After the SaaSpocalypse, with Wade Foster

Hey everyone. My name is Elio Narciso, co-founder and CEO at Scalestack. Welcome to the Revenue Engine Masters podcast. The way companies are building go-to-market, actually building period, is changing faster than any of us expected. And so AI, not just automating, but replacing work and software itself. And so this is a podcast for leaders who are figuring out what to do now and what comes next. And today's guest is probably one of the best people positioned to help us thinking through this stuff. An absolute rock star, Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO at Zapier. Wade and his co-founders started Zapier in 2011 in Missouri, which I now can say I visited, and I'm proud to have done that. And they bootstrapped basically to a $5 billion valuation, profitable for like a long time. Today, D500 apps connect to Zapier, 3 million+ users, 150 people across many, many countries, fully remote from day one, another impressive feature of the company. Wade, you're also another podcast host, Agents of Scale, and I'm very happy to have you here. I just realized also while doing research for this that you play saxophone. Welcome to the podcast. Anything that you want us to, you know, know as we get started?

You did a great job, Elio. I'm stoked to be here.

Very good. I know that you just finished your like annual company offsite, so I'm sure that there is some, some recovery from that.

Yeah, we had the whole team out in LA and funny enough, we, the night we got in, the hotel we were staying at was hosting the Grammys. So, uh, like, you know, here all these like tech people walk in and like, you know, hoodies and you know, stuff like that. While all the like Hollywood elite are like dressed to the nines. Oh yeah. Like the best looking people you've ever seen are just like, you know, walking through this thing and it's like, whew, this is a different vibe than I'm used to.

And so did you meet anyone? I didn't meet anybody.

No.

In New York, sometimes we see some of those people, but definitely less so than like, uh, if you go to the Grammys. Well, very good to have you. We'll talk more about the Offsite. I'm very curious about that as well, but I have a lot of stuff on my mind, so let's dive into it. First and foremost, I mean, what you guys have built, like, it's an amazing PLG engine, very capital efficient. Can you take us, Luke, to the early days? How did you build that, like, early go-to-market motion? And when did you start seeing, like, evidence, oh, this is working? You know, let's do more of that.

So we founded the company in 2011. And the insight that we had was you would go to the help forums of the early SaaS companies. So this is like Dropbox and Evernote and Salesforce and QuickBooks and things like that. They all had these public community forums at the time, and customers would submit feature requests, ask for help, share tips and tricks, all that sort of thing.

Yeah.

And there was one type of post that was common across all of 'em, and it was, when will you integrate with X? And when you'd click into those threads, you would see the same pattern. It would be customer after customer saying, "Me too. Yes, please. I want this. Plus one," that kind of thing. And then eventually a product manager would come in and say, "Hey, thanks for the suggestion. We'll get back to you on that." And so we saw that and thought, "Hmm, I think we can build a product focused on integrating these tools. We'll put a UI on top of the APIs, and that way people don't have to understand how these technical underpinnings work. Now, from that, it wasn't a huge leap of logical conclusion to, to suggest that, well, one of the things we ought to be doing is sending those people to our site some way. And if we were in, say, the Evernote, like, uh, help forum, and they were wanting to find like an Evernote, like, Dropbox integration, well, it sure would be nice if we sent them to a page that was for Evernote and Dropbox. And so we thought, hmm, we ought to have a big old directory that lists out all the different ways in which you can integrate with Zapier. And so we just started building the site. So every new integration we add would create landing pages for all the, the new combinations we would have. And, you know, we drop into the forums and say, hey, you can go build an integration with the APIs directly if you're looking for something that maybe could do this off the shelf. We're working on a project, Zapier, you might check it out and let us know what you think. And that ended up also being a really really good way to drive traffic through search. Um, nobody was searching for, like, there wasn't huge volumes of people searching for any particular integration. The market for Evernote Dropbox was probably fairly niche, but the market for people searching for any particular type of integration turned out to be quite large. Uh, and so pretty soon we started to see that this was working. Now, search is not one of those categories. Certainly wasn't any—

What's pretty soon? Like, uh, how long?

I mean, over the course of like 3 months, 6 months. Yeah. 3, 6 months. Like, but search is one of those things.

And you were still in Missouri, by the way.

