#27 - The CEO Who Pays Employees to De-Locate From the Bay

**Craig Cannon** (0:00)
Hey, this is Craig Cannon, and you're listening to Y Combinator's podcast. So today's episode is with Wade Foster of Zapier. Zapier did YC in the summer of 2012, and this year they got a bunch of press for their delocation package. So that's basically a $10,000 offer to new employees who live in the bay to move somewhere else. So we talk about that in this interview, we talk about remote work, the whole team at Zapier is remote, and we also talk about Wade's interest in racquetball. So if you need any tips, you can skip to the end.
As always, we're going to post the YouTube video and the transcript at blog.ycombinator.com, and please remember to rate and subscribe to the show. All right, here we go. I haven't started with questions from Twitter before, but I feel like they kind of covered some of the initial ones I wanted to go off with. So maybe we should just go with those. So the first one was from Ben Thompson, and he asked for more detail on the pay to leave San Francisco. So I think you guys called it a delocation?
How's it going?

**Wade Foster** (1:01)
Well, we introduced this delocation package, I think it was in March, and the concept for those of you who aren't familiar was, if you're in the Bay Area and you take a job with Zapier, we'll pay $10,000 to help you relocate to anywhere, or as we call it, delocate. This was an idea that one of our engineers came up with, because we'd seen in interviews with folks from the Bay Area, they would come to Zapier because we're 100% remote and say, well, I'm interested in y'all, in part because I like the product, but also because this remote thing helps me get away from San Francisco because I'm either disenfranchised with housing costs here, or I have family somewhere else that I'd rather be living with, or I just want to be somewhere else. A whole bunch of reasons, right?
And so what the engineer on our team hypothesized was, well, maybe there's this nascent demand here in the Bay Area where folks who are kind of just putting up with it because this is where the jobs are. And he's like, there's probably some folks who are kind of on the fence that if a good opportunity came along, they might be willing to jump on that, but maybe they just need a little bit of a nudge to go do this sort of thing. And so that's where the whole idea of this delocation package came. It's not that crazy. Like, plenty of companies here in the Bay Area even will pay relocation costs to help you move here, so we're like, well, let's just turn it on its head and say, we'll help you move anywhere, right?
So we launched that, I think it was in March, and the funny thing was since then, we've seen probably about, roughly about a 30% increase in applicants to Zapier. So pretty significant. Yeah, we've had our roles routinely get 100, 200 applicants. Some roles we've even had, I think our record is like 1,500 applicants for one open position.

**Craig Cannon** (2:49)
And it's a signal, like those are, they're 30% increase in like quality candidates.

**Wade Foster** (2:53)
Yeah, yeah, just across the board.
And one of the interesting things we noticed was the applicants weren't actually from San Francisco. A lot of them were just from wherever the heck they were.
And so it was clear that the like, offering this thing, you know, it got some buzz in like mainstream media. And so it kind of just elevated the profiles app here. And so folks were like, even who weren't in the Bay Area, were like, this is just seems like a cool company. Like they have the same types of values that I have. They are working on an interesting product. And so we got a lot of great applicants from outside the Bay Area again. 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.

**Craig Cannon** (3:41)
Have you located anyone to the Bay Area through it?

**Wade Foster** (3:44)
No one's moved here, so we're way up.

**Craig Cannon** (3:47)
That's really funny. And do you guys ever do relocations other than this current thing?

**Wade Foster** (3:51)
No, not generally. Most folks are where they want to be, or they're heading that way anyway.
So that's kind of the beauty of remote work, is that you don't have to live in a place just because that's where the jobs are. You can live in the place that you want to be, because that's just where you want to be. You've got family there, you've got friends there, you've got life there, you've got a hobby there, you've got, you just want to explore the area because you've heard cool things. Like, it doesn't matter what the reason is, right? Like, you can do that.