Influence Through Action: How Wade Foster Built Zapier and a Movement

the best leaders you can think of, they usually combine those two traits, right? Where they, they know what you're capable of. They know that you can do things that maybe you don't even believe you can do. And so they know how to have that demanding element of you. They're gonna push you, they're gonna challenge you, et cetera. But they often marry that with a deep sense of support where they're like, I believe in you. I, I'm rooting for you. I want you to succeed.

Welcome to another episode of Chief Influencer. I'm your host, Anthony Shop, co-founder of Social Driver. Let's face it, Washington is the center of influence in the US and arguably in the world. Chief Influencer features leaders who have figured out how to break through in today's fragmented and fast-changing environment. Social Driver teamed up with the Communications Board and the George Washington University College of Professional Studies to recognize these incredible leaders as Chief Influencers and highlight how they inspire and influence others. Well, I'm thrilled to welcome today's guest, Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, the automation platform that helps millions of people connect their apps and automate work, quietly powering workflows for teams around the world. Before we dive in, here are a few things that I think you should know about Wade. Number one, his entrepreneurial spark started early, long before Zapier. Wade's first business, I guess you could call it, began with a saxophone in hand, earning his first $50 playing jazz standards at the Missouri Governor's mansion, an early lesson in developing a skill and putting it into the world. Number 2, he didn't follow a linear path. Wade studied industrial engineering, but it, it felt practical. An internship in corporate America clarified what didn't fit and pushed him toward building, experimenting, and learning in real time. And number 3, Wade learned entrepreneurship by doing. He taught himself marketing, became what he calls a full-stack marketer, and leaned into shipping and solving real problems. Experience that eventually led him to co-found Zapier with Brian and Mike and build one of the most influential workflow automation platforms in the world. I'm sure you've heard of it. And if not, by the end of this interview, I promise you, you're going to be playing around with it and figuring out how to use it to make your life easier. Wade, you have been called a remote-first pioneer, an automation evangelist, EY Entrepreneur of the Year, and a Forbes 30 Under 30 honoree. Today we're proud to call you a Chief Influencer. So welcome to the show.

Thanks for having me, Anthony.

Well, we gotta start with Missouri, Wade, cuz you know, I'm also from Missouri and I wonder if you could just kind of give us a little bit of the backstory. Tell us how this journey started back in Missouri. I think you, you grew up in Jeff City and just your early days and, and what that environment taught you about work and ambition and community. And then we'll get to what you're doing today.

Yeah. So I'm from Jeff City, born and raised. And, you know, for those who are unfamiliar with it, it's the state capital. It's kind of a, you know, a pretty like sleepy, slow-moving pace. It's not this like bastion of industry. You know, the biggest employers there are the state government. Then it's like the hospital system, the public schools, things like that. And so, yeah, I was mostly surrounded by, you know, teachers and nurses and, you know, state workers and things like that. And so mostly what I just grew up around was what I felt were like fairly normal middle-class hardworking people that would get up, they'd go do a good day's work, they'd come home and then, you know, go watch your kids play soccer on the weekend or play T-ball or whatever. And that was kind of what I was exposed to. I didn't have a lot of, you know, examples of what entrepreneurship looked like. Certainly not tech entrepreneurship. You know, the tech entrepreneurship seemed like something that was for the brainiacs, right? Like, ah, that's Bill Gates, that's Steve Jobs, that's this other type of person who, you know, is just like a rocket scientist in a lot of ways.

Yeah.

It wasn't for me until, you know, I got to college that I sort of was exposed to entrepreneurship and, you know, more ways in which people could, you know, sort of make a buck in this life, I suppose.

So what was that journey? How did you get exposed to entrepreneurship and where was that spark?

Well, I think the first one you brought it up, I, I, the first dollars I ever made was at the Missouri Governor's Mansion. So I had, I was in 9th grade. I had a saxophone teacher. I'm learning to play saxophone. And they had a quartet that would regularly play at the Governor's Mansion. And they had a situation where their one of their quartet members had had to leave town. I think there was like a family health situation or, you know, something like that and wasn't gonna be able to like make the next gig. And for whatever reason, I, I think mostly desperation, they thought the best solution was, hey, let's ask this 9th grader to see if he could come to a practice and, and see how he does. So I did the practice and I must have done well enough, or again, that desperation thing. And they said, hey, come play at the gig. And so I went and played for 2 hours. Got $50 and a free meal out of the thing. And in 9th grade, I was just like, wow, that's, that's incredible. This is an amazing deal. And then if I contrast that with my first, first quote unquote real job, I was a lifeguard at the public swimming pool there. I'd make $47 for like an 8-hour shift, you know, basically babysitting kids, cleaning wet toilet paper out of our locker rooms. And I had to pay for my own snacks. So that was kind of that first, like, taste where I'm like, hmm, if you have like a valuable skill and you can figure out how to sell it, You might actually make more than just an hourly wage. Uh, and, and I didn't do much with it at the time, but you could tell I'd sort of been infected by this other way of working.

