WorkOS's Michael Grinich on Becoming the Enterprise Layer for AI's Biggest Companies

About this episode

Michael Grinich discusses the evolution of WorkOS and its role in the AI industry.

Michael Grinich is the co-founder and CEO of WorkOS, the enterprise authentication and identity infrastructure used by Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, xAI, and hundreds of fast-growing companies. Before WorkOS, Michael dropped out of MIT, worked at Dropbox, and founded Nihilus — where a painful first experience with enterprise features planted the seed for everything that came next. In this episode, Immad Akhund and Raj Suri sit down with Michael to talk about the SaaS apocalypse thesis, how WorkOS quietly became the enterprise layer for AI's biggest companies, and what it actually takes to build for developers. What you'll learn: Why the SaaS apocalypse narrative gets it completely backwards How WorkOS became the default enterprise-ready layer for AI-native companies The Stripe parallel: why developer infrastructure compounds the same way payments did What a failed first startup taught Michael about idea validation How keeping a daily idea notebook — volume, not quality — led to WorkOS Why second-time founders approach conviction and validation completely differently The do-or-die bond between developer tools and their customers How Michael taught himself enterprise sales after…

People in this episode

Hosts: Immad Akhund, Rajat Suri

Guest: Michael Grinich

Topics covered

• enterprise software
• AI infrastructure
• developer tools
• SaaS
• startup experiences
• idea validation

Keywords

• WorkOS
• Michael Grinich
• SaaS apocalypse
• developer infrastructure
• enterprise authentication
• AI-native companies
• idea notebook
• enterprise sales

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: WorkOS, Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, xAI, MIT, Dropbox, Nihilus

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