Wade Foster - CEO of Zapier com On Running A Remote Company & Leading In The Future of Work

Welcome to the Boundless Podcast, exploring the human side of work. I'm your host, Paul Millard, and I'm fascinated with how we can imagine past the default path to do things that matter. I have conversations with entrepreneurs, freelancers, and thinkers who are questioning the role of work in our lives, who are thinking about how we can unlock creative potential in ourselves and organizations, and are carving new paths in the world to create a more human, future of work. If you want to support the podcast, check out the Patreon link in the show notes. And for more information, go to boundlesspod.com. Today I'm talking with Wade Foster, who's the co-founder of the company Zapier, which he founded and led for 7 years. Uh, it's a company that helps automate workflows in the web. I will actually give you a plug here. I use the service to run my own business. As a solopreneur and find it very helpful. His company is RemoteRun, and he's literally written the book on running a remote company. Welcome to the podcast, Wade.

Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Paul. Thanks for having me.

I am excited as well. So I'm looking forward to diving into learning more about running a remote company, how you're thinking about that, how you're thinking about technology and the web. And just wanted to put that on hold for now and go back to your path. Uh, and we actually have a similar background. I also went to a state school and got an industrial engineering degree. For me going into a path like that, it was a very structured, kind of very clear vision of what I might be doing after college. So you're walking on Missouri's campus as a freshman. What were you thinking about your life and what your, what path you might take at that point?

I had no clue. I really had no clue. Same here. Yeah, I mean, I liked, so I showed up to Mizzou, you know, starry-eyed 18-year-old kid who, you know, I didn't really know much about what the future holds. I was a pretty good student. I was good at science and math. So I was like, I'm gonna try this engineering thing out and see like if I like what's going on over there. I also was into music a lot, so I spent a lot of time in the music program at Mizzou as well. And I kind of fell into industrial engineering mostly because I liked efficiency, like I like doing things well, I like reducing waste, I liked kind of just the philosophy behind what industrial engineering is and could be. And so I kind of fell into that and really enjoyed like the coursework and the problem space. The thing is, we kind of went through the program though, is a lot of my peers, when they started looking at career paths and things like that, it ended up being like manufacturing facilities, right? And that sort of thing. And while I appreciated the problem space, I couldn't see myself working in that environment. That was not a thing that I got super excited about, was showing up to work in a manufacturing plant every single day. And so that kind of started getting me to think like, well, I like these problems, but I don't like the work cultures and the workspace around these types of things. So what should I do? Uh, and that kind of was a fork in the road for me.

Funny enough, that resonates very closely to my story as well. I, uh, I remember interning on a manufacturing floor and I, same thing. I loved the coursework, right? Like lean manufacturing, respect for people, solving problems, removing waste. Then you get to the manufacturing floor and it is just pure chaos, pure stress. People are firefighting and it's like, oh man, this— if I choose this path, this is going to be a very stressful life. And, uh, for me, I tried to start thinking about different, uh, paths.

Yep, 100%. And, you know, I think for me about that time, uh, also 2008, the kind of financial crisis hit as well. And there wasn't a lot— like, a lot of the people that were hiring kind of pulled back hard on hiring, right? And so it was harder even for good students to just kind of— you couldn't just like walk your way into a job anymore. Like, you really had to prove like, hey, I'm something special as a student. And you know, I was good student, but I wasn't like— I didn't have like a bunch of extracurriculars or a bunch of other things that I could point to and be like, I'm more than just like kind of a decent student. And so I kind of started hunting around for like alternative paths and I found a small software company in Columbia, Missouri, which is where the University of Missouri is. And they were like, you know, 6, 7 people looking for some help on marketing of all things. And I was like, I don't really know much about marketing, but I started to read up on like Google AdWords and I like this idea of making money on the internet and I thought it was really cool that you could distribute, like, you know, whether it was software or, you know, a podcast or blog posts, like, you could put this out there in the world and like anyone could like potentially see that. And I thought like, wow, that's like a really cool thing. And so I somehow talked them into hiring me as an intern to do marketing at the software company. And that honestly was like kind of eye-opening for me. It kind of opened my eyes to the world of like the internet. And really, um, give me a different perspective on what, uh, life could look like.