Yeah, it's like a different paradigm to, to how you can earn, create value and, and earn a living, I guess.

Totally.

Okay, so let's jump ahead to Zapier. For listeners who may not know about Zapier, although I'm sure most, if not all, do. You know, what is it and what is the problem that it solves in plain English?

Sure. We like to say that Zapier is the most connected AI orchestration platform. But in plain English, what that means is that you're working inside of software tools every day. Maybe you have Gmail or Outlook for your calendar office tools. Maybe you're using Slack or Teams for, you know, discussions with your team. Uh, you might even have some customized tool for your industry, maybe a CRM or a support ticketing service or any number of applications. Inside those applications, there is valuable data and valuable workflows, and oftentimes humans are sitting down copying data from one into the other, trying to figure out how to do tasks here and then move that over to another team over there. With Zapier, you can set it up and build automations that sit on top of those things. My favorite use case right now, everybody's having fun setting up these meeting recording tools. So you might use something like Fathom or Granola or Otter, Firefly, they're all over the place. And after that meeting, well, instead of having it just generate to-dos for you, you should have it generate action for you. You should have it generate, you know, if you're talking to a customer, have it generate a case study. If the customer asks a question, that you've never answered before, we'll have it generate an FAQ for your website. You know, you have a whole fleet of sales teams that are recording their sales calls, generate a coaching bot that coaches them on how to do this. And so, you know, with a tool like Zapier, you can pull in all this data and have it build automations that just do work for you consistently. And I think that's one of the magical things, especially with AI, you can do now is it's not just copying and pasting data back and forth. It's actually making decisions and coaching and guiding and, and helping you do work. Yeah.

AI and Zapier together, I mean, you like make so many crazy ideas possible. Things that, you know, the examples you just gave, things that I mean would've been really unimaginable a short time ago. Take us back to the early idea of Zapier. I'd love to hear more about some of like the very early use cases where this kind of concept came from and what that moment was when you realized, hey, this isn't just a good idea, this is something that people can rely on every day that can really help them, you know, expand their capabilities.

Two stories. So I think the first place what that inspired us for creating Zapier was, this would've been 2010, 2011, there's starting to be more software as a service. And you know, if you would go to the community forums for these products, so think like Salesforce, QuickBooks, Zendesk, that kind of thing, you would find in the help forums customers asking for integrations. They'd say, when will you integrate with X? And then often inside that thread, there would be a bunch of commenters saying, yes, I want this too, plus one, me, when will you have this? Inevitably, after a bunch of people had commented, there would be a product manager from the company that would chime in and say, hey folks, thanks for the suggestion. We'll take a look at this. And if you've ever worked in, in one of these companies, you know, when you see that, that's kind of code for, eh, probably not gonna happen. It's going on a backlog somewhere. So that was the thing that got us thinking, hmm, if we can make a really simple way to build a UI, to build integrations on top of this, we can make it so folks don't have to know how to code. They don't have to use the APIs and all that sort of stuff. So, so that's where we started. And then the first use case where I knew it was, gonna work was I had emailed what turned into our first customer because they were posting in one of these forums, hey, does someone have a PayPal Highrise integration? So Highrise was the CRM at the time for small business.

Remember that?

Yeah. And we thought, well, hey, we can, we can build that. So I emailed him and said, hey, are you still looking for this PayPal Highrise thing? If so, I think I've got you. And he said, well, I actually don't. I moved on. I changed. But he left the door open for me. He said, well, Did you build something like this? I said, well, sort of. It can hook in PayPal Highrise. And then I went and looked on his site and I was like, what else does he use? And I found out he used Wufoo for his form software and he used AWeber for his email newsletter. And I said, PayPal Highrise, Wufoo, AWeber, and other tools. He responds back to that and goes, awesome, I need someone to take my Wufoo form entries and add those to my email newsletter automatically. And so I remember texting Brian and Mike and sounding like, great, we gotta get Wufoo and AWeber on Zapier right away. So I think I got, I think I got us a customer. And, uh, so they built those integrations. I got on a phone call with Andrew, was his name, Andrew Warner. He, he runs this big podcast, uh, Mixer team, and started to walk him through the setup. And the setup was rough. The product's not very good at this point in time. He's tripping over step after step after step, and it's not his fault. Like, it's just the product is so bare bones, so basic. So, so it's not even a beta. It's like an alpha stage. But we get to the end, we finally get his first Zap set up and he goes to test it. So he adds, you know, submits his form on his site. He goes over to AWeber, refreshes the list, and then sees the name pop through. His eyes light up and he goes, Wade, oh my God, this is so awesome. This is gonna save me so much time and headache. How much money do I owe you? And I remember thinking in my head, he just went through this abysmal, horrible product setup and out the other side, he is super excited. And I remember thinking, if we can just make this easy for people to use, I think we're really onto something. So those two insights were like pretty critical for us in the early day.

