Michael Grinich - founder & CEO of WorkOS

It's great to see you again, Jack. Yeah. And how's, how's your conference experience been?

And a lot of those people are here. And so they've come by our booth and said, oh, I've heard about WorkOS, or what do you guys do? All different, you know, parts on that spectrum. We gave a talk yesterday, a detail from, from our team talked about our new fine grain authorization tech, and some people came over and wanted to hear more about that. So it's just kind of a great great time to engage with people like that, and, and just a lot of fun too.

And really they're thinking about business goals. They're not just thinking about what specific technology should I use, or is it better to write this in Rust or Elixir, or should I, you know, upgrade our latest version of of React or Next. Js. They're less interested in the actual specifics of the technology and more in the impact it has on their, like, wider organization goals. Recruiting and building talent is a big part of that.

How to weigh priorities and trade offs is a big part of that. Building new teams like security teams is, is definitely a a topic that's been discussed. Everybody here is talking about AI, how they can leverage AI, ways that they're using it to be more effective and and scale faster, not to mention in their own products, you know, shipping it. So it's definitely, like, kinda higher level conversations, pretty different than if you went to a conference. I don't know.

Like, you know, like like Vercel's, Next. Js conf. That's very much about Next. Js, the framework, the actual they put code on, you know, presentations and screens. Most presentations here don't have, like, code. Ours did a little bit, but most of them don't have don't have code shown.

So not necessarily the the way in which we do it, but the end results on a business. That tends to resonate more with, you know, executives or people that are thinking about staffing teams, thinking about projects on maybe several quarters timeline, you know, a year or 2. A lot of those people are here. Those those engineering leaders are here. So sometimes they're interested in telling me, like, how do I actually do it?

Show me the code. Show me a demo. But more often than not, they're like, what do I actually get from this? Walk me through the impact of it long term.

Sometimes they're ready to go. They just wanna understand, like, pricing or kind of commercial structure stuff. But this is just the beginning. It's kind of just step 1, usually. And and we can't keep coming back here to this conference for ELC because we've had customers that have discovered us here and, you know, months later actually sign up and use the product, and we can tie it back to our presence at at these events.

So it's pretty good. It starts sometimes from just one one little conversation a great, you know, customer relationship can be can be built.

What I do for us for conferences is I will always go just by myself the 1st year to scout it. So no booth, no team, no presentations. I'll just buy a ticket for myself. And usually just go for, like, a couple days and go check it out and do, like, sort of a vibe check. Are there people that I think could be customers?

Is the tone or the type, you know, kind of topics relevant for us as business? And do I think if we actually brought brought a team, it would be impactful, you know. So the 1st year for ELC, that's what I did. I just came and bought a ticket, met some people, and I was like, oh, yeah. This is it.

This is a good spot. There's many events I've gone to where that's not the case. I've gone there and I'm like, not so much, not really our vibe. It may maybe not exactly how our team would fit in. One that I went to last year for the first time was re:Invent, AWS re:Invent, which is in Las Vegas in, in December.

And, you know, I just bought a plane ticket, got a hotel room, just went by myself, and I was just blown away. I was like, this is crazy. It's like it's like 80,000 people all talking about SaaS and Cloud and tons of other companies and vendors there, not just AWS. I spent a bunch of time talking to folks from Cloudflare and Datadog and LaunchDarkly and all these companies that we we really love and we've learned a lot from. They've inspired us.

So this year, going back to to re Invent, we're actually bringing a team. We have a booth that we're gonna have and meet a bunch of customers there. So that that's my recommendation is kind of like dip your toe in the water because it's a big investment. I mean, it's it's, of course, money. You know, you sponsor the booth.

You have to pay for stuff. But it's really just time and focus. You know, you you you, if you're gonna bring your salespeople away from engaging with customers online, if you're gonna bring in this case, we had a a couple, you know, engineers coming to this giving talks. That's a big investment. The time is a hard thing to get back.

So for every business, it's different. For every business, their product might have a different audience or different place to go to. So I I wouldn't say ELC is perfect for everybody. But it's a pretty good one for us selling to developers and and specifically engineering engineering leaders. Yeah.

