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You Don’t Go Upmarket by Adding SAML SSO
You Don’t Go Upmarket by Adding SAML SSO
Most companies begin going upmarket with a feature-gap analysis. What do we need to build for enterprise customers?…
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Birkan Icacan reposted thisBirkan Icacan reposted thisOver the last two weeks, John Willett (cofounder), Séverine RAYMOND SOULIER (VP of EMEA Sales), and I spent time with our clients and partners across London, Madrid, and Paris. Many of Europe's largest financial institutions already run on Rogo, and EMEA is one of the fastest-growing parts of our business. Our conversations with their leadership teams sharpened a few observations: - Sovereignty is THE European question. But the most sophisticated institutions have moved past owning the model. Sovereignty is owning your data, workflows, and evals - and keeping them portable into any interface. That matters even more in Europe, where each market has its own regulator. - Every firm has a version of an internal build. We think that's necessary, and we look forward to building with the teams behind them. - The conversation has shifted from productivity to edge. If every bank has the same models, differentiation comes from your own institutional knowledge, codified and compounding as your people (and their agents) work. We recently announced a strategic funding round, and we now have 9 global banks on our cap table, including Barclays, Societe Generale, and BNP Paribas. There's no stronger signal than the world's leading financial institutions being both our customers and our investors. The next chapter of this industry is being written on both sides of the Atlantic, and we're excited to partner with the best financial institutions in the world to build the AI-native institutions of the next decade. We are hiring quickly across London, Paris, and Madrid!! Please reach out!!
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Birkan Icacan shared thisExciting personal news. I joined Rogo to lead the Enterprise product team! I’m bullish on bringing the power of AI into the application layer. As models become more capable, so much of the product opportunity lies in the context and workflows we build around them. Knowledge that AI can access, the tools it can use, and how closely the whole product is tailored to the people and domain it serves. That’s what Rogo does so well for finance. It brings together financial expertise, a firm’s own knowledge, and agents designed around how bankers and investors work. The opportunity to rethink those workflows across finance is enormous. At Google, Stripe, and Notion, I helped build products that teams rely on every day and enterprises can trust at scale. At Enterpret, I went deeper into turning fragmented customer feedback into intelligence and action with AI. Rogo brings those experiences together. The opportunity to help shape how an entire industry works is what makes me so excited about this next chapter. Thank you to Gabriel Stengel, Strib Walker, and the entire team for your trust and confidence. Every conversation made me more excited about the people, the product, and the opportunity ahead. And we’re hiring! If you want to help build the AI platform for finance, let’s build together!
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Birkan Icacan posted thisI recently wrapped up leading Product at Enterpret. As AI makes it faster and easier to build, the real alpha is shifting toward knowing what to build. Answers are often hiding in plain sight. Customers tell companies what’s broken, what they need, and what they value through support conversations, sales calls, surveys, reviews, social posts, and product usage. But those signals are fragmented. They rarely reach the right people, influence the roadmap, or shape the decisions that follow. Enterpret exists to change that. Over the past year and a half, I’ve been lucky to help Enterpret become a key part of the product development lifecycle by turning fragmented customer feedback into intelligence teams can use to decide what to build, improve the customer experience, and understand the impact of what they ship. I’m grateful to Varun Sharma and Arnav Sharma for their trust in me to lead Product. Thank you to my amazing product team (Vivek Kaushal, Jayadev R, Rahul Rajvanshi, Sarthak Gupta, Kumar Aniket) and to every xfn partner across design, engineering, GTM, and the broader company. It has been an honor and a great pleasure to build alongside you. My chapter at Enterpret has ended, but my conviction in the problem and my admiration for the Enterpret team and product are stronger than ever. I’m rooting hard for Enterpret and the team building its future. More on my next chapter soon.
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Birkan Icacan shared thisPower of running your agents on a preprocessed context graph. Faster, cheaper and more consistent results over time. Kudos to Enterpret team for building the best Customer Context Graph in the industry.Birkan Icacan shared thisWe spend a lot of time arguing about which AI model is cheapest. Meanwhile, the agent keeps rereading the same 100K customer conversations from scratch lol. We tested the same question about what to build next in two ways: - Search raw feedback each time: $14.61 - Use Enterpret’s organized customer context: $3.54 Enterpret was also 3× faster and produced better answers: 4.9/5 vs. 3.3/5. That works out to roughly 6× better cost for the quality of answer. The reason is simple: Enterpret gives recurring customer problems consistent names. They become easier to find, count, compare and reuse. Better models help. Better context changes the economics.
