In this InspiredInsider interview, host Dr. Jeremy Wise talks with Zapier co‑founder Wade Foster about personal adversity, company culture, product innovation, hiring, and productivity tools. Wade recounts the hardest moment of his life—his father’s unexpected death in 2012—and how his co‑founders helped keep Zapier moving while he worked part‑time. He describes Zapier’s remote‑first model, emphasizing the importance of twice‑yearly retreats and hackathons that have birthed core built‑in utilities such as Formatter, Digest, Delays, Storage, and a weather app. Wade highlights Zapier’s growth from zero users to over 1.4 million and a 50‑person team, and outlines the roles they constantly hire for (customer support and engineering). The conversation closes with Wade sharing his favorite Chrome extensions for power‑users, including LastPass, uBlock, Push by Zapier, Pushbullet, Buffer, Printfections, Anchors Away, Flipshot, and OneTab.
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What I got, you can't buy. It resides between my eyes. Walked through the fire, came out better on the other side. See life's like a beach if you find the sand. Right now, I'm feeling like 100 grand.
You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Wise.
Dr. Jeremy Wise here, founder of inspiredinsider.com, where I talk with inspirational entrepreneurs and leaders like the founders of P90X, a top Kari, many more, how they overcome big challenges in life and business. Today our sponsor is Rise25.com, where entrepreneurs of 6, 7, 8-figure businesses come together live and in person every few months to solve their biggest business challenges and leave with lifelong friendships. Check out Rise25.com. It's run by myself and co-founder John Corcoran. It's application only. Today we have Wade— I'm really excited, it's been a long time since we've chatted. We have Wade Foster, co-founder of Zapier, and Zapier gives you internet automation superpowers. And it does this by making it easy to get your web apps to talk to each other. And I'll give you an example. So I use Zapier in two ways. One, someone fills out our Typeform application in Rise 25 and it automatically imports that into Infusionsoft so we can make sure to stay in touch with people. Also, for Inspired Insider, for this, I use it, when blog post gets published, it automatically posts the link on Twitter and Facebook. So my tagline, Wade, for Zapier is, it's like having a virtual staff member focused on automation for a fraction of the price. So that's my personal tagline. And Zapier went from zero to over 1.4 million users and grew to 50 staff in 5 years. Wade, thank you for joining me.
Yeah, I'm excited to be here, Jeremy. Thanks for a wonderful intro.
Yeah, that's my favorite tagline. Feel free to steal it.
Yeah, that's great. I love it.
Since it's Inspired Insight, I always ask what's been the lowest point and then how you push through, and then what's been the proudest moment.
Yeah. Well, I think the toughest part, and you and I have talked about this before, is in 2012, my father unexpectedly passed away.
Right.
And that's tough. I've got hindsight now, 3 years, and I've been able to come to terms on what that's like living with not having him around anymore. But at the time, he was the guy that I went to for everything. When I have a tough spot, you pick up the phone and call dad, right? Right. Zapier wasn't clear that it was going to be amazing success. We were still struggling to get things done and make progress and all that sort of thing. It was really tough, like, losing him kind of right there at the beginning. But, you know, we were able to push through, and now I can think back fondly, and I remember a lot of his lessons that he shared and stuff.
Like what? What were some of the things that you remember?
I think the thing that I remember most from him is just the way that he treated people. You know, he always would go out of his way to, like, help somebody out. Or do something nice for them or try and help support them in whatever they were doing. And so he made a lot more friends that way. And he had a lot of people, I remember at like the, you know, the kind of the week after he passed away, like people would just come out of the woodworks telling stories of all the stuff he'd done for folks. I had no idea. Like I just was like totally clueless to these things that he'd done. And so it was like, wow, like that's really how you build up You know, I think he just did it because that's the kind of person he was. But like, you can build up, you know, people that are gonna be there for you when you need it most by just treating them really well.
Yeah.
So I think that was a big lesson I learned from him for sure.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's tough to go through at any point in life, especially with all the chaos and everything else that you had going on.
Yeah, it's not easy for anyone, that's for sure. Whether you're starting a company or not starting a company, it doesn't matter who you are, like, losing people close to you sucks.
Do you take time off at that time, or how do you deal with it? Because things are such a weight on your shoulders, because if you stop working, it doesn't get built, right? It's not like you have a government job where you can leave and maybe, you know, take a few days off and still be getting paid at the time. Things only happen when you are there to make them happen.