Yes. Yes. But search isn't this thing that's like up and to the right, right away. It's this like very steady, steady improving channel. And so we just kind of saw it week over week was like, you know, week 2 was better than week 1 and week 3 was better than week 2 and week 4 was better than week 3. And it just kept compounding and compounding and compounding. And you know, if you do that for a long period of time, any amount of compounding adds up to a big number. And so that was kind of the original, the, the like product and the, the PLG engine, they worked like a, you know, a hand in a glove.

Yeah. This reminds me, great story. This reminds me, a friend of mine started a company called Music Match, which powers lyrics for like big platforms like Spotify and, you know, Apple, et cetera. And basically was born out of the observation that like lyrics is one of the most searched terms, like on, you know, on any search platform. And so like, oh, what's the lyrics for that? And so they did something similar like you guys did, like, oh, like, you know, there is a lot of people asking for the lyrics. Let's build the lyrics product. And, you know, they are now like a multi-billion business as well. And so at the beginning, you were building the integration. Now it's very different. People build and maintain those integrations and apps for their joint users. When did you stop building and maintaining apps?

Well, we never stopped, but definitely the scale is heavily favored towards the apps themselves. So we built probably the first 50 ourselves and then quickly realized to get to any sort of scale, we probably will need a community to sort of help us go about this. And so we built our developer platform and we can go into the details why, but it took off.

And as a result, so people contributing their time building apps that they were not owners of, but that, you know, they care about.

Well, it usually was. It usually was. Like—

Usually was. Okay.

HubSpot built the HubSpot integration. Okay. ActiveCampaign built the ActiveCampaign integration. Slack built the Slack integration, so on and so forth. And that happened to the tune of, you know, over 8,000 different apps at this point in time. And so yeah, we still do build and maintain some ourselves, but it's a, it's a very small number of the, the overall fraction of community. And you know, we, we're maintaining the ones you would think. It's like, the Google integration and stuff like that.

Yeah. Yeah. I don't know if you remember, but we met like many years ago when I was still at Amazon AWS and like my team was managing actually the partnership with Zapier. And at the time, I remember I was shocked when I learned that you guys didn't have a sales team. This was essentially like 2020, you know, 19, 20, 21, something like that. And at the time, you still basically didn't have a sales team, which you started when, in '22?

Yeah, it would've been about then. Yep.

And so what made you decide for that? When did you think, okay, now we need to, you know, what, what is, where was the data, you know, that told you, okay, it's time to layer in sales?

The truth be told, we should have done it sooner. Okay. We had the data sooner, but for a whole host of reasons, we just hesitated. But yeah, I think the thing that we saw that we should have jumped on sooner was we were attracting a lot of larger companies. Who had, they valued the product, but they had slightly different categories of needs. Now, a lot of it's kind of the normal things you would expect around, you know, governance. It's admin controls and permissions and things like that. Certain compliance needs, certain regulatory needs. And we should have said, hmm, let's go build not just a sales team, but also a product team that's going to be dedicated to building out a specific package of Zapier for Enterprise that's dedicated to that set of users. And so like the signals are just market pull, market demand. People were using the product, they loved it, but they had reasons why they're like, we can't really use it the way that we want to go use it, but we want to use it. You just need to help us with, you know, ABC thing. And so after sort of getting knocked above the head, you know, many, many times, we finally woke up and we're like, oh, I guess we probably ought to be doing this.

Yeah. I remember at the time it was very surprising for a company already at that time, like a pretty sizable that, you know, these motions were, were like early. Very good.

And so.

What would be your advice now for like founders that try to build like a go-to-market motion while building the product? What is like something that you would tell them that maybe either they, they don't see clearly at the beginning, like, you know, when, you know, it's just like 6 months in, a year in, uh, and maybe that is counterintuitive based on your experience or what you've observed.

Well, I think the companies that I have seen grow the fastest and the most efficient, the product and the go-to-market are kind of one in the same. They fit together like so perfectly well. Maybe the product has like virality baked into it. And so just in using the product, you're naturally sharing it with others and it grows because of that. You know, in the case of Zapier, it was the more apps we had, the more landing pages it spun up and it worked well on search. You know, the interesting thing I think is that the founders that seem to have the best shot at building these are both students of what makes products great, but they also really understand customer acquisition and they're, they're up to speed on how like modern platforms work. They understand, you know, maybe it's, you know, nowadays maybe it's like how, you know, AI is surfacing recommendations or how like a, the YouTube algorithm or the TikTok algorithm works. So they, they understand sort of like mechanically, like how those platforms drive traffic and drive awareness and drive impressions to their, their audiences. And somehow they're able to like build a product and the go-to-market that again, sort of has that like hand-in-glove feel to it. And that's where there's like really just like, it almost feels magical when you sort of do those things in tandem. It feels like there's sort of a cheat code. And I, I often see the founders that struggle, they're, they're usually have one or the other, like they've got a great product, but it has no, acquisition attached to it, or maybe they're like really good at driving attention their way, but they can't turn that into, you know, a product that people really care about. And so it really is at the center of the two that you get these kind of, um, you know, exponential experiences. And look, that's not a— that's— there's exceptions to that rule, but I think that's like a nice place to try and find yourself.

