LOGAN: Wade, foster, thanks for doing this.
WADE: Yeah, thanks for having me. Logan.
LOGAN: I think probably a lot of people that are listening to this know what Zapier is, but how would you describe what Zapier [00:02:00] does?
WADE: Zapier is an automation platform. It makes it really easy to build workflows across pretty much any of the tools you might work, use at work. There's 6,000 apps on the platform. Think things like Slack and G Suite, MailChimp and QuickBooks, and you name it. And so often you need these tools to work better together, and Dapper makes it really easy to do that.
WADE: So if you get, a lead that comes in from, say, an ad that you're running on Facebook, you can trigger that, run it through a lead scoring mechanism, then you can send it to Salesforce. If it hits a certain score, you can send it to MailChimp. If it is a different score, you could pinging your, Salesforce rep.
WADE: And, these things can be as simple as just a basic one and be like, Hey, send me a note in Slack based on. Something that happens on Twitter or X or whatever it's called these days. Or as complicated as those, the workflows that I described. And it's all just like really simple, easy to set up ui.
WADE: So you don't have to be an engineer, you don't have to know what APIs are like. It's really built with a non-technical user in mind.
LOGAN: The no-code platform that you guys were out in front of before I, I think that was [00:03:00] even a term. When did you first hear no-code as a thing? Was that
LOGAN: Totally after the fact?
WADE: Yeah, I was, I, you started to hear it like 2017 I think is when I started to hear no-code being like more of a thing people would talk about. Before that Gartner had a thing they called citizen developer, which I always thought was like a very Gartner like way to describe the phenomenon. Yeah.
LOGAN: So Zapier, the name has an API in it, which is the protocol that you're basically integrating between these different applications. And so as simple use case as if my company or my name gets mentioned on Twitter send me an email or send me a Slack notification. I have one set up that if I book a flight on my personal account, then my, my Gmail, it copies over to my RedPoint account and blocks that part of my calendar.
LOGAN: Pretty simple workflows around that. Now, a p i incorporating that, I know that was important to you guys early on. How much do you regret? The fact that people just keep saying Zapier. And do you think you've stamped out that it's, Hey, Zapier makes you happier, or whatever it [00:04:00] is at this point, and it's actually in the nomenclature.
LOGAN: Are you still getting Zapier with regularity?
WADE: I, we get everything with regularity. Zapier, here's how I-
LOGAN: The French version of it, yes. Not Columbia, Missouri. Columbia. France is Zapier.
WADE: The way I sleep at night is, I've convinced myself that this is all just good of good word of mouth, as long as people are talking about it. Is there's a naming, it's a gif thing, right?
WADE: Which one is it? And so we're in the minds of people because there's a debate around it. And so it was all a marketing strategy at the very beginning. A very well intentioned marketing
LOGAN: yes. Very purposeful.
WADE: Yes. A hundred percent.
LOGAN: so most recently valued at 5 billion, is that right?
WADE: Yep.
LOGAN: Okay. And you've raised what in total?
WADE: 1.3 million.
LOGAN: $1.3 million to get to a $5 billion valuation. And most recent, that's really bad for my business, right? What you guys are doing this whole, like my business is giving people money and you are breaking that model.
WADE: If you were in that 1.3, you'd be doing great.
LOGAN: totally!
LOGAN: No, [00:05:00] I'm curious, so who was in that 1.3? It was Bessemer
WADE: Yeah. Bessemer and YC are the two main ones. Yeah.
LOGAN: In the public numbers, how many employees customers, revenue you've most recently disclosed?
WADE: Yeah, employees is like 800. We haven't disclosed revenue recently. It's been-
LOGAN: The last I heard was over 150 million in recurring revenue.
WADE: Yeah. I think the last number we cited was one 40. But it's been, that's a few years outta date at this point in time.
LOGAN: So you didn't quite bootstrap but you've you effectively did for all intents and purposes, right? Getting north of 150 million in recurring revenue, $5 billion valuation off of a tiny bit raised. Do you think constraints and operating in a principled kind of profitable way led you to build a better company than you would have otherwise?
LOGAN: Or is it just too hard to know the counterfactual if you had done a $6 million series A and then a $15 million series B and gone down the line from there?
WADE: I do think constraints like breed creativity and I think we built a better business [00:06:00] because of that. I still don't think we had, we knew what to do with that much money. Like at that point in time, we're first time founders. We're figuring a lot of this stuff out. Embedded in the founding team is also like a really strong set of complimentary skills.
WADE: And so there was nothing in the no like task or problem that we could not do ourselves. And so for as long as possible, we wanted to do those things ourselves because it felt like it really helped us understand our customers, our product, et cetera. Versus the only, the main thing you're gonna spend money on in the software business is people.
WADE: And so we didn't actually want those people yet. We wanted to really understand it. And we even had this philosophy of don't hire till it hurts because we wanted to feel the pain. Know that, okay, if we're gonna go hire someone, we actually know what they're gonna do. Part of that was because, it's easy to sound smart, but part of that was also like, we didn't know how to hire people.
WADE: And so that there were certain things like that where it was like we have to because this other thing we actually don't know how to do yet, we have to go figure that out. So we just [00:07:00] tried to push a lot of these choices that you do end up needing if your business grows, but it's like, how long can we delay those things?
WADE: Because the moment you do that, you're bringing on overhead, you're bringing on tax. And so constraining yourself, it just, it keeps things simpler. For a lot longer. Remote work was the same way. Like we didn't have to deal with having an office. Think of how many people in the last two years have gone raised Buco is a box and now the problems they've got is they've got investors at the table telling 'em what to do.
WADE: They've got a whole bunch of cashflow. They don't know how to spend. They might have an office that they may or may not need. They've got staff that they're trying to figure out what they should do with, not do with, and you don't have product market fit. It's like you really should just be focused on.
WADE: Shipping code, talking to customers, and you got all these other things that you've signed yourself up for that just are a distraction from that, especially the early stages. Now, later on, some of it gets a little more nuanced, but the early stage, like that's the game and all these other things like get in the way.
WADE: Unless it is like in the direct line of something that's important to get done.
LOGAN: You referenced finding product [00:08:00] market fit there. And when I hear go and listen to you telling the story of finding it, it seemed like there was such a a unique pull that you actually put customers through a shitty experience of Hey, here's all the hoops you have to join through to use the product.
LOGAN: And they were like, okay. And how do I give you money? Is that revisionist history on my part? Or was it really lightning in a bottle from a product market fit standpoint? And people were ready just to give you money when you started building out the integrations?
WADE: We had the problem the bullseye from day one. And it was really then about making the software good. I remember, so our first customer, we started writing code, this would've been like October of 2011, and then the first user slash customer we had would've been December, 2011.
WADE: So two months basically. From writing code to actually someone putting their hands on this thing. It's hard to build something really good in two months. But you can build something that exists and is functional and is capable of [00:09:00] doing a thing. And the way we found these folks was, we were, I.
WADE: This is 2011. So there was a bunch of the SaaS companies that would have community forums, they're really popular at the time. And you'd go in and you just see people asking for integrations. When is, when are you gonna integrate with X, when are you gonna integrate with Y? And a product manager would jump into that thread and say, Hey, really thanks for the feedback.
WADE: We're gonna take a look at this and we'll get back to you. Which, if you worked in any of these companies, is basically yeah, long shot, probably not gonna happen. And so we were just looking at that and we're like, Hey, we help out with this. Integrations like, seems like we could do something there.
WADE: And we had a somewhat novel approach, which is this like hub and spoke thing where it's okay, you got a trigger on one side, an action on the other, you plug in, those apps and then they automatically work with each other. You don't have to go build each integration, point to point.
WADE: So the hub and spoke model was like somewhat novel. And then, we put the first version in front of this customer, and I remember I. We were like big fans of the self-serve stuff. We're like, we really want it to be this way. So we just sent him a link, gave him a login and said Hey, [00:10:00] let us know what you think.
WADE: And, emails me back and is Wade looks really cool. I'm, I could use a little bit of help like, on, on thinking through this. It's okay, let's just on Skype. Skype was the thing at the time. And I watch him trying to use it and it's bad. Like he can't figure out like what to do on the first screen.
WADE: And just to paint a picture of this, there's like little dropdowns where, say you've got some form software and you're trying to pick the name of the form you want, it's hey, this is my RSS v P form or whatever. So instead of having the human readable version of the form name, It would pop down the ID number of the form.
WADE: So you had to know which Id goes with which, and he's I have no clue which form to pick. And I was like here's how you go figure this out. Go to your form software, click on it. See up here in the URL bar, there's a little ID in the U R L bar that tells you which one of the forms it is.
WADE: So now match that to that, it's that's the, like when I'm talking like janky experience, like that's the kind of stuff I'm talking about where it's like it really wasn't that great. So anyway, we go through the setup for it is, we get to the end, it takes 30 minutes to get there.
WADE: It's not a long amount of time, but it's not [00:11:00] smooth. And then we go to test this app and, he, this was like a, he wanted to take, he had a contact form on his web website and he wanted to take folks from the contact form and put 'em into an email list if they check the box. And so I was like, okay, let's go test it.
WADE: He fills out the contact form and it automatically sends the person into their email list. His reaction is just like jaw hit se for, he is I have to do this every single day. I hate doing this. I've been looking for something. I love this. How much do I owe you? Where do I put it? And we had no billing infrastructure, we had nothing.
WADE: We hadn't even thought of that. So just like on the fly, I was kind like, oh shoot. Yeah, you probably should pay us something. And I was like, how about you PayPal me a hundred bucks? And he was like, cool. Done. And so I gave him my personal PayPal account and went and talked to my co-founder. He was like, I think we're gonna need a bank account to take some money.
WADE: I was like so we went and walked. We were in Columbia, Missouri at the time. So we went to the local, like credit union to set up a bank account. And before we went, I was like, oh, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna set up a quick zap that if I get [00:12:00] any, anyone PayPals me money, I'm gonna get a text message about it.
WADE: And we go to the bank and I kid you not, Now revision is history. As we are walking into the bank, I get a text that's Hey, just paid you a hundred bucks for the beta of Zapier. And so that was how we had the, a hundred buck deposit to open a bank account up.
