The GTM Podcast is available on any major directory, including:
Wade Foster is the CEO of Zapier, a company that sits between 7,000+ apps and runs millions of automations every single day. That gives him a front-row seat to how companies are actually adopting AI, not just talking about it.
In this episode, Wade breaks down the exact decisions he made at Zapier to go from 10% AI usage to 97% company-wide, why agents and workflows are not the same thing, and what most leaders are getting completely wrong about AI fluency.
Discussed in this episode
- The difference between agents and workflows (and when to use which)
- What triggered Zapier’s internal “Code Red” after GPT-4 launched
- The one-week hackathon that took AI adoption from 10% to 50% overnight
- The AI fluency rubric Zapier built: Unacceptable, Acceptable, Adaptive, Transformative
- Why leaders who aren’t using AI are the biggest bottleneck in their companies
- How to measure AI ROI: floor raisers vs ceiling raisers
- How AI now handles 50% of Zapier’s customer support tickets
- Wade’s personal “advisory council” of AI sub-agents he uses for every major decision
- Why building a company today is 10x cheaper but distribution is 10x harder
- The truth about fundraising: you’re selling your company, not raising money
- How Zapier stayed profitable by only hiring when it hurt
Episode highlights
Key takeaways
1. If you’re waiting for a ticket, you’ve already failed your customer.
By the time a customer inbounds a problem, you’ve already missed a window. The best CS orgs are predictive. They identify where customers get stuck, build curated digital journeys around those moments, and intervene before the customer even knows they need help. That’s what “always on” actually means.
2. CS only drives revenue when it’s outcome-based, not relationship-based.
The old model (check-ins, QBRs, account health scores) isn’t cutting it anymore. Teresa builds attribution models that correlate specific engagement touchpoints to retention and expansion. You can’t improve what you can’t measure, and most teams aren’t measuring the right things.
3. Dynamic segmentation beats static ACV tiers every time.
Hard lines on company size or contract value lead to misallocated coverage and missed growth. The better model? A two-by-two of current spend, risk, and expansion potential that flexes every few months as customer health changes. Your best CSMs should be matched to the accounts with the most upside, not just the biggest logos.
4. Don’t just treat retention as a CS swim lane.
Teresa runs a monthly cross-functional meeting with product, marketing, sales, and support to action NPS insights together. The inner loop closes individual feedback fast. The outer loop informs strategy. Most companies say retention is everyone’s job. Few actually set it up that way.
5. Start at the end of the renewal cycle, not the beginning.
When building a digital CS motion from scratch, Teresa starts with win-back and renewal, not onboarding. That’s where you can show near-term impact, identify churn culprits, and build the playbooks that eventually get you to a proactive, full-lifecycle motion. Crawl, walk, run.
Thank you to our sponsor:
HockeyStack
If you run go-to-market, you already know the problem: your data lives everywhere. Spreadsheets, CRMs, sales calls, ad platforms… yet you’re still guessing what to do next.
HockeyStack is the AI platform for modern GTM teams. It unifies all your sales and marketing data into a single system of action. Built-in AI agents help teams prospect the right accounts, improve conversions, close and expand deals, and scale what works. That’s why teams like RingCentral, Outreach, ActiveCampaign, and Fortune 100 companies rely on HockeyStack to eliminate wasted spend, take better decisions, and make space to think.
Learn more at
hockeystack.com
Nooks
Outbound sales today is still built around manual work: writing emails, building lists, and managing sequences across disconnected tools.
Nooks is breaking the mold. With their new AI Sequencing product, Nooks is an agent workspace where AI works alongside reps, helping them understand accounts, prioritize the right prospects, and generate context-rich outreach based on actual first-party interactions.
No more wasting time in multiple tools – it’s one unified workspace for all your outbound channels. Arm your sales team with intelligent outbound. Learn more at nooks.ai.
Follow Wade Foster
Follow Sophie Buonassisi (Host)
Where to Find GTMnow
The GTMnow Podcast tells the stories of how the top 1% of founders, operators, and investors build, scale and invest.
Each week, we uncover the pivotal moments, bold decisions, and go-to-market strategies that turn ideas into breakout companies.
GTMnow is the media brand of GTMfund – we are an early-stage venture firm made up of 350+ go-to-market executives from the fastest-growing companies.
Visit gtmnow.com for more episodes, The GTMnow Newsletter editions, and other content.
GTM 185 Episode Transcript
00:00 – 00:02
Sophie Buonassisi:
Wade. Welcome to GTMnow.
00:02 – 00:03
Wade Foster:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Sophie.
00:04 – 00:31
Sophie Buonassisi:
Wade. Zapier sits between, you know, over 7000 apps, has millions of automations running every single day. So that means that you actually see what people try to automate, what gets, you know, left behind after a couple weeks and how people are actually successfully building. So what’s been a moment to kick us off where you saw workflow, somebody built and thought, Holy shit, this is the future of how companies are going to operate, or at least gives you a perspective of how they’re going to operate.
00:31 – 00:57
Wade Foster:
We started the company in 2011, focused on integrations specifically, and we quickly realized that folks wanted more than integrations. They did want workflows. But when we launched workflows in 2016, you know, it wasn’t exactly obvious all the different ways that people would use it. And I remember one of our very early power users of that feature, this guy in Australia, he messaged me and was like, Zapier is incredible.
00:57 – 01:15
Wade Foster:
I have built an entire business in like application on top of it. And I was like, oh, that’s interesting. Tell me more. And it turns out he had built basically like gag apps. So one was called Seinfeld quote, and the other one is called Kanye Text. And effectively what you could do was you would put in like a friend’s phone number.