No, I made the mistake, to be honest, like failing because like we were in love with the tech and the product and completely forgot about the distribution piece. Can you trace like that to the DNA DNA of the founders? I mean, like, it was the founder, like, composition at Zapier, you know, optimal so that you would develop, you know, both at the same time?

Yeah, I, you know, I think, uh, there's, there's 3 founders. Of the 3 of us, we, we had enough, like, shared experience. We'd all worked at this mortgage company that was really good at online marketing, and so we sort of all kind of honed our chops there, understood how, like, search algorithms work and all that sort of stuff, but we also had unique skill sets as well. So Brian was an exceptional product builder, backend engineer. Mike had like good frontend and like product instincts. And you know, I, I often felt like I had the least skills, but I, I at least I would like hustle like nobody else. Like I was happy to do all the grunt work, all the customer support, all the marketing, like anything that needed to get done, I was happy to do. And so, you know, kind of between the three of us, it meant that there was no, job in the company that we had to outsource and hire somebody else to get done. Like we were willing to just do it with our own sweat equity. And that also is really valuable. I see a lot of founders, the first thing they have to do is they have to go raise money to hire people because they can't actually do the thing themselves. And so you're already like starting the clock, whereas if you can kind of just go do it on your own, that means you buy yourself time to like figure out a whole bunch of stuff.

Awesome advice. Very good. Let's switch gears a little bit. I mean, 8,500 integrations, apps, it's pretty incredible. It seems like, you know, just from your early description, like you rode like the search SEO wave and then like the API proliferation and then obviously SaaS attached to it. Now, like, you know, it seems AI is eating everything and I haven't watched yet your podcast with Dharmesh. I saw like it coming on my feed. Um, but it seems that you touch on some of those topics. Do you feel that like, uh, your moat is under threat or do you think that like the moat is like somewhere else than like, um, the connectors and like, you know, how are you thinking about like your changing moat in today's like, uh, AI craze world?

Yeah, gosh. I mean, this is like a constant mental exercise to try and understand what parts of a business are truly valuable. We're having this interview at a time when everyone's pontificating about the SaaSpocalypse. Um, all the stock prices are way down. Uh, you know, SaaS dead. Is it gonna exist?

$400 billion. Yes.

Yeah, exactly. And while I think that is overblown, it didn't happen for no reason that, that, you know, those stock prices are way down and it's because everyone is uncertain about the future. You know, in the past you could look at those companies and say, we feel like that recurring revenue is pretty predictable. And so as a result, like, you know, we feel comfortable investing at a certain price and we're happy to like let that go. And now people are saying, you know what, maybe that revenue isn't so predictable and they don't know. And so that's what everybody is trying to ask of themselves inside their customer companies is to say, what do we have that actually is durable over the long haul? And what do we have that might be at risk? And so, That's the exercise we're going through is saying, okay, yes, we have like a lot of integrations. What particular part of this is valuable? And I think the thing that we've realized is there's a lot of value still in our, our trigger and our authentication layer. Nobody allows you to run background agents like we do. No one has like all the retry, error management, all that sort of stuff. That's really strong. And then the auth governance piece is really valuable. In fact, I think that's one of the things that gets even more valuable in the future. Where inside these organizations, more and more people are delegating work to agents and those agents have access to tools. And there's big questions around, well, what capabilities do you give those agents? Those agents can go move with autonomy really quickly, and that means they can do a lot of powerful things very fast. And are all those powerful things, things that you want them to do or things that you don't want them to do? And so one of the things we've released is like, Zapier MCP, and this is a really useful mechanism to grant access to tools to your AI, but do it behind sort of a gateway that governs that effectively versus just signing up to a bunch of random community MCP servers that have no security, no governance layer, none of those things. And yeah, hey, maybe it was easy to get it set up, but like, who knows? Like if it's going to work the way you want to work. So, so that's kind of a long-winded way of saying, like all of us, I think we're trying to find the places that have the most durable value. And when I look into the future, I do think that there's a lot of value yet in background automation and in like proper governance of these tools. And I think those things just get more and more important the more advanced these AI systems get.

