Zack Kanter
Founder and CEO, Stedi · 1 appearance on the record.
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Zack Kanter is the founder and CEO of Stedi, a developer-first platform and clearinghouse automating business integrations and healthcare EDI transactions. He previously founded performance chassis and auto parts company Proforged, which he bootstrapped before selling it to Huron Capital / Drake Automotive Group.
43statements → 6claims → 4claims resolved → 75%fully supported → 3.86/5average certainty → 2.42/5average debate potential →
3 supported 1 partly supported 0 contradicted 2 not checkable as stated how the 6 claims stand · each chip opens the sources
6 assertions · 3 opinions · 26 insights · 8 disclosures · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 6 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 4 are resolved, and 2 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.
The record, in short
What the tape says about how Zack argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.
Their most notable supported claim
Kanter: Complex fitment criteria kept auto parts e-commerce penetration around 4%
“And because of the complicated fitment criteria, the e-commerce penetration rates in auto parts are very, very low. So I don't know the latest numbers, but when I was in the auto parts industry a number of years ago, the penetration rates in automotive were se…”
Expressed certainty vs assessment result
weighted support: a fully supported claim counts one, a partly supported claim counts half. Each filled bar is clickable and opens exactly those claims; "none yet" means nothing said at that certainty level has resolved yet
Everything Zack Kanter said on In Depth that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →
Kanter: Venture capital makes far more sense for high achievers than bootstrapping
“So as a high agency person, being able to remove the fundamental constraint of capital as the limiting factor of a business, like, to me, it's like the equivalent of going pro. I think that there's vastly more cases in which venture capital makes sense for a h…”
Kanter: Execution is definitely not a moat in software
“Very common thing people say in software in, in, in venture. Oh, the only execution, the only mode is execution, which is not, which is definitely not a mode.”
Kanter: The quality-price-speed trade-off is an illusion
“They say, okay, well, you know, quality, price, and speed, you have to pick two. And I think that that is like the most losing mindset in business and engineering and design and whatever the thing is. And that the trade-offs between those three are usually an …”
Kanter: Founders who hate their companies only have themselves to blame
“When it came down to it and you probed these questions of what they were looking for is basically they had, they disliked the business that they ended up building. And to me, like, that's a kind of a crazy situation to get yourself into. Cause it's your fault.…”
Kanter: 20 years of experience is often just one year repeated 20 times
“In the beginning, you look for people who have a lot of experience. And then you realize you hire someone with 20 years of experience, and they don't have 20 years of experience, they have one year of experience repeated 20 times. By contrast, you hire somebod…”
Kanter: Stedi gives identical support to $500/month and seven-figure clients
“We don't have a different support program, any internal designation for support between customers who pay us seven figures per year and customers who pay us 500 dollars a month. This is the exact same support.”
Kanter: Founder anti-VC bias stems from confusing ownership with control
“Would you rather own, you know, a hundred percent of a ten million dollar business or 10% of a billion dollar business? Like, of course, I think unless you really have some obsession with ownership, but I think most of these things are confusion about ownershi…”
Kanter: Half of B2B deals that seem 99% likely to close fail
“Of B to B deals that seem 99% likely to close, 50% of them fall through.”
Kanter: Listing pending POCs to investors has almost pure downside
“I think there's just almost pure downside in listing these things out to investors.”
Stedi threw away its entire codebase roughly eight times before public launch
“It took four and a half years for us to launch anything publicly. And what you don't see during that time was that we threw away everything that we had built completely, every line of code, maybe eight times.”
Kanter: Legacy EDI companies became trapped by accepting interim technical compromises
“And I think that you gain more of an appreciation for how the other EDI businesses ended up where they are, because they got to one of those paths and they said, all right, like this is gonna, this gets us kind of part of the way there and we'll fix it later. …”
Kanter: Software systems ossify after two to three years of shipping
“What you generally see is that companies are able to ship for some short period of time, two years, three years, and then the system ossifies and then they go and they're kind of stuck with that system. Going forward, and that's basically what they're gonna se…”
Kanter: The best entrepreneurs are risk killers who trim failure paths
“There's a myth that the best entrepreneurs are risk takers. When in reality, the best entrepreneurs are risk killers and they're trimming away failure paths. And Thing is when you trim away a failure path, your odds of success go up.”
Kanter: True product-market fit is when customers buy despite missing features
“It's when people are buying the product despite all the things that it doesn't do. And the deals are closing anyways. The deals are closing anyways, and everybody's so happy.”
Kanter: Most buyers won't pay more for software beyond 80% quality
“The reality is that most people don't care about the product only being 80% as good. For most people that doesn't matter. They're not willing to pay a lot more for that incremental, incremental piece.”
Kanter: Stedi de-scopes features until they are barely usable by one customer
“If the, if there is the option to ship things
Incrementally.
It is, I think, virtually always better.
And that's how we ship things now.
Like we ship, we don't ship big bang features.
In fact, like we de-scope features to the point of where we're, where we thi…”
Kanter: Software founders have more to learn from discount retail than other industries
“I think that there's more to learn from the category of discount retailing than there is, you know, in software than there is to almost any other category.”
Kanter: Healthcare transactions cost orders of magnitude more than SMS or AWS
“When you compare the price of a, Claim or an eligibility check to a text message or to a transportation status message or to an S three read or write or storage or something like that. It's orders of magnitude more expensive.”
Kanter: Focusing on quality reduces costs more reliably than cost-cutting
“Always focus, focus on improving quality because the quality gains usually materialize. If you say like, okay, we're going to reduce the defect rate or we're going to, it's just like a very measurable thing. And, but what you find is that by improving the qual…”
Kanter: Stedi tells new hires on day one that everything is their fault
“On everybody's first day at Steady, I say, welcome to Steady, everything's your fault now. And then I say it's not as bad as it sounds, actually, everything's your fault now also. You know, everything's your fault, and your manager's fault, and everything kind…”
Kanter: B2B companies rarely suffer from edge cases warned against
“You find that most of the things that people warn you about don't come to pass. And like most of these edge cases don't come to pass. I think it's a little bit different in consumer with fraud and stuff like that, but it'd be to be generally don't need to worr…”
Kanter: As CEO, I review every pull request across the organization daily
“The other thing I do is I look at, you know, take at least a cursory look at all the pull requests that are made throughout the organization every day.”
Kanter: Amazon Transcends Bezos While SpaceX Heavily Relies on Elon Musk
“If Bezos were no longer CEO of Amazon, you know, the businesses, I think the business would suffer, but I don't think that the business, like, if Elon were no longer the CEO of SpaceX, I think that would be a huge problem. Amazon is in really tough spaces, tou…”
Kanter: Landing the first wholesale customer is much harder than consumer
“I learned that the hardest thing to do is to get your first customer in any one of these segments. It's okay. Like consumer is, is, it's not that hard to get your first customer. There's enough people out there. In terms of wholesale, everybody wants to know, …”
Appearances (1)
| Episode | Date | Speaking time |
|---|---|---|
| How to build a company you’ll run forever | Zack Kanter (Founder and CEO of Stedi) | Nov 6, 2025 | 1h 8m |