Speaker 1Wait, wait, Sam, you got to clickbait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life.
Speaker 2Well, are you a 5 billion? What are you guys worth now?
Speaker 3Who knows?
Speaker 2You know, you know, you, you.
Speaker 4I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no day's off. On the road, let's travel, never leave.
Speaker 1All right, we should do a little intro. So first, do you, is it? I've been saying Zapier my whole life. Is it Zapier or Zapier?
Speaker 3Zapier makes you happier is the trick. It rhymes with happier.
Speaker 1Happy, wow. Dude, how is that not your slogan? Here's your, here's what your slogan is on your site. The automation layer for agentic AI. It doesn't really flow the same way as Zapier makes you happier.
Speaker 3It doesn't. We could, so there's two things from the name. We, one, we just couldn't afford the second P when we started. The domain was available. But the other, like, we were too clever for our own good is it has API in the name, which we always thought like, oh, that's neat. Because it's all connecting all these APIs and all that good stuff.
Speaker 1I didn't even notice that. Didn't notice that. Yeah. Honestly, didn't even notice the P was missing.
Speaker 2But it also, if you put Zapier makes you happier, I would have read it as Zapier makes you happier. Just got on with your day.
Speaker 1But we're happier here. Thank you. The short story is you're this guy who's built this really cool, started off as a very simple idea where you can make different apps. Connect with each other. What does that really mean? Let's say I have a business and people submit a form over here on my form thing. But then I kind of need that form thing. I need all the people who submitted the form. I need that data to go over here in this other unrelated app. And you guys built those like universal plugs and you can just plug in anything to anything else. And it was just incredibly useful. Sam used it. I used it. We didn't realize or I didn't realize how monstrous of a business this had become. I believe you guys are worth several billions. Maybe five billion was a number. That I had seen at some point in time. And I think you had bootstrapped a very long way. Is it purely bootstrapped or you at some point took some money?
Speaker 3I think the word people call it now is seed strap. So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change. But that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.
Speaker 1Yeah. So just incredibly to raise a million bucks and then get to five billion in value is just pretty, pretty wild. So super cool. But you're here not to necessarily tell the whole story of how Zapier makes you happier. But to show us what you're doing. Can you give me a public sales pitch real quick? I'm requesting a sales pitch. And what I want is I know how OG V1 of Zapier worked, where you connect one app to another. You're saying, Hey, we have this new AI product that you use with Claude, presumably makes your Claude or ChatGPT usage more powerful, whatever. I haven't been using that. I also, here's the other caveat. I'm kind of dumb. So like, imagine talking to somebody with half the IQ of yours.
Speaker 2He's like, can you give me a pitch to someone who's like, yeah. Yeah. Who's sort of dumb and doesn't listen.
Speaker 1But these are smart at the same time.
Speaker 3The confidence of a smart man. Yeah. I have really good news for you though. Like, I think AI is this incredible gift to people who are kind of dumb because you can just agree, talk to it and say like, Hey, I didn't understand that answer. Explain it to me like I'm five. And so you can keep like going down the dumbness stack, I guess, for like lack of a better word until you understand. It and then go, okay, now like teach me back up to where I need to go. So, okay. The sales pitch, you want the sales pitch in the old world, you know, Zapier, you know, come in, build integrations, connect apps. The new world has a lot of the same things, but it's different nowadays. You're hanging in Claude, you're hanging in, you know, Codex or cursor or, you know, open claw or whatever it is that you like using. Right. And you're just talking to it, going back and forth. Most people start with that. AI is the chat pod is valuable. But it's only generally smart. It knows everything that the internet knows. It doesn't know anything about your business. So the next step that you need to go to is to start connecting your tools. You start connecting your CRM, your help desk, your email, your team chat, all this stuff. And you feed that context in to the AI. Now, when you start asking questions about my first million and all this other stuff, you get not just generally smart answers. You get hyper specific answers around how your business works. OK, so if you install Zapier into this, you can hook up any of the tools that we have, right? So that's that's the first thing, the first bit of value and the first thing that people sort of experience is like, oh, connecting stuff makes sense. But look, you can do native connectors and all that other stuff. So, you know, use Zapier, use the native connectors, do whatever you want. The next layer and where this gets really powerful is not where you're sitting having this like back and forth conversation. It's when you're actually deploying automations and agents to actually go operate for you. While you sleep, like that's where you start to get the real magic. And the reason you want to use Zapier to do that versus like any of these generic agent builders.
Speaker 2What's an example?
Speaker 3I mean, like, you know, Claude has routines or ChatGPT has scheduled stuff like, you know, there's a bunch of these things that can kind of do agents or pseudo agents these days. But the nice thing about Zapier is that if you use us, we are going to make it so that whatever you build is optimized to run more deterministically than agentically. And I don't think people have caught up on this yet, but you've probably experienced it.
Speaker 1Climbing up the IQ scale. I know, I know.
Speaker 3Hang tight, hang tight, hang tight. Agents, agents, they kind of just guess what to do, right? And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time. But sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens, right? We probably heard token maxing, right? So they're really expensive. But if you use Zapier, we're going to write code for you and we're going to write workflow logic for you, which means that it's going to run. It's going to run like a machine runs. And so you're going to get, it's not going to burn tokens. It's going to be reliable and accurate. And it's only going to use AI exactly where it needs to use AI. And you've got this, you can host it on Zapier.com. So you don't have to sit here and like keep your laptop open to run these agents in the background. And so you just get this like rock solid infrastructure that Zapier has always been great at and hook up of everything that we've always done. But you can build, you know, inside Claude, which is like really nice because Claude just kind of, the natural language style of building is, I don't know, it's just like way better than the no code style stuff that we were doing in the past.
Speaker 1Well, you're not the wolf of Wall Street, but that was a pretty good sales pitch. I gave you the sell me this pen test and you did a pretty good job there. So I appreciate that. I feel like I now actually understand it. So that, that was good.
Speaker 3Well, and here's the magic. You can, if you didn't, and you're just pretending and being nice, you can take the transcript of this and you can plug it into Claude. And say, Wade said this weird thing. Tell me what this guy was talking about. Tell me what he was really saying. And that's like the cool part of AI.
Speaker 2That is cool. You gave us a list of stuff. So we said, Wade, what are you, what are you making? And it doesn't always have to be like this, like crazy, like game changing stuff. But what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of like three or four things. You said you have robots.
Speaker 1You got to click bait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change. His life. Well, are you a five?
Speaker 2What are you guys worth now? Who knows? You.
Speaker 3I mean, you know, I don't know how the markets behave right now. They're like up and down all sorts of ways.
Speaker 2Like, what would your guess be?
Speaker 3I don't think about it. Honestly. Like, I'm just like, how do we build stuff that makes our customers successful?
Speaker 2I knew you were a sweet guy. I didn't think you were a liar, though. Yeah, because I know you think about it under oath.
Speaker 1You know, there's the old saying, right?
Speaker 3Like in the short term, the markets. You are a voting machine and the long term, they're a weighing machine.
Speaker 2I'd rather you just tell me F off and give me these lies because I know you think about it. But don't don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain, Wade.
Speaker 3Honestly, don't tell me.
Speaker 2Just tell me it's none of my business and I'd accept it.
Speaker 3All right. It's none of your business, right? OK, that's fair.
Speaker 1Since the last time you guys got value, where did you where the five billion number come from in the first place?
