Remote Work, No-Code, and Products that Sell Themselves (w/ Zapier CEO Wade Foster)
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So, Wade, thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, thanks for having me. Can we just get a quick clarification? It is definitely pronounced Zapier, right? Like it's super classy?

Yeah, the fancy version. Zapier makes you happier. That's the trick we go with. But, you know, when you're in the early days, the second P is expensive. Domains are hard to come by. That's the reason. Well, the real reason is actually we wanted API in the name. And so the original logo had API in gray and everything else was in orange. I remember that. Yeah, so it's just three engineers being...

Too clever for our own good. Was the notion immediately right away that they would be called zaps or was that sort of like an afterthought? That was always the case. It's like, hey, we had our app directory at the time was called the zap book. And yeah, it's like you set up zaps. Zaps sound awesome. Zapes, that sounds, I don't know, it sounds weird. Yeah.

I feel like zaping is a thing that I shouldn't do. Yeah, zaping is what all the teenagers are doing these days, right? It's not good for them. No. Yeah. But zapping is fun. It is. All right. Well, since we're into the show, and for listeners who don't already know who you are, David, can you introduce our guest a little bit? Yeah. So Wade, who we are super lucky to have with us, is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, as we discussed, a company that

To the best of our knowledge and on the internet, hasn't really raised capital, or at least not capital like many of your peers, doesn't have an office, doesn't have salespeople, and your product is connecting other people's products. Yet despite that, or maybe because of all that, it's actually one of the most interesting private SaaS companies in the world today. You guys have grown to over 50 million in profitable ARR in just seven short years, and we are super excited to

have you here to dive into the whole story behind it. Thanks for joining us. Yeah, you're welcome. Thanks for having me. It should be fun. As our listeners know, and Wade, you're about to find out, we like to go way back on the show. Can you tell us about the band that you guys were in before the company? Sure. So Brian and I were in a, like a jazz and blues combo. We'd play like

Miles Davis stuff and John Coltrane stuff just like around Columbia, Missouri. It's not like there's a ton of places to gig in Columbia, Missouri, but enough. Did you guys start in college? That's actually how I met Brian. I played in the college jazz band, but Brian, I knew because there was like this combo thing that was happening sort of over on the side.

And I never played in a group with him at the time, but I had heard his group play. And so like I knew they were good. He was a good bass player and I knew they were his group always was like writing songs. Most of the rest of us were covering things and they were always like writing new stuff.

Sounds like typically he's an engineer and you're a product manager. Sounds about right.

There wasn't like a ton of engineers in town and Brian was one of the few that I knew. I was like, oh, I remember that guy who played in the bass and like wrote songs. Like I'm pretty sure he's making stuff. You could find like you just see him on the internet and he could do all sorts of things. So I hit him up and I was like, hey, you know, I'm like,

you know, hang out. We caught up one time and I was like, Hey, I'm trying to like build this, you know, site and trying to make this thing. You think you could help me out? And he's like, sure. And so I was, you know, he helped me out with it. And this is like 2012, 2013. This would have been 2010. 2010. Okay. Yeah. Probably, probably 2010. Yeah. Then he was like, by the way,

we need a better sax player. Do you want to play in my band? And I was like, well, fair, spare. You're helping me with the site. Like I'll, I'll be more happy than come play in the band. And so we just hit it off. And, you know, before you know it, like we were playing gigs together. We were building sites together. Uh, we ended up working at the same company together. We were just spending a lot of time together on stuff basically. Yeah.

The story is a little bit different, but it was actually building tools for bands. But, you know, Venmo, which we've covered on the show, also kind of came out of like the Philadelphia, not Columbia, but music scene. Yeah. Well, I think music is like a good way to sort of feel out like if you could be

you know, good co-founders together because like it's not glamorous. You don't make a lot of money. You have to collaborate. You have to like each other's style. Like it's a little bit subjective, but it's also quite objective in certain places. And it's a small group of people doing things for the fun of it. So it's like if you can get along in a band, like you can probably get along pretty well in a startup.