I mean, I think that also what we are seeing is that the market is repricing the equation between like the apps layer, the infrastructure layer, and it seems that more power is being absorbed by the infrastructure. I mean, if you think about NVIDIA, like, you know, hard hardware infrastructure, but then I think also like all these different apps, and it seems that now everybody can code because like the programming language is like English, will need some coherent way to be connected to one another. And so the infrastructure that like, you know, Zapier and other platforms provide will continue to be important for many of the topics that you touched on, like the governance element, et cetera, et cetera. I think that the infrastructure will continue to be important also because you cannot have random agents. And so for me, an agent is not just something that is completely disconnected, especially at the enterprise level, no? So like in an entire company cannot be disconnected from everything else. And so maybe another question that I have for you is when you think about an agent, Is an agent part of an agentic workflow? You know, when they come to you and say, we want an agent, do you always think about that in the context of a workflow?

Well, agent has become a very overloaded term in the industry right now. I think it's used to communicate a whole bunch of different concepts. And so, you know, when folks are looking for an agent, you really just got to understand like, well, what is the, what is the job you're trying to do and what's the best way to achieve that? Sometimes that means they, they. ChatGPT is the agent. Sometimes they mean a coding agent. Sometimes they actually mean a Zap. Sometimes they mean like an actual, like autonomous workflow, like a Zapier agent. But you can't really answer that question without trying to understand like, what is your actual job to be done? And then let's build a system that achieves that goal within your sort of constraints. Like, you know, do you care about cost? Do you care about reliability? Do you care about efficiency? Like what, what is it the thing that you're trying to get out the other side of this? And I think that's one of the biggest challenges you see organizations facing right now is there's a huge learning curve around this technology. And there's a whole language and vocabulary that is new and people don't understand it yet. And so, you know, sort of folks walk up and they're like, hello, I heard the agents were here. Like, I would like some. It's like, okay, well, let's get into understand like what actually you're really looking for here.

Yeah. And I've heard you saying that like, you know, you have You're thinking about like the 90% rule so that like agents do 90% of the work and humans do the last 10%. Well, first I'm curious about how did you arrive to that split? And the next question is like, you know, will that split become, I don't know, 99-1 or 100? What's the end state?

Well, I, you know, I think humans definitely have a role in this work if you value quality. We've all experienced AI slop at this point in time, which is really easy to generate. And I think the difference between— there's sort of two camps of people, like folks that are sort of just showing up and prompting the tool to do the task and then not bothering to like evaluate it and see, you know, is this actually, you know, good or not? And I'm not even talking about like, does it hallucinate or not? Like you can— it doesn't have to hallucinate to still generate stuff.

Quality at the edge. Yes.

Yeah. But then there's the people that I, I find that are doing some of the best work with AI, and they often are just very sophisticated in how they prompt it, the context they give it. And then when the output comes back in a way that they don't like, they often go back to the source and say, okay, what, what context did I lay out? What details can I get back into it? And so they're, they're really active participant in this loop. Now, the interesting thing is for that person, they're finding as the models get better and better and better, They're able to do bigger, better things themselves with it. And the places in which the human intervenes, it's changing along the way. And so, you know, I do think, you know, sort of humans in the loop is going to continue, but, you know, we're sort of that outer loop. It's, it's pushing us into like different areas. Um, yeah, there's just more and more things where AI is able to just take on more of, I guess, the tedious work as we work through it. Um, but the human still. At least at this moment in time, it's pretty valuable for assessing like, is this good? Is this what, is this what I wanted? Particularly for like non-technical tasks.

Yeah. Yeah. I think it's different for, yeah, exactly. I think it's different for technical, like coding stuff. I think that we are approaching fast capabilities that are beyond human in many of those areas. I think that in the last OpenAI model, the You know, the AI engineers at OpenAI said that this was the first model that was largely programmed by AI itself, which is—

Yeah, once that recursive loop starts, it's, it's pretty wild. And you can see it like when you use those models, they are able to think for really long periods of time and operate for really long periods of time, which is pretty impressive.