That's awesome. Did he pay you more than the saxophone gig?

It was $100. So we hadn't, we hadn't actually thought of like how much to pay, we didn't even have a bank account at this point in time. And so off on the spot, I just said, why don't you pay us $100? It'll be for access for the lifetime of the beta. And you can go ahead and just send me the money on my personal PayPal account. And I kid you not, after that, I went and said to Brian and Mike, I was like, we've got money, we need to go set up a bank account. And so like, I think the next day or 2 days later, we went to the local bank bank to go open an account. But before I went, I set up a Zap. I said, I want to get texted anytime someone messages me on, uh, or someone pays me on PayPal. And I kid you not, the moment we are walking into the door of the bank to set up the bank account, I get a text message that says, Andrew just sent you $100.

Oh wow.

Super cool.

You probably had to turn that Zap off after a while. It was going ding, ding, ding, ding. You know, you're getting a lot of messages as you got popular.

That was definitely like one of the most fun days was turning that zap off because in the early days, you know, I mean, it's like every entrepreneur likes to take their first dollar bill to their door.

Yeah.

And this was the digital version of that where you're just getting, great, you got another customer. Great, you got another customer. But then there was a certain point where more customers were coming and it was like, okay, this is like, I get it. We got more customers. So, uh, I did have to turn that, that zap off.

That's awesome. Well, you've come a long way obviously from that first $100, you know, alpha or beta, you know, project that, that you launched. As the CEO now thinking about influence, who do you have to focus on influencing? And 'cause you know, you have product and customers and team and the market and all kinds of different folks and you know, where do you have to focus that energy now?

Well, I think that there's a lot of places, um, but first and foremost, we're trying to influence our customers, um, or, or potential customers. You know, we, we're trying to build products that solve problems for them. And so, you know, a lot of this is us sharing our point of view on how to solve problems, but it's also us listening to them, letting us be influenced by what problems do they have, and then us using our creative problem solving to figure out how can we build better solutions that, that meet their needs. And so I think, you know, customers is sort of first and foremost. The second then is the team internally. You know, a lot of the job of a leader is to, you know, convince people to join you and, you know, give them jobs. And then when they're here, like, make sure that the best ideas surface to the top. And so you're trying to get people to have vibrant debates and share good ideas and, you know, debate each other and say, is this better? Is that better? And so a lot of the influence is trying to build that culture where you can have like the best ideas rise to the top, where you can have this, you know, like optimistic dissatisfaction with the status quo where it's like, ah, we're not as good as we could be, but boy, it sure could be a lot better. Let's go. So a lot of your time as a CEO is spent trying to You know, get the team to operate in what you view as like the, the best way possible.

Yeah, I would imagine that your team comes up with some pretty creative ways to use your own product to solve problems. And you know, that's probably really exciting. And, and, um, I don't know how, what's it like inside of a company with a product like this, trying to help people see how they should leverage the power of the automations that you create to scale your own business?

Dogfooding is like one of the best ways to get good ideas. So we have a whole initiative internally called Zapier on Zapier where our team tries to figure out what problems they're facing in a particular area and build solutions to it. So, you know, one example we have is our recruiting team uses Zapier a lot and they recently implemented this new system about 6 months ago when you started to see a lot more AI job applications. Uh, there was a lot more sort of spray and pray because the AI makes it really easy to, to apply to jobs. Well, it turns out that makes our job kind of hard. And a particularly insidious challenge in there is you can have some small percentage of applicants can look very good, but are actually fraudulent applications. Um, these are not real people, or they're people who are employed in multiple places. And they're not necessarily applying for a job with, you know, positive intentions. And the team built up a detection system where they could start to figure out, 'cause there's certain patterns that those types of applications tend to have. And if you're paying attention to 'em, you can spot them. But if you're just moving quickly, they're sometimes pretty tough to tell. And so using Zapier, they built up an automation that you know, spelled out here are all the things to check for. And if they're checking for it, I want to generate a score. And, you know, they call it like the fraud score where it's like, hey, you know, if it's higher, it doesn't mean we're necessarily going to instantly reject this, but it means you should double-check these, you know, one or two things before you sort of pursue with this candidate because there's, there's some, there's some yellow flags going on here that you should check into. And so I think that's part of the fun of being inside of a company like Zapier is you can find people in all disciplines that have unique problems pop up for them and they can go figure out how to deploy the technology to solve, um, a, a particular problem they're facing. Yeah.