01:15 – 01:40
Wade Foster:
And then he had hooked it up to Stripe and Twilio. And basically you could buy like a small or medium or large package and depending on what you bought, it would basically spam your friends with either Seinfeld quotes or Kanye texts. And it was like all built on top of Zapier. I was just like, Holy cow. Like, I had not anticipated people building, like, full on applications or like businesses on top of the platform in that way.
01:40 – 01:47
Wade Foster:
And so that was a very early eye opener. Basically, it was like, oh, we’re just thinking way too little about what this thing could become, how it.
01:47 – 01:48
Sophie Buonassisi:
really was on the journey.
01:48 – 02:02
Wade Foster:
So that would have been around when we launched workflows. So that would have been around 2016 or so, which was like five years in. You know, it took us a while. Like integrations was like such the focus for the first, you know, couple of years, you know, probably about 2 or 3 years. And we’re like, we got to go figure this workflow thing out.
02:02 – 02:07
Wade Foster:
And, you know, it took a year for us to get that, you know, product ready and ship.
02:07 – 02:27
Sophie Buonassisi:
And I mean Xavier’s evolved tremendously since then too. And now the world also looks very different. Everybody’s talking about agents of course. And everybody wants to build agents. But there’s actually quite a distinction between workflows and agents. So I’d love for you to actually walk us through what that distinction is. You know, a traditional workflow workflow that uses AI, maybe a true agent.
02:27 – 02:29
Sophie Buonassisi:
And if I’m missing anything else in there, too?
02:29 – 02:48
Wade Foster:
Yeah, certainly. Like everyone uses agents to call the superset for for everything. I tend to think of agents in the difference between agents and workflows. On on a spectrum, a workflow is deterministic. It behaves the same way every time. It’s like a computer program. You say, hey, I want it to do this, and then I want it to do this, and then I want it to do this, and I want it to do this.
02:48 – 03:05
Wade Foster:
And then you’re like, great. Then the computer will go execute it the same way every single time. And so you get like reliability, you get costs, you get all these sorts of things. And so that’s what a workflow actually looks like. An agent to me is different. An agent is something you give a goal and you give it instructions on how to complete that goal.
03:06 – 03:30
Wade Foster:
And then maybe you give it access to data or tools or something like that. And then every time, you know, the agent has the opportunity to go complete that goal, it goes and figures out how to do it. But it has its own logic, its own reasoning, its own way about going about it. It might be different than the way you would go about it, and as a result, you can give it a wider variety of tasks, because you don’t need to know all the possible ways that it needs to behave to go solve the problem.
03:30 – 03:44
Wade Foster:
But you’re also trading off against reliability costs. Things like that too. And so to me, agents workflows, they sit on a spectrum and you might want one for a particular job and you might want a different one for a different type of job.
03:44 – 03:53
Sophie Buonassisi:
Completely makes sense. And what does that evolution been like over time? Almost all stages of evolution since you’ve seen them all to get to this point earlier now.
03:53 – 04:12
Wade Foster:
Well, I think obviously like agents blowing up in the age of AI, like there are so much more use cases that have been a lot because of the ability to work with AI. And so that part of the puzzle is where all the momentum is today. That said, what is interesting is that there is also been a renaissance of workloads as well too.
04:12 – 04:30
Wade Foster:
And I think the reason why is because a lot of folks maybe had like a mental block or had just sort of said, oh, I can’t solve like, this is not for me. Like I’m not an engineer, I’m not technical off, I don’t know how to go solve this problem. And so when you go sit down and, you know, talk to people, now they have this appreciation that AI exists.
04:30 – 04:45
Wade Foster:
And so their minds like, oh, what problem can I solve? And they start saying, can you automate this? Can you automate that? Can you automate this? And honestly like nine times out of ten no I required it’s something that they could have been doing all along, but they just didn’t realize it that that was something that was available to them.
04:45 – 04:59
Wade Foster:
So in a lot of ways, I think I has been this like catalyst for all of us to be more generative with our ideas and say, oh, there are like and get more excited about the automation potential. And the irony is, of course, much of that stuff we we could have been doing all along.
05:00 – 05:20
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah, that’s super interesting. A really good point because like you said, it’s been there all along. We just might not necessarily have had the creative inspiration to actually go there. And now that we are being pushed across that kind of chasm towards AI because of the advent of AI agents in 2020 through you called a company wide code red at Zapier.
05:20 – 05:36
Sophie Buonassisi:
And for anyone unfamiliar, code Red just means that you drop everything and the entire company shifts focus to one urgent priority. And I believe after that moment, AI adoption inside Zapier actually went from 10% to 50% in a single week. What triggered that decision to call a code Red?
05:36 – 05:55
Wade Foster:
The key insight that we had was we had seen the ChatGPT launch in the fall of 2022. I think a lot of people that was like, whoa moment for us. It was like, this is cool. But it didn’t yet, like cause us to, like, monumentally change our behavior. Instead we were, you know, we shared the product launch in our slack channel in general.
05:55 – 06:12
Wade Foster:
It was like, hey, check out Tapscott. This is a cool product. We like cool products. You probably like cool products. Check it out. Some of the ideas in this might be useful in our own products of, you know, your product manager and engineer and like you’re trying to think of like cool, interesting like problems you can solve in automation on behalf of our customers.