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Birkan Icacan posted this$1T in SaaS market value disappeared this year while most of these companies beat earnings. The market is repricing the entire model. Good quarters don't matter when buyers are questioning whether they need the product at all. I've been on the vendor side of this at Google, Notion, and Enterpret. For a while, procurement teams pushed back on seat counts. Then the question changed entirely to "can we build this ourselves with AI?" Publicis Sapient cut their SaaS licenses in half. Walmart built internal AI tools instead of buying seats. Buyers now believe they can build or replace what they used to buy. And the proposed fix, outcome-based pricing, has its own problems. Most companies can't even agree internally on what a "successful outcome" means. I watched this create new friction in deal after deal. Procurement teams need predictable invoicing. Consumption and outcome models make forecasting nearly impossible. Every SaaS vendor I know is stuck in this gap right now. The old model is losing credibility and the new one isn't operational yet.
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Birkan Icacan posted thisWhen AI governance becomes a procurement requirement, most SaaS companies won't be ready. And it will happen faster than security compliance did. I say this because I lived through the security version of this shift. At Notion, we spent significant time building SSO, SCIM, audit logs, data residency controls, and admin permissions. Each one was necessary. Each one took months. And we were relatively early compared to many SaaS companies our size. Even then, we were often playing catch-up with what enterprise buyers expected. AI governance is going to follow the same pattern, but compressed. Companies are already asking questions like: Where does our data go when your AI processes it? Can we audit what the model saw? Will your model provider use our data to train their models? How do we control which teams can use AI features and which can't? What happens to our data after the model interaction ends? Most AI-native products don't have clear answers to these questions yet. Because standards are still forming and the infrastructure to support them is early. Companies that start building now with AI governance in mind, while the answers are still forming, will have a meaningful head start when the standards finally catch up.
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Birkan Icacan posted thisThe first big enterprise deal I saw close taught me the wrong lesson. We landed a Fortune 500 customer. Mid six-figures contract. Team celebration. It felt like proof we had found product-market fit in upmarket. Then we tried to do it again. The next prospect had a different workflow, different compliance needs, and a different idea of what success looked like. The first playbook barely applied. We customized for months. We eventually closed but the effort made the economics hard to defend. That distinction has stayed with me. One large contract is evidence of demand. It is not evidence of a market. Demand means a customer wants what you built badly enough to pay for it. A market means a repeatable set of customers has the same core problem and you can solve it with roughly the same product and go-to-market motion. It is easy to confuse the two. Revenue is growing. Logos look great. The team is busy. You are hiring. But if every enterprise customer requires a new bespoke feature, and a new definition of value, you are not scaling a product business. You are building a consulting business with product margins. The question I come back to when a large prospect asks for something custom is simple: Will the next ten customers need this too? Not “can we build it?” Not “will this help close the deal?” Will it make the product stronger for a real market? That is the filter.
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Birkan Icacan posted thisThe average company with 2,000+ employees runs 259 apps. Early in my PM career, I treated adoption as a destination. If people opened our product more often, we were winning. If usage fell, we had a problem. But 259 apps means your product is, at best, one of 259 things competing for attention on any given Tuesday. And most of those 259 aren't competing on quality. They're competing on proximity to the moment a decision gets made. That is why integrations matter. They determine whether your product becomes part of the workflow or remains a destination someone has to remember to visit. At Enterpret, some of our most impactful work put customer intelligence inside the tools teams already use, through our MCP server and Slack bot, rather than asking them to return to a dashboard. I used to see integrations as a tax of selling to larger companies. I now see them as core product work. 259 apps. Your product is one of them. Will it show up where and when your users need it?
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Birkan Icacan posted thisHardest part of using AI today isn't the model. It's knowing what to ask it. ChatGPT and Claude are remarkable. But they're still largely reactive (at least for now). They wait for us to frame the right question. And most of us aren't good at that. We don't always know what we want, let alone how to phrase it. What's even worse is by the time you figure out what you should have asked, the moment to act has usually passed. Real promise of AI agents is not simply better answers on demand. It’s better and timely signal detection. An agent that notices the customer risk, the emerging opportunity, the slipping commitment, or the decision you’re avoiding and brings it to you before you think to ask changes the nature of the tool. That is when AI becomes less like a search box and more like a capable colleague quietly paying attention, connecting dots, and helping at the moment it matters. The future of AI is not just conversational. It’s ambient, proactive, and trusted enough to be useful before the question exists.
