Inside Zapier’s Code Red: How CEO Wade Foster Hit Pause to Reinvent for AI

**Wade Foster** (0:00)
If we want to be very reductionist about how you set culture inside of a company, it's what do you reward, what do you tolerate, and what do you not tolerate? And so to use this as an example, in action, we wouldn't tolerate. At BATS, we're like, hey, that's good. And then what we reward is actual successful attempts. Hey, I'm Wade. I'm one of the co-founders, CEO at Zapier. Zapier is the most connected AI orchestration platform. I'm looking forward to chatting with y'all about how you can transform your organization to take advantage of AI.

**Jeremy Utley** (0:34)
Okay, Wade, we've been really stoked to talk to you. Really stoked. And you've been really active recently on social. I don't know if there's... I would actually love to start there. I feel like there's been kind of a ramp up recently in terms of your presence, talking about the transformation that's underway at Zapier. Is that just a perception or is that reality?

**Wade Foster** (0:54)
So I think it's a combination of a couple things.
Two years ago, Chat GPT comes out and we realized that there's a real opportunity for Zapier and a real risk if we don't seize the moment. And we kind of jump all in on this thing and start the journey of making sure that the products we are selling are taking advantage of all the AI capabilities that are emergent, but also that we're changing how we operate to also take advantage of the tools that are available to us. And I think over the course of the two years, like we've just learned a lot around what works, what doesn't work, we got a product that can really help people make the transition and a lot of folks are out there knowing that there is a huge opportunity, but they don't really know where to start. They don't really know how to figure this stuff out. And I just felt like, hey, we ought to be a lot more public about sharing our own lessons learned and what's working for us. I think one, it's just a good public service announcement. And two, there's the self-serving part of it is, we got a product that can help with this stuff too. And so by being a little bit more public with these things, it'll probably help us with sales as well. So, and so far, I've been a lot more public with my accounts in the last, I don't know, 90 days or so. And it seems to be working. Folks seem to really appreciate the learnings.

**Henrik Werdelin** (2:30)
Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
I think I started BarkBox around the same time as you started Zapier. So I think we're in the same class of companies. It does seem that more and more founders, CEOs, now taking the mic and talking more. How was that for you? Was that, you know, like, I saw the, I saw, yeah, because I saw the Notion CEO, a founder, he was kind of like talking about it and being like very, kind of like open about how it was a bit awkward suddenly to be like doing this. Like, has it been difficult or has it just been like, yeah, here we go?

**Wade Foster** (3:05)
It's, I mean, it's not like where I'm probably most comfortable. Yeah, I think I find the discourse sometimes on social channels to be a little...

**Jeremy Utley** (3:17)
Gosh.

**Wade Foster** (3:18)
Yeah, they're just sort of like, they're hard to get a feel for, you know? It's like, how exactly do this? And I was a lot more active when Zapier started, like, you know, 2012 to like, I don't know, 2016, 2017 or so. Like, it felt like, hey, I, you know, try and put ourselves on the map, like get out there, do that sort of thing and it worked. But then I just personally got pretty tired of that stuff. Like I found like the more I was reading, you know, Twitter in particular, I was just like, gosh, this is just not good for me. And so I made a pretty intentional decision to say, hey, I'm going to like, you know, uninstall these things from my phone. I'm going to unfollow a bunch of people. I'm going to just try and like have less of this be a part of my life because I found it sort of like worked my ability to think for myself. So it was like a pretty intentional choice.
But then, you know, you fast forward to, I guess today, there's a recognition that like, hey, I actually have some stuff to say. And so I feel like I ought to be able to say it. And two, the algorithms reward CEOs and individuals and people like that. And so it's like, all right, I'm going to do it for my account. And so, yeah, I have a bit of a system set up that sort of helps me like be a little bit more public on the accounts without having to get into like the doom scrolling sort of habits that I had maybe back in 2016 or so. So I think that's part of the challenge is like, how do you use these tools as sort of like write only and like read just a little bit. You just don't want to get hooked into the deep waters here.