LOGAN: You guys didn't seem to have to toil after all this and it was clearly this unique moment in time. Is there anything you look back on with hindsight and say, yes, here's what I would extrapolate from that story, or like the lessons learned around that? Or was it just such a unique moment in time?
WADE: I had worked on a product for another small company in ed tech space before this. And. We did not have product market fit for that. And I remember I was brought in to try and figure out, I was marketing, I was gonna be the marketing guy. And I'm like, I'm trying everything to sell this.
WADE: I was like, oh, I learned SEO I learned email, I learned social, I learned, tried. I tried selling directly. I tried bd. I try all this stuff. [00:13:00] I'm convinced they're gonna fire me because I'm like, I'm not being successful. Clearly I suck at this. I'm bad at my job. And, the longer this went in, the more I started trying, the more I started to get exposed to different parts of company building, I started to lean in.
WADE: I think maybe the product isn't so good, or maybe it's this other stuff. So start to learn product management, start to figure some of these things out. And I was like, you know what, we just don't, we're just not building the right stuff. No one actually caress about what we're building.
WADE: Like I can try and sell this all day long, but if no one caress what are we doing here? And It was interesting to see that because the product over there, it was like good design, good engineering. You sign up, it's pretty obvious what you need to do. It was hitting those marks, which, when I contrast that with the Zapier experience where we were putting a thing that I was like, I was embarrassed about it.
WADE: I was like, this is not that good. And to then get like that person on the other end be like, oh my gosh, this is such a important thing for me. That contrast was what was, that was really clarifying for me. 'cause I [00:14:00] was like, oh I actually get what product market fit feels like now. It's, so much of a, so many people talk about it from like a metrics point of view or like a retention point of view or something like that.
WADE: But for me it was just like that feeling. It was like, oh, that's what somebody, when they actually care like this is, it shouldn't be that hard. If you actually have somebody, people care about, It is a lot easier. And so when I think when these folks are toiling away at this stuff and you're asking like, do I have product market fit?
WADE: We've gotta ask. I think you know,
LOGAN: I will say, I feel like you guys in Slack and maybe Stripe and there's a handful of companies that like launched with some ver and certainly knocked out a lot of different integrations. But like the value prop that you delivered day one and the product market fit you had day one was such a so strong that it, there's certainly a gradient of that in a fullness of feature set and all of these things that you guys were uniquely able to time the moment that [00:15:00] this was needed in the market.
LOGAN: I'd be curious your perspective, like how much earlier could you have started Zapier to the same success?
WADE: I do think we got the timing. I. Pretty good there because, you think 2011, that was the year Stripe launched Twilio was, I think that year, maybe a year before that sort of gen one of SaaS companies was launching APIs. Zendesk had an API, MailChimp had an API, QuickBooks had an API.
WADE: Trello was in v one of their API. So a lot of these folks were just starting to open up their platforms, provide these capabilities. I think the exception was maybe like Salesforce, which like, I think they were on like V seven or something.
LOGAN: Your market existed before this but, and has created a lot of equity value with TIBCO and MuleSoft and a bunch of the big names, but uniquely this long tail SS m B use case, the names you mentioned while not like the true V one of Sass 1999, 2000, 2001, this was really the V 1 of [00:16:00] democratizing the mid-market
WADE: Yeah, it's like the cloud, like all these cloud first, solutions. This is when they were coming into their own. And so I think if we would've tried to have done it, a year or two years earlier I don't know that we would've, it would've just been more of a grind, I think like the rest of these opportunities there.
WADE: And if we'd have done it a year or two later, I think somebody else would've there's enough other players that were messing around this, and I, there's a mile long graveyard of, people that I would get emails from, investors or whoever saying have you seen this competitor?
WADE: Have you seen that competitor? Are you worried? Are you worried? Are you worried? And I'm like, I don't know, like there's not much I can do about it except for just. Build the company that we're trying to build. But I think it would've been later, like the answer probably would've been dapper, like what it is today would've been any one of these other companies.
LOGAN: Emmett Shear has a funny thing about like you can either be too early and try to survive until a market opportunity hits or too late and you miss the market opportunity. Very rarely is it like on the exact day that you start the company for the problem set that existed the market. And I think maybe you [00:17:00] guys did or came pretty close to it.
LOGAN: But the interesting thing, I think that you guys were able to do that. I'm sure I can come up with other people that did this. Maybe Slack had elements of this, but you were able to really get a B two B network effect going where people were doing work. For you and can you talk through not only was it the customers that had the appetite for it, but it was actually the ecosystem and the partners that did well as well.
WADE: Zapier has 6,000 apps today. Most of those apps are built by the vendors directly. So that network effect that you're talking about here you go to zapier.com/platform/developer, you can see what this looks like. I, we started building that, I think had about 50 apps on the platform and all 50 of those, like myself, my co-founders, we'd built those, these were the artisanal integrations, the like brute force, we're doing it ourselves thing.
WADE: And I remember this would've been summer 2012, we had this path in front of us, which is okay, [00:18:00] we can keep brute forcing our way through this. Or we can try and go this developer platform route and see if we can get other people to build. And we, like everybody we're like, we really don't wanna brute for this.
WADE: That seems like a lot of work. But we were also pretty honest with ourselves that like most people launched these developer platforms, Nothing happens with it. Like it's pretty rare to, for these SaaS companies to launch a developer ecosystem and to have a lot of folks go build on it. You name some of the ones that have been successful, the Slacks, the sales forces, the Shopifys of the world, the vast majority of the sort of like economic value floats to those extreme players, like the ones that are like really stand out.
WADE: But there is this really long tail of SaaS providers and many of them that are like quite good companies, public companies, et cetera, that just don't have that. Like they might get, a handful of integrations, but it's a dog fight to really build out like that big integration library. [00:19:00] And so here we are, like less than a year old and not that many customers and we're like let's give it a go.
WADE: But we were this probably won't work. It's like the honest reaction. But we had a couple signs that we thought. May, maybe it could probably the strongest was we'd gotten an email from Aaron at Box at yeah. So he'd emailed us. It was probably, I think it was like a 3:00 AM on like a Saturday or something like that.
WADE: And he was like, Hey, why is Box not on Zapier? Like, how do we fix this? And one, we were stoked to get an email from Aaron. We're like, all right, this is, that's cool.
LOGAN: Yeah, cool guy, funny tweets, good entrepreneur.
WADE: yeah, it's like this. That's neat. But the honest answer was like of course Box should be on Zapier. We're just three people. We just haven't we're trying like this, the honest answer to make this thing work. And but we started thinking like if Aaron cares enough to email us on the 3:00 AM like maybe he's got an engineer hanging out that he could lend to help with the problem.[00:20:00]
WADE: And we'd had, that was probably like the most concrete example, but we'd had a few more of those types of inter interactions where I was like, okay, maybe there's something going on here. So can we try and get a little bit of a flywheel going here? And we built the V1 of our developer ecosystem.
WADE: My co-founder built it more or less in a couple weeks. And then myself and my other co-founder were like, okay, let's go to all these folks that have reached out and been asking us like, Hey, can we be on Zapier? And basically see if they will build their integration with us. And the pitch at the time was like, we're gonna do a big launch around this.
WADE: We're gonna let you be a part of the story. Oh. And we're gonna actually help you build the integration. Like it's not just gonna be you by yourself, like it is gonna be you, but it's like we're gonna do it together, deal. And not everyone said yes to that, but enough did I think 12 or 13 did.
WADE: And in that cohort was some like pretty Good names. HubSpot was in there active campaign was in there. It's a really big WordPress plugin. Gravity Forms [00:21:00] was in there. And then, a bunch of other folks that I think you may or may not have heard of. And we launched that and it worked.
WADE: And so from there it just was like, I don't wanna say it is what it is now. Like today we're adding, almost 10 apps a day. It's a real machine, but at it, at the time, it just got things going. It had us, it had an answer where we could point folks to, and we were able to put a little bit of service enablement alongside of it, that it just started to snowball.
WADE: And so when we'd get requests for apps in, we'd be able to go to the partner and say Hey, we got a bunch of people talking about it. And when, the customers would come to us and say can you support X? We'd say, Hey, why don't you go back and tell 'em that you'd like this to be on Zapier?
WADE: And so we'd try and just do these things to show to the market that like, hey, You wanna be involved in this Zapier thing somehow, some way. And you know how like these ecosystems, these network effects work, they just, once they get going, you don't always know why they get going, but they just hum along and they work.
WADE: That's why I think they're, I think that's why everyone wants one, is like, they're so powerful [00:22:00] when they go.
LOGAN: People that remember long since forgotten. But if this, then that was going after a more consumer oriented use case, which ironically has, Alexa has now done a lot of the stuff that I think they were trying to do of Hey, when I when I walk into my. House, turn on the lights or whatever, like a bunch of consumer oriented things, but I'm sure there were other ones that I've forgotten that were also targeting the same market you went after.
LOGAN: Anything else you would really point to that, that allowed you to out execute those competitors?
WADE: I, I think we were really good at. That developer platform and the distribution strategy, like we, we weren't just thinking about the product. We were thinking about how the go-to-market piece works. And we have landing pages that support every single integration, which at the time was incredibly novel.
WADE: No one was doing anything like that. Now everybody's copied what we've done there. But that was, that machinery was very impactful because it meant that we were acquiring customers at [00:23:00] what a rounded to zero cost. And every time someone was building a new app on Zapier, it was lighting up a whole new suite of keywords that we could go rank for and target.
WADE: And so it just meant that like the machinery was growing the company and not humans growing the company.
LOGAN: Leveraging the community to build the integrations. And then just the p l g as the term now, the product-led growth that you had with the landing page optimization and for people that internalized that. I gave the example of slack in my calendar or whatever, slack in my email, Gmail and Slack integration.
LOGAN: If you search that, Zapier would be one of the first, if not the first page to pop up. 'cause you built a dedicated landing page. But it's. Those two things were so unique having the ecosystem around you and having the landing pages being out in front of that, I, that's why I wonder like what's actually replicable because those two things allowed you to build such an efficient, unique company.