Speaker 3That was a secondary number sale that happened in 2021, maybe.
Speaker 1OK. All right. All right. Revenues slightly up, way up, down, way down since then. Revenues are up. Yeah. OK. All right. Good. So we're doing well. All right. The clickbait headline holds. OK, continue on. So how you're actually using AI as a as a high functioning CEO.
Speaker 3OK, let me share screen on some of this stuff. So we'll get into the to the fun bits. One of the cool things is, you know, because I work with my agent all the time, I can say, hey, I'm, you know, going on my first million. Like, help me. Help me demo this stuff. And so this is this is what it came up with. It's like, here's the stuff you should actually go go demo. And so you can see I've got, you know, four potential things we can show off. One is the robot staff. This is kind of like my chief of staff that does like a whole bunch of different automations and agents for me. I've got the CEO CRM that I built that helps me stay really close with our enterprise customers. I've got like an AI that argues back. I think this is a really important thing that every leader. Needs to to build. I think there's a lot of CEOs out there, a lot of leaders out there that are talking to an AI that just agrees with them all the time. And so you need to like there's a few ticks and tips and tricks you can do to, like, force it to, like, scrutinize your thinking rather than just tell you, yeah, you're you're totally right all the time. And then I've got a bunch of skills that I run for a whole bunch of random tasks internally. So, yeah, I would probably start with the robot staff. I think this is, like, cool to dig into. The first thing, and we'll I'll show the complete version of this. Where I think most people start is kind of the morning brief. You know, it's super simple. It's a good, it's a good way to experience like your first agent. You know, you hook it up to your calendar, you hook it up to your email, you hook it up to your, you know, any meeting, like notes, you've got any prioritization, like a to do list that you have. And then, you know, in this case, it runs at 6am in the morning, and then it sends me
Speaker 1a Slack message. Yeah, I call this waking up like the president, like the president wakes up, it's a daily brief. Here's what, sir, here's what you have on your plate today, 930, you're talking to this person, 10am, this person's here, here's what they want to talk about, that sort of thing. And so totally waking up like every now everybody gets to wake up with a presidential briefing.
Speaker 3Exactly. And so, you know, these things run like in my case, I have it send me a Slack message, you can have it send you an email. I mean, heck, you could probably have it fax you something if you really want to feel like the president. I have it set up so it prints.
Speaker 2But it doesn't, it doesn't do it all the time. And I also have this woman named Ari conveniently, because I told I wanted to make it come from like a person and the person they made.
Speaker 1Is that weird for you? That Sam named his agent after you?
Speaker 2The person they selected looked at looked like Ari. So I was like, it's Ari. So I have Ari that sends me like a pump up speech as well for the day. So I love these daily briefs.
Speaker 3There you go. Now, so the cool thing I'll actually show you. So I have the link out to this one. This is, you know, this is running on Zapier. And you can see what this actually looks like, you know, kind of looks like, you know, classic Zapier a little bit, you know, runs every day at 6am, it goes and fetches all the calendar events. And then here, it's writing some specific code and hitting the AI to like write to Slack in a very particular way. Now, what is different about this is we can poke over here. This is all code, which in the past, you couldn't do this with Zapier. Now, I've not actually looked at any of this code. Like, this is actually the first time I popped this open and even taken a look at what this is. So you don't have to know what's going on here. But again, it kind of speaks to the value prop of Zapier is it's turning all of this stuff into a deterministic workflow. And it's only using AI in the places that you really need to use AI, which means this runs way more reliably, way more consistently, and way more cost effectively than than most agents.
Speaker 2But can I use this instead, like the problem that I have with Claude or perplexity or whatever is that my computer has to be open for a lot of these routines to run exactly. And it's a pain in the ass. Would would doing it on Zapier just be like in lieu of using like OpenClaw or having a Mac mini?
Speaker 3There you go. Exactly the point. You can just deploy these to Zapier and we run them in the cloud for you. That sounds way better than using OpenClaw or having a Mac mini. So way, way simpler, right? You can look up here. It's also agent managed. So one of the nice things
Speaker 2is all right, hold on just a second. I know what you're doing. Wade, who started a company grew to a billion dollar valuation. He's telling you all these amazing AI prompts that he uses for his business. You're probably taking a lot of notes right now. That's exactly what I was doing. And so what we decided to do was take all of those notes, all of the scripts that he's talking about, and we put it into a really easy document. So you just copy and paste everything. So there's the prompts where he talks about AI arguing back with him, where he can stress test different decisions by having a seven person AI executive committee kind of help them figure things out. And then your own life coach so you can have a better day. So if you want this exact AI workflow, again, you can just copy and paste all this stuff. Just click the link in the description or scan the QR code. All right, back to Wade.
Speaker 3While it is running deterministically, if for whatever reason it breaks, like say an API is down or something doesn't work right, it falls back to having an AI try and troubleshoot for you. And so it automatically apply fixes when things don't work quite the right way. And so there's this really nice blend of traditional software and like agentic software here that is just, you know, super well done by the team over here. So I definitely would say, hey, if you're if you're struggling with your open clause, if you're like keeping your laptop open all the time, you should definitely install Zapier into like your, you know, agent or AI of choice and give this a try. Okay, what else? So you get the morning brief. That's pretty standard, I would say. So let's talk about, so I think the morning brief is pretty standard. But the one that I really like is the the evening brief in the scribe. So, you know, I've had I played with a couple versions of it. One is it runs after every meeting. And then I have another version that runs at the end of the day. I actually think this is way better than the morning brief. And the reason why is you could actually have the AI help you do stuff. So, you know, it this loops over all of my meeting notes from the day. So I'm using granola for all of my meetings. It loops over all of the to do's that are still in my to do list for the day. It loops over all of the outstanding emails that are in my inbox for the day. And it and then it prompts me and says, hey, how did the day go? So there's two key things that it does for me. One, when I say what how the day went, I basically said it was a good day for this reason, or it's a bad day for this reason. So now all that stuff is getting, you know, it's getting, you know, it's getting logged and it's learning how to tune my day to help me have more good days than bad days. But the second thing that it's doing is it's actually taking action on them stuff on stuff. So it says, hey, you know, you were in a meeting with Sam and Sean yesterday, and they asked for an intro to your buddy over at this company. Do you want me to go ahead and make that intro for you? Great, please do that. Right. So it's drafting those follow up emails, it's drafting all this other things. And so this is where AI starts to get really, really helpful is it's not just giving you a brief and sort of teeing it up for you to do. It's now saying, I'll just do that for you. And this is where I think you start to really feel the power of AI is when you can actually put it to work. So I love scribe those sort of like post meeting follow up or the end of the day wrap up because it just, I don't know, I used to spend like two hours at the end of my day, just like, you know, just trying to catch up on every little ticky tack thing that I sort of got roped into. And now that like two hours at the end of the day
Speaker 2like 15 minutes. So you think this is legit saving you two hours a day almost?
Speaker 3Yes. Yes. And furthermore, that like, you know, what's good about my day, what's bad about my day part, it just helps me stay like focused on the things that matter. So both the AI is helping me with that. But I also will send like, I remember 90, like about about 90 days after I started doing this. I said, Hey, I had this thought I was like, you know, so much about like, what makes me have good days and bad days. Can you like summarize like, what is common about my good days? And what is common about my bad days? It was like, sure. And it did all that stuff. And then I gave it to my assistant. And I said, Hey, here's like, please make my days look like more good days versus bad.
