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 28 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
Wade Foster: Zapier is rolling out AI coding tools to non-engineers
“This week now we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three.”
Wade Foster: Vibe coding is for one-off utilities, not load-bearing SaaS
“I think vibe coding is fantastic for building tools that you can't buy, or these, like smaller utilities, where it's like, hey, this is sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job. Fantastic. We're seeing so much more …”
Foster: Zapier will likely always rely on external LLMs
“I think, you know, we will probably always depend on you know, external LLMs for large parts of this.”
Warner: Zapier is actively building marketing motions targeting AI agents
“I just talked with Wade, the founder of Zapier, he's got people in his company now who are mark, who are building marketing motions to sell to agents, and it's phenomenal, and it's going well”
Foster: Zapier uses AI to automatically critique and coach its executive team
“And so for our exec team meetings, we have these recorded. And so we'll take the transcript automatically. We'll send it to a prompt. That is based on the five dysfunctions of a team. So if you haven't read five dysfunctions of a team, it's, it basically descr…”
Foster: OpenAI's Agent Builder without Zapier is just a chatbot builder
“In fact, I would wager, if you're not using AgentBuilder with Zapier, you're probably using like a much It's basically just a vanilla chat, chatbot builder, is what this is.”
Tossell: AI coding tools will not turn everyday consumers into software builders
“My mum still won't build an app even though you can use something like Lovable. It's, because I think it's still, you've got to want to do the building bit. Like, that's still the issue. It's either someone like my mother wants the app built, doesn't want to s…”
Zapier CEO Wade Foster personally reviews every company job offer
“I review every single job offer that goes out inside of Zapier still.”
Wade Foster used Cursor to build a tool from Granola meeting notes
“I got off the call, and I have cursor hooked up to granola, And so the meeting was recorded with Granola, and so I said, hey, Granola, our, go, go fetch that meeting I just had with Ryan, and in it he describes the war council he built. Build that for me. And …”
Wade Foster: Software accounts for a single-digit percentage of company spend
“It's minimal. You know, it's like a single digit percentage. It's so small compared to like headcount.”
Wade Foster: Zapier uses a multi-agent AI to check hiring decisions
“I find it to be a really helpful tool at keeping the panel honest, keeping me honest on a decision where I can find myself sort of like feeling one way or the other, and then you talk to it, and it like really grounds the decision, and you're like, then you ha…”
Wade Foster: Interviewers struggle to reject candidates approved by previous rounds
“It's hard for humans to say no to, like, candidates that are good. It gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So, like, two people before you said yes, now are you gonna be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are…”
Clients buy business outcomes, not custom code or Zapier, says Thummala
“Who really cares about what it's made in or if it's custom or if it's Zapier, like the thing that you're, should be buying is the outcome for the business.”
Warner: Zapier's founder automates employee meeting feedback based on management books
“Wade, the founder, likes the, what is it, the five dysfunctions of an organization, of a team. I forget the name of the book. Anyway, he likes it so much that that, at the end of each internal meeting, Everyone's individual contribution to the meeting gets ana…”
Foster: Top automators route queries across ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini
“What I see the best automators do is they know ChatGPT is really good at this type of queries. Claude is really good at these types of queries. Gemini's really good at this type of stuff, and so they're using Zapier to say, hey, go route this request here, and…”
Foster: AI is valuable for building workflows because people struggle with systems
“This is the other place where AI is really exciting, is it's not just helpful as a tool inside your workflows. It's also really helpful for building workflows, because building workflows is kind of hard. Like, not everyone thinks in systems, thinks in structur…”
Foster: Zapier's peak monthly cash burn was only about $20,000
“The most money we lost in a month was about 20,000 dollars”
Makerpad founder Ben Tossell no longer uses Zapier, preferring to code
“Because I have a very high threshold for pain and I want to code it.”
Tossell: No-code tool workflows are fundamentally programming in a visual format
“The thing I didn't realize until, I don't know whether it was within the MakerPad life or after it, was like, I'm still teaching programming, but in a different format. Like, there's different, the tools just look different. Like, they don't look like a code b…”
Howard: AI integration dramatically boosts the value of Zapier and Make automations
“When AI comes into the mix though, now an automation gets so much more valuable, right? Because your automation can be Infinitely smarter than anything you could do previously with, you know, scripts and stuff like that. So that has dramatically increased the …”
AI agents reduced Foster's candidate review time from 30 to five minutes
“And that was a task that used to take me You know, 30 minutes per every candidate. And now it's down to like five.”
Foster: Zapier integrates with 8,000 different tools
“And then you can have logic that encompasses any of the 8000 different tools we work with.”
Foster: Most automation agencies spin up around digital marketing
“Digital marketing agencies, they're like, this is the place where I've seen most automation agencies spin up because there is so much just low hanging fruit that can help any business be more, more successful.”
Foster: Zapier raised a $1.2M seed round in 2012
“We did a seed round that was 1.2 million in 2012.”
Foster: A former roofer built an agency automating roofers' back offices
“We have one of our like solutions partners, experts, he started as a roofer. So he was running small time business, local roofing business, you know, Hale would come in, people would call him up and be like, I need a new roof, and he'd go out and, like, get hi…”