The future of remote work, juggling APIs, and dream integrations with Wade Foster of Zapier | E2221

What do you think the future of work is going to be? Because I'm seeing that we don't need as many clerical people to run a larger and larger operation. And what will the future of work look like for those clerical people? Will they be more like developers? Is everybody going to be a developer? Because let's face it, this is like scripting.

Yeah, it is, right? Like, this is kind of stuff people get hired to write this kind of stuff today, right? Like, that's what Brian and I were getting hired to do 5 years ago. We were getting hired to write code that did this stuff.

Yes.

So now, like, a savvy person could probably hire themself out and pretend that they're writing code, but it's actually Zapier behind the scenes if they wanted to, right?

Right.

Are people doing that? Yeah, some people do do that, right? They, you know, say that they, you know, are going to build this stuff and then they do it and then they wait a week and then tell them that they've delivered it.

Wow.

You know, I think in the future you're going to see people just using more and more of these tools that make, you know, I hesitate to say it's coding, but it's like quasi-coding, right? Like it just—

Scripting?

Yeah, it's basic scripting, macros.

Yeah, macros, you know, that really puts that kind of power in their hand and lets the tools kind of just get out of their way, right?

This Week in Startups is brought to you by Zeit. Zeit is the fastest way to build business software with AI. Build apps, forms, websites, and portals that connect to the tools you already use. Go to zeit.com/twist and get 50% off your first project. Every.io. For all your incorporation, banking, payroll, benefits, accounting, taxes, or other back office administration needs, visit every.io. And Goldbelly. Goldbelly ships America's most delicious iconic foods nationwide. Get 20% off your first order by using the promo code TWIST at checkout. Welcome back to This Week in Startups. This is Alex, and we have a packed show for you today. First up, Jason and I are talking to the founder of Tour, a company that brings together AI, videos, and apartment listings in one cool package. I would've killed to have this company back when I was in school. Eh, better late than never. Then we're talking to Alembic's Thomas Puig. His company is doing analytics for marketers all about attribution. If that's not something that you particularly care about, don't worry. We dig into what is causal AI and how it's helping Alembic. Very interesting, very important. Then to wrap up the show, Lan and I are going all the way back to episode 626 when Jason sat down with his little baby company named Zapier. During that conversation, Jason gets into white-collar job loss, automation, and the power of technology to empower the individual. If that sounds a lot like what we're talking about today, well, it is. And you'll find out why. Let's have some fun. We're going to hear from a founder building a product that I'm sure everyone in college is going to want to use. It's called Tour, and it's helping make video walkthroughs of apartments much easier and better. but if I'm reading the website correctly, they have a much larger vision for a much bigger company down the road. Please join me in welcoming to the show co-founder and CEO, Emilia Parmar. Emilia, how you doing?

I'm doing well. It's so good to be here, Alex and Jason. This is a very special show. So many of the interviews and conversations you have inspire the next generation of entrepreneurs to start their, and start and launch their own companies.

So, wow, this is, I like the way this is going.

Wow.

Say more. Well, that's why we're here. But way to work the refs. I like it. We're going to give you 2 minutes on the clock to pitch using the fabulous Gamma software, and then we're going to give you some candid feedback on your pitch and answer some questions about your business. Share your screen and here we go in 3, 2, go.

Hi, my name is Emilia. I'm the CEO of Tour, and we automate a property's digital tour and competitive research so property managers do less busywork and can focus on reaching and closing more prospects. Today, rent is becoming one of the largest e-commerce purchases for millions of Americans, but core property management e-commerce processes are still manual and not reflective of a $10 to $20 million e-commerce business. Today, setting prices and specials for apartments still requires scouting 10+ competitor websites and manually comparing SKUs and specials. Advertising, even with the spend of a few hundred thousand dollars per year, is still a black box. And today, most of, most sales and tour conversations are high friction and happen, happen exclusively in person or over the phone and not low friction on the website. Tourr fixes this. We built a virtual leasing agent that delivers guided digital tours that engage every website visitor and AI research agents that track pricing, specials, and advertising shifts so managers can set smarter pricing and make better advertising decisions. You just select your top comps from our database of over 150,000 apartments, choose your frequency, and Tour AI automatically alerts you to gaps across the market from pricing, ads, and specials. Those same agents can also help you generate tour scripts that you record once, and Tour can publish and embed these bite-sized shoppable videos into your websites and ad sets combined with scheduling to create personal interactive tour for every website visitor. As a prospect browses the tour and website, Tour tags and qualifies them and notifies leasing teams to call high-intent renters while they're still on the website. For Sagar, that means more qualified leads, zero-time building pricing reports, and 4 times the number of tours delivered, and far more clarity where to spend his ad dollars. Tourr has toured 1.4 million prospects, is loved by 130+ property managers, and is adding $80K ARR just in the last few months because our now AI agents allow onboarding in minutes, not weeks, making it easy for us to scale across student housing, multifamily, co-living, and senior living. There is no other platform that combines competitive intelligence and digitally guided tours into one cohesive e-commerce engine for properties. I realized this opportunity after working on conversion optimization at Google and Amazon. I was so driven to improve the leasing e-commerce experience after renting my first apartment. I became a part-time leasing agent, uh, to really understand the market. My hands-on lessons shaped Tourr into a platform that's delivered over 1 million tours and drive over $100 million in leases for these apartments. Our team's deep understanding of customer is just another reason why properties choose Tour as their digital tour and e-commerce competitor research engine, a platform that automates the busywork and scales outreach so property managers can choose to focus on closing more prospects. Thank you.

Great job. It is really interesting how many of these apartment properties there are in some of the cities you live in. If you live in an old city like, let's say, New York or Boston, like they're not building these new apartment complex. If you live in San Francisco, yeah, you might see some of them in the Mission Bay District, but not too many. But if you live in Texas, oh my lord, or if you live in Vegas, uh, or you live in Miami, they're constantly putting up these 50 to 500 apartment facilities. And getting people to understand what the opportunity is or what the offering is as a consumer is super important. And you outlined really well that these AI-powered virtual tours and the lead management system. All of this is a great advantage because this online generation likes to take out their phone in a vertical video. They probably just want to see what it is, and, um, I don't know if they'll actually make the transaction online and just get an apartment, but they would certainly— you're probably getting 80% of the information they need by giving them this tour. So tell me a little bit about about this millennial and younger generation and how they look for apartments and how this converts versus the other opportunities that property managers have? Because you charge property managers $2.99 a month for this product.

That's exactly right. You know, we're seeing a world where two numbers become pretty apparent. The first is a trend that was already happening 10, 15 years ago. People are shopping for apartments online. This is what listing platforms have demonstrated for a very long time. You find and research information online. This is more true in our generation than ever, that if you're student, if you are, you know, someone who works and is moving for a job, you want the ability to shop outside of business hours. And naturally the most convenient method is going to be the internet, right? But text goes only so far. Some of these photos only go so far. And so what we see is the next generation of renters are looking 5 times more and finding digital footprints before coming in person. While maybe the older generation was able to and make a decision to say, hey, okay, I'm going to visit these 10 properties and then make my decision. The young generation is often pulling in different strings to figure out what apartment they're interested in before they come in person to tour.

Really, you're meeting the market where it is. People already want this increased information, so you're essentially bringing it to them. Okay, that, that makes good sense to me. Can you tell me more about the actual videos and, and how they're put together and what assistance that Tour actually gives people to make compelling kind of tours?

Yeah, absolutely. One of the first things that we realized when starting Tour is that this generation also is very like the TikTok fast-paced nature of some of the content. You want to focus on getting the most specific pieces of media that these individuals care about. And so we made it interactive from the get-go, right? You have a general introduction to the property, but then you see what you care about seeing. If someone's interested in the gym, you click on the choose your— it's a choose your adventure tour. So you click on the amenities and you click on the gym that you're most interested in. If you're interested in specific floor plan, you It should take you into a path that's curated to you personally. What we do that's interesting is now, before we had to spend time asking them about their property, et cetera, what we now do is we run agents through their website, learn all about all the amenities they have, their floor plans, and then prepare basically a script that they get started. Because the big problem actually isn't that property managers don't want to do this, they don't know how to get started, right? If you just give someone the task, okay, let's go ahead and create these tours or these mini tour videos, Or if you just say, bring me a tour, they don't know how to get started. But if you say, now say, hi, we've created these 15 tour scripts for you. Here's exactly what you do. Here's your A-roll shots. You say these lines, the B-roll you need to capture, and you just give it to them, hand a plate, and now it becomes a much more manageable task.