And then, you know, others outside of Zapier might use that same automation, right? 'Cause of how you've sort of set up the, I, I know what language you call like that, like the marketplace or the examples, but I think one of the things that makes Zapier so cool for those who you know, use it is that you can get a lot of inspiration for how other people use it. So you don't have to just reinvent the wheel every time.

100%. And I mean, truth be told, we probably learn more from our customers, uh, than, uh, you know, even we learn from ourselves. Uh, I think we do a good job of paying attention to like, oh, what are you doing? We should borrow that. And then if it works for us, then we try and make sure that everybody is aware of that.

I wanna like hone in on that for a second, Wade, because I think, um, whether someone runs a technology company like yours that has customers, whether they run a membership association or a nonprofit that serves a certain group, finding ways to learn from your customers, your stakeholders, your audience, your community is so important. That two-way influence that you mentioned, and I wonder if you could share some of the ways that you all have, um, done that over the years, things that have worked particularly well because again, whether they're at a tech company or another type of organization, I think they might be able to learn from some of your best practices since you've done it very well from what I understand.

Well, I, you know, the, the first one from our founding until probably shoot about 10 years in, we had this concept of all hands support where it meant no matter your job function, you know, you could be a dedicated support rep or you could be the accountant or the lawyer or the engineer or whatever. Didn't matter. We were gonna expect, you know, that you do some amount of customer support, uh, every single week. And that is such a valuable way to learn how are our customers trying to use this software, where are they running into limitations? And, um, no matter your discipline, you often got ideas for things you could be doing with the software itself based on what your customers were seeing. And so I, I can think of no better way to be inspired by your customers than to just spend time in customer service and see what they're learning and what they're doing. You know, as we've grown, we've obviously adapted many more ways. So we pay attention to comments of Zapier on social. So we have AI agents that are sort of mining the web and pulling all those comments in and helping us synthesize those. We're inviting groups of customers to events. So we do these intimate events with people in particular disciplines. So we might bring a bunch of CMOs together or a bunch of CROs together and say, hey, let's talk about how you're tackling, you know, particular marketing problems that you're facing and how automation can help you with certain tasks that you're facing. Uh, so, you know, as we've grown, we've started to have more different ways to engage with people. And I think the, each one of those tactics brings like a slightly different bent and you get something slightly different than you might get from another one. And so I like having the diversity of inputs. Because I think you just, you catch angles that maybe you didn't expect if you're just sort of only focused on one way of learning from customer.

Yeah, I think a takeaway I would have from that is, you know, if an organization's really good at that human touch, you know, in-person feedback, they may be missing out on some of the automated ways like you use AI to scrape comments on social media. On the flip side, if an organization is really good at technology to listen out to what's happening you know, online, maybe there's room for them to, to add in some of those more human elements, right? Like bring CMOs together in person. It does take, take a mix, I think, of doing that. And it's cool to hear how, how you all, you know, despite being so technology and automation focused, do a, a great mix of both of those.

Yeah, I, I love the Bruce Lee, like, just describes his fighting style as the way of no way. And effectively what he meant is he studied all martial arts and from each discipline he took the things that he thought was best and he discarded the rest. And I think that that is such a valuable way to go about whatever discipline you're trying to learn is to find the things that really work well and discard the rest and try not to get too religious about any particular way of go— going about things.

Yeah. So you mentioned you have to influence the market. So if someone's already a customer of Zapier's, um, you know, they, they're, they're, they're, you know, they're logged in, they can see other ways to use it. So I see how naturally you'd be able to expand your relationship and deepen it with customers. But for folks that might be just overwhelmed by the fact that a technology can provide automation, I would think that one of your competitors might be just not using any type of automation tool, right? And they just do things the way they've always done it and they, you know, it's inefficient. And, um, how do you influence people who could really benefit from the almost endless number of integrations and automations that you provide, but who just may have that barrier? Because that's, and I suspect that's probably something that you have to really think about to scale.

