Zapier

“Historically, almost all of our folks who have moved into like management positions have been working at Zapier for, you know, six, 12 months.”

“I think a lot of companies, at least in startups, like they try to reinvent the wheel here. I think it's not probably a great idea, especially if you're growing really fast. It's, there's, like, a lot of good, like, scientific-backed research on, like, how to …”

“So like we, there's this podcast called manager tools and they have like a paradigm. And we basically just said like, we're just going to use their philosophy on how they go about stuff. Because we were like jive, like 95% of it jived with us. So we were like,…”

“Our, we did, we started doing like an employee net promoter score and came in at like 72 which is like pretty world class.”

“One of the things that I always like, I like to do is about every six months, I'll go seek out founders who are basically a year ahead of me. And just ask like, what did you do in your last year? Like, what was the smartest thing you did in last year? What was…”

“The primary reason we did YC wasn't for the capital. Primary reason we did YC was because we were from Missouri relatively unknown and not well connected into the broader tech ecosystem, particularly for our product, which is integrations with other SAS compan…”

“So for us, you know, we have the most integrations of anyone and most of our partners are building the integrations for us.”

“Since then we've seen probably about roughly about a 30% increase in applicants. To Zapier.”

“If you're in the Bay Area and you take a job with Zapier, we'll pay 10,000 dollars to help you relocate to anywhere, or so we call it delocate.”

“We're at about 95.”

“And then when we got in YC, one of the first things I did was, you know, emailed the folks and PG was like, oh yeah, we can help with that. And found a, you know, like a company that acquired like their CEO and like I had an intro to like a high level VP, like…”

“So we do this thing called Airbnb on boarding, which when we hire folks within the first month, we actually do like to have them spend a week in person out here in the Bay area. So we'll, we'll rent an Airbnb. We'll bring their manager out here, them out here …”

“Our attention is like incredibly high. So we actually just ran the numbers last week like 97% retention for over the last 12 months.”

“So we've actually hired about 15 folks since then, and only one person from the Bay area. She's in the process of, like, mulling over whether she wants to take it or not, but so we actually haven't offered any, because we haven't hired any folks in the Bay Are…”

“Zapier is a great example of one of those companies. They were paying people to delocate from the bay last year, which was interesting.”

“In the early days, what they were doing Was making things that Hacker News wanted, but it turns out that Hacker News and their customers was not a 100% overlap. So they were spending all this energy generating this content to get people through the door, but t…”

“We applied actually twice to YC. We got the email rejection the first time. We applied basically with the prototype from Startup Weekend. So we had no customers, no traction, basically just three dudes from Missouri.”

“And there's kind of a meet in the middle approach where you kind of want the work that's happening, 50% of it to be kind of top down driven, and I think 50% of it being bottom up. Because in reality, the exec team leadership is never going to have perfect insi…”

“And it's like, well, yeah, we have, you know, a hundred, we have like fifty million in ARR, like, yeah, we're a real company.”

“We've got about seven or eight product managers, a similar number of product designers, and then an engineering org that's about 50 folks attached to that.”

“It's actually interesting that like, I think the life cycle of people like getting their business online, it's like you start off with like, I need like a presence. It's like, how do I get my stuff out there? And so use like website builders, like by default b…”

“Like, this is one of the things that's great about writing down our process documentation in Zappi, writing down our decision-making processes, is when it's written down, you have something to debate about. I can go to you and say, hey, can we debate whether t…”

“The types of things you have to do in order to be a successful remote company make you just a generally better company. They are not unique to remote. However, they, you do have to figure them out earlier.”

“I think it is one of the reasons why it is so hard to add remote onto an existing company is because remote while When you see folks talk about it and ask questions about, it's always very process and tools based. I think the honest answer is that it's more of…”

“We, so we built our app directory before we built the product. Before we launched in TechCrunch, that whole story was, ah, pre, that, we had been working on Zapier for about five months, I think, at that point. The very first thing we did when we sat down was …”

“Just because of the dynamics of the explosion and how many tools there are, there's no one player in that marketplace that's going to be incentivized to go build thousands of integrations with everyone else.”

“And very early on, we set the expectation that Slack is not a tool you're expected to keep up with in Zapier. You are free to leave channels. In fact, we encourage it. Kevin Hale: That is fascinating. Mike Knoop: There's a feature in Slack where you can turn o…”

“The value we gave to partners was around retention. If they built, they integrated with Zapier, they got access to 50, 60 at the time integrations that were maintained and scaled and were adding more to it, and they got it left for free. So it allows them to g…”

“We don't send any internal email.”

“Even though we're a hundred percent remote, there is still a lot of value for getting in person. and we don't like discount that. you get to build a lot of empathy. You get to build relationship with folks and it allows you to kind of be, assume best intent …”

“And then the second time we applied, you know, by that point we had had hundreds of conversations and chat logs and messages from actually a lot of folks in, like, the YC network were even using the product. It was invite only at that point, and we were having…”

“Your work can't be your family at Zapier or any distributed remote company. Like you, in the past, it's very easy to lean on your work as that, like, social connection.”

“If you're the type of person who like, as soon as I get blocked, I'm just going to sit here until I'm told what to do next. You're not going to be successful at Zapier or I argue most remote companies.”

“In Slack, if you tag somebody in a message, like, at tag them specifically, it's kind of the social norm to be, to acknowledge that within 24 hours. So we have some expectations like that, and the reason we have said 24 hours is because we have folks all acros…”

“I like to think about there's like the things that are important to be consistent across teams are the interfaces. Like, you need to make sure that the interface between teams is consistent so that both teams know how are you.”

“And today that's a hundred million dollar revenue business. And they only raised money that one time.”