That's, uh, that's pretty amazing. I, so I perused your LinkedIn profile and you have a phrase in there which really caught my eye as somebody that hates boring presentations. Uh, you, you said for, I think for a class you were helping with, you helped create slide decks that weren't boring. So talk to me about how you think about presentations and what helped you do that.

Oh my goodness. I had a— I was the TA, the teaching assistant for this professor who taught the massive Marketing 101 course that like, you know, I don't know, 1,000 students a semester like took this course. It was like just a giant lecture hall. They pack them in there. And the teacher, he had like a big personality and he— his slides were just like incredibly boring. But like he had this really like engaging storytelling, like way that he would walk into this big lecture hall and he would— he could grab the attention of like the students there pretty well just because of his personality. And so I was like, I just kind of had this idea of like, you know, he should not have like these bullet point slides. Like I basically just did the TED Talk thing where it's like, you know, big pictures, like a core concept, you know, I'd find like an internet meme. GIFs weren't really much of a thing in 2008 or so. So I just find like an internet meme or something like that. You know, I'd plaster it on there, try and find stuff that would resonate to, you know, college freshmen basically, that would make them laugh and make them like feel like they wanted to show up to this class and something that suited this professor's teaching style, his personality. And so, you know, I probably like tripled the number of slides in like his deck, but really narrowed the focus of each of the slides. And I think they probably were more engaging than what he had in the past. I don't really— I can't say for sure, but he told me that he liked them, so I guess it worked.

That's awesome. So it sounds like you were almost accidentally picking up these skills, which were almost perfect for the economy that has emerged today. Storytelling, digital marketing, learning about technology? Were you thinking about it in any practical way at the time?

I don't— I hadn't put it all together for sure, but there was kind of just like this, this thirst for like picking up on new skills. And, you know, I kind of fell backwards into doing like a bunch of email marketing at that software company. And I, you know, ended up like trying to do some sales and business development for them. And then I started doing AdWords. Then I started to try to like make their blog take off. I did like some grant writing even, which was like kind of interesting in a way that I don't really want to ever do it again, but still interesting nonetheless. And all those skills, you know, they kind of like— there wasn't a complete picture, but it was like I had this grab bag of things that I could kind of fall back on. And then I was good enough at learning things and like, I was just curious enough that I was like, oh, maybe I should try doing some of this stuff or maybe I try doing this. And so like I started to teach myself to code and I started to do like some frontend development and some backend development. And, you know, I don't know that I ever got really great at any one particular thing, but this like grab bag of skills and this like curiosity and this willingness to just try things ended up being super useful both in my early career, but then also in starting Zapier too.

Right. It, uh, it almost sounds like, uh, graduating in probably the worst job market in the history of the world, uh, was, uh, somewhat of an advantage. Yeah.

I think it probably pushed me to try things that I maybe otherwise would have not been willing to do. Like I had to work harder to find a job and As a result, it kind of was like, okay, I should be smarter about how I'm doing this stuff. So that plus, you know, looking at, you know, look, working in a manufacturing facility made me go, one, I gotta be better at the things that I'm doing. Like, I can't just be like, I just can't coast as a good student. Like, there has to be a, I have to be better, just period. And then two, I was like, it's, I want to find something that's interesting and engaging and exciting for me. Because I'm gonna be doing this for a lifetime, so I want to have fun doing it too. Like, I, you know, of course it's a job and, you know, some things are a job and you do some things that kind of stink, but on the whole I should be excited about what I'm doing on a day-to-day basis.

So let's jump to Zapier. When was the first moment this, like, what was the smallest moment or piece of idea that eventually turned into Zapier? Was it a conversation? Was it a problem you're trying to solve? Solve?

