Paige Finn DohertyFounding Partner, Behind Genius · Founding Partner at Behind Genius Ventures

dating an entrepreneur is like full-time training for a chief of staff role

18 May 2023 · 1 min

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In this personal monologue, the speaker recounts how a social media post joking that dating an entrepreneur serves as full‑time training for a chief‑of‑staff role caught the eye of Michael Greenwich, CEO of early‑stage startup WorkOS. Greenwich invited her to interview, and she accepted the job after turning down a venture‑firm offer from OpenView to stay with her family in San Diego. She began working at WorkOS the weekend after graduating from SDSU. She describes the chaotic, fast‑paced environment of an early‑stage company, spending her days on demo calls for WorkOS’s single sign‑on (SSO) API, helping high‑growth customers such as Webflow and Hopin scale during the pandemic. The narrative ties personal relationship insights to professional development and highlights key career decisions, company context, and product impact.

Chapters

And I had this one shitpost about dating an entrepreneur is like full-time training for a chief of staff role, which indirectly ended up catching the attention of an early-stage CEO, Michael Greenwich. He's the CEO of WorkOS, and he emailed me to ask if I wanted to interview for a job at his company. Sounded pretty awesome. I also didn't have a job. I had turned down my job offer at a venture firm in Boston, OpenView, which I'm actually like writing a piece with now, which is pretty cool. to stay with my family in San Diego. So I actually started at WorkOS the Saturday after I graduated on Facebook Live from SDSU. Working at an early stage anything, by the way, chaos. Perfect fuel for an extremely online person. So during the day I was on demo calls with early stage companies. WorkOS is a single sign-on API, so we help companies like Webflow and Hopin scale as they were experiencing really dramatic growth throughout the pandemic.