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Emilia, one thing I want to say is the, the interactivity of the video tours is super cool. And I entirely missed that during your presentation. I don't know if I was taking notes on the other elements of it when you said that, but just my two cents as someone who has rented and likes startups, I would hit that a lot harder because I think the idea that you're giving people not just the format they want, but also the content they want inside that format specifically, that's awesome to me. I just think I missed— I think I missed that part.

I agree with that note. And if you go to the website, you can see like all the different tour options. How does the tour compare to Matterport? Every time I go on like housing sites, whatever, or apartment sites, Matterport seems to be like a standard for the 3D tour. So how does the video tour differ from the Matterport?

Tour?

And which one do people like and why?

So what we see is our customers ultimately want the opportunity to narrate the experience, right? And often Matterport and 3D tour options offer a very passive experience for the apartment guy. And so what we wanted to do is when we talked to our nature, like the core apartment demographic, we found two things. One, Matterports are often hidden on a specific page and they're specifically on the floor plan. But today, modern amenities of apartments, they're far more flush. You have experiences, you have coworking offices, you have amenities, you have resident stories. And what they want to do is they want to feature and help give you a guided tour of the apartment, just like if you were, if they, if you came in person to the office. And so our goal was to say, hey, let's give them the bite-sized tour of what they might get in person, bring that online. And the problem is like, there's like 5 times the number of people who visit your website that even come in person to tour. Right? And so if you can increase the number of people who take that more complete tour, we find more qualified leads. So the leads we end up generating through tour end up being 4 times more qualified. So that means each lead from tour has seen the tour, they understand what they're interested in, and they become 4 times more likely to lease. And so that's one important element. The other thing is it's an and, not or. We actually integrate the 3D Matterport tours inside our experience. So we actually create 3D tours plus a video agent in the corner on some of the floor plans, right? So you can have the still narration experience but can still take a 3D tour.

What's really cool, and you didn't show this, think in the demo, and I would add it, is that you block people from taking the tour unless they put in their actual phone number and put in a code. So this is the brilliance of it. Now that might be annoying to folks, like, I just take me on the tour. But you say, hey, here's the tour. You can start the tour, pick your floor plan. You get them a bit invested. Give us your phone number, give us your email, give us your name. You click it and it's like, and okay, we just texted you a number to unlock the tour. And like, oh my God, you just forced me to give you your phone number. Now somebody's going to call me. So you actually eliminate the looky-loos. You eliminate people who are competitors trying to get information, whatever it is, you know, scammers, scrapers. And that increases the hit rate. Correct? You made that decision in the product.

You nailed it, Jason. That's exactly right. We're constantly looking at these opportunities to increase conversion, understand you as an individual, bridge the gap from basically a person's a virtual, like random analytics number on a website to a real human. That is like a very core tenet of a philosophy at Turo.

Is the product priced correctly? Because $299 a month, seems like, you know, whatever, $3,600 a year. And then I get what for that? One apartment, one floor plan, one apartment complex? What if I own 20 apartment complexes in 10 cities? Like, tell me about the pricing model and how that's going.

$30 is our starting price. We have some customers paying up to $600, $650 per month. And the thing is, one property manager might manage 10, 15 apartments.

Right?

So we price based on a tour for a specific apartment on a specific website. As the property manager, as you work with larger property managers, they, we have a large online and expand motion. We grow with almost every single property manager we're with. Right? And so they, so they go from one property with us to maybe 5 to 10 to 15. And ultimately, Touro is helping manage one of their most important sales processes, which is their tour. We over the last couple years have grown countless like opportunities from like one apartment, which is like $3,600 contract. To $60,000 contracts, $75,000 because they have per year because they work, they manage many, many.

Do they know how to get people to fill out that form and do marketing? Are they marketing savvy or are they just like once you give them the lead, close savvy, your average customer?

That's where we also are trying to fill in the middle, middle gap as well, right? So what we have seen is there's two elements to that. One, which is they might want to call the prospect immediately. Yes, that's something that they want to do. And I think that's like a natural intuition. But I think one thing that we're trying to backfill is that marketing savviness, right? This person was interested in the gym, they were interested in the floor plans. We want to, every time we not only take that lead and help follow up there or instantly to their systems, but we also want to put small retargeting signals as the person browses the tour. Say these are opportunities and moments to retarget the individual, and then you take other elements of the tour videos, maybe parts that they have not seen, and you put that as part of the retargeting message. Because today the property management ecosystem and marketing system is very disintermediated. Most of these property managers are running ads through third-party agencies who don't have this content, who aren't working with the property managers very closely.

So why don't you just offer them, hey, we can get you leads for between $75 and $150 each. Would you like us to do that and build like a little product on top of this, which is your booster that or do you have that as an option or is that not a good business?

We're working on ways to go ahead and figure out a pricing model that works. Right now we've really focused on just the nature of, we know for many of our properties we generate real tours and real leases for the business. We're constantly weighing, weighing, do we want to charge per lead or do we want to charge per lease we generated, right? Because some of the tours we, you know, help give turn into leases. And right now we're building a model that just helps us understand how much value we generate for the apartment. I think per lead is interesting. I think per lease is also really interesting.

Per lead feels like halfway through the value funnel of like doing the advertising and signing the lease. It feels weird to stop right there.

Maybe per lease would make more sense to some things you have control over and some things you don't, and it has to be simple. So that's why I was asking the sophistication level, and my guess is the sophistication level is probably between You know, if, if somebody running TikTok or the people who work at Uber or DoorDash, they're like a 10 of 10 of sophistication in getting new customers to download an app and et cetera. Facebook, like that's 10 of 10. And then like online retailers are like, you know, sophisticated ones are 8 or 9s, you know, Nike or Lululemon. They're like a 9 or whatever. I'm gonna guess these are typically like between 2 and 6 in terms of sophistication. They know enough to get themselves in trouble. They can go spend $10,000 online and get 100 leads and then none of them convert and Maybe one converts and they're underwater. That would be my perception. Is my perception close?

I think your perception is spot on, Jason. And I think the nature has to change because here's the thing, they're only going to spend more and more money on advertising. They're only going to spend more and more on these digital marketing, you know, experiences. Rent in the last 5 years has increased by 30% and it's already 28.9% of the median income, right? We're talking about a very expensive purchase. It's only growing expensive. Apartments don't know where to put their money except for, you know, advertise it somewhere. And so the problem is right now is understanding, okay, you're not spending money on Google, right? You want to put some thoughtfulness into the marketing stack.

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That was LA28.

Okay.

Yeah, I remember. So this was 2023.

Okay.

Yeah. Cause we've been doing more of them. Okay. So it's not that long ago, but you're kind of before the AI boom. I think having an AI boost product that you trust us to boost your Instagram account, your LinkedIn account, et cetera. And they authenticate with you and you just put a human in the loop, but you say it's AI boosted. But it's literally you and 2 interns who are just doing creative stuff for them for $500 a month to give them an AI boost or $5,000 a month. And then you just go spend that money on advertising, et cetera. And you make some accounts like LA Apartment Reviews and this, you know, like some, I don't wanna say burner accounts, but some accounts that are content around the market, right? So you do student housing, I think too, yeah?

Yeah, student housing is one of our biggest.

Yeah, so if you did student housing LA, student housing New York, you know, you know, Best Student Housing or Student Housing Reviews, and you had your own content strategy, and then you insert them as the advertisers in that, you could kind of come up with an AI boosting product that is 50% AI, 50% human in the loop, and maybe you could help make it more addicting for them. Because people do like to be able to click on a button in an interface and spend more money. Final question for you, the talent in the videos. What works best, having an awkward real estate broker who actually sells that apartment, who's not trained on TV, and maybe they dress like a normal civilian, not a model who does, you know, actual video tours for a living and is an on-air personality. Maybe the delivery kind of sucks where it's, you know, they got ums and ahs in it, you know, they put your nose in it. So what works better, the authenticity of a civilian or the polish of a professional?