Last thing I'll say about that, if you wanna get really scrappy, I remember 1 year I was at SaaSter and we had a booth. We had a pretty pretty good sized booth, brought a bunch of people. And there was this guy, and we're just handing out swag. Right? We're handing out, you know, hats and candies and stuff and and ice cream.

And this guy came around giving out, I think it was like popcorn or something. And he didn't work for the conference. He didn't have a booth. He was just a startup founder. He was doing like the reverse pitch.

He was going out to people at their booth, pitching them his stuff. And I was like, this is brilliant. He doesn't have to pay for anything. He doesn't have to, you know, like, actually, kind of register, you know, $40,000 in advance or more. He was able to actually go after the same, you know, audience, but but prototype it himself, just like hustle his way into it.

And, that's pretty fantastic to see that that level of of hunger and energy. And I don't know if he ended up going back the following year and getting a booth, but that type of attitude typically compounds and results to success.

The best booths, the best conferences, people have that have that hustle, and it's it's exhausting. I mean, it's it's for sure for sure tiring. You gotta take, you know, take turns, hand off stuff as people get, you know, tired from it and cycle through. People that think conferences are just time off of work or vacation. It's like totally not the case. It's the opposite. It's it's like really, really dialed up intensity. It's draining. It's draining. Yeah.

It's it's really universal to every business, every software software business in that sense. Now for the first one, it's it's not too realistic to get other people to come sponsor. It's really hard to get other people to give talks and just to coordinate, you know, across multiple folks. So for the first one, it's really just mostly us speaking. We're gonna have some external people in a panel and some external pretty cool fireside chat we're gonna do at it, but it's mostly us.

So in terms of how we're thinking about it, we're like, okay. We'll shape it. We'll put the structure around it. We'll we'll fund it too. You know, we'll pay for it.

But the whole point of it is to be an experiment. So long term, you know, we'll know how to run an event, we'll know how to invite people, we'll know how to handle, you know, everything from food to security, to, like, making cool swag for people that come by, to, you know, the the kinda like ticketing stage beforehand and checking them in. We're hoping to learn about all that stuff. And then also at the same time, be able to actually announce some cool stuff that we've built, showcase some features, use it as a bit of an event to kind of focus a lot of the work that we've been doing over the last year. So I'm really excited about it.

You can probably tell. It's gonna be really cool. Yeah. And the design the design stuff of it is super fun. I mean, if you like designing products, a conference is kind of like a product that you, like, sit inside of. You know, it's a temporal one day product that you get to experience. We have some cool stuff for that too.

And I think what what you're focusing on there is, like, legibility of a market. Like, this market is this, like, organic kind of expanding crazy thing, and how do we make some sense of it and be able to talk about it? That's what frameworks are for. And and they're helpful for that, put structure on it. The problem is if you started try to use the framework as a genesis point for new ideas, it's extremely constraining.

And I think you you kinda just don't get anywhere from it because it's it's too categorized already. And so instead, like, rather than using a framework the question yesterday was using a framework to kinda come up with an idea for a start up to build, like, which directions you could go. I I my answer was more like, you should just go talk to a ton of people, build empathy with those users or with the market, really, really try to understand them and understand what makes them tick, what problems they're having, what's painful for their job, and then use that empathy to shape your idea of what could be better and then go build that. It's not really a framework, you know, and it it's messier, but I think it's a more, likely source for, like, getting to, like, the bedrock of the the idea or the actual pain that a person is having.

I think the reason why it's valuable is because you always learn something, and there's this tendency to assume you already know what the users want. Like, you you you're very quick to just make that idea real.

No one figures it out initially. And so the talking to user step is something that generally invalidates your assumption very quickly. And what you don't wanna have happen is, like, spend a lot of time working on an idea and then it turns out to be wrong. So it's like check, check, check, check, check. It's the lean startup methodology.

