Zapier | Automated (Remote)Work

Hey, everyone. Welcome to Gray Matter. I'm Heather Mack. Today's episode is part of our Work From Anywhere series. Our guest is Wade Foster, who is the CEO and co founder of automation software startup Zapier. The company has been a remote first organization since it was founded in 2011. In 2017, Zapier even began offering a $10,000 delocation package to help new hires move away from the tech hub of the Bay Area. Today, Zapier has about 300 employees all over the world, and the company is often held up as an example of how to run a distributed organization. Now that most businesses are remote, Wade says Zapier is getting more requests than ever for advice on how to make the most out of a distributed workforce. Wade joined Greylock general partner Sarah Guo to discuss Zapier's work from home policies, including best practices for running meetings, working across multiple time zones, and more.

Wade, welcome to Gray Matter. Thanks so much for doing this with us.

Yeah, thanks for having me, Sarah.

I think a lot of people will have heard of Zapier already, but can you just introduce yourself and the company a little bit?

Yeah, sure. I'm Wade. I'm co founder and CEO at Zapier. Zapier helps you connect all the tools that you use at work and makes it really easy to automate all the things you really wanted to do. So we hook into things like Slack and G Suite and Trello and Mailchimp and QuickBooks and Zendesk and Salesforce. There's like 2000 of these, so I could go on for a really long time.

I think now people recognize the sort of value of this idea of integration and automation, but you've been working on this for a long time. What's the founding story of Zapier?

Sure. So we started the company in 2011 and it emerged out of kind of like some side projects and freelance work one of my co founders and I were doing. We were just doing anything to make a buck, honestly. You know, if someone hired us to do something, we would pretty much just do it. And we were making some websites, we were making some plugins, and we ended up making like a WordPress plugin that was Formsoft for WordPress that you could hook into Salesforce. We made like a PayPal QuickBooks thing and my co founder Brian had this realization that app to app connectivity is a big pain point, particularly for small business owners who can't afford engineers who don't have know what APIs even are, but they still need this. Like it's really valuable to get your leads from your website, into your CRM and into your email marketing tool, or to get notifications for new payments, or to get alerted that you have a critical file waiting for you. All these, like little things are super compelling and needed for those folks. And so he was like, we should just make a place where it's easy for the sort of regular person that works in all these small businesses to set this stuff up on their own. They don't need to hire engineers, they don't need to know how to code, they don't need to know APIs. And so we set out to sort of start building that in 2011 and now, nine years later, here we are.

What does here we are look like?

There's over 300 employees working at Zapier globally, all over the world, fully distributed. We've never had an office. We support millions of users, over 100,000 companies using the platform. We've been profitable for a long time. It's not a tiny little company anymore.

Yeah, well, congratulations to you and Brian, the entire team on the progress and just the impact you're having on these businesses. So let's like talk about you and Remote and, you know, the 17 time zones of Zapier and everything. I'm sure you just get inundated by the startups that are like, wade, we're remote. How do we do this? What do we do? Now, you guys published a guide and lots of content around this. But in terms of what you're hearing from founders and leaders about going to Remote in a forced way, what are the biggest mistakes you're seeing people make right now?

I think a lot of folks use presence in a not super great way. So you see this most commonly when folks are talking about zoom fatigue. Like, I think everyone's got zoom fatigue right now where they're just on zoom all day, every day and by the end of the day they're just like beat. It's like, I just can't do this at all. And I think a big part of it is they're over reliant on synchronous work to get things done. They're like, if I don't talk to you and tell you, hey, these are our priorities, or this is what happens if we don't spend time discussing this live. How would work ever happen? I think if you sort of step back and say, actually we can get a lot of things done if we aren't on Zoom all day long, you'll probably be more effective. Now, that doesn't mean that there's not a place for being on video conferences. We're power users of Zoom. We love the software, but I think if you rely on it back to back all day every day, you're going to have a tough time. And so how do you actually do that? Well, it really just boils down to getting really crisp about what it is you're trying to achieve. So I think you have to set up on a day to day and a week to week basis. Okay, where do we want to get to at the end of the week? What is it that we care a lot about? And then making sure your team has the time and space to get that stuff done. You can rely on tools like Slack or email or whatever other tool you're using on to do like quick little daily updates. You can do things where you say, hey, when you have a second, just give me an update on this piece of thing. You can use tools like Zapier that automatically ping in status updates from these other tools like, hey, there's a new thing that's been built in Figma. Pipe that into Slack and let people get alerted that we're starting work on this stuff. That sort of reduces your, I guess, reliance on synchronous work to be successful. Once you sort of make that shift from synchronous to more asynchronous, you'll find that remote can work, I think, a little more peacefully for you.