You know, there is that element of creativity where you have to trust when someone wants to go out on that creative limb and they seem a little crazy. But you also do have the objective feedback of like, do people like this or not? And like, you do have to listen to that. Yeah. And you have to, you know, there's a certain like agreements, like we're playing in a certain key and there's a certain time. Like you can't go outside that box, but you know, the box is still pretty big. So like, you know, do what you want as long as you stay in time. Yeah.

Right. All right. So, Wade, take us from this moment up through the famed startup weekend. Sure. So, I mean, honestly, literally, we were just spending tons of time together, like doing side projects, playing in the band. We had the same day job. And throughout all that, you know...

Just when you're hanging out with friends, you discuss a lot of different things. And oftentimes we would just talk about product ideas we'd have that we would be interested in building or maybe trying to make. And most of them were just ideas. That's where it stopped. It was just like, oh, wouldn't it be cool? You could build a business like this or you can make a product and I think it would be successful. And then one day, middle of the workday, Brian messaged me on iChat and was like, hey, I

What about an idea to connect all these different tools? Like we're using all these different tools at work. We're building around all these different tools and none of them hook up together. People keep hiring us to connect these tools. It's kind of expensive to hire us. It would just be easier if they had off the shelf software that they could use to set up an integration between Wufoo and MailChimp or Google contacts and high rise or PayPal and QuickBooks or whatever.

My reaction to that was like, oh, of course. Like, it was just such an obviously good thing. I was, at the time, in my day job, dealing with the Marketo API, and...

It was hard to use. It was like an old soap wisdom API. So it was hard to begin with. You have to be generous because Marketo is, I assume, a Zapier partner now, right? They are, yes. And their APIs are much better now. But in 2010, they were not as good. But it wasn't just Marketo's problem. I was also a bad engineer. So I'm not putting this all on Marketo. I was equally bad at engineering. And so...

For me, I was like, this would be my ideal choice is to have off-the-shelf software. I'm not writing code because I just love to write code. I'm writing code because I have no choice. I have to figure this out because it's the only way to get it done. So my reaction when he pitched that to me was, yeah, of course this should exist. And how different is Zapier today than sort of like...

the idea that was discussed in that moment? Like, was it pretty much fully like, yes, this is exactly it. And then from that moment on, like you had a clear roadmap and people liked it and it worked or have you sort of changed it along the way? The roots are the same. Like that original seed is like at the core of Zapier. There's tons of stuff that have sort of like branched off and like added it to the idea and sort of made it more,

and evolved it. But that seedling is still the core of what Zapier is today. That's super cool. It's so funny how you notice that with like Uber or like there's some of these startups where like the two sentence pitch is just like, oh yeah, no, that's a super good idea specifically at this moment in time. And then like that is pretty much still the company a decade later.

And, you know, the company I'd been at prior, like it was the exact opposite. It was like hard to explain. No one tried to use it. The activation rates were low. It was hard to sell the thing.

And so when we started working on Zapier, it was like the exact opposite. People wanted this thing. They got it. They paid money for it. Like the product was bad at first. Like it just was not very good because it was an early prototype. Like we just hadn't gotten very far with it. And even still they loved it. So that to me was like, we're onto something here. Like if we can make this simple and easy and accessible, like,

Like we win. It's game over. Like we've got it. I mean, it's a brilliant idea. And obviously like, I think it was 2013 when I first discovered you guys. So a few years in and I was like, oh yeah, this is brilliant. This makes sense. But what do you think was in the timing in the ecosystem that made like that moment the right time? I can think of a few things, but I'm just, I'm curious your perspective. Well, so APIs had started to be a thing. Like open APIs were not as common. So you think about, you know,

Salesforce, they were probably the most sophisticated at the time, but you also had companies like MailChimp, GitHub, Zendesk, QuickBooks. The sort of Gen 1, SAS 1.io folks had APIs.