Speaker 2What were your good days? And what were your bad days?
Speaker 3So for me, like the single most important thing is I'm a morning person. And so I do my best work in the morning. I'm most focused. You know, once once after lunch comes around, you know, I'm just not going to get anything like serious done. And so the most important thing is I don't want a meeting until 11am. And so you just give me that morning time where I can knock out the most critical things. And the day is going to go great, like I will win the rest of the day. But if I have to, like, you know, if that time starts to get sucked into like firefighting mode, you can tell I'll just be grumpy at the end of the day where I'm just like, Oh, like, I'm not I'm not being successful. And you'll notice this podcast started at 11am.
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Speaker 2So how to get the AI to challenge you instead of Oh, yeah, let's do that. So coming back AI that
Speaker 3argues back. So this is pretty simple, right? I use I use cursor as my daily like agent. But if you're using Claude, if you're using chat, if you're using Gemini, they often have like a system prompt or a way that you can sort of tune like how it talks to you. And so in cursor, I have a file agents MD, that's kind of what it uses everywhere. Claude has a Claude MD. And basically, I have a file that's like, how to work with me. And, you know, I, you know, have it be direct and honest, I need the truth, my co workers are afraid to tell me, I need you to challenge my assumptions, I need you to poke holes in my thinking, I need you to just like disagree when you genuinely disagree. And these things are like goal seeking entities. And so if you tell it, like, what I want from you is this, it's going to say, Okay, well, that's what Wade's one. So I'm going to try and give him that goal. But if you don't tell him this, if you don't make this configuration, it's going to just genuinely try and like placate you because it thinks that's what you want. And so you do have to tell it, you know, it sort of guided a little bit. So like, here's an example of like, you know, a live prompt, I ran ahead of time for this, I said, Hey, I'm thinking we should kill our entire free tier this quarter, because one of our competitor raised prices, help me draft the announcement, right? So this is like something that it should definitely like, say, Hey, press pause, like that, that's a, that's a bad idea. And so when I do that, here's the, you know, pushback that it gives me, it's like, Hey, it's a big move off a pretty thin signal. Before you draft anything, I want you to, I want three things on the table. So like, you know, bring me the data, you know, tell me like, what the actual problem you're trying to solve is, you know, pricing announcements are wrong. Like, you know, is there a smaller experiment you can run? That's great. Yeah, it's just like, helping you think through, you know, these problems. And then, you know, I have this other skill that I've made, which I call my war council skill. And so this is like an even like more specific version of this that I will often invoke. So I could say, Hey, y'all, I'm thinking about hiring this person. Here's all the like notes that I've got on them from the interview panel. Like help me figure out if this person's going to raise the bar or not. And what it will do, the war council is, this is a, actually let me poke back. I think I have the war council skill in here. Uh, yeah, here it is. Um, okay. I, it didn't actually pull the skill up. So this, if you go to, uh, Zapier's GitHub, you can get a copy of the war council. But what this does is it spins up sub agents and these sub agents take on personas. There are seven sub agents that get spun up. So seven personas, some of them are standing members. So for example, I have, uh, the wartime COO is a standing member of the war council. There's the ruthless CFO is a standing member. There's a contrarian board member that are standing members of the war council. Then I leave four personas to be generated dynamically. So based on the prompt, it will decide who else,
Speaker 1who else do I need to get advice from? That wartime COO, you created the persona, you described its characteristics, or you trained it on like Travis Kalanick transcripts or something like what did you?
Speaker 3In my case, I, it's a gen, it's a generic version, but you could do whatever you want, right? If you want it to, to have like Travis, what does generic version mean though? You just said you be, I just said, these are the traits of, I said, this is a traits of a wartime COO. And it like, I said, actually what I did was said, I want a wartime COO, you know, generate that persona. And then I looked at what it created and just made some, like,
Speaker 2do you have like a pretty chill, generally happy, positive outlook? Like, like,
Speaker 3this is, this is, you're seeing the, like the, the, the internal competitor inside of me, right? Like this is the, the Kobe Bryant Mamba mentality, like, you know, like coming through. I like having this, like, you know, this sort of thought partner that is a little bit more like ruthless because that's not my, that's not my default mode. Right. I want to have that kind of checks and balance
Speaker 1there. And as a CEO, you're not always going to have people who are comfortable, available, skilled in that way around you, right? Like this is, this is like who you would want on your team when you want them to spin up. Quick, stupid question. You said I use Cursor for my AI. I thought Cursor is a coding tool, but you're, it sounds like you're using it to chat, make decisions. Am I just wrong about
Speaker 3what Cursor is or? Yeah. I mean, Cursor, you can use Cursor, CloudCode, Codex, like these are all ostensibly coding agents, but they have this like agent mode where you can just talk to it. And the thing is it talks to it, but because it can write code, it can do stuff for you. And so the way, I try and talk to people who are not engineers and say, Hey, you should try using this is don't think of it as a tool for, you know, engineers to build stuff. Think of it as like you're hiring Cursor or CloudCode or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to, where it's like, you, you probably have engineers you've worked with. You like to tell that engineer, go build this for me or go build that for me. Like, that's why I use Cursor is because it goes and build stuff for me, not because I'm using it to actually go build a bunch of stuff. I don't really write any code.
Speaker 1Wait, so your default, when you just need to like, talk to an AI or chat or ask a question, you go straight to Cursor. You don't do ChessGPT or Cloud or anything?
Speaker 3I mean, mostly, especially when I'm at my desktop, I'm mostly talking to Cursor most of the time. It has like different models that you can sort of toggle back and forth on, which I like. So I can, you know, test a bunch of different models and things like that. Are you a typer or a talker? I, I'm, I do a lot of voice to text these days. So I use this, um, this app monologue. Why monologue? I don't know. I like it. Like I've tried a few of these. I've, tried like WhisperFlow and SuperWhisper and monologue. Um, I don't know. It just like, it just gets me. Um, like, I don't know, like, I don't know of a better way to describe it. Quick side note. I think this is going to be like an interesting thing about software for the future. Like when it is so cheap to build software, I think you're going to see more software that has like a personality to it. You know, you think about like consumer goods. It's like, how many places can you buy? Jeans from, or how many places can you get, you know, whatever from, there's like not that many differences, but you choose, like you might choose one brand and I might choose a different brand. And it's just because like, I like it better, but it functionally does the same thing. I think there's going to be more software that kind of like feels that way.
Speaker 2Yeah. It's yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a good point. It's like the Adidas and the Nike shoes do the exact same thing, but like, you know, or like t-shirt brands. Like, do you remember I was watching this Blake 182 documentary last night? Do you guys remember Hurley? Sean, you remember Hurley shirts? They're everywhere. And I was watching the show last night. I'm like, why did we love those shirts so much? Isn't that crazy that we got obsessed with it? It was just that stupid logo. And why did that matter to us so much? And that's, I think that's a good point. That's how we're going to think about B2B, even B2B boring software.
Speaker 1Well, that's, I think it's a really fascinating point because it always was differentiated on either features or price, right? Those are kind of the two main axes of competition. When design got layered in, and I feel like there was like a wave where better design, better UI, UX became a differentiator and design, you know, got a seat at the table. And then, but if you look at like other products, non-software, it'll be either kind of brand or like status, you know, like luxury, it's signaling something about you. That doesn't really exist in software. And it sounds like what you're saying is there's going to be a new axis of competition, which is personality. You know, who do I like the feel of when I interact with it versus which model has more parameters and, you know, a higher, you know, benchmark score on the evals is not going to be how people are going to choose these things because I'm already doing that. I think you're absolutely right.
