What Kind of Company Do You Want to Build? | Zapier Co-founder Mike Knoop

What we wanted to do was run a— we wanted to build like a company that we wanted to work at. We didn't— we don't have any previous big company experience so that we could really translate. The 3 founders all— this was like the first company that we had all worked at. So we had to kind of learn how to build a company at the same time where we're leveling up all of our management skills. And I think this is just kind of expected. Like, if anyone who's working in a small company kind of knows that like, hey, management skills— management's probably not going to be super good. The reason you're attracted to it anyway is you want that kind of individual personal autonomy.

Being out of the Midwest, you know, You know, like you mentioned, the network isn't as opportunistic as it is out here, right?

Correct.

And so, you know, you started Zapier right after college, right? And so, you know, one thing that I talk with a lot of the founders here about is like the person you become in the process of starting the company, right? Because, you know, you're a living, breathing thing, same with your company. Your company's a living, breathing thing, right? And you have to evolve and change and improve over time or else you're gonna die, right? And so how did you evolve over time with the company to be able to, achieve what you have, right? You know, what, what, what person did you become, uh, in order to achieve what you, you know, where you're at now over the course of the 8 years?

Yeah, yeah. I feel like if there's one reason why anyone would want to start a company or, or, or even work at a, at a startup, work at a small company, it's due to the fact that you get to grow and learn faster than anyone else in the world. Uh, the types of like problems you get faced with on a It's just a daily basis. Like, I remember being, it was what, we were less than a year in and we had to fire somebody. I'd like never even, I'd never even managed anyone before. We totally fucked it up, did it completely badly. But like, I learned how to do that better. I quickly learned if I want to, like, that was like one of the worst nights I had. I remember thinking like, OK, if I want to avoid this, how do I avoid this feeling again? And, you know, like, that type of stuff doesn't happen that early in your career usually. So I think that's one of the big advantages of like just starting companies and software and working at small-stage companies is the scale of growth is so fast, it kind of forces you to grow up, even if you don't want to. You just get all these bad feelings, and you're like, no, I hate that. Humans are very good at avoiding things that they don't like. So you very quickly learn what sucks, and you want to avoid it. So I think that's been kind of this forcing function a little bit in the early days of Zapier for how I matured. Shoot, I don't— yeah, that's probably the biggest way that I think I've matured over the last 8 years is around learning how to manage folks. Again, in the early days, totally sucked at this, completely did it backwards, had no clear expectations. And I think when we were starting Zapier, one of the things that we really wanted to do was we wanted to build a company that we wanted to work at. So we didn't— we don't have any previous big company experience so that we could really translate. The 3 founders, all this was like the first company that we had all worked at. So we had to kind of learn how to build a company at the same time where we're leveling up all of our management skills to go along with it. And I think this is just kind of expected. Like if anyone who's working in a small company kind of knows that like, hey, management skills, management is probably not going to be super good. The reason you're attracted to it anyway is that you want that kind of individual personal autonomy. So yeah, I think that's probably a pretty good summary for how I've leveled up over the last 8 years in terms of how the company has scaled.

Awesome, yeah. And then in terms of the person, like you said, you just basically threw yourself into it and figured out what skills are necessary or required to sort of get to the desired outcome, right? And so what are some of the foundational principles as a founder that need to be there? Fundamental truths.

Like, if I was going back in time, I, I, that line I just said, I, I would, like, do it again. I would ask, what kind of company do I want to work at? Like, in the early days, you are the company, right, if you're starting a company. And I would ask, what's the kind of company that I want to work at? Do I want to go, do I want to work at a hypergrowth startup where there's, you know, you know, where I work with the best of the best people in the world and I'm okay with like a lot of friction in that relationship with those individuals? Lots of successful companies run that way. Do I want to work at a company where it's like a couple of my really close friends and I want to be able to build this company into something that's going to sustain me and give me like a bunch of expendable capital that I can do really fun things with outside work? That's the type of company you can build. If you want to build a type of company where you have a lot of the, you know, end of the control in terms of the destiny of the company in terms of what decisions get made, you want that, like, at the end of the day, the buck stops at you. You want all that kind of equity and control internally, you can build that kind of company. You know, I think that sets up the values in a lot of different ways. To tie this specifically to Zapier in the early days, again, I kind of think individual autonomy was one of our most important traits that we cared about. Again, coming from the Midwest to the Bay Area, didn't have that, like, any kind of social authority to be able to convince others or build a network or convince people to join. The people that we knew that we would want to work with were back in the Midwest, who were our friends from college. So we kind of decided very early on, like, you know, let's like give this remote company thing a try. Like the 3 of us were working nights and weekends. I was still a student at the time. Brian Wade had full-time jobs and we'd work out of like shared office occasionally. We'd be working from our home offices. I'd be working from campus. And in the early days, that was kind of the type of company we wanted to build. We were like, well, we would not want to commute for an hour every single day just to get to an office. We would not want to have to convince our friends to move to the city that they didn't want to live in to work with us. If we were in their shoes, we wouldn't have wanted to do that. So that was kind of what was right for us in the early days. We wanted to prototype that and decide it. And within, I think, maybe 12 or 18 months after first deciding we wanted to start hiring folks remotely, became kind of clear to us, not only is this like, uh, not only is this an okay way to work, it's actually a better way to run a company in many respects. So, um, yeah, I think at the— if there's like any fundamental truth, just to try to ask yourself like, what's the type of company you want to run and make sure to model your initial values and what kind of early decisions you make against it. You don't have to like copy someone else, right? You can kind of make these decisions for yourself and I'd like encourage you to. There's a lot of paths to success. Zapier does not look like most paths to success, I think. Hopefully we can be an example that making your own decisions and thinking through the type of company you want to build is an okay path.