It's somewhere in the middle. It's, it's, it's such a good question. And I'll tell you what the, what we've realized, cuz we have experimented with both. There's a magical moment that happens when someone had taken a tour online, kind of like someone meets you, Jason. They go, they take the tour online, they experience, and then suddenly that person is there when they go ahead and sign lease, right? There's a magical experience there that feels, you know, like that person had just got been scaled to the, to the website. That is like a magical moment. We've seen really high lease conversion there. I think there is something to say to be a professional when it comes to, you know, increase engagement, polish, those things come through. But there's something about that authenticity that we've seen conversion.

You might wanna think that one through. I would think that one through as a, um, coaching service or an academy. Do you have like online course material for those people in coaching?

We have Tour.University. And so, you know, the whole idea is We wanna make it easy for people to go ahead and start, you know, creating some of these tour elements. We're constantly working and trying to find new ways to teach people. For example, one of the things that we talked about in the presentation, which was like the whole idea of AI scraping, was because we want people to know what ads are currently running. Like if you talk to an apartment, they ask what ads are running, they're spending tens of thousands, tens of thousands of dollars. They legitimately don't even have any idea. They don't know what's running. They don't understand. They get shocked when I show, when we show them. These are some of the images that are running. They don't, they don't understand, right? And now with, you know, certain pieces of infrastructure, we are showing that in them. We're teaching them that they can make these changes.

All right, listen, continued success. Where can people find out more?

Please visit use2.com or more. We love to, we love to talk.

And if you are feeling inspired, you can go to gamma.app and start working on your idea and make an incredible pitch using this incredible software. All my startups seem to be moving to Gamma.app. It makes chef's kiss beautiful presentations that engage investors like me. And maybe we'll see you here on a future episode of This Week in Startups.

We're talking to a company that I've been waiting for for a long time. If you've ever worked next to marketers, you've heard the term attribution followed by foreheads smashing into desks and a string of profane words. It's a tricky, tricky thing, but it's very important. That's why Alembic is interesting to me. It's a company that thinks they have a new way to help marketers attribute information to spend to results, and they're going to take it in a broader context later on. So please join me in welcoming to the show, it's Tomas Puyk, founder and CEO of Alembic. Tomas, how you doing?

I'm good.

Attribution, in my experience working with people in marketing, it has been the never-ending problem, the impossible black box. Can you just tell people out there who aren't as familiar with the issue why it matters so much and why it hasn't been solved yet?

You know, I think the answer is it's complicated. One, two, the reason why it's so important is that you really have a couple different types of marketing that occur. One they hear about a lot is like your Google Ads, your Facebook Ads. We call that programmatic marketing, right? It's very technical, very driven. It's very good at finding people who are interested in a thing, reactivating people, stuff like you would expect. But when you want to get net new people who've never heard about you at all, You want to broaden the market, you got to go big. You're going to do like a Super Bowl commercial, or you're going to sponsor the World Cup if you're international. We had a customer we worked with who spent $100 million over 7 years to sponsor one major league team. These are incredibly large brand expenses as we talk about them.

This is called brand advertising.

Called brand advertising. But it's just basically the first time you've ever heard of a company, you usually go with that. And you know, there's been a lot of amazing movements in being able to understand how like spending a dollar on Facebook for an ad might get you money, but for the big stuff, right? Whether it's influencer work, whether it's a Super Bowl commercial, whether, you know, it's the Olympics, we know it works, but it's very, very hard to prove.

So how do we know that it works? Because I know return on ad spend— every marketer in digital context talks about how much money they're putting into Facebook and getting out of Facebook, and huzzah, ROAS! I've always been skeptical of the Crypto.com arena, or you know, Gemini sponsoring the McLaren F1 team because it seems like such a kind of an incongruous connection that it shouldn't seem to work, but people do it, so it must. But how have we known that it does before we cracked this attribution problem?

One of the most interesting things we hear is especially about like, say, the F1 side of the house, right, that you just brought up. There's a different thing that comes with a lot of these brand spends. That's hospitality. And so like, remember, marketing is not just like being a net new brand, but it's also having the best box in the world at the F1 race. So you can make the CEO of Fortune 500 show up.

So it's essentially a big, a big lure to get people to come hang out with you.

I mean, isn't all advertising to a certain extent that?

True, but I was— I think about it more as a business-to-customer versus business-to-potential-partner conversation. But maybe I'm thinking too narrowly.

We work cross-board. We work with B2B, B2C, right? So B2C is business-to-consumer, right? So selling, you know, whether that's a plane ticket or, uh, your favorite soap, whatever. And then there's B2B, which is like a company selling to another company. You know what we always say the hardest thing about being a marketer is? Everybody thinks they're a marketer. So it's actually, you've got a very sophisticated thought process to it where you think, you go, okay, marketing has a number of different purposes. One would be just get a new person in the door. The other would be how do you sell something for more because it's more valuable? How do you make a deal sell faster because people have heard about you? You have to do less validation. So all of these things, when you're talking about like stuff, you have to actually think about the world in much more sophisticated faction. You can't be like, I have a ROAS for $1. Well, what if it's terrible at that, but it doubles every deal size?

So if you don't think about just marketing as a digital advertising event where you put in a dollar, get out 2, in theory, uh, you can have disparate impacts over a longer time horizon. And that's probably why it's difficult to sort out what's actually driving impacts. And this brings us to Alembic, your company. I think you're kind of on the edge of science fiction because I was reading about spiking neural networks, which was a new term to me. You guys use those. And you talk about causal AI as a way to infer connections between cause and effect in the marketing context. So tell me how this all works.

We started the company quite a while ago, right? Really got— I think we did our incorporation papers, like just playing around in like late 2018, but we really got started in 2019. When we first started the company, we thought that what we wanted to do is we wanted to build Datadog, right? Like, which is a signal processing company. For unstructured data. We were like, okay, we want to be able to understand all things coming in marketing, whether it's brand, whether it's this, whether it's anything, right, in that space, be able to look at and actually see what had happened because that was the biggest problem at the time. And then as we started doing that and we brought in these enormous datasets from some of the largest companies in the world, we had a really intense technical staff. The reason we thought that this was such an interesting problem is you were basically dealing with one of the most complicated datasets world. It crosses every medium. Think about what we just talked about— an F1 race to TV to a digital ad to foot traffic, literally every medium and every modality. And you have to understand a huge amount of the world. So we started doing it that way, and then what we discovered was there's really two fronts to kind of the tech that we talk about a lot. One is just how do you even see the thing, right, the signal process, and the other is the causal connection.

And they're different.

You know, anybody who's worked in business for any amount of time has had this moment happen where they're talking to somebody on the technical side and they go, "I would like to predict something," or, "I would like to know about something," and someone goes, "Well, we don't have enough data for that." One of the hardest things in marketing is we have a— we did a famous case study with Delta Airlines for the Olympics. The Olympics happen for 2 weeks every 2 years. If you have daily data, which is actually pretty aggressive for a marketer, daily data, you would have 14 steps of time, 14 days. So how do you tell whether something's different or something changed when you have zero historical data.

And Delta is the Olympic sponsor, right, of the US team, which I recall from watching the Olympics. Shout out Delta's marketing team.

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Yeah, you know, the most interesting thing that occurred with Delta in the Olympics is they did this huge sponsorship and it did well for them, right? It was fine. But the thing that actually was the most effective advertising for them, the thing that actually moved people the most to both consider purchase, etc., was actually not the 30-second commercial or the 60-second commercial. At the time, Delta had, uh, worked with NBC, and one of the things what happens when you buy an enormous amount of media, right, in some cases you could be 8, 9 figures, right, buy a lot of media, they start giving you in-programming stuff. So if you watch the Olympics, you saw that Delta had the medal presenter in ceremony. So every single time an American athlete won a gold medal or a medal, it would be the medal presentation sponsored by Delta. Well, imagine you see a super emotional moment on TV, you see the Eiffel Tower in the background. One would assume you sell a lot of tickets to Paris. And so the most effective ad was actually not the 30 or 60-second spot, it was that emotional moment that was actually in the program. Wouldn't even be considered a traditional ad. Yeah, in fact, you don't even necessarily know where to account for because it usually gets brought as part of the package.