Speaker 3Well, and I certainly feel it like, you know, as someone who plays around with a lot of the models, I'm starting to find myself have some preferences for like different tasks. Like if I'm asking it to actually go do an engineering task where I don't need to talk to it, there's models I like for that, you know, like Fable is fantastic. Yeah. Like you're going to give it a really complex, like, you know, engineering task. I'm like, great. Have Fable go take a swing at this. It's going to nail the thing. But man, I do not want to talk to Fable. Like it is, it is not fun to talk to at all.
Speaker 1We all have coworkers like that. They crush it at some tasks, but you're not, not a great hang.
Speaker 3Yeah, exactly. But then there's other like models where you're like, hey, if I want to sort of like go back and forth and have like a discussion and a debate around like what we're doing, I'm like, okay, I feel like I can, you know, tolerate that discussion a lot better than like trying to talk to Fable where I'm just like, oh my God.
Speaker 2Are all the phrases, like when Claude talks to me, it's like, what are the, what are its phrases? It's like, um, it's not this, it's that, or here's, here's the thing that's quietly really
Speaker 3the problem. Yeah. The honest truth, the load bearing, you know? Yeah. Like let's get to the
Speaker 2spine. Um, are those specific to AI or to the model? To the model for sure. Like you can tell
Speaker 3most models, I think are derivative of either, either the, um, you know, like anthropic series or GPT series. And so like, you know, those two kind of have two distinct personalities, but if you go use, you know, any of the like open source tools or things like that, you can kind of see like who they've been distilling a lot. And like, it sort of inherits the personality of, you know, the one
Speaker 2above. Dude, I've noticed that my coworkers are starting to say like the Claude, like someone the other day said, like, let's get to the load bearing part or like something like, like when
Speaker 3they're talking out loud,
Speaker 2not in writing. Yeah. Yeah. I've noticed that where they start saying things. I'm like, that's Claude. And it's sort of like them. Yeah. Like, or, or they're trying to talk that way. So then they can like use Claude's writing and be like, no, it's really me. Who is training who, right?
Speaker 3Are we training the AIs or the AIs training us? And I think, like, I think you can go a step further where actually, let me show you this other use case. Cause this is interesting too. So this is a bunch of synthetic data. So it's not real, but you know, I have a real version of it and it's got a list of accounts and you can kind of click into the accounts and see what's going on with it. So if we click into, you know, Acme logistics here, you can see, you know, a bunch of stuff about it. It's like, Oh, you know, usage is down 34%. There's a renewal in 45 days. Here's all the apps they're using. Here's the people in the organization that you need to care about, et cetera. But then like, here's the interesting part. It's got the suggested CEO outreach where it's like, you should email Jordan and, you know, check in on him, see what's up. And so this is where, you know, I think AI gets really interesting because in some respects, who's the boss now? Like, am I the boss or is the AI the boss? You know, every Sunday morning now, I wake up with a list of, you know, 10 customers that I want to get in touch with. And it's got proposals for what I should say and what I should do and why I should do it and all that sort of stuff. And I candidly love it. Like, this is stuff that was really hard for me. Like, I'm not naturally a person who's just like, you know, ultra networker, like you guys are where I'm just like, I got to keep in touch with everybody. And so now I've kind of put an agent in the loop and said, like, hate me, help me be better at this stuff. And yeah, I just, I literally wake up in my Sunday morning briefing. It says, here's all the accounts you need. I've already drafted the emails in your inbox. You just need to review them and make edits or press send. And I think there's like something to this where, you know, if you, if you do a good job of like building these tools up, they'll kind of start telling you what to do. And you do have to keep your brain on because if you turn your brain off, you'll probably sound dumb from time to time. But by and large, I think these things make pretty good bosses for certain use cases. Well, Brian Halligan, one of the
Speaker 2founders of HubSpot, he either came up with this idea or it was in an interview where Jack Dorsey from Twitter came up with the idea and it was on Brian's podcast. But they basically said, a lot of people are confused. They think it's going to be a human brain or a CEO in the center and then all these agents running around doing stuff. He was like, that's not the way to look at it. AI is the brain. AI is going to be the CEO. In the humans, their job is just giving it information and then making some judgment calls if it wants to listen to the AI. But in general, the AI should actually be making the hard decisions because it's likely going to do a better job. And so that kind of like changed how I thought about it. And it sounds like that's sort
Speaker 3of what you're saying without saying it that way. Well, I think so, right? If you are able to hook up all of your company's institutional knowledge to the AI, it's going to be able to reason over ways that it's not going to be able to do that. And so I think that's kind of what I'm saying. more information than a human CEO. It just can. It can look at every single commit into the code base. It can read through every single customer conversation. It can scan every comment about you on Reddit or X or LinkedIn or whatever. So it just knows way more than you as a human is ever going to know. And so that's going to make it way more useful for certain types of decisions. To start right now, it's like you use it as an assistant to sort of help you make these decisions. But it seems plausible to me that you might start saying, hey, I'm going to take a suggestion more often than not
Speaker 1in certain places. Yeah, I think that's not true. I wonder if AI is going to have like, because, you know, the upside would be AI is not going to have the emotional roller coaster that a human would have or fears that would hold it back from doing the right thing or avoiding conflict or, you know, different things that humans have as their biases. And then I wonder if we're going to have to come up with the cognitive biases of AI to watch out for like, OK, we know we have this bias for recency bias. What is AI is going to be? Because we're going to need to be aware of those the more we sort of turn over decision making to AI. Yeah. Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to Mercury dot com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and column and a member's FDIC.
