Tech Titans: Learn How to Remix as a Leader with Michael Grinich, founder at WorkOS

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:01) Today, we're bringing you our most timeless advice from our last conversation with Michael Grinich, founder of WorkOS. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Mike Migurski at 00:00:16) I don't get upset when people copy us at all. I mean, it's the way that people learn. You're totally right in that. It's also just such strong validation that what you made resonated with someone. Someone saw it and they were like, "Oh, I want this. I want to make something just like this to feel what it's like to get this out." It's fine. It's kind of like a gift that you're giving other people making things. And hopefully, at some point, they'll make their own stuff as well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:42) Yeah. It's a good way to learn music, right?

(Mike Migurski at 00:00:44) Totally.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:45) To feel what the rhythm is like, to understand timing, how long these notes come out. And then you understand how the greatest songs feel to sing and play them, then you're in a better position to write great songs.

(Mike Migurski at 00:00:58) I was reading about the Beatles, you know, how they formed, most iconic band of all time. And they played in a cover band in this pub in Liverpool, I think, for close to ten years or something, playing every single night. They were playing their own songs, they were playing other people's songs, and just playing them again and again and again and just ingesting that. And that was the genesis of their creative style and their music. You talk to any musician, of course they play covers. It's how you learn. And so I don't think it needs to be that different in the technology world. I think there's sort of an ego or pride that comes when things get ripped off or people are just kind of personally miffed around it, you know, like go do your own thing. But if it's someone just starting off in their career or just trying to learn what it feels like to create something really great, sometimes imitating excellence is a way to get you to that finish line, and it can inspire you for the next stage as well. I think there's a lot of value in that, and we shouldn't be punishing people or talking down on them for doing that. The role of people that are doing the work that those are copying should just continue to be doing great work, not look behind, just keep looking forward and sort of leading the industry. So the fact that we got copied, I'm like, oh, that's great. It means that we actually pushed the boundary there, and now we have the opportunity to do that again. And hopefully, actually, people will copy the next thing that we do.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:22) Yeah. Well, it's a great indicator of maturity. If you look back at it upset, you clearly haven't reached that level to where you actually have realized that you are the leader and this is how people and things grow. So the simple fact that when you look at it, you're like, this is awesome and you post and you tweet about it. It's like, yep. They get it. They understand what it means to lead.

(Mike Migurski at 00:02:43) Yeah. We try not to copy too much stuff ourselves directly like that. You know, that's quite a direct copy. But we do look at a lot of other work. I mean, internally we have this Slack channel just called Inspiration. And it's just stuff that people share that they really like, that they kind of see other companies make, that they're like, wow, this is super well done or really tasteful or just really creative in a different sort of way. And it's not what you would imagine with just everyone cloning Stripe's homepage with gradients or whatever. There's a wide variety of different things that we look towards for inspiration. And that's kind of how I've approached things in my own life is trying to find things that are software products that people have made, experiences that people have. We think about our support team, how we support customers. And a lot of our customers are engineers, which are very discerning about the type of support that they want. How do we create an amazing experience for people like that? I am intently curious about all of these types of things, how technology is changing. And, you know, WorkOS is an enterprise software API for developers. It has nothing to do with AI today. I mean, we support a lot of AI companies, but we're building this kind of very different type of a product than maybe what these guys are doing. But I still find that there are areas everywhere. If you look closely that you can draw inspiration or ideas or creativity from. And we have that as a culture internally as a company. It's not just me doing that. Other people are finding interesting stuff. And from a brand perspective, I mean, we draw inspiration not just from Apple or Stripe or something like that, but from streetwear brands, you know, like skateboarding companies, music labels that are doing events, restaurants, hotels, all these different areas where people are creating products and experiences. So when we copy things, I think people don't necessarily see it because we're copying something maybe that's from a different industry or a different category and bringing it in. And it feels very fresh, you know, when it's landing in our stuff because people haven't seen it before. But there are traces of it from other places. There's a lot of good stuff that we've brought in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:04:48) And so, yeah, copy plus interest. And it's even more beautiful. And when we were experimenting with different content, we would do that. We would go over to this vertical where there's a popular style of content and be like, would that kind of work over in this other vertical where they're not used to that content style? And so we would mix and mash and figure out what really took. And that's just great products. And developers appreciate it, by the way. It arguably more so in a corporate product, right? Because you typically find the corporate product's usability lags behind the consumer interfaces and usability.