You also had API first companies that were launching around that time. So Twilio, Stripe, SendGrid, this was like right around their sort of like first or second year in business. And so it was like, if you had tried to do this business a year ago or two years ago,

He just couldn't. The tooling didn't exist to even do the business. And of course, if you'd have done it a couple years later, well, we were already there. And there was other people working on this idea at the same time. We certainly weren't the only people doing it. But you had a pretty unique approach. Was there anybody else that was taking a...

user-centric approach? Because there was MuleSoft, there was Apigee that were taking a company to help you build your APIs approach. But you guys had the, no, no, we're not going to focus on the partners. I mean, you focus on them, but the product is for people who are integrating stuff. Yeah, yeah. So there was. So IFTTT, I think, is probably the most well-known that folks would recognize. But there was others that

You just never heard it. Like, the companies are totally gone. They're out of business and just didn't survive. That were, like, trying to do similar versions of this. And there was even a company that did get a little bit of traction that got acquired by Intuit, like, a couple years into our lifetime that was...

Like they were a little bit ahead of their time. I think it was like really well, it was like a very engineering product. It didn't have quite the user experience that we did. It was called it does it was the name of the company. And they were like, like you could do all the stuff. And so in some things you could even do better than what Zapier does today, honestly, but it was just hard. Like you still had to be like pretty engineering to make it work. Um,

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This is a good jumping off point into a different topic, and I'm going to jump around our sort of outline here a little bit. So you said those are pretty engineering. One of the hallmarks of Zapier today, at least historically,

by my assessment of all the different friends that I have at companies that use it, is like, it holds a lot of companies together. And I would say startups, but like, it is shocking how late stage a lot of these companies are where their sort of internal operational infrastructure is still held together, not by building their own engineering stuff, but by like some savvy ops person being like, ah, now I can do this with Zapier. And that living for like five to 10 years. How do you think about the fact that like, there are,

big companies that important infrastructure is held together by zaps

One, I think it's awesome. Like I think these businesses were held together by spreadsheets before us. And we've made that even easier for those types of people to like level up their skills, you know, just to the next bit. I think our challenge is like, how do we make Zaps more durable, more reliable? And I think we've done a pretty darn good job of that. But I do think there's even more we can do to make that stuff more.

Yeah, durable, reliable, you know, over time where, you know, like you said, you were like, hey, it's remarkable that it's built on Zapier. I want you to have that reaction of it's remarkable in the sense of like, that's awesome versus like, oh, yeah.

Right, right. That people would think of it not as a hack, but think of it, which I'm sure is how it was when you got started. Oh, totally, yeah. And think more like, hey, this is actually a trusted part of my, like, this is robust infrastructure and this is what people do when they want robust infrastructure. Yeah, and the, I mean, the reality is like,

It's it is surprisingly durable. Like it does last a long way. I was just talking to one of our early employees because I have another talk that I'm working on. And I was asking him, hey, what's like one of your biggest lessons learned? And he was like, people overthink stuff in the early days. He's like, you can put like a V dot one process or system in place and it will scale for years and years and years, way past what you thought it would have gotten to. So like, just don't overthink this stuff.

you can get pretty far on these off the shelf software these days.

It's actually a good thing where you didn't say low code or no code, but there's this definite movement going on right now that sort of takes this notion of, you know, you don't have to overthink something and build something really robust and loop in your engineering team. And what you actually should do is just get something out that works. Zapier to me feels like one of the three companies that's always named when people are citing this, you know, sexy movement that's going on right now in low code. Like, number one,

How do you think about that? And number two, sort of what's it like when a movement kind of falls in your lap like that and you get lumped into, or maybe it was more intentional than that. I don't know. I should stop naming it and let you jump off that. Well, certainly no one called it no code in 2011 when we started the company. Like that was not really a thing at

Along the way, people have tried to name it. I heard Citizen Developer was one that the Forrester or Gartner analysts like to use, which I was like, it's not quite right.

Are most of your users not developers, right? Yeah, they're not developers. They're software users. They use software to get their job done. So if you know how to use software, you know how to use Zapier is kind of the best way to describe it, I guess.