That is a very important question, Anthony. And you know, this one is harder to answer because to your point, our biggest competition is usually not some other technology product. It's usually the status quo. It's usually apathy. And yeah, I won't pretend that we've sort of like, oh, just do this one trick and, you know, all your apathy problems are solved. But, you know, I think one thing that we have found to work well is to do workshops with groups of people. And so oftentimes when we're speaking with, you know, enterprise customers, there will be a handful of power users in the company, but those power users know that their peers could also benefit massively from the technology. But they're just busy. They need help. They need, you know, they need pointers. And so, you know, we'll work with those power users and say, hey, let's set up a, you know, a 4-hour workshop where people can have some time, some space to take a minute to breathe and to step outside their day-to-day and everybody come learn and build things. And we see this time and time again. When you do that, you often have this huge acceleration of automation inside of a company because people are going to say, let's, let's take a quick beat and, you know, learn a new skill. And then once you learn it, you can sort of deploy that for the rest of your life. And I think that's, you know, it takes like exercises like that to get most of us out of the hamster wheel. Like, it's so easy for us to get on the hamster wheel, just go about our day, do a lot of activity, but we may not necessarily always like make that huge step forward. And oftentimes to take that step forward, you do need to find a mechanism to get people to just like pause and learn a new thing. Um, and doing that as a group is usually like— humans are social creatures, we just like doing that. And so that's always a pretty good tactic.

This episode is brought to you by the George Washington University's College of Professional Studies, with in-person and online programs ranging from master's degrees in public relations strategy to with certificate programs in digital communications, GW offers more than just the credentials to help working professionals get ahead. It prepares them to be leaders in their field. Check out cps.gwu.edu for more information. I think that's such a great insight because especially a tool like Zapier is something that somebody can sit down in front of a computer and geek out by themselves. You know, you don't necessarily think of it as having that group element, by having a workshop, bringing people together, and you mentioned power users, I'm thinking a lot of those might be early adopters, and early adopters often is where something starts and things spread from. Um, by being very thoughtful about bringing those folks together to solve problems together and adding that social element, you know, then they become advocates to one another for you because they may say, hey, did you see this thing that I figured out? And so they're, they're talking about the product with one another, uh, rather than it always having to be you know, a conversation directly with Zapier.

Spot on.

So let me ask you, as you've grown, as you've scaled, we heard some really great examples of how you've scaled. What are some of the leadership principles that you think have been really important or, um, maybe that you've even, you know, learned and developed along the way, um, to help with your expansion?

One that has been important for us from the start has been default to action. You know, I think it's so easy for humans to say, I'm not ready yet. I need to learn more. Let me just do some more research. But the thing I have sort of, I think, recognized even when we were just getting started and has proven to be true is that you learn the most by simply doing. You know, a lot of folks have this mental model that the best way to learn is to go do research and then act. But I have found that the best way to learn is to actually act, to gather information, and then once that information, you can act again and you can act again. This is an iterative cycle. And so that default to action is so valuable because you can put stuff out in the world, see how customers react to it, and then if it's positive, do more of those things. If it's negative, go, okay, less of that. Um, and that action orientation has been so powerful. I think the second thing that I've had to learn along the way, which is something I wasn't particularly good at from a leadership perspective, was how to be both demanding and supportive. This is something I learned from Ravi Gupta, who is a partner over at Sequoia. Yeah, the best managers, the best leaders you can think of, they usually combine those two traits, right? Where they, they know what you're capable of. They know that you can do things that maybe you don't even believe you can do. And so they know how to have that demanding element of you. They're gonna push you, they're gonna challenge you, et cetera. But they often marry that with a deep sense of support where they're like, I believe in you. I, I'm rooting for you. I want you to succeed. You know, you can think of that, you know, high school, you know, sports coach or a musician who, you know, when you make a mistake, they've got their hand over your shoulder and they're like, you know, you messed up. I know you messed up. Get back out there. You can do that again. And that was something I had to work really hard at. I think the supportive side came more natural for me. The demanding side always was trickier. It's like, am I gonna hurt somebody's feelings? Are they maybe not gonna like me? And so I've had to just get better at marrying both of those things as we go. And I think, you know, that's something that took, as a skill that just sort of had to be developed over time. And honestly, I'm still learning how to do that great.

Yeah, I really like that, the demanding and supportive, that particular language around that I think really resonates. And also just what you said before about acting, you know, influence through action. I think that, that, because sometimes it can feel like influence is, um, talking and thinking and planning, you know what I mean? It's, it's kind of a, a, you know, theoretical. And I think bringing the action into it, uh, is also a really good example and obviously aligns very well with kind of how, you know, your, your, your company and your, and your product. You know, speaking about the company, something that's interesting about Zapier, not as unique these days for companies, but still in many ways it's a remote-first, you know, distributed team. And I wonder, especially now, I mean, we see an interesting mix. We see remote-first companies, we see companies that they're insisting their teams come back in the office. That's in the news a lot these days. What are some of the lessons that you've learned about building trust and getting your team aligned, um, when in-person is not the default.

