Assertion Supported AI assessment confidence: 98% certainty 4/5 debate potential 1/5

Y Combinator rejected Zapier's first application in 2011

Wade Foster · How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster · Dec 11, 2024 · at 3:51

Wade Foster is the co-founder and CEO of Zapier. He describes Zapier's initial attempt to get accepted into Y Combinator from Columbia, Missouri in late 2011 before succeeding on their second attempt.

0:00 / 0:02exact quote · 2.8s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“So we go ahead and apply. Straight rejected.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

More from Wade Foster

Insight
Wade Foster says startups should charge beta users to filter noisy feedback
“Everyone's like, oh, we should make it free. So we get more usage, et cetera. And I just think that that's a really tough place to be. Cause you're going to get a lot of just like noisy feedback from people who actually really don't have this problem. Whereas …”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 20:04 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Insight
Early customers tolerate poor software if founders care deeply about their problem
“Like most, most people don't have an entrepreneur who deeply cares about solving their problem. And so even if the software is not good, they'll be okay with it because like you just have a passion and excitement for it.”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 30:55 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Insight
Wade Foster says initial product ideas will not survive customer contact
“You gotta like make your product, your ideas. It won't survive contact with customers. So you have to show them what you're working on. Launch earlier than you're, you know, comfortable doing.”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 30:26 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Insight
Wade Foster says early growth at Zapier was an engineering problem
“We knew the thing that would create, cause us to grow is more integrations. Cause every new integration meant new landing pages. It meant new partnerships. And that was, More customers coming our way. And so basically growth became really about an engineering …”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 24:06 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Insight
A company's decline starts when it stops doing small customer-focused things
“I think it's so easy to lose that stuff as you get bigger. It's like, ah, we're a big company now. Like we only do big company things. But that's kind of when I think the decline starts and the decline might be long. Like you might have like so much like insti…”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 29:29 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier had 1,000 paying beta users when Y Combinator finally accepted them
“This time around, I think the time we applied, we'd had a thousand people that had paid for access to the beta, 10,000 people on a launch list.”
Wade Foster Dec 11, 2024 ▶ 4:25 How Zapier Became Profitable in 3 Years and Scaled to $5B with Wade Foster
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 1,000 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.