And I also think that the definition of how to do synchronous is going to change for many organizations because it's not going to be like, let's be in scheduled one hour meeting blocks all day. That means you're literally going to do no real work. But as you said, I think there's a place for it. And being conscious that it's not just the sort of direct translation of like be around each other 100% of the time.

Yeah, we did our annual planning this week, a big part of it and a lot of that did happen live over Zoom. But the way that it happened looks very different. So we're utilizing breakout rooms a ton to get into smaller groups. We have Google Docs open shared with everyone at the same time. So like every single person is like tossing stuff into the dock as we work through things. And it's not this situation where it's like five people, 10 people, 20 people in a Zoom, but most everyone's just sort of leaned back, not engaged and it's one person talking to everybody else. It's really trying to use these tools to get everyone actually engaged. And working on the same problem at the same time. And so it accelerates the work. If you have a room of 20 people, 19 people aren't working, and one is, you want to try and figure out, how do you get 20 people all working together and putting that into creating something.

There's a concept at Greylock of, like, a partner hour, which is like, do not put 8 GPS in a room and have a discussion if it's not worth eight partner hours.

Right? Yeah.

Because there's a lot of stuff you can do one on one. There's a lot of stuff that you only need 20 minutes for. So don't schedule an hour and that. We absolutely need that live discussion to make good investment decisions, make decisions for the fund. But it is not what we want to be wasting, you know, 40 partner hours every day. Right.

When you said a really important word in there, and it was decisions, it's like you get them in the room because you have a hard, difficult decision to debate. So when you have that decision, synchronous can be a very valuable tool for, like, wrestling with the nuance of hard problems. But you don't want to put eight people in a room to get a status update. Like, that should just be an email or a doc or something. You're like, hey, go read this. And then as long as you read it, you're fine.

So if. If I think back a bit, I. I feel like we got to know each other in, like, 20, 20, 13, 14, some while back. And at the time, of course, Zapier was already remote, but at a different scale. And I think we were probably speaking a year or two ago where you're. You were telling me that the way you managed to remotely prior to this crazy year was changing because the company was scaling. Right. Just in terms of being able to onboard people. You used to have, like, every new employee come, like, camp with you for some period of time. Right. You know, hard when you're 300 people and growing. So tell me about, like, what you've done to scale while remote. Because who knows how long this goes. Right. And a lot of young.

Yeah.

Are like, well, we still need to hire. I'm very uncomfortable doing that. How do we continue building?

Yeah, we used to do this thing called Airbnb onboarding. So we would fly the new people out, we'd rent an Airbnb for them out here in the Bay Area, and then we would work with them for the whole week. And then the evenings, we'd take them out to dinner. We'd come Back and play board games and other nerdy stuff. That that's kind of just our personality types. And it was really a pretty valuable way to get to know the early employees. Like we really knew each other in a way that I don't think is common for most companies. And that scaled pretty well. We did that to like 150 people. But towards the end of that run, it was definitely breaking. It was like people were flying out here every month, like different man. It was a big burden for managers and leaders in the company to always be out here. This is a lot and it's starting to slow things down. But we did move to just totally remote onboarding, which honestly we probably should have done sooner. We're an entirely remote company. Why wouldn't we? Onboard remote. And there was a few shifts we made. We started onboarding in cohorts. So every two weeks there is a new cohort of folks that join the company. And their first week is through a centralized onboarding process. They don't go straight to their manager on day one. Instead, the people team owns their time and they run them through some self directed material. Some live like learning courses. And it's oriented around helping them get to know Zapier, helping them understand the tools that we use, how we use them, our values, our culture, who our customers are, what our product is. All these different types of things that give them this real high level, holistic understanding of what we are and what we're trying to do. So that that way when they go to their teams, they're able to actually be more effective on day one. And that has been really important. The other thing that they get out of that is a sense of community. That was one thing we realized was really important, that Airbnb onboarding did really well, sort of on accident. You started with a group of folks that you got to know. So it was like it didn't matter if you were in engineering or support or design or whatnot. It's like I started with these people. We went through like the onboarding ringer together and those folks check in on each other. They, you know, there's a just a sense of like, oh, these are my work people now. And you need that in a remote company. When you don't have connections to others by default, you have to work hard to build those bonds with other people. And the new onboarding process did that really, really well. We certainly have other things that augment that, but finding ways to build that community and connection is critical in a remote company.