Speaker 2So you run a company that's worth billions of dollars. How many decisions are you making a day
Speaker 3that it's actually weighed versus AI? Well, I would say like any high stakes decision, the AI is weighing in on now. Like, you know, there's sort of a seat at the table and, you know, the exec meeting and the board meetings and all that sort of stuff where we're asking the AI to
Speaker 1like surface those things. Is there an example where AI kind of changed your mind or got to the right answer that you weren't at and you decided to go with it? Here's an example of
Speaker 3a place where I find AI to be really useful. Let's come back to the hiring example. So, you know, we we run a bar raiser process where I approve every job offer that goes off. But like exec team member sort of is on the final part of the hiring loop, and it's intended to audit the hiring process in addition to sort of figuring out, hey, is this person going to elevate the culture, the work, et cetera, here at Zapier? Now, in the past, pre-AI, when I would go through those approvals, I would often, you know, I would go through those approvals and I would go through if I would come across a candidate where I was not so sure on, I could kind of smell something is wrong. I've just done enough interviews now. I've interviewed thousands of people. I've looked over thousands of applications where I just have more reps than most hiring managers have. Like most hiring managers hire one or two people in a year. It's like I've just looped over like way, way more volume. And so I don't always have the language to say like why it's wrong, but I can still smell it. I'm like, and so I would often go to these folks and be like, are you sure something is off? Like this, this or that. And it was interesting. That interaction with my staff was always a little bit fraught. Like folks would be like, well, I stand by this person. Like, wait, are you just going to make the hiring decision? If so, like you just, if you don't want to hire them, don't hire them. And it sort of would be like, and I'd kind of be like, well, that's not really what I want, right? Like I want you to make the decision. I'm just trying to like give you some guidance here. And I want you to sort of be able to, you know, reason through this problem. And if you've answered it, like if you have confidence that you have, you know, efficiently answered it, I will back you. Let's go hire this person. But if you haven't, then I want you to like take this into account and go figure out like, you know, is there more information you need to get, or do you need to adjust your course, et cetera. But that's not often how it would play out. It would just sort of play out as like, well, does Wade want me to hire this person or does Wade not want me to hire that person? And I'm like, ah, like, so anyway, that's kind of what was happening pre-AI. Post-AI, I'd run the war council or like my hiring committee over these folks. And then I would notice like, it's just more articulate than me. It could sort of say, hey, I noticed that, you know, this person has these traits and the panel did not scrutinize this. So you need to go scrutinize this. And it would, you know, it'd give like a score of like here compared to everyone you've hired at Zapier, here's how likely I think they're going to be successful or not. And so now I could take that to the hiring panel and say like, hey, the AI said this, I agree. Like what's going on here? And I noticed all of a sudden the behavior shift where people would go like, oh, interesting. I think the AI did get this and this right, but I think it's wrong on this. And here's why, because I have this other context that it doesn't have. And I'm like, great. That's all I was wanting to know. It's like, I want like, what else, what else am I missing? What am I not seeing here? And I just found that like, maybe because it's not, maybe because it feels like arguing with an AI is easier than arguing with the CEO, or maybe because it's more eloquent and it like actually has a way of talking that makes it like easier to address the specific points. I'm not exactly sure, but I did notice the way we made decisions around hiring got better in part
Speaker 2because we added the AI to the loop. I don't know if you guys were ever like believers in some of these personality tests. Like there's this thing called culture amp, I think it's called where it's like a software where you do personality tests before you hire someone. Ray Dalio has his version of it, whatever. And there's like, tends to be, it's like a scale where people fall in where they're like, I don't believe in anything involving like personality tests. I've noticed I've fallen closer to the side of like, I follow what it says because I've done some of these personality tests and I've used it to train my AI and it's helped me a lot. But when it comes to hiring, do you guys buy into this at all when it comes to personality tests and like figuring out if a person could be good for the job? Because that makes, with AI, it makes the process so
Speaker 1much easier. What do you think, Sean? I go the other way, meaning it's not really about personality tests per se, but I find that, you know, like with self-driving one approach was let's put all the sensors on the car. Let's get cameras, just get more cameras. Let's get LIDAR, let's get radar, let's get sonar. Let's, you know, put a, what else can we do? Taste test. What are all the different possible sensors you can put on the car? And the Tesla approach was basically like, it needs vision and it needs eyes only. And one of the reasons why people thought it was for cost, which was, I think a factor that like LIDAR was very, very expensive. So it was not practical in the longterm. But the reason that Elon says that he did it was because he was like, I don't know, I don't know. I don't know. I don't is because when you have too many sensors, you get too much conflicting data and you don't know which one to trust. It makes it more faulty, more error prone. And actually what you should do is take only the minimum number of sensors needed, but then train the hell out of them. That's kind of my approach to hiring where I now simplify. I need less time to spend with somebody and I look for fewer things, but those have to be home runs. Otherwise, I'm just not going to hire the person. So what do I mean by that?
Speaker 2Yeah, yeah. Answer the question though. Like how do you get, okay, what you're saying is instead of looking at like hundreds of questions, you're looking at three questions. Are you good at this, this or that? Okay, so how do you gather that information?
Speaker 1So again, stealing from Elon, he talks about you want evidence of exceptional ability. So all I'm looking for, I'm not looking for like the first filter is just evidence of exceptional ability. So I'm not trying to assess culture fit right now. I'm not asking, do I like them? I'm not asking like, do they have the relevant experience? All I want to know is, have you done some exceptional shit and then tell me that story. And in that story, I'm going to try to understand, did you do it? Or were you on a team of people doing it? Or were you riding somebody else's coattails doing that thing? And if you really haven't done anything exceptional, the odds of this being the place where you have the first exceptional thing of your career is not really a bet I'm excited to go take. And so that's the very first filter that I'm looking for. And that's not personality test driven. Then after that is a kind of personality test of like, I try to do something with them where I get the, you know, that feel of like, do we have creative chemistry? Do I feel like this person is good to have in the room when I'm trying to figure something out? Or do I feel like they don't, they're not elevating that conversation when that happens. And so I'm really just kind of like a two-step filter and that's it. And that's all I want to signal. But obviously like I'm not running the size of org that way it is. And I'm working with people who are working directly with me in a very, very small team where everybody has to be, you know, 10X or better. Otherwise it's just not worth it. It's just not worth having them on the team. And so that's the, I've learned that kind of the hard way because I used to do it very differently.
Speaker 3yeah we so we've done some work with this so like we've done like myers-briggs type stuff internally at times we've done there's this one called berkman that we've done at times i have found it to be moderately useful i have a ceo buddy who runs this public company in columbia that does disc profiles for every hire and he's like insistent where it's like if i have an accountant they need to be this profile this dot it on it's like if they're not they're not going to be a good fit on the team i'm not gone that far i think what i where i net out is that i mean you do need somebody who is exceptional first and foremost like everybody's got a personality type but it doesn't tell you if you're good or not like you know you you can score whatever you're going to score but you still need to be good yeah but i do think that like teams matter like and when i look at my my personality or my way of working there are things where i am exceptionally good at and there are certain defaults that i have where i know that if i am part of the team i'm going to be a good fit on the team and i'm going to be a good fit on the team and i'm going to be a good fit on the team and i'm going to be a good fit on the team and i'm going to be a good fit on the team and i'm going to be a good fit on the team with somebody who has like a complementary traits i'm going to be way better because they're going to have my backside in places that i i don't know if like there's any science behind this but if you look at my ea versus my like myers-briggs she has three different letters than i do so there's four letters in that and three of them of hers are different and she does like have she like likes doing things that i don't like doing and she's good at those things that i don't like doing and it ends up being like pretty helpful because it gets kind of like in sports where it's like you know if you basketball team it's like well you need somebody that's gonna you know michael jordan's gonna shoot all the shots well you need dennis rodman who's gonna like lock down d and grab
Speaker 2boards but are you doing that for when you guys are hiring we don't do it no we don't actually
Speaker 3have people like take a test and say like hey what are you going to do different hiring managers are probably doing it somewhat like by like organically but it is not a science for us i have an idea for
