#115 - Mike Knoop and Kevin Hale

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, how's it going? This is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. Today's episode is with Mike Knoop and Kevin Hale. Mike is co-founder and chief product officer at Zapier, which was in the YC Summer 2012 batch. Zapier moves information between your web apps automatically.
Kevin's a visiting partner at YC. Before YC, Kevin was a co-founder of Wufoo, which was funded by YC in 2006 and acquired by SurveyMonkey in 2011 You can find Mike on Twitter at MikeKnoop and Kevin at ilikefest. All right, here we go.
Hey guys, welcome to the podcast. How's it going?

**Kevin Hale** (0:36)
Great.

**Craig Cannon** (0:38)
Kevin, welcome back. For people who don't know you, what do you do?

**Kevin Hale** (0:42)
I'm a partner at Y Combinator. I founded a company called Wufoo back in 2006 I was in the second batch at YC.
And that company appropriately was a no office company. We were all remote all the way back then.

**Craig Cannon** (0:58)
Huh, that's relevant to today, isn't it?

**Mike Knoop** (1:00)
Yeah, some early inspiration for us.

**Craig Cannon** (1:02)
What are the odds? All right, Mike, so what do you do?

**Mike Knoop** (1:05)
Hi, I'm Mike. I am a co-founder at Zapier. I'm our chief product officer.
And I originally started out as a front-end engineer and a product designer. So I have a very deep appreciation for those areas. And I think has kind of how I came to run some of the design team today and have thought a lot about like scaling design teams over the last seven or eight years.

**Craig Cannon** (1:24)
And what does Zapier do?

**Mike Knoop** (1:27)
Zapier is a piece of software that helps you automate your tasks at work, helps you be more productive.
So if you have, if you use multiple tools for your job and you're trying to, like you manually are copying and pasting data from one tool to the other all day as part of like a task you do, you can use Zapier to automate that and have it done automatically in the background. So an example would be like if you are a, let's say a project manager and you've got a team that works out of GitHub and you wanted to like send some notifications into Slack or into Jira, whenever those issues get closed, you could set that up just as one example.

**Craig Cannon** (2:00)
And how did you guys meet? Because you've known each other for a while.
Yeah.

**Kevin Hale** (2:04)
Yeah. I came over to the place that you guys were working when you guys were doing YC and we just like talked for a couple hours. But it was a really interesting conversation. Basically, I told you, like this is what we did at Wufoo. And I was like, you should basically just do kind of a lot of the same things in regards to...

**Craig Cannon** (2:21)
Specifically, yeah.

**Kevin Hale** (2:22)
Yeah. Like think about remote work, that you're going to be doing this for a really long time. And then integrations was kind of like, you know, patching a bunch of things together to a form builder was like a feature at Wufoo. But to me, I saw like what they were doing was like turning that into an actual business.
And so like a lot of my insights were like, this is what works for us. It's like really powerful. And I totally get why every other company would kind of be interested in Zapier.

**Mike Knoop** (2:47)
Yeah, you're definitely one of the people who saw the early, I think, vision of what Zapier could be. And form software is such a good use case because the data never ends in a form. You want to do something with it. Usually it's once someone submits a form, I want to go put it in my CRM or qualify that lead or put them in an email list somewhere.

**Kevin Hale** (3:04)
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 you like website builders like by default become really big.
We didn't realize this when we started, but we understood this later on was that like, oh, then people need to figure out like, how do I collect data from all these people that are coming to us? And so form building, contact forms, et cetera, like all of that became really relevant in surveys. And then the next thing is like, oh, now I have all this new data. What do I do with it? And that's like Zapier's like the next step. So these are like the three like stages of every company of like, oh, this is what I need. And they have just giant markets. I remember early days, Wufoo, people would talk to us about like, so what's your TAM? What's like your total addressable market? And we literally would just like, I'm not doing that because it'd be like everyone that ever has a website, everyone who needs to collect data. Like, do you want me to calculate that? I have no idea.