Right. Really cool, yeah. And so can you talk more about the— I mentioned, or you mentioned, I was watching the podcast and you guys mentioned it started at a hackathon, right? Can you talk a little bit about how you guys met, the hackathon, how you guys sort of— and then the first initial journey, and then how it took off from there?

Yeah. We got started at a Startup Weekend back in Columbia, Missouri. It was the first Startup Weekend that Columbia, Missouri had ever hosted. If you all have— I'm guessing this room is probably pretty familiar with what Startup Weekend is. But if you're not, it's basically a weekend hackathon where people pitch ideas on Friday night. You work on it all weekend long. You pitch on Sunday again and do presentations. And there's prizes and stuff. So before Startup Weekend, I had kind of— this was around fall 2011, so I was still an undergrad. I kind of knew that I liked the software thing. space at this point. I kind of wanted to do side projects, but I didn't know what exactly I wanted to work on. I had those ideas. And I got this email from our university. They send out, you know, campus newsletter every Friday saying like, here's what's going on, you know, events this weekend. And I was scrolling down, I saw this line that said there's this like startup weekend event happening. I was like, oh, I like startups. What— I'm kind of curious, what is this? So I had known Brian for about a year at that point, my co-founder. We worked at the same company on like some side projects together. We got beers a bunch of times. Really never really done much other than just like we were acquaintances. But enough of what— that I messaged him on Facebook and I said like, hey, Brian, are you going to go to this thing? It's like $100. Like, I don't know if I really want to show up to this like event. You know, I'm a broke student still. $100 is a lot of money. I can do a lot with that. So Brian messaged back and said, yeah, I'm going to go. It sounds kind of cool. So I was like, all right, fine. At least I'll know one other person there. I'll pay the $100 and show up. To date, by the way, that is the best $100 I've ever spent. I would 100% make that decision going back in time. I did not know Wade ahead of time. It turns out we all worked at the same company, but it's a big company. We didn't know each other. So I met Wade at Startup Weekend. Brian was actually the one who pitched the idea. It was originally called API Mixer, this idea that you could mix and match APIs together in this drag-and-drop kind of interface. And I was actually going to pitch another idea.

Oh, really?

It was a much worse idea. And I was sitting in the audience, and I watched Brian go up on stage and pitch this. And as soon as I heard him say it, I was like, that's what I want to work on this weekend. So I didn't even end up pitching. And we walked over, and that's where I met Wade for the first time. As soon as we kind of— that voting process was done, we found the back garage in this building and just started coding for basically 48 hours nonstop. Ended up winning Startup Weekend that weekend, which kind of gave us a lot of momentum, too, I think, to go into the next few weeks. Another kind of problematic symptom of a lot of Startup Weekends is I think they kind of get attracted to folks who just like the idea of starting a company, but not necessarily the actual effort that might go into doing it. So as a result, a lot of companies just die on Monday morning. And by die, I basically mean they just stop working on it. So that was the one thing that we wanted to do. We had this decision, like, do we want to keep working on this? And we said yes. So we didn't stop working on it. And in fact, I think that's actually a pretty true statement about startups in general, which is the only way they die is if you stop working on them. Now, that comes in a lot of different forms, right? Maybe it goes from your full-time effort to a part-time effort to a once every month you think about it effort, right? The process for death can be very quite slow. But at the end of the day, that's the only way your startup or your idea stops is if you'd stop putting effort into it. So we wanted to avoid that, so we kept putting effort into it after the weekend, kept going as a nights and weekends project for several months. We applied to Y Combinator right away. We had— the application window was open. We applied with our demo that we'd built. We were on top of the world because we just won. We had all this— felt like we had all this momentum, and we got straight email rejected. Not even an interview. And that was, one, eye-opening, but two, I think it also cemented that kind of independent autonomous nature we had, which was like, well, if these folks don't believe in us, we think this is a good idea still. We have early customer validation that says this is worth working on. We're going to go prove those people wrong and show them the mistake that they made. So we kept working on it for another 4 or 5 months. We got a lot more customers. We had, I think, several hundred people who'd paid us like $5 to get into a beta at that point. A lot of, like, validation just from live chat on the website, a lot of social conversations we had had on, like, forums and blogs around people, like, begging for these integrations. And the second time we applied to YC, that's when we got the interview and got in and moved out to the Bay Area in 2012.

So,