Speaker 1companies could use ai to improve their hiring i don't know if this was like fully like legal i don't know if you could do this exactly the way i'm going to describe it but here's the exercise i'm in you you go through your team so you have all the all the past hires you've made in the last let's call it three years and you could stack rank who's exceptional who's acceptable and who's kind of like been a source of kind of hit or miss performance let's say cool so you could stack rank employees and you could stack rank employees and you could stack rank employees and you could and your team and you could say great you also have maybe the the transcripts or the recordings of all the interviews that they did right so you have this historical pattern um that you that you have with all of them and then you have new people that are coming in and like so because when i was at uh twitch they use the amazon bar razor thing that you described and they're trying to do like the human version of this it's like here's this guy who's seen a thousand interview panels who will come in and kind of like standardize the hiring process but also like provide the most experienced voice on hiring and then they're kind of checking this candidate against the pattern of past candidates as well as against your values and you know the the role the role in mind and i just think ai is going to be way better at that than people i think it's going to be like dramatically better at that and i'm surprised that people aren't using like kind of the training data of your existing team to inform the next hire do you think it would work like i don't know for sure if i would be good at that but i i kind of think that would that would be helpful i mean i i remember
Speaker 3google sharing like a lot of their hiring insights where they did a ton of tests around this stuff like this and i think what they found was that no hiring managers were like had an edge over any other hiring managers with one exception and the one exception was that there was like this hyper specific specialized group of like technical talent where there was like only like an in of like a hundred people in that domain and it's just like they're not going to be able to do that they're not going to be able to do that and so i think that their hit rate was better because it was like well there's just only 100 people to do this thing and so i don't find that a very satisfying answer like it feels like there should be something to what you were saying also something that i've
Speaker 2been thinking about a bunch like i was thinking a large percentage of the people who work at my company which is like 35 or something they we work here in this office out here and they're here because basically i'm bored and i want someone to hang out with most days like that's like probably why i have a company it's just because i like want someone to hang out with because i'm not good at friends yeah friends are hard employees are easier it's hard starting starting llc's is easier which sounds like a joke but like anyone you know i'm sure sean you agree like you sean has sean has a guy who works with him he's like if you can work for me if you move here and we hang out every day
Speaker 1yesterday i was like i'm kind of done working you want to play fortnite we just played fortnite for
Speaker 3a couple hours like yeah absolutely i need a pickleball partner can you come be my employee
Speaker 2i mean that's kind of how it is i just want to like hang out people but when you have okay now i'm not i want you to put like let's be the ceo war console and i need you to be like crazy wade not real wade so anything said for the rest of this section you can be you could kind of go on hinge unhinged mode okay yeah but war wade yeah i don't know how many employees you have now but you used to have 700 what do you have now it's like 7 30 or something like that it's not that most part you only know them as just like slack avatars right like you don't know all 700 people and they many of you them don't know you other than like this guy on zoom and someone who blogs occasionally it kind of like begs the question like what if they were all just like or if like kim like one person just be like 10 or 30 different agents that they monitor and you only have like 20
Speaker 3employees i i think there's definitely a school of thought where i've heard that i i do think there's limits to this and the way i think about the limits is that it's kind of like how a manager has like an ideal span of control where it's like oh i can only have like you know i don't know the the rule book says eight i think you know you're seeing people push the limits now to have like you know 10 or 12 or if you're jensen you've got 60 or whatever but there's still a limit where it's just like i just cognitively cannot like keep up with like this many people but you
Speaker 2don't keep up with that many people anyway like um when you have a company like there's stuff happening that you don't even know about well why wouldn't you just have it be one of your agents
Speaker 3well so you could but the thing is you're only going to be able to keep up with what 20 agents because it's going to keep assigning you tasks and more things to do and more things to do more things there still is like a there still is like a limit but i'm not saying that it would be
Speaker 2like just wade what i'm saying like do you think that there's a world where let's just say that hypothetically you guys do close to half a billion in revenue is there a world where like 20 people could do that for a company like zapier i'm
Speaker 3not sure but definitely like a company could certainly do that in fact we've already seen companies that have gotten to like that size on very small numbers of revenue which ones well i mean shoot like minecraft back and before microsoft bought it was like i don't know how many people but it was like less than a hundred i think and it made it you know a whole bunch of money there was that new york times story that came out this summer about that guy who was
Speaker 2selling like glp1 stuff yeah we had him booked as a guest on the podcast and then that article
Speaker 3came out the day before and he canceled on us well so yeah like you know he's doing like i don't know how many employees he has but i think it was like maybe one or two yeah how many inmates does he have now yeah yeah how many cellmates does he have but i mean you also could think of someone like uh like taylor swift like taylor swift has a very small team from what i understand and is you know printing you know billions a year or something like that or at least at her peak was so i you know i think it just kind of depends on the business maybe just the philosophical thing
Speaker 1of like do you think that the way so the way work worked before was you start off as an individual contributor and then you can become a manager where you manage a fleet of individual contributors yeah is that then and maybe in the corporate world your value was purported to be like proportional to how good you were at managing people is the new world where your value the thing you get the amount you get paid is based on how well you manage ai agents right like how how big of a fleet can you manage and how effective is that fleet is that the new managerial skill
Speaker 3yes i i feel pretty confident that that is the direction we're heading to
Speaker 2sort of saying i mean i don't want to put words in your mouth but you just said the same thing you're saying i'm right and i'm genius yeah like you're i we got there we got there and again this is ruthless wait so i don't want you to like think that you have to like
Speaker 3hedge or apologize but there's still different roles in a company right like you're you know you're think of like your sales team like i still think that for certain purchase categories we still want to talk to a human we still want to buy from a human do you want your sales reps every day waking up and managing fleets of agents or do you want them talking to your customers and helping build those relationships and close that trust and all that for that role i'm like i think i kind of want you built in the human relationship more so than like doing a bunch of ai stuff i definitely want you to do some ai stuff but it's not necessarily like hey you know mr or miss like sales leader or like frontline sales ae like go manage these 20 reps
Speaker 2that are going to actually do the sales for you can i switch gears for a second how old are you i turned 40 this year okay so you were if five billion dollars is your value you were in the ballpark of being a under 40 billionaire give or take does that feel strange because you seem like a guy who does not particularly even though i was teasing you you seem like a guy who does not particularly even though i was teasing you you seem like a guy seem like a guy who doesn't particularly care about money or success other than having a good time
Speaker 3i mean it it feels honestly it feels a little fictional to even hear you say that where i'm like i don't i don't think of myself like that way and i in it in it it sort of is like so much is like tied to like the paper the paper worth of zapier at any given moment in time it's like the voting machine like i don't have liquid dollars that look like that you know i have
Speaker 1some of math that's liquid. Describe, describe your psychology around money. So how do you think about it? How, how do you use it in a way that improves the quality of your life? How do you avoid it so that it doesn't mess up certain parts of your life? Make us a little smarter,
Speaker 3just share your perspective. Yeah. I think, look, it's a lot of this stuff is like highly personal and like, what do you care about in life? And for me, the like things one, two, and three are my family. And so, you know, I want to be around my family, have like, you know, provide for them, you know, make sure that they sort of are able to sort of live a good life by whatever definition I have of that. And truthfully, like once you get to like a certain amount of wealth, like more wealth doesn't change that equation. What do you think that level is? I mean, shoot, if you come live in central Missouri, it's not that much. Yeah. I think you could do just fine with like a million bucks and, you know, do quite a lot of money. Yeah. Quite well. I mean, shoot, when I was, I remember when I just got out of college, my dream was if I could only make $100,000 a year. That was my dream. It's like, if I could make $100,000 a year, I was like, man, I'll be set.
Speaker 2That was mine too, by the way. It was like, if I can get out and work at KPMG and get 60 grand, I might get to 100 grand before I'm 30 and then I am set, baby. That was the goal.
Speaker 3And I don't know, like partly that's, you know, I don't have like a lot of vices. I don't have a lot of expensive hobbies and things like that. I don't have a lot of money. I don't have a lot of
Speaker 1hobbies and things like that. Do you do anything cool with your money?
Speaker 3You know, when I go to a restaurant, I don't look at the, how much the items cost. Nice. Like that kind of stuff.