Yeah. Well, one of our, another core value we have at Zapier that I think is especially important for distributed teams is default to transparency. You know, if you're gonna have folks working all over the globe from home, they need access to information. They need to know how to do their job. They need to understand what's important. They need to understand the context behind why that's important. And if you're constantly sharing that out at all levels of the company, the CEO to the most junior employee, sharing out what you're learning, what you're doing, what you've completed, that makes it so much easier for everybody to stay on the same page. That was true pre-AI. Now with AI, it's even more important. These large language models are so good with documentation and text. And so if you've taken the time to put that stuff out there, you could find that you can deploy AI much more readily inside the company if it has access to what are you thinking, what's going on in your head. And so taking the time to jot it down and share this stuff out is so, so powerful, um, for running a, a distributed team, especially as it gets larger and larger.

Yeah, I think that's such a great point. If we're going to integrate AI, it's almost like part of the team that how do we make sure that we have that transparency for the people, but then also for these, you know, these, uh, non-people who are helping us. 'Cause I mean, in some ways AI is taking on tasks that to support people. And, and having that documentation available can really allow the models to, to do so much more to support you.

Spot on.

What about internal communication? Are there any specific ways that you have been able to, I mean, you mentioned documentation of transparency, but just any other habits or systems that have had a strong impact on keeping your team aligned?

Well, that, that I think, you know, we use Slack a lot internally. Uh, again, default to transparency. We try and stay out of, Direct messages, direct messages makes it hard for people to follow along. In fact, on the executive team, I, I have a, we have an agent that sets up to create a scoreboard every month, uh, and shows like who, who has had the highest percentage of their messages happening in public channels. Oh wow. As a way to sort of subtly encourage us to be more transparent, more transparent, more transparent. Uh, I think there's other small things you can do to set up tools like Slack to be better for distributed teams. So good naming conventions for how you organize channels. Makes it easier for people to wayfind inside of a large organization. So, you know, we have channels that are prefixed with, you know, deal. So those are potential prospects we're looking at. We have channels prefixed with customer. So those are shared channels with customers. We have channels that are prefixed with fun. These means they're off topic. These are non-work-related chat channels. We have topics prefixed with city. So that just means here's all the people who live in the city that work at Zapier. and so it helps people get together in person. And so all of these little like tips and tricks just helps people wayfind inside the company, feel a sense of like they, they know where they're at. They've got their sort of two feet planted on the ground. Um, whereas if you don't have these just like little, little signposts along the way, it can feel, be pretty disorienting and kind of lonely inside of a distributed team.

Yeah, that's such a great point. Um, you know, I've been hearing the term vibe coding a lot lately. How has AI changed the on-ramp for people who maybe haven't used Zapier before, but now they see that maybe it could support them and how they're working with, you know, LLMs? What's possible, I guess, for everyday users now to automate in their daily lives?

Yeah, I think the most exciting thing is you can just talk to a chatbot and it can go build the automation for you. So if you, you know, sign into Zapier, we have a big chatbot, uh, called Copilot that will help you build your automations. In the past, you actually had to think through what trigger do I have and what action does it take next? And you had to just think through all the mechanics of this. And look, it was easy to do, but it required a lot of cognitive load to sort of work your way through that. Um, now you can just say, hey, you know, I, I'm, I'm collecting, I'm maybe I'm running a webinar and my webinar's running on Zoom and I need to take the leads that I'm getting from the webinar and I need to somehow get 'em in my CRM. And boy, it would be nice if I could enrich 'em somehow. Like if you could collect extra information from him. Could you help me do that too? And in just going back and forth with the chatbot, it can be like, great, here's what I think you should set up. Do this, this, and this. Would you like me to just do that for you? Wow.

Yes, please.

And then it just goes and does it for you. That's amazing. And even if it doesn't get it perfect, it gets you all the scaffolding. And then, you know, you're probably 90, 95% of the way there. The last touches is just like, well, maybe not quite that, maybe a little more like this. And that takes all that cognitive load off of the human and it feels like you've just got this amazing assistant that's helping you, you know, solve problems alongside you where you're like, I know what I need to go do, but for me to do this myself, it's just gonna be tedious and painful. Can I just get somebody to help me like with the drudgery of setting all this stuff up and also kind of think through the implementation a little bit?