Okay, so this is where I get really curious, because if we are going to ingest all this data and then use your particular form of neural networks to, to, to deal with it, how do you know if someone saw the emotional nettle ceremony? Because I presume that me, Alex, on my couch, um, is not being count— I'm a YouTube TV subscriber. I don't know if you know. So talk me through the, the, the links there.

So where the big inspiration for all of this came from was, uh, a lot of the mathematics that came around during COVID A lot of people think mRNA, the vaccines, were the only big technology to come out at the time. The other thing that came out of it was a lot of incredible mathematics. Do you remember contact tracing?

Yeah.

So contact tracing, they had these ways where they could, uh, fairly anonymously see whether you touched somebody else. They had all this big indulgence at the time, but it was also the first time we had both the compute and the causal mathematics at scale to be able to— that do these computations, these huge simulations, and see in real time, in actual with it, to see whether we were correct. And then I woke up one morning, I was like, wait a minute, what is the difference between a contact trace and a marketing touch mathematically?

I'm gonna guess very little.

Nothing.

Nothing. Nothing.

Right.

Ah, okay.

So for every other industry, nuclear, weather, disease, drug discovery, we run these huge simulation models on supercomputers to try to figure out what's going on. We spend a trillion dollars a year worldwide on brand marketing, and we all use math from the 1960s. '70s. And so we brought those models down. So you asked, you know, think about like this, we actually have no PII in the entirety of Alembic.

Personally identifying information.

Yep, no personally identifying information. We don't even have the fields to store it. So everything we do is anonymous and aggregated and privacy respecting. But you won't think about like a singular human, you would think about it like a cohort, like a group of people, perfectly fine for when you're trying to figure out what's going on.

When we talk about causal AI, and I would Love it, Tomas, if you define that term for us. We're not talking about Alex saw X, Alex bought Y, that generated X, Z revenue for company Q. It's more like this event or thing led to a group of people doing something in particular.

Yeah. So you're going to think about it like to respect both the privacy of the individual and also just keeping it sane, you look at things in what we call cohorts and groups of people.

Okay, got it.

Got it.

And so like, say you have a bunch of users who sign up on a week and you see how quick they quit, right? That's a classic cohort. You know that there's a group of people, etc. What you care about in marketing is— it's interesting, people often think that folks, marketers, are like these stalkers who want to like obsess over the singular human. That's often not the case. Marketers just don't want to get fired, and so they just want to be able to know what's making money. And for them, when you're holding up, say, 75 million $200 million on the P&L line, right? The profits and loss sheets. You better have an answer. And so that's where all of this comes from, right? It doesn't come from a place of anywhere else. And so when we were doing, uh, causal, right, we need to be like, look, there is no world in which somebody just watches a TV ad and within 24 to 40 hours goes and buys something. Are you that person?

Depends, uh, how late at night it is and how much Taco Bell is on the television. But yeah, keep going.

Yeah, what I'm saying, right, it's, it's very rare that you get that tight. And so usually it's like you see something on TV, you Google for it on your phone, you then search all the threads on Reddit seeing whether this thing sucks or not, and then you buy it, right? It's much more complicated. And so that's why we do this type of thing where what happens at the moment is anything that you can see physically gets the credit, but everything outside of that might not. This also has a huge amount of, um, negative effects when we talk about people doing this. So think about like ragebait and clickbait. That's because you don't know if anything else works, right? You have a feeling that other stuff would. To go back to your early question, because I do want to answer, because we got— went on two separate topics. First, what is a spiking neural network? When we have very little data, like those 14 steps of time, you can't use what we call a predictive set of technologies. You can't look at something and be like, I've seen a stock trend for the last 30 years and project what it is next week. So we had to find an outlier detector. Something that could detect changes in things that required no historical data. Spiking neural networks are actually a digital twin of the human brain. You got kids, right? Yep. The first time they saw a dog or a cat, did they always know it was a dog or a cat after that? It's like there's certain things that happen in a kid's life where they're like, like it's very tight. It's a very short period of time. Yeah.

It doesn't take that long for them to go woof woof or meow meow.

Exactly. And they go like, it's very thing. So when they see an object, when a human sees an object, what it does is it can implant that pattern into its brain. So just like I'm looking at this table or I'm, you know, I touch the screen in front of me, all of that gets encoded into a neuron spike in my head.

And a neuron spike is essentially a signal.

It's a signal. I don't want to get too much into it on this, but the best way to think about it is that like the instant you see a signal, you imprint the shape of that signal onto that neuron as a threshold. So like a thing that would make it fire. And then when the next piece of data comes in, it looks at it and goes, Hey, am I the same? Am I different? It's actually doing a comparison. And so when you're looking at data and you're like, nothing has existed, suddenly the Olympics come along, that pattern, the shape of the data is literally different, right? We know something new is occurring. This obviously has much stricter mathematical things, but it's not all like an LLM or anything else. It actually happens at the time you receive data.

And because an LLM makes essentially predictions, it needs a lot more data. And so you, with your 14-day Olympic window, an LLM is just not a good fit for that. Circumstance.

Yeah, it's not that those aren't awesome, it's just that it's bad for this. And so the way to think about what the reason SNNs are great— one, they're incredibly efficient, but two, they let us be able to look at data in a way of which if you have stuff that's, uh, random or you've never experienced before, to be able to understand it. Now you can combine this with other methods to be able to see things. So when we, uh, are able to basically predict these outliers from no data at all, we get from the day we see them, that gives us a deep advantage in being like, how does our model understand things. When something matches that shape, that fires. We can be like, look, that neuron firing— did this neuron firing cause this neuron to fire? This is also how you solve what we call the normalization problems. Think about it like this. So you've got a whole bunch of signals. We talked about earlier foot traffic, Nielsen ratings from TV, right? Digital signals from Facebook. How are those all the same? They're different mediums. One's physical, one's digital. They're different modalities. How do you actually put them into a same space to even make a decision? That's because everything becomes neuron spiking, so they normalize, right? You're looking at the same thing.

So we can be like, output is the same even if the inputs are different.

Exactly. And so it puts it into a common space, a common embedding space as we often call it. Sure. This common space means that we all speak the same language and you can compare things and be like, did you cause you, et cetera. Now the causal connections are actually completely different. The, so we have to first find these spikes, then we can run a whole different set of massive mathematics to figure out whether they caused each other. They're actually different models.

Okay, so they're actually distinct technologies that work together. That makes a lot of sense.

So one, you have to figure out what are the things you want to connect to even be able to see them. And then the thing that makes the connections is a different piece of tech. Now, the thing that we do that's a bit more unique as opposed to others is most of the time when people are looking for causal connections, they're like, I have one thing I'm tracking, like sales or instances of disease or whatever. And you do everything looking backwards. You want to reverse the butterfly effect from that one object. What we do is we connect, when we connect data, we actually connect everything, every single connection that possibly exists. That means sometimes we're calculating trillions of connections for a single customer. What that does is that creates a basically space that we can search for any connection to anything. And then you can be like, in general, does this cause this?

Is the information that you get out of that sufficiently detailed, accurate? I'm not quite sure what the word there is, to help marketers go, okay, now that we know this, we're going to reduce spend here and put more spend here because we have an 80% confidence interval. Is it 100%?

Well, it depends. We actually give our customers their confidence intervals. So we're actually very transparent on it.

Are you just a mathematics project pretending to be a startup? And I mean that as a compliment, for what it's worth.

Can I note something? One of the things we often joke about is we're an applied science company. What we would say is, so are all the LLM companies. Companies, right? These labs and everything else. I have a bit of a different take on all this. And what it is, is this, is I like, look, I actually adore the LLM tech and use it all the time. We even use it for UX. But the interesting thing to note about it is I was talking to a Fortune 500 CEO literally in the last couple of weeks. And they were like, okay, CPG, here's my problem. So say I get the best model in the world, whether I decide it's, you know, Claude or ChatGPT or whatever. And say I give it to my staff. And my guy out of New York asks it, what's the best tactic to go get more sales here? And then my competitor who has the same model asks it the same question. And then we both do the same thing. How in trouble are we?

