Startup Spotlight #137: WorkOS

WorkOS provides APIs to make your app enterprise-ready, with pre-built features and integrations required by IT admins.

Jul 06, 2021

Author’s Note: My apologies for the delay with this article and for missing last Friday’s update. I am still working on a number of backend processes with F2F to make it better. Startup Spotlights will resume on July 12th.

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I got the chance to speak with Michael Grinich, founder and CEO of WorkOS, about what he’s working on at his startup, and any advice he has for emerging entrepreneurs.

WorkOS is a 2-year-old startup building “Stripe for enterprise-ready features.” This helps developers quickly make their app enterprise-ready and unlocks larger customers and more revenue. The company was founded by Michael Grinich, an engineer who previously founded Nylas and studied at MIT.

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Startup Spotlight: WorkOS

Problem: Developers need features like SSO/SAML, Directory Sync, and Audit Trail to close enterprise customers, but those features are complex and time-consuming to build. WorkOS provides these via an API, enabling developers to close large customers and much faster than building from scratch.

Market: Anyone building cloud apps/SaaS. It’s already a huge market and continues to grow.

Solution: WorkOS provides a developer platform to make apps enterprise-ready. With one integration, developers can immediately ship dozens of enterprise integrations and features.

Team: WorkOS is a fully distributed team of primarily engineers and designers. We obsess over the developer experience and ship code every day.

Recent Success:

Grinich: Today, WorkOS is powering enterprise features in some of the fastest-growing products like Webflow and Hopin. But I’m most proud of all the smaller startups we have helped grow and get their first few enterprise customers. My hope is that WorkOS will create equal access to the enterprise market.

Lots of developers have said they love our API documentation. Creating good docs is surprisingly difficult and takes an incredible amount of time and focus on small details. At this point, we’ve rewritten our docs 4 times and I can still think of things we want to improve. The point here is to never be satisfied. I believe the best products are the result of relentless polish over many years.

Recent Struggle:

Grinich: As a small company, there is always more and more to build. One of the hardest things at this stage is having the discipline to focus on a narrow set of problems for our customers. Startups need to do one or two things and do them really well.

There are lots of features needed for enterprise readiness, but we decided to start with one of the big ones: Single Sign-On with SAML systems. It turns out just this alone has a fractal complexity most companies are not able to solve completely. We’ve done a lot here in the past two years, but there's still more to do.

Founder Advice:

Grinich: Listen to the market. Many founders will be so enthralled with their ideas of the future, that they get lost along the way and aren't able to commercialize their work. When building a startup it's obviously important to have a vision and mission, but it's equally important to grow a business along the way. And sometimes (quite often actually) this means taking a nonlinear path to your destination. Great founders will embrace this, evolving their business based on market feedback and traction. It's not a pivot. It's sailing where the wind is.

Another small piece of advice: it's unlikely your first imagination of a solution in your market will be the right solution. But if you are steadfast committed to your unique take, you can miss what might actually be the right product to build. So instead of falling in love with your solution, try to fall in love with the problem space. This will let you more objectively see the market and move from good to great.

Three Cool Founders You Should Know About:

Grinich: Here are three founders you should check out next!

Ludwig Petterson, Founder of Quill: Quill provides messaging to make your team better.
Nina Kuruvilla, Founder of Daily.co: Daily is real-time video for developers.
Paul Rosania, Founder of Balsa: Balsa is building the best second screen for builders, integrating tools you already use like Jira, GitHub, and Figma.

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