Speaker 2And so you've raised money. So you have to have some type of likely, presumably you're going to, you want to have some type of exit event, whether that's IPO or selling the whole thing. Is there anything that you have on your bucket list that you'd want to, like, if you're like, okay, if I get over a billion dollars liquid, I want to change this about my life, or there's something interesting I want to do?
Speaker 3No, there's like nothing that I couldn't already do. You know, like I remember my grandpa, like his dream was always to go on a safari and he never got to go on one. I always thought like that was an incredible thing. And so when my girls are old enough, I'm like, let's go on a safari. But I do that now. I don't need billions of dollars to go on a safari.
Speaker 2The reason I like asking you about this stuff is because you are very well-rounded and you seem like we had this like joke called like the total man. It was like, like a buddy of ours, or a podcast guest who was like, kind of like the perfect package. Like they were like, ruthless when they need to be ruthless. They were sweet when they needed to be sweet. They were smart when they needed to be smart, but they were still a good hang. And like I said, like Dharmesh has that and you definitely have that too. So I like hearing your opinion on topics where most of the people, ourselves or myself included, talk about it from a they're broken, they have a chip on their shoulder perspective. Whereas I don't think you have that you have a far more... wholesome and a positive outlook when it comes to a lot of this stuff. So that's why I like hearing you talk about some things where you don't typically peer an emotionally healthy person, give their perspective on.
Speaker 3I, you know, I was really lucky. Like I grew up, you know, with a, like a, you know, a family that was all sort of like, you know, like my parents were married, my two grandparents that were married. I have like aunts and uncles and cousins that were all sort of just like really tight knit. But if I was to like give a shout out to any of those, like I got to talk about my granddad. Like, you know, my granddad is a World War II vet. But you know what, I didn't know him as that. I just knew him as this guy, you know, who like always had time for his grandkids. He died, he's 98 and a half. And he basically lived by himself the entire time I knew him. He drove himself up until two weeks before he died. He walked three miles a day every single day until two weeks before he died. He did the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen every single day. And I remember going to, you know, after he died, we were at the funeral home, and they were trying to like plan out all this stuff. You know, most 98 year olds, when they died, it's like they don't got any friends, there's nobody going to be there because everybody who's everybody who would have been there has already died. You're 98. Like they just, he just made it a long time. And I remember the staff saying like, okay, like, you know, we'll probably just do like a receipt, you know, the receiving line or whatever will be, you know, like, we'll just do like 30 minutes or an hour or whatnot. And that receiving line is there for three hours, people just like coming through nonstop. And, you know, just members from every single walk of life, like he had, you know, when he was a teacher, he had all these teachers that were coming through that remembered him, he was like big with the dare program. So like all these highway patrolmen coming through all these members of the church coming through all his extended family coming through. And I remember that, like, standing out a lot to me where it was like, here's a guy who, you know, was was great at family, and great at professional stuff. And I just that that to me was like, just a really good example of, you know, someone who got their like priorities doubled, like, like dialed in really, really well, you know, he didn't have it all, but he didn't need it all. It's like the things he cared about, he nailed them. And so to me, that's always like stood out as like, what, what a good life looks
Speaker 2like. Sounds like a good role model. I think that you definitely seem to embody that we're like, like I said, you are great at business and also like, don't have this jackass side that most people who are where you are seem to have. Right, Sean?
Speaker 1Yeah, yeah. We, first, I love that story that you just told that was actually a really awesome, an awesome story. And also, you know, I think that the value of what you just said, you said two things that stood out to me, you said, he didn't have it all, but he didn't need it all. And I think, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, which is that you're really only as, as rich as what you don't need, you know, basically, like, if you don't, that's whether that's material things or other, right? If you don't need the approval or attention, of others, you're free, you're rich, you know, because you just don't need that. It's not one of the things that you have to go pay the cost to go get, right? Like, you know, you don't have to go be super flashy on social media because you just don't care for it. And so I think that's like such an underrated attribute. And when you said that, it kind of reminded me, it sounds like your grand, grandpa had that kind of that way of life. And the other was, you know, defining what winning is. So it's like, if winning is just in the work domain or winning is just in, in one, you know, just in, in, in, in one way, if you have to kind of decide what it is for you, and it sounds like pretty early on, you got clear on that. And the clearer you are, the less likely you are to be blown around with the wind. You know, if the media portrays Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever as like the Titans, and then you say, oh, I guess that's what winning is. And then you're, you know, soon enough on your, you know, multiple divorces and your kids don't like it, whatever, whatever you can go, it's easy to go down a certain path. If you didn't have like a really grounded belief system, you know, you're, you know, you're going to go down a certain path. If you didn't have like a really grounded belief system, you know, you're going to go down a certain path. If you didn't have like a really grounded belief system around what winning is and have examples of people who've won that way, because you'll get a lot of examples of what I call one-dimensional winners. Michael Jordan, the ultimate, I'm a basketball fan. So I grew up being like, Jordan is the GOAT. He's the greatest, he's the best. And he is when it comes to basketball, but he also had many things in his personal life that I don't want to emulate. And so as much as I wanted to be like Mike on the court, I did not want to be like Mike off the court. I think it's worth the time to do what it sounds like you've done, which is kind of like find, find whatever that North star is for you so that you kind of have a clear picture in your head. It makes all future decisions really easy. Totally. I love that. Like, you know,
Speaker 3define your own definition of winning and you know, if you do that, well, like some of your decisions might look odd to others. They'll be like, why, why are you doing that? That way you could do this. You could do that the other, but you'll be a lot happier when you're just like, this is what I want to be doing. And you know, for what you want to be doing is, you know, running a software company and you know, great, go do that. If what you want to do is, you know, be a teacher and, you know, help students do that. Like if what you want to do is, you know, I don't know, live on the coast or live in the, it's like, what, what is it that sort of
Speaker 2is winning for you? Do you have any examples of that? I mean, you are very successful and you moved from San Francisco back to Jeff city. So that's like an obvious one, but like, are there any other like strange Zapier or Wade decisions that you've made that you think that the normal Silicon Valley guy would be like, that's insane. I mean, the sort of remote work story is one where
Speaker 3it's never had an office way before anyone thought that that was normal. You know, we only raised the one round of money. Like that was like pretty odd at the time. Like, you know, we're, we're building this business for like the long haul. And so again, I constantly get questioned around like, well, what about, I mean, heck you guys are asking me about, it's like, well, what about the X or what's the valuation or what's the, and I'm like, it'll be what it will be. Like we're here to grow it for our customers. Like that's the thing I care about, not these other things. And you know, I think if we do a good job of that, then sure the numbers will follow, but that's not the point. Like the point is like, the, the, the work itself. And I think that's, you find that with anyone who loves what they do, you know, you ask them, this is where I feel like the media gets a lot of this like narrative around billionaires wrong. Is there like, you know, they're, they're hoarding their money. They're in all this stuff. I mean, look, I don't know all billionaires, but I've, I've gotten to meet a couple and, you know, Dharmesh Halligan, like, you know, guys like this, who, I don't know, they genuinely just seem like they like what they're doing and like, they're going to keep doing that, whether or not they make, you know, a little bit of money or a lot of money.
Speaker 1The test has played out. They did it before they were making any money and kept going when there was no clear line of sight to money. Then when they made the money, they kept doing it. It wasn't about the money because
Speaker 3I just like doing it. I think athletes are the same way. Like you look at like Olympic athletes, Olympic athletes don't make a lot of money, but they just love doing it. And they're just going to keep doing it no matter what. You see it in professional sports where guys are at the tail end of their career and they probably should be retiring, but they keep playing because they just love playing. And they'll take the lesser contract. They'll do all this other stuff because it's like, I just can't. I just love this game. I love doing that thing.