Yeah. But I agree also that for non-technical users and outside of coding, when like, you know, you started talking about like, you know, business use cases or like, you know, things that power like the day-by-day work, I do think that it's moving not only the bar, the bar is higher. Like, you know, I get like really annoyed if I quickly can spot like if somebody just like prompt quickly and a document was generated and no thinking was put in it. And so my bar is getting higher. Like the same document maybe like 4 years ago would have been like amazing. Now it's like terrible. Go back and work on this because I'm not even going to look at it. And so the bar is definitely higher. And if we put good work on it, like that 10%, maybe it can do really amazing stuff. Let's talk about the enterprise. Enterprises are like different animals. I know that you guys are very interesting, interested in doing more there. Where, I mean, and you and I have talked about this, where like in the enterprise, like, you know, use, you know, sometimes in the enterprise, like there are like things that happen where not necessarily the best product wins. And so first, like, I'm curious to know your opinion on this. What are the things that maybe not necessarily like the best product wins? Um, and then how are you thinking about like Zapier entering more enterprises and supporting them like, you know, at larger scale?

Yeah. Well, enterprises have unique requirements and as a result, there's a lot of great products that just don't. Put the time and investment in to meet those requirements, even though they're incredible. Maybe to give a very current example of this, you're February 12th, and 2 weeks ago, we saw this product OpenClaw go massively viral.

Oh my gosh.

And the product is like, like inspiring, honestly. It is, it is super cool, super interesting. You know, people are putting it on Mac minis and these local machines and like turning this like little mini AI agent loose to go automate anything and everything. And I love the boldness of the experiment because you can sort of see what's possible when you just truly throw caution to the wind. You say, hey, let's just go see what a like completely empowered agent can go do. And a lot of folks are finding, wow, this is, this is pretty awesome. Zero enterprises will deploy that product because there is no governance, no security, no anything. In or out it. And, and in fact, any enterprise that would deploy that product is instantly like negligent. It just doesn't make sense at this moment in time. And so, obviously that's a very extreme example that I think most of us can relate to, but you can sort of see that play out even when the gap is narrower, where there's products that you're like, well, I think this product would actually be the better product for you, but some stakeholder, maybe IT, maybe a CISO, maybe someone else, maybe just like the team says like, hey, this is because we operate in this regulatory environment or we operate in this framework. We just simply cannot adopt a product that doesn't allow us to do X, Y, and Z. And so in that ver— in that world, the best product for them is technically something else. And so, you know, that, that's kind of, I think what ends up happening, um, in, in a lot of these enterprises is, you have those, those needs plus The one thing I didn't even mention is for enterprise, it's usually not just the software they're buying. They're buying services and change management and like the whole like project management apparatus that a vendor can provide to help them actually implement and change the organization and make it actually a success. It's pretty different from a PLG company who just drops some software in their lap and says, here's a great tool. You can go do it all yourself. And, but for many enterprises, they're like, hey, that, that's nice, but like, we, we got, we need some help figuring out the rest of this stuff. There's a bunch of other problems we're facing too. So, yeah, long, long story short, like just selling to an enterprise is, it's just different than selling to, you know, Joe the entrepreneur who's like happy to go just figure it all out himself.

Yeah. And are you interested in this problem? I mean, you and I have been talking about like Dell and IBM and their massive organization that support like enterprises in exactly the things that you're saying. Are you interested in like solving those type of problems and like developing like the ecosystem that is required to support those type of customers? I mean, like philosophically, I mean.

Yeah, we actually started doing this. You know, one of the things we offer now is an AI transformation program. And, you know, we started to hear from more and more customers that they wanted us to come in and help not just with rollouts Zapier, but help us think through like how we inject this way of building in, in the entire culture. I think partially this was 'cause we were just very public about sharing our own transformation journey and, and we sort of open-sourced our playbook. You know, I've talked about it a lot on LinkedIn and on various podcasts. And so, uh, a lot of folks just started asking us like, hey, can, can like show me how you did that? And yes, software is one piece of the puzzle, but often there's culture and change management and tooling and there's just a lot of other ingredients to make that work. And so we built out a program that will come in and run workshops and help a company make the transition and hopefully accelerate that timeline for them.

