Wade Foster | Zapier CEO on Remote Work and Building a 250-person, $50M+ company

Wade Foster  4:08  

Yeah. So we, it took us two months to get our first customer. And then we launched sort of general availability to everyone in about nine months or so.

John Corcoran  4:19  

Okay, so you but so it took it took a couple of months to figure out how to get it working. And then what were the original apps was it just a handful of apps at the beginning?

Wade Foster  4:29  

In the beginning, the first apps were based on what our customers wanted. So we had a customer asked for a woo foo and a Weber integration, which we didn’t have at the time. And so it’s like of course we have blue and a Weber and I’m furiously typing to Brian and Mike we got to get through and a Weber like ASAP and so that evening, move through and a Weber were added to the platform and the customer was happy because it exists. So we do stuff like that when customers would come in and potential customers would ask for things. We build that out. We pay attention to What people were pressing on our website. So we had like little forums and places where you can submit your email and say, hey, I want this app or want that app. We look up, you know, some of those are gut instinct on what tools were popular at the time. So we were like, you know, we knew QuickBooks was popular. We knew Google Apps were popular news sales force was was popular. So some of the instinct also guided us to figure out what some of those first apps would be. And in what was your role in the early days was your role to go out and get clients? I was doing a lot of kind of like customer development. Yeah. So like talking to sort of our early users understanding what their needs were providing research back to Brian and Mike were adding apps and building out the websites, things like that as a customer support marketing. And I did my hand and some code here. They’re not a lot of it. That was mostly Brian advice, territory,

John Corcoran  5:53  

but your background so a Bachelor’s of Science and industrial engineer, and an MBA I figured you weren’t The heavy coat or type, you know,

Wade Foster  6:01  

not really. But the funny thing is Brian guys are sort of

Unknown Speaker  6:05  

Sorry about that.

Wade Foster  6:10  

The funny thing is Brian, who is our CTO, his degrees in finance, and he’s one of the best engineers I’ve ever worked with. So, you know what the resume says doesn’t always dictate like, you know what you’re good at?

John Corcoran  6:21  

Sure, sure. And so you went to Y Combinator in 2012. For those who don’t know what that is probably a lot do but those who don’t explain what it is, and I want to dive into what that experience was like.

Wade Foster  6:34  

Yeah, so yc was is a an accelerator. They help new companies sort of in technology companies, more specifically, sort of get off the ground and been around for about a decade. Some of the companies you might have heard heard of, or Dropbox, Airbnb, reddit. instacart instacart Coinbase are some of the more popular consumer products that have been coming through yc but they fund everything from consumer products to asked to be ready to be to be to even like bio sciences and, and other types of products these days. And they’re probably the one of the most well known accelerators and perhaps the most successful probably the most successful and so the advice they give you really just sort of helps you kind of cut through a lot of the the sort of noise and generic advice you see out there and get to really the heart of what matters for a founder.

John Corcoran  7:27  

Right. And what was the experience like did you move out from Missouri to take place to

Wade Foster  7:34  

be moved to California that summer in 2012, and the three of us rented an apartment, a two bedroom apartment and lived together for three months working on Zapier so mostly the experiences you’re just in the apartment working on the software yourself so is that just insane focus like of building the product out, mixed in with they do office hours, which is once a week you go in sort of share what you’re tough. Problem is and they sort of, you know, riff with you on some ideas on how to get through that they hold dinners once a week on Tuesday night where they bring in speakers, usually successful founders that sort of talk through some of the successes and struggles that they’ve had along the way. And then there’s a lot of just like, general advice that sort of gets to the heart of what you need to do. So things like how to set up your company structure, how to interact with potential investors, what advice you should pay attention to what advice you should totally ignore until later. So they really just kind of give you those nuts and bolts that gives you especially

John Corcoran  8:40  

the first time founder a lot of confidence in what you’re working on. And is it is it a number of different ycombinator partners that are involved in this process that are providing you with this guidance? They have coaches?

Wade Foster  8:53  

Yeah, so they have today they have, you know, I think dozen plus partners that are part of it at our point to I think there was maybe a handful, four or five different partners that you could interact with and work with on on whatever the problem is that you have the week. Mm hmm.

John Corcoran  9:08  

Yeah. And so at this point, you are starting to get some traction. What was it? How did you when you emerged from Y Combinator? Do you feel like you were on the path or was still early?