Speaker 2So Sean, listen to this. One time, I think in maybe 2019, Wade spoke at HustleCon in Oakland, California. And this was right, I think, before you raised your round, I think. But you guys were the hottest thing going. And you came and talked and I thought it was awesome. And I don't know if you remember this, Wade, but you and I sat backstage for like 10 hours and all the speakers would come and go and they would have to pass through this. And I think, I don't know exactly if this is how you felt, I think you did the same thing I wanted to do, which is like these people would come in and we would just stare and like observe how they were behaving because it was kind of fun to have like, you know, billionaires or like these big shot CEOs just like interacting with you, having a normal conversation. It was really exciting. It was like people watching on steroids and we were just, we're kind of staring at them. But I remember you sat with me, I don't know if you remember this, for like, it was like eight or 10 hours. It was like the entire day. And I was like, do you got somewhere to be? And you're like, nope, I just like being here. And I remember that you, you doing that. And it seems like you have a change where it was like, you were very, you were successful then. Now you're incredibly successful, but it was a very similar personality where you're still very curious.
Speaker 3Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember it was all day.
Speaker 2Like you got it at nine and I think we left at four. So however long that is.
Speaker 3Maybe it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you got good, you pulled good guests, man. Like who wouldn't want to just like sit backstage and like listen to how these people are running their companies and what's working for them and what's not. I mean, shoot. I'm, I, I'm almost certain I had a notebook of ideas that I sort of took back and was like, all right, we're going to try this. We're going to do this. Yeah. I mean, the awesome thing is like, you know, back when you were doing that, like, I feel like podcasts weren't quite as big of a deal, but now like, God, you can just like pour over this stuff and you'll just have like notes for days on things that you can just go try and just like, all right, see if this works for
Speaker 2me. What do you listen to and what do you consume on a regular basis? Books, podcasts, whatever.
Speaker 3My favorite podcast. I got to give a shout out to the acquired guys. Like, I mean, this is just 10 out of 10. Like, you know, most of those things they do a deep dive on are just these legendary entrepreneurs who've like, you know, did it for decades. Leave us a, leave us with a recommendation.
Speaker 1Give us an acquired episode we should listen to and maybe a book that you liked.
Speaker 3Well, the NFL episode, if you like sports at all, like, you know, that is a good entryway into acquired though. Probably my favorite series is all the retail ones. So there's like a, like a cop, like, I think it's Costco, Walmart, and Amazon. And there's sort of like a trifecta right in there that are like, oh, really, really good. As for a book, I recently finished this book, make something wonderful. It's a Steve jobs, like in his own words, that's a really good one. You know, I think Steve jobs, you sort of, he has like a larger than life reputation. This book is literally just emails, speeches, literally just like his own, his own thinking. And it's sort of organized roughly chronologically. And so you get to kind of just see his progression of like, you know, V1 Apple, the Pixar years, V2 Apple, and you kind of just see how he, he changes sort of like over time.
Speaker 2Sean, do you have a book that you read recently you want to recommend?
Speaker 1Yeah. There's a book called The Score. Have I talked about that here? See Ty Wynn is the guy's name on the cover, but it's called The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. And this is a guy who, the fundamental premise of the book is amazing. He's, so he's talking about like the power of a game. So he's like, imagine a game. Let's say we take a Pictionary. We open up a game of Pictionary. Games are this incredible thing because they tell you what winning means. So they tell you the rules, what you're allowed to do. They tell you the scoreboard. So like how you gain, how you win in this game and like what your goals should be. So they dictate your goals. They dictate your behavior. And then they also sort of dictate who you need to be to be good at this game. And he's like, let's take a game like charades. To be great at charades, you're going to have to be loose. You're going to have to be highly communicative. You're going to have to be a great team player, whether you're the guesser or you're the actor, it doesn't matter. But then let's say you play Risk. It's like, you're going to have to be like ruthless, dominating. You're going to, and so like, he's like, it's amazing if you just take the idea of a game, how it will change your behavior. And he's like, basically extends that to like the games we play. And so he describes like when he was this professor, he's like, I got into teaching philosophy because I love philosophy. That of course, that's why, who else becomes a philosophy teacher? He's like, but then I discovered this leaderboard and it was like all the philosophy professors in the country. And he's like, suddenly I started, well, how do you get on that board? Right. I don't want to be not on the board. And so he kind of innocently is like, oh, you got to get published. And he's like, well, then I realized like the way to get published the most and the fastest is in these obscure publications about these types of things. He's like, suddenly a few he's like, why am I even doing this? Like I'm doing studies about shit that I don't even care about to get published, to get on a leaderboard that doesn't even matter. Why? Because I play games, we all play games. And so you have to be really careful about like games and the different types of ways you play. And there's like striving play, which is like you play for the joy of playing versus like outcome-based where you're playing to win. And like, you know, you want to be a striver for these reasons. And that gets strivers actually tend to win more too, but they didn't play for that reason. And like, you can't just say, well, I'm not going to play any game because like, it's no fun. Let's say we're playing charades. And if you don't care at all about winning, we're not going to have a good time. Like the trick is to care about it in the moment and then completely let it go afterwards. When you remember that, oh, the reason we're playing charades is so that we could have a fun time as a group hanging out, not so that I got the most points in the game. And so, you know, there's all this like nuance around games. And I, and I think like, cause I think the biggest decision you make in life is what game you're deciding to play and how that will shape the next 10 years. It looks like it just came out to the book.
Speaker 2Came out like six months ago. Yeah. So I'm digging that book right now. I just finished. I'll, I'll wrap it up with this one. Wade, you might like this one. I think you, if I had to guess, do you listen to Blake 182 as a kid? I did. Did you Sean? I mean, who didn't? I read the biography of the memoir of Mark Hoppus, who is one of the lead singers of Blink 182. Such a good book. I read it in three days. I couldn't put it down. It was one of these books where like, I had to force myself to put it down when I was going to bed at night. Cause I was
Speaker 1like staying up too late. Dude, why are musician biographies so good? Like the life of the memoirs or whatever of musicians and comedians. What else do you have? The Red Hot Chili Peppers guy, Anthony Kiedis. Was that good? Long time ago. I was like in college. I read this thing and I loved
Speaker 2it. Well, his is, his is good. I think because he had a messed up and he partied. Messed up childhood leading to a messed up adulthood. So it was like riveting. These guys, they weren't really that messed up. Um, but they got really famous, like really fast. And he talks about it and he's like, you know, a lot of, I'm going to, this is really the chapter where I complained about fame. And he was like, just joking. I loved being famous. It was awesome. Like people come to me all the time and they say they love my work. It feels amazing. And then he also later in life, he got cancer. He talks about like his cancer treatment. Oh, such a good book. If you guys want something fun to read, uh, Mark Hoppus has a biography. And if you want like the cliff notes, Fahrenheit 182, I believe. But anyway, wait, you're the man. We appreciate you. You have an invite whenever you want. And thank you for everything.
Speaker 3You bet. Thanks for having me guys.
Speaker 2All right. That's it. That's the pod.
Speaker 4All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast
Speaker 1that is part of the HubSpot podcast network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these are the podcasts that you can listen to wherever you get your podcasts.
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