Just for folks sanity so one more question on how you handle time zones. A lot of companies, I would suppose, digital enough and well oriented enough that they actually could manage it, or until they had, you know, people fleeing New York, all across the country, their families and living with their in laws, and then all of a sudden they're. They're managing a time difference they've never done before. So how does Zapier think about that?

Yeah, so it's certainly. This is another area that's evolved over time. First 10 people were all in the US across three or four different time zones. It's not really a big deal. Like you can manage that without a huge amount of headache. The first person we hired in Europe was interesting because I remember talking to him and saying, like, we've never done this before. I have no idea how well this is going to work. It's a big time zone difference. We don't think it's going to be a problem, but I just want you to know that up front before you join us, that you're a guinea pig, basically. And he was like, it's all good, let's do it, let's see how it goes. And it turned out being great. He was one of our best engineers in very short order. And so we were just like, okay, I guess time zone doesn't matter. And so we got like really adventuresome in where we hired folks, we hired people all over the world, and for the most part it just kind of worked for a while.

Wade, when you say it just worked, because I have specifically portfolio companies who are like thinking about pulling the plug on somebody just one more times in a way, and they're super nervous about it. Right, Because. And the thing they specifically worry about is getting blocked on decisions and slower velocity. Right. So do you think he did something different or do you think people are just too nervous?

I think people just thought about, like, how do we set this up and make it successful? I remember like, we had a writer in Thailand and it was actually like pretty great because he would like do drafts of his work, he would hand it off to the us they'd edit it all up, and then he'd wake up in the next morning and he'd be like, I got my edits back. And so it was like there was no latency in feedback for him. It sort of worked out really well in those instances. And so that was sort of what our early experience looked like. Then we got to a point where like, we had like a product unit and like product manager, designer engineers spread across Americas, Europe, And a person in Australia and it just was no good. Like it just, it just was slow. Everything was slow, everything was frustrating. The person over in the APAC was new to the company and just felt like wasn't getting a lot of help getting onboarded because it was a new team. It was emerging like the documentation for them hadn't been written very well yet. And it was like, okay, so I guess it's not like a thing you get for free. Like there is a bit of effort that has to go into this and so since then we sort of backed up and I think the real key learning that we have is there are parts of your company where a sort of 247 follow the son model and is a strategic advantage for you. You think about, you know, your support org you can support globally. If you think about having 247 follow the sun across the world. If you think about sales, you can do that there too. If you think about any of your go to market functions or customer facing functions are going to benefit from being more distributed. Even things like your site reliability team is going to benefit from that because now they're not getting 3am Pager duty calls. Those teams really can be quite successful the more distributed they are and it becomes an advantage for you. If you get those collaboration pieces right, the cost is well worth it because you can reach customers more effectively. The teams where you have to think harder about it are the ones where collaboration and feedback loops need to be fast. That's certainly your design teams, your product teams. A lot of times sometimes your marketing teams have those campaigns that they're working on. And so they're basically what we sort of have a loose rule around is, you know, plus or minus three time zones. So we want to just group people and cluster people that way for those teams. And that's been like our core learning there. And as long as you make sure the teams have clear missions and clear understandable goals, you don't have to worry so much about decisions getting bogged down because they have the autonomy to go pursue those things. So that's kind of been our, I guess, time zone journey.

I was thinking about something that you have said. I feel like your attitude toward the work that Zapier does and the value you guys add to the world is down to earth, I suppose. And you said at one point that excitement about the engineering work doesn't equate to value. In talking about the engineering work that Zapier has taken on. I think that's a really funny thing to say. You know Silicon Valley culture is often like, people want to work on the quote unquote, hardest problems or most interesting problems in the world. Can you explain what you meant by that?