I think that the the piece around asking why is part of that. It's like, why is this painful? Where is the value? Why why are we doing this? Why is this important? And, yesterday, we were talking about this. It was more around narrative of the company. Like, why should this exist? Why is it important for us to work on? But why is it really important for us to work on?

What is the the thing driving us? And it can't just be, like, to make money necessarily. It needs to be something, like, firmer than that. And ideally, you can get down to the bedrock piece of it, as I say, is is like the the the, like, pain that the customer is having in their life in some way, whether that's a a problem they're having with an existing tool, or it's like a task that they have to complete, or something that's limiting their ability to succeed in another area. The more you can articulate the that why, the more clearly you can kind of hold it, the better you can use it.

And that becomes an asset for hiring people, for raising money, and honestly, for doing sales. Sometimes sometimes if you can sit down with a customer and you can just so clearly articulate the thing that they're feeling pain with, you don't even have to tell them the solution. You can just articulate what they're frustrated with. That person is like, I feel so seen and so hurt. I'll buy whatever you have.

Doesn't it doesn't even really matter, you know, like, what it does, but, like, just because I finally feel like someone understands me and understands the challenge I'm trying to have. So much of sales starts with, like, the what, what we've built, and then, like, how we've built it. Here's some new technology, you know. We we built this new orchestration that's, you know, instead of using instead of Kubernetes, it's better orchestration layer for containers. And we did it written in whatever whatever language, and it's massively paralyzed, and it runs on ARM chips or whatever.

But you never get to the why. Like, why is this actually important? But if you can start with the why, start there's a really good book by I I think it's Simon Sinek who wrote Start With Why. You know, it's it's a 150 pages long. It pretty much just says this.

If you start start with that piece Yeah. And you literally start with it. You begin begin with y. It it almost instantly builds this, like, connection between you and whoever you're talking to. And if that common ground is established, it's it's valuable for sales or hiring or fundraising or anything.

Maybe. But but I mean, in terms of, like, who they are, what they struggle with, one of one of my favorite things about WorkOS, I've I've said this to you before, is the the type of customers we get to serve are amazing. They're like these fast growing, usually technology led startups expanding up market with big aspirations, with these businesses activating. You know, we, whether it's like Perplexity or someone like, you know, Vercel or or the hundreds of other customers we have, we get to work with their engineering teams and their technology teams out. It's super cool.

It's like, you know, it's it's the best thing second to going working at Perplexity for me, is to work with their, you know, engineering team or design team on their future product. I'm just tickled to have that opportunity. And and I think that ends up being durable even when a single product doesn't work. You know, you build a product, you build a new feature, and it flops, and not everything is gonna be a hit. The thing that, like, can be sustaining as you do through it is that connection you have with the customer, the empathy you've built, and hopefully, the desire you have to make their problem, you know, just go away long term.

So fall in love with the problem space and and also your customers become one of them.

There's definitely things that we've changed and things that we've tried that hasn't worked or or things that haven't hit as well. But, we we really haven't changed the message or the direction of the company for for several years, which is which is, which is great. Not not everyone gets the the luck to be able to do that, you know. You have to adapt and change if it's not working. But I think that why one of the reasons why it has been for us durable is is it's connected to something that's, like, higher than just the specific features we build.

You know, we're we're not the SAML company. You know, we're not just about SCIM or audit logs or access control or authorization. You know, we're not even called auth OS. Right? Like, authentication is a big part of what we build, but but that's not the name of the company.

It's this higher level thing about building a new platform for workplace tools, like the the work OS, and this idea of becoming enterprise ready, enterprise ready story. If you can articulate that as your startup, you know, that that narrative, or actually just have it in the back of your head as you're building it, those things end up being, like, pretty durable over time. And I think for for companies as you scale and you grow, you need to figure out what are those invariants that you're gonna have that whether it's, you know, you care a lot about design, you know, the the user experience or performance or speed or always being at the bleeding edge in terms of the frameworks that you support. Or for us, it's like developers. Like, developer joy is our number one operating principle.