LOGAN: And then we can talk about the [00:24:00] remote work stuff as well, which was a first principle decision or maybe a happenstance as it so happens, but just very unique circumstances that you guys had in the early days.
WADE: I think the thing that most founders, they try and replicate. Really well-known tactics. It's like you look out and you're like, oh, I'm gonna run back the Slack playbook, or like the Airtable playbook or the Zoom playbook. And it's like everybody knows that playbook. Like it's, you're not gonna get the same advantage.
WADE: Like you go try and run the Zapier playbook now. Good luck. I don't, I couldn't run that playbook if I did it in a new company because there's it's so entrenched at this point in time. And so the like, best opportunities I feel like are trying to find these lesser known tactics that are maybe working somewhere else, but are just not deployed in the space that you're looking at.
WADE: So for us, like the landing page strategy, we stole that from or borrowed whatever. From Patrick McKinsey who patio 11 on the internet he's I don't know, he's like internet famous [00:25:00] and like hacker circles I guess. But he ran this small business called Bingo card creator, which. He was doing sort of the same thing where it was like we, he was trying to sell bingo cards.
WADE: He was mostly selling it to teachers. And he'd done the math on this thing and it was like, if I can spin up a landing page for a specific type of bingo cards, so think like US president's, bingo cards, or, physics bingo cards or whatever, it costs me, a dollar to spin up that landing page because I have this template generator thing where he'd hired a, I think a mom in Utah or something like that and given her A C M Ss where she could input a list of 50 words that could go create those bingo cards.
WADE: And then he realized, okay, it cost a buck to make one of these pages. I'll go make three sales and three sales for him was like, 40 bucks or something like that, and you just looked at that and you're like, that's pretty interesting. Not sure I'd apply that to bingo cards like that. The tam on bingo cards is probably not amazing.
WADE: But if [00:26:00] you applied that same like approach to something that has maybe a bigger opportunity associated with it, there's not a lot of people were doing that kind of thing. And so that, that to me is like the lesson learned is go look for is that, the saying is like, Hey the future is here.
WADE: But it's not equally destroyed. It's like the future is here. It's just there's people on the cutting edge and they're probably in different fields and they're probably tackling it. So you're like playing in those sequels and then borrowing from that and pulling it to another space that just hasn't figured it out yet.
WADE: Like that to me is what entrepreneurs do. That, that like invention thing. You're not gonna get it from looking at, a Zapier or a Slack or a, Salesforce or what have you. 'cause it probably just doesn't, it doesn't exist anymore. We've tapped that out.
LOGAN: You were three friends in Missouri that came up with this idea, and you applied to Y Combinator, got rejected. I think automated response, clearly. I don't know if they were using, probably not using
WADE: Not at the time.
LOGAN: but Yeah, not at the time. Now they do the rejections through Zapier. Then in between that you went and signed up a [00:27:00] bunch of customers and were starting to grow.
LOGAN: At this clip and then you reapplied to Y Combinator. Why do that? Why go back? The business seemed to be working at that point in time. Why'd you decide to reapply and go through yc?
WADE: We're in central Missouri, we don't have much exposure to Silicon Valley. Like it's not. What we know this idea of going and raising a seed round and being able to pick up a million bucks, or I guess nowadays it might be 3 million bucks or 5 million bucks or whatever.
WADE: That's just a foreign concept. It just didn't seem like it was, it's like why would someone do that with us? And, the company we'd all work for is this company, veterans United. And that company's owned 50 50 by two brothers. They scaled a bunch of bootstrap businesses before and sold those.
WADE: This one, I was like the 500th employee there. And I'd left 10 months later starting Zapier and it was like a thousand employees at that point in time. So it's growing very quickly and we just seen the front row seat to okay, you can build businesses like differently.
WADE: There's not one playbook here that's the quote [00:28:00] unquote right playbook. And so that's the bias that we're coming from. The one exception was, we read Hacker News, we were reading Paul Graham's essays, and we just We're not into the like whole fundraising thing, but it really might be helpful for the type of business that we're building to be closer to like our ecosystem partners.
WADE: Like we're trying to do integrations with Salesforce and with QuickBooks and with all these folks, and we are just some random people in the middle of the country. And whether it's right or wrong, people may not necessarily give us the time of day. And so it just felt like to us, like YC was the way in which we could get a little bit of a stamp of approval that might open up some of these doors, which early on before Zapier had a brand and, a name associated with it, it could help grease the worlds.
WADE: And so that's why we went back to that, that well, and yeah, I think it did help like in those early days to be associated with yc.
LOGAN: What led you to raising the incremental million some odd dollars there.
WADE: Going through yc, like [00:29:00] it culminates in demo day. Demo day is when you're supposed to raise money. And we've already started to get a little bit of m r I think we're maybe like m r was maybe like six grand or something like that at the time. Which is not enough for three people to live in the Bay Area.
WADE: But we are like, we're seeing like the growth trends and we're if we keep trucking along at the rate at which we're going, like we'll be there soon enough. But there just wasn't a lot of breathing room for us. And, we had spouses and stuff like that and it was like, so that's where we were like, okay, we'll go raise a little bit of something and we'll treat it like it's the last money we ever get and see how that goes.
WADE: And so we, we went and did that.
LOGAN: Normally people don't actually treat it like it's the last money they ever get but you actually did it.
WADE: I think that's just the Midwest.
WADE: Penny saved as a penny earned. All those sayings are like, that's like classic Midwest
LOGAN: Hopefully no future entrepreneurs listen. Or you can do it. Just talk to me first and then after that. Yeah, just don't not everyone do it, or at least check with me before you [00:30:00] bootstrap all the way.
LOGAN: Your batch included Instacart. Coinbase is as well. I don't know if there's other names that, that we would know
WADE: Benchling.
LOGAN: Oh, wow. So a number of billion dollar plus companies that, that have executed quite well. Was it obvious who the successes were gonna be at the time? Or are you surprised that these names have been the ones that have endured?
WADE: It was not obvious, at least not to me. Maybe it was obvious to somebody else. We always felt like we were a little bit of the oddball in the batch. We felt ah, there's, we're coming from Missouri. I. And like to B N Y C is so incredible, like these folks are. So there's a, there's like a founding pair in the our batch that had beaten the Massachusetts lottery.
WADE: Like they had literally figured out that there was, an expected value break in one of these games, and like they'd figured out how to beat it. And so we're, I'm just like looking at stuff like that and I'm like, there are people in here that are so much smarter than we are, and we're just over here.
WADE: We're just like working hard. It's like basically what it boiled down to. And YC was going through its own scaling challenges at the time. And there was, it was like any clique, there was like companies that seemed cooler than others [00:31:00] and could be going places and then companies that weren't.
WADE: And yeah, it wasn't obvious at, at all at the time that like, who would be the winners out of the batch?
LOGAN: You now have raised outside capital, if not directly to the balance sheet as liquidity for employees and I assume maybe some of the participants in the early In that single round as well. Can you talk about flipping from giving options to employees in the early days to profit sharing, to back to options and the need to raise.
LOGAN: I think it's an interesting journey that you went on as you as you thought through how to incentivize employees.
WADE: So we start out granting options because that's what you do. That's what people tell you to do. And so we're like, all right, I guess we'll do that. Two. And we start granting these new employees, we're running a different. Hiring strategy though we're building the company remotely.
WADE: And [00:32:00] so the people we're hiring are from all across the country. They're mostly not in the Bay Area. And we're giving them these options and folks are okay, boom. Like it's nice to have 'em. But. Like you, you read these posts around where people are like, ah, they're just a lottery pick.
WADE: You should treat it worth, it's it's worth zero. And that sort of seemed like it was happening. It's takes work to administer these option plans. And I'm again, first time founder, so I don't know any I barely know about options myself. Like I'm learning what these things are and how they work and like all the mechanics around them and 4 0 9 a's, and strike price is an option.
WADE: It's like an intricate way to get compensated. And yeah, so the employees don't really care and we're paying them really good salaries for where they're living and they're excited to work for us. They're, putting all their energy in. And it's like really a pain in my neck to do this thing.
WADE: And I'm like why are we doing this? If they don't care. And it's hard work for me, like that seems dumb. And we're growing profitably, so I'm like, why don't we do something that's like just a [00:33:00] little simpler, candidly. And that simpler thing is we got profits at the end of the, whatever.
WADE: Year, let's pay something out, put cash in people's pockets. They don't have to wait. And so we flip over to that, stop doing the options thing. And that worked pretty well, honestly people like getting cash. Like it's nice. It's motivating folks were, it eager to join the company and see that hey, we're, I'm not playing for a lottery ticket.
WADE: I'm playing for something that's real and tangible right now. And I think that worked really well for a long time. And then, like a few things started to happen that caused us to say, you know what? We should go back to granting options. One is the company just grew a lot and, I started to look at like the on paper net worth that myself had, my co-founders had.
WADE: And we just were like, look, we're happy. We're glad. But it just didn't feel right that, The rest of the folks that had built this thing, like weren't get getting to participate at least as directly in the upside, they're getting it through profit sharing and whatnot. Owning [00:34:00] has like a exponential growth thing.
WADE: And I don't know that we ever anticipated that would be what Zapier would be. It just happened 'cause we just kept working on this thing. So there was that you obvious, we obviously got a lot more sophisticated about how the whole options thing worked. And then the profit sharing bit, just as a company got bigger it's harder for any individual to feel like a true sense of like ownership on driving that.
WADE: Whereas in when you're smaller, everybody feels that way. But as it gets bigger, like the levers got really weird and we started to optimize for things that were like not necessarily profits all the time. It was like, you actually wanna run cashflow break even right now. We wanna reinvest in some of these areas and we wanna make some of these choices.
WADE: And it just ended up being a friction point there where it was like, hey, we had to think through like how to solve some of that stuff. And so we ended up, rolling back to a, sort of equity for all sort of setup where everybody gets an option. And I think that's gone too, but yeah it's definitely a journey.
LOGAN: When did that shift occur to the equity for.
WADE: we started doing it like 20 19, 20 20, something like that.
LOGAN: As part of that [00:35:00] you needed someone to value the business.
WADE: Yeah. Yeah.
