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Zapier executives resolve minor meeting items silently in 10-minute pre-reads

Wade Foster · 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 · Apr 15, 2021 · at 8:33

Wade Foster, founder and CEO of Zapier, explains how his executive team structures weekly meetings to resolve minor cross-functional issues silently in Google Docs.

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“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. We're in a Google Doc, so everyone's, like, commenting out to the right, and a lot of small stuff sort of just gets cleaned up in that 1:10 minutes, where it's like, you know, someone from engineering had this thing with someone in marketing, and they're like, okay, we should do XYZ, and so, like, we never have to, like, talk aloud about those issues, because they just sort of get taken care of in the comments section.”

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