Well, it's not a Nash equilibrium, I'll tell you that.

So what I view the world as, is I say, if we don't want the world to become a giant LLM oligarchy, the way that you think about it is you think about it like the only thing that will separate people is private data. That's where all the improvements will come from. So I many years ago said that, look, I want to build the best private evolving model in the world for our customers. And then as we get bigger and bigger, we'll obviously want to service lower levels. We start big on the enterprise. And then what that does is because we can see over long swaths of time, because we can find these things that nobody else would know that's unique to them, then if you layer it in with your agents and everything else, you still have individuality. You still have a different view of competing in the market because you have your own data feeding it and that's private and therefore it's only yours.

So no one else will have the exact same view of the world that you do.

Exactly. And so you can make better decisions. There was a great guy who founded a company called Renaissance Technologies.

Oh, the hedge fund.

Yeah, super famous. The first real, first real, like, high frequency trading crazy hedge fund.

I've had friends that worked there.

Oh, man. Brilliant folks. Like, he would say that, look, all edges you can get in the market, all advantages have capacity. So if you have a big edge and you start making huge amounts of money, the market will notice. Everybody jumps in and that edge disappears. And so what I'm saying is, as you have private data, you can generate your own edges that can give you advantages over that period of time. But it's not so simple as just being like, how do I do it? And so what I would say is that, like, from my point of view is I'm like, look, I think agents are very cool. I think they're another word for API, often. I don't care whether an agent is a human or a machine. I want to be the agent to controller. And I think that we have an online evolving model that provides that individuality. And that's how you end up with more Star Trek than Blade Runner.

Good, which is what we want. And if you don't get that reference, read a book. So we're talking about a lot of compute here, Tomas. And this feeds into your last fundraise, $145 million. And you guys talked about building a second kind of cluster, I think out in San Diego. You had one in Virginia.

San Jose, actually. San Jose.

So sorry.

Yeah, it'll be ready January, I believe.

Fantastic. But an expensive proposition. I'm curious, for the other founders out there who are purchasers of cloud computing and other, you know, GPU access points, why did you guys decide to build your own clusters versus going the rental route?

Oh boy, a lot of reasons. One, just we have the skills for it. So my COO was one of the heads of cloud infrastructure at Google during the IPO, and then he built LinkedIn with Reid. My co-founder, I'm kind of like the math nerd, but my co-founder on the infra side, John, he was the 13th employee at Twitter and scaled it from a Mac mini under his desk through IPO, right? So we know how to stand up machines. The second thing is, is that we actually code our own GPU kernels, as we call them, our own low-level GPU software here. Because what we're doing is not the same as everybody else. We can't just go and use a package that everybody's already built to do what we do.

So Alembic then is a system by which it can ingest lots of different types of data into one single place. It has a particular neural network approach, which is using a digital twin of the brain to mimic or simulate neurons. Then from there, you have a system to tie cause and effect, causal AI, and you're applying it today at this particular marketing attribution world. How long, Thomas, until it's time for the next item at the top nav of your website when you add a second vertical and what will that be?

So the funny thing is, is that one of the things I love, I jokingly say, you don't ask if you have product market fit as a startup, you hold on for dear life. You know what I mean? Like you're holding onto this rocket ship and you're like, if you ask, you don't have it, right? You're just like, literally like, I cannot even get servers up fast enough. I'm dying under whatever.

Is that Alembic today?

Yeah, absolutely. Like we literally, we have a waitlist that is quite long.

Long.

Our next vertical will probably be FP&A, which is financial planning, like at the corporate level for like CFOs.

Okay, you know what, I actually really think that makes good sense. Because that, that stuff is complicated. It's stuck in legacy software. No one likes to say ERP out loud. I don't think anyone actually knows what's going on inside of most companies, including their accountants.

So yeah, the more interesting thing that we've been working on is like, say a tariff gets announced, one that we do a lot of what's called graph work, right? So we have these, you know, it looks like connect the dots, but they call them this physical structure graph. And what we do is we look at it through time, right? So we have this thing moving through space. It almost looks like stars moving through space. Could trick your head. So what ends up happening is when you have a big event outside, we call it an externality, like someone announces a tariff, you can literally physically watch it warp the graph beneath it. We can literally detect the effects of external events on the datasets below it. And so when we started seeing that, we were like, oh, that would be really, really useful.

It's olympic.com. Tomas, thank you so much for coming on. We could talk for 2 hours. Is there any job though you're hiring for that you'd love to shout out before we go?

Yes. I mean, I'm looking for anybody who is insanely curious and has a scientifically based mind that likes to code. Literally, we're looking for everything else, whether that be go-to-market or the rest. One of my favorite things about the company is a huge amount of original employees, even from years ago, still work here, right? Take a look at our site. Definitely hiring.

Well, thank you so much. We'll talk to you soon. Tomas, a pleasure. We'll see y'all next time.

Good to see you.

So we're doing another This Week in Startups flashback today. We're going all the way back to March 1st, 2016. And I was actually, when I was going through the archive, putting together clips to make these show out of, I was really surprised to discover that this company existed in March 2016. Uh, the company is Zapier on episode 626 of This Week in Startups. Jason. Had Zapier CEO and co-founder Wade Foster stop by. This is his old studio in San Francisco. For those of you longtime fans, you'll recognize it. We use Zapier very regularly today at Launch. It's one of the tools that we use all throughout Notion to help sort of tie all of the things that we're doing together. You know, we're spread out a, a bunch of different portfolios, a bunch of different sort of CRMs and management systems across different platforms. And we still use Zapier to like, if you tag a button on Notion, it'll trigger an email or it'll send you an update here. It'll post to Slack or all sorts of these integrations that we still use today. The fact remains, 10 years later, after Wade Foster was on the show pitching this idea to Jason, Jason was like, oh, Zapier, interesting. Tell me more about it. Reminds me of If This Then That. It's not only still going and still a viable company, but it has grown and become so entrenched into so many of our workflows. So that's what I thought was really fascinating to go all the way back to 2016 and find this chat. And of course with me to talk about it, Alex Will.

Thank you, Lon. Zapier is a company we all know, but I'd forgotten that it was founded back in 2011. So by the time Jason talked to Wade Foster, it had already had a half decade under its belt. Now it hasn't raised that much money, which is very interesting. It did raise a seed round, $1.2 million, October 2012. Y Combinator, Bessemer, DFJ. And then nothing, because as we learned during this interview, the company was cash flow positive. Now, Lon, I will say that more recently Sequoia did buy some shares of the company at a valuation of more than $4 billion. But I think Zapier is a good indication and reminder that you can build enormous companies that are very important to the fabric of the digital economy without needing to burn $100, $200, $500 million. I want to start, Lon, with this discussion about multi-part Zap. Now the idea here is that you can take a Zapier if this, then that kind of statement and then chain them together to do more complex, interesting things. Today, a little bit table stakes, at the time rather innovative. But what's interesting is how curious Jason was about them because he was curious about what could be automated inside the realm of white-collar work. Take a listen.

So Zapier now does these multi-part Zaps, stacked Zaps. Where I called them ZapBots. Obviously, this is like an amazing way to take something, a repetitive task that a white-collar worker does, and basically automate it. So now, if you have a bot and, you know, this white-collar worker in human resources creates the entire scheduling bot, can the scheduling bot then fire off another bot? Let's say there was a bot that somebody created in the developer team on like, let's say this This was the sales team. And the sales manager created a sales bot, a ZapBot to do sales testing, to test somebody's ability to sell. The HR bot, when it got to step 7 might be, when the person is here in the building and they've logged in, fire off this test and send them through this test. Is that what the next step is to have multi-level Zaps querying other multi-level apps.

Yeah, exactly right. You can see all these cool ways that interacts with them. In fact, you mentioned when someone's in a building, there's a company called Envoy, uh, which allows people to check into office spaces and, you know, collects their information, prints off badges, things like that. So that's exactly—

that's the thing that's happening when you're at the front desk.