So Brian and I— Brian's one of my co-founders— we had been doing some freelancing. We were playing, we were also playing in a jazz blues quartet. So we were spending just a lot of time, you know, playing music, building stuff, hanging out. And, you know, we'd banter ideas back and forth pretty regularly. And one of the things like we kind of stumbled across was you know, we were building these like one-off like integrations for clients. We built like a WordPress plugin, a WordPress Forms plugin that you could collect forms on WordPress, spin up a contact form or anything like that. And I remember we built a way for you to push those things into Salesforce and other places like that. And there's a few people that really liked it. And then we had like a person asking about a PayPal QuickBooks thing. Brian kind of had the realization and he messaged me one day while we're at the day job and he says, you know what, I think we can build a thing that allows you to connect all these sort of like tools that are these up-and-coming tools, things like Woofu and Zendesk and Mailchimp and Basecamp, things that were like starting to get pretty popular but like definitely not mainstream at all yet. He's like, I think we can build a way to connect all these things together that allows these folks who are looking for these integrations but not technical to just do that themselves. And, you know, at the day job, I was messing around with the Marketo API and not having a lot of success. And so I was— I thought, wow, if this existed, this would just make my life more interesting. And so when he shared the idea, I was like, wow, that's a no-brainer. We should go We should go work on that. We should try and do something. And so we took the idea to this startup weekend in Columbia, Missouri, teamed up with Mike and built like a functioning prototype in 54 hours. Wasn't very good, but it like kind of works. Like you could send PayPal, say like you could take a PayPal customer and log them in HiRISE, or like if someone tweeted a keyword, you could get a text message about it. So like we had a couple of little things that it could do. In the early days. And it was so much fun to build it out. And like, we were just, we were just young and excited about the concept of something like this existing. And Brian and I hooked up the Monday after that weekend and said, you know, should we like try and make a thing of this? Like, can we, could we do something around this? And we kind of said, yeah, I think we, I think we could. And so We wrote Mike and said, "Hey, you want to make a thing of this too?" And he was like, "Yeah, I think I could do that too." And so we're in Columbia, Missouri, you don't go raise a bunch of money or anything like that. So we just decide like, okay, let's just start building. And nights and weekends, we would build. It would be from 6:00 PM till midnight, 1:00 AM, 2:00 AM. Sometimes 3 AM, we would just work on this project and kind of push it forward every day just a little bit, um, just to try and bring it into the world.

Was this question maybe out of left field? Did— how did, uh, jazz or, uh, that influence how you thought about starting a company?

I don't know that You know, I think probably the biggest thing Jazz did for me, and I don't know that I realized it at the time, but I very much was used to just kind of following a path that was in— like, I would just take the path of least resistance oftentimes. Like, in school, I would just kind of, you know, take the courses that I would take. Engineering, hey, that seems like it's interesting and well-paying jobs. I guess I'll go do that. You know, teacher assigns homework, I go do the homework. You know, things just kind of— you just kind of take the path of least resistance and stuff works out. But in jazz, like, there's not like rules like that. I mean, there's kind of some rules. You have some— this is the chord structures and things like that that you have to follow. But then it's kind of on you to like make something cool and interesting out of that. And then like the people you're hanging out with in like the jazz world, they kind of beat to a different drum. And so they're like, they're kind of doing things off the deep, off a different path. And so you kind of get exposed to this world that's like just a little different. And I think that influenced my thinking and it gave me a little bit of permission to say, you know what, maybe the path of least resistance isn't like a great path. Like, there's lots of interesting things and lots of interesting forks on this road that you can, that you can try and go down. And, you know, maybe they work out, maybe they don't, but at least you did something interesting and unique that, and got an experience that most other people don't get to do. And so I think it just kind of, it kind of shook me out of my, you know, element and said, go try, try stuff. And when you start a company, like, that's all you're doing is like, you, there's no rules in front of you. It's just build, just figure it out.

That's, uh, that's pretty cool. So let's fast forward. You, you're building the company, you end up becoming part of Y Combinator and starts taking off. You said about 9 months in One of your co-founders was moving back and you decided that you were going to found it as a remote company. Now, was this— I mean, I think this was pretty early in terms of thinking about remote-only companies. There are other companies like Automattic, Basecamp, but what was the decision? I mean, it was pretty obvious if you're going to keep that founder involved, but What were some of the influences and how you were thinking about it at the time?

