StarZero All shows Try the podcast clipper →

Wade Foster

Co-founder & CEO, Zapier · 1 appearance on the record.

computed by AI from the episodes · how this works → · full disclaimer →

founderexecutiveinvestorhost@wadefoster ↗LinkedIn ↗zapier.com ↗

Foster co-founded Zapier in 2011 alongside Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop, leading the company in workflow automation. He bootstrapped the company to profitability on $1.4 million in outside funding while scaling it into a fully remote business valued at $5 billion.

19statements → 4claims → 3claims resolved → 100%fully supported → 4.05/5average certainty → 1.89/5average debate potential → ≈4.5/5argument clarity, estimated → 3said about them ↓

3 supported 0 partly supported 0 contradicted 1 not checkable as stated how the 4 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

4 assertions · 3 opinions · 7 insights · 5 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 4 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 3 are resolved, and 1 names no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Wade argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable supported claim

Assertion Supported
Zapier's initial pricing model was based on the Fibonacci sequence
“We sort of said, screw it, we're going to do our first pricing model based on the Fibonacci sequence, and so our plans were 11 dollars, 23 dollars, and 58 dollars, and then we named them Amps, ohms, and volts, sort of like riffing on the zap theme a little bit…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 28:42 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier

How they sound: speaking style how? →

263 words/min while actually speaking · 1.3 um and uh per 1k words

No argument clarity score for Wade Foster: no usable question→answer exchanges on raw tape (a fair score needs 8+). We do not score a sample that small. Roundtable and news formats yield far fewer direct exchanges than interviews. Their coarse estimate from 28 exchanges on the produced feed is ≈4.5/5, shown at half point precision because the sample is small and produced tape scores higher.

Measured by listening to 5,304 words across 1 episode, but every recording we have of Wade Foster is the aired feed, and an editor cleaned that audio before release. Some of the hesitation was cut before we ever heard it, so read these as floors: the true rates are at least this high. These are measurements of speaking style, not scores. How it's measured →

How the interview went all their pushback → series average →

Across 1 rated episode:

host pushback ▾ 2/10
pushed back at the host ▾ 2/10
setup questions received 35%

Everything Wade Foster said on 20VC that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Insight
Foster: Founder secondary share sales enable bolder business risk-taking
“You know, I generally think that, particularly for founders in particular, like, having a little secondary generally is a good thing. When you run a company for a long time, you tend to not pay yourself super well. You take on a certain, like, personal finance…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 25:34 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Foster: Leaders should not enforce accountability for non-priority meeting items
“I tend to say, you know, because we've intentionally put them below the, like, priority list, I don't worry about them all that much. Like, I kind of take the mindset of, like, well, if it was really important, it would have been, like, the number one thing we…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 9:57 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Opinion
Foster: Midwestern companies generally lack the ambition found in Silicon Valley
“Having operated inside of Silicon Valley, like We've tried to sort of borrow some of the ambition that you find in companies there. Like, I think you don't necessarily get that in the Midwest.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 15:13 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Opinion
Foster: The VC community excels at marketing and selling itself to founders
“This is a thing that I just feel the VC community is just so good at marketing and selling itself that it is really hard to resist that temptation.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 19:57 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Foster: Founders are not raising money, they are selling company equity
“You are not raising money. You are selling a part of your company. That's what you're doing.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 20:06 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Opinion
Foster: Many startups raise large venture war chests without accretive plans
“And I see a lot of companies go out and just, like, taking these war chests and, like, selling all those parts of the company only just to sit on the cash and never do anything with it. Or to go spend it in ways that aren't accretive to the business.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 20:52 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Foster: Join the smallest company possible to learn how business works
“Well, if you want to learn how to run a company, I think the smaller company you can be a part of, the better, because you're just going to get exposed to, like, the whole of the thing.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 5:36 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier executives resolve minor meeting items silently in 10-minute pre-reads
“Yeah, you know, at Zapier, we, like, the exec team has a staff meeting every week. There's a prompt ahead of time that tees up the topics, and so people sort of pre-fill out their documents and Folks join a Zoom for the meeting. We do 10 minutes of pre-read. W…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 8:33 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Zapier hit operational scaling breakpoints at 30, 100, and 300 employees
“I feel like we're kind of at starting to get to a little bit of another inflection point where we're sort of having to reset some of how our operating cadence works. Like, how our management structure works yet again. So, like, I'd say 30, a 103 hundred kind o…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 13:16 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Foster: Executive hiring is the single hardest challenge for any CEO
“I have not encountered anything harder in my career than, like, hiring great executives. Any CEO who tells you that's not at least in their top two, like, I would be like, really?”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 13:53 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Insight
Foster: Avoiding fundraising redirects founder energy into product and growth
“So many founders spend so much time engaged in the fundraising process. That is a huge mental and time investment that you have to commit to, and so for us, we never had to do any of that. That all Was founder energy poured right back into helping our customer…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 23:18 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Disclosure
Foster met select VCs quarterly to preserve fundraising options without pitching
“I did want to be in a position where we could do that quickly, and so I just sort of set up a, like, simple calendar where I said, you know, hey, One Friday, every quarter, I'm gonna, like, go snag lunch with somebody, or I'm gonna jump on a Zoom call with som…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 24:23 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Disclosure
Zapier acquired no-code community MakerPad
“We actually just acquired this company, MakerPad”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 29:10 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Disclosure
Zapier built an internal Reddit-style forum tool called Async
“We've built this tool, Async, internally, that is like a I mean, the best way to describe it is kind of like a Reddit style, but long form Reddit, I guess, where you can post blog posts and assign them, like, into a category or, like, maybe subreddit if you wa…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 11:01 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Disclosure
Foster has not taken $10 million in secondary stock sales
“I haven't. So, I don't need that much money, like, to sort of live a good lifestyle, I think, is sort of what it boils down to.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 26:52 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Assertion Supported
Zapier's initial pricing model was based on the Fibonacci sequence
“We sort of said, screw it, we're going to do our first pricing model based on the Fibonacci sequence, and so our plans were 11 dollars, 23 dollars, and 58 dollars, and then we named them Amps, ohms, and volts, sort of like riffing on the zap theme a little bit…”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 28:42 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Assertion Supported
Zapier is pronounced to rhyme with the word happier
“Zapier makes you happier is the trick.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 2:29 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Assertion Supported
Zapier headcount stands at slightly over 400 employees as of 2021
“A little over 400 people today.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 12:20 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier
Disclosure
Zapier CEO Wade Foster reduced his direct reports from 14 to six
“Today I have six, I think, so, you know, I'm doing pretty good right now, but there's been, you know, even as early as late last year, I had, like, 14 or something like that.”
Wade Foster Apr 15, 2021 ▶ 14:10 20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Misunderstand About Fundraising & How Founders Should Think About Secondaries Today with Wade Foster, Founder & CEO @ Zapier

The other half of the tape: Wade Foster's own voice is left out of every number here. Other people bring the name up 3 times in 1 episode on 20VC. every mention, with the transcript →

Who brings them up most Jason Lemkin 3

Every mention by year

tap a year for its mentions
0021312022episodesmentions
0112022episodes it came up in
001.50.5312022episodesmentions per episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode

Appearances (1)

EpisodeDateSpeaking time
20VC: Scaling Zapier To $140M ARR and a $5Bn Valuation on $1.4M of Funding, What Founders Apr 15, 2021 21m
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,200 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.

Try the podcast clipper Learn more