(Mike Migurski at 00:05:23) Totally. I know there's this documentary, this thing a while ago, titled Everything Is a Remix. Everything comes from something else. Everything in creativity, there's not this pure genesis from the brain of Zeus or whatever that springs out. Everything is a remix from everything you've consumed, where you've drawn inspiration from. Just last week, I was going to the ballet in San Francisco. I love watching dance. It's just a fun thing. The San Francisco Ballet is incredible. But it's a performance of Swan Lake, which is a Tchaikovsky ballet. And I was listening to it, and I was like, oh my god. I hear Star Wars. I hear Harry Potter. There's pieces of it. They were like, wait. Those six notes are in the Harry Potter theme song. And you're like, John Williams ripped off Tchaikovsky. He's copying them. And it's totally the case. He took the best bits from it, and that's why some of these songs are absolutely iconic. And I'm sure Tchaikovsky also copied from other people, you know, a different era. So if you zoom out on a long enough timeline, everything is connected and there's these patterns across it. I mean, even Apple's design, when you look at it today, there's all these things that they pulled in from Xerox PARC, stuff that Doug Engelbart did. You know, that informed NeXT, which Jobs started, and then NeXTSTEP. And then on the industrial design side, parallels to Braun and Dieter Rams are just striking. I mean, there's so much stuff there. That doesn't mean what they did is not valuable. It's obviously incredibly valuable. It's a great combination of things together. But, you know, just because people pull inspiration from different places and compose it together doesn't remove value from it. I actually think it's one of the hardest things to do is to take different pieces and kind of seamlessly blend them together, integrate them together. You know, I grew up playing music too. I almost went to college to be a jazz musician, funny enough. And in jazz, it's all about doing that, composing things together, bringing these together. You can play a solo that's entirely new from your own gut. But people do these things, especially from musician to other musician, where they weave in patterns from other songs. And it's almost like, if you know, you know. Someone will be playing one song and start riffing and improvising, and they'll pull in a melody from another song that maybe the audience doesn't even know. The combination of those things together and the ability to do it in this sort of super normal way, I think is actually the demonstration of mastery. It's the most insane version of excellence or craft, is being able to take those things and put them together without missing a beat or missing a step in the case of dance. And it's not different. You know, creating products in technology is an extremely creative pursuit. It's I found it to be much more close to writing a song than building a building or building something in your shop. It's this extremely deeply creative pursuit. And the inspiration kinda comes from the same place. You know? Software designers, software engineers are a lot closer to musicians and artists than we give them credit for.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:28) 100%. Yeah. I'm a software engineer and a musician.

(Mike Migurski at 00:08:31) Yeah. There you go. Yeah. It's not uncommon. I don't know. Talk to people on podcasts or on Zoom, and the background behind them is covered in guitars, you know, or drum sets, or painting, or photography. These things are deeply connected together. And a lot of the people I've met that are in software careers today, that's what they make, they didn't start off in that. You know, they started off making music or taking photos or painting or writing or in very different industries, more deemed the traditional creative industries. It's the same thread, you know. I find it's the same thing that drives you. When you wake up and you're like, what am I gonna do today? What's gonna get me out into the world? What's driving me to express my humanity, you know, to the world? It's the same thing. It's the same genesis. So, going back to copying and inspiration, I'm absolutely delighted and honored that someone could use what we've built as inspiration in a very direct way. And I hope other people do too, you know, can look at it and pull the bits from it that they think is good and that resonate with them.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:40) What prepared you for all of this? What past experiences do you have?

(Mike Migurski at 00:09:45) Gosh. I don't know if anything really prepares you for starting a startup.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:51) Isn't this your second one?

