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

15:34Wade Foster:Do you want me to go ahead and make that intro for you? Great. Please do that. Right. So it's drafting those follow up emails. It's drafting all this other things. And so this is where AI starts to get really helpful is it's not just giving you a brief and sort of teeing it up for you to do. It's now saying, I'll just do that for you. And this is where I think you start to really feel the power of AI is when you can actually put it to work. So I love Scribe, the sort of like post-meeting follow-up or the end-of-the-day wrap-up because it just, I don't know. I used to spend like two hours at the end of my day just like, you know, just trying to catch up on every little ticky-tack thing that I sort of got roped into.

16:11Wade Foster:And now that like two hours at the end of the day is down to like 15 minutes.

16:17Sam Parr:So you think this is legit saving you two hours a day almost? Yes. Yes.

16:22Wade Foster:And furthermore, that like, you know, what's good about my day, what's bad about my day part, it just helps me stay like focused on the things that matter. So both the AI is helping me with that. But I also will send like, I remember 90, like about about 90 days after I started doing this, I said, hey, I had this thought. I was like, you know so much about like what makes me have good days and bad days. Can you like summarize like what is common about my good days and what is common about my bad days? It was like, sure. And it did all that stuff. And then I gave it to my assistant and I said, hey, here's like, please make my days look like more good days versus bad days.

16:58Sam Parr:What were your good days and what were your bad days?

17:00Wade Foster:So for me, like the single most important thing is I'm a morning person. And so I do my best work in the morning. I'm most focused. you know once once after lunch comes around you know I'm just not going to get anything like serious done and so the most important thing is I don't want a meeting until 11 a.m. and so you just give me that morning time where I can knock out the most critical things and the day's going to go great like I will win the rest of the day but if I have to like you know if that time starts to get sucked into like firefighting mode you can tell I'll just be grumpy at the end of the day where I'm just like oh like I'm not I'm not being successful and you'll notice this podcast started at 11 a.m.

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18:11Sam Parr:Can you show us how to get the AI to challenge you instead of... Oh, yeah.

18:16Wade Foster:Let's do that. So coming back, AI that argues back. So this is pretty simple, right? I use Cursor as my daily agent, but if you're using Claude, if you're using Chatipati, if you're using Gemini, they often have a system prompt or a way that you can sort of tune like how it talks to you. And so in cursor, I have a file that's the agents MD. That's kind of what it uses everywhere. Claude has a Claude MD. And basically I have a file that's like how to work with me. And, you know, I, you know, have it be direct and honest. I need the truth. My coworkers are afraid to tell me. I need you to challenge my assumptions.

18:51Wade Foster:I need you to poke holes in my thinking. I need you to disagree when you genuinely disagree. And these things are like goal seeking entities. And so if you tell it like what I want from you is this, it's going to say, okay, well, that's what Wade wants. So I'm going to try and give him that goal. But if you don't tell him this, if you don't make this configuration, it's going to just genuinely try and like placate you because it thinks that's what you want. And so you do have to tell it, you know, it's sort of guided a little bit. So like, here's an example of like, you know, a live prompt I ran ahead of time for this.

19:24Wade Foster:I said, Hey, I'm thinking we should kill our entire free tier this quarter because one of our competitor raised prices. Help me draft the announcement, right? So this is like something that it should definitely like say, hey, press pause. Like that's a bad idea. And so when I do that, here's the pushback that it gives me. It's like, hey, that's a big move off a pretty thin signal. Before you draft anything, I want you to, I want three things on the table. So like, you know, bring me the data, you know, tell me like what the actual problem you're trying to solve is, you know, pricing announcements are wrong.

19:55Wade Foster:Like, you know, is there a smaller experiment you can run? That's great. Yeah. It's just like helping you think through, you know, these problems. And then, you know, I have this other skill that I've made, which I call my war council skill. And so this is like an even like more specific version of this that I will often invoke. So I could say, hey, you know, I'm thinking about hiring this person. Here's all the like notes that I've got on them from the interview panel. Like help me figure out if this person's going to raise the bar or not. And what it will do, the War Council, is this is a...

20:28Wade Foster:Actually, let me poke back. I think I have the War Council skill in here. Yeah, here it is. Okay, it didn't actually pull the skill up. So this, if you go to Zapier's GitHub, you can get a copy of the War Council. But what this does is it spins up sub-agents. And these sub-agents take on personas. There are seven sub-agents that get spun up, so seven personas. Some of them are standing members. So for example, I have the wartime COO is a standing member of the War Council. There's the ruthless CFO is a standing member. There's a contrarian board member that are standing members of the War Council.