LOGAN: You're probably never gonna raise, or at least it doesn't seem like you're gonna raise primary capital to the balance sheet, but you're keeping venture capitalists at least a short list, I assume warm in their in the engagement and conversation.
LOGAN: And so how did you go about doing that? How'd you prioritize who to build a relationship with? Can you talk through that?
WADE: Basically it was pretty simple, more or less what you said. There was, a set of folks that I'd gotten to know over the years that I kept warm and, people that I respected people that I felt came from reputable firms and it just gotten to know 'em. Yeah, I think the thing that was a little different in our approach compared to how most people is we knew that, at least at that point in time, people wanted to invest in Zapier.
WADE: Like we were a desired commodity, which was not the case when we did that seed round in 2012. That was scraping and clawing to get what we need. But by this time, like I was like, I know people want a piece of this.
LOGAN: [00:36:00] Probably than you did.
WADE: And it just, it's funny 'cause I've seen some of my friends in this.
WADE: It's it seems to go, fundraising is one of two ways. It's are you convincing them to buy or are they convincing you to sell? And it's one of those two directions and your fundraising strategy probably depends quite a bit on which one you're in. And so in our case, we knew that we were in the case of VCs trying to convince us to, to sell something anyway.
WADE: And so I, I just took it real slow. It was like, Hey I, I'm just like reticent to take money from anyone without really understanding them and them really understanding us. Like we're weird. Like we don't do things the same way. And I just wanted to make sure that we're just a hundred percent clear on this is how we're gonna run the business.
WADE: This is what, how we view the future. And if you're still interested, Great, let's talk, but I don't want you to feel like I'm pulling one over on you. You expecting zapper to be one thing and it's not. And so it's just like having those conversations, lunches, zoom, catchups, what have you. And that sort of whittled down a list to a small [00:37:00] group of folks and then it was just, okay, let's, we're finally gonna do a thing like you've said, you were interested tell me what you got.
WADE: Let's go do it.
LOGAN: Do you have a proper board set up with outside investors? Or is it is it just the management team? Not that just the management team implies that not proper board, but what is the current
WADE: We're a little unique there too. So it is three co-founders and then Jay Simons, who was the president, Atlassian for a long time is on our board. And he came
LOGAN: Is Jay on as an independent or
WADE: he's on a, as an independent, so he came on in 2020.
LOGAN: He's he's the best. So you have a good board member
WADE: Yeah, Atlassian, we get compared to Atlassian a lot and we. Love what they did and just felt like if we wanted, Jay is like, if the fit's there, the fit's there.
LOGAN: You also have been one of the pioneers of remote work and at least for tech software companies. And you were basically remote by from day one as a function of happenstance, right? It wasn't some like dogmatic, [00:38:00] purposeful long-term vision that you had. It was just the structure that you guys were operating under.
LOGAN: Can you tell the story of like how you ended up remote and then I would love to talk through like some of the takeaways, but hearing the story of how you ended up remote, I think is interesting as one of the founding fathers of this culture, I think.
WADE: Yeah. It definitely was like a little bit of like playing the hand you're dealt sort of situation. We're we. Starts as a side project, side projects, can't afford offices. So by de facto, I guess we're remote. Now we're all in the same city. We go to yc. As we're going through yc, the three of us are living in a two bedroom apartment together.
WADE: We've turned the kitchen into a makeshift third bedroom and YC ends. And one of my co-founders moves back to Missouri to be with his then girlfriend, now wife. She's wrapping up law school. So two of us in California, one in Missouri. So we're operating, distributed there. Start to have to think about hiring folks again, first time [00:39:00] founders.
WADE: We don't know anything about hiring. Never hired anyone in our lives. So we're like, not really sure what we're doing there. Asked for some advice and someone gave us this advice. Why don't you hire some old colleagues, people that you already know the quality of their work. You trust their working style.
WADE: And we're like yeah. Makes sense. Yeah, that's decent advice. And People we know, they're not in California, they're back in the Midwest. And we hire a former roommate of mine who was, he ran a Chicago Cubs message board. And I figure if you can run a Cubs message board, you could probably do support, so like Cs to run support.
WADE: There's a couple engineers we'd work with that are in Club B Missouri. And at that stage we're probably like six, seven people spread across three or four cities. And team seems happy, customers are happy, we're shipping features fast. Customer count's growing, revenue count's growing.
WADE: And he just looked at it and was like, I think we can do this. There's a few other, again, there's a few other folks doing distributor. We're not the only ones at this time, but there's a few other people out there too that are doing this. There's, [00:40:00] GitHub's doing this, automatic's doing this Reddit was doing this, so there's like a handful of companies that are doing so this model.
WADE: And so it wasn't like, okay, Yeah, there's not a ton of examples, but there are examples. It's not like it's impossible. And so we were like, eh, let's give it a ride. See how it goes. And I think again, it's one of those timing things where the tool and the technology, they were just starting to get pretty good to pull some of that off.
WADE: And they've just gotten better as we've grown. The video conferencing stuff was probably one of the shat things in 2011. Hangouts existed, but Hangouts was not amazing at the time, but it was good enough for a one-to-one convo. But as we started to have like group meetings, like it was pretty shaky.
WADE: And so we moved over to Go toeing and go to meeting was a lot better quality, but it could only have six concurrent people on a video call. And that was great when we were less than six people or like when we were doing meetings of less than six people. But it was a constraining and so Zapier was growing a little more then Zoom launches and [00:41:00] 20.
WADE: 16, I think. And like it's so clearly way better. And you don't have this six concurrent visitor or like limit. And so great, we're on that. And so some of this was like we just got to grow up like at the same rate as which the technology got really good too. And so we're just, again, it's like a bit of a timing thing I think again.
LOGAN: You've published The Ultimate Guide to Remote Work, which we could link in the show notes and people can go through, but what are some of the top takeaways if people were to hear operating remotely or building a remote first company and culture are there a few things that you would encourage people to like definitely internalize or think about?
WADE: I think there's a few things. One, you gotta be, it does require a little more discipline and you have to make the there's a lot of stuff in companies that's implicit that I think you get away with when you can just like tap someone on the, like the shoulder and have a little side combo.
WADE: But in a distributed company, that stuff all of it has to be defined. And so you do need a little bit more [00:42:00] explicit setup, rules of engagement principles for how you operate. And so you're gonna work on defining those things and writing those things down, like documentation matters. So you wanna write that stuff.
WADE: Then I think over time, You gotta be willing to, at least for us, because nobody else was doing it, we were figuring off out a lot as we went. And so we leaned a lot on just asking the employee base what's working, what's not. And for the stuff that was working, we'd be like, oh, that was cool.
WADE: Let's do more of that. Let's make that happen. And stuff that wasn't working, we would just be like, poor one out, like good riddance, like that was not helping us be great. And we'd send it, into the great unknown and be happy we were done with it. But we would just do that regularly.
WADE: And even eventually it became a little more formal where we do a regular employee survey and parts of it were about like the operating environment and what's working and we just try and trade notes in internally and we go talk to folks externally and just, in the same way that you're working on your product and listen to your customers and saying oh, customers really like this.
WADE: We, [00:43:00] we need to make that experience great. Or this thing sucks. Like we gotta fix this. You do the same thing with your, like how the company was working. It was like, okay, this stuff's really working good. This stuff isn't, we gotta go fix these things. And so just like paying attention to that helped us a ton.
LOGAN: When you say the structured or the process oriented, being explicit about writing things down. I know that you all have some like rules of engagement related to Slack. You have a product async that I assume has I don't know if you're still using, I. Using Async. Are you,
WADE: We we are actually just getting ready to sunset it. It has lasted us 12 years or whatever.
LOGAN: So Async was a was a I'll let you describe it, but a asynchronous communication tool. But what were some of the things that might not be obvious be it the naming conventions in Slack or the rules of engagement of what goes where. What were some of the things that you standardized that might not be apparent or obvious to someone listening?
WADE: You named some of the few, I think onboarding is a really important one. Like you wanna Yes. You wanna really [00:44:00] structure that onboarding period. Early on we did onboarding, so we'd fly people out to the Bay Area and we'd onboard in person for a week, and that was really good to get structured one-on-one time with the founders.
WADE: So we, it's still a sense of purpose and mission and culture and all that stuff right there. And we go out for dinners and play games and all sorts of stuff. That was really helpful as we started to hire more and more people. We did that then in cohorts. So it was like, Hey, you're doing this with a group of people.
WADE: And that built some community, some comradery, which is really important because remote work that's one of the cons is there is like some loneliness. There is like a sense of, it's easy to get disengaged if you haven't built some of those things. And so it was like trying to find mechanisms to increase connections between the employee base.
WADE: The slack, you mentioned the naming conventions. There was one thing that I used that was really useful for me and I borrowed this from Dharmesh at HubSpot, is like these just like hashtags to communicate stuff. Because I was finding for me, people would, I'd write stuff in Slack and folks really had a tough time [00:45:00] interpreting like, what is a mandate versus what is just like an idea.
WADE: And Dharmesh had this really good system, which was, hashtag FYI is just I'm just putting this out in the ether. Like I. Look at it, don't look at ad, I don't care. Hashtag suggestion was like, Hey, I thought about this and I had an idea. If you like it, go for it. I think it's a cool idea, but I have not studied this at all.
WADE: So if you wanna just totally outright dismiss it and don't tell me, that's fine. Hashtag recommendation is I actually spent a good amount of time on this. I have some expertise on this. And I really think you should probably do this. You can choose to not do it if you think it's the wrong thing, but at least have the courtesy to come tell me why.
WADE: Because I put some effort into it. And then hashtag plea was like a mandate. It was like, for the love of God, I need you to do this. And I don't really care why you're giving me things. And it's like little stuff like that. And I found that just like really useful because now in Text and Slack I could just upend one of those things and people are like, okay, I get what this is and I know how to now react to it and navigate it.
