The Exchanges

Q the time that were building that way. Um, and I'm sure tons of other stuff that I didn't hit on. And I'm curious, like, what do you make of that? Do you think about the world in that way? Or like, what are the conditions that lead you to a lot of these decisions in the way that you've chosen to build product, distribute product, build the team, et cetera?

A Yeah. Um, when you add them up like that, there are a lot of weird things that we did. Um, You know, my co-founders and I were from Columbia, Missouri, when we started the company. And, you know, some of the things we did were just what we had to do to make it work. You know, you start a company in 2011 in Columbia, Missouri. It's not like you have people knocking on your door to give you millions of dollars to start a software company. Like, that's just not the environment that we were in. You combine this with, you know, one of our key reference points was this company we were working at, Veterans United. And, um, You know, it's a incredible company in Columbia, Missouri. It's owned by two brothers, 50, 50, and never raised any money. They'd built a couple of companies before and sold them and done really well. They're kind of like the entrepreneurial, you know, poster childs there in Columbia, Missouri. And, uh, you know, I remember I joined there in, you know, early, 2011 was like the 500th employee. And by the time I left 10 months later, as we were starting Zapier, there was a thousand employees there. And so our reference point is like, well, here is a incredibly fast growing company, one that is doing exceptionally well, has an actual business, like they're making money, um, making profits, and they're doing it without raising a dime. And so, you know, we have these ref…

AI assessment note: “one of our key reference points was this company we were working at, Veterans United”

Q So on this topic of the distribution engine that you've built, what's sort of the founding story of that part of the business?

A Yeah, there's really, like, two pieces of it, and if you tried to replicate it today, like, you couldn't do it because everyone has copied what Zapier has done now, um, and It's just too competitive. But at the time, you know, when you would go search for integrations, the results, the keyword results that would show up were a bunch of like, just kind of like junk pages. Like you get like a paste bin result that like had API docs and stuff like that, which is not what people were looking for. Most people were like looking for a product that says, Hey, I can just integrate, you know, Salesforce and Zendesk. I can just integrate, um, PayPal and QuickBooks, um, one click, like they wanted a SAS product. They didn't want You know, an API at the end of the day. And so we had read, there's like a patio 11. He's like famous on Hacker News and Patrick McKenzie worked for Stripe for a long time. But way before those days, he had this thing called bingo card creator. And he'd written a lot about how he did content creation for bingo card creator. And he would spin up these landing pages for every type of bingo card he could think of. You know, we'd have like a physics bingo card of US history bingo card, a world history bingo card. You know, states of the, you know, the, the company, the country bingo card, anything you could think of. And, uh, he'd done the math on it and it, you know, …

AI assessment note: “we had read, there's like a patio 11... had this thing called bingo card creator”

Q Do you reflect on sort of the interplay between skill and luck in the last 12 plus years in building this company?

A There definitely is a luck factor. Uh, timing, for example, is a big aspect of this. Like, you know, we start the company in 2011. That's the year that Stripe started, Twilio started. Most of these companies, like a Zendesk, a QuickBooks, and whatnot, they're on V one of their APIs. So there's the public APIs are sort of starting to be a thing. Um, if you tried to build a company like ours before, I don't think you have like all these APIs that you can go connect and do this stuff. Like most companies aren't building and doing stuff in this way. If you try and build it, you know, a year later, there's already other companies doing it. There was, there was probably a half dozen startups that had a similar idea in this timeframe, give or take. And as far as I can tell, more or less came up with the ideas fairly independent of each other. So like, that's definitely like, We just lucked out in timing. Like we, you know, we could have been early, we could have been late, but then there's the part of it, like you said, around like the plus one marketing thing, like show up and do the work every single day. Like, you know, we, we've worked hard on this. Like we, that definitely is like a skill aspect where it's like in an effort aspect. Um, I mean, it takes both, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna succeed without both. I look at, I mean, again, on the luck side, like we went…

AI assessment note: “it takes both, you know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna succeed without both”

Q Um, so on the hiring sort of folks with management experience, maybe building the executive bench earlier on, what's the why behind the decision not to do that?

A You know, I think it comes back to that, like, don't hire till it hurts philosophy. And I don't know that we felt the pain of not having those roles. And I don't know that we clearly understood the upside of what great look like there. And so that was one area where I think that philosophy maybe hurt us a little bit. And we probably had some baggage From old gigs where, you know, had managers, maybe weren't great managers, and maybe drew the wrong conclusions from that, which is like, hey, I don't think managers are all that useful, which would have been the wrong conclusion to have drawn. And so I think we were just like slower to establishing that and seeing the value and what really good could look like in those areas. And I think it was somewhat hidden from us because mostly the business was working and like team was generally pretty happy. Things weren't breaking down. And so it's like, well, what Like, why do we need this? And that probably made us a little slow to, to act in this area.

AI assessment note: “I think it comes back to that, like, don't hire till it hurts philosophy.”

Q So on, on that point, if I were to go back and launch you in the team, make these product decisions, what did it look like in a little bit more fidelity? I mean, I, I would assume at any given point in time, particularly because you had a lot of market pull, you could always go X or build Y, you could do this or you could do that.

A I mean, 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. So, you know, when we decide to go build multi steps apps, it's, hey, this is the thing. This is the most important thing we can go do. And so the product teams are laser focused on that thing. And you know, yeah, there's some smaller stuff getting like shipped along the way to polish up the product in other ways, but that's it. And then you get to the finish line on that. And there's a little bit of you ship it, Then there's polish work that you're sort of making sure like, you know, you're cleaning up sort of stuff that maybe you missed or, or didn't serve like you didn't hear that feedback with your beta customers on, but then afterward you're sort of coming back to the table and then you're like, okay, what's our next thing? What is the next big chunky bit that we want to go tackle and get after? And then all the while you're still filling it in with tons of like, you know, smaller quality of life, feature polish, Um, you know, business model testing types of ideas along the way, but generally we were always trying to think through, like, what is the one thing that, like, really matters for, for what we want to go next, and it's really only been, you know, more recently when we've been able to g…

AI assessment note: “a lot of it is, You know, a maniacal focus focus on like the singular thing.”

Q How do you do that? You know, most people don't get up and say, you know, I want to be intellectually dishonest today. And so how do you, I guess I'm super interested in how you action it for yourself, but in addition, are there ways you kind of inculcate it or mechanize it inside of the company?

A I mean, you want people around you to push you when you're thinking, to challenge you when you're thinking, you know, the more the org becomes group think, like the harder this is going to get. And like, there's a fair body of evidence to say, like, 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. You're like, oh, I've actually thought it through. I actually am being intellectually honest. And like the more you do that, the more likely are to make these mistakes, which when you start to think about that, you're like, oh crap, like I'm screwed. Uh, and so, uh, having like, you know, this is where I got a couple of co-founders, you know, could be executive team. It could be customers. You just got to find some way to like constantly like push back against You know, those that settled things and you can't do this all the time. Like that's the other half of it. You're running a company. You've got, you know, a whole bunch of different fronts that you're sort of dealing with, but the ones that are really important, like you do have to be able to have this like honesty about yourself. You have to like, treat it a little bit more like a science experiments than a, than a sort of settled thing. And then like, you go…

AI assessment note: “you want people around you to push you when you're thinking, to challenge you”