The CEO of an auth company on agent sign up, auth, and MCP

Michael Grinich (CEO & Co-Founder of WorkOS) has spent seven years making software enterprise ready, and the last two watching AI companies become his biggest customers. In this episode of Navigators, Paul sits down with him to talk about what's still broken at the front door of every AI product.

Michael makes the case that coding agents already choose your vendors for you, they just can't finish the job: signup forms are built to block automated traffic, so a human still has to step in and register the account. He also gets into why MCP is still growing despite the hype cycle moving on, why he thinks SDKs are becoming unnecessary as agents write their own, and why the next wave of growth will come from agents, not people, filling out your forms.

Topics covered:

• "Stripe for enterprise features": what WorkOS actually sells

• How an SSO and SAML company ended up as AI infrastructure

• The biggest mistake founders make: staying in the pre-PMF experimentation mindset

• Why nothing works unless the management team is AI pilled first

• auth.md, the missing front door for agents

• Is MCP dead? The higher-intent signal hiding in MCP connections

• Why SDKs are going away and coding agents write their own