Yeah, I think there was, I guess, 3 things really at the time. One, Mike was, you know, moving back from the Bay Area. He was moving back to Missouri to be with his then-girlfriend, now wife. And, you know, we're not going to kick a critical member of the team out just because of, you know, a few miles. The internet, you know, we could work on the internet. We've done this before as a side project. We work nights and weekends and like we'd been in like weird situations before and it worked out fine. Fine. So we're like, yeah, we'll do this remote thing. So that was one. The second thing was we were at a point where Zapier was starting to like see some pretty good traction. We had like quite a few users and we had to figure out how we were going to grow a team to support all these users. I was like waking up and working from 8 or 9 o'clock till about 3 o'clock every day just doing customer support. We'd never hired anyone before. It was not a skill that was in my repertoire. I didn't know what it meant to evaluate talent, to think about what a culture looked like, any of that sort of stuff. That was not a skill I'd honed yet. I went around and asked some mentors and some smart folks and said, "Hey, what advice would you have around this?" It came back and said, "Why don't you just hire old colleagues, people that you've already worked with, people that you trust?" where there's already rapport built up and it kind of de-risks hiring a little bit for you.

Right.

And we just moved to California, so we didn't know anyone in California. All the people we knew were back in the Midwest.

Oh, okay.

And so the first guy we hired, um, was a former roommate of mine that I'd worked with. And then a second person we hired, um, was a guy who ran the local meetup at Columbia, Missouri that we knew. The third person we hired was a former teammate of mine at another company. And so we were kind of just shortcutting this hiring process by hiring smart people that we knew rather than getting good at hiring, but they were stretched across the Midwest and not in California. Uh, and so that kind of set us down this path of we're being a remote company. And then I guess the third thing was, perhaps it was us being naive, we just thought like, okay, you know, Basecamp's doing this, GitHub's doing this, Automatic's doing this. There's some smaller companies at the time like Buffer and Help Scout that were doing this too. Like there was enough companies, you know, we were like, this could be done. This isn't like an impossible thing to do. And the arguments for, you know, why to do it remote made sense to us. We're like, well, of course that should work. And so we just went down that path. It didn't seem like a big deal to us.

But it sounds like it was more than you imagined when you started.

Well, it was— it, it worked for us. Like, it works great. There were certainly people who thought we were crazy, like in 2011, 2012. People were like, ah, this remote thing will never work. No big company has ever been remote. Like, there's no way you'll ever scale this thing. You're insane for doing this. It just, it just won't work. You know, fast forward to 2018 now, and I get emailed every week by, you know, CEO, VC, you know, an executive. How do you do this? How does this work? We got to do this. We got to figure this out. We can't hire anyone in the Bay Area. Like, how are we going to do this remote work thing? And so it's totally gone, done a 180 now, 6 years later. But at the time, people were, they were, they thought like remote thing was kind of this, this weird side thing that like only, you know, no real companies did it that way. Real companies go to an office.

Yeah. I've, I've talked to several founders at this point who are building remote-only companies and it's really shifted my thinking because I see so many benefits just in terms of how they're being intentional about their teams and culture that when people— I've had people that email me and say, hey, do you know anyone for this job? And it'll be like, has to be located in New York, New York. And I'm just thinking to myself, you're asking people to move to one of the most expensive places on earth to make $60,000 and you're having trouble finding people. It's like, does it have to be located here? And they're like, yes, it has to be located here and it's like, oh my gosh, it's like, I think I need to short these companies.

Yeah, you're handcuffing yourself. You're making your job harder. You're trying to play basketball with one hand behind your back.

I was asking one of my friends who built a remote company and I said, what would you ask Wade Foster? And he was most curious about trust. And you've written a bit about trust and said that I think the default is you have to actually think about trust much more, right? Because you can't just look over there and say, this person is in their chair. You have to actually trust that they're going to do work and do good work.