We always wanna build for developers. It's very hard to go add those things later, you know, to add them, you know, post fact. And so sort of knowing who you are, what you stand for as much as you can early on, I I definitely look for that when I invest in people too. You know, I do some angel investing, and I'm like, why is this person doing this? Why do they care about it?

You know, why why is this gonna be the thing that they actually do wanna keep working on for a long period of time? Because, even if you have the right idea or the right market, the right customers, it's enormously difficult to build anything. And certainly to build like a startup that scales, there needs to be a deeper reason why that founder is gonna stick it out and keep building.

I you know, they've built something. It solves that problem, But there may not be a kind of, you know, a sense of, like, you know, we're helping people cross the enterprise chasm sort of why. Do you think people should try to find that why? Or do you think it's something that is obvious to you? And if it's not, maybe you keep you keep, you know, doing things until you find that deep mission that you really want to solve? Yeah.

And and over time, you can, like, kinda learn to love anything, but I guess, but I think it's it's easier if it's something you're drawn towards, that you find compelling, that it's for people that you really wanna spend time with. You know, if if you if if you really love hanging out with, you know, people that work at restaurants or something or chefs, you care about cooking, build something for the food industry, the food and beverage beverage industry. You'll just inherently be surrounded then by people that you wanna spend time with. I think you shouldn't force it. You should just sort of follow your interests, and those will be the areas, in my mind, where the the richest the richest ideas are.

You know, the the areas that you're like, and Paul Graham even wrote about this. It's like, kinda follow not your just your passions, but what you're interested in. And don't be too concerned about it, whether it's a good company or not early on or whether it's a good start up idea. Just go build and The thing

They had to build. They struggled with it, you know, themselves to build in house. Engineers didn't necessarily like working on it. Like, it had all these characteristics that sort of intuitively felt right as the thing that'd be valuable to build and work on. I didn't really think about how big the exact market would be, you know, or or try to think about it from a more, like, mathematical perspective, maybe.

I was like, it seems valuable for the world. I know some early people I could sell it to. Those people are people I like. Like, I I enjoy talking to them. And it's kind of this problem that, like, feels really gnarly. Just as, like, no one's really solved this in a way. There's not any good alternatives. It's just a snake pit of of technology. And I was like, oh, that seems like valuable. You know?

And so I and and so that was kind of the genesis to go after it, and and, the idea formed from that, from those, like, primitives. But as I realized the power of, like, the building for enterprise and going up market and what what these capabilities actually do to your company when you add them, it just kinda felt more and more special. And and I realized, like, there was more and more opportunity to help people. And that's when I decided to, like, raise more money and go faster and kinda scale it up. But you only have part of the picture in focus.

You know, it's it's kinda like sometimes it feels a little bit like, remember, like, in the nineties with, like, Internet? Where, like, early 2000s? Like, late nineties where you would load, like, a page and, like, the image would come in and it would load? But, like, I think it was, like was it, like, the I think it was, like, a JPEG encode, where it wouldn't just load top to bottom, it would load, like, a few lines horizontally, and then, like, another few lines. And so you would kinda be able to see, like, the picture slowly as it came in.

It's kinda like that. Like, you kind of have an idea with what the shape is, but it takes a while to get the full image and picture in there. And I think there's kinda similarities to as the company develops what, yeah, what what the business looks like. Yeah. I don't pretend to be, like, clairvoyance or had it figured out from, you know, day 1 or knowing Workhorse is gonna grow into what it is today.

I still pinch myself a lot of mornings. I'm like, oh, wow. It's really working. Yeah. It's a real business.

Like, I had met him when he was at MIT. And I was like, it's been really cool to see how Stripe has grown over the last few years. And he looked at me kind of sheepishly. He was like, he was like, yeah. Well, we just we haven't screwed it up yet.

And I just think about that all the time, how, like, success I mean, he was being very humble. They've done a lot of amazing stuff as Stripe. But I it's true that, like, a large amount of success is, like, once you get it, once you're you're in the pocket, just, like, not screwing it up. Not, like, totally messing it up, and just holding on for as long as you can, and trying to kinda keep the most important thing the most important thing at the company, and and just, like, stay focused and stay true to your principles. Yeah.