06:12 – 06:30
Wade Foster:
This is another tool in your toolbox like, yeah, go think about using it. And that was kind of it. Then over the course of the next like 4 or 5 months, there was more areas where we just started to bump into users, partners doing interesting things with it, where that sort of like organic, you know, more casual adoption.
06:30 – 06:51
Wade Foster:
We started to just get like a little more forceful, a little more force, a little more forceful here or there. And that all culminated with the GPT four launch, which happened in the spring of 2023. The reason that set off the code red for us was that one, it was only six months between 3.5 and 4, and four was a vastly superior model to 3.5.
06:51 – 07:11
Wade Foster:
And the costs kept going down. And so we looked at that and said, Holy cow, if this represents any sort of trend for the future, we need to rethink our roadmap. We need to rethink our internal operations. There is a monumental opportunity for the companies that jump on this, and candidly, this could be a threat as well to if we don’t like, react to it.
07:12 – 07:24
Wade Foster:
And so I remember a Thursday night call with my co-founders where we were just like trying to figure out, like, what are we going to do? What are we going to do? What are we going to do? And ultimately, we called the exact team in at like 7:00 am the next morning and we’re like, hey, here’s here’s what’s on our mind.
07:24 – 07:46
Wade Foster:
Like, this is a code red moment. We need to go figure out what that that means. Now, ultimately, we had never called the code red internally, so we didn’t actually have a concept of like, well, behaviorally, what does that mean? And so we had to go figure out what exactly do you mean by code red? Like, it sounds serious, but like, you know, beyond just sort of everyone, like throwing their hands up in the air and being like, oh, let’s figure it out.
07:46 – 08:07
Wade Foster:
Yeah. Like, what is this practically? And we did a bunch of things in the, like, days, and weeks following that. But there was one thing in particular that, like, really stood out as a very effective technique. And that was the following week. The following Monday, we kicked off a companywide hackathon. So not just engineering, but, you know, marketing and sales and HR and finance and all these functions.
08:08 – 08:26
Wade Foster:
And we said, hey, we want you to go build with AI. And, you know, for engineers, that probably meant building features with, you know, the OpenAI APIs for, you know, our sales team or our marketing team that might be just using ChatGPT and like trying to have it do research for you, do your tasks for you or things like this.
08:26 – 08:48
Wade Foster:
What we saw was over the course of that week was like a lot of people just like got a lot of experience using these tools. And we did a show and tell at the end of it, a demo day where people showed off. There’s a bunch of learnings and all that sort of stuff, and the culmination of that was that pre that hackathon week, there was probably just under 10% of folks using AI like daily, for their work.
08:48 – 09:07
Wade Foster:
And after it was just north of 50%. So almost, you know, 40% of the company, you know, went from very little to no usage of the technology to, you know, now using it pretty frequently. And so that was probably the single most effective thing that we did to jumpstart acceleration of how we think about AI inside of Zapier.
09:08 – 09:17
Sophie Buonassisi:
Do you think that’s still a very effective method to host just company wide hackathons? Because everyone wants to increase their adoption of AI exponentially now?
09:17 – 09:49
Wade Foster:
So since that time, I have talked to probably hundreds of companies, founders, CEOs, executives, and the singular most effective tactic that I’ve heard is some concept of a hackathon builder sessions. Luncheon builds like workshops like you hear that repeated over and over and over again amongst the companies that are seeing the most success. It makes sense to me, like you see a very different mentality between the people who are using the technology versus the people who are pontificating on the technology, the folks pontificating about it.
09:49 – 10:14
Wade Foster:
There’s a lot more fear mongering, there’s a lot more sensationalism. The people are actually putting their hands on it like they have it just have like a richer understanding of where this is a powerful technology and how it can help them. They understand the limitations and what it is not capable of, where their role is. And like the thing I end up just coaching people on is like, I it’s a tactile thing where it’s like, you benefit so much from using this stuff.
10:14 – 10:26
Wade Foster:
And so I recommend it wholeheartedly. And I think that is not just like I wouldn’t say Zapier is in, in a, in of one here. This is like a in a, you know, 100 plus where I’ve seen now that this is a very effective technique.
10:26 – 10:43
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah. I mean that’s fantastic. We’ve definitely seen some portfolio companies leaning to that approach. I know for myself, I’ve just got a network of folks and we host hackathons just separately from her companies just amongst us, where if we share similar use cases and things like that, it’s just so, so valuable to be able to focus on it and learn from others.
10:43 – 10:57
Sophie Buonassisi:
Now in a previous 2025, correct me if I’m wrong way, but you actually meet AI fluency, a requirement for each new hire. So you took it a step further and built a rubric. Unacceptable. Acceptable. Adaptive. Transformative. Tell me about this rubric.
10:57 – 11:15
Wade Foster:
You know, I think we had just seen a couple of things we’d invested so much in just providing opportunities for folks to learn and have space to kind of figure out how to use the technology. And as we’d seen that we definitely were starting to see that the folks adopting at the most were almost like the super contributors inside the company.
11:15 – 11:35
Wade Foster:
Like their productivity was sky high. They were able to do things that they could do before, and they’re providing leverage for themselves for their team, for the company and all sorts of interesting ways. Also, we had seen, you know, adoption of AI go from 50% post that first hackathon to now. I mean, I think by the time we announced that, we were like at 97% or something like that.
11:35 – 11:51
Wade Foster:
So basically everyone in the company was using it, regularly. And so the thinking there was like, hey, if you’re not using this stuff coming into the company, like you’re just going to be behind inside of a company like Zapier. So at this point in time, this is kind of just a job requirement to be successful inside of a company like Zapier.