Yeah.

But have you found any helpful rituals or routines that help, like, build that trust in a remote basis?

Yeah, we've gotten better at this over the years. I think when we started, the default thing was we just extended trust as the default, right? We said, hey, we trust you to work wherever you want to work from. We trust that you're going to get job— get the job done. When we made the offer, it's like, hey, we trust you. We think you're smart. We think you're talented. We want you to come work here. We're going to treat you like an adult. And just come do good work. That's all we ask. And I think for a set of the population, that's a really appealing value proposition because the default for most companies is they don't trust you. They ask you to clock in first thing in the morning. Right. You know, they ask you to clock out at lunchtime. They ask you to do these just like, you know, you got to sit in this chair in this spot in the office and like if you walk across the office more then a certain number of times, like, we start to question whether you're committed to the job or whatever. Right. I don't know. It's just kind of like a weird environment. And so the fact that a company would say, you know what, we don't need to even see you. We just, you know, based on the interview, based on getting to know you, based on seeing some work samples, we think you're going to do a good job. That's like really appealing to a high-performing set of the population that's like, wow, I want to be in an environment like that. So at the gate, that was kind of how trust worked. It was like, hey, up front we just default do it. Now over the years, one of the things I've learned, uh, through some trial and error is the bigger your teams gets, the faster you have to shortcut— or the faster you're growing, you have to build these kind of ways to shortcut trust. And you have to get really comfortable with people that you've just met really quickly in order to be successful. And one of the best ways to do that, um, there's a lot of research on this, but what the core of it comes down to is by being vulnerable and open and honest with people really quickly. So I'm actually thinking about this a lot right now because we're getting ready to have an exec offsite. We have 2 new execs that are joining for the first time for the offsite. And one of the things that— there's a lot of exercise you can do, but simple things like introduce yourself and share who your parents are. You know, my parents are Jim and Carla. And you think about that, how many people in your life outside of your family actually know who your parents are? Like what their parents' names are. I love that. It's like a pretty rare thing. And so you can start with something simple like, you know, my parents are Jim and Carla. And then you can open up and share more things and say like, well, here's a formative decision in my life. You know, I reached a brick in the road or I reached a fork in the road around, you know, my major was industrial engineering and I finally decided that, hey, that's not the thing that I I wanted to do. So you're kind of asking me in this podcast to open up, right? But go ahead and do that with your teammates and do that really quickly. So like, that's one way. And you can use— there's resources that can like help you do this. So you can do like, you know, take a Myers-Briggs test, but not to— don't just take the test, like talk about it as a team and say like, hey, this is what this means to me. Write an operating manual. There's stuff like that on the internet of like, hey, here's my personal operating manual. That can be a tool. We have a person internally that's a Berkman coach, which is like a version of like these Myers-Briggs but kind of on steroids. And then she facilitates these sessions. And when you think about it, it's kind of a weird thing to do because in no other part of your life do you meet someone very quickly and then like all of a sudden get like somewhat intimate in the types of things that you're discussing with them, right? In a very short amount of time. You know, when you're in your family, you don't really do that. Friend groups, you don't do that. School, you don't really do that. Church, you don't really do that. Like there's no other sort of like societal organization that says, I'm going to force you to build a bond and relationship and really get to know you. Very, very quickly. Instead, we kind of just let things take its normal course. Like, you know, we, you know, if we have common interests, maybe we'll become friends and maybe we'll share things down the line. But in a workplace that's growing quickly, you need trust. You have to have these little exercises, I guess, for lack of a better word, that get people to open up and share and build and see each other as like, oh, we're both just humans. We have backgrounds, we have histories. We have dreams, we have goals, we have ambitions. We're the same. Like that, those kinds of things like build that trust. And it all starts with you as a leader, where if you're willing to do that yourself and be vulnerable and say, hey, this is who I am, this is what I'm good at, this is what I'm not good at. Like I struggle with being organized or I struggle with these types of environments at work. I shut down at these types of stuff and I'm working on it. I'm trying to get better at it. But this is just who I am, cards on the table. And it kind of gives everybody else permission to be like, well, if the leader's willing to open up, maybe I can too, and it'll be okay. And that helps you build some of these trusts, builds more trust in these, in your work environment.