I was pretty lucky. I had two good co-founders and we had Micah at the time, so it was a team of four of us. They were able to cover a lot of things. Pick up the slack. Pick up slack. We weren't operating quite at the scale we are today either, so me being unavailable for like a few weeks was not the end of the world. A lot of it ended up being The nice thing about it was I could work part-time a little bit. So like, that was flexibility, right? Like I was back in Missouri when that happened and I was able to like do 2 hours this day or 4 hours that day or whatever. So I could keep the ball moving even if it was less than what I was accustomed to. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for sharing that. It's, that's such a tough thing to go through and I'm sure people have gone through that, are listening. What about proudest?
Wow. Proudest moment. There's so many things that are like, that make you proud. I think the thing that's really exciting for us is those— I talked about the retreats that we do. We do those twice a year. Every retreat is really cool because because we work remotely, you don't always visually get to see like all the people that are contributing to this. Like, you don't— you know that it's happening, but you don't see it, right?
Yeah.
But those retreats, we get to see all, you know, in this last one, 43 people come together all in the same room, you know, from various different walks of life, from all over the world, uh, and you're like, these 43 people, like, we've been able to build something pretty special at Zapier. And you're also just— I'm just incredibly thankful that they spend their days helping me out on the thing that I love. It's just like you feel proud and thankful and humble and all those things.
I'm sure you do obviously the hackathon, but you do probably team exercises. What's a breakthrough, like a team breakthrough, a company breakthrough that came from just being together? I don't know if you do any special exercises or activities with the team. And what's come out of it?
You know, we talk a lot about, we do a lot of roundtables, like share experiences and tackle that sorts of stuff. A lot of the hackathon projects are like the best stuff because it's the first inspiration for something that eventually is going to become, might become a key part of Zapier. Yeah. So I mentioned the Chrome push extension, but we also have a whole set of—
Yeah, what are some of the other Breakthrough is the key.
Like, if you go look at a lot of our built-in apps, they were started at retreats. So we've got the Formatter, we've got Digest, we've got Delays, we've got Storage, we've got a weather app. Like, all these kind of built-in utilities as part of Zapier are— I think most of them started at a retreat, which is pretty cool. Yeah. And it's also just a good time. You know, we treat it as just a good time to reflect and, and just hang out with each other and just enjoy kind of the last, you know, 6 months' accomplishments. So that's kind of what we use it for.
Wade, this has been super valuable. I really appreciate your time. People should obviously check out Zapier, zapier.com. Where else should they go to check out on your site that would be valuable?
Yeah, so if you're, you know, we've talked to, you know, zapier.com is the place to check out for Zapier. zapier.com/zapbook shows all the integrations we have. Definitely check out the blog too if you're interested in productivity, how to use apps. Jeremy mentioned that earlier. And if you're interested in work, if you think this has been cool enough, like, and you want to join Zapier, check out jobs, zapier.com/jobs. Like, we're hiring, bring on more folks to the team.
Is there a job that's typically common that you're always looking for people?
Yeah, you know, we're pretty much always looking for help on our customer support and we're pretty much always looking for engineering help. So if that kind of matches your background, we pretty much always have a spot for you.
Yeah. So Chrome extension, last question, Chrome extensions, I need to know what do you use as a power user?
Let's see, LastPass, I'm a big LastPass user.
Huge, yeah.
uBlock, so ad blocking, like I just can't stand most sites these days with the amount of ads they have.
Obviously Push by Zapier goes without saying, but we'll say it anyway.
Push Zapier, yep, it is. I've got Pushbullet, which is a pretty cool extension that allows me to push, you know, files and URLs and stuff between my phone and my machine. So I like that. I use Buffer for tweeting. I have Printfections Chrome extension installed, which lets me quick generate a t-shirt link. So if I want to send someone a link where they can get a Zapier t-shirt—
That's cool.
I have that installed. What else do I have? Man, I have a couple other ones up here that I— oh, ha! I've got one that's, it's like a, what's it called? Oh, display anchors. It's called like Anchors Away or something, which shows all the anchors on a site where you can link directly to that spot on a page, which is nice for really long pages. Sometimes you want to link to a specific spot so that display anchor one lets me get a link to the exact spot on that page. I have a full browser screenshot, Flipshot, that takes a screenshot of the whole page. So you don't have to scroll, take screenshots, scroll, take another screenshot.
Very efficient. You're very efficient.
I got a whole bunch of stuff. I have OneTab, so it collapses all my tabs into one tab, because oftentimes I get too many tabs open.
Guilty. Yeah.
So there's a handful. There's more that I use, but those are some of the most common ones.
Thank you, Wade. I really appreciate it. It's always fantastic catching up.
Yeah, thanks, Jeremy. I appreciate you having me on the show.