21:07Wade Foster:Then I leave four personas to be generated dynamically. So based on the prompt, it will decide who else do I need to get advice from. That wartime COO, you created the persona, you described its characteristics, or you trained it on like Travis Kalanick transcripts or something? Like what did you, how did you do that? In my case, it's a generic version, but you could do whatever you want, right? If you wanted to have like Travis. What does generic version mean though?

21:34Sam Parr:You just said you be a wartime COO.

21:36Wade Foster:I just said these are the traits of, I said this is the traits of a wartime COO. And it like I said, actually, what I did was said, I want a wartime COO, you know, generate that persona.

21:45Sam Parr:And then I looked at what it created and just made some like, do you have like a pretty chill, generally happy, positive outlook?

21:51Wade Foster:Like, like, like this is, this is, you're seeing the, like the, the, the internal competitor inside of me, right? Like this is the, the Kobe Bryant Mamba mentality, like, you know, like coming through. I like having this, like, you know, this sort of thought partner that is a little bit more like ruthless because that's not my, that's not my default mode. Right. I want to have that kind of checks and balance there. And as a CEO, you're not always going to have people who are comfortable, available, skilled in that way around you, right? Like this is like who you would want on your team when you want them to spin up.

22:28Quick, stupid question. You said, I use Cursor for my AI. I thought Cursor is a coding tool, but it sounds like you're using it to chat, make decisions. Am I just wrong about what Cursor is or?

22:38Wade Foster:Yeah, I mean, Cursor, you can use Cursor, Cloud Code, Codex. Like these are all ostensibly coding agents, but they have this like agent mode where you can just talk to it. And the thing is it talks to it, but because it can write code, it can do stuff for you. And so the way I try and talk to people who are not engineers and say, hey, you should try using this is don't think of it as a tool for engineers to build stuff. Think of it as like you're hiring Cursor or CloudCode or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to. Where it's like, you probably have engineers you've worked with. You like to tell that engineer, go build this for me or go build that for me.

23:15Wade Foster:That's why I use Cursor is because it goes and builds stuff for me, not because I'm using it to actually go build a bunch of stuff. I don't really write any code. Wait, so your default when you just need to like talk to an AI or chat or ask a question, you go straight to cursor, you don't do chatGPT or Claude or anything? I mean, mostly, especially when I'm at my desktop, I'm mostly talking to cursor. Most of the time. It has like different models that you can sort of toggle back and forth on, which I like. So I can, you know, test a bunch of different models and things like that. Are you a typer or a talker?

23:45Wade Foster:I do a lot of voice to text these days. So I use this app Monologue. Why Monologue? I don't know. I like it. I've tried a few of these. I've tried Whisperflow and Super Whisper. Monologue, I don't know. It just gets me. I don't know of a better way to describe it. Quick side note. I think this is going to be an interesting thing about software for the future. When it is so cheap to build software, I think you're going to see more software that has like a personality to it you know you think about like consumer goods it's like how many places can you buy jeans from or how many places can you get you know whatever from there's like not that many differences but you choose like you might choose one brand and I might choose a different brand and it's just because like I like it better but it functionally does the same thing I think there's going to be more software that kind of like feels that way yeah it's yeah no I mean I think that's a good point it's like

24:45Sam Parr:the adidas and the nike shoes do the exact same thing but like totally you know or like t-shirt brands like do you remember i was watching uh this blake 182 documentary last night do you guys remember hurley sean you remember hurley shirts they're everywhere and i and i was watching this show last night i'm like why did we love those shirts so much isn't that crazy that we got obsessed with it was just that stupid logo and why did that matter to us so much and that's i think that's a good point that's how we're going to think about um b2b even b2b boring software Well, I think it's a really fascinating point because it always was differentiated on either features or price, right?

25:21Those are kind of the two main axes of competition. And then design got layered in. And I feel like there was like a wave where better design, better UI, UX became a differentiator and design, you know, got a seat at the table. And then, but if you look at like other products, non-software, it'll be either kind of brand or like status, you know, like luxury, it's signaling something about you. That doesn't really exist in software. And it sounds like what you're saying is there's going to be a new axis of competition, which is personality. You know, who do I like the feel of when I'm going to interact with it versus which model has more parameters and, you know, a higher, you know, benchmark score on the evals is not going to be how people are going to choose these things.

26:04Because I'm already doing that. I think you're absolutely right.

