Michael Grinich at a glance
Fact | Detail |
|---|---|
Role | Founder and CEO of WorkOS since 2019 |
Education | Computer science at MIT, where he wrote his thesis on email tools (MIT CSAIL) |
Before WorkOS | Dropbox, Nest; co-founder of Nylas (2013–2017) |
Lives in | San Francisco |
None published; X and LinkedIn are his public channels | |
X |
WorkOS CEO email address: how to reach Michael Grinich
Grinich doesn’t publish a current email address; his old site, grinich.com, now redirects to his X account. He is on X as @grinich, with about 15,800 followers, and on LinkedIn with about 15,400, where he announces milestones and hiring. For jobs, WorkOS posts its open roles on its careers page.
Channel | Address | Note |
|---|---|---|
X | @grinich | About 15,800 followers |
linkedin.com/in/grinich | About 15,400 followers | |
GitHub | github.com/grinich | Personal projects |
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Career timeline
Date | Milestone |
|---|---|
Nov 13, 2026 | Announces $100 million ARR |
Mar 2, 2026 | Raises $100 million at a $2 billion valuation |
Mar 2020 | Launches WorkOS |
2019 | Founds WorkOS |
2017 | Leaves Nylas after Nylas Mail shuts down |
2013 | Co-founds Inbox, later Nylas, with Christine Spang (MIT CSAIL) |
Before 2013 | Engineer at Dropbox, designer at Nest |
MIT | Studies computer science; starts the Startup Bootcamp speaker series |
How Michael Grinich built WorkOS
At MIT Grinich started a speaker series that brought founders such as Drew Houston and Patrick Collison to campus, and landed an internship at Dropbox (The Generalist). In 2013 he co-founded Nylas, which built an email app and later email APIs. Users liked Nylas Mail, but companies wouldn’t buy it: “The feedback I got was, this is a great app but we can’t buy this as a company because you’re not enterprise-ready,” he told TechCrunch (TechCrunch).
“Nylas Mail was dead and I was heartbroken,” he later wrote. After a year and a half exploring ideas, he started WorkOS in 2019 to sell the enterprise features every startup has to build, “the #1 killer of post-PMF startups” in his words (WorkOS). AI companies, which get pulled into enterprise sales within a year or two, made WorkOS grow fastest.
Michael Grinich’s net worth and age
Neither Forbes nor Bloomberg publishes a net-worth estimate for Grinich, and we don’t estimate one; WorkOS is private and his stake isn’t public. No published source gives his age.
In his own words
“WorkOS just hit $100M ARR.”
— Michael Grinich, November 13, 2026
“As intelligence becomes abundant and software becomes autonomous, trust becomes the constraint.”
— Michael Grinich, March 2, 2026
“AI puts a premium on fundamentals. The companies that win this era will keep investing in reliable primitives, because primitives compound.”
— Michael Grinich, November 5, 2026 (LinkedIn)
“WorkOS is essentially an API that expands TAM.”
— Michael Grinich, June 2022
“Missing or incomplete enterprise features are the #1 killer of post-PMF startups.”
— Michael Grinich, March 2021
WorkOS’s revenue, funding and products are on the WorkOS company profile.
