Is MCP dead?
@grinich (CEO of WorkOS) says it's better than ever and become the strongest intent signal in your funnel.
@workos is building the auth, permissions, and registration layer for that world, the same enterprise plumbing it sold to Vercel and Plaid, now sold to AI companies.
I sat down with Michael to talk about it in episode 4 of Navigators.
His argument: your coding agent already picks your vendors, but signup forms are built to block automated traffic, so the agent stalls at the front door and waits for a human to paste in an API key.
We got into:
00:00 "Stripe for enterprise features": what WorkOS actually sells
02:44 How an SSO and SAML company ended up as AI infrastructure
04:13 Why AI companies can't meander up-market the way Slack, Dropbox, and Figma did
06:54 The biggest mistake founders make: staying in the pre-PMF experimentation mindset
09:51 Why nothing works unless the management team is AI pilled first
10:47 "Claude day": pairing engineers with finance, legal, and ops once a month
13:36 auth.md, the missing front door for agents
15:26 Why registration, not tooling, is the next growth channel
16:59 Is MCP dead? The higher-intent signal hiding in MCP connections
19:35 Why SDKs are going away and coding agents write their own
23:09 "The super cycle of all super cycles": AI amplifies labor, it doesn't just disrupt it
Thanks for joining me on the pod
@grinich!
Watch the full episode of Navigators here: