College Freelancing & Inspirations | Zapier Co-founder Mike Knoop

And that kind of led me down the path to eventually thinking about what other side projects I could work on, maybe, you know, turn one of those things into a full-time startup maybe one day. And very luckily, the very first thing that I worked on was Zapier with my 2 co-founders, Brian and Wade. And, you know, the writing's on the wall for how that turned out. So I think that ended up— I got very lucky that the very first thing that I worked on with that kind of game plan worked as well as it did.

Who here has used Zapier in the past or has ever heard of Zapier?

All right, we'll change that today.

Okay, awesome. So, yeah, so, Mike, do you want to just give a brief introduction of yourself and as well as a brief introduction of what Zapier does?

Yeah, so, my name is Mike Knoop. I founded Zapier, which I've heard it both ways. So, Zapier, kind of our mission at Zapier is to, like, kind of democratize automation. Zapier is a tool that allows you to connect together tools that you use to run your business, Uh, and this is not a new space. Automation's been around since the '80s, the '90s, uh, but it's usually been kind of locked in the hands of, you know, folks in IT, folks who know how to code, uh, business leadership. And the kind of goal of the company was how can we give that power to most, like more and more people? Everyone in this room, for example, could probably log in and it's, it's a tool that's designed for non-technical folks to be able to, uh, connect these tools together that you actually, um, you know, have problems connecting in day to day just to get your job and run your companies and things like that. One of the co-founders, I'm the third co-founder. I was the Chief Product Officer for the first 8 years of the company's life. About a year ago, decided to fire myself and hire a new CPO to take over my responsibilities, and today I run Zapier Labs, which primarily focuses on kind of longer time horizons. So kind of working out ahead of the product organization that we've got today to try and figure out what is kind of future value we can create for Zapier customers over like a longer time horizon. So that's a little bit about me and Zapier.

Yeah, awesome. Definitely wanted to dive into the business aspect later, but want to focus more on right now, like, sort of your personal journey. So can you talk more about, I know you went to the University of Missouri. Did you grow up in the Midwest? And can you talk a little bit about sort of, you know, the family environment as well as how you grew up? Like, were you always, you know, working on startups? Were you interested in businesses? And then how did you, like, how did you spend your time at college?

Yeah, good question. So I gotta rewind the clock here. So growing up, I was always into like building stuff. I actually thought I wanted to be an architect, like a house architect for a long time growing up. And then I got into high school and I took some of these art classes, prereq classes, and I was terrible at actually drawing things on paper. So I realized, oh, that's not the path I'm going to go down. Funny enough, the whole industry changed. Everyone uses software now, so I think I could maybe do it. But at the time, that was kind of my disqualifying event for myself. But I always liked building stuff. Like, I have been, like, coding since I was in elementary school. I wrote a bunch of, like, if you're all familiar with graphing calculators, I built a bunch of games that maybe some of you have even played in, you know, middle school and high school. Built, like, a couple of side projects just on the side to hone my skills. And then in high school, I was trying to decide, like, what do I want to actually do, I guess, with your life? Because high schoolers should know what they want to do with their life, which I totally Don't buy. I figured, like, I like this coding thing so much and I like this, like, building thing so much. I was really worried that if I went and did computer science in college that I would, like, kind of burn out on it. I was worried that I, you know, I would— there'd be this rigorous curriculum that I'd have to follow. There'd be tons of homework and tests. And I hated that kind of stuff in school. You know, I was not a 4.0 student like that. I, I cared a lot more about the things that I did outside of school in my own time than I cared about this, like, formal rigid structure. And I think that resonates a lot with folks probably here in this room, other entrepreneurs, folks building companies. Like, you're kind of not doing the standard path that's laid out for you, right? So I was really worried that if I went and did the standard path for computer science, that, that would— I would just get— I would just get burned out on it. It would not be fun for me. So I decided to do something completely different. I did— I decided to study mechanical engineering and go down that path. And a couple semesters, couple years into college, I realized there's actually kind of a way to blend those 2 things together. There's actually quite a bit of software that was starting to be used in hard engineering fields. And mechanical engineering specifically, you write like a lot of optimization code. There's a lot of finite element analysis where you're actually writing like Fortran still, which is kind of crazy to me. So I found this way to like kind of blend what I was interested in with like this other kind of path that I had chosen. I was doing a lot of like freelancing also in college. That was how I made my money, how I made my beer money and bought my laptop for stuff is just doing like, you know, PHP freelancing basically on the side. I still remember like there was this one specific job I did. I was like doing like $50 an hour, you know, coding or whatever for freelance clients. And I'm a big follower of Patrick McKenzie and this start small, stay small stuff. And I was like, you know what, let me see if I can charge a higher amount and see if I can actually make this— see if I can make freelancing support me full-time as opposed to just kind of side money and expendable cash. So I had this one project where somebody pitched me, I think it was building this social media monitor thing where you could put tweets and Instagram photos up on a wall at big events and stuff. And I knew I could build it in like a weekend, but I went back and I said, you know, I'll do it for $5,000, like knowing that this is going to take me like probably 10 hours. Normally my hourly rate, that would be like, you know, maybe several hundred dollars. And they came back and said, sure, that sounds reasonable. And I was like, holy shit, like that's amazing. Like I just, I can't believe that my skillset was like worth that much, that much value. So I did it. I used that money to buy like a top-end laptop and had a bit of fun with that. But that was kind of one of the first moments where I realized, you know, whoa, I don't necessarily think I want to follow this, like, kind of traditional go get a big engineering job at, like, a big— or a big software engineering job at a big company. And that kind of led me down the path to eventually thinking about what other side projects I could work on, maybe, you know, turn one of those things into a full-time startup maybe one day. I still remember— this is mid-Missouri, so I still remember thinking, like, I'd never been to California before. Even at this point, I remember thinking maybe one day I'll go out to California and attend like a conference maybe. So like, you know, still clearly not in that headspace at all. Towards the end of college, I was doing some research, the grad program like you'd mentioned, spun some of my work that I'd done in undergrad into this grad program and got basically a stipend to live on it for 2 years if I kept doing research. And my kind of game plan was, Well, this stipend is paying for like cheap housing in a college town. It's paying for my food. It's not much more than that, but it's enough to survive. So I'll just keep working on these software side projects, maybe side businesses that I had in mind. And if one of them can spin up into a full-time company, I'll drop out of school and go do that. And very luckily, the very first thing that I worked on was Zapier with my 2 co-founders, Brian and Wade. And, you know, the writing's on the wall for how that turned out. So I think that ended up I got very lucky that the very first thing that I worked on in that kind of game plan worked as well as it did.

