# Great user experience should come before enterprise controls

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/great-user-experience-should-come-before-enterprise-controls/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Jean-Denis Greze](https://realalpha.app/builders/jean-denis-greze/) · Jean-Denis Greze is founder and CEO of Town. · Led Plaid’s EPD from $10M to $300M+ in ARR, then co-founded Town, an AI assistant for everyday work.
- Host: [Erik Torenberg](https://realalpha.app/people/erik-torenberg/) · General partner, Andreessen Horowitz · Helped build Product Hunt; founded On Deck, Village Global and Turpentine.
- Show: a16z Podcast
- Episode: [Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/), Oct 19, 2026
- Moment: 13:34 to 16:15 of the episode (3 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/great-user-experience-should-come-before-enterprise-controls/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=814

## Quote

> “It is **almost impossible** to go from an experience that starts from the compliance IT enterprise requirements and then figures out how to make the product experience incredible”
> — [Jean-Denis Greze](https://realalpha.app/builders/jean-denis-greze/) at [14:19](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=859) · a16z Podcast

## Takeaways

1. Start with a product users love, then add enterprise requirements.
2. The founders drew this lesson from their time at Dropbox.
3. Security and admin needs are easier to tackle after product value is clear.

## About this segment

Jean-Denis Greze says he and his cofounder prioritized a great user experience, then planned to add enterprise controls. Their Dropbox experience suggested that the reverse path is much harder.

From “Why a $1M Startup Wasn’t Worth Building in the Age of AI”, Oct 19, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[13:40](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=820) of do you go PLG, right? Or do you go, like you have big companies that say, hey, give me your product, I want it. But you kind of realized that if the customer is not the user, the customer is the person that writes the check, the user is the person that has to deal with the product. If the customer is not the user, you might end up building a bad product because you're making the CISO happy, you're not actually making the user happy, you're making the customer happy.

[14:07](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=847) Yeah, my co-founder and I worked at Dropbox. And I think one of the big learnings for us from Dropbox is you can always take a world-class product experience and figure out how it works for the enterprise. It's really easy to go in that direction. I mean, let me rephrase that. It's tough to go in that direction, but it is possible. It is almost impossible to go from an experience that starts from the compliance IT enterprise requirements and then figures out how to make the product experience incredible if you take that as the baseline.

[14:35](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=875) So we felt, and I think until now, until maybe a couple months ago, we felt like there was so much alpha in just making the product better. That should be our focus. Growth was just happening naturally. We're like, if we figure out the product experience and if our foundation from an enterprise perspective, from a data security and privacy perspective is good, we can figure out later how we shape the admin side of the product to be perfect for an enterprise.

[15:05](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=905) I think that was the right call for us. I think, you know, especially as consumers' expectations around what AI can do, those are going to be consumer-grade experiences. And so our thesis is that CIOs, CEOs of companies are going to tell themselves, hey, this amazing personal assistant experience that I get on the personal side of the world, I want that for my company. And so whoever has an enterprise experience that feels like a consumer experience, they're going to be set up to win.

[15:37](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=937) And we were like, that's where we want to be as a business. And I think we've mostly actually succeeded in getting there. And now the question is, first we have large companies that are using the product. So it's like, how do we go from just one enterprise deal to being able to do dozens effectively? How do we take the data, privacy, security requirements of not just a couple of customers, but how do we satisfy those for every enterprise company?

[16:05](https://realalpha.app/v/o_5f4N6Nq80/?t=965) That feels like a much more knowable problem now and we can go after that with our heart out