Yeah, exactly.

You sign it and you're like, sign this NDA that nobody ever reads that says if you see something here, you'll never be able able to create a better life again.

There you go. So that's them. Um, but yeah, they can hook into Zapier. So that could be, you know, okay, you fit chaining off this app. Now when they show up in the building, we need to do this whole other second set of criteria that follow up from that.

So what do you think the future of work is going to be? Because I'm seeing that we don't need as many clerical people to run a larger and larger operation here at Launch.

Mm-hmm.

For example, we have, I think, 8 or 9 people, and the Launch Festival has gone every year from We've gone from, you know, 1,500 people in year 1 to 15,000 in year 8. We've literally gone 10x in 8 years, but the same number of people because a lot of the things that used to take a lot of time are now becoming more automated. So what's the future of employment, do you think? Because a lot of the low-skilled white-collar jobs are being automated. It's a hot-button issue.

Yeah, it is.

And we can put aside the fact that you and I probably believe that the more jobs will be created because of this.

Yep.

But what's the way for somebody who's listening to become proficient at these things, do you think? And what will the future of work look like for those clerical people? Will they be more like developers? Is everybody gonna be a developer? 'Cause let's face it, this is like scripting.

Yeah, it is, right? Like, this is kind of stuff— people get hired to write this kind of stuff today, right? Like, that's what Brian and I were getting hired to do 5 years ago. We were getting hired to write code that did this stuff.

Yes.

So now, like, a savvy person could probably hire themself out and pretend that they're writing code, but it's actually Zapier behind the scenes if they wanted to, right?

Right. Are people doing that?

Yeah, some people do do that, right? They say that they are going to build this stuff and then they do it and then they wait a week and then tell them that they've delivered it.

Wow. Finished it.

Yeah, right? Clever. So some clever, some young aspiring entrepreneurs right there, right? So I, you know, I think in the future you're gonna see people just using more and more of these tools that make, you know, I hesitate to say it's coding, but it's like quasi-coding, right? Like it's just scripting. Yeah, it's basic scripting.

Macros.

Yeah, macros, you know, that really puts that kind of power in their hand and lets the tools kind of just get out of their way, right? It's like the thing that's more interesting to you is how do I put on a good event, right?

Right.

Who are the people that I need to I have at my event that can talk and give interesting discussions and engage the audience and all that stuff. How the ticketing system works is just a detail that you don't want to think about. So as much as that can be automated and pushed into one simple setup thing, that's what you want to do. I think that's how these tools are really enabling more and more people to set these workflows up. So now you don't have to be as savvy, uh, as an internet user as you maybe had to be 5 or 10 years ago.

So Lon, to me, this sounds exactly like the conversation we're having today about automating white-collar work using AI agents, which are more flexible and more intelligent than a simple schema set up in Zapier. But my God, I feel like we're having the same chat still.

And he even brings up If This Then That, which was a very popular tool sort of like 15 years ago back on the web. And it was always about the same, the end goal I feel like really hasn't changed, which is I want the computer to do more things for me. Like I can automate some things, but frustratingly moving between platforms, moving between systems, moving between languages, there's all these different variables that then require me, the human, to sort of like intervene in the middle and say, oh no, do it like this, or oh no, move it like this. Or even just like something as simple as copy and pasting. We're still doing it all day, every day, constantly. And if you're moving, if you're on two laptops like me, you're doing it all. Believe me, you're doing it all the time. And so I think the promise, the promise of a computer's gonna get smarter to the point that it's gonna know you've done this 100 times, you wanna do this 101 times, I should just do it for you. That promise has been so tantalizing and so just out of reach for so long, and that it does feel like. The AI agent era. We're like on the precipice of maybe we're finally gonna figure it out. Maybe I could finally get my Amazon cart bought and unloaded to my house without me having to click the button.

I'm gonna believe we're actually there when I'm doing something for the 14th time in a day and a little bubble goes, bing, Alex, you're doing this again. Would you like me to do that for you in the future? And then we'll be there. But it's interesting. We've been working on it for a long time. Not there yet. Zapier though, crushing it though. Now, Lon, while we're thinking about the historical context here, there was an era under which APIs were a bit more locked down than they are today.

Yeah, well, especially I feel like the Twitter era when social media was sort of exploding and there was so much happening on Twitter, so many conversations were going on. There was this huge wave of apps and other products that sort of built themselves on top of that API. Like we're going to, you know, like TweetDeck very famously. Periscope, very famously, there was, there were so many of these examples. And I think that we then learned this sort of valuable lesson, or anybody watching the industry learned this lesson, which is if you rely heavily on one or two other companies' API to build your company, it's sort of an unstable foundation. They can yank that API away at any time. And now suddenly you don't have a company. And we, we are still of course seeing this. Gummisearch, a tool that I love that was built atop Reddit. That used AI to help you search Reddit. It's being shut down because Reddit has shut off their access to the API. So we are still sort of living in this world, but you kind of forget about it now because websites are, they're so eager to interconnect and yet everybody learned their lesson. And so founders really aren't building entire companies that are like, we scrape Twitter and then do, well, Twitter is X. I don't feel like there's a whole wave of companies that, that are built atop other apps that we all use because everybody sort of learned this lesson. And actually, in an interesting way, Jason was just sort of recently talking about this in terms of OpenAI. Like if you build your product atop OpenAI's API, they're gonna be peeking at what you're doing and it will be very easy for them one day to be like, we should start doing that and rip you off. So we are kind of still having this API conversation. It's really fascinating to go back 10 years and hear about an earlier version of the same discussion.

So, speaking of, uh, APIs and Twitter, how is Twitter and them pulling back on their API and then saying, then changing their mind now, when you look at that kind of change, did that change how you build your service? Uh, no. Because there's some limits, aren't there?

There are, um, and you see this often with consumer platforms, right? Um, who are figuring out their platforms. Twitter has done this, LinkedIn's done this, Facebook's Facebook is notorious for doing this.

Pulling the rug out from under developers?

Yeah, or just changing things, right? It's not always pulling the rug out, it's just, you know, they're trying—

Just in those three cases it was.

It was, yeah, but they're trying a new thing, trying a different thing here, right? And the thing there is that their customer is ad buyers, right? And so that's who they end up serving. And so the API platform has to serve the ad buyers as well. And so that kind of creates an interesting friction that you don't necessarily get in B2B, right? You know, when you're looking at Salesforce developer platform, it's all about empowering the end user of salesforce.com. And so the API is built to empower people to use more of Salesforce and get even more out of Salesforce. They don't care if you log into Salesforce every day. They care if you're getting value out of the data that's in Salesforce. So if the API helps you get data into Salesforce and pull data out of Salesforce and makes Salesforce more sticky, then of course Salesforce is going to invest more in their API.

The more integrations you build, yeah, the less likely you are to get rid of that core component.

Exactly right.

You're the building block.

It is, it's a, it's this, and that's what you see with like Slack blowing up and why they've done so much to invest in integrations is because it makes Slack sticky and you don't want to leave anymore.

Because it is interesting, one of the reasons we didn't leave HipChat Slack, even though some people on the team were like, well, I'm using Slack for this other project, we move over to Slack. I was like, you know what, we have so much Zapier plus HipChat, I don't want to spend a weekend or two, like, changing all the integrations. And then the people who are on Slack with my other company, Mm-hmm, Insights on Slack, not— and then Launches on HipChat. Yep. They have the opposite problems, like, oh yeah, we built all these custom integrations and da da da da, that they built themselves. Mm-hmm. We can't get off Slack, right?

Yeah, yeah. What happens when someone leaves the company?

And yeah, I mean, the whole thing is super complicated. So yeah, with Facebook, LinkedIn, and Twitter, then you're saying, hey, you could remove the value, the core value could be extracted from those consumer platforms, and then a third party could kind of take away the business that should be their core business, right? That's that's their concern.

That's what Twitter was worried about, right? With people basically replicating the Twitter feed in Twitter clients, right? It's like, now you don't have to use Twitter.com or officially sanctioned Twitter clients, you're using some third-party client that maybe isn't pulling in ads in a way and getting, you know, showing ads to users.