Wade Foster  9:22  

So the big thing that we did in yc, as soon as we got in, like, they saw that we were like, ready to launch we haven’t launched publicly yet. But the product was like, basically there. We had customers, we had people who paid not a lot of money, but somebody and they were kinda like, Why haven’t you launched yet? And you were like, ah, we don’t know for We’re ready. Things aren’t great yet. It’s not perfect, and all these different ways, and they’re like, you’re ready, just launch it. So one of the first things we did was launch. And then over the course of the next three months, we spent a lot of time at first adding apps to Zapier, but then we sort of reached a bit of a question mark, which is like are we going to add all these apps ourselves. Are there other ways that we could do this? So today we have 1500 apps or so many apps on the platform. Almost any tool you use, we support. But in those days, there was that wasn’t the case. And there’s 50 apps at that point in time. And one of the insights we uncovered was we had a the CEO of box that emailed us like really late on like a Saturday night and was like, why is it box on Zapier? And we’re like, we just haven’t gotten to it yet. For three people. We’re working as fast as we can. And the insight we had is, well, if he cares enough, perhaps he would dedicate an engineer to to building the integration himself. And so we built out a version of our developer platform that summer in yc, that allowed partners to start adding apps to Zapier and that was one of the, I think, most painful things we did during that summer, because that’s what has allowed us to scale out to, you know, so many apps over the last, you know, decade or so,

John Corcoran  10:59  

I can’t even imagine The amount of engineering resources that would have taken if you done all those 1500 apps in house.

Wade Foster  11:06  

Yeah, I mean, it certainly would have been a lot more work

John Corcoran  11:09  

a lot more. What about the decision to remain virtual? You’ve 250 members of the team now and their virtual.

Wade Foster  11:18  

Yeah. So we the advice we got the three of us are, you know, working on this product ourselves, as we start to think about hiring. We’re first time founders, we never hired anyone before. I had no clue. What does it take to even hire a person that was a skill set that was totally unbeknownst to me. And so some of the advice we got was, Well, one way you can de risk This is to find a former colleagues, people that you’ve worked with in the past that you already have a relationship with that you already know and trust that you already know, do good professional work. And that’ll make the process a little easier. And so all those people were back in the Midwest, they’re not in California, where we Are. And so the first person we hired was in Chicago, the second person we hired was in Colombia, because that’s where we knew people. And as we started hiring them, we saw that we were shipping product quickly, customers were happy revenue was growing, all the things that you want out of a healthy business continued to happen. It didn’t feel like it was a hindrance to us to be operating in this way. And so, you know, around 10 or so people, we just put a stake in the ground and said, we’re distributed company, we work remotely, we think it’s a good way to do business. And it’s been a sort of advantage for us from a hiring perspective Ever since then, that we’re willing to work with people anywhere in the world.

John Corcoran  12:38  

And how do you keep people accountable? How do you keep the culture, you know, kind of keep it the way that you want developers the way that you want the culture to develop?

Wade Foster  12:49  

Yeah, accountability comes down to good management practices. So if you work with an individual on your team to set goals, you set up goals together, share goals, and then you just check in At the end of the week, how do we progress on that goal? Do we need it? Do we not need it? If we didn’t need it? Why not? What happened? Was there something we didn’t expect? Or is there a performance issue that we need to dig into. And so just having that good management, hygiene, I think really helps create a sort of culture where people continue to hold each other accountable and to perform at a high level. And then in terms of, you know, creating a culture, a lot of it was around our values. So in the early days, we came up with a set of values that articulated who we were as a company, and we set that as part of our hiring process. We had a rubric and we asked questions that sort of tested people on those characteristics, and then part of our performance reviews has that as well. So the formal ways that we keep the values in chain are sort of in the DNA of the company, and then we have informal ways that we do it as well, too. And then there’s other things that we use to sort of keep camaraderie high because camaraderie is another aspect that is really important to distributed company, you want people to feel like they they know each other at work that they’re working with colleagues that these aren’t sort of random people spread across the world that are, you know, unbeknownst to them. And so we do things like off sites twice a year we get people together in person that in person element is still useful. To build those human bonds. We have things like a donut calls once a week, where you sort of randomly get paired up with one other person on the team and jump on a zoom call and just chat about whatever it is that you want to chat about hobbies, family, or whatever is interesting to you. We have a bunch of off topic channels in side of slack that are all prefixed with fun search things like fun gardening or fun movies or fun music, where people can just chat about shared interests, and that helps build some bonds across the team. All these little things add up to contributing to a sense that you are part of something. You’re part of a community you have a sense of belonging you have a sense of purpose that’s really important when you’re sort of trying trying to drive towards a shared mission.

John Corcoran  15:05  

Yeah, as an aside, I saw a talk, I went to a talk recently with the cofounders of 15. Five, which is an app that probably is in your database. And it helps with managing culture inside of companies and, and I believe they have a distributed workforce also, and they talked about culture, highly recommend checking out what are some of the things some of the advice that they have, but I wanted to ask you, so looking deep in your background, you’ve this incredibly impressive background. You got MBA, you’ve got Y Combinator graduate, you’ve got Zapier, which has been really successful as it has grown to quite decide, you know, significant size, but the funny thing about you is that not digging too far down before Zapier, which admittedly is like eight or nine years old now. You’ve got reprocessing engineering intern, which is not that far. But I want So, so personally, how have you grown into the role of being CEO of this company with 250? people, you know, has Have you turned to coaches if you turn to two groups and returned to other founders, other CEOs, what have you used personally, to grow into that role?

