Ryan Peterman

And so, yeah, I think it was in the context of your writing about what you should orient your team around, not systems, but actually missions.

And maybe that's a way to fight system bias.

If inertia is so strong, how did you fight it and close down all those projects?

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

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?

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

but I'm curious about the other two quadrants.

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

Let's say I came to you.

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