WADE: And that was just like [00:46:00] helpful for me in the c e o role because as we got bigger and bigger, I just saw people. Everyone treated everything like a plea. And I was like most, in fact, very few things were actually a plea. Most things were like FYIs and suggestions. And then, yeah, there's occasionally something that's a plea, but it's, yeah, it's just not that, that common
LOGAN: How have you gone about building trust among the employee base? 800 or people that I don't know how many have met in person? Probably a pretty small number. So that they're not just viewed as a, we found this when we went totally remote during during the pandemic. Everyone was You forget the human elements of what people are going through and that they're not just a Slack icon or a email response and all of that.
LOGAN: And so were there things that you all have done to build trust and remind people that the human element of getting along and socializing and all of that stuff in a kind of structured way.
WADE: FaceTime, is still really important. We would [00:47:00] pre pandemic, we were getting the company together, twice a year for, all company events and then smaller groups we'd get together for various things. Yeah, I get asked like, how do you plan an offsite and all this sort of stuff, and we've tried almost every permutation under the sun of just oh, more strategy oriented, more team oriented, more this, more that.
WADE: And honestly, it almost doesn't matter. It's like just the act of getting people together, breaking bread, spending time together. We know what to do. Like humans just inherently know what to do to do that. And as long as you care to put something together, like just getting people together, just, it just works.
WADE: It like helps build some of that trust. And, again, we, after we run these events we'd pull folks and run these surveys like, what'd you like this time? What'd you, what do you think we could do better? And so we, we would make 'em better throughout that and make 'em more distinctly like Zapier.
WADE: But just the act of getting people together goes such a long way. I'm trying to think of anything, any other, like tru key Trust building stuff, onboarding folks and cohorts helps.
LOGAN: The name of their parents.
WADE: Yeah. Yeah. [00:48:00] There you go.
LOGAN: That one that you did? I didn't make that up. I think
WADE: No, that's legit. That's
LOGAN: Yeah, you did it in the early days, you would say my name's Wade and my parents are X, Y, Z. And it like humanizes the person that they have parents and they're willing to be forthcoming with it.
WADE: Yeah, and I, I've tried to model that too. We, we do these things called Friday updates and, Friday update, it's here's what I did this week, here's what I got doing next week. And I know, I remember one of the early days, one of our employees was like, these things are fine, but I like, they feel so clinical.
WADE: And so he just, he was like, can I just add some other stuff? And I was like, sure. See what it does. And so he added this thing called Unplugged, and it's literally just here's what I did outside of work, and you usually include like a picture or something like that. And people loved it ended up being like a core part of the Friday update template.
WADE: So you, you include an unplugged section. And, I've always tried to do that. People internally, like they know my spouse, they know my dog, they know my kids' names, they know like my extended family. Like they, I'm, yeah, I'm weighed the c e o and founder of Zapier, but I'm also just weighed the like.
WADE: Guy who goes on [00:49:00] vacations and
LOGAN: One of the things we, we've alluded to, but that you guys were intentional or have been intentional about is the importance of the onboarding experience. Experience. And so once upon a time actually getting people together in person, it sounds like not doing that anymore, but still starting people in batches.
LOGAN: Having the learning and development team actually own the onboarding experience having a company centric programming initially. Can you talk through like integrating someone in their first week of the job and how you've thought about making that successful for the employees that are starting.
WADE: we've gone through a few phases. And so I think the phases, it's a, it's been a little different for us. The earliest employees, it was me and my co-founders were onboarding these folks directly. We do onboarding. We'd fly 'em out. Not a lot was written down. It, a lot of it was like informal storytelling, a lot of relationship building.
WADE: We'd work during the days and at night we'd go, out to eat and then we'd, play games and, just stuff like that. And we'd usually do that like once a month or something like that would be [00:50:00] happening. And that was really effective for I don't know, up to maybe 20 employees, 30 employees, something like that.
WADE: Because it was very personal and everyone heard from me or Mike or Brian, and they really understood like, what are we, what is Zapper all about? So that has maybe phase one, phase two then was just like that, but at a little bit bigger scale. And Brian, Mike and I were then still intimately involved, but it got to a point where it was like, okay, we have one or two other key people in the company.
WADE: Usually a manager that was like helping us onboard into different functions. Micah would come out and help us with support hires. It's Hey, can you help us here? Or we'd have someone come out and help with engineering hires and, the and we'd start doing 'em in cohorts, so they got a little bit bigger but still more or less the same format.
WADE: Brian, Micah and I are still involved, but like maybe less involved in some of the day-to-day bits, but we're still going out to eat with folks at night. We're still playing games. We're still like sharing the Zapier history the vision here's what we're gonna go do and be
LOGAN: Did this transition, was that 30 to 40 people that you, that the transition started to occur?
WADE: Yeah, probably [00:51:00] around then. And that lasted somewhere between a hundred, 200, I'm not sure. But we started to get to where we were hiring so many folks that one, Airbnbs didn't really fit the number of people we're hiring anymore. And so it was like, ugh, there's a real Scaling challenge here.
WADE: And we got to where we're flying these folks out to the Bay Area managers out and it was like disrupting like the flow of work. 'cause it was just like, this is happening so regular that like their job is actually becoming this and not leading the function that they're trying to lead. And so it was like, okay, we gotta, we got got to a fork in the road and I remember we were thinking, okay, we have two options.
WADE: Like we actually could go get an office now. But we're gonna think about the office a little bit differently. It's it's not gonna be like a place where people show up every day. We're just gonna get a spot where we can host these. Like it's gonna be more like a classroom. This is how we're gonna design it.
WADE: We could do that or we could go just full on remote onboarding. And it was actually like pretty like lively debate internally, which direction we should go. But eventually what we settled on was like, look, we're a distributed company, we're [00:52:00] remote. This is who we are. If we can't onboarding people remote, like what are we doing here?
WADE: And so we just said, Hey, we're gonna go get really good at that. About that time too was when we had started an l and d function. And so I'd had a former coworker who I had, lo is actually former boss of mine who I loved working for. I think he was incredible. And he had gone and he was, he had been a, he's an instructional designer.
WADE: He was actually a web designer as well too. And just like a all around good person. He'd been spending the last four or five years as a school teacher, a literal school teacher. And so we brought him in and said Hey, help us build out, like all the corporate onboarding for a lot of this stuff. And that's when we started to build in a much more structured virtual onboarding.
WADE: So people join, they have these courses. It's a mix of self-guided stuff versus live sessions. So the self-guided stuff is, all your like blocking and tackling things like, Hey, here's how you get your payroll set up. Here's how you get access to tools. Here's how you do X, y, z sort of things. Then you have these virtual [00:53:00] things that allow people to get to know each other in different parts of the org.
WADE: I teach a course on feedback, how we do feedback at Zapier or what's the good way, bad ways, et cetera. I also do a core or an a m a with my co-founders where folks get a chance to meet us, ask us questions, learn about the history, da. And then there's other folks in the organization that we've enlisted to provide different parts of Zapier where they just teach like what's relevant for those folks.
WADE: Week one is mostly like the company onboarding, and then it's pretty packed. Week two starts to be taper off a little bit and be a little bit more focused on your specific function or your specific area of the company. And then usually after two weeks, you're unleashed into the organization.
WADE: We have a Slack channel that's dedicated for these folks, so they're all, crew slash the date you joined. And these channels they'll be a pretty lively, like even well past the onboarding date because these people just They become onboarding buddies where it's like, ah, and when you go to our events, like our retreats and stuff like that, they'll be like, Hey, it was good to see you in [00:54:00] person.
WADE: Like we, we started together. And it just creates a little bit of a you move through the company together and it creates that community.
LOGAN: Historically there's been in person for the most part. And then you all pioneered along with a few others, this remote first world, and I don't know how dogmatic you guys have been about it. Is there any office, are people allowed, does everyone need to be on their own independent screens for every meeting?
LOGAN: How principled are you about it's only remote or people can get together and zoom in together.
WADE: know, I don't mind people like getting together. Like we have certain places that have, I think our biggest city has maybe 40 people work there. But there's no like office that they go into and. So folks are free to get together. Like they can go to a coffee shop or do that or whatnot, but we're not gonna provide funds and stuff for that.
WADE: And that's intentional. Yeah. We just wanna level the playing field. It's this is how we all work and so no one's gonna get like a leg up. Or it's, I don't know if leg ups even the right way to describe it. It's we're just not gonna have a different way.
LOGAN: just [00:55:00] changing the framework of if there's two people in a room together, zooming in, the dynamic's gonna be different for the one person that isn't in that room.
WADE: Exactly. And so we just said, Hey, we're not gonna do that. We don't, we, it's hard enough running one type of culture, much less. Two, and this is where I think like the folks that are doing the hybrid thing have chosen like the toughest path because they're, now designing for two different types of environments, I've always felt hey just be in an office or be remote is probably like the easiest path.
LOGAN: This like partially in person, partially remote some days this, some days that, are you skeptical that's going to work and we're gonna need to go back to the extremes of fully remote or fully in person? Or do you think it's just gonna take someone to pioneer exactly the framework around remote that you guys did for this hybrid world?
WADE: It's clearly doable. There's a lot of folks that have doing hybrid and done it for a long time. I think it's just, it just makes it harder. There's maybe some ways to do it. It's there's some models that I've seen that I'm like, oh, [00:56:00] that could work. Where, they're choosing to be hybrid, but they're still hiring in just the same city.
WADE: So it's okay, everyone now is still on the same schedule where it's like we all work distributed these days. We all come into the office on these days and it still is one cohesive culture. And so there's probably some ways that you could pull it off. The thing that feels really hard is when you're creating different cultures and you're managing different ways of working and because you're like, not like I, COVID just really did a number on this where everyone got forced into one style of working and then, humans, we all have our own personal preferences.
WADE: And so once it came back to okay, we want to unify the company around it, everybody had gotten a taste of what their own personal preference would be. And I don't envy any c e o that's in that position of then trying to like repo that back to what they actually want. Because once you give humans a taste of something different, like that's just hard to convince 'em that they should accept something different [00:57:00] than that.
LOGAN: Can you talk a little bit about Chesterton's fence and what that is and how you think about it.
WADE: Chesterson Fence is this idea that hey, say you come upon a fence out in a field and you think this fence is pointless. I don't understand why anyone put this fence up. Chesterton's Fence says you're allowed to take the fence down. Only once you understand why it was erected in the first place.
