Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, discusses the company's management structure and historical promotion practices as the distributed team approaches 100 employees.
“Historically, almost all of our folks who have moved into like management positions have been working at Zapier for, you know, six, 12 months.”
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More from Wade Foster
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.”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 0:27The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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…”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 23:34The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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.”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 15:20The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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 …”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 19:29The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
AssertionNot 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…”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 2:51The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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 …”
Wade FosterAug 18, 2017▶ 9:44The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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