Yeah, you probably need to have like a little bit of logic thinking, you know, you can think in sort of like, hey, when this thing happens, I want this other thing to happen. But that doesn't mean you're necessarily an engineer, not at least not like a traditional software engineer, the way I think most people think about it. So it's been really fun because yeah, in the last, I don't know, 18 months, 24 months, the no code thing happened.

Finally, there's a name to this that sort of stuck and feels good and people are rallying behind it. But it's something that's been happening for a long time. People have built companies off the back of Zapier that were non-technical founders for a long time. One of the things we're trying to do is democratize access to this stuff. You shouldn't have to be an engineer. You shouldn't have to be the elite to make this stuff happen.

These tools should be accessible to anybody. This could sound wrong, so I want to be clear up front. Engineering is critically important. I don't mean to denigrate it at all. However, we've gone just like I've seen it in the investing side from over the last year from engineering is a absolute critical core competency you must have as part of a company from day one.

to, yeah, that's kind of a question mark. It kind of depends what you're doing. And if you're doing the right things, like, no, you can use Zapier, you can use Webflow, you can use a bunch of stuff and get really far without it. Totally. I mean, the company we were at before Zapier was they specialized in selling VA loans, so home mortgages, and they predominantly were a tech-enabled business.

world-class marketing and sales operation. They never raised a dollar. They're probably up to 2000 employees now. Their engineering department was so-so, honestly, like it was pretty mediocre and didn't exist for the longest time, honestly. Like they, you know, mostly were just like really good at PPC. And so that's how they scaled their business. So it just depends on what you're doing.

Do you have a favorite example of like someone who built something that even you were shocked where you were like, oh my God, you could do all this with zaps? I mean, you could just go like check out Ben Tossall's stuff on makerpad.co. Any of the things those people are building is just like baffling.

blows my mind. They're building like Airbnb clones and job boards and Reddit clones and like all sorts of stuff off the back of, I like to call it AWZ, Airtable, Webflow, and Zapier. That's amazing. Connect the dots for us between there was this market opportunity right around when you started Zapier of all these software tools, they have APIs, SaaS is finally going mainstream and

And then you guys won. And in the interim, there were all these other competitors that didn't win. What? Obviously, there's a lot of luck involved. But like, to your mind, were there a few key decisions or features of you guys? Or was it simply that you were good at marketing and nobody else was? What helped you win?

We worked hard. That, I think, probably goes without saying, but I'll say it anyway. We were definitely better at marketing than all of them. I think we found a repeatable model through our developer platform to just get enough apps on the platform that allowed us to get some network effects that we were able to just sort of race in front of everybody else and made it really hard for anyone to help.

You started with 35 or so integrations that you guys built, but then pretty early on you opened...

a developer platform to let anybody bring their own integrations, right? Yep. Yep. And people did earlier than you would expect. They were earlier than most, like most people say like, Hey, we're going to build a platform and you know, that's how we're going to grow. I've seen it enough now that I'm like, eh, prove it. Uh, and so it sounds like even in hindsight, I'm kind of surprised it worked for us. The only reason I can think that it worked was just that

It was valuable. Like people wanted it even without the network. It was like, Hey, if I can just connect to these 50 other apps, like that alone is valuable. I don't care how popular Zapier is yet. I don't care that it's not a household name. It solves a big problem for me as is. It's funny. This is a totally different domain, obviously, but it reminds me a little bit of Instagram versus Hipstamatic. Like Instagram and Hipstamatic did the exact same things as they made your photos look better. Yeah.

But Hipstamatic just lived on your phone and your camera roll. But Instagram had the network attached to it. And in your own way, that was a difference between you guys and some of your competitors. Yeah, but the thing with Instagram is the network didn't matter in the early days. What mattered was the filter thing. It was like, oh, I just want to take my pictures with Instagram because they look cool.

Right. Yeah. The whole come for the tool, stay for the network. Yeah. People probably don't even remember Hipstamatic, but it was also a filter tool, but there was no network. It did the same thing. And it was big. It was earlier than Instagram, bigger than Instagram to start, but they didn't attach it to a network. They didn't attach it to a network. And I think Hipstamatic, I believe was 99 cents and Instagram was free. How did you guys figure out your pricing strategy? And was there any element of this?