I love that introduce your parents story. I think it's such a subtle mindset shift, but really helps people open up. Talk to me about remote dance parties. How does that play a role as well?

Yeah, so those are like, that's a great example of something we do that, I mean, I was, that was an idea from one of our customer champions, someone on our support org. And you kind of, in a remote company, you got to be willing to let your team come up with things and try them and go along with them. So one Friday afternoon, this individual in our support org, you know, things were slowing down and they had this idea of like, let's do a dance party and here's how we're going to do it. We're going to pick a random song on Spotify. Then people should pop open Photo Booth and, you know, record a like 3-second little ditty, upload it to Giphy. You know, you can Photoshop it or filter it or whatever you want to do to it. To make it more interesting, put a cool background behind yourself, whatever you like, and toss it into Slack. We'll just have a bunch of little 3-second ditties of people dancing to this song. It was one of those things that just people like it. They're like, "Oh, that's cool. I can do a little 3-second ditty." You know, it's now become like a semi-regular thing that happens, you know, I don't know, every month, every 2 months or so on a Friday afternoon. This is a random dance party and kids will make cameos and pets will make cameos and like all this sort of stuff. And so it ends up being just like this cool little thing that, I don't know, it's just fun. And it helps you build that like sense of belonging in a remote org that you're like, hey, I'm part of a team here.

Were there different moments at different sizes of the organization that where you had to shift how you're thinking about running it? I know like Dunbar's number 150 is a big, seems to be a big shift for people, but wondering if you've noticed any size and scale issues.

Yeah, we saw things, you know, around 20 or so people starts to get different. You have to introduce like your first layer of management. So what does that mean? You know, around 50 or so things get trickier too. You're kind of, you're starting to introduce a second layer of management. Once we got past like 100 or so, well, 120 or so, 100, around 120 was the first time I really felt like I'm the CEO of this company. Before that, I kind of shied away from that. I'm like, I'm a co-founder, I'm in it with all you all. Like, this is, this is a team effort for sure. But then around 120, it was like, no, there really needs to be someone that owns this. And I like, I don't know if I— it wasn't like one day I woke up and was like, I am this, I am the CEO here. It was just kind of one of those things where like the team basically asked it of me. They were like, no, Wade, we need you to be the CEO, like for real. Like you've had the title, but like you gotta, you gotta like do the things that a CEO does. I've been doing some of those things, but I very much am like the reluctant leader type.

Right. Was that a scary moment?

You know, at that point in time, not really. It just kind of was, it just kind of was. It was like, all right, this is how the world is now. Like this is kind of who I am and this is my role. And I have a part to play in it. I think the thing for me was I've always seen the CEO as a role that I play and not who I am. And I think that helped me be more comfortable with it because I never saw myself as like, you know, you look at some of these CEO figures and they're all, they're a bit, you know, some are narcissistic and they have like, they're a bit pompous and all that sort of stuff. And there's like a stereotype around it. And I'm like, I never saw myself that way. And so it was hard for me to embrace the identity behind that, but when I said, you know, this is a role that I play, this isn't who I am, it made it easier.

That's awesome. So what it— you said a lot of people are emailing you, VCs, companies. I'm wondering what type of advice seems to resonate or work with maybe traditional companies that are coming to you that have all their people in seats that they can look at Has anything resonated with that crowd? What advice do you give them anyway?

Well, they asked for my advice. I didn't say I gave them good advice.

Fair. I always tell people my first advice is don't listen to anything I say.

I typically, you know, I'll brainstorm with them is really what I'll do. I'll ask them questions and say like, you know, okay, what does your company look like? What does this look like? And then I'll say like, well, here's how I might think about it. But keep in mind, like, Zapier is different. We started out 100% remote. We never had a situation where we were migrating from an office to a remote culture. But I think, you know, the common thing I go back to is you got to try somehow, like you got to try it. And I think the best way to try it is to pick a team, maybe a team that's well-suited towards remote anyway, like maybe a support org or an engineering org or something like that. And everybody on that team works from home one day, or one day, or actually have them work from home for a week or maybe two weeks and really get a feel for what it's like. I think it has to be long enough.

