Insight certainty 4/5 debate potential 3/5

True winner-take-all markets are rare in B2B software

Wade Foster · The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator · Aug 18, 2017 · at 19:29

Zapier CEO Wade Foster explains the structural differences between consumer network effects and B2B software competition.

0:00 / 0:19exact quote · 19.1s
▶ Watch the full episode on YouTube → 720p mp4 · rendered on demand · StarZero watermark
“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 all successful. And they're going to continue to grow and be successful.”

quote is from the automated transcript, cleaned for reading: filler sounds and stutters are removed, nothing is rephrased. names can be misheard (the analysis reads context, assessments check outside sources). how →

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 Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 0:27 The 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 Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 23:34 The 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 Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 15:20 The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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…”
Wade Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 2:51 The 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 Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 9:44 The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
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…”
Wade Foster Aug 18, 2017 ▶ 13:33 The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay · Y Combinator
Made with StarZero

Turn any episode into a week of clips.

This entire site, over 300 episodes transcribed, diarized, checked and made playable, runs on the StarZero media pipeline. Drop in your own episode and the podcast clipper finds the moments worth sharing, cuts them, captions them, and reframes them for every feed.