11:51 – 12:09
Wade Foster:
The second thing was it was an important signal for our employees, but also to the market where it was, you know, we we want to be known as the type of company that is going to invest in this technology and invest in, like the future of, of work. And so we wanted our employees to know that, like, hey, we are going to be on the cutting edge.
12:09 – 12:38
Wade Foster:
And so to the extent you’re fearful about your skills continuing to be modern, continuing to be relevant, like you don’t have to worry about Zapier being a place that’s going to support that. We are 100% going to stand behind you and support you and like making this transition to our to the sort of new AI world. And just as importantly, we wanted people out there in the world who were maybe in companies where that wasn’t true, but they were excited about working this way, and they’d be doing this like in their spare time to say, hey, come, come look at us like we want you here.
12:38 – 12:55
Wade Foster:
Like, this is going to be awesome for you. So we said about that as well. I think the biggest challenge was we had to just define what the heck does AI fluency mean? You know, I think a lot of companies at this time were struggling with this where they wanted more. I had in fact, I’d say companies even today still are struggling with this.
12:55 – 13:12
Wade Foster:
Like they want more adoption inside the company, but they don’t have a good way to talk about it. Like, what does it practically mean? What’s the rubric? You know, at the end of the day to say, is this person good or bad? And so we just set about like a very simple exercise, which was we went to leaders in every function.
13:12 – 13:26
Wade Foster:
We went to the power users and every function and just said, hey, what are the things that you feel like are baseline level skills for people working with AI in your function? So if you’re an engineer, you need to be able to do this. If you’re a designer, you need to be able to do that. If you’re a marketer, you need to be able to do this.
13:26 – 13:40
Wade Foster:
So on and so forth. And you know, we said, okay, what’s sort of like the basic things like what would be the type of stuff you kind of just expect people are doing these days. What would be the type of thing that you go like, oh, you’re kind of ahead of the curve. And then what would be something that you’d be like, Holy cow, you figured that out.
13:40 – 13:57
Wade Foster:
Like, we haven’t figured that out yet. Something that would just, like really surprise you. And so we just made like a simple rubric and said, hey, this is kind of the, you know, not acceptable, acceptable and, you know, adaptive and transformative. And we put that out there and said, hey, this is what it looks like. You know, I think alongside that, we said, hey, we fully expect this rubric to change.
13:57 – 14:13
Wade Foster:
It certainly has a you’re in because the technology moves very, very quickly. So, you know, it is an important exercise to do this, but it’s also just as important to recognize that the slope here is like more important than any, you know, along the way because of how fast the technology is moving.
14:13 – 14:29
Sophie Buonassisi:
Definitely. And I would echo you that it’s something people are constantly struggling with right now. We get requests all the time from leaders just around. How do you actually evaluate AI usage and the the methodology people are using just is skewed so heavily. There’s no right or wrong per se, but there’s so many different forms out there.
14:29 – 14:43
Sophie Buonassisi:
This is probably one of the most standardized forms that I’ve seen is a sales leader. Let’s just say wants to implement this rubric. What does that actually look like? Do they have a rubric for each skill? Is it function specific or tactically how does this rubric work.
14:43 – 15:01
Wade Foster:
So in effect we’ve created these based on it’s like any other rubric. Like if you were trying to hire for, you know, like a content marketer, it’s like, well, you probably want to see that they’re good at writing. You probably want to see that they’re like, have good ideas. You probably want to see that they, you know, have some understanding of like search or like headline writing.
15:01 – 15:14
Wade Foster:
Like, so you kind of know, like, okay, these are sort of like the skills that are required to be good at this job. You’ve probably worked with people before where you’re like, oh, this is the best of the best. This is like pretty good. This is like not very good. And you just create a rubric out of it.
15:14 – 15:31
Wade Foster:
It’s not in get it for free. I’m like at the end of the day, this you do the same thing. I think where I see folks really struggle with is you mentioned like leaders struggling with this. I actually think leaders are one of the biggest reasons, like companies are held back because a lot of these leaders are not putting their hands on the keyboard and not using the technology.
15:31 – 15:47
Wade Foster:
And so they’re asking, how do I create a rubric for this? And the reason they can’t do it is because they haven’t used it so they don’t know what is good look like, what is bad look like. And you know, that is where I find, like so many leaders are in a bad position themselves because they’re running a dated playbook.
15:47 – 16:07
Wade Foster:
They sort of grew up in this era where they had once upon a time, their skills were fresh, modern, best of the best. But now they’ve sort of like, you know, grown into this management job and they’ve kind of lost touch with their craft. And the craft is changing, like how they do the work is actually changing. And those folks have not gone back and stayed relevant on this.
16:07 – 16:24
Wade Foster:
I grew up with a bunch of folks in the medical field and in my family, and if you’re a doctor or pharmacist or a nurse or any of these people, you’re always doing continuing education, like you always have to go back and do these things because there’s, you know, maybe there’s a new like, technique for surgery or there’s like a new medicine that comes out that sort of impacts these things.
16:24 – 16:44
Wade Foster:
To me. These are like, you know, folks in the medical field who never did their continuing education. And it’s like, well, of course you don’t know how to, like, stay fresh on AI because you’re not putting in the work yourself. And like I would just caution, if you’re a leader in one of these positions, like, you gotta go figure out how to rectify that because you’re not going to be able to lead your team effectively if you are not yourself being a user of this technology.