Super passionate about this stuff. I mean, I have a mixed experience, like founder, but then also spent time at Amazon. And at Amazon, like they had homegrown, like the equivalent of like Slack plus, you know, like Zoom, Chime. I don't know if you remember it, but it took them 2 years to move to like Slack with, you know, 10 years of evidence that Slack was a far superior product. But like, it's not because they didn't want to, because like the system around it, like needed to be adapted to like security, governance, and a ton of other stuff. And I don't know, you know, I'm fascinated by these problems and passionate about solving them as well. Let's switch gears a little bit about like, um, the UI layer. You and I have talked about like, you know, drag and drop versus like, you know, English language. And so how are you thinking about this, like the UI of the future? So like, uh, do you think there will still be a space and a place for like, um, you know, a visual workflow builder or like UI will become like English, like, you know, with like good prompting and understanding of the context, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah. Well, I think it depends on, you know, sort of if you're thinking about, you know, how do you build workflows versus how do you think about UI generally? I think building workflows. In sort of like a visual UI is probably not gonna be the most common way in the future. Um, we're already seeing this at Zapier. We built a copilot and an agent builder where people just talk in natural language and it goes out and builds our automations. The activation rates are much higher for this experience. I think that is gonna be the preferred way of going to build all this stuff in the future. Now, does that mean that English is the UI for everything? Chat is the UI for everything? There, I would say Probably not. And the reason why is that, you know, cognitively humans benefit from consistency. And so, you know, if you interact with like the same tool every single day, you don't want to always like have that be like a generated experience over and over and over again. Um, you know, you can sort of think of this as like, I don't know, like the Comcast field agent who has like a, you know, an app on their iPhone that's sort of out in the field doing stuff. And has to do like the same job every single day, you want that person to like pop and open an app that's like hyper-optimized for speed and you're not changing that up on them all the time. Like you want like a very predictable experience and they can just move fast as they're going through this stuff. I think the same thing when you're trying to convey like complex information, humans benefit from charts and dashboards and visuals and things like that to convey that information. And so there's gonna be a different type of UI around that. So I do think that there is room for innovation in UI, but I do think when you're trying to like just build stuff and explain stuff, like the experience of like talking in natural language is pretty dang good. Like it's very enjoyable.

Yeah.

Like I, I call it yap to zap. Like I wanna just yap to zap stuff. Yeah.

That's what I was thinking that like, if you start now a company, I think that like you need to be thinking very carefully about like, you know, do I really wanna invest in a UI or like in whatever it's behind the UI so that it works. And then at the beginning, it's just an agentic layer. I mean, early on, like at ScaleStack, even like we decided not to invest in a UI and that like, you know, we had to just focus on the infrastructure. And so I think that this changes the equation for many founders starting today. Talking about founders, I think one of the things that I admire the most about Zapier is that, I don't know, how much did you raise? At the beginning, $1.4 million is what's publicly available. I don't know if that's—

yeah, I think it was $1.3 million. It was the actual number. Yeah.

That is incredible because like, you know, I, you know, we haven't raised that much, but we've already raised more than that. My question is like, how did you resist the pressure, especially because you are, you did Y Combinator. I'm sure you did the Demo Day. I'm sure there were like people that wanted to like fund the company. And my first curiosity is like, how did you resist that pressure? And then like, um, you had to constantly make like new decisions about, oh, should we invest more than like, you know, because you became profitable very quickly. So like you had to keep deciding not to raise more money in order to go maybe faster in certain directions.

You know, we surrounded ourselves with a bunch of mentors and people from a whole bunch of different walks of life. It wasn't just a bunch of Silicon Valley people. So, you know, that mortgage company we were at, all 3 of us grew up there. That company was founded by 2 brothers. They owned it 50/50. When I joined, there was 500 employees. And then when I left, starting Zapier like 10 months later, they had 1,000 employees, all bootstrapped, all bootstrapped. And so we had seen upfront how quickly some of these companies can grow when you get the core business right. When we were going through YC, we met Kevin Hale, who was the founder of Wufoo, and he had gone through YC and he just sold his company to SurveyMonkey, but he had built Wufoo in Tampa Bay and they had a local team, but they were distributed. They would come into the office once a week. Yeah. So he was kind of thinking a little differently about that. Of course, we'd gone through YC and so going through YC, you see how a bunch of different people raise companies. Now the interesting thing about YC is you've got PG who's telling everybody, be a cockroach, don't raise money, don't raise money. Like get only the amounts you want. That advice is not followed by the vast majority of YC founders.

The vast majority, yeah.

They've raised tons of money. And so of course you got, you get to see that, but I think there, you know, sort of, we were just like surrounded by people that we just heard different advice and different ways of thinking. And it kind of forced us to think for ourselves a little bit. And we're willing to, you know, look at our situation and say, you know, what, what of these facts across all these different people, like most apply to us and then forge a path that made since in our way. And so, you know, it never felt like we were, I don't know, like going against the grain. It always just felt like we were just making the decision that felt best for us.