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Birkan Icacan reacted on thisBirkan Icacan reacted on thisExcited to share that Rogo is part of the inaugural launch of the OpenAI Marketplace announced at DevDay this week. Enterprise customers can now use part of their existing OpenAI commitment toward Rogo, bringing frontier intelligence together with purpose-built technology that understands how financial professionals work. Proud to be included alongside an incredible group of companies building the next generation of enterprise AI. https://lnkd.in/gf_c3bdJ
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Birkan Icacan liked thisBirkan Icacan liked thisAnd so it begins: I've recently joined Northwestern Mutual as Chief AI Officer. What attracted me most was the opportunity to help shape how a company with a 169-year history of serving clients and advisors navigates one of the most significant technological shifts of our time. We are living through the most exciting period in the history of computing, and the mission of Applied AI is clear: deliver lasting impact by bringing people, business, and technology together with a relentless focus on outcomes that scale responsibly. Long-term success comes from enterprise alignment, visibility, and shared capabilities woven into deep partnerships and co-creation. And that's 𝘦𝘹𝘢𝘤𝘵𝘭𝘺 what we are here to build. I'm grateful for the warm welcome and excited for the opportunity to help shape what's next. Looking forward to the journey ahead! #AppliedAI #NorthwesternMutual #EnterpriseAI
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Birkan Icacan liked thisBirkan Icacan liked thisAlmost every AI ROI conversation I've been part of lately starts the same way. Someone asks for one number. I get it. Budgets are real, and someone has to defend the spend. But the more time I spend on this at Rogo, the more I think "what's the ROI?" is really five questions. 1. What does it actually cost to own? License and usage are the visible part. Training, change management, and review time are often the bigger ones. 2. What work got done that someone actually used? A first draft is an attempt. The version that goes to the client is the output. 3. Where did the saved time go? It shows up as more clients covered, faster turnaround, less outside spend — but only if someone decides where it goes. Left alone, it just disappears into the week. 4. What changed in the business? How fast you go from client request to final deliverable. How many clients each senior person can cover. Eventually, win rates. 5. Will it last? If every competitor gets the same gains, a lot of that value gets competed away. McKinsey's latest State of AI survey found 80% of people say AI has made them more productive, but only 6% of organizations qualify as "AI high performers" seeing real EBIT impact. Gabriel Stengel said something on Invest Like The Best recently that I keep coming back to: he'd rather charge for the finished thing — the CIM a banker sends out, the quarterly report that goes to LPs — than try to put a dollar value on tokens. A bank knows what a CIM is worth because it knows what it charges to sell the business. Nobody really knows what $100,000 of tokens is worth. I think measurement ends up in the same place. The unit that matters is the deliverable: what it cost to produce, and what it was worth to the firm. Each of these five questions gets you a little closer to answering that.
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Birkan Icacan reacted on thisBirkan Icacan reacted on thisMillions of people use Canva. How do they understand what customers need at that scale? For years, we’ve worked alongside the Canva team as they’ve used Enterpret to make sense of customer feedback and turn what they learn into product decisions. Recently, we spent a few days in Canva’s Sydney office with the people behind that work. We heard how they find the signals that matter, share what they’re learning, and keep the voice of the customer close as they build. We’re so proud to share their story — and excited for you to hear directly from them. 🎥 Thank you to Canva for welcoming us in and being such wonderful partners. 🩵
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Birkan Icacan reacted on thisLoved working with the team to bring this Canva case study to life. Even better getting a little reminder of home along the way - plenty of Aussie accents and the chance to work with one of Australia’s best 🇦🇺🐨Birkan Icacan reacted on thisMillions of people use Canva. How do they understand what customers need at that scale? For years, we’ve worked alongside the Canva team as they’ve used Enterpret to make sense of customer feedback and turn what they learn into product decisions. Recently, we spent a few days in Canva’s Sydney office with the people behind that work. We heard how they find the signals that matter, share what they’re learning, and keep the voice of the customer close as they build. We’re so proud to share their story — and excited for you to hear directly from them. 🎥 Thank you to Canva for welcoming us in and being such wonderful partners. 🩵
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Birkan Icacan liked thisWe are grateful for partners like Nick Sands and the whole Citi team.Birkan Icacan liked thisReally tough act to follow but following his awesome interview on Invest Like the Best, had the opportunity to sit down with Gabriel Stengel and ask him about Rogo, building the AI platform for global finance. Definitely worth it if you prefer reading to podcasts! Alex Davidson, Max R. Mailman, Jelena Zec, Arvind Purushotham, Andrew Murray, Vibhor Rastogi, Tejas Sathian, Raoul Bhavnani https://lnkd.in/gcngc4xsHow AI can support financial investment teams: Q&A with Rogo co-Founder and CEO Gabriel StengelHow AI can support financial investment teams: Q&A with Rogo co-Founder and CEO Gabriel Stengel
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Birkan Icacan reacted on thisBirkan Icacan reacted on thisI've joined Anthropic on the product team! I'm excited to work with Catherine Wu and team to help build Claude. Grateful for almost 5 years at Notion (time flies!). I met so many talented friends and learned how delightful software can be when you make it both beautiful and useful. "We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us." This is Notion's tagline and it feels more true than ever. Claude has already had a huge impact on how I work and live, and I'm so excited to help build it!