Yeah. Yeah, that's good. Unlocks the potential that's there. I mean, I can't tell you how many people I've talked to that say, Hey, I always knew this thing was possible in a spreadsheet, but I just had no idea how to do it. But now I can actually explain to, you know, uh, whatever my preferred, uh, AI tool of choice is, and it will, you know, set up that formula for me so that I have this really awesome, uh, pivot table or function or whatever. And you're sort of bringing that same level of, um, coaching to a number of different SaaS tools that you integrate with. So it really unlocks a lot of possibilities, which is kind of exciting.

Yeah, I think the hardest challenge for us is actually just remembering, like, having good ideas is like half the battle and just having high agency to say, oh, you know what, maybe I should try and have it solve this problem for me and then just see what's, what's possible. You might find that there's way more automation potential in your day-to-day than you're realizing. Yeah. Let me ask you this though.

I think as we talk about influence, trust is such an important part of influence and how do we You know, build authentic influence with trust. And when we think about technology, you know, these automations, um, there are ways that technology can help us build trust, but there are also ways we can use technology that diminish trust, right? Like, you know, if I get really great spam messages from people all the time and I know, okay, well, I'm not gonna trust them necessarily more, but I can use AI, I can use automations to do things that'll build trust. How do you think about that in terms of, you know, within your own leadership, your own company, how your customers use the product.

Yeah. Yeah.

I'd love your thoughts on that. 'Cause you're like—

My co-founder Brian has this great saying that I love, which is you can delegate the work to AI, but you cannot delegate the responsibility. And I think that this is really important concept, especially when you use these models kind of in a very like vanilla basic way. They generate this concept of AI slop. It's this AI is the AI has this like out of the box way of talking, thinking, designing, et cetera, that once you see it, you can't unsee it. You're like, oh, that is, that's so clearly an AI answer. And you see this all over the internet today. Like if you go to any major social network and look at the comment section and just of any popular post, you can see how much is just AI generated slop. It's regurgitating the main poster, in the same old way that it was before. And if that's the way we're gonna use these tools, we're not adding anything to the discussion. It's, it's just purely recycling old garbage talking points. But if you're, if you are a thought partner alongside the AI where you're giving it better inputs, when it delivers output, if you're giving it good feedback, you're gonna find that what you get out of an AI system is much more elevated. Than what you got from just the baseline level. Takes more work. You have to be in the loop. You have to be working with it and collaborating on it. And I think that's the big difference that I see between, you know, people who are building incredible systems with AI and people who are kind of just recycling, you know, human knowledge that has already been generated. And so I come back to Brian's thing. You can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the responsibility. So if you're gonna put that work out into the world, You better sign your name to it if you want to get, um, you know, to be trusted, to be influenced, uh, uh, an influencer, I guess.

You can delegate the work, but you can't delegate the responsibility. I really like that. And I love that you quoted, uh, Brian. I feel like that's, that's like the, um, earnest Missourian in you because, you know, in DC we have this joke that the first time you say that, you say, you know, oh, as my co-founder Brian says, and then the second time you say like, you know, oh, as my friend always says, and then the third time you say, as I always say. And so you could, they could easily adopt that quote, but you were very, uh, kind to, uh, give Brian credit.

He gets credit for it through and through.

That's great. You know, we thought about kind of like, um, the role that you have and how it's changed, but also the role that Zapier has with customers and how it's changed. You know, when you, when, when Zapier started, you were sort of playing like a very specific tune, like that first Zap for that client. And now you've gone from being like an instrument into this full orchestra, right? You're helping to orchestrate the way people integrate with artificial intelligence. And it's sort of a similar journey that you've gone on 'cause you started as that saxophone player, you know, you were like a, you know, player, you're, you're selling the idea that you're writing that specific Zap for the, you know, to get the text alert for yourself, et cetera. And now you're having to orchestrate what the whole team does. So I see sort of an interesting parallel there. One of the things I'm wondering about is when you're trying to communicate really complex ideas, you know, strategy, you know, how you integrate with AI, your culture, um, how do you, as the conductor of the orchestra, make those ideas clear enough that others can understand them and repeat them accurately so that your influence reflects, you know, what, what you, your idea was, and it doesn't get, um, changed along the way.

