Sweat rolling down my face, I turned off the AC in a tiny rental car in a Starbucks parking lot in Mexico. A strawberry sarong serving as my background, I began to speak about Engineering Developer Joy for our WorkOS Customer Event. As I rerecorded the talk I had recorded last night in a quiet cool hotel room, I watched my computer battery tick down below 23 percent and the clock count down the 30 minutes to the customer event.
I chuckled as I ended my talk on a last note of, we’re hiring developers that love talking to other developers and ✨creatively solving problems ✨.
But then, I accidentally clicked the x button while ending my recording instead of the check – deleting my completed-in-the-nick of time talk. Shortly after, a man was particularly startled by a frustrated scream coming from the car next to him. With 15 percent battery and 12 minutes left, I quickly rerecorded my 10 minute customer event video and uploaded it with the remaining LTE I had. My head hit the roof of the car as I jostled around (and through) potholes to get back to the cafe with good wifi.
Strawberry sarong flailing behind me and drenched in sweat, I burst into the cafe with 2 minutes to spare. I sighed in relief as I shared my screen & my talk began to play at our live customer event.
Freeze frame…so you’re probably wondering, how did I end up here?
In January 2020, I had turned down a job in venture capital in Boston to stay close to my family in San Diego. Living in my parents’ house & finishing a packed course load at SDSU during the pandemic, I turned to Twitter to find people that shared my passion, helping early stage founders better understand venture capital. In April 2020, Michael, our CEO, ended up reaching out via a cold email about WorkOS & their efforts to help early stage B2B SaaS founders and developers cross the enterprise chasm.
I joined two days after graduating via Zoom from SDSU, compelled by the WorkOS value of developer joy, the crispness of the product, and the incredible team Michael had built. WorkOS fit the problems growing SaaS companies dealt with like a glove, and built a solution with an attentiveness to feedback and polish I had rarely seen. Taylor, a software engineer focused on developer success, and second hire at WorkOS, especially impressed me with his deep interests in tea, mycology, and computers. He would go on to become one of my best friends (even though we still haven’t met in person).
Reflecting on some of my favorite memories & learning experiences as a Developer Success Engineer at WorkOS from the past year
One of my favorite parts of WorkOS was interviewing developers and writing case studies on their experience integrating our product. Hearing developers gush about our products & the support experience was really rewarding. I wrote the case studies for our work with Webflow, Hopin, and Patch & was delightfully surprised when I heard we’d helped Patch unblock $1 million in enterprise GMV.
In my meetings with Micheal, he’d reflect on the hundreds of hours he’d spent interviewing enterprise IT admins, teaching me how to probe deeper into customer problems. We had a stint of engineers “getting on the bus,” where our whole engineering team would join demo and support calls.
To make a transition from sales-led growth to a fully self-serve product led growth model, we learned together how to go from getting on a demo call with every interested customer and Wizard of Oz man-behind-the-curtain onboarding to a robust self-serve onboarding, dashboard, and docs experience. The effort our engineering and developer success teams put into the minutia of every aspect of that overhaul was inspiring.
In startups, things are not going to go according to plan. Developing resilience and creative problem solving skills in a fast-changing environment is not easy – the key to preserving through those times together was grace and optimism.
I learned working at a startup is like a dance troupe – everyone has their own talents but it only works when we’re all in the groove together. For us, that meant over-communication, a healthy dose of SAML-related memes, and a shared passion for developer joy.
Developer Joy means going the extra mile to support developers, even when it is not convenient or cannot be scaled [yet]. I like to think I embodied this value during my time at WorkOS and I’ll leave behind some bread crumbs of that DNA. Our Developer Success team went from me and Taylor to 6(!) developer success engineers, and I feel lucky to have worked with such incredible engineers and people here.
We scaled a Slack-first support organization with custom tooling, integrations, and Slack bots from tens to hundreds of channels. We went from no paying customers to hundred of thousands of dollars in ARR.
Venture capital still held a close spot in my heart, and I spent nights & weekends writing Seed to Harvest, an illustrated book for kids and adults on venture capital. Writing Seed to Harvest ultimately led to me leading early stage syndicate deals and deploying over $300,000, meeting my future business partner Josh, and truly becoming a character in the book I was writing.
What’s Next? A Different Type of Developer Joy
A year after joining WorkOS, I’m leaving an incredible team to continue to serve early stage founders and developers in a slightly different role – as a founding partner of Behind Genius Ventures, an early stage venture firm focused on investing in product-led growth companies, especially companies with underrepresented and GenZ founders. I’m so proud that no less than six WorkOS alums and current team members are limited partners.
To read more about my journey, feel free to follow me on twitter at @paigefinnn or check out the below articles:
Asking questions are actually nice thing if you are notunderstanding something completely, except this post presents nice understanding even.