Insight
Foster: Pure AI agents guess and waste tokens; deterministic workflows are more reliable
“Agents, agents, they kind of just guess what to do, right? And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time, but sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens, right? We probably heard token maxing, right? And …”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Foster: Cheap software creation will make personality the main differentiator
“Like when it is so cheap to build software, I think you're going to see more software that has
Like a personality to it.”
Disclosure
Foster: AI weighs in on every high-stakes decision at Zapier
“Well, I would say like any high stakes decision, the AI is weighing in on now. Like, you know, there's sort of a seat at the table and, you know, the exec meeting and the board meetings and all that sort of stuff where we're asking the AI to like, Surface thos…”
Insight
Foster: Cognitive limits will restrict humans to managing roughly 20 AI agents
“Well, so you could, but the thing is, you're only gonna be able to keep up with, what, 20 agents? Cause it's gonna keep assigning you tasks and more things to do and more things to do. And so there still is like a, there still is like a limit.”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Foster: Future worker value and pay will depend on managing AI agents
“Yes. I feel pretty confident that that is the direction we're heading to.”
Opinion
Foster: Adding AI to Zapier's hiring loop improved hiring decisions
“I did notice The way we made decisions around hiring got better, in part because we added the AI to the loop.”
Insight
Foster: Leaders must configure AI to challenge their thinking, not agree
“I've got them like an AI that argues back. I think this is a really important thing that every like leader needs to build. I think there's a lot of CEOs out there, a lot of leaders out there that are talking to an AI that just agrees with them all the time. An…”
Insight
Foster: Evening AI briefs provide more leverage than morning summaries
“I actually think this is way better than the morning brief. And the reason why is you could actually have the AI help you do stuff.”
Disclosure
Foster: Zapier's War Council AI tool uses seven sub-agent personas
“So this, if you go to Zapier's GitHub, you can get a copy of the war council, but what this does is it spins up sub agents and these sub agents take on personas. There are seven sub agents that get spun up. So seven personas. Some of them are standing members.…”
Insight
Foster: Treat AI coding assistants as delegated engineers, not dev tools
“Think of it as like you're hiring Cursor or Cloud Code or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Foster: Open source models inherit personalities from Anthropic or OpenAI distillation
“Most models, I think, are derivative of either, either the you know, like, anthropic series or GPT series.
And so, like,
You know, those two kind of have two distinct personalities, but if you go use, you know, any of the, like, open source tools or things lik…”
Insight
Foster: AI with institutional access reasons over more data than any CEO
“If you are able to hook up all of your company's institutional knowledge to the AI, It's going to be able to reason over way more information than a human CEO. Like it just can. Like it can, it could look at every single commit into the code base. It can read …”
Assertion Partly supported
Foster: Google found hiring managers have no predictive edge over each other
“I remember Google sharing like a lot of their hiring insights where they did a ton of tests around this stuff like this. And I think what they found was that no hiring managers were like, had an edge over any other hiring managers with one exception. And the o…”
Disclosure
Foster: Zapier Has Raised Only Around $1M in Primary Capital
“So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change, but that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.”
Assertion Supported
Foster: Zapier's $5B valuation originated from a 2021 secondary sale
“That was a secondary number sale that happened in twenty-twenty-one, maybe?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Foster: AI workflow reduced end-of-day wrap-up from two hours to 15 minutes
“I used to spend like two hours at the end of my day, just like, You know, just trying to catch up on every little ticky tack thing that I sort of got roped into, and now that, like, two hours at the end of the day is down to, like, 15 minutes.”
Disclosure
Foster: AI drafts Sunday morning outreach for top ten customer accounts
“Every Sunday morning now I wake up with a list of, you know, 10 customers that I want to get in touch with. And it's got proposals for what I should say and what I should do and why I should do it and all that sort of stuff.”
Wade Foster