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Ryan Peterman

👤 Speaker
1027 total appearances

Appearances Over Time

Podcast Appearances

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

From that article, you had a great quote, or I guess a great question to think through this.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

It said, you went to everyone or a bunch of people and you would say, if we could be spending these resources working on any project at the company right now, would this still be the best use of time?

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And I feel like it frames exactly what you just described really cleanly.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Vercel all use this product to make their lives better.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And the problem it solves is when you're building SaaS or an AI product and you want to sell to other companies, there's all these requirements you need to meet.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

There's SSO, there's SCIM, there's RBAC, there's audit logs.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

These are all things that take time to integrate but aren't the main focus of your app.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

WorkOS is an API layer that lets you meet all of these requirements in just a few lines of code.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

So let's say you have a new SaaS product and you want to sell to other companies.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

WorkOS will solve all of these critical feature gaps for you.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

You can check them out at workos.com to learn more and get started.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And I appreciate them for supporting my work and sponsoring this podcast.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

you mentioned this idea of do the right thing and then you know the byproduct you also get promoted and i think that's that's the dream you know do the right thing get promoted but in reality oftentimes people would have to make the trade-off imagine a two by two matrix of doing the right thing doing the wrong thing getting promoted not getting promoted obviously that you know do the right thing get promoted great do the wrong thing don't get promoted obviously bad

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

but I'm curious about the other two quadrants.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

Which one would you have picked when you were earlier in your career?

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

Let's say I came to you.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

I said, Hey, you can do the wrong thing, but you're going to get promoted or you can do the right thing.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

And I guarantee you, you're not going to get promoted.

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

the privilege that the real privilege that we get is to work on something cool and uh that's what i advocate for i love the idea you mentioned earlier that's kind of counter to the common opinion i i often hear like the common opinion i hear they someone working at a big company they're in this machine it's kind of defeatist they're going i ship this thing but i hate this or

The Peterman Pod
Dropbox’s Former Most Senior Eng: Building Great Systems and Advice for the AI Era | James Cowling

I don't believe in this.