Well, sure. Like, there's always this sort of like, what's hot, you know, in the news and you know, ML AI, like whatever sort of trendy is where people tend to flock to. But most engineering work is this sort of just like nuts and bolts, plumbing style work that has to get done. I mean, how many CRUD apps have been built across the SaaS industry is so many. And they've gone on to be quite successful. These very basic building blocks. It isn't necessarily super exciting or thrilling work. And so it often is hard to or harder to get that work done or prioritized. And I think when you look at, you know, a company like Zapier, it's easy. I think in some companies that do have engineers, people will say like, well, why, why would I use software like that? I could just build that on my own. But the reality is you don't really want to spend your time deploying engineers against this problem. You want them to be focused on the core business things that you are serving. This other type of work. You want it to be fast and easy and done. That's what Zapier really gives you, is a place where you can come in, set it up in minutes. We take care of everything. It's hosted, it's maintained. All this stuff you don't have to worry about. And so it's the sort of unsexy, unglamorous part of running a business that makes it work that we really help.

Accelerate from a recruiting perspective. Do you think people at Zapier like, look at that work differently than others do, or do you think it's a cultural thing that you guys are so excited about, like doing this?

Yeah, I think part of it is like the scale and the diversity of tools that we get to work with. And there definitely is like a, like, I think of myself like I grew up like playing Legos and stuff like that. And so there's like something interesting about like all these random tools, like, what can you build if you put them together in interesting ways? And in fact, I actually think that's kind of why some of what we've done, while I've sort of always talked about it in unsexy ways, has sort of turned actually into a trendy thing. These days. You hear about no code, low code, and like, we're square in the middle of that. And so we've actually Become kind of the trendy thing. Not really on purpose. It just sort of happened. And I think it kind of gets to that point where it's like, oh, you're actually helping people build, unlock their creativity in a way that's really compelling. So I think there's a personality type that gets really pumped about that.

Yeah. So sexy or not, tell me one story of an automation that a user has built with zapier that you just, like, are inspired by, you think is really cool.

There's two users that I have just been enamored by lately, and they are two of the forefront folks on this, like, no code industry. They really kicked it off. One is Tara Reid at Appswithoutcode, and one is Ben Tossel from MakerPad. And if you go, like, check out the stuff they're building, it is pretty inspiring. You look like MakerPad is building like, Airbnb clones, Reddit clones, Facebook clones, like, all this sort of stuff. And they're using off the shelf software that's predominantly connected with Zapier. Zapier is the logic layer for all these things that they're building. And it really has created, I think, a totally new category of work, a segment of work, because it's shown folks you actually can do a lot with these types of tools. You know, you don't need to learn how to write code these days to get stuff built. And so I think those two have been just really great, you know, faces for, like, the no code world that's emerging.

Can you talk a little bit about your process for goal creation?

It's hard. As your company gets bigger, this is one of the hardest things to get right. I think I heard a CEO saying one time, they're like, if I give really specific goals and I really tell people what to happen, the right things get done and I'm happy, but everyone hates me because it's too dictatorial. If I give people lots of autonomy to go get things done, then they're very happy, but the right things don't happen. And so, like, figuring out that middle ground is kind of tricky. And then there's this constant, like, curation of the strategy and the mission. As you sort of get new information, as new market threats, new competitive environments, you're always kind of doing a little bit of gardening in those areas to make that work. I can't say that we've nailed it, but we use an OKR framework. We focus really heavily on what are the key things that we want to get done in a year. What do we feel like is Most critical for our business. And why is now the right time to do that stuff? And so we really try and focus on the answer to that question first and get lasered in on that stuff. The OKR framework then supports that stuff. I think a lot of times people start with the framework and they're like, well, it doesn't fit in the framework, so we got to change it. And I'm kind of like, well, if it doesn't fit in the framework, that's okay. Let's really just get what it is we need to achieve first and then we can fix the framework to match this other stuff if we we need to. The one thing we're trying that's new this year is we're adding a piece called Actions to the OKR framework. I think a lot of times the OKR framework cascades through your Org and there's this like, well, we'll just give you objectives and you figure out how to get the work done. I find that that can be challenging because oftentimes there's a disconnect between there's a belief in the objective and a belief in the krs. But there's not necessarily alignment that the work is going to deliver that stuff. And so we started to say, okay, do we believe in the Actions piece? Do we believe that that is going to deliver that stuff? And really getting alignment on that is a new thing that we're trying this year. I'm optimistic about it, but we'll see. I think we are constantly evolving this stuff. The other tricky thing with annual planning is it's annual. So you only get one shot at it, really, a year, and then you're just kind of constantly trying to engage with this regularly. It's probably one of the hardest things. It's like one of a very few really hard problems that I think companies have is like just getting that tight alignment on what it is you're trying to do as you scale.