And Stripe's obviously grown and I don't mean to diminish their accomplishments by that statement from Patrick, but I do think a lot of companies kind of get get over their skis or get ahead of themselves a little bit too much or or make the wrong decisions, and that leads to, you know, leads to them kind of creating their own demise versus it being an external external pressure. So so so much of a success, I think, for companies that have raised money. It's like, if you can just focus on not screwing it up, just everyday wake up and be like, okay. Today will not be the day I screwed up.

Shipping, if you care about quality, being like, but the engineers really wanna get this out, and okay, we're just gonna ship we'll fix it later. We'll fix you know, just small things like that where each individual piece doesn't actually kill you, but in aggregate, they can really hurt. So it's it's sort of like, you know, it's either death by a 1000 cuts or success by, like, you know, a 1000 small wins. That's that's what it feels like to me at this at this date.

I wonder if you, but I think you've also your previous startup, you did have cofounders.

Having cofounders is great. I know a lot of people that have have excellent cofounders and, even companies where, you know, they swap off, like, who's the CEO? Like, what were one person leaves and then the other co founder becomes the CEO. That's a thing. There's also companies where later on other people get called co founders.

I don't know if you've seen this in the wild, where like they didn't actually start the company, but then they somehow get the title co founder. That happens. So it's all it's all over the place. I think at the end of the day, the question is like, who are the people you can work with and collaborate really well with? And who are the people you can really trust?

And actually be able to, like, share responsibility. And, because there's a lot responsibility. There's a lot to do. Unfortunately, a common thing with a lot of startups is like, you have a group of co founders, and then not all of them will become leaders in the company, in terms of actually building teams and hiring and growing the organization. And it's it's really tough to square later if you have, you know, somebody who is a co founder, but just wants to write code as an engineer, and another person that's a co founder is like managing half the company.

You know, and and the responsibility gap changes, and those people end up leaving. So I I have seen a lot of examples where, the equity mismatch ends up actually coming out in terms of in terms of co founders and their their leadership. Some people have talked about fixing this with, like, longer vesting cycles or things like that. But, and the reality is at the very, very beginning of the company, the roles aren't very defined. And then as the company grows and scales, roles change a lot.

And for some people, that's that's very different than others.

And then I was spending more time doing, like, recruiting, essentially early sales, product developments, and and sort of more, like, technical writing, like, I wrote our documentation and stuff like that. But I I wasn't writing, like, all day every day, like, production code in the system. I I'm a little bit of an odd duck in the sense that, like, I have a very technical background and, like, you know, worked as a software engineer. I've built probably, like, 20 or 30 different products. They see a bunch of contract work, did a bunch of iOS work, you know, like, web engineering.

I have, like, CS degree from MIT, and I've kinda learned the business side through just building companies and stuff. And so, WorkOS is, like, the perfect type of product for me to work on because it has this technical depth and and matches my interest. But I think if it's someone that you're, like, thinking about starting a technology company and you're not really a technologist, you probably need somebody as a cofounder to represent that. And it's really tough to build us a software company, a technology company, where you're gonna outsource the technology development. It's like a 3rd party or a agency or something like that.

You can maybe do it for the first version, but it ends up not being a long term solution,

If you're Pepsi, if you're making, like, soda, maybe you do need a CTO for running IT. But maybe the CTO of Pepsi is not as, like, the most important role compared to the chief, I don't know, manufacturing officer or something like to to chief financial officer, right, about the margins on the product you're making. So I think it's different it's different for every company. You know, it's the same thing at Workhorse. Our engineers shape products and, like, do design work and actually build things end to end.

You were end up wearing a lot of hats. So titles don't really matter, you know, early on at the beginning, but I think the what I have seen as a mistake, maybe maybe I'll just say this, is like, you start a company, there's like 4 cofounders, and then everyone is like chief something officer. Like, because they just wanna come up with titles like that. And then as the company scales, like, those things don't matter. And then, you know, you have you have a CTO that is, like, not running the engineering team, and then you have a CFO maybe who, like, has never done start up finance before or never done any finance.