Oh, God. How did we figure our pricing strategy? Well, I'll tell you this. It started pretty silly. So we were in a room. This was like, we just got accepted into YC. We're like, I think we're ready to launch. We should probably launch. And so YC is big. These guys are talking about launching. They're just like, you should just launch. So they just sort of like do it. And we're like, okay, well, if we're going to launch, we need like

pricing for this stuff. We didn't have pricing, but we wanted to launch the next day. And so we had to figure out, okay, what are we going to, how are we going to price this? Literally the next day. Yeah. Yeah. We're going to do it the next way. Um, which people think that it needs to be more than that, but it probably doesn't. Um,

We were up all night like arguing about what the best pricing plan would be. You know, all of us had read various different best practices and stuff on it. And we kept citing stuff. Someone was like, well, needs to end with a nine. And another one would be like, well, actually, no, it should end with a zero because that shows that it's higher value. Oh, well, three, three plans is best. No, four is better. You know, we're just sort of arguing. But

None of us had any actual data to back it up. It was just based off these random blog posts that other people had written. And eventually, I don't know which one of us... It was like a Mexican standoff. We're all just sort of frustrated with each other. And I'm not sure which one of us blinked first. But somebody said, screw it. None of us know anything. We don't know what the best pricing plan is. So let's just make our pricing plan the Fibonacci sequence.

So literally our first plans were $11, $23 and $58. No way. And to make it even nerdier, we went all in on the zap theme and named the plans, uh, volts, amps and ohms. Um, and so that's the pricing model we launched with.

Like, it was dumb, but it worked. Like, people started paying us. And, you know, I think probably three months later, we changed it up to something like a little more normal, I guess, for lack of a better word. But it just goes to show that if you make something people like, don't overthink the pricing stuff. Now, pricing is very important. Don't get me wrong. But on day one, like, nobody knows. Just start. This is related to the product approach you took, too, but...

certainly not your direct competitors, but MuleSoft and Apogee and the like, their whole mindset was enterprise and like, oh, we're going to go out and we're going to do enterprise sales. We're going to land six, seven figure deals. You took the opposite approach and especially in kind of a new category, let people use it and start getting hooked on it instead of like talk to a sales rep.

Yeah, well, we felt like that was pretty important because we're connecting tools that had freemium models like we're connecting MailChimp and Basecamp and Evernote and Dropbox and all these sort of bottoms up tools that people sort of self serve. They like fall in love with the user experience.

We felt like we needed a model that was congruent with that. That was basically the sort of one philosophical thing is like, this is how people in this segment of the market buy software. So we need to be able to be purchased in a similar way.

So it makes sense to get started that way. I'm curious if you've thought about sort of now there's this category emerging of RPA. And I think for someone that's been using Zapier for a long time, you're like, well, wait a minute, that's not so different from what I've been doing, but it's more enterprise-y and it's sold in this enterprise-y way. And, you know, it involves more screen scraping than you guys. So how do you look at like, gosh, there's this big emerging enterprise opportunity. Should we or should we not go chase that?

Well, I mean, it certainly is pretty powerful. I think I saw UiPath announced they're at like 300 million in revenue in 2019. So clearly a big business in RPA. You know, I think you just have to figure out though, like your company only gets to chase so many things. And I think too often in Silicon Valley, we stretch ourselves way too thin trying to do way too much.

It's just trying to understand like where can you win and in the places you can win, you want to win big. But if you stretch yourself really thin, you might actually not win anywhere. I think the thing we're always looking for is like if we're going to get into something, we want to be able to do it really well.

So that's not to say we won't do RPA, but if we do decide to do it, like we're going to do it because we feel like we have some unique insight that, you know, the existing market is not serving very well.

Alright, so here's a hypothetical posit. If I said, alright, Wade, here is $100 million on more than fair terms, like it respects the fact that you have pretty decent leverage at this point in any negotiation because, oh my god, you've built this great, profitable, nicely scaling business.

