Wade Foster
19 statements across 3 episodes · 11 bullish · 3 bearish · 2 people on the record · first statement Dec 23, 2021 by Wade Foster · said 7 times in 4 episodes since 2021 · 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.
Mentions by year
brought up most by Jason Lemkin (4), Anu Hariharan (3)
tap a year for its mentions
2024 1 mention in 1 episode
2022 3 mentions in 1 episode
Everything said about Wade Foster, oldest first
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Startups under 20 employees should focus entirely on product, sales, and support
“Micah shares, don't play business until you have to. Especially when you're quite young, when you're less than 20 people, ah, it's really hard to have, to do everything that bigger organizations can do. You're gonna hear a lot from a lot of great folks today w…”
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Developing distinct sub-team cultures prevents employee isolation as startups scale
“Now, it's all great to have, ah, you know, shared values, shared purpose, shared mission, but as your org gets bigger and bigger and bigger, it can start to feel a little more lonely, and so one of the things that Linz's team done is they've branded the suppor…”
Dec 23, 2021 neutral
Dec 23, 2021 negative
Adding headcount without clear role definitions slows down startup execution
“It can be tempting to want to throw more bodies at problems and say, ah, if we just had one more person, if we just had 10 more people, we might be able to solve this. But if you don't have a clear perspective of how they're going to help, you're going to end …”
Dec 23, 2021 neutral
Rapid organizational scaling frequently outpaces an early employee's management capabilities
“As your organization grows, and if it grows faster and faster, your org growth might outpace an individual's ability to grow. And that's okay. So it's important to make sure each of your early folks really understand that there is a path for them inside your c…”
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Zapier required every employee across all functions to handle customer support
“For a long time, we asked every single one of our employees, no matter what function you worked in, to do some support, and what this meant is that all of our folks really understood the product that we were building and what was special about it, and they als…”
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Scaling companies must constantly evolve their operational mechanics while preserving values
“Steve shares, keep the values, but change the mechanics. Companies change constantly, whether it's your code base, your org chart, your systems and processes, your go-to-market motion, all these things are going to change and evolve over time. So your organiza…”
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Zapier's core values established at 20 employees successfully scaled to 500
“Some of those things that we thought through at 20 people have scaled with us to 300 to 500 and have ripple effects over where we've gone. Those sets of core values have really helped us be intentional about where we're taking the company. If you contrast the …”
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Dec 23, 2021 negative
Dec 23, 2021 positive
Zapier enforces mandatory code reviews only for the riskiest software changes
“So one of the things we've done over time is said, you know what, we're gonna put in infrastructure to make sure code review's happy against some of the riskiest changes, and then we find another path to production for other types of changes.”
Dec 23, 2021
Scaling startups stagnate unless non-founders are hired to drive product innovation
“If your founding team is the only ones that are thinking about innovation, and they're now focused on scale, what you can find is that innovation starts to stagnate. So it's really important in your organizations to bring in other folks that are thinking about…”
Dec 23, 2021 bullish
No-code platforms help founders rapidly build high-quality, durable MVPs
“The great news with a lot of no-code solutions, things like Airtable, Webflow, even Zapier itself, allow you to build things not just quickly, but also with quality. And so it's easier than ever to build these MVPs and actually have them go the distance for yo…”
Sep 29, 2022 positive
Sep 17, 2025 positive
Sep 17, 2025 positive
Foster: Zapier uses internal AI agents to aggregate cross-team customer feedback
“And so we have a whole automation system agent system that like takes all that stuff. It then generates a bunch of themes based on that and then generates reports based on those themes. Then the second thing we have built up is a chat bot around all that stuff…”
Sep 17, 2025 neutral
Sep 17, 2025 negative
Sep 17, 2025 neutral
Foster: MCP will not replace APIs; both will remain valuable and coexist
“I think the answer is we're going to end up having both. I think APIs are very, are deterministic and cheap. Works the same way every single time. And so there's a whole set of use cases that Do you want it to work that way? Where MCP is a lot more flexible. T…”