Yeah.

That you have to say like, oh wow, like you can't be like, it has to be long enough where you can't say, oh, I'll just fix this when I'm in the office next time. Right. Has to be like, no, I have to figure out how to fix this. Now the way that it is. So you have to try it for a long enough period where it forces you to build habits and process and structure around what it means to work remotely. And I think you have to make all the whole team do it. At least the whole small team do it because if some people are in the office, they, they don't know what it's like to be the remote contingency. So everyone kind of has to feel what it's like to be remote. So if I was going from an office setting to a remote setting, setting, I think that's probably, you know, experiment number 1 that I would run.

Among your employees, do you think there is more pressure or focus to think about, okay, I can't depend on work for kind of being around people all the day, all the time. I need to prioritize this in my personal life. Have you seen any anecdotes or shift that people talk about?

Yeah, it's definitely something you have to do. And I think, I think folks are more intentional about it in remote companies, particularly over time. You get better at this. When you first start working remote, I think sometimes people are a bit of like, they don't think about like what this, what it actually means, where it's like, no, you might not see anybody today. And so what does that mean for you? Like, are you the type of person that's like really cool with that? Or are you the type of person who like that's going to be a problem for? And so we, we started like coaching people on like, hey, this is what this is going to be like as part of the onboarding process. Like when I onboard a new person that's working directly with me, I'll spend time asking them about that. I'll be like, hey, how was your weekend? How was your, how was your night last night? What'd you go do? Because if you don't build those structures around you, you're going to struggle to make remote like a thing that can be successful for you. And it doesn't have to be anything big. Like for me, I go to the gym and play racquetball a couple of times a week and like I get my social element out with that. So it's not like I have to, you know, have some, you know, massive planning thing where I do a, you know, big old friend group or anything like that. Uh, it's just a couple things a week that, you know, build some bonds in the community and in, in my day-to-day that make me feel like I'm connected to something outside of work.

So as somebody that integrates a lot of platforms, I'd love to get your perspective on platforms. So for example, like Medium famously got its start on the backbone of Twitter. I think a lot of companies are kind of putting up walls, not letting people use the different users now. How are you thinking about like playing in this space? Do you, do you think like platforms should have more of a duty to kind of enable other platforms to start in their backbone? Should they rely more on services like you guys? I may not even be framing that perfectly.

Yeah, I mean, platforms exist. I, I think platforms exist to provide a service to their customers, and so they have a duty to serve the customer base. And that might mean at times that they provide a very open ecosystem, because if they provide an open ecosystem allows the community to extend it, and it provides more choice to the user base, and it provides more new types of functionality, new features. And so I think from that perspective, building a platform can be very valuable for the end customer, and you want to empower that. Now, I think you look at things like Facebook and Twitter, the more— the social networks, the consumer-facing social networks, and We're seeing downsides for what being a platform means there when you talk about spam, abuse, things like that. And so there's also responsibility where if being a platform starts to hurt your customers and hurt your community, you have to find ways to moderate your platform as well. You have a duty around that. Now, where we play in, where Zapier plays in, we're mostly in a B2B world. So we're mostly trying to provide services, infrastructure, tooling, applications that help companies run better. And so platforms are just a normal part of life in B2B. You don't have as much of the, you know, spam and abuse and things like that because you're trying to be productive and build businesses and all that sort of stuff. So being open and collaborative in the workplace and across all the ecosystem is a super normal, positive, way of life in kind of B2B world. So I think it's less of a thing for, or it's, there's less downsides I guess in B2B than there is in, you know, consumer.

What's a one zap, if I will, that you would say everyone should check out?