Was that a mistake?

Um.

In your mind? Would you do the same thing?

You know, it's tough to know if I was in their shoes. It sure angered a lot of developers, right? And I think that's It's— it seemed to have hurt them, right? They— you don't see nearly as much interesting things happening within the Twitter developer ecosystem as you did, you know, 4 or 5 years ago.

So the— if Twitter were to allow people again to make their own clients and to display the feed however they wanted and just have fun with it, that'd probably be a good move.

I think it would. Maybe, I don't know if it's too little too late, or, you know, if, you know, it's certainly— I don't know that it would hurt too much, right?

All they have to say is you can't monetize it. Mm-hmm. Monetize. I say it wrong. Monetize. But you can't monetize it, right? So if you want to do it, you just can't insert ads into the stream. If you want to put ads in, you have to put our ads in. So if you created, you know, Wade Foster's, and I created Jason's Twitter client, and we had different ideas why ours were better.

Mm-hmm.

We could put in Twitter ads and then take a percentage of them, but we couldn't put a third-party ad in. That would be a fine concession.

Yeah, it might be, you know. It all comes down, you know, Twitter's operating at a billion-dollar scale, right? Like, so now the thing is, is Wade Foster's Twitter client or Jason's Twitter client enough of a big deal for them? And I guess they probably run the numbers and said, you know, it's just not that big of a deal for us. —But I don't know. I'm not Twitter.

It's interesting because if you think about it, Google allows you to do search from Firefox, Chrome, Opera, or any flavor of browser, Dolphin, and they give you 30% if you have your own browser of whatever search results come up. So, like, we're getting 70%. Yeah. So if I was running Twitter, if I was Jack, you should just say anybody who makes their own client can take 30% of whatever revenue is shown in that client. Mm-hmm. Because it would just drive people to create more interesting clients. Yeah. So if I want to create just basketball, just all the basketball stars, you open it up, it's basketball Twitter. Mm-hmm. And I take a third of the revenue or 30% of the revenue, they're still getting 70%, and it might make people who are into basketball more interested in Twitter.

I also like that, uh, Jason shouts out HipChat in this discussion, a service that in 2016 felt very relevant. And I honestly don't know if I've thought about much since then.

It's funny though how it all comes down to money, because in the conversation Jason's like, what about ads? Are they getting served? How does the money work? And companies like Reddit were like, hey, we want to conserve monetization. Reddit went through a similar lockdown of its applications. You mentioned Gummy Search, but this actually happened as well a few years back when they were crimping down on third-party apps. And at the time people were like, oh, they're being greedy, they just want us to use their application. No, it was all about AI training And so the idea of open or closed gardens, who can get over the wall for what reason, how does the money flow? It's almost like law. There are some things in technology that are just business and therefore will never actually be fully resolved.

The other sort of very famous use case for this would have been like the Zynga games and Facebook, where for a long time it was like, you got to, you know, go FarmVille. And then Facebook was like, why are we just hosting these billion-dollar enterprises for Zynga? We should just make them make our own games or kick them out. And, you know, it's, it's sort of always the push-pull. You want to put your product in a place where all the people are. You want to meet them where they're already hanging out, but then you have to play by somebody else's rules and you're setting yourself up for a big fall if they decide to rip you off or cut you off.

Speaking of playing by other people's rules, if you go work for a company, you are under their regime. You have to follow their protocols and rules. And Zapier at the time was a remote team. Jason was curious about this. How do you keep your team motivated? How do you keep them on track? And how do you ensure that they're actually doing the work? Take a listen.

And you got 100% distributed team with no central office. So you have 36 people working from home. Yep. So you're kind of like that Matt Mullenweg. Yeah, yeah. Automatic. Yep. Mm-hmm. How do you know that people are working? How do you manage that issue? People leave a digital trail, right?

When they work these days. Mm-hmm. Um, whether it's Slack logs or GitHub commits or publications on a blog or what have you. There is a digital trail of did you do this thing or not, right? Yeah. So I think that's really what it comes down to. In a lot of ways, I think it's more efficient because now you're looking at the byproduct of the work rather than necessarily looking out over the room and seeing people in the chair, which isn't work in and of itself.

Absolutely. It's a lot more pure. Exactly. And do you actually do that, or you just spot-check it? How does, how does one manage this distributed workforce like this at scale? Yeah, because it's one thing to manage 10 people in a chat room, but to manage 36 and then eventually 100, slightly different, right? Yeah, it is a little different.

Um, you know, we have a pretty basic way we do it, which is every week people write what we call a Friday update. And so in our— we have an internal blog— you publish, hey, here's what I, I took care of this week, here's what here's what I'm going to tackle next week, and here's some fun stuff I'm doing this weekend or whatever. That's good. Yeah, which is nice for remote. But then whoever the team leads are, they can go through, check, make sure that people on the team are making progress. Not just making progress on the task, but are they making progress in the right direction? Do we have one person running this way and one person running that way? Well, if so, maybe we need to reconsider how we operate. So those Friday updates are just a really quick, easy way to— so everyone knows like, hey, this is, this is the pulse of Zapier. This is kind of what is moving.

And you put it on the internal blog. That's brilliant.

Yeah, it's all, it's all public and transparent on the internal blog. So everyone kind of knows here's what's happening and you can go read anyone else's if you want. Right. So like an engineer can go check out what's happening in marketing, can go check out what's happening. It's just like a WordPress blog or something. Yeah, we used to use a WordPress blog called Zapier P2, which is the same thing that Automattic uses. We actually have now built our own variant of it because it was so important for us that we were like, we want to, we wanted to specialize in a few ways.

I love that idea though. It's just like, and so you get to work from home, but you have to self-report. Exactly right. So the cost is like, because some people get offended when you're like, write down a list of everything you did like for the week. And it's like, are you micromanaging me? And it's like, No, you get to work from home, dude, or dudette. It's pretty freaking cool. Exactly.

I don't think it's write every single micro task down. It's more just, hey, give us the broad overview. Tell me where to go look. If I want to see the specifics of that commit, just link me to the commit so I can go see. All right, here's the hundreds of lines of code you wrote this week.

Here's how it works.

Here it's tested. All right, a manager can make sure, do code review, not just a manager, a teammate, like, you know, a lot of check in on it. Yeah. Yeah. You know, you rely on your teammates that are doing work too. So like you have to collaborate, you have to be able to check these updates, make sure that teammates have access to what other teammates are doing and can, can benefit from that shared work.

Zapier's sort of ahead of the curve. I mean, we now think of having an entirely remote team as, you know, just another day doing business in the tech industry, but in 2016, 2015, this was well before COVID lockdowns. This was well before, you know, quiet quitting or whatever. Like this was still an era when most companies were expecting most people to show up to work.

Yeah, absolutely. But I do love that we're still having again the same conversations because we're talking about end of week roundups. What are you working on? People taking a look into like the checklist of people's operations. It's almost like technology doesn't change that much. Like this, this is the funny thing to me. We're still talking about Slack. In this conversation 10 years ago and today. We're still talking about remote work then and now. I'm still a big believer in remote work. I know Jason's kind of gone to the other side of things here, but it seems like it didn't hurt Zapier too much to have a mostly remote team.

No, it really doesn't. And I also thought this was a, this is a fascinating look back into history because sort of the idea of self-reporting, like, well, if you're gonna work remote, you've gotta post multiple times a day, let everybody know what you're doing. You gotta be, So much extra communicative to make up for the fact that your boss can't just stop by the office and peer over your shoulder and see what you're doing. And this became such a huge discussion during the sort of Doge era when Elon Musk was asking government employees to do this. And a lot of tech leaders were saying, I definitely wanna do a start of day, end of day, end of week type reporting. We do those at Launch. It's a big thing that Jason's a big believer in. And they were already sort of discussing this same conversation back in 2016. I really liked Wade Foster's point that if you really think about it, you can tell who's being productive because everybody leaves a digital trail. That's the phrase he used, which I love. It's like, even if they're more efficient, it doesn't— you can't tell how much time somebody is spending necessarily remotely, but you can tell they got these 5 big tasks done today. And if you're not looking at work that way, well, maybe you should be.