16:44 – 16:52
Wade Foster:
And it doesn’t mean that you have to be like the world’s foremost expert at this stuff. You just gotta, like, start and play around with it and you’ll get better just like anybody else.
16:52 – 17:02
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah, a good lesson. Just get your hands dirty on AI for everyone. And we’d if you’re open to sharing what has been the actual revenue impact of going AI first in Zapier.
17:03 – 17:31
Wade Foster:
I think there’s a couple areas that we see the most like one, we’ve pushed it into our product in so many different areas. And so it’s not just like that. Our operations are different, it’s that we are building AI capabilities for our customers. And so when you look at the growth curve of our users who are using our AI capabilities versus the ones who are not playing night day difference, you know, those like those cohorts are growing just vastly, vastly faster than that than the other cohorts.
17:31 – 17:48
Wade Foster:
And I think it just speaks to the power of the technology. It’s like, this is a really powerful way to work. Internally, there’s sort of two ways that I think about this. One is easier to have an hour to measure. The ROI one is much harder. So the whole like 100% of people are using AI daily. I think of this as like a floor raiser.
17:48 – 18:02
Wade Foster:
This is, you know, let a thousand flowers bloom. Everyone is using it as like a personal tool to help them with their day to day. If you were to ask me if you’re asking our CFO, if you’re asking any of these people, like what ROI is there on that, it would be. I’d be hard pressed to tell you.
18:02 – 18:17
Wade Foster:
I know that there is because I see it in my own work. I see it in other people’s work. But if you ask me to measure it in a very concrete way, I just don’t. I’m not even sure how I would like go about that problem. And so there is just like a leap of faith there where I’m like, I know this is working, but it’s hard for me to sort of point to like the ROI impact of that.
18:17 – 18:41
Wade Foster:
Then you have like your ceiling raiser project. These are places where you can look at a very concrete business result and say, like this is working. So, for example, in our customer support team, some 50% of our customers requests are now being fielded by AI. And those folks get one much faster response times. But they also for those set of questions cite higher customer satisfaction as well.
18:41 – 18:58
Wade Foster:
And so that’s one of those things where you can very like concretely measure, hey, this is working. It’s better than the way that it was working before. And I think that’s the thing when people ask like, how do you go about measuring AI productivity? The answer is like, we don’t really measure AI productivity. You measure your business outcomes.
18:58 – 19:34
Wade Foster:
And so generally that’s like, are you improving like sales throughput or conversion rates or are you, you know, decreasing the cost to serve in some way somehow, like all the sort of KPIs that you probably measure today? Those are the things that you should be seeing improvement on if you really are deploying the technology effectively. And so if you’re trying to look for how do I actually go impact the business, you probably have to start with those KPIs and work backwards and say, you know, what are the bottlenecks that are causing us to not be like more ambitious with these goals and then figure out, okay, can I, like, meaningfully change the fundamental unit economics of how that works in a particular way?
19:34 – 19:44
Sophie Buonassisi:
I love that advice. Weed is it really is futile to just do AI for the sake of AI, which right now feels like there’s a lot of pressure for a lot of people. But at the end of the day, if it’s not driving business outcomes, what’s the point?
19:44 – 19:58
Wade Foster:
I would say the point is that there is like a little bit of play that has to happen first. Like it’s really hard with something new to just wake up and go, okay, if you cannot show like monumental business results, I will not let you touch this at all.
19:58 – 19:58
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah.
19:58 – 20:15
Wade Foster:
And the reality is like there is like a learning curve. And so your first two things you probably try, they probably don’t change the color of the sky for the business, but that learning that’s put into that it will end up paying off. You know, by the time you get to something that actually can have a much larger impact.
20:15 – 20:26
Wade Foster:
And so I think that’s where like in this moment in time, companies do have to probably be like a little tolerant of like play and experimentation. Some might call it waste, but to me I call it investment.
20:26 – 20:48
Sophie Buonassisi:
I love it, flip it on its head. And plus there’s the technology kind of curve to where, you know, it might not be at the point where some leaders feel like it makes sense to implement fully. But if you’re not playing with it now, then that learning curve just gets harder as it goes. Like the people that were experimenting early, that adopted early, like yourself, have such an advantage with that compounding knowledge, then those that are jumping in later.
20:48 – 21:00
Sophie Buonassisi:
So you took Zapier through quite a transition and really embraced AI. If you are starting Zapier, say, today in an AI native world, would you build anything differently?
21:00 – 21:23
Wade Foster:
I mean, we started the company almost 15 years ago, so it is such a different world. I think there’s two sort of like general observations. I have one, the cost of build stuff is so much cheaper now with these tools. Like you can be way more ambitious in what you build, the speed at which you build it. And so unquestionably there would be like different approaches we would take just in building like the first capabilities.
21:23 – 21:53
Wade Foster:
The flip side of that is marketing. Distribution attention, I think is probably ten times as hard. Maybe even more than ten times as hard. And I suspect that that is where we would have to do things much, much differently. It’s hard to like, think through exactly what that would be at this moment in time, because like all the channels we benefit from, like we basically popularized those, and so, like, you know, if I had to start it today, I’m assume I’m competing with ourselves who have already, like, monopolized and satirize like all those channels.
21:53 – 22:00
Wade Foster:
And so it’s like, well, how do I go find an edge that, you know, all these other people haven’t taken advantage of yet? And so that’s like the key question to ask.
22:00 – 22:11
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah, that is and it’ll be interesting to see how people build now as it is far more saturated. Are you concerned at all around Zapier and moat just as agents become more prevalent?
