How a $5B founder is using AI (3 tutorials)

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
Wait, wait, Sam, you got to click bait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life.

**Sam Parr** (0:07)
Well, are you a five, what are you guys worth now?

**Wade Foster** (0:09)
Who knows?

**Sam Parr** (0:10)
You know, you know, you, you.

**Shaan Puri** (0:24)
All right, we should do a little intro. So first, do you, is it? I've been saying Zapier my whole life.
Is it Zapier or Zapier?

**Wade Foster** (0:31)
Zapier makes you happier is the trick. It rhymes with happier.

**Shaan Puri** (0:35)
Wow. Dude, how is that not your slogan?
Here's what your slogan is on your site. The automation layer for agentic AI. It doesn't really flow the same way as Zapier makes you happier.

**Wade Foster** (0:45)
It doesn't. We could, so there's two things from the name. One, we just couldn't afford the second P when we started, domain was available.
But the other, we were too clever for our own good is it has API in the name, which we always thought like, oh, that's neat because it's all connecting all these APIs and all that good stuff.

**Sam Parr** (1:03)
I didn't even notice that.

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
Didn't notice that. I honestly didn't even notice the P was missing.

**Sam Parr** (1:09)
But also if you put Zapier makes you happier, I would have read it as Zapier makes you happier.

**Wade Foster** (1:16)
Just got on with your day.

**Sam Parr** (1:20)
But we're happier here.

**Wade Foster** (1:21)
Thank you.

**Shaan Puri** (1:22)
The short story is you're this guy who's built this really cool, started off as a very simple idea where you can make different apps connect with each other. What does that really mean?
Let's say I have a business and people submit a form over here on my form thing. But then I need that form thing. I need all the people who submitted the form, I need that data to go over here in this other unrelated app. You guys built those universal plugs and you can just plug in anything to anything else. It was just incredibly useful. Sam used it, I used it. We didn't realize or I didn't realize how monstrous of a business this had become. I believe you guys are worth several billions, maybe five billion was a number that I had seen at some point in time. I think you had bootstrapped a very long way. Is it purely bootstrap or you at some point took some money?

**Wade Foster** (2:07)
I think the word people call it now is seed strap. We did go through YC and we raised about a million in change. But that's all the primary capital we've ever taken.

**Shaan Puri** (2:16)
Yeah, so just incredibly, to raise a million bucks and then get to five billion in value is just pretty wild. So, super cool, but you're here not to necessarily tell the whole story of how Zapier makes you happier, but to show us what you're doing with AI. Can you give me a public sales pitch real quick? I'm requesting a sales pitch. And what I want is I know how OG V1 of Zapier worked, where you connect one app to another. You're saying, hey, we have this new AI product that you use with Claude, which presumably makes your Claude or ChatGBT usage more powerful, whatever. I haven't been using that.
I also, here's the other caveat, I'm kind of dumb. So imagine talking to somebody with half the IQ of yours.

**Sam Parr** (2:57)
He's like, can you give me a pitch to someone who's sort of dumb and doesn't listen?

**Wade Foster** (3:02)
But these are smart at the same time.

**Shaan Puri** (3:05)
The confidence of a smart man.

**Wade Foster** (3:08)
I have really good news for you, though.
I think AI is this incredible gift to people who are kind of dumb. Because you can just talk to it and say, hey, I didn't understand that answer, explain it to me like I'm five. And so you can keep going down the dumbness stack, I guess, for lack of a better word, until you understand it and then go, okay, now teach me back up to where I need to go. So, okay, the sales pitch. You want the sales pitch. In the old world, you know Zapier, you know, come in, build integrations, connect apps. The new world has a lot of the same things, but it's different. Nowadays, you're hanging in Claude, you're hanging in, you know, Codex or Cursor or, you know, OpenClaw or whatever it is that you like using, right? And you're just talking to it going back and forth. Most people start with that. AI as a chat pod is valuable, but it's only generally smart. It knows everything that the Internet knows. It doesn't know anything about your business.