Is there something interesting you could do with that to say, okay, we're now going to go run at this enterprise opportunity? And how many times a day do you get pitched that? I think if you do that, it takes all the creativity out of the process. Like you're going to dive into gestion really. The first chapter of High Growth Handbook, there's an interview with Mark Andreessen where he talks about this, where he's

The biggest constraint in most companies, well, let me back up. Most companies, when you think about R&D, they think about, hey, we're going to give a percentage of our budget to R&D. We're going to say, I don't know, 10% or 20% or whatever is going to be sort of focused on R&D, and that's how we're going to create new products, and we're going to innovate and all that sort of stuff. Let's throw $10 million or $20 million or $50 million at this problem, and we'll figure it out. But what Mark posits is,

Money is usually not the constraining factor. Usually the constraining factor is this concept of product pickers. And this is sort of like people in your company who are capable of creating like new creative products that people would want to buy. And I think there's some truth to that. You know, you can give $100 million all you want, but you still need money.

Like, who's going to be the person that does this? I just got done another example of this. Have you all watched Ford vs. Ferrari yet? Oh, so good. Yeah. So this movie is awesome. And there's a scene in there where Henry Ford II is asking Shelby, like, hey, say money wasn't a problem. Like, could you do it? And his answer is like, no.

Maybe like you might not actually like money might not be enough. Like what you really need is like the driver and this other person. And so it's a little bit like that where, yeah, don't get me wrong. Money is hugely valuable for building companies. But the team is really at the end of the day, the constraining factor.

I've been reading Charlie Munger's Poor Charlie's Almanac, which is so great. You guys are kind of like a... You're like a Berkshire Hathaway of a company of software companies, if there ever was one. And he has this great point in there that I never heard. There's so much in this book. It's so good. He's like, most businesses...

that are great enduring businesses, people think about them wrong. They only do one or maybe two things that are very simple, very well. And he talks about Costco. He's like, Costco is all about like discount warehouses and they are a fantastic business. They're not trying to compete with a target. They're not trying to compete with Amazon. They could try that.

But that would just delete the focus of what they are doing really well. Yeah, you just I think you got to know where it is that you are going to win and then make sure that you do that really well.

Wade, I'd love to move here into a little bit of a conversation about remote work. So you are speaking to us from your home office, which is sort of your only office. And I think you guys are one of the most maybe vocal, probably the better way to put it is the most one of the top two or three most well-known companies who have pulled off remote work.

And when I say remote work, I mean fully distributed, fully remote company. So I'd love to launch into a little discussion there and say, how did that come to be? Did that sort of happen accidentally? Did that happen very intentionally? And then we can get into it a little bit. Yeah, so...

It wasn't a like, you know, hey, what's the pros and cons checklist of having an office or not having an office? I think a lot of people thought that it was like that. But really, it was more like you have some cards that are dealt you like what hand you play. And in our case, at the tail end of YC, Mike was moving back to Missouri to be with his then girlfriend, now wife, as she was wrapping up law school.

And we're not kicking him out because he's too important. And so we were just like, hey, we'll just go back to sort of working via, you know, chat and GitHub pull requests and like Trello boards and stuff like that, because that's what we were doing before we had like all been in the same place. That was a side project before. So we were used to like kind of not working together.

And then a second thing happened at the same time, which is we hired our first person and we never hired anyone before. And so we asked for advice. Hey, how would you go about de-risking this situation? And some folks recommended just work with old colleagues, people that you already sort of trust and have a good working relationship with.

And all those people are back in the Midwest. They're not in California. So we hired a guy I'd worked with who was in Chicago. Then we hired another one who was in Columbia, Missouri. And so, you know, fine people were in three different cities. A couple things happened. Features kept getting shipped.

Users kept signing up. Customers kept paying us. The world didn't fall apart. Yeah, the team was happy. Yeah, the team was happy. Customers were happy. So like all the sort of basics, like...

