Crossing the Enterprise Chasm - Michael Grinich (2024)
In this talk, WorkOS founder and CEO, Michael Grinich, presents "Crossing the Enterprise Chasm," the inevitable transition every B2B SaaS company has to make when they start selling to enterprises.
Although it's a necessary step, moving upmarket is fraught with challenges — building enterprise features takes a ton of capital, it requires aggressive prioritizations, and engineers generally don't like building enterprise features.
According to a PM at Slack, they spent $30M just building these types of features and they were only half complete.
WorkOS helps SaaS businesses become Enterprise Ready in minutes, with APIs that help you quickly integrate common enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, RBAC, FGA, Audit Logs, and more.
Get started today: https://dashboard.workos.com/signup
0:00 - Intro
1:54 - What is the Enterprise Chasm?
2:51 - Enterprise software success formula
4:18 - The 5 stages in crossing the chasm by Geoffrey Moore
6:04 - Breaking through to the Early Majority from the Early Adopters in SaaS
6:54 - Why you should cross it?
8:08 - Waiting to cross it poses a huge risk
8:55 - Dropbox vs. Box
9:41 - Slack vs. Teams
10:35 - What makes this difficult?
11:48 - Building enterprise features requires years of runway
12:46 - Engineers don't like building enterprise features
14:20 - Feature prioritization is hard
16:12 - Splitting focus is necessary
17:43 - How do you get started?
18:37 - Admin features enterprises require
19:04 - SAML, SCIM, RBAC
21:10 - audit logs, data retention, DLP, CASB
22:16 - GDPR, HIPAA, SOC, data residency
23:18 - APIs, webhooks, iPaaS