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

Grit

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: [e-mail]
• Learn more about Kleiner Perkins
• This episode was edited by Eric Johnson from LightningPod.fm