22:11 – 22:33
Wade Foster:
I think every company is probably asking themselves the moat question and sort of rethinking from first principles like what those could be. Yeah, I think that ultimately, like, you’re trying to figure out how can you counter position against other companies, how can you do things that they can’t do or won’t do? And I do think that the best companies probably do have some, like keen observations around how that works.
22:33 – 22:53
Wade Foster:
But I do think oftentimes moats reveal themselves rather than are discovered over time. And so I think the best companies are just ferociously listening to their customers shipping crazy fast. And along the way they sort of discover, oh, wow, like we have an edge because of this thing we did and maybe didn’t totally appreciate it when they did it.
22:53 – 23:07
Wade Foster:
Certainly that was like when we built our original moats. Like that’s how we felt, like we found them. It wasn’t that we set out to say, oh, this is our boat. This is what we’re doing. It’s just like, well, this is how we’re going to get customers. These are the important things. And it turned out those things happened to have characteristics of a moat.
23:07 – 23:21
Wade Foster:
Maybe there are some founders out there that are like much more savvy and can, like, identify them in advance. But I find that it’s like anytime you hear people pontificate these companies, it’s so easy to connect the dots looking backwards, but I doubt it actually played out that way. Looking forward.
23:21 – 23:38
Sophie Buonassisi:
It’s almost giving me, your echo experience of your founding story of starting Zapier in terms of how it was a little bit serendipitous and happened because of the value that people were getting for the product in the service, as opposed to you going in and planning out necessarily what that look like, and that you’d be sitting here, you know, 15 years later.
23:38 – 23:50
Sophie Buonassisi:
Very cool. And you’ve been profitable for years, with raising minimal capital, which is something that a lot of companies look to Zapier as an example for. Do you have any advice for anyone that’s really trying to lean into the profitability side?
23:50 – 24:09
Wade Foster:
Well, I think it’s a lot easier than it used to be. I think a lot of companies could have done it before, too, that just chose not to. Now I think it’s just more popular. I think, you know, especially right now, a lot of founders went through the sort of like zero interest rate period. They hired big teams, their companies ballooned bigger than they probably should have been.
24:09 – 24:27
Wade Foster:
They experience all the pain and headache of over hiring and, you know, coordination costs. Like before the company was ready for that stuff. Then, of course, you saw the market draw down and these are like lived how painful that was. And, you know, it kind of came out the other side and said, you know what? I think I shipped faster with a smaller team.
24:27 – 24:44
Wade Foster:
I had more fun with a smaller team. I could grow revenue faster with a smaller team. And, you know, while it used to be somewhat contrarian to say, hey, we’re going to like keep headcount like low, we’re going to only hire when it hurts. Like a lot of that contrarian advice is now actually become more in vogue and saying, like, hey, we actually can’t do this.
24:44 – 24:59
Wade Foster:
And so as a result, you’re seeing a lot more companies building this way. And I think I does help because you don’t need as much engineers. You don’t need as much other things to like go ship and deliver, you know, first, second, third versions of your product. So yeah, I think my advice to folks would be just like, well, one just lean into that.
24:59 – 25:20
Wade Foster:
Like go use these like capabilities that you have for yourself. I think the second thing that I see a lot of folks get tripped up on is they don’t really think maybe for themselves. The way I’ve always thought about it is fundraising. Is is selling your company effectively? Like that’s what it is. Yeah, but a lot of times that’s not how it gets like positioned to founders by VCs and other folks.
25:21 – 25:34
Wade Foster:
You know, it’s raising money, not selling your company. It’s like, no, you’re selling your company. Now in a lot of cases, you’re hoping by selling a part of your company, you can make the company bigger than what it is. But if that is the case, you should be able to step back and have a clear hypothesis around that.
25:34 – 25:51
Wade Foster:
And so the exercise we always went through, yeah, when we had opportunities to raise more money, is we step back and we paid attention to like the underlying metrics of the business. And we said, okay, what is actually the bottleneck that is preventing us from growing? Like if we had, you know, another million dollars, another $10 million, what thing would we invest in?
25:51 – 26:06
Wade Foster:
How would we deploy that money to help us grow faster? If the answer was money isn’t the bottleneck, something else is the bottleneck. We just decided we’re not going to raise more money. Why? Like we don’t want to sell more of our company to solve a problem we don’t have. And I think a lot of founders don’t go through that exercise.
26:06 – 26:26
Wade Foster:
I think they basically listen to groupthink, you know, hey, the best companies raise money. Don’t you want to have a war chest? Don’t you know, wouldn’t it be nice to have work with, you know, this fancy brand name things like that, which look, those might be useful. Those might be helpful things. But you got to step back and understand, like, do you actually need those?
26:26 – 26:40
Wade Foster:
Is that the thing you need right now or is that just something that, like, helps you feel better, helps you sleep better at night, etc.? You know, I don’t fault anyone for operating one way or the other. I mean, we’ve raised money ourselves. I think it is a valuable tool in the tool chest, but it becomes the de facto path so often.
26:40 – 26:58
Wade Foster:
And that’s where I see people get tripped up and they over raise their companies, get, you know, balloon, they lose control. And even if they don’t lose control, like the outcome for them personally is never going to be as good as it could have been had they sort of grown in a way that was more reflective of what the opportunity inside of that company looked like in the first place.
