Assertion Not checkable as stated
Knoop: Zapier operates with zero internal email across the entire company
“We don't send any internal email.”
Insight
Knoop: Remote employees cannot rely on their workplace for primary social connection
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: Remote companies are forced to adopt better management practices much earlier
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: High quality work requires four-hour deep work blocks, not constant collaboration
“A secondary benefit that I think isn't as obvious is that when you're actually doing your job, like, the best work gets done not when you're, like, sitting next to someone and, like, collaborating all day. There's Like, you have to get into deep work. Even for…”
Insight
Knoop: No single SaaS company is incentivized to build thousands of integrations
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: Platforms are viable when 1% of revenue could be a business
“I think I'd always, I'd heard the heuristic of like once you get big enough where you could carve off one percent of your revenue and that could be its own standalone business, like you've kind of reached a critical mass that you could actually build a platfor…”
Insight
Knoop: Zapier bootstrapped early integrations by offering partners retention, not distribution
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Knoop: Zapier had reached $50M in annual recurring revenue by 2019
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: Switch to video when Slack says 'several people are typing'
“If you, like, one of the things I tell a lot of our teammates, if you see that, that's probably a really good signal that you should be, like, jumping on a video call at that point. Instead of wasting, or not wasting, but instead of spending, you know, 10 man …”
Disclosure
Knoop: Zapier requires employees to acknowledge direct Slack tags within 24 hours
“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…”
Insight
Knoop: Workers who wait for direction when blocked fail in remote environments
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: Standardize boundaries and interfaces between autonomous teams, not internal processes
“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.”
Insight
Knoop: Goal setting should be split 50/50 between top-down and bottom-up
“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…”
Disclosure
Knoop: Zapier disables Slack notices and actively encourages employees to leave channels
“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…”
Insight
Knoop: In-person retreats build interpersonal empathy necessary for text-heavy remote teams
“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 …”
Insight
Knoop: Transitioning to remote work requires a cultural transformation, not just tools
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Knoop: Zapier built an app directory and landing pages before the product
“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 …”
Assertion Supported
Knoop: Zapier was rejected by Y Combinator on its first application
“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.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Knoop: Zapier charged 10 users $100 and 100 users $5 pre-YC
“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…”
Insight
Knoop: Written decision artifacts significantly reduce organizational conflict during internal debates
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Knoop: Zapier's product org has 8 PMs, 8 designers, and 50 engineers
“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.”
Mike Knoop