Yeah. And, and then that decision was made several times after, because I mean, like, you know, you started growing, you were profitable, but what about like new area of opportunities? Oh, we should do this. We should do that. How did you stay like, you know, consistent almost like, you know, in that objective of like being very efficient? And not like, uh, do big bets that maybe like you were seeing as potentially plausible if you had raised money?

You know, there we, we had, um, we kind of just had like a framework for like how to think about this stuff, which was, you know, anytime the opportunity came up, we tried to understand what is the core bottleneck in the company? Like what, what is the thing that is really holding us back? From achieving our ambitions at this moment in time. And every time that conversation came up, we never said, oh, the answer is that our balance sheet isn't big enough. We need a bigger balance sheet. If we only, we had a bigger balance sheet, then we would be growing faster. That was never the answer. And so as a result, the answer, when the opportunity came up to sell part of our company to get a bigger balance sheet, we just said, ah, no. We, we gotta go work on other things. Then we have other, other priorities that are holding us back from achieving our ambitions. And I, I think that's where like a lot of companies are probably should be, are probably in that position that we were in. But I don't know, I just see them raising gobs and gobs of money. And often the, um, often the reason they cite is like, well, we wanna, we wanna a war chest for a rainy day. And look, I think that's admirable, but oftentimes they're not raising a war chest. They're, they're raising 10 war chests. And I'm like, at a certain point you're just giving up equity. For, for what? Like, do you need that 10th war chest? Like, is that really going to be the thing that makes or breaks your company?

Yeah. What about the team? Like, as you grew, I mean, you and I have talked about like, uh, what's the number of people, like, you know, which, you know, it becomes impossible for everyone to know each other. Like, you know, probably around 150, we said. How do you, I mean, you guys are all remote or the majority remote. Um, and like, how do you ensure that like, uh, the culture, I mean, like, especially for someone like you and your co-founders, like, you know, with this, like, mental frameworks and, like, for decisions that seem, like, very thoughtful. How do you maintain and grow the culture as you grow the team beyond, like, 50, 100, 750 now?

Yeah. Well, you know, I think you have to— I've learned a lot on this. Um, yeah, I think it's really important that you understand what are the things that are important to you and that you believe creates a winning condition inside of the company. And then you need to like enumerate those as crisply as you possibly can, because what is about to happen as your company scales is that you are not the only enforcement layer. You now have a group of leaders and those people will go hire other leaders and they become the enforcement layer for what the company looks like. Now, when it's just you, it's okay. Like you can sort of have this like messy thing in your head where you're like, I don't, I can't really say why, but like, I know it's not working. Yeah. So like, I'm gonna let this person go, or I can't really articulate why, but this person's just crushing it for us. So like, you know, I wanna, I wanna get this person in the team. But the moment you now have other people that you, you're relying on to do this—

you have to explain this. Yes.

Yeah. You have to explain this stuff really well. And, you know, at that point in time, if you do it great, you know, you've got a leader who can now go compound the culture inside their, their world and do a fantastic job at it. If you make mistakes, You're gonna feel that pain because they're gonna go compound that mistake in a bunch of different other areas. And of course, you as a leader have to go audit this as well. So you gotta go do skip levels, you gotta go pay attention to the work, you gotta go audit it, just like you gotta audit the output of an AI agent. You gotta look, is that what I wanted? Is that what I intended to happen? And if the answer is yes, then great, you've probably done a good job of it. If the answer is no, then you probably gotta go back to your leader and say, hey, we gotta course correct on this. And, you know, Ideally, they course correct, but if not, then you gotta say, okay, probably time to make a change.

Yeah, I've admired your ability to know details about specific enterprise customers that, you know, it wasn't obvious to me that you would know the details of, and that shows like the care that you put into this stuff. So, yeah, basically audit.

You gotta know, and look, you can't audit everything, right?

Yeah.

I was even, I was hearing a, I listened to a podcast with Elon Musk recently where someone was asked him like, you're known for micromanagement. He said, please, nanomanagement, picomanagement, like, you know, sort of joking that he goes even smaller. But even he acknowledged, you know, he's got, you know, however many companies he's got and like thousands of like employees across. There's, there's no way he actually goes to like the front thing for every single decision. But what he's trying to do is he's trying to say, what is the most critical? What is the limiting factor? For us to be able to achieve our ambition. And then he is like, I am going to go inspect there and I'm gonna make sure I understand it in detail so that we can make sure that that no longer becomes the limiting factor. And I think that's like a pretty smart way to go about running these companies is to understand what is the singular area that is holding you back at that moment in time. And as the leader, you should understand that so that you can make sure it no longer is the bottleneck.