26:58 – 27:13
Sophie Buonassisi:
Yeah, I hear you, and definitely see the same thing. It’s surprising, actually, how many conversations that we have regularly with founders around. Is this the right, like vehicle for raising money for you? Because sometimes it’s not. It’s going to be that transparent conversation and decision where it has to make sense. Like you said, it has to be so intentional.
27:13 – 27:28
Sophie Buonassisi:
So maybe it is the profitability side or maybe it’s something else. But I’m curious. Wait, if there was, you know, a company building decision that you made that felt maybe risky or wrong at the time, but turned out to be one of the best decisions that you could have made for Zapier?
27:28 – 27:51
Wade Foster:
Yeah, I mean, the fundraising one was definitely one that I think worked very well in our favor. I think another contrarian decision we made that works really well in our favor was building a distributed team in 2012. That was something that was not a popular choice at the time. I remember, you know, people around the company and yeah, when we were doing like folks asking about it, you know, I remember one particular comment was like, no important company has been built this way.
27:51 – 28:09
Wade Foster:
And so I remember, like hearing stuff like that. But, you know, we felt like we knew something maybe before other people had figured it out. It’s like, well, no company has been built this way because the tools weren’t available to build it that way. But they are now. And so it’s just a matter of time before companies can be built this way.
28:09 – 28:30
Wade Foster:
And as we sort of went about it, we realized that, you know, we could get access to like top tier talent in tier two, tier three cities for a fraction of the rates, which was huge for a startup that, you know, was effectively like near bootstrapped, to be able to tap into that talent. You know, those folks in a lot of ways were better than, you know, sort of your average Silicon Valley like engineer.
28:30 – 28:50
Wade Foster:
At the end of the day, I’m sure there is like elite Silicon Valley engineers that maybe could go to toe to toe or beat these folks. But, you know, the number one in a particular city can be better than most others. And so that was like a great talent arbitrage opportunity for us. And then we learned how to, like, build a good culture of like, you know, operate the company like so many things that you I think we had to learn just kind of on our own.
28:50 – 28:54
Wade Foster:
And it ended up, I think, paying off in spades for us. Along the way.
28:55 – 29:00
Sophie Buonassisi:
I’m seeing a common pattern here. You’re zagging while others are saying, and it’s clearly working out in your favor.
29:00 – 29:17
Wade Foster:
I do think that’s like a pretty reasonable kind of coming back to the category. Like a good way to find Alpha is to do the opposite of what conventional wisdom says. It doesn’t always work like you got to be right to like. That’s the hard part. You know, there’s definitely some places where we, you know, probably had that contrarian streak and we were just wrong.
29:17 – 29:26
Wade Foster:
And that obviously doesn’t help you out. But if you sort of pick the right dimension to do the opposite of what everyone’s doing, it turns out you’re right. You’re going to get a lot of upside from that brilliant.
29:26 – 29:33
Sophie Buonassisi:
And it’s trying to 86 right now. What do you leaning into in terms of go to market motion as you look towards this next stage of growth?
29:33 – 29:52
Wade Foster:
Well, I mean speaking of things that like we were contrarian on and were perhaps wrong is, you know, we are spending a lot, investing in our enterprise motion. You know, what happened was product led growth like self-serve business for the longest time. And we definitely resisted that, that sort of expansion up market along the way. And, you know, I think early 2020s, we realized, oh, we’re just wrong here.
29:52 – 30:12
Wade Foster:
Like there’s we have a product that is incredibly valuable in these organizations. There are feature gaps that we need to go invest in. And if we do so, like these folks are going to benefit massively from what we’ve built. They already are. They’re just like, you know, these sort of edges that need to be sanded often, you know, to work a little better in these three particular unique cases.
30:12 – 30:29
Wade Foster:
And so we went about building a lot of those capabilities. Nowadays, RPA is a full blown enterprise platform for automation. And so a lot of the work we’re doing on the GTM side is to mirror that is to make sure that, you know, folks in these companies are aware that Zapier can do, a lot more than I think they probably historically might think it can.
30:29 – 30:30
Wade Foster:
So that’s a big effort for us.
30:30 – 30:43
Sophie Buonassisi:
Completely made sense. That’s fantastic. Very, very exciting times ahead. And what kind of personal AI flows are you using? Like, what are the three AI workflows you personally use the most every single week?
30:43 – 31:03
Wade Foster:
So I have, like an AI chief of staff that I built out inside of. I use cursor for this, and it uses cursor and the Zapier MCP, which, allows me to hook in all my tools. So I have, you know, Gmail, calendar, slack, my to do list, which is on Kota Granola, which is what I use for meeting notes.
31:03 – 31:19
Wade Foster:
Also, all this context that, you know, sort of is around me and, you know, there’s a whole bunch of workflows I use around this one. I have it generate a morning brief for me every day, that sort of thing for the day. So I know, like who I’m meeting with. What are the key topics coaching for like what I should be trying to do inside those calls?
31:19 – 31:31
Wade Foster:
So, you know, if it’s like a sales call, it’s like, hey, here’s the things you need to listen for. Pay attention to. If it’s a, you know, a customer. Like here are the questions you need to ask them about the usage that they already have on the platform, any friction that they’ve already had with the platform, stuff like that.
31:31 – 31:46
Wade Foster:
And then I also do an end of day recap with it, where it sucks in all the granola notes for the day, it pulls out key action items. It starts to actually do that. The action items to the extent it can, some of them make them complete entirely on its own. Some of them it’s just partial. Some of it can’t quite do.