I think one of the things that I've seen is really hard for company leaders is to understand, like when there's a disconnect across functions. Right. Or what communication is happening between their teams. How do you as CEO know what communication and relationship is happening in your teams?

Yeah, I think you want to create artifacts. Like the cool thing about these tools is that they create a digital exhaust. Right. If you're using GitHub, it creates commits. If you're using Figma, you've got files. If you've got Zendesk, it's creating tickets. Salesforce has a customer log so there's this exhaust that happens from the work. And so the cool thing is you can set it up where as the manager or CEO or whatever leader, you get that exhaust sent to you automatically. In my case, I have like alerts piping into Slack all the time. So I'm able to observe the proverbial factory at work without having to ask people, can you just. Can you give me this stuff? Can you give me this stuff? Because no one wants to turn in their TPS reports. That's like just, it's mundane work, right? But I can set it up where it automatically comes to me. And so that helps me get a feel for where are things operating really smoothly and where is there like a decision making that's getting bogged down or like two teams are clearly not aligned or just sort of stuck?

Can you give an example of like an alert that you pay attention to as CEO?

So I'm paying attention to metrics. Those are like the obvious ones. So, you know, revenue and customer happiness and things like that are piped in daily and weekly. And then we also have anomaly detection. So things like certain key indicators move outside of normal sort of fluctuation. Those spin up alerts. Beyond that, it's a lot of like, certain decisions I'll be keying off on. So, like, there will be times when we're working through a particular problem where I'm like, I need to be paying attention to that. And I'll set up alerts for certain keywords inside of Slack where it's like this comes up. I want to be seeing what's going on in those things. So that's one way, you know, any sort of like customer unhappiness or if like key customers are unhappy, you can set up alerts for those.

So you've talked about this idea of digital native work and how many organizations now are trying to take everything that they did in the real world, in the office and just like find the analog and get as close as they can to that analogy, you know, while we're all distributed and you've talked about how you don't think that's right. Can you explain a little bit more?

Well, yeah, sure. So I think like, you know, oh, the, the weekly conference room meeting or whatever. It's like, oh, we've got a project and, you know, someone's got to come in and present us to what's going on. You all pile around a conference room, someone gets in there, hooks up the slide deck, turns it on and just walks you through a slide deck. And you spend 45 minutes out of an hour hearing them talk to you. And then you hear the last 15 minutes of random Q and A. And what kind of goes on. There is like a very low calorie meeting. It's like not much has gotten done other than a bunch of people sat there and heard a person talk to them. And then at the end you have a Q and A session that maybe was a little productive. But I would bet the most dominant voice is the one who did most of the question asking and answering. And you may not have gotten like dissenting opinions. You may not have heard the things that you need to hear. That's what the offline world looks like. And then people try and replicate that online because they're like, oh, we should need that. Well, one, that's a bad way to do it. You shouldn't try and replicate it anyway. You should just try and find a better way to do it. The cool thing about all these digital first tools is they actually give you ways to fix some of that stuff. And so if you started online, you can just design that whole process better in the first place. You can say, hey, before this meeting, I'm actually going to send you out the document that has all this stuff and I'm going to expect everyone to have read it. Or if you don't want to expect everyone to have read it, you can say, first 10 minutes of the meeting, I want you to read through this stuff. And while you're reading, people can be interacting with that document. They can be putting in comments, asking questions, and then folks can be answering each other live, doing work, answering, building clarification, building consensus, building understanding, all at the same time. Because it can happen in a writing form. So these digital tools allow you to do that. And then you can. There's all sorts of other creative ways you can make this work. You can use tools like mural to do better brainstorms. You can say, hey, let's break out. And everyone answer this question at the same time. We don't need to sit around as a group. And so you make sure that the voices of everyone are being heard. And you can also see the dissent easier. You can see someone saying like. And it could be the quiet person saying, like, I just am not really on board with this. And so it fits. Everyone gets to sort of participate a little bit better. And you can use that to like, better understand, you know, what's the real blockers here. And you can also use it to clear up real issues faster. And so I think when we talk about like digital first tools. I think that's the power of the way a lot of these software has been built is it allows you to do that kind of stuff and allows you to play around with the medium in which work gets done. It doesn't necessarily have to be this traditional meeting structure.