Yeah, awesome. And so I wanna rewind for a second and go back to, you mentioned Patrick McKenzie. So growing up and into like your early startup journey, sort of who were sort of the mentors or maybe people that guided your business in making decisions and also principles that you instilled into life as well as business early on?

That's a good question. Certainly, my, like, answers on this have changed over the years, I think. Like, you know, I think when I look at mentors, I don't look at a single person as, like, a holistic mentor to say, like, I'm going to try and copy that person. I think you kind of can't do that. If you look at one person and say, I'm going to do literally everything they do, you're— it's not going to be— you're not going to be— it's not going to be authentic. You're not going to be bringing yourself. You're literally just cloning them. What I've done more recently is I've just had the opportunity to meet so so many different individuals, having, you know, run a pretty successful software company, that I can figure out, or I can start learning, like, okay, I really like, you know, this aspect of this individual. I really like this other aspect of this other individual. You know, for example, like Greg Brockman, former Stripe CTO, now at OpenAI, almost one of the best writers that I know about in written communication. And written communication is so important for a remote company. I love having, like, a high bar to aspire to there. Someone like Sam Altman, I really respect his ability to, like, in a verbal format, to be able to succinctly communicate an idea down into something that is very tangible and very clear and aspirational there. You look at somebody like, you know, the Collison brothers over at Stripe and their ability to run, like, I think one of the most professional companies and actually make really good future investments in what the future of Stripe is going to look like. I think they do that better than anyone else today. In the early days though, when we were just getting started, I didn't know any of those people. So, you know, the network that I had was— I didn't have a professional network in Missouri. None of us did. So it was mostly through who I could follow online, who I saw writing about startups, who I saw writing about like small companies, like this, you know, area that I thought was very tractable to me as like somebody in the Midwest who didn't have any of these other advantages that someone in the Bay or Coast might have.

So you were talking about the importance of networking.

So Rob Walling had wrote this book, Start Small, Stay Small, which basically was like start these like small software projects and it's okay if it never, you know, blows up and gets huge. Like you can create a huge, great lifestyle around just a bunch of, you know, a suite or a category of, you know, maybe 4 or 5 different small micro apps that you build and have like niche value. Similar with Patrick McKenzie, he'd built a bingo card creator and had grown it basically on the back of like, you search and SEO to find this niche market to sell bingo card software to teachers and was making a living on doing that. So those were kind of the inspirational stories that I got started with and kind of said, hey, that's like a path I can follow because I don't need anyone's permission to do those things. I don't have to go convince investors in the Valley. Like, I knew that I couldn't do that. I didn't have the resume. I didn't have the network. I didn't have any of those things. Finding people who were telling me that I didn't need permission to kind of go this own path was really powerful for me in the early days. And then, like I said, as Zapier has grown, I've been able to get in touch with just a lot more folks who've run successful companies and just see, okay, what are the values and how do they operate that I might want to emulate as the company is growing?