You know, I think a lot of folks start with automation around email. Almost everybody uses email. And, you know, certainly if you're at work, you use email. Some, though, I mean, more and more companies are using Slack to replace email. That's certainly the case at Zapier. But I think email is a good place to start. And a basic thing you can do, some basic things you can do with email, one is help you file emails, whether you need to take action from it. So you can say, you know, hey, when I label an email that looks like this, I want it to create a task in my project management system under this spot or my to-do list under this spot to help me follow back up on it. Or maybe I want to file the attachment. Maybe I'm getting regular emails that include invoices or contracts or photos or whatever. Whatever I label them in a particular way, I want to make sure those attachments get saved in Dropbox or in a Box or Drop— or Drive in some automated fashion. So I think email is just a really good place to start because a lot of people spend a lot of time in it. A lot of people don't love that they spend a lot of time in it. And there's a lot of easy things you can do to make your time in your email inbox less of a pain in the neck.

[Speaker:Wade Foster] So you are very much leading a company which is carving new paths in the future of work. What are the biggest questions on your mind as you're thinking about evolving and leading a company?

I think the thing that I've had to shift my mindset from is, you know, when you start the company, you're building the first version of the product. You're building the product that your first customers are going to use, that they're hopefully going to enjoy, they're going to love it. You're going to be able to build a business around that. As you start to grow, the thing that I shift is How can you build a company and a team that builds those products? So while I can contribute to the next product, it may not be me, it may not be my co-founders that build product number 2 or product number 3 or product number 4. And in technology, if you're going to be relevant, you know, in 5 years, in a decade, you got to be thinking about how can we continue to build services products that customers want, that customers need. And so we're— I spend a lot of time thinking about how can we build a resilient organization? How can we build a team and a culture and an environment where people can do really great work, where people can be creative, where people can explore the future while still taking care of the customers that we have today? And so that's the thing when I look out, you know, across the next year, across the next 5 years. It's really about how can we build a culture and a team that's known for taking chances, for thinking about the future, and for kind of pushing the envelope on what it is we build.

So a question I've been closing with is around what I'm calling the human side of work.

Mm-hmm.

What does that phrase mean to you?

The thing that comes to mind for me is like, how does work just integrate nicely into your life? I think too often work becomes a hindrance to what it means to be a human. You work because, well, I have to work because that's the thing that I can do to support my family. And I actually will sacrifice things for my family so that I can earn a living and then hopefully take care of them. And I don't think work and family and friends and community have to be at conflict with each other. And I think this is one of the things that's amazing about remote companies and distributed teams, is that you're able to build a career that is in harmony with your own personal interests. So we've seen that happen at Zapier where, you know, we'll hire people who are in San Francisco or New York or wherever. And one of the first things they do is they move back home, they move to where they want to be. And now they've got a job, a career that they love, a place that they want to work in, the industry that they want to be a part of. But they're also around the people, their families, the part of the world that they have an attachment to as well. And so I think just basic things like that are super important for, you know, building sort of the human side of work. If work constantly takes you away from what makes you— your connections to your family, to your friends— work's not so human after all. So I don't think work should do that.

I love it. It was fantastic talking with you today, Wade. I am more of a fan of remote workforces after talking to you and wishing you guys continued success.

Awesome. Thanks, Paul. I really enjoyed getting to chat with you as well.

Thank you for listening to the Boundless Podcast. If you have feedback, guest suggestions, or ideas I should explore, I'd really love to hear from you. One of the best things about this journey I've been on is connecting with all the people from around the world who are resonating with some of the ideas— some crazy, some better, some worse— that I'm putting out into the world. You can email me at paul@think-boundless.com or find me on the various social which I have linked on my site. So I'm focused on keeping this podcast ad-free, clear of requests for ratings on various platforms. Basically just want to keep it useful, interesting, and worth listening to. You guys hear enough about different underwear and sleep mattresses that people are pushing. I mean, how many mattresses can people sell? It's unbelievable. Anyway, if you do want to support this podcast, and support this crazy journey I'm on, you can do that on Patreon through the show notes link. And this is just so much fun, and I really thank you for listening and the continued feedback and support.