This seems fine. It actually seems more than fine. It seems even good. Was Silicon Valley Orthodoxy telling you you were crazy at this point? Oh, yeah. I mean, this is 2012 and people are like, no company has ever been built this way. No one will ever buy you. This isn't going to scale. Yeah, just all the sort of reasons why it wouldn't work. And we're just sort of looking at it and being like,

I mean, you're not wrong that there's not big companies like this, but also it's working. So...

you know, I don't know what to tell you. And they're like, no, your pricing needs to end in a nine. Yeah, exactly. I read a blog post once that said it needs to end in a nine. And I'm like, I don't know what to tell you. So we just said, like, I think we've, I think we know something that other people don't know. We're just going to do it this way. And as a result, we'll be able to tap into a global talent pool and no one else will be doing this. And hey, that'll be good for us. And, you know,

You know, sorry for everybody else, I guess. Give us the pro con list sort of looking back. I mean, like life is all about trade offs. So there's all these, you know, you get to tap the global talent pool and there's lots of great things. What are the trade offs involved? The biggest bummer of it all is how you celebrate like epic moments. You do it on Zoom. And so it's not the same as like all being in a room, high fiving each other and just like you miss out on that.

So that I think is probably the biggest bummer for me. Eric, if you're listening over at Zoom, this is a feature you guys should build. Yes, like how do you make that moment feel better? And we found ways to make it feel good. Like, you know, maybe we're 80% as good as being together, but it's still not quite the same. So I think honestly, that's probably the biggest bummer. There's...

level of discipline that it requires that not a lot of people are willing to do. You know, there's some communication overhead that you have to put the effort in on, but I don't think that's actually a trade-off. I actually think that's a good thing. Like as your company gets bigger anyway, you're going to need that discipline. You're going to need to be good at communication. So I just think it forces you to think about that stuff earlier in your company's life cycle, which forces you to

when you get there, you'll be better. You'll be more prepared for it. It's interesting. So you guys have literally published a, an ebook about how to build a remote culture, which we'll link to. It's awesome. You write in there a bit about like making sure when you're hiring, you need to hire the right type of people who are gonna succeed in this. But I'm wondering, hearing what you're saying now, and you talk about that being like excellent written communication is important. Hearing you talk about it now, could,

Could you maybe even say like, no, that's just important, period. And this will like help you. Yeah. My co-founder was actually on a podcast with Kevin Hale, the co-founder of WooFoo, talking about this. And he was, Mike was sort of enumerating these things that make good remote workers. And Kevin goes, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. That's just people who are good at their job, period. He said a little tongue in cheek, but I do think there's some truth to that where it's these skills are,

make you good at any job but in a remote work they're sort of necessary so i have to ask you are open about and talk about you've built this so you use slack you zoom you use google drive lots of other you know tools that are you know you've documented out there but you also have this internal tool async that you've built as you describe it it sounds awesome can you tell us like more about it

It's like a blog meets Reddit, I guess, is probably the best way to think about it. The biggest value it gives us is it's a place for like...

slower form communication like more intentional thinking uh like company announcements key strategies things like that i find slack is so fast-paced the half-life of a slack message is like an hour like if you don't see it in the hour like you might as well have not existed at all well it's not the right medium to to document something thoughtful

It isn't really. And so async is kind of that version of communication that's maybe like between a wiki and Slack, where like wiki is very permanent. It's like, hey, this is sort of our forever documentation. But async is like, hey, what's important to us this week or this month? And it's slower form. An async post might live on for a full week or something like that.

maybe a little longer. We've made it somewhat dynamic. So right now the homepage is dynamic so that it adjusts based on like, what's it like, Hey, these are the posts that sort of everyone should look at. You have your own personal feed. That's also dynamic based on who your manager is, who your teammates are like other authors you read regularly. So it tries to like say, here's some other things that you should probably be paying attention to.

