Selling to Enterprise

This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.

Leave us a comment

Changelog++ members get a bonus 7 minutes at the end of this episode and zero ads. Join today!

Sponsors:

• Sentry – Get to the root cause of an error or latency issue faster by seeing all the technical details related to that issue in one visual replay on your web application. Use the code CHANGELOG and get the team plan free for three months.
• Postman – Build APIs together — More than 20 million developers use Postman for building and using APIs. Postman simplifies each step of the API lifecycle and streamlines collaboration so you can create better APIs—faster.
• DevCycle – Build better software with DevCycle. Feature flags, without the tech debt. DevCycle is a Feature Flag Management platform designed to help you build maintainable code at scale.
• Fastly – Our bandwidth partner. Fastly powers fast, secure, and scalable digital experiences. Move beyond your content delivery network to their powerful edge cloud platform. Learn more at fastly.com

Featuring:

• Michael Grinich – Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website
• Adam Stacoviak – Mastodon, Twitter, GitHub, LinkedIn, Website

Show Notes:

• WorkOS
• Ironclad
• WorkOS: Enterprise’s Great Equalizer
• WorkOS raises $80m in Series B financing, acquires Modulz
• WorkOS raises $15M to build “Stripe for enterprise-ready features”
• WorkOS careers
• Resend

Something missing or broken? PRs welcome!

Timestamps:

(00:00) - This week on Founders Talk
(00:44) - Sponsor: Sentry
(03:08) - Start the show!
(03:51) - Where do we begin?
(11:55) - Digging into Nylas
(15:05) - Does WorkOS flatten the market?
(16:31) - Box vs Dropbox
(22:39) - Sponsor: Postman
(25:27) - How do you position WorkOS?
(27:38) - Low hanging fruit integrations
(33:13) - Keeping in touch with customers
(39:54) - Is "Enterprise" boring?
(44:14) - PLG or sales-person driven?
(50:25) - Adam loves sales
(57:55) - Is Michael good at sales?
(1:06:43) - Giving up your Lego
(1:14:26) - Being content with where you are
(1:24:14) - Sponsor: DevCycle
(1:27:01) - The downs
(1:40:33) - Who can you emulate?
(1:50:20) - That was the best I could do
(1:53:34) - They like you Michael, hiring?
(1:58:35) - We've come along way from SAML
(2:01:22) - Up next