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Birkan Icacan liked thisBirkan Icacan liked thisTwenty years ago today, I moved from #Türkiye to the United States of #America 🇺🇸 to work as a software developer at Microsoft, which gave me quite a soft landing: a furnished apartment, a car, and even a relocation specialist who helped me open a bank account, get my SSN, and begin my Green Card process, which I got in under six months. A lot has changed in 20 years! At Microsoft, I had my own office, a desk phone, and a heavy tower computer. Laptops weren't nearly as powerful or common, and remote work felt more like a downgrade than a perk. Back then, instead of Google Maps on a foldable iPhone, we used paper maps sold at gas stations. Forget OpenAI Codex, we didn't even have Stack Overflow. I learned C# from a book on the flight from Istanbul (it is a long flight). Moving halfway around the world from #Istanbul to a small, rainy city in the Pacific Northwest wasn't exactly appealing to my family and friends back home. Over the years, I had the privilege of building the credit card payment system at Netflix, the payment gateway at PayPal, driver payments, leasing, and wheelchair-accessible vehicles at Uber, and Palantir Technologies' modern data infrastructure. Ultimately, I took everything I learned along the way and built my life's work: Base64 Document AI. I'm proud to have played a small part in this progress and grateful to every company, colleague, and friend along the way, even the ones I no longer particularly like 😁 If I could start over, I would make the same decision again. Before I close, I want to thank Christer Lundin, who gave me the chance to become #Microsoft's first international college hire from Türkiye for a software developer position working on the #Windows codebase. My life would have been very different if we hadn't met. Christer was my fifth and final interviewer that day. After hearing from his colleagues that my coding skills were strong, he gave me a brain teaser and 20 minutes to solve it. I finished in about 10 seconds. Before letting him be too impressed, I admitted that I had solved the exact same puzzle in TÜBİTAK #BilimTeknik, a popular science magazine, just the week before. Apparently, that combination impressed him even more. Sometimes, you need a little luck too 😁 Twenty years later, that story still reminds me of something I believe deeply about people: work hard. Aim higher! Pursue what you believe is right. Above all, be honest. Your skills may determine what opportunities you get. Your integrity determines who you become. You may lose your hair and cuteness along the way but never compromise your core. Some things, once lost, you don't get back. A lot changed in twenty years. Not where it matters. Because nothing else matters! 🤘
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Birkan Icacan reacted on thisCongrats to Max Schoening the new CTO of Notion. Max's strong engineering and product sense is exactly what Notion needs for its next chapter. I can't be more excited about the future of Notion with Max at the helm! As for me, I will be a Notion advisor until the end of year and plan to take a much needed and planned sabbatical.
Experience & Education
Projects
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Determining Cancerous Tissues Using Morphological Algorithms on CELL BE Microprocessor Cluster
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Graduation project collaborated with IBM Turk.
Implemented on a tiny cluster which consists of two Playstation3s which contain CELL BE microprocessor. Written an academic paper and applied to CASCON 2009, not accepted due to one reviewer who pointed out the weakness of our preliminary experimental results, ignoring 33x speedup (64x was the theoretical bound!) over the sequential version of our program.
Internal monthly journal of IBM Turk “Ozgur Yazılım” allocated four full pages…Graduation project collaborated with IBM Turk.
Implemented on a tiny cluster which consists of two Playstation3s which contain CELL BE microprocessor. Written an academic paper and applied to CASCON 2009, not accepted due to one reviewer who pointed out the weakness of our preliminary experimental results, ignoring 33x speedup (64x was the theoretical bound!) over the sequential version of our program.
Internal monthly journal of IBM Turk “Ozgur Yazılım” allocated four full pages for the project.Other creators
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Turkish
Native or bilingual proficiency
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English
Full professional proficiency
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Moxesh Mehta
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