(Mike Migurski at 00:09:52) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And so, you know, doing it the first time, certainly. This one's moving faster. It's a bigger TAM, faster growing customer base and market and all that. But, any sort of life experience just helps you. Hopefully you go faster and get better as you grow. When I was growing up, I organized clubs. I ran my school's newspaper. I did kind of stuff like that. But I think nothing can really prepare you actually for trying to take something from nothing to something. What the founding moment is truly pretty profound, to have something that's in your head, you know, that no one else believes in or exists, and you kind of manifest it into reality. It's extremely hard. It usually doesn't work. You know, it's literally in 99.999% of cases, because so many things stop before they even become a company, it's just ideas. But when it does work, it's sort of one of these extremely intoxicating things to have been part of. And it happens every day with the company too. The new things that we build, the new things, you know, people taking those from inception to reality. But I don't really know if that could prepare you. I built a lot of stuff. I was very curious as a kid. I would just make things in my garage and got into software. And then when I was in school, I was actually a physics student at the time, but I started building iPhone apps just to kind of pay the bills and make some money. This is back in, gosh, 2008-ish. No, 2009, going forward. And I probably built 50 or 60 iPhone apps for random different companies. And I just started, I wanted to get really good at making stuff. You know, going back to the musician kind of thing, if you want to jam with other musicians or be a session musician, you just gotta be able to play really well. You gotta be able to hang. You have to have mastery over your instrument. You can't be struggling to just throw down chords or keep a beat if you wanna play with other folks. And so I wanted to just get good at building stuff. And so I built a lot of mobile stuff, a lot of iPhone stuff at the time, and then a lot of web stuff as well. I just love web engineering and understanding how the web works and web services. I think that's what let me figure out kind of what to build next. Now my job is like, what should the company do? What kind of strategy? Where are we going? And I think the only reason I have any amount of intuition for that is a mixture of curiosity about what's going on in the industry. And the creativity actually just comes from having built a lot of stuff and experienced it myself. Hearing it. You know, you can make really good music because you've listened to a lot of music. I think you say you talk to any musician, you're like, how much music do you listen to? You look at their headphones, you know, you got a pair of Beyerdynamics on, I think, which are great. These are some Sennheisers. You listen to music all the time, if you're a musician. Constantly. You're constantly absorbing and listening to stuff. And I think that the equivalent to that for startups or people doing is being curious about how people make companies, curious about business. Nowadays, I'm sort of an obsessed student around what makes companies work, how do you build products that people actually care about. You know, I started angel investing a few years ago. Not really to make that much money, it kinda, you know, but just to get involved and be like, oh, I wonder how this company is gonna operate? How do I think about their possibility of success? What are the risks or not? I think you just kind of get a little curious and obsessed around it. And hopefully over time, your judgment, decision making, and sort of insight gets sharper and sharper and sharper, just like a musician. And at some point, you know, you pull one of these master level musicians into a jam session, and you just watch them and just the stuff that comes out of their head or their fingers is just insane. Right? You're like, how where did that come from? And it's like, oh, well, that's thirty years of listening to music every single minute, playing every single minute, and refining the craft again and again and again. I think it's not dissimilar from those creative pursuits. So I don't know what prepared me. I kinda just jumped in.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:01) Jumped in, got a ton of experience. Yeah. I was listening to an interview with Joe Rogan and Gary Clark Junior the other day, and he said to your point, he's like, yeah. I just go into the local record shop. And I'm like, what do you guys got?

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:13) What are you listening to? What's hot? Like, what's going on? He goes, and then I'll just get the record, and I'll either like it or I won't. He goes, and I'm just constantly listening to new music and new artists and different ideas.

(Mike Migurski at 00:14:25) And they never stop. Never stop. You see these musicians in their eighties, their nineties, consuming. They are, it's until the day they die. Right?

(Mike Migurski at 00:14:34) Well,

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:34) it's the process. The process is the success.

(Mike Migurski at 00:14:37) Yeah. In some way, I actually believe the effects that they make, like, the thing that they produce, the actual record itself, is just a byproduct. You know, the products that we build are just a byproduct of the creativity and the drive towards understanding or inspiration or just the need to make something. You know? It's not really, I think that's the thing that's really misunderstood about, like, Silicon Valley and tech and builders.