inside the company and it just sort of allows everyone to like keep tabs on things that are like you know just take the blinders off a little bit I guess yeah you talked a little bit about online and in the book about it being kind of like a

replacement for what would be an internal email or I'm thinking like an internal memo like you know yeah like yeah you'd send like somebody might send either whether it's a executive leader or somebody else just be like you know here's a here's a multi-paragraph thing of like thoughts I have that are like important but not so important that you're gonna like you know write it on the walls yeah exactly and I that's how I use it you know every week I

I write like a multi-paragraph memo to the team. That's like what's on Wade's mind. And sometimes it's like product things. Sometimes it's like cultural things that are going on. Sometimes it's like customer related issues. And it's just a way for me to like, you know, get what's on my mind out there and, and,

It builds alignment. It builds like, because otherwise I would have to tell the exec team and then they'd have to tell their managers and then they'd have to tell their managers and then they'd tell their ICs. And then who knows what the people on the edge is actually here. You know, they might hear. All right, wait. So how can I license this thing? Yeah.

You know, you can't right now, but it has crossed our mind that maybe this would be a good thing to sell. All right, one last question on remote work. It has been...

espoused, the folks over at GitLab sort of have this belief that if we were to sell, and we want to be a company that IPOs, and they've been very public about documenting that, if we were to sell, the prevailing wisdom is that a remote company takes a 50% haircut on valuation. And this show is ostensibly about acquisition, so I figured I may as well ask the question, do you have any thoughts on that? Do you think it's true that there's some sort of valuation haircut that happens because

you know, when a choir thinks there'll be higher attrition or something like that? I think in 2012, yes, but today I think that's not even true. In fact,

You might even be able to get a premium for it because I think companies are realizing that they're going to need to be global companies. They're going to need to work with distributed teams. And so an entirely distributed org is going to bring in an expertise that it's going to be hard to build on your own. So I think there's an argument to be said that you might be able to get a premium for it. Interesting. One last topic we'd be also totally remiss if we didn't cover related to that.

Can you talk to us a little bit about your financing strategy at the company and capital raising and lack thereof? And, you know, see, you guys have raised less than $3 million in total, right? And are at well above a $50 million revenue run rate. You're profitable, you're cashflow positive, all this, you're an amazing company. Obviously that sounds amazing, but are there any trade-offs along the way as you, you know, looking back on all this that like making those decisions? Yeah.

For us, I don't know that we traded off on anything. Like I think we more money did not mean more success for us. We had other bottlenecks that we had to take on and deal with. So money wasn't the trade off for us.

And so that's how we always thought about it, which was what's the blocker in our org? What's causing us to not get adoption in the market at a way that we want to get adoption? Like what's holding us our mission back? And let's laser focus in on those things.

And try and fix some of that stuff up first, rather than throwing more people. Because really what you're talking about when you're raising money is you're saying, hey, let's throw more people at this problem. We didn't feel like more people at it is the solution. You're either saying more people, more fixed costs, or you're saying lots of companies are doing this now, more variable costs, more marketing dollars. Yeah, I guess that's true. But yeah.

I guess, I mean, you could just throw a bunch of marketing at it and like lose all that money, which maybe is, I mean, that's how like, you know, Casper and some of these other companies have built their business. But, you know, look what's happened to them. That's clearly not a great way to build a business. Well, Wade, that's a great transition into the final point here. Do you have any advice that you would offer to other founders or aspiring founders before we let you go?

Just going back to the pricing strategy, I talked about how we did that in a night. We as founders at Zapier have certainly been prone to overthinking things.

I think the thing we're constantly reminding ourselves is just go for it. And like, don't be afraid of being a little weird about it either. Like if your sort of conviction is telling you to do something that's unconventional, it's hard to stand out. So unconventional stands out. So if you sort of have conviction in the thing, just go for it and you might be onto something. I love it. Where can listeners find you on the internet?

At Wade Foster on Twitter is probably the best place. Well, Wade, thank you so much. Thank you for building a product that runs much of Acquired's infrastructure with Zapier powering a lot of... Ben is a power user. Well, we've just set up episode two here, I think. Would love that. We'll have to have you back. Cool. Thanks for having me.