I mean, there is a performative aspect to sitting in the office and looking very, very busy and very stressed out, arriving early, staying late, but taking a long lunch so you look more productive. I mean, people play these games, right? And I'm not trying to say that every remote worker out there is an absolute saint who should be given a raise and more responsibility. But, uh, I do like that Zapier was ahead of the curve here, and, uh, I think it's worked out for them pretty well.

I mean, that concept they— that, that Wade discusses in this segment of the internal blog. Well, we wouldn't call it a blog today, but the, the idea that there's a central place everybody's going, they're posting about what they're doing. You can look at what everybody's doing. And so you could, if you were the boss, you could look at their blog post and say, well, that doesn't sound like a whole day's worth of work. What did you do for the rest of the day? So like, it's not that there's no way to check up, but it's not as rigidly like hour-based as I think a lot of employers are. Where it's like, I need to know that you're very, very busy, sweat dripping from your brow, hunched over the keyboard for 10 straight hours every day, or I'm not getting my money's worth. And you know, it's not good for that.

As a very bursty worker myself, uh, I really approve of this model. Next up, Jason and Wade Foster discussed how he forgets that he has the application that he's using it because it is essentially software that works in the background and does stuff for you so that you don't have to do it. Take a listen.

One of the things about Zapier I find is I forget that I have it. Yep. Because I set it up to solve a specific task. It's an invisible invisible tool too. It is an invisible tool, right? Like, I don't have to log in to actually experience it. It's just occurring in the background. And so I've always, like, wondered with a product like yours, it's almost like I wish there was somebody who would come in and audit our company. Yeah. And teach everybody in our company, like, all 8 or 9 or 10 people in Launch, here's how it works, here's how to leverage it. Yeah.

Go. Yep, totally. Yeah, this is something where we actually started experimenting experimenting with early this year. Like, we have Jess, who's running our concierge program, who is doing this, right? Concierge. Yeah, fancy name, right?

I like that idea, though.

So yeah, Jess will talk to a person and say, hey, you're using these 5 or 6 apps. You know, well, based on what we've seen across our hundreds of thousands of other people who are using Zapier, have you thought about setting this up? Would this be valuable? I can set this up for you, right? Wow. So we started experimenting with this. You know, I think it— Some early signs are pretty positive. I think this is pretty common in a lot of industries, right? You have like a services component to the company. So we'll see if that's something that ends up taking off or not. But I think it is. I think a lot of people are in similar boats to you as they've got this tool, right? It's like, it's like having a spreadsheet. You have a spreadsheet. Yeah. What can it do? Yeah.

What can it do? How could this help me get my job done?

Exactly. So you've got all these tools now laying around. And you just need like a little inspiration to figure out what's the next, what's, what do I, what do I do with it, right?

Now the reason why I wanted to bring up this segment is that again, I'm hearing an echo of current trends in the past because they're talking about concierge service and helping and auditing, figuring out what people are using it for, where they're not using it, how to get more out of it. And we've talked on the show lately about forward deployed engineers from major AI companies that go into a business and help them set up let's say a new AI model or a set of AI agents, and then help them kind of figure out the process to actually use that technology. And here, 10 years ago, Zapier is doing a similar thing. Now, they were very early in this process. They were doing more of an experiment, whereas today I feel like your Palantirs and your OpenAIs, et cetera, are more aggressive about it. But again, people need help, and that has not changed in the last decade.

It echoes a lot of what you hear with sort of how AI is deployed and how a lot of AI engineers and researchers are feeling like the current era is very like demand-focused. Like I go to ChatGPT and I type in what I want. I tell Claude what I need an answer for. I ask Gemini to make me an infographic. And one day the, the idea is that AI is maybe just gonna always be kind of hanging out, listening to us passively in the background. And then it will figure out, Lon needs some help. I'm gonna just jump in and write that for him or give him the right answer. We actually, when we first brought producer Claude from Anthropic into This Week in Startups, this was my idea. I was like, can we just have Claude listen? And if he's got background, be like, actually I could add, you know, like have him alert us that Claude has an insight. We're not quite there yet, but I'm really excited about the day when we can sort of forget that you've got these AI applications on. And then they will just remind you by being helpful and then they will go away again. Obviously that means we have to let them listen to us all the time. I know that's not ideal privacy-wise, but—

I really do think that we're going to have eventually our own personal AI instances that are so locked down that that won't be an issue as long as you can trust the overall privacy architecture. But you know what? That is not the topic of today, Lon. Let's stay on topic. I'm not going to let myself wander into that forest. Just to wrap up here, Lon, Jason wanted to know Zapier's holy grail. What is that? The absolute— end of the tunnel? What are they looking forward to building in the future? Take a listen.

What are these services that you guys want to add and that you'll add in the future that you think will be like the Holy Grail and really sort of— that are frustrating that you can't add them today but that you could? Like, there's a wish list of things. Yeah, why doesn't Google allow us to put search in here? Well, I think Google Search is a closed ecosystem, right? There's no API for it.

Um, I don't know. Um, I think it— yeah, I think it is closed. I mean, the one that we're, you know, waiting for bated breath with is Microsoft's Office suite, right? Like, traditionally, you know, Excel and Outlook and Word and all that stuff have been kind of a closed ecosystem. So I guess we'll see what happens. You know, I'm cautiously optimistic that this will— with Office 365, now they're definitely moving in that direction, right? They've had some announcements around, you know, APIs coming soon sort of thing. So we're pretty excited about that because the world still, like, as much as, you know, we like to talk about new tools and, you know, we've talked about all the cool tools we've used today, the world still runs on email and spreadsheets. Like, most businesses are using that still. And so just, you know, getting access to the world's most popular email and spreadsheet tool is pretty exciting, even if it is kind of boring.

It's really an amazing product. I highly recommend people go take a look at it. It's super cheap. 5 plans, and they range from free to $125 a month. And then, have you gotten into any huge enterprises yet, or do they just— you let the groups just put them on their corporate cards?

Yeah, pretty much. You know, people will hit that $125 limit every now and then and ask us for higher plans, and we'll— we oblige. Willingly, of course, but we, we haven't, you know, it's still all self-serve credit cards. Um, we don't have a sales team or anything like that today.

I love when people get what their ultimate dream was because he says in this clip that the white whale, the ultimate integration for Zapier would be Microsoft's Office suite. It's this closed ecosystem. So many people are on it. It's what runs the business world. Everybody's on Office and it was like the far off distant fantasy. And if you go onto the internet today, Microsoft Office 365 completely integrated with Zapier. Wade made his dream come true and how, how proud of him we all are.

And we make fun of people that want to manifest their success. Well, here's a guy going on a little podcast back in the day and he brought Microsoft, now a multi-trillion dollar company, to heel to open up the darn doors. Shout out to Zapier, man. I mean, what an amazing company. I think it's going to be one of these IPOs that when it does happen is going to really impress impress a lot of people. Now, there's not a lot of venture pressure to get them out the door because they've only raised a handful of millions of dollars. But I mean, they're going to want to list eventually, Lon, right? We're not going to be left in the dark for another 10 years wondering how much money they make.

It's just become such an essential tool. I mean, that, that's why I was so surprised that it had such a long shelf life before we all sort of became aware of it, because today it seems unthinkable that we would run our entire system without Zapier. It's a, it's a fundamental building block of everything that Launch does. And so that was really surprising. And back when Wade came on This Week in Startups, it was talking about, you know, his dream one day of Microsoft Office or whatever. They didn't even have a sales team. They weren't even focused on enterprise sales at all. They were selling Zapier to individuals with credit cards. And so to see the growth from then is unbelievable.

Speaking of growth, this entire segment was shot in what appears to be a WeWork. Like there's just people walking, walking by and Jason's talking about launch having like 8 people or something.

Jason has a great love of coworking spaces. It's where we tend to find ourselves there.

It's almost like he's an extrovert.

Coming to you from the Capital Factory here in Austin, Texas.

I'm coming to you from my home office of Introvert Castle. All right, everybody, this has been This Week in Startups. Lon, you're the best. Thank you for finding these amazing clips. More flashbacks coming your