WADE: When you do understand it, then you get to choose. You can take it down, you could leave it up. Go for it. And so I think it's a really helpful framework, especially in onboarding and especially for new leaders. 'cause they come in a company and every company has things that are great and everything company has things that are just the way that they are.
WADE: And you join and you're just, it's gonna be hard to tell the difference between the two sometimes, like what has just been built up because it was like, I don't know, we just needed something and so we just did this. It's not, no one's in love with it, but it's fine. Versus things that are like, no, this is like a, I.
WADE: This is like an intentional, like part of who we are and we cannot take this [00:58:00] away. So you just tell folks like, Hey, once you understand why it was there in the first place, go for it. You're in charge. Do what you want. But if you don't take the time to understand why, and then you go make a change, like that's kinda on you, like you should have done your homework.
LOGAN: I've heard you talk about the difficulty of re-architecting things at scale. And once these things get calcified or built into an org, it's really hard to redo them later on. Are there, how do you think about that? Are there specific examples that have brought that up where it just got late and you wish you had made a change early on in something?
WADE: way I like to talk about it internally is what are the norms of the company? And so like we have things that are values or principles. These are things that are explicit. We said, this is who we are, this is what we want to be. And so those things we write down and we try and aspire to. Then there's a bunch of norms that just build up over the years and the norms that get built up, those weren't intentional.
WADE: They were just, we just did [00:59:00] 'em. And these are the really tricky things I think, in companies, because some of those norms are actually quite good. They're quite helpful. You needed them, you implement them. Some of them were just temporary. We needed a four point in time. Some of 'em were actually bad habits and not actually all that good.
WADE: But depending on who you are in the company, you might look at that norm and start to say, this is who we are. And start to put identity into that norm and say, I care about this. This is who Zapier's culture is. This is the really important thing. And I found that the longer you let that stand and let that go, like you go unaddressed and that's like implicit, like the more dangerous that is because.
WADE: If you really don't buy into, if you don't think that's where it's gonna go, you're gonna have to unwind that. And saying is really helpful to be clear to folks that like, Hey, this is who we are and this stuff, this is just a trait in which we're doing right now. This is a thing about us. It's not, we don't ascribe any, we know [01:00:00] dogmatic point of view in these areas.
WADE: It's just a thing of convenience. So I do think the, like general principle applies. But yeah, all the trickiest ones are ones that I might upset some folks internally talking about a
WADE: podcast.
LOGAN: We don't need to air any grievances or laundry on that, but one of the things I think you you've talked about is that maybe you were late bringing in certain. Executives or you would've brought in more experienced people in certain functions early on. What advice would you have for founders listening to this about like when to bring in an executive of some in a certain role?
WADE: We were definitely late to bring in more experienced leadership. We were, again, three first time founders with not a lot of management experience. And so we benefited from, getting, folks who have really good understanding of like how to scale certain things, good management experience, et cetera.
WADE: We, we would've benefited from doing that sooner, and I don't think we really understood what great looked like. It's also really [01:01:00] hard to hire people that are good here though, too. So like you're gonna wanna try and bring them in earlier, but at the same time, the earlier try to bring it in, like it probably is also a.
WADE: More risk of going wrong.
LOGAN: Have your successes oriented more to inexperienced people that scaled or been there, done that. People that could come in and operationalize based on experiences that they've had in the past.
WADE: It's a mix, honestly. I think our executive team now, like half of 'em are maybe homegrown and half of 'em are external. Yeah, I think it's gotten, some of it's unique to you as a C E O. Like I think for me, the first, like some of the earlier execs we hired they definitely were a little more seasoned, a little more experienced, et cetera.
WADE: And part of that was complimenting me. 'cause like I was learning and I didn't know enough and so I, I needed some more help in those areas versus some of the more recent execs, like I've gotten a lot better and so I can take a chance more on an up and comer and I can help 'em and get Perhaps some unique skills that you may not necessarily [01:02:00] get when you go out to get super seasoned.
WADE: I don't know. Some of it just depends it's hard to, it's hard to ascribe like a particular rule set to this type of hiring. It's like you wanna assemble a great team and you definitely need great talents, individual talent, but the team part is like somewhat unique to you and your company and how you wanna get it to go.
WADE: If you're a sports fan at all, you see this, like you see teams that on paper you're like, this team should have won it all and they didn't. And you're like, why did that happen? And then these other teams that you're like a lot of good players, but they ended up being a great team. And so like why is that?
WADE: And I think a lot of us try and describe this thing, but if it was easier to do more of us would've actually done it. It's actually quite hard to pull that off. Quite rare.
LOGAN: Your interview process in hiring seems to be very evidence-based and like requiring specifics to the extent that you've referenced the US veteran. An affairs office actually having great behavior related questions. Can you talk through your interviewing style and what you're trying to get out of people in those conversations?
WADE: [01:03:00] I'm a big fan of just like behavioral interviewing in general, which like the gist of this is tell me about a time when and the reason why is like you, you wanna hear what people actually did in the past, not what they think they would do in the future. Because generally, like their past behavior is probably gonna be pretty close.
WADE: How they do things for you on the job. Now you can you can go exploring. So you can say tell me about a time when da, then they tell you the time and then you can ask questions like if you could do it again, what do you think got right? What do you think you'd do differently? And you can get a sense for are they learning?
WADE: Are they evolving? Have they reflected on the process? And the follow up questions really help, the probing really helps, but you're generally trying to get a sense of what actually happened then. The nice thing about this is you can also then combo this with like reference checks and back channels and stuff like that.
WADE: 'cause now you've got a bunch of stories where you can say, Hey, now to the reference, you can be like, tell me about this project. Can you tell me how it happened? And you don't have to give away what you actually think happened or what you know about the process, but you can hear another person describe it and you know [01:04:00] it.
WADE: Do the stories match up? Does the person you're interviewing take more credit or less credit for the way others see it? And you can start to then triangulate a whole bunch of information to better understand do you think this person is the one that's really gonna get it done for you?
WADE: And so that that behavioral interviewing combined with really good reference and back channels is that's like the best,
LOGAN: You alluded earlier to, as part of the onboarding process for new employees, what do you call your employees? Are they
WADE: Zapps.
LOGAN: Zapps. For new Zaps was you actually give a course on how to give feedback and I'm sure there's elements of that are specific to Zapier, but what have you learned from giving feedback or what are some of your top lessons about giving feedback?
WADE: Good framework here situation, behavior impact. Basically the way it works is like you describe what happened. You described like the situation you share the behavior associated with what impact it had, and there's like a little formula. It's Hey, when you do this was the impact and, could you keep it up or not?
WADE: So Hey Logan when he started this podcast a little late, it maybe [01:05:00] made the rest of my day like off kilter. Can we try to-
LOGAN: For the record, we started on time, this is just an example.
WADE: The actuals. I was the one that was late so maybe it's, Hey Wade or Hey, when you started this on time, it meant the rest of my day was going on time.
WADE: I really appreciate it. Thanks. And the magic of it is, it's grounded in like a shared observation, a shared fact. You and I both know, did it start on time or did it not? Versus a lot of times when people get feedback they skip over that part and they'll just say, it's something like, Logan, I just don't think you value my time very much.
WADE: And if I give you that feedback, you're probably like, what the hell, dude? Of course I value your team. I don't get where's this coming from? I don't understand. And so it sets the recipient, like it puts 'em on their heels. It gets that fight or flight response re mechanism like firing up versus just starting with Hey, this thing, we both saw it, we both did it like right.
WADE: Yeah, I remember that. And then you can start to describe this is what it did. And here's how it impacted it. And it just helps it just helps facilitate like a better conversation around some of these trickier areas. And it's pretty simple too.
WADE: Like it's something generally [01:06:00] everybody gets once you describe it to 'em one time.
LOGAN: Were you a manager before starting Zapier? Did you have a team of employees?
WADE: No, I was, I learned everything
LOGAN: So you've had to learn, which is an unnatural thing. I feel like leadership can be natural in some ways, but management is a set of skills that are somewhat unnatural. I don't know if you agree with that, but what feedback is one element of it, but managing and leading now a team of 800 people, what were some of the things that you've learned or internalized about growing as a manager?
WADE: Feedback's definitely one. Delegation is probably a big one. Hiring, firing. It's a big one. The other thing that's tricky in all these areas is there could be like mixed advice, like how to delegate. There's a lot of mixed advice on delegating and like that one kind of befuddled me for quite a while. It's am I supposed to get into the details and have a big vision and do this, or am I supposed to hire great people and get outta their way?
WADE: And you start to try around with some of these things [01:07:00] and yeah, you find like the version that's okay, this is what works for me. And then try and be really explicit with everybody else where it's this is how I'm going to delegate, this is how this is going to work here. And again, it's that expectation thing.
WADE: Like you set expectations, then everyone generally can come along for the ride. The thing that stinks is when you know they're expecting one thing and it's a totally different thing. This is why it's really nice to define your culture upfront. So that when people are going through the hiring process, they can be like, oh, that sounds awesome.
WADE: I really wanna work there. Or, whoa, no way. I don't want that. And it's really good that filtering process happens before they join, because if they join and start to feel that way, now you got a real headache on your hand because it's a, it becomes an internal battle versus like you have that internal cohesion if you get it right.
LOGAN: This is maybe implicit to that, but goal setting. And it comes into delegation, it comes into expectations, it comes into all of this, but how do you think about if you give very specific goals and tell people what to do, they might feel [01:08:00] micromanaged in some way. If you give too much latitude the other way, you might not get what you think the objectives should be.
LOGAN: And so how do you think about that tension as it relates to delegation and expectations and all that?
WADE: We've tried all the goal setting stuff, like we've got K, we've tried KPIs, we've tried OKRs, we've tried North Star metrics, we've tried all this stuff. I don't know that any of it's ever really stuck for us to be honest. Some of it works okay. Some of it is like a lot of overhead and people hate it, and it's no fun.
LOGAN: How do you do goals now? How have you landed on all this?
WADE: We have a set of bets that are really important for the company. And I name an executive sponsor who's solely responsible for achieving that thing end to end, and then I hold 'em accountable for getting it done. That's basically it. And then I trust that they're gonna push it through their org the way that they need to push it through their org.