31:46 – 31:59
Wade Foster:
Yeah. And then I have it prompt me for like, hey, how did the day go? And so then I go augment it. I say, hey, here’s what you know, today was a great day or today was a bad day. And, you know, here are the like 2 or 3 things that we need to make sure to keep track of and follow up on from the day.
31:59 – 32:17
Wade Foster:
And so that workflow is like really keeps me organized on a day to day basis. The second thing that I do that I love is I have, you know, inside this, like I chief of staff, I’ve got all of our company context. So it has the company strategy, the product strategy, your ideal customer profile. It’s got my own, like personal 360.
32:17 – 32:37
Wade Foster:
Like the things I’m working on. It’s got my personal goals and so much more inside this. It’s like a, like a second brain or a shared brain. And one of the skills I built out for it is I call it an advisory council. And so it has a bunch of personas that are sub agents. So it has, like the ruthless CFO, the wartime operator, the contrarian board member.
32:37 – 33:00
Wade Foster:
But for every decision that I face, I often, well, you know, think about the decision on my own. But I also ask the advisory council to consult with me. And so based on the decision that it is, it will also generate some agents that have a persona attached to them. So if I’m asking them about, like a candidate where, you know, I’m reviewing a candidate that we want to go hire, it will spin out probably like a recruiter persona.
33:00 – 33:22
Wade Foster:
It’ll spin up like an expert in that domain. It’ll spin up like, you know, 2 or 3 of these, these personas. And then, the advisory council will go, like, critique this, and then it will come back and it will provide their seven members on the advisory council. So each of them will provide their personal individual suggestion. And then there’s like a, I don’t know, like a chairman of the council who is like, here is the like, you know, the sort of vote that I would advise you on.
33:22 – 33:43
Wade Foster:
And I use this for like so many decisions and it helps like sharpen my thinking because you just get this like rubber duck style thing that it’s these patterns that maybe you’re not seeing it like catches things that you didn’t catch. It’s just super powerful. And I find myself often sharing the output of this with folks on the team where I’m like, you know, you ship me this to review for my approval.
33:43 – 34:01
Wade Foster:
Here is like the advisory council feedback, like, have you thought about these things? And, you know, sometimes they’ll be like, yes, we have here, here, here and here and other times will be like, oh, that’s interesting. I haven’t thought of that. So that one is like super interesting. You know, I know everyone says like don’t like code or CRM and I definitely would advise like don’t vibe code your CRM.
34:01 – 34:07
Wade Foster:
I did break the rules. I call it a CEO, CRM. It sits on top of our CRM though it sits on top of data.
34:07 – 34:07
Sophie Buonassisi:
Doesn’t count.
34:07 – 34:31
Wade Foster:
That spot. Yeah, so it’s really more of like a view on top of the CRM. And then it has a handful of very specific workflows that I use. So yeah, I find that the like the UI of our CRM was like it just more it was just have more features than I actually needed. And I wanted like 2 or 3 capabilities that were very focused on the jobs that I use the CRM for over and over and over and over again.
34:31 – 34:37
Wade Foster:
And so that’s what I built on top of it. So I could go on. But these are like, you know, three things that I’m using a lot right now.
34:37 – 34:47
Sophie Buonassisi:
Those are fantastic. Fantastic. I’m sure people are starting to build out their own personal kind of advisory committees also. And how do you learn about AI? Where do you go for sources of learning?
34:48 – 35:07
Wade Foster:
I think a couple places. One, you know, inside Zapier is like just this vibrant experimental pad. So there’s like a bunch of people like playing around and doing stuff inside of here. So I learned from our team a lot where they’re like, I’m trying this, I’m trying that, etc. so that’s a big source of learning X. Like a lot of folks are sharing like their own workflows, tips and tricks on X all the time.
35:07 – 35:25
Wade Foster:
And so I’m just paying attention to like what’s going on there, learning about the products, trying all the products, things like that. We live in like a really lucky time where a bunch of the, like, smartest AI researchers are like very actively going on podcasts and things like that too. So it’s like a handful of podcasters out there that are like continually getting like fantastic guests.
35:25 – 35:38
Wade Foster:
And so I’m often like listening to those trying to understand, like what’s happening at the cutting edge, things like that as well too. So, you know, just building a disparate source of resources and, you know, trying to catch like as much things through that as possible.
35:38 – 35:44
Sophie Buonassisi:
Very cool. And what about less digital? Do you have any favorite books that have been impactful for your career?
35:44 – 36:15
Wade Foster:
A few of my favorites that I’ve sort of read over the years How to Win Friends and Influence people as like fantastic, like book. It sounds a lot more scammy than it actually has a very practical way. Yeah. You know what? We are first getting started with Zapier. It was right around the launch of things like the Lean Startup, Four Steps to Epiphany, things like that, and so learned a lot about just, you know, how to think about experiments and prototyping and you know, how to get like, your early customers and product market fit and things like that from books like those as we scaled up the company hard thing about hard things,
36:15 – 36:25
Wade Foster:
high growth and book like these tools were just like very helpful and like, yeah, just like building and growing a company and doing a thing that I haven’t done before. So I don’t know. Those are those are a handful that comes to mind.
36:25 – 36:37
Sophie Buonassisi:
Very cool. Great reading list. Wade. This been fantastic. Really appreciate you joining sharing all your AI knowledge. We are happy top your customers of GTM fund and excited for what 2026 has in store for you.
36:37 – 36:39
Wade Foster:
Awesome. Thanks for having me, Sophie.
36:39 – 36:40
Sophie Buonassisi:
Thank you. Wade.
