Disclosure
Zapier pays $10,000 to new Bay Area hires to relocate elsewhere
“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.”
Insight
Tech media overvalues Silicon Valley because VCs avoid traveling for deals
“And so they end up having to rely on proxies for that. And a good proxy often is, you know, where's the venture funded companies happening and venture funded companies have tend to happen closest to where VCs happen to live because they don't like to travel th…”
Insight
Freemium is generally a bad business model for bootstrapped startups
“Freemium is a bad idea generally for bootstrap companies because like you're going to have a ton of support for free users who don't pay you anything. And if you're not getting any money from them, it's going to be really hard to bootstrap.”
Insight
True winner-take-all markets are rare in B2B software
“Whereas in B to B, like it's pretty rare to have like true winner take all markets. You know, if you're making yet another CRM company you know, there's dozens of CRM companies that are very good CRM companies that compete with each other head to head and are …”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier hired 15 people post-announcement but paid zero delocation bonuses yet
“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…”
Insight
Startups should adopt proven management frameworks instead of inventing new ones
“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 …”
Disclosure
Zapier joined Y Combinator for Silicon Valley network access, not capital
“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…”
Insight
Identifying strictly as bootstrapped or VC-backed harms founder decision-making
“When you like start to put your own identity and like, well, I'm a bootstrap or I'm a VC thing like that starts to affect your decision-making in ways that are probably not Healthy for your company. And it's just better to look at money and fundraising general…”
Assertion Supported
Mailchimp won its category without raising any outside venture capital
“You look at something like Mailchimp, which haven't raised a single dime. They have dozens of well-funded, super well-funded public companies that are direct competitors and still Mailchimp takes the takes it home as the winner of that market.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier has the most integrations, and partners build the majority of them
“So for us, you know, we have the most integrations of anyone and most of our partners are building the integrations for us.”
Opinion
Local talent shortage is the top scaling bottleneck in smaller cities
“So I think that's probably the biggest scaling challenge that you might actually just run into. If you're the first in a city of a billion dollars or a billion dollar company is just, is there the talent there?”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier achieved 97% employee retention over a 12-month period
“Our attention is like incredibly high. So we actually just ran the numbers last week like 97% retention for over the last 12 months.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier saw a 30% applicant surge after announcing its delocation package
“Since then we've seen probably about roughly about a 30% increase in applicants. To Zapier.”
Disclosure
Zapier flies new hires to Bay Area Airbnbs for in-person onboarding
“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 …”
Disclosure
Zapier adopted the Manager Tools podcast framework for internal company management
“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,…”
Disclosure
Paul Graham connected Zapier to a target partner VP within two days
“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…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Zapier's employee Net Promoter Score reached a world-class 72
“Our, we did, we started doing like an employee net promoter score and came in at like 72 which is like pretty world class.”
Disclosure
Wade Foster consults founders one year ahead of him every six months
“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…”
Assertion Supported
Zapier had approximately 95 employees as of August 2017
“We're at about 95.”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Almost all early Zapier managers were promoted after six to 12 months
“Historically, almost all of our folks who have moved into like management positions have been working at Zapier for, you know, six, 12 months.”
Wade Foster