WADE: I went through a journey on this, like [01:09:00] where, we didn't do it at first and then we started like realizing, ah, we gotta scale, we gotta grow. And so it's ah, I gotta figure out OKRs and I gotta figure all these goal setting, gotta figure all these things out. And we tried a bunch and it was just like, it's just like really complicated and not all that helpful.
WADE: I remember talking to somebody about this where they were like the, there was a c O at a fairly large company and they were like, the best goal setting framework was to literally go to the whiteboard and write down, this is the number one thing we gotta get done, and this is the person responsible for driving this.
WADE: We're all gonna line up and help them make this thing happen. And for whatever reason, like the simplicity of that, the clarity of that, I really like it. It's just like I don't have to mess with all the orchestration of this whole system. It just resonates with me a lot more versus I don't know, OKRs sometimes feel like Google did like a collective like denial of service attack on all these startups and convinced them to do this, and it like ended up slowing them down because it's like this thing is complicated.
LOGAN: That's funny.
WADE: And then good [01:10:00] judgment, like good judgment is the other piece of the equation. That is probably the trickiest thing where like a lot of folks want to, is, and this is another thing, it's is you, your company grows, you want more, you hire more of these people that have process and they want clear rules of engagement and they want things to be like just so perfect.
WADE: But that's just not how companies get built. Like companies are a series of betts and risks and chances and, they're educated guesses and risks and chances, but they're not known predetermined facts. And A good amount of goal setting, a good amount of like performance management, a good amount of delegation.
WADE: So you're just trying to hire people who have good judgment and a good feel for these things who are taking the inputs and are looking at the metrics and the numbers. But then they're also assessing a bunch of qualitative facts what's going on in the market? How is my team showing up? Are they putting the effort in?
WADE: Are they not putting the effort in? They're just pulling that all in together into one big stew. And then they're going, you know what? Here's my God honest take on this situation, and [01:11:00] this is what I think we need to do. Versus I think a lot of management advice misses out on that judgment piece. It's just this is the data.
WADE: The data tells us X, we do X. And I'm like yeah, the data's important. It should be an input to that process, but it's one of several inputs. And I think as a, I think a lot of management gets that piece wrong.
LOGAN: You resisted having a c e o coach for a long time and finally I think caved and has it been, I guess why did you resist it for a while and has it been successful? What's been the benefit?
WADE: There's a lot of these like coaches and stuff that pop up and it just felt a little like a snake oil industry to me, to be honest. Where it's you, what are you? What? What? I don't know, like what are you gonna whatcha gonna teach me here? This is a little squishy feely sort of thing going on.
WADE: But I had enough people that were like getting c e o coaches and stuff that were like swearing by it. And smart people that I was like, may maybe I'm the one that's like being dumb here. And so I went out and interviewed like a handful of folks and found somebody that like just really fit with me.
WADE: And the thing that I [01:12:00] found was just like really helpful was there was just like a fair amount of stuff as you're scaling the company that, you start to question yourself, you're not really sure about and you're like, You are not maybe ready or not even sure if you should talk to anyone in the company about it.
WADE: Should you talk to your executive team about these things? Should you talk to your company about these things? Or you maybe know that you do, but you're not exactly sure how to have that conversation yet. And so like my exec coach just became like a really good, partner for those types of conversation where I'm like, I'm struggling with X and I feel like I need to say Y, but I'm not really sure like even how to get into it.
WADE: And then we just workshop it. And usually I'd come in a meeting, just be like, okay, I know I'm gonna go have a conversation with this person. This is what we're gonna do, here's how we're gonna say it. And it's just like really helpful for that for me. So that, that was my challenge with it. I think for other folks too it's different.
WADE: Different people have different things they wanna work on different things they wanna optimize for. I had someone that was like a gen, a fairly general coach. As the company scales and gets, it grows, like you probably [01:13:00] need more coaches to help with different parts of. What you're trying to do.
WADE: Like you, it's just like an athlete. An athlete's gonna have, a coach that helps 'em with fitness, one that helps 'em with nutrition, one that helps 'em with injuries, one that helps 'em with just all these different things. And, as you scale and grow, like you realize the, the eke out, the incremental gains, you need specific help that you may not be able to go figure it all out on your own.
WADE: And you might not wanna figure it out on your own. There's something to be said about having somebody who can just short circuit a lot of those learnings and allow you to get it done today, what you could figure out on your own. But it might take you a month or two months or whatever.
LOGAN: We touched on this earlier, but the you time the no code market, well before it was even a thing. And then it became a buzzword. The other one that you guys were definitely out in front of was the product-led growth, which we spoke about earlier in particular with regard to the landing page element that you guys were able to do.
LOGAN: I'd love to touch on a few of the other ones and maybe get your perspectives on what kind of the takeaways [01:14:00] were some of the other tactics that you all you all did. Content marketing was there anything that you that you internalized from that whole process and recommendations for people that want to build a content marketing engine?
WADE: We knew we had this landing page strategy that was working. But we wanted to like fan the flames of it even more. And we wanted to really get a higher quality. Level of quality content going. And that's where the content stuff started to kick in. I'll be honest, like we didn't have much of a strategy.
WADE: It was more of a tactic at that point in time where it was like, we're just gonna try stuff and see what happens. It took us a little bit to find what is it that we're actually doing here with this stuff? And in hindsight you look back and it's duh, that's what it should have been.
WADE: What it ended up being was just like, we're gonna write about apps. Like we know all about apps and so we're just gonna describe what are the best apps for this? How do you integrate that? How do you know workflows and various use cases and show off all these types of different ways that you could find 'em.
WADE: And that ended up being our sweet spot. Some of it, [01:15:00] like the way we got there was a lot of trial and error and then we paid attention to different things. Like we pay attention to okay, what starts ranking really well? Where do we start to get a lot of search traffic? Or, what gets shared a lot?
WADE: What's getting, going out on Twitter? What's going out on acronyms? What's going on these places? Is that something that we can maybe build a thing around?
LOGAN: On the consistency versus the quality spectrum, was there one that you guys ended up landing on more than the other?
WADE: remember when we hired our first person, like I, we had to set some standards on this. And I remember we just settled where it was like, Tuesday, Thursday we're putting something out no matter what. Do the best quality level that you can do with that cadence. And that's where we landed. Over time.
WADE: We've been able to figure out a way to do like quality and quantity, like together now costs more like you usually have to pull on, like there's a lever that comes with that. But for us it generally pays off because we also know what tends to work better. So like it allows us to pay more for content that we think is really [01:16:00] gonna do quite well for
LOGAN: We talked about landing pages in ss e o, there's the partner ecosystem that led to the virality as well, where partners were actually pulling you into deals or recommending people to work with you. And I think one of the unique things you had was very clear, r o i, right? If like someone built a zap they, for the customer or for the partner, they would retain at a higher level, or we're just a, generally a better customer that would show that action.
LOGAN: Are there other things as you think about like p l G, that, that term, are there other things that stand out advice you would give to people? Maybe it's on the onboarding experience, maybe it's on how you oriented sales reps. Anything that sort of stands out in building this engine that's been as self-serve and viral as it has been for you.
WADE: I generally think people make it more complicated than it actually is. All of us are. Consumers ourselves. Like we bought stuff from Amazon, we bought stuff from companies in a self-serve way. So we know like [01:17:00] how it's supposed to feel to buy something in a self-serve way. So just mimic that for like your software is like maybe the simplistic advice, but the one place where I do see folks getting it wrong is they often think, oh if I'm gonna be self-serve, I should never talk to a customer.
WADE: That's actually the I, I lose if I ever talk to a customer, and actually I think you should go about it the exact opposite way. You should actually try to talk to a lot of customers and you should try and do a lot of ride-alongs and handholds and you should watch what's happening every step of the way and where are there places where the website or the app or whatever is causing them to trip up and causing more friction.
WADE: And that's where you start to know, we gotta be better.
LOGAN: I heard your co-founder, Mike, say that you guys have actually never really developed product features or product related roadmap. Things that weren't solving a specific pain point for a customer that, that you didn't know, like you would get paid for in some way, or at least there would be people [01:18:00] jumping saying, yes.
LOGAN: I want that. I guess do you agree with with that sentiment and how do you think about setting product direction and roadmap and all of that stuff for Zapier?
WADE: We generally, for whatever we're building, we like to have a, like a like a proof point, like one use case that we can point to and say at the other side of this, we need to be solving this problem. Which really helps us avoid like these grand theoretical features that are like, oh, we're gonna build an amazing platform for X, but not really grounded in any particular problem.
WADE: And so like we always just wanna start, like when we launched like multi-steps apps, for example we had a very specific thing that we were trying to solve for, which is if you wanted to create a an invoice in QuickBooks, you had to associate a customer with it too. And so we wanted to make sure that the customer is really easy for them to know, okay, I gotta create the customer first and then I gotta attach the invoice to 'em.
WADE: And so that's how we're gonna go step through multiple actions. And then we stepped back from there and said okay, great, we've solved [01:19:00] this specific problem, but how do we make this more generic? It's not just QuickBooks that this exists for. There's a whole ecosystem of places where you could do multiple steps.
WADE: And so how do we generalize the solution here that does create that platform effect, which ended up being like, Really positive for us because then our customers went and did things that we never even anticipated. I remember seeing, a customer do something. Like one of the first times I saw someone create an actual app with Zapier and I was like, holy crap, you can do that.
WADE: I didn't even know you could do that with our product. And that kind of stuff is when that sort of, it feels like when it gets fun, when people are pushing your product past the places that you even have dreamed of yourself.
LOGAN: Now that ties us into artificial intelligence, which I know you guys are doing stuff around today. Maybe describe for people what you're doing with ai. What has you excited about this new wave?
WADE: The dream with AI for Zapier is that you can set up these workflows, you can set up these integrations with just less configuration. The whole like natural language paradigm is [01:20:00] way more intuitive for humans. We like to be able to just speak so something to an existence.