Yeah, that is a big question. Um, I think the discipline I've learned the most from is like books and movies and storytelling. You often— there's, there's a saying that the data point doesn't change behaviors, that the anecdote changes behaviors. Um, and so if you really want to have influence, you do want to connect to people on an emotional level. And so, you know, I could sit here all day and tell you a story about, you know, all, you know, all the, all the starving people in the world that don't have enough food to eat. And you would probably go like, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course. I know, I know, I know, I know. But if I told you the story of you know, a 3-year-old girl who was born in this place and, you know, was trying to da da da da da and went on and on and on about that, that's gonna sit with you probably in a much more visceral way because you're gonna feel a connection to that person. And so, yeah, I think one of the things I've had to learn is just how to be a better storyteller, how to connect to, you know, stories from my own life, stories from shared connections that we have with the team and our customers. And how do we weave those narratives together to, I have a simple point of view that a lot of people can rally around and say, okay, yeah, we wanna go solve that problem as a team. And that can be tough, especially when you're working in like, you know, a technical domain like Zapier and you have a lot of jargon, you have a lot of, you know, acronyms and phrases that can easily alienate and ostracize people 'cause they're like, I'm not sure that I know what that means. And so you're often trying to look for just like simpler ways to convey these concepts. Obviously you're in DC, politicians are the best at this. They're always like trying to figure out how to come up with like a great little soundbite that can take this enormously complex topic and reduce it down to, you know, something that can sound great on TV and, you know, a 15-second clip. And so I think that exercise, that skill is one that if you really want to like start a movement, you probably are going to have to get pretty good at storytelling.

Yeah, I think that's such a great point. And I think, you know, figuring out what story is going to resonate, obviously, with your— the customer segment or the audience, and then finding those stories sometimes is, is, you know, tricky. And I think the fact that you shared a little bit before about how you interact with your customers and how you provide support, how you mine those, I think you, you gave us some examples of how you probably identify those stories so that you can help someone see like, oh, well, you could connect these systems and that might help but a real story of how somebody saved an hour a day and got, you know, or achieved a goal because they were able to unlock the potential of these systems that they already had. I mean, that really, um, that, that must break through at a completely different level for Zapier to get folks excited. 'Cause one of the things I know about your brand is you have these brand enthusiasts. They are champions. They're like these power users that just love Zapier and they tell everybody about it. And unlocking those stories probably makes a huge impact for you.

Uh, 100%.

Let me just ask you as we close, you know, our topic of Chief Influencer is always influence, and I'd just love to know, um, when you think about influence today, how do you define it and how has that view evolved as you've grown from, you know, building this product and sort of starting it, you know, being scrappy to, and now having this enterprise that you are the CEO of?

What comes to mind for me is I think the people that have the biggest influence are the people who actually change how other people go about their life. Like right now, age of social media, the term influencer, it's so easy to reduce influence down to hot takes on you know, whatever social media platform of choice you're getting. You know, are you getting good likes? Are you getting good engagements? Things like that. But to me, so much of that stuff is ephemeral. It, you know, it comes and goes as fast as it, um, just super fast. But the, the folks who have real influence are often changing how people show and live their lives. And so when I think about how I wanna approach my work. You know, the stuff I put out there, I want people to say, hey, I'm actually going to do something differently. I don't need them to think, oh, Wade's so smart, or Wade's, you know, seems like a nice guy, or things like that. I want them to say, I'm going to, I can live my life differently. I can approach work differently because I have different tools. And to me, I wish more of society approached influence in that same way where I'm like, I'm going to benefit the world by changing people for the good. Hmm.

That's such a great, that's such a great point of thinking about the lasting impact of your influence because you're right. I mean, there are people who have that title influencer, but, but it's just, you know, they show up in someone's feed, but it doesn't really, um, mean anything beyond that. And then making a deeper impact that lasts. I mean, that's what true influence is. So I love that. And I think it ties back to, you know, something you said earlier, we talked about, you know, influence through action. You know, not just thought, not that just ideas, but, you know, acting and then being able to build on that, um, is really where we see influence. And what you've built with Zapier, I mean, I think it's just incredible. You know, proud as a, a fellow, uh, Missourian to see that a company that, that, uh, everybody in my field is familiar with, uh, came out of Jeff's city and what you've done. And I think right now the power today is to find those interactions and the, um, interactions between people are so important. I think we touched on that. We gave, uh, you gave some great examples about how helping customers connect with one another and interact and solve one another's problems. And that's really what your business is about through automation. It's about building those connections across systems to unlock potential. That wasn't there. And, and certainly that's a powerful form of influence. So Wade, thank you so much for taking time to be with us today on, on Chief Influencer. Absolutely love this discussion. And for folks who, uh, are, uh, not yet users, I encourage them to check out zapier.com and, and see, uh, what, what, uh, automations they may be able to unlock to maximize their potential too.

Thanks for having me.

Chief Influencer is a production of Social Driver. We help clients transform complexity into clarity with people-centered strategies. Whether you're looking to elevate the influence of your brand or of your leaders, check out socialdriver.com to learn more. For show notes or to nominate a guest, visit us at chiefinfluencer.org or follow Chief Influencer on LinkedIn.