Grit26 Helmi 2024

#179 CEO & Co-Founder Zapier, Wade Foster: Missouri’s Connector

Guest: Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier

When Wade Foster and his co-founders launched Zapier, he was 24, and doubted himself constantly. He consulted mentors like Paul Graham and Jay Simons, studied entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos and Steve Jobs, and also took inspiration from an unlikely source: Actor and martial artist Bruce Lee. “[He] had this fighting style, ‘The Way of No Way,’” Wade says. “He would study all the different fighting styles, and he would say, ‘None of them is the best or the worst ... My job was to take the best of each and then discard the rest, and make it my own.’”

In this episode, Wade and Joubin discuss fully remote companies, long-term thinking, hyperscaling, product-market fit, broken products, secondary offerings, “delocation packages,” interview questions, mind-breaking growth, doubting yourself, LLMs, hackathons, and adding a sales team (eventually).

In this episode, we cover:

(01:10) - Living in central Missouri
(04:15) - Will Wade do this forever?
(10:23) - Startup envy
(13:09) - “Do people actually want this?”
(18:44) - What Zapier does
(20:15) - Taking outside capital
(22:43) - Why Zapier is fully remote
(28:01) - The pace of hiring
(30:35) - Why résumés can be a trap
(37:09) - When to promote from within
(41:06) - Scaling problems
(43:47) - Self-confidence and mentors
(47:37) - Reacting to ChatGPT
(53:43) - How Zapier’s team uses AI
(58:12) - Who Zapier is hiring

Links:

Connect with Wade
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
Connect with Joubin
- Twitter
- LinkedIn
- Email: grit@kleinerperkins.com
Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm

Tämä jakso on lisätty Podme-palveluun avoimen RSS-syötteen kautta eikä se ole Podmen omaa tuotantoa. Siksi jakso saattaa sisältää mainontaa.

Jaksot(294)

The AI Race Has a Leaderboard | Arena CEO Anastasios Angelopoulos

AI could be bigger than electricity.Anastasios Angelopoulos is seeing that shift firsthand, with Arena ranking 500+ models and tracking roughly 10 new releases every week.On Grit, he explains why ther...

7 Syys 1h

Data Centers in Orbit by 2028: Baiju Bhatt on His Plans After Robinhood

What kind of founder walks away from a multi-billion-dollar fintech company to start building rockets?Baiju Bhatt, co-founder of Robinhood, joins Joubin Mirzadegan to talk about life after one of the ...

24 Elo 1h 12min

Booking.com CEO on AI and the Future of Travel

"Our mission is to make it easier for everybody to experience the world."From the dot-com crash to AI, Glenn Fogel has spent nearly three decades helping Booking Holdings evolve through every major te...

10 Elo 50min

Ex-Twitter CEO on Why AI Needs a New Internet | Parag Agrawal

"The answer to every problem is a model."Parag Agrawal shares the ideas behind Parallel: products that continuously learn, and teams designed around versatile problem solvers.He also shares why he bui...

27 Heinä 1h 1min

The Sales Framework Every Founder Needs | Mark Roberge

"There's 20 fires going on at every moment in the office and you have enough water to put out four."Mark Roberge shares what it takes to build and scale a company, from finding product-market fit to k...

13 Heinä 1h 22min

Airwallex's Jack Zhang on Fintech, Failure, and Growth

In 2020, Airwallex lost nearly half its revenue overnight. Today it's worth $11 billion.Jack Zhang reflects on the decisions that kept the company alive, raising capital during uncertainty, and leadin...

29 Kesä 1h 11min

Why 80% of the Fortune 100 Chose Qualtrics | Ryan Smith

AI may change software overnight, but company building still takes time.Ryan Smith explains why, despite the pace of AI, “the race is going to be way longer than anyone thinks.”He reflects on Qualtric...

15 Kesä 1h 12min

What It Takes to Build Software for 171,000+ Restaurants | Aman Narang

Great software companies often come from understanding pain points at a very deep level.On Grit, Aman Narang shares how Toast built trust with 171,000+ restaurant operators by helping restaurants mana...

1 Kesä 1h 17min