WADE: And I think for us, the place we're starting is just like, how do we help people brainstorm? Hey, I, what should I use app here for? I feel like I should be automating more things, but I don't actually know where to start. And it turns out these LMS are like quite creative, quite good at exploring these frameworks.
WADE: And so if you tell 'em like, Hey, I'm a VC who has a podcast and I would like to run a more efficient podcast. Like, how should I use app? Does a pretty good job. Like it'll probably give you four or five ideas that you're like, yeah, I should do that. And so you start there and then the next obvious step is okay, can you just set 'em up for me?
WADE: And, we're working through that, the first problem's a lot easier because it's just brainstorming. The second one actually requires you to build things in a correct way. And this is where the LLMs are Like the accuracy is not amazing yet with this stuff. And so there's a lot of like trial and error to figure that piece out.
WADE: But that's like the tip of the spear here. I think, it's just a really freaking exciting time to be building stuff [01:21:00] because these things are, I, it's like the first time I felt like the internet has like magic associated with it in quite a while, and I'm like, this sort of patterns of how you build products in the last 10 years have been, I dunno, it's just yeah, we know what we're doing and now it's like we're figuring it all out again.
LOGAN: When you look on the roadmap, like I can understand, so hey Logan you have a podcast and these are the tools I'm using and it can say why are you doing automated meeting booking through Calendly and whatever your Gmail account? And I'm sure there's a bunch of suggestions there, and I can internalize the actual integration.
LOGAN: Okay, go set up this integration for me so that I can use Calendly and Gmail together to book guests. When you dream the dream out, Two years, five years, 10 years. What is there anything Zapier in ai outside of those that, that you're like, gosh, I can see a future in which this is what we're doing with [01:22:00] Zapier?
LOGAN: Or is it, are you guys just so focused on the getting the natural language integrations figured out?
WADE: The thing that's been like pretty obvious for us since the beginning is that people really want their software to work better for them, and for us it started with that observation around, I really wish this stuff could integrate with other stuff. And it just doesn't like, and when you go ask the company, Hey, can you build those integrations?
WADE: You'd get the PM saying, Nah, I don't got time. If any of us run these SaaS products, like we have feature requests that are a mile long, and so we're all playing this game where we're trying to figure out what is the set of features that are opinionated enough that we can attract an audience, we can be differentiated and we can stand out, but are not so opinionated that we price ourselves out of a market.
WADE: We hit some lowest common denominator that we can build a company around that. And what ends up happening there is all [01:23:00] of us as consumers of this software, we just settle. We're like, okay, this is pretty good, but it's not exactly the way I would want this thing to work. And we're okay with that.
WADE: But I think if we had the choice, we'd rather that software work a little bit better for ourselves. But we don't all have the ability to go do that sort of stuff. We're limited by our own ability to write code and the market doesn't have enough engineers and engineers are expensive to go create that sort of personalization that's gonna happen here.
WADE: But I suspect what the future's gonna look like here is that LMS are gonna make it a lot easier for the regular person to describe exactly what they want. And there's gonna be a set of building blocks, zaps are one, but it could be data storage, it could be ui. There's gonna be a whole bunch of things that kind of comprise software and humans are gonna be able to speak that software into existence.
WADE: And it might be creating like a new site or a new app just for you. Or it could [01:24:00] just be tweaking one that already exists. You might just say Hey, I'm really happy with how Slack works, but I really wish this part of Slack worked in this way. Can you like, Make it so that I have a little widget or a button here that allows me to do these things, and the LMS will let you do that.
WADE: So I think we're gonna see this just explosion of software that is way more custom fitted to the specific way that we like to work. And that, I don't know, that's like pretty exciting because I don't know, like most software I use, like it's fine, but it's not amazing. And it would be more amazing if it understood if it understood me, if it understood me better.
WADE: And I just think that's that's the most exciting thing about what's happening right now is that these LMS it's is like you can it's a lot easier to see. It feels like it's a lot closer than we imagined. It was not that long ago.
LOGAN: Sam Altman was he was a partner at YC when you guys were going through in 2011, 2012, is that right?
WADE: I think he might have been like a visiting partner at that time.
LOGAN: But you guys got to know each other right around [01:25:00] then, and I think he, he gave advice in the early days for how you guys should go about things. Was it evident to you then that, not that he would be one of the most influential.
LOGAN: People in the world. But is this surprising to you that he's in this role, in this position today?
WADE: That guy's capable of anything.
LOGAN: Yeah.
WADE: I'll tell you the one thing I do remember, and this is not like any super special thing, like he had a way of staying on top of stuff that I personally haven't been able to replicate. But he'd always walk around with this just like a like piece of, like a flip book of note, a notepad thing that was like one of the smaller ones and.
WADE: He was always taking action items down in this thing, and the way he scheduled it out was like, there, it was like the first one was Monday, the next one was Tuesday, the next one was Thursday. And so he is keeping this like rolling list of stuff to do and just like perpetually, like chucking this, checking the stuff off.
WADE: The guy was just like a machine at [01:26:00] getting things done, and he just didn't feel like any action item ever just slipped by him. And like that, like you would just see him do that and you'd just be like, what man? Like he's just operating on different levels. And there's something about it too where it's that's not like you or I could choose to do that too, but for whatever reason we probably just don't, I don't know.
WADE: Maybe you do. I'm not that good at it. Like I feel like I'm decent and I've gotten better at it, but there's, yeah, there's just something innate there that's pretty special.
LOGAN: The very early days of Zapier, you lived off of your wife's teacher salary in a $500 a month apartment in Columbia, Missouri. Taking out the market opportunity around you couldn't start Zapier today as Zapier of today would already exist. Do you think there was something, I don't know how old you were when you got going, but was that a unique moment in time for you to start a company?
LOGAN: Or do you think you were destined to be an entrepreneur and if you had stayed at the prior business it just would've delayed a couple years of starting [01:27:00] something?
WADE: It was definitely like a unique moment in time. I just I was 23, I think 24, so just outta school used to work, like used to living with no money and things like that. I didn't have the lifestyle creep, didn't have kids, like there was, Surviving on a relatively modest salary was fine.
WADE: I wasn't wanting for, anything more than that. And so I do think that definitely helps when you're trying to start a company because turns out things cost money and so if you can just not have to use as much money, you're gonna be able to go a lot longer than if you've got some like lifestyle inflation, which like, yeah.
WADE: That, that's just like a fact of like how this stuff gives, it's no, no knock on anyone who does have kids. I have kids now, and it would just be tougher because it's like, Hey, I got these other responsibilities that matter to me, and I, I'd have to make a much tougher choice.
WADE: Versus, at the time it was like, Zapier was it, this was the thing. It was the thing. It was always the thing. And so I think that definitely plays a big role in terms of was it inevitable? I don't know, like [01:28:00] I. I definitely was pretty discontent with being an employee. Like I'd done it a couple times and it was just fine.
WADE: Like I didn't love it and so I was looking for a way out. Like I was like, I've gotta figure out a, something more interesting, more compelling, more whatever. And got by get, got bit by the, startup bug and whatnot and just, I dunno, I just liked it. It just felt like the thing to go do.
LOGAN: Was there an experience that you look back on prior to starting Zapier that most prepared or helped you.
WADE: Yeah. The one that comes to mind is I grew up playing the saxophone and I had a saxophone instructor who had a quartet that would play at the Missouri Governor's mansion from time to time, and they had a member of their quartet that moved away. Pretty suddenly, I think there was like a family health issue or something like that, that they had to deal with.
WADE: And so they were up a creek 'cause they, they needed a fourth member to go play at this gig. And for whatever [01:29:00] reason probably desperation the best idea they had was like, Hey, let's invite this ninth grader to come to a rehearsal and maybe see if he could come play at this gig. And so I remember rehearsing with him and being like, super nervous, but like really excited.
WADE: 'cause I was like, for me growing up in Central Missouri, like the governor's man, like that's like the coolest thing on the planet. And so I get to go play in this thing and I remember play for two hours and I get 50 bucks and I get a free meal out of it. And then that summer I was a lifeguard at the public swimming pool and I'd work a full day, hot Missouri Suns cleaning up toilet paper, wet toilet paper in the locker rooms.
WADE: I. I had to pay for concession snacks, and the take home on that was like 47 bucks. I remember just thinking like 50 bucks for two hours of work, having a lot of fun is a lot better than 47. Working at the swim pool. And I think that just planted the seed in my head where it was like, if you can do [01:30:00] something different, differentiated and special or whatnot, like it's just a better way to make money.
WADE: At the end of the day. I don't think I totally appreciated that was what was happening in my brain at the time, but I look back on it and I'm like, I think that probably spoiled me a little bit.
LOGAN: Now you're in the certainly the 1% of the 1% of founders' successes in Silicon Valley, and you've done things your own way across a bunch of different vectors that we've talked about. Any advice or if you look back and wanted to tell 23 year old Wade starting Zapier, any single thing that you've learned from the last 11, 12 years of building the company?
LOGAN: Is there anything that stands out?
WADE: Just go for it. Don't be afraid to be different. I think, in the early days we were so cool with being different and as you grow, you get more people around you and all that sort of stuff. They start to push the things that make you different out. But the things that make you different are the things that allow you to stand out.
WADE: You think about like your field, not to [01:31:00] knock venture, but like
LOGAN: We can do it. I do it.
WADE: All right. Okay, cool. So let's go in. A lot of it is hey, we wanna invest in outliers, we wanna invest in things that are like unique. And then the diligence process is all pattern matching. It's all just oh, you don't do it the same way this other person did it.
WADE: It's yeah, because we wanna be way better than that. And I think. If you really wanna get outsized impact outside return, you gotta do it different. It may not work, but I'll tell you, doing it the same way, you're gonna get the same results everybody else is getting.
WADE: So if that's what you want, if you want the same results as everyone else, fine, go follow the playbook. Do it that way. But if you're really trying to stand out, do something a little bit off the beaten path you gotta just be, go for it. Be different. Don't be afraid to do it. And then if it's wrong, change your mind.
WADE: 'cause like sometimes you do get it wrong too.
LOGAN: Wade, thank you for doing this. This was a fun conversation.
WADE: Yeah. This is cool. Thanks for having me, Logan.
LOGAN: Appreciate it.
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