Wade Foster  16:17  

Yeah. So in the early days, it’s a mixture of stuff, read a lot of books, I read a ton. I think that is a really important way to sort of just learn, and it’s a lot of just in time learning, so it’s, you know, we’re running into a problem. It’s like, okay, where can I get the book on that topic? And then you try and read it really fast and be like, okay, I kind of know what I’m talking about. Now. I’m not great at it, but like, I sort of know the moves. I can mimic it a little bit, almost to the extent that it’s like I kind of know what I’m doing. So that’s a big part of it. Spending time with people who are just a little bit ahead of you is another thing that I’ve done a lot of So, you know, we’re 20 people. It’s going Talk to the CEOs who are at 40 and 50 people and saying, what did you do last year? What works for you? What didn’t work for you? What do you wish you would have done differently? Where did you feel like you under invested? Where do you feel like you over invested? And just asking some of those types of questions to get a sense for what’s what might be in store for you for your future. It’s not a guarantee you if someone else went through it, but you start to do this across four or five different CEOs and you start to get some ideas, there’s some themes that start to emerge and you go, Okay, I think maybe these are some of the things that I should be paying attention to. And then, you know, a couple years ago, I did hire an executive coach, as well as part of this. And I actually it came out of some of the interviews I had with CEOs who like around when we got to about 100 people or so I started hearing more and more CEO saying, Do you have coach Do you have a coach, you have a coach, I was like, someone asked him about coaches, coach and I started to investigate. Turns out there’s a lot of money You’re now going to coach and so I went out and got one myself about two years ago now. And that’s been another way that I’ve sort of tried to learn on the job. So, you know, it’s one of those things where you’re never going to be an expert, as a CEO at really any of the things that you need to do in your company. But you’ve just gotta develop a personal habit of learning, whatever it is, as fast as you possibly can just so you can try and stay ahead of the curve as best as possible. You’re never going to feel like you’re, you know, laughing the field. But if so long as you’re just far enough ahead, you’re probably in a good spot.

John Corcoran  18:37  

Right? Right. Another thing I want to ask you about even though you have this distributed workforce, you personally moved from lie in your with your co founders, you moved from Missouri to Silicon Valley, and you’re in Silicon Valley now. So what role does that play Do you think being a you know fast growing tech company in the heart of innovation in Silicon Valley? How does that contribute to your learning or development? The growth of the company? Yeah.

Wade Foster  19:06  

For us, the simple reason was access to partners. And with 1500 apps, San Francisco, Silicon Valley is the heart of technology. Even if companies aren’t based here, they’re coming through here all the time to meet with customers and with partners to meet with investors. So it’s just a hub that allows you to sort of have those touch points with people a lot, lot more frequently, we could probably I could probably run the company successfully somewhere else, it would probably work fine. But having those touch points, especially to external to partners, to customers, to advice and network is really helpful for me as the leader of the company.

John Corcoran  19:46  

Yeah. Now what about raising money? So I’m looking at crunchbase here and it says you’ve only raised a small amount of money and it was a number of years ago.

Wade Foster  19:57  

Yeah, we raised 1.3 million right after In 2012, right at the tail end of yc. And

John Corcoran  20:03  

was that as a result of the they have what they call it? Demo Day? Demo Day? Yeah, they

Wade Foster  20:08  

do Demo Day. And that, you know, we we raised it right at the tail end of that. And at the time, that was what we needed to sort of fund operations for, you know, what we hoped would be forever. Like our goal was saying, like, let’s take enough and see how far we can get on just this amount of money. And so far, that’s turned out to be what we needed. We, in our mental model was to act as if we hadn’t raised that money. We wanted to run the operations as lean as efficiently as possible. One of our values is don’t be a robot build a robot. So we want that lean efficient. DNA as part of our company, and so our go to market model is really lean. Our product building is really lean. And we try and make that part of who we are and as a result, we found ways to grow fast without needing You know, tons and tons of capital to do that. So you don’t feel like your growth has been restricted by not bringing in another round of 30 million or anything like that. No, it hasn’t dynamics of how our business work. It’s not required other businesses I understand, you know, it makes sense. You look at like we worked, you know, they published the rest one recently, and they’re getting ready to go public. That’s a real estate business, they have to own real estate. Makes sense that they would need boatloads of capital to run that business. Right. But for a software company like ours, it’s not as necessary,

John Corcoran  21:33  

right? And it’s a fiction one too.

Wade Foster  21:34  

Yeah, exactly.