So it's great to start a company with other people, but I think if you're gonna do that, you constantly need to be talking about how your role is evolving and what the company's needs are and where to augment yourself with skills. What are the skills that you're missing? What would be ideal to hire? What are the gaps that you have? And be real about that.

And it doesn't get easier, because as you succeed, you know, people reach their limit and can't the company's needs grow faster than an individual's ability to, like, learn more themself and transform. The only way to get through that is to have, you know, kind of difficult conversations. Be like, hey, this isn't working or we need someone else to do this or, you know, I love you buddy, but we can't have you doing the books or like, you know, your random uncle doing

If you don't, whether it's a person whose performance you need to correct or maybe let them go, like, sometimes people have, like, a savior mentality, like, oh, I'm gonna give them every shot possible, and then only at the very end will I let them let them go. Just like being problem avoidant or conflict avoidant. I see this happen with a lot of folks. It's really it's really it's really tough. It's really tough.

Because because most people are not seeking conflict, you know, they're not looking for that. And so, so so it's natural that they would try to avoid it. But developing the skill that at the first instance of that, you're able to understand why maybe why you're avoiding it. And literally just reach out with the person and and have the conversation. And, I don't have any framework for it.

One trick that I have is, and it sounds simple, but it sounds silly, but at the beginning of it, you just say like, this is gonna be a tough conversation. You just literally just say that to them, and your and yourself. And it just sort of like prepares the room, you know, if you're like and you can say that before you fire somebody. You can say that before delivering some critical feedback, just to kind of, like, make sure that they hear it also. Be like, hey, this is, you know, this is gonna be a bit of an uncomfortable conversation, but there's something really, really important I wanna talk with you about.

So I wanna make sure I have your attention. I can talk about it for a few minutes. And that, you know, I think that just brings a little bit more seriousness seriousness to it. But it's it's tough. It's definitely a maturity type of thing. I I think firing people is one of the hardest things to do, to learn how to do. It's it's awful. I mean, it's like I remember the first time I did it. It's like getting kicked in the stomach. I I, like, when I I went and threw up later that day.

I just was, like, physically ill from it. And yet it's the thing that, like, as a company grows and scales, even if you make the best hiring decisions in the world, like, the needs of the organization just change. It just it just inherently there's some changes you're gonna need to make. And so the sooner that you can learn to have those uncomfortable conversations or sort of difficult conversations, I think, the better you'll be able to, like, actually make corrective action, whether it's, you know, firing somebody or, like, killing a product, telling your team, like, hey. This thing that we've been doing is not working.

We need to change direction. Because if you're the founder or you're the CEO and and you're unwilling to say that or have that conversation, guarantee no one else is going to be willing to do it. They look to you for the, the ability to have that tough conversation.

You just don't wanna do it.

Thank you so much for that. And you're like, I should have done that a week ago. I've been, you know, pulling my hair out of, like, anticipating the pain around doing this.

You know, it's like, compliment, feedback, compliment. Really, that only works on people that are really junior, where their ego gets in the way of them hearing feedback. If you try to do that to somebody who's, like, more experienced in their career, they're like, cut the crap. Like, just tell me they just wanna know. They, like, just wanted to do better or whatever it is in their in their job or in their role.

But it's tough. It's definitely a thing to learn, and I think it's, I've I've certainly gotten, I think, better at doing that. I certainly do it faster. Like, whenever I see things, I'm like, let's talk about it. You know, maybe not make a decision, but I at least wanna make sure we're talking about it, as early as possible.

Where are my weaknesses or areas that I haven't, you know, grown as fast as I need to? In a start up, if you're the CEO, you you actually have the very unique job where you're allowed to be bad at your job. You're you're allowed to be bad at it. I'm allowed to be a bad chief marketing officer or a bad chief financial officer, you know. I can't commit fraud or something like that, but but I'm allowed to, like, step into those roles and sort of bootstrap them and spin them up, to learn enough to be able to go hire those people.

