate, that you think is kind of mature, and sort of safe, so to speak, and in that place where they probably shouldn't take risks, but they find ways to? |
**Michael Grinich:** I think emulating others is a really dangerous thing to think about, and it's kind of like a cargo cult mentality. I talked about this with my team actually quite a bit... Because the place that another company has converged to, like where they're at today - they did probably didn't go directly the... |
My example I give about this all the time is like OKRs, like objectives and key results, that's like the goal planning framework that Google came up with, \[unintelligible 01:41:15.17\] And like, OKRs maybe work well at Google, but I think if you do them in a small company, it's a total disaster. It's like a misapplyin... |
Yeah, I think that it's really dangerous to look at big successful cases and try to back-propagate from where they are at that moment to today. Because then if you go and talk to the people that actually built it - that's what I've been doing the last couple years to learn. I go talk to people that were early at like C... |
\[01:42:18.10\] So I think emulating is really tough, but there are companies that I think are willing to take big risks. And I really, really admire them. Cloudflare is actually an example of one. If you look at the shipping philosophy of what they've built in the last few years, it's just mind-blowing. They have some... |
Another one I've always looked up to is actually Apple. Not necessarily Apple today, but if you look back at Apple in the kind of like iPod, iPhone era, every year they were rebuilding the iPod. They would have the top-selling music player in the world, with like 98% market share, and they would every year throw it awa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, for sure. Apple's a different beast though, for sure. But I do agree. |
**Michael Grinich:** Well, they've done it again and again, too. Even if you look at the Mac to the iPhone transition - like, they went from like all of the revenue being from like Macs to all of it being from like iPod and the iPhone, in a few years. It's like literally building a brand new company. It's wild. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Michael Grinich:** It's almost hard to imagine that type of scale of transition happening in other companies... And I think you have to be willing to go all-in and sort of bet the farm. Other things I've seen happen like this - Intel did this early on, when they transitioned from memory to microprocessors. Boeing did... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah, that is a good example, because not only is it a different direction product-wise, but also a different name that was formed around the product. Like, that's just -- I mean, you might eventually say it's courageous... Right now we may think it's not so courageous. It's definitely audacious... ... |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, in a few years you're either a genius, or the biggest fool, squandering an opportunity. That's what the pundits will say. But in the moment, you can't tell. And I think that separates people, I think, that are kind of in the game-playing from people that are not, is willing to take that risk.... |
\[01:45:56.19\] And going back to something you were saying earlier, about how do you do this every day - I think that's the piece that makes it feel fresh. You never know what's going to happen next, and... You know, in two years, WorkOS could look like something totally different, for sure. We could take a big bet an... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Well, I do like where you're at now. I will commend your design talent, and your -- I mean, copy, design... There isn't anything about all the pages, and I have like -- just too many to count; at least 10+ tabs of your website opened up just to kind of dig into the product a bit more... Because \[un... |
**Michael Grinich:** Most people don't, actually. It turns out we're kind of a niche product. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Wow, that's crazy. |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah. The design is a tough one. I have a secret for that one, too. None of these things are secrets, but here's the secret: you have to be willing to spend more time on it than anybody else is willing to. That's the secret. Anybody else that would work on it would just be like "I can't believe you... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** It's sort of challenging though, Michael, because you have competing advice, right? You have, from your friends at Facebook/Meta, you've got "Done is better than perfect." |
**Michael Grinich:** 100%, yeah. Release early, release often. Absolutely. Yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Move fast and break things, all these things. |
**Michael Grinich:** We talk about sense of urgency being a really important thing, and speed being a huge advantage that startups have. We talk about this internally all the time, about how we want to move quickly, and make fast decisions, and follow up fast with the team... I don't know; that's the thing, you've just... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Michael Grinich:** It's also not required. Like, WorkOS could be a fine company without doing this. But in my mind, that's like the hardest thing about getting this level quality; it's not just the time. You have to be willing to put in the time, to wait and iterate on it... But it's shared values. It's everyone's sa... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** \[01:50:20.14\] It's really a lot easier to appreciate the work you did put in, regardless of outcome, if at the end you're like "That was the best I could do. I put it all out there. Everything I have was put into it, and... Success or not, fit or not, I put it out there." |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, like misses are kind of -- you know, when you have a failure... I think the place that you can have solace in if you do miss, or do fail, or have a company that doesn't work out, is being able to say "I gave it everything I had. I put it all out." It's kind of like if you're an athlete, and y... |
I think when you compromise on that, when someone's like "Oh, we could have made it better, but we just kind of shipped it." I don't know. If you always feel like you could have made it a little bit better... And I'm not saying you should wait forever to ship something. There's an art of scoping things down, and an art... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** Yeah. |
**Michael Grinich:** You know, like "Can I work in any other way after tasting this? Or am I willing to compromise on that for some other reason?" It becomes a personal decision, I think. And I think people that are on the other side of that, where they're like "Look, I've tasted what that tastes like, and I only want ... |
**Adam Stacoviak:** For sure. Well, since people may have listened to this show all the way to this point, and they like you, they may want to work with you, they may want to work for you... |
**Michael Grinich:** We've kind of departed from SAML APIs. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** We did depart from SAML APIs quite a bit... \[laughter\] But you know, you have to begin somewhere though, right? |
**Michael Grinich:** Yeah, yeah. |
**Adam Stacoviak:** And that's what I love about this podcast, is there's -- like I was telling you before the show, Mike, I don't really know how to tell you how the show's gonna go, Michael. I just know roughly where we can go. And really, it kind of depends on ultimately the willingness of the person meeting with me... |
\[01:54:16.12\] But really, it takes the commitment and the willingness of the person meeting with me to share, and to be introspective, and be willing to even put out their flaws, potentially even. Not just the things they're most proud of, but also the things that there's like "Man, it's kind of like, I don't tell to... |
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