This episode carries Wade Foster's own address, with nobody on the show putting
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Wade Foster, co-founder and CEO of Zapier, shares scaling advice from early employee Micah on avoiding premature operational complexity in early-stage startups.
“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 who share tons of best practices. Many of those things won't be possible if you're a quite small company, and, ah, Mike's advice I find to be particularly good. You know, you may not be able to build reports for everything. You might not be able to adapt the applications these larger organizations are doing. But what you can do is focus on three things. One, are you building a great product for your customers? Two, are you helping sell more of your stuff? And three, are you serving those customers really, really well? If you do those things, you can let other stuff, you can save that for later down the line.”
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