I sit on a lot of video. I don't think video is going away, but I think that it's going to be a combination of richer interaction than just video where one person is communicating. Right. Which is a lot of that being said. Like, I don't know if you have, you know, filtered for this in hiring a zapier or you just teach people about it. But I feel like in it traditionally, you know, there's been a lot of resistance to this idea of structured meetings and meeting tools is kind of seen as this like weird management foo of like not just to be totally direct like that. That's not important, right? Like how do you work around that resistance or filter for it?

We teach it in that onboarding. So that's part of it is we, we teach people how to have better meetings in the onboarding. And then the first time you experience it, it's just like. And it works. You're just, it's just sold. Like I, I find very few people who go through that and are like, eh, I'd rather be snoozing through this meeting rather than like actively engaging to it. The part that's a little bit trickier is the prep part because sometimes it does require a little bit more preparation, a little more discipline. But candidly like that's just good hygiene for being like, if you want to be good at your job, you should show up prepared. Like, so there's a personality type who sometimes can, you know, get away with like a little bit of charm and charisma and sort of float through this thing. That person struggles more because they can't really hide behind the charm and charisma anymore. They have to like show up, be prepared and ready to dig into this stuff.

One thing that I've heard from other founders and CEOs in our portfolio and on this podcast has been that they're worried about basically like breakthrough innovation and creativity. While remote, you clearly believe that this can happen because you're building your whole company with new products around this. Is that concern well founded or what do you guys do to encourage like brand new product ideas or real creativity?

You have to create space for it is the big thing. A few thoughts come to mind. One is oftentimes when I hear this critique, I ask for the example. And the first example you get is like, well, what about the random, like, you know, chats, the serendipitous chats that you get inside your company. And my reaction to that is I understand that that is how it has been done and it can happen that way, but I feel like leaving your company strategy up to like a chance encounter in a hallway and is a pretty risky proposition on its own. Like if you are banking on just one employee having to luck into another employee to create whole new things, I mean, it can work, it's clearly worked before, but I think I would like to try and find a better way than that. And so to the extent that you can understand what drives innovation and what drives new product ideas, I would try and put the. Put your focus on those things. It's really just carving off time and space to work on those things. And so High Growth Handbook has a great first chapter with Mark Andreessen where he talks about like, who are your product interviewers in your company, making sure that you have been like, dedicated to working on these things, make sure that they have space and energy to go after your most interesting ideas, make sure that you're not like just overworking folks on like other types of things, that this stuff never happens. And so I think a lot of it just boils back to saying, hey, on a yearly basis, like, we can do five things. Well, three of them are going to be supporting the business as is and really helping them be successful, but maybe two of them are in service of something a little more unknown. And we're going to have real dollars and real people dedicated to working on those things. So that's kind of been our approach. It's, it's works pretty good for us, I'd say better than a chance encounter.

I think it's a really interesting framing and I've. One thing I've always admired about you, Wade, is you carry a very first principles thinking approach to even the idea of like the hallway interaction or the spontaneous encounter. I hear that all the time and it resonates with me. But the of idea, the idea of like, well, just because we want the creativity doesn't mean we can't design those interactions into our company.

Right? Yeah, And I think that's the point. It's not saying that like hallway conversations aren't useful or can't create obvious things because there's so many examples of where that has happened. And so to debate that that's not possible is not. That's just Not a real, like, I don't want to engage in that debate because I'll lose. I'd rather say, well, that's good that that happens. How can we make that more regularly and how can we make that more predictable? Because if you can make it more predictable, then you're really onto something.

Yeah, maybe you can even drive, you know, the equivalent of more of it.

Right, exactly. You could make it go up. If it's literally chance, you have no control over the success of your company or not. You're just sort of like hoping that's.

No way to live as an entrepreneur. There's enough control. So the last substantive question, you must be watching with both empathy and bemusement as everyone tries to figure out this remote thing, like, give me a prediction, like watching this. What do you think is going to stick or not about this new way of working broadly?

