The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 22 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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…”
Lemkin: DigitalOcean and Zapier Built Their Growth Entirely on SEO
“DigitalOcean was built entirely on SEO farm. So was Zapier and others.”
Zapier refused Segment's enterprise feature requests to maintain strict SMB focus
“I have one example. Zapier did that for very, very long. I talked to the Zapier founders. I talked to Mike when I was at Segment, and I wanted enterprise features, and he said, gee, we love you, but I'm sorry. We're not going to build those features. I'm like,…”
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…”
Harries: Over 70% of Zapier's SEO traffic goes to its blog
“If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog.”
Harries: Over 70% of Zapier's SEO Traffic Goes to Its Blog
“If you look at Zapier, over 70% of their SEO traffic still goes to their blog.”
Lemkin: Startups are lucky if half their VPs carry extra founder load
“You're lucky if half your VPs not only do their job well, right, but do more than their job. Like, carry some of that load, and if you can even have half of your management team do it, that's like magic, and I realize he's right”
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?”
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.”
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…”
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…”
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…”
Zapier reached $140M ARR and $5B valuation on $1.4M primary funding
“Post-YC in 2012, Wade raised 1.4 million dollars for the company from Bessemer and Threshold, but since that round, he's scaled the company to a hundred and forty million in ARR and a five billion dollar valuation without any traditional style venture rounds h…”
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…”
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…”
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.”
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…”
Hsu notes Zapier never raised venture capital after its seed round
“Zapier is now, I'm not sure, 50, 80, a hundred million or something like that, and to my knowledge, they've never raised a round after the seat.”