Wade Foster
14 statements across 1 episodes · 3 bullish · 3 bearish · 1 people on the record · first statement Oct 5, 2023 by Wade Foster · across every show →
On the record as a speaker too: Wade Foster's record, appearances and statements → this page counts the times other people say the name.
Everything said about Wade Foster, oldest first
Oct 5, 2023
Foster: Product and go-to-market must be designed together from day one
“Product market fit is not just about the product. It's about the market too. You need these things to like coexist. And in many ways, that's what made Zapier hum is that the product and the go to market motion are inextricably linked. They work as one fluid mo…”
Oct 5, 2023
Foster: Zapier focused maniacally on one major product initiative at a time
“And that's like for most of Zapier's history, you know, it's a relatively small ish team. And so a lot of it is, you know, a maniacal focus focus on like the singular thing. ... Generally we were always trying to think through, like, what is the one thing that…”
Oct 5, 2023 negative
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Foster: Dynamic problem solvers are more valuable than single-playbook masters
“It's way more fun and way more valuable to work with folks who have a much more dynamic problem solving skill set, where they can borrow from a bunch of different areas, and then they can start to put those puzzle pieces together in novel ways.”
Oct 5, 2023 negative
Oct 5, 2023
Oct 5, 2023 positive
'Don't hire until it hurts' forces founders to learn every role firsthand
“We had this rule, don't hire till it hurts... One, it meant we did every single job. So we understood every piece of our business. So when we hired somebody in that meant we knew exactly how they were going to be effective, what was going to help them win. And…”
Oct 5, 2023
Zapier built its search-optimized app directory before having any customers
“One of the first customers was doing that, but the app directory existed before we had a customer. It was just like, hey, we'll build this like little app directory, see if we can get people coming in through search. And if they are like, yeah, we can build a …”
Oct 5, 2023
Foster: Product-market fit is obvious because customer demand makes growth easy
“How do you know if you have product market fit? And I'm always like, well, you know, because people want what you have. It's not actually that hard if people actually want what you're selling. They don't want it, then everything seems hard. Everything feels im…”
Oct 5, 2023 positive
Startup people problems are often just symptoms of underlying business model issues
“A good business makes a lot of this stuff a lot easier. Like, if you're making good money, if you're growing, if there's plenty of opportunity to go around, there's plenty of money to go around, salaries and bonuses and things like that, everything gets way ea…”
Oct 5, 2023
Oct 5, 2023 neutral
Smart leaders are more vulnerable to cognitive traps through better rationalization
“The more you're even aware of these phenomenon, like the more you, and the smarter you are, like the more it actually dangerous you are to these things because you actually get better at rationalizing your way through it.”
Oct 5, 2023
Foster: Copying a competitor's product roadmap feature-by-feature leads companies astray
“I think you get into this really tricky thing where you're just literally like paying attention to somebody else's roadmap and just being like, Hey, we just got to keep up. You know, we just got to match it one to one because oftentimes you don't actually know…”
Oct 5, 2023 negative