And then I understand you write weekly memos to the team. Is that an important artifact for you?

Yeah, I do like a, I call it a Friday Five, which sort of just encompasses, you know, 5 things I've sort of on my mind, things that are thinking about across the company. And, you know, they cover product or customers or culture or, you know, external trends, you name it, but it's kind of whatever is on my mind that week.

Okay. And do you write that like on your own or like, you know, with the leadership team, with your co-founders? How, how does it work?

It is, it is my own. Folks will try and. Lobby for me to talk about a particular thing or say, hey, I'd like, I'd like you to give a shout out to this thing, or I want you to go check out. And that's actually helpful. Like, it is good that people are like wanting me to see interesting or helpful things in the company. It helps me be aware of more things that are going on. But the indecision is I decide. So there's many times where like there's good stuff, but I'm just like, yeah, I just don't really have much to say about this at this moment in time.

So is that process to influence? That process to influence the memo, like, uh, structured or it's like people tried? Okay.

Yeah, it's just people will shoot me a message in Slack and say like, hey, this would be a good thing for your Friday Five. On the exec team, there is a little bit of structure to it where people are like surfacing things that we've stated as like strategic importance. And they're like, hey, we hit a key milestone here, or we closed an important deal here, or, you know, some, some important change happened in this part of the organization. So there is a little bit of structure at the executive level to help shape it. But again, I, I, I author it myself.

Very good. And then you just flew like 700+ people to LA, which is massive undertaking for any company really. I mean, besides the obvious, like social cohesion and like people spending time together that they don't usually do, what is your goal in bringing the team together? What were you, you know, hoping that as they left felt or they wanted to be equipped with?

So we've done these retreats, these summits since the beginning. We used to do them twice a year. Since the pandemic, we've started doing them once a year. And they've evolved a lot, but what they, what has always been at the heart of them is that they're, they're sort of like the key coming together moment for the whole company. Everybody is here. We're there to celebrate the work we did. We're there to get excited about the work that's coming up. We're there to learn from customers. We have customers that come on site. We're there to challenge each other. There's a lot of like hard conversations that happen where we're pushing and trying to figure out a problem and solve a thing. And, you know, I think it represents like the, the like intensest form of like Zapier's culture. And it sort of feels like filling up the gas tank a little bit where it's like you go to these things and you're like, oh man, I'm ready to go. And we've, we've found that like, at least at our scale, like about yearly is like a good way by the, you know, you can sort of feel it in the 11th month where you're like, okay, the gas tank's getting a little low.

Like we need—

We need one of these, right? Um, and what about you?

I mean, and what about you? What, what keeps you going? I mean, you could have sold the company, like, you could have, like, stepped back, you could have, you know, like, I mean, you're like, what, 14 years in?

14 years in. Yeah.

Amazing, by the way. Congrats. So what, what keeps you going?

I just love building and I love making stuff. And, you know, I think the— this AI era has, like, reignited a bunch of energy into problem solving. And so You know, if we were to like stop doing this, I, I, you know, probably take a break and then find myself right back at it. But without the advantages that we have at Zapier and the fact that we have a brand and customers and a great team and all these things, it just, you know, I feel like if I had to start over, I would like, I would just yearn for the things that I had at Zapier. And so I don't know, like I, I think right now is like one of the most fun times to be building. Software, it's, it's definitely chaotic. There's a lot of stuff that's moving fast, a lot of things changing, but it's also like, it's also when really cool stuff gets built.

Yeah. Very good. Well, Wade, thank you so much. I really appreciate you taking the time. I don't know if I've ever told you this, by the way, but one of the inspirations for like, you know, deciding to build Skillstack was Zapier. Uh, like we said, oh, what if we did like a Zapier that goes deeper into the data and like, you know, transforms the data, et cetera, et cetera. So Lots to learn from you. And by the way, I'm equally inspired by like how humble you are. And like, you know, despite being a rock star, um, we haven't advertised it yet, but like, can we say like the Zapier Fund did like a small but meaningful investment in Skillstacks? I'm very proud of that. Thank you. And everyone, thank you for listening.

Awesome. That was fun, Ilio.

All right.