John Corcoran  21:36  

Now, before I interview just before I interviewed you, I entered interviewed Phil and a Dell, who was partners, he ran the management. He was the managing partner of the venture fund with Barbara Corcoran for a number of years. And we were talking about his entrepreneurial journey it was talking about he had some websites that were like giving away mp3 when that was all the rage, you know, and I’m sure they thought Oh, it’s gonna be big forever. Well, so I want to ask you about changes because you know, a lot of companies have a lifespan and there might be a change that comes in the marketplace that changes everything. How much of your time? Do you focus on that? Do you think about that changes that might affect Zapier, because by your nature, I mean, you’re connecting different apps. And you know, is there a fear that there could be that these changes will happen that will undermine what you built?

Wade Foster  22:26  

Yeah, that’s a good question. Uh, you know, one of the things I really liked from Jeff Bezos was, he has this quote, that he tries to build Amazon based on the things that don’t change things that remain steady over time. Because that’s predictable. You can build a strong foundation over that. So in Amazon’s case, that’s things like, customers always want low prices. Customers always want choice. Customers want fast delivery. So like these things are sort of universal truths for Amazon. It doesn’t matter you know, things can be changing left to right. Always around them. But as long as they fit, stay focused on those three dynamics, they will be in a good spot, their innovations will be focused on those three things that are sort of universal truth for, you know, their customer base. And so for us, we tend to think about similar types of things. We know that businesses, you know, are always looking for better efficiencies, automation is a big part for how they’re going to deliver that we think we know they’re always looking for, you know, a, you know, a better way to do the thing. And so for focus on how can we help them automate, how can we help them be more productive? How can we help them grow? Like we’ll be able to sort of survive, you know, any other sort of market changes and market dynamics and things like that.

John Corcoran  23:45  

Right. Well, we’re running low on time, but I want to ask you what you’re excited about, what are you excited about with the company and you know, the rest of the year ahead?

Wade Foster  23:54  

Yeah, I’m, I’m just excited to keep helping more and more customers and we have 3 million that have Sign up and use the product today. Hopefully next year we get as a 6 million Our job is to create is to make automation, the thing that everybody knows about and everyone is able to use, it’s insanely easy for them, and they can fall in love with a new skill that they’ve developed. So if we do that, well, it’s just more, it’s exciting for me to see more and more people sort of,

kind of wake up to this way of working.

John Corcoran  24:24  

Right, right. Well, we’re running low on time. So I want to ask you a question I always ask, which is, let’s pretend we’re an awards banquet, much like the Oscars of the Emmys and you way to receive an award for lifetime achievement for everything that you’ve done up until this point. And what we all want to know is, who do you think who are the mentors or the friends or the business partners? Who are the coaches? Who are the cofounders that you acknowledge in your remarks?

Wade Foster  24:45  

Yeah, well, you already told me before I can’t say family get some family would definitely be first on that list.

Unknown Speaker  24:52  

Everyone says it so

Wade Foster  24:53  

yeah, family is top of the list. Like you can’t get anything done without them then of course, friends not too far long. But two people really come to mind. One who I’ve spent a lot of time with, which was my saxophone instructor growing up gene Atkinson. I worked with him for since from fifth grade all the way through college on all sorts of stuff. He opened up so many opportunities for me that I had no right to be there. I remember he invited me to play in his quartet played at the governor’s mansion when I was just in ninth grade, which had no business being there. But he opened those doors along the way. And, you know, wasn’t just teaching me music, but was teaching me life skills and things like that along the way, too. So that’s a big one. And then as we’re getting into technology, Kevin Hale founder who comes to mind, he was the first one that sort of got like the distributed model, he understood what we were trying to build. And he’s got a bit of a contrarian mindset to certain things, which certainly I liked. I love the first principles thinking and really gave us a confidence in the early days, to be different, to be a little weird. And to sort of ignore conventional wisdom when we had committed That there was a better way to do things.

John Corcoran  26:03  

That’s a great one. And Kevin Hale, by the way, has got a great resource out there, which I just discovered not too long ago. His startup school, I believe it’s called startup school.

Wade Foster  26:13  

He’s running startup school now.

John Corcoran  26:15  

Yeah, so founder woo food turned partner at Y Combinator. He’s got this startup School, which is a free resource you can join if you’re interested in any of these things, and founding it a technology based startup. But it even goes beyond that. I was watching one of his presentations is really about business fundamentals. So I haven’t been that Yeah. Excellent. So Zapier is the place to go you can Google it. You can find it Where else can people learn more about you?

Wade Foster  26:43  

I’m active on Twitter at Wade Foster and my emails not too hard to find either. So if you want to send me an email, ask a question here. They’re happy to try and get back to them

John Corcoran  26:52  

very 3 million different customers and you offer for people to email you that’s,

Wade Foster  26:57  

I try I don’t always I’m not always able to answer but I can get you to someone in the company that can help. That’s good. Alright, cool. Thanks.