Democratizing Software Integrations | Zapier Co-founder Mike Knoop

One of the big strategies that we used over and over in the product team was make sure any work that you do manually, you can get more payoff for. Use the demand from a customer, use the manual work you're doing as an excuse to kind of build the underlying infrastructure and the flexibility that you need in order to be able to remix it and recombine it in much faster, lighter-weight ways in the future. Decision-making.

over the course of the 8 years, what are some of the key decisions that you made that really paid off really well, right, that stand out?

Yeah, I think the biggest one, if I could go back in time and give myself some advice around something, it would be hire a senior management team faster. This is something that we waited a long time to do. We started hiring our exec team in late 2015. It took a long time. We just hired our last kind kind of key role for our exec team. They started a month ago. So that took 2 years to really flesh out a senior leadership team at Zapier. And that is something that we probably should have started years earlier, if I'm being honest with myself. I think that we finally realized, like, hey, yeah, we really need to bring in more senior talent. We had primarily hired out of our user base. We'd primarily hired out of our friends and family— or not family, but friend network and our user base network. Got to a point where we realized, yeah, if we're going to take this to the next scale, we need folks who've seen the path forward. We need folks who've seen the next 2 years. This is usually how we thought about exec roles and senior leadership roles is try to find people who've seen at least the next 2 years of growth from where you're at today. So if you're 10 people and we're going to bring in a leader, we're hoping that they might, and you're expecting to grow from 10 to call it 50 over the next 24 months, you should probably find somebody who's at least run a 50-person team before, or seen a 50-person team, so that they can pattern match off of what it takes to run that type of organization and bring that experience into your small company for scaling. Yeah, I think that was probably the one big company decision that we made that made a really, really big difference in the trajectory of the company. Maybe one interesting one on the product side. So I mentioned I was the Chief Product Officer for the first 8 years of the company's life. One of the big strategies that we used over and over in the product team was make sure any work that you do manually, you can get more payoff for. Use the demand from a customer, use the manual work you're doing as an excuse to kind of build the underlying infrastructure and the flexibility that you need in order to be able to remix it and recombine it in much faster, lighter-weight ways in the future. I can give you a couple of examples of this. In the early days, when we were sitting down to do our pricing and packaging, it was summer 2012. We just launched— I think it was like the weekend before we were going to launch Zapier on TechCrunch, we realized we don't have pricing on the website yet. So we needed to come up with pricing. So we sat down at a computer and we're like, you know, let's do like the Fibonacci sequence. So our initial pricing was like $11, $23, $57. And Brian's sitting there coding up the pricing infrastructure, pricing thing to do this. And this early decision we made around, OK, we could have just plugged those things into Stripe at the time and just exposed them on the website. But instead, what we did was Brian built this kind of flexible system where you could have individual price plans that were in a plan group. And when you signed up, you got put in a plan group. Pretty small, easy architectural decision. And we're using Django, so you get this kind of admin interface that you can use to expose it in the future. We ran, I think, 2 dozen pricing experiments over the next 8 years on top of that same infrastructure because one of the advantages it gives you with the plan group is you can grandfather folks in. So when someone's new signing up, you just put them into a new plan group and they see new pricing, but the previous customers still get access to their old pricing. They don't have to worry about pricing getting changed on them. That allowed basically our marketing team and myself and a product manager to run pricing experiments. We ran, like you mentioned, I think over 20 of them over the next several years and kind of honed in our pricing without having to have any engineer involved in that. This is kind of just one prototypical example of a more fundamental philosophy which we've taken around our product, which is whenever you're going to do a bunch of manual work, just think, is there a more flexible foundation here that we might be able to— someone who's non-technical or can't code or might give more power to someone else in the organization to remix this into into something new and get like a lot of value out of it over the long run that, you know, engineering time is expensive. So if you can find ways to scale that further, it's almost always in your interest to do so.

Awesome. Yeah, so guys, I think some questions. We're going to open up for questions. And last question I have for you though, Mike, is the Peter Thiel question. What important truth do very few people agree with you on?

Well, this has certainly changed over the last 8 years. You know, 8 years ago, that was like running a remote company is an acceptable way to run a company. When we were raising money back in 2012, we were pitching to VCs, you know, for that first million-dollar seed fund. And the things that we got told, frankly, were insulting, right? Like, you will probably experience this too, I'm guessing, maybe in a different way. But like, people literally told us to our face, when are you going to grow up and be a real company and get an office? and raise money. And like, how rude and insulting that like, this isn't a valid way to run a business and scale a company. Like, it just kind of blew my mind a little bit. So I think the mentality around Silicon Valley has certainly changed over the last 8 years. Certainly housing prices in the Bay Area don't help there. Now you see a lot more venture capital and kind of the thought leadership of the Valley. Like, it's almost expected that you're going to have some part of your company be remote now. Right? Like, I think the kind of running message is hire your leadership team in the Bay Area, but be okay with hiring everyone else outside the Bay Area somewhere else, which actually is pretty good. I think pretty decent advice. Like we were kind of similar. The three founders are still in the Bay Area, and everyone else is you know distributed around the world mostly. But yeah, it's definitely something that is moving more, I think, into the mainstream. But certainly something in the early days was not something that most most folks agreed with. Nowadays, as we've grown, you know, I think something that I believe in— automation gets talked a lot about. I think automation often gets talked a lot about in kind of a negative light in general. And I think it makes sense. Like, I get why automation has typically been locked in the hands of folks who are like the decision makers, leadership, management, folks who can deploy capital, folks who have control over like labor. If you look back in time, that's almost been universally true. And I, I, I, I, that, I think one of the interesting things about Zapier, um, and the reason why I'm so passionate and why I'm still working on it, you know, almost a decade after we got started with this company is, um, I've started to see the other side of, of that coin of what it actually, what kind of benefits you get by actually putting these tools, these like tools in everybody's hands. Right. And I think that's something that we're still, you know, we haven't, we've, we have over 100,000 customers, but there's 6 million, 60 million knowledge workers in the US, hundreds of millions of knowledge workers globally. So like, we have a long way to go. before I think we can say we've made a big dent or achieved that mission anyway. But I think that there actually is a very positive story to tell about automation, especially when it's democratized and everybody has the ability to do it. If you think about coding, I'll go back to my story from college, right? So when I did that first $5,000 project, it was eye-opening to realize, wow, this this, you know, fun side skill that I've been learning from my whole childhood has a ton of value. And coding at the end of the day is just automation, right? Like when you're building products or you're building infrastructure, like it's all just automating something when you're building software. And I think, you know, we've all seen what kind of economic advantages folks who know how to write software get. You know, just go look at the salaries and comp and Facebook market, Facebook and Google and Salesforce. Why doesn't everyone have that same economic advantage then? I think that's something that Zapier can actually help with, give that same kind of economic advantage to literally anybody who has some interest in connecting tools together to get their job done. So yeah, we still have a ways to go, but that's where we're at today. Thank you.