(Mike Migurski at 00:15:07) I lived in New York for a couple of years and met people in the finance world. And just, like, people could not understand why you would just make something because you want to make it. Just because you're compelled to create something because it's cool or interesting, or the feeling you get when you make it is just so good. You just love that feeling. You just have to do it.

(Mike Migurski at 00:15:28) Everyone loves listening to music, I think, and engaging with music. But I think for a lot of musicians, they make music because they just have to. It's like, it's just in their bones. Like, they can't not do it. And the record, the effect of it, is just a byproduct that lets them live their life and make enough money to eat and engage with the world and their fellow humanity. But the thing that drives is much lower. You know? I've sort of asked myself why I created this job or career for myself, which in many ways is extremely

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:00) stressful. You know?

(Mike Migurski at 00:16:03) It's not conducive to a nice relaxing quality of life. And the only place I've come to is, like, it's just something that's either wrong or right with me. But the byproduct of it is making a company, is the startup. But that's not the goal. You know. It's actually the effect at the other side.

(Joel Beasley at 00:16:23) People make that mistake when they're trying to get money for the first time, as if, like, the money is the destination. And it's, like, after you figure it out, you've come to, you understand that the money is the byproduct. It's like the exhaust of being able to do something that's so incredibly useful to people and so valuable that they can't help but give you their money to do it.

(Mike Migurski at 00:16:44) Absolutely. I mean, imagine going and buying a car at the dealership, and the guy's like, so what are you going to use your car for? Like, what are you looking for? You know, help you find the right car. And you're like, oh, I'm just looking for a car that's something that'll just burn some gas. You feel like, well, you can do that with any car. What? You don't want to go anywhere? You don't want to do anything? Oh, I just want something that I can put a lot of gas in and burn it, you know, because that'll feel good. And it's like, no. No one does that, of course. You're like, no. I want a car, some community work, or, you know, I want to, I need to drive my family. I need a bigger car, or I like going skiing. It has to be four-wheel drive or, you know, go into the desert or something. I think the same is true for companies. When investors look and they say, why are you doing this? Like, what compels you? What pushes you to make this happen? It's very hard to be not genuine about it. I mean, people can, you know, come up with stories or whatever. But in my experience doing just a very little amount of, you know, moonlighting, angel investing, and talking to VCs, it's so immediately apparent when they're not into it for the right, you know, in my mind, the right reason. When it's just like, oh, I want to do a startup. My friends are doing startups. So I want to do a startup because it'd be cool to say I'm CEO or something like that. Or, you know, I'll be able to talk about it at parties or something. None of those motivations, yeah. Super weird. And none of those motivations are lasting. They are all extremely fleeting. Like, you can maybe hold on to it for a few years. But when stuff gets really hard or, like, you're just, you know, pulling out your hair and, uh, kind of at the end, the thing that I think leads to perseverance, you know, passion, people call it, is something deeper that holds you. You know, I was reading that the word passion has an Italian root, I think, or, you know, it's Greek or whatever. But it literally means suffering. It comes from the same root as just to suffer. I'm like, yeah. Like that kind of is, in a sense, they are really, really connected. And suffering isn't bad, you know, like the Buddha says, like life is suffering. Like existence is pain or suffering in that way. But I think there's this piece around sort of, like, finding the way that you can suffer in the way that feels the most like you. Yeah. Like, you know, it's like my form of suffering that is really me. I think that, you know, everyone talks follow your bliss. I'm sort of like follow your suffering. Find what's the way that you suffer that just feels so uniquely, like, who you are as a person or what drives you, and just kind of lean into that as your life. Bury your shoulder into that. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:19) A hundred percent. People got passion confused with this sort of, like, sugar. Like, this temporary high of, like, oh, I'm passionate about this fleeting thing. Well, Michael, I want to be respectful of your hard stop. We made a podcast. How do you feel?

(Mike Migurski at 00:19:34) Oh, this is great. Thanks for having me on.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:37) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email, [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.