Well, I think more things are going to stick than not. Honestly, I think the biggest thing I wager is that most people are finding that they can be productive, or at least productive to a good enough degree, and the sort of broader employee workforce, enough of that population is going to say, this is better. And I want this, that it creates a macro challenge for any company who says, well, actually I want to be in person only that it's going to be hard for that company to hire talent because the workforce just as by and large is just not interested in that. And so when it creates a talent shortage because people don't want to go into an office or people don't want to be in a big city like San Francisco or New York, there's a certain pragmatism. It's like, how many companies are in San Francisco because, well, that's where the money is and that's where the talent is. And so that's where I am. Not necessarily because I wanted to be there, but that's just how I had to be. Like, pragmatism is a really powerful driver of how companies operate. And so they go where the talent is and they go where the money is. And if the talent says, I want to work from home, well, that's how we're going to be set up. And so I think that's one thing that is going to be a pretty powerful dynamic. And it'll be interesting to see if that truly does play play out. And then if you get there, it will be interesting to see, I think, just what that does to, like, the talent markets globally. Like, we've got the distribution, how pay works, how compensation works, all that Sort of stuff gets upended. How commercial real estate works, that gets upended. You start to realize, like, how intertwined all these systems are. And I don't know where it's going to shake out, honestly, but you realize that something has to change. Like, something will be very different here.

In reaction to that. Are you guys doing anything different with your own talent strategy from here?

Not much. The biggest thing that we are really focusing on is like, we really just are thinking about, like, tightening up, like, our employee brand and how we think about, you know, why you should come work at Zapier, I think for a long time, certainly, hey, totally remote. We're one of a few if you really want that, like, we're the place to be. Very strong value prop. When everyone's that way, that value prop, it doesn't come across as powerfully. And so we're just looking at that and trying to just update how we think about that stuff. Like, those are the types of things that when everyone is sort of shifting in your direction, you have to kind of come up with a. You have to understand what your differentiator is more deeply.

Quick takes. So is there a content recommendation being locked at home from the last seven or eight months that you'd like to share?

Yeah, I can tell you what, I've been listening to a lot of podcasts lately because I have a newborn at home and so I don't have hands or anything like that. And because the world has not been as fun to be around, I've looked for a lot of escapism. And the Conan Needs a Friend podcast is a blast. Like, it's just. It brings on, you know, as friends and comedians and they just chat about silly stuff, but they also oftentimes talk about, like, their process, their creative process, like how they come up with jokes or skits or sketches and things like that. And that part of it is pretty inspirational, too. So if you're looking for just like something to take your head out of, you know how things are. Conan's a. Conan's a good stop.

Yeah, I could use that. What about a shout out to someone?

Shout out right now has to just go to all the healthcare workers. My sister's a nurse, my mom's a pharmacist. There's so many people out there that are doing things that are difficult and hard that us in technology are really the lucky ones. We can work from home, we can sit in front of our laptops and we get our food delivered to us, and we don't have to venture out into the world. I think those folks really are the ones that have taken the brunt of what this pandemic has done to us, and they deserve all the props that they can get.

I deeply agree. What about one learning about yourself or the team?

In some ways, I feel like I was meant for the pandemic. We're already set up to be remote. I'm an introvert by nature, so this has been great where I can just be like, oh, you know, I don't have to go out not to see people. I can just, you know, hang out at home by myself a lot. I don't know if my wife agrees with that, but it's working for me right now.

Awesome. Any last words of advice for entrepreneurs in the audience?

Embrace this remote thing for the long haul. So, yeah, don't. Don't assume you're going to get back to your office anytime soon. I'm sure folks are already realizing that if they haven't six months in or whatnot. But just lean into learning these things. Be comfortable with what you don't know and be comfortable trying new things. I think you'll find that if you're willing to try new stuff, you'll find stuff that really works for you and you really like. And that's honestly how our culture has been built over time. It's just been built through trial and error. And we found some things that we loved and we doubled down on it and, you know, or things that we tried one time and we're just like, we're not doing that ever again. And so over time, you kind of come up with the rituals that work for you and the company gets better.

Awesome. Wade, thank you so much for being on Gray Matter. And I always learn from talking to you and talking about Zapier, so. So congrats on the newborn and be well.

Yeah, thanks, Sarah.

Okay, everyone, that concludes this episode of Gray Matter. You can subscribe to our podcast on soundcloud.com greylock partners or you can find new episodes and blogs on our website greylock.com youm can also follow us on Twitter reylockvc. I'm Heather Mack, and thanks for listening.