Right? So there's a whole ton of areas at WorkOS where I could hire people that could be so much better than me. Most pretty much all those areas, I would say, like, at this point, pretty much everything. And then I think to your question as well, like, if I was gonna be gone for a year or 2, what would I try to do in advance? It's the stuff I've already been trying to do.

It's like set up the organization to succeed, not around specific products that we've, you know, been been building or, like, specific features that we've been shipping. But but more from the perspective of, like, what are the values we have? You know, what are the the ways in which we operate? How do people give feedback? What are what are the kind of rituals we have as a team?

Those those last. Like, at WorkOS, we've done a company all hands every single Friday since the beginning. That's not gonna stop if I was gone. I I would assume not. It's just kinda built into the company. So I I mean, if I was gone for a year, I I actually don't think the thing would fall apart today. You know? It it might not transform in the way that I'm working on right now. Like, I'm always trying to change it. You know?

I'm like, like, I yeah. Let's look at what I say this. Like, the idea of the company that I have in my head is the company as I want it to be 6 to 12 months from now, and I'm working to sculpt it in that direction. I realized it's actually about my job a few years ago, that my job is actually not really to manage operations as it stands today. I I need to make sure that happens.

I need to hire really great people that can do that and execute on, you know, what we're achieving with customers and what we're building and all that and how we're shipping stuff day to day, week to week. And I need to, like, keep them accountable and make sure it happens. But in terms of, like, my job job, I think it's to grow the company, to to evolve and change it. And I have a pretty pretty specific vision for what that is and what I want it to turn into. I think it'd be very hard for me to find somebody else that could do that.

So my my guess is if it was like a year or 2, I was gone. It'd probably keep growing at the clip it is and and doing well, but it might not turn into this thing in my head.

And then we kinda stopped doing that. We kept it part time. And it was so shocking to me how easy it was to maintain the existing stuff that we had, and people just kept coming back and we're putting, like, less than 10% of the effort in, and it would just maintain. And it was like, okay, it's because it's just so hard to actually, like, accelerate and grow, but it's like compared to that the the maintenance is like quite easy. I don't know if that is, like

Not just twice as better, twice as good, or 3 times as good, 10 times better. You know, if if you go to a customer and you say, we can make it twice as good, would you switch? People actually say yes. We can make it half the price you guys are paying. Would that would you consider switching?

Oh, yeah. Oh, 50% off? Like, absolutely. But but in practice, it's it's not enough. In practice, it actually needs to be 10 times better, because there's so much inertial, like, you know, headwinds around it.

It's it's it's it's so hard to change anything that it actually needs to be not just a little bit better, but an enormous amount better to overcome all of that kind of, like, legacy, you know, experience. And, I think that's what you're kinda suggesting there. It's like, once things are working, they'll get to compound, you know, when they, when they do get disrupted eventually. It usually doesn't happen, like, overnight as well. You know, there's still people running, like, IBM mainframe systems that are out there for for for decades.

Yeah. Yeah. I I even have this pet theory that, like, the way to do disruption is actually not to, like, go after existing things that have been built, but it's just to build the next the next thing, the next layer. Like, it's way easier just to go, like, capture a new market than it is to try to disrupt everyone tries to go and disrupt existing markets because there's, like, there's money there, there's a budget, there's all this stuff that's already been built out. But I think it's it's it's way, way, way harder.

A new market is smaller, but if you can capture it and it can compound and grow, that can be actually a a growth avenue for you versus, you know, it's it's like trying to it's like trying to redo the foundation on a skyscraper, you know, it's like just get enormously complex to do something like that.

Like, it's it's not zero sum between companies. Sometimes it does though. Sometimes you do have competitors in the markets. But I do think that you you can't, like, drive a car, like, looking in the rear view mirror. Like, you have to have all of your attention looking forward.

You know, you can't be just, you know, glancing behind you, especially if you're driving really fast and trying to be going as as most extreme as you can. So, yeah, we look at what other people build sometimes. Yeah. In the auth and identity space, there's so many companies now building this. I mean, it's it's kinda wild. It's like every month there's, like, a new one. It's it's kinda cool.