26:06Wade Foster:Well, and I certainly feel it like, as someone who plays around with a lot of the models, I'm starting to find myself have some preferences for different tasks. If I'm asking it to actually go do an engineering task where I don't need to talk to it, there's models I like for that. Fable is fantastic. You're going to give it a really complex engineering task. I'm like, great, have Fable go take a swing at this. It's going to nail the thing. But man, I do not want to talk to Fable. Like it is, it is not fun to talk to at all. We all have coworkers like that. They crush it at some tasks, but you're not, not a great hang.

26:42Wade Foster:Yeah, exactly. But then there's other like models where you're like, hey, if I want to sort of like go back and forth and have like a discussion and a debate around like what we're doing, I'm like, okay, I feel like I can, you know, tolerate that discussion a lot better than like trying to talk to Fable where I'm just like, oh my God.

26:58Sam Parr:Are all the phrases, like when Claude talks to me, it's like, what are its phrases? It's like, it's not this, it's that. Or here's the thing that's quietly really the problem.

27:10Wade Foster:Yeah, the honest truth, the load bearing, you know.

27:13Sam Parr:Yeah, like, let's get to the spine. Are those specific to AI or to the model?

27:21Wade Foster:To the model, for sure. Like you can tell most models, I think, are derivative of either the, you know, like Anthropics series or GPT series. And so like, you know, those two kind of have two distinct personalities. But if you go use, you know, any of the like open source tools or things like that, you can kind of see like who they've been distilling a lot. And like it sort of inherits the personality of, you know, the one above.

27:44Sam Parr:Dude, I've noticed that my coworkers are starting to say like the cloud, like someone the other day said like, Let's get to the load-bearing part. Or something like...

27:53Wade Foster:Like when they're talking out loud, not in writing? Yeah.

27:55Sam Parr:I've noticed that too. I've noticed that. When they start saying things, I'm like, that's Claude! You unplugged them? Yeah. Or they're trying to talk that way so then they can use Claude's writing and be like, no, it's really me.

28:10Wade Foster:Who is training who, right? Are we training the AIs or are the AIs training us? And I think you can go a step further where... Actually, let me show you this other use case. because this is interesting too. So this is a bunch of synthetic data, so it's not real, but I have a real version of it. It's got a list of accounts and you can kind of click into the accounts and see what's going on with it. So if we click into Acme Logistics here, you can see a bunch of stuff about it. It's like, oh, usage is down 34%. There's a renewal in 45 days. Here's all the apps they're using. Here's the people in the organization that you need to care about, et cetera.

28:45Wade Foster:But then like, here's the interesting part. It's got the suggested CEO outreach. where it's like, you should email Jordan and, you know, check in on him, see what's up. And so this is where, you know, I think AI gets really interesting because in some respects, who's the boss now? Like, am I the boss or is the AI the boss? You know, every Sunday morning now, I wake up with a list of, you know, 10 customers that I want to get in touch with. And it's got proposals for what I should say and what I should do and why I should do it and all that sort of stuff. And I candidly love it. Like, this is stuff that was really hard for me.

29:19Wade Foster:Like I'm not naturally a person who's just like, you know, ultra networker like you guys are where I'm just like, I got to keep in touch with everybody. And so now I've kind of put an agent in the loop and said, like, hate me, help me be better at this stuff. And yeah, I just I literally wake up in my Sunday morning briefing. It says, here's all the accounts you need. I've already drafted the emails in your inbox. You just need to review them and make edits or press send. And I think there's like something to this where, you know, if you do a good job of like building these tools up, they'll kind of start telling you what to do.

29:52Wade Foster:And you do have to keep your brain on because if you turn your brain off, you'll probably sound dumb from time to time. But by and large, I think these things make pretty good bosses for certain use cases.

30:02Sam Parr:Well, Brian Halligan, one of the founders of HubSpot, he either came up with this idea or it was in an interview where Jack Dorsey from Twitter came up with the idea and was on Brian's podcast. But they basically said, a lot of people are confused. They think it's going to be a human brain or a CEO in the center. And then all these agents running around doing stuff. He was like, that's not the way to look at it. AI is the brain. AI is going to be the CEO. in the humans, their job is just giving it information and then making some judgment calls if it wants to listen to the AI. But in general, the AI should actually be making the hard decisions because it's likely going to do a better job.

30:41Sam Parr:And so that kind of like changed how I thought about it. And it sounds like that's sort of what you're saying without saying it that way.

30:46Wade Foster:Well, I think so, right? If you are able to hook up all of your company's institutional knowledge to the AI, it's going to be able to reason over way more information than a human CEO. Like it just can. Like it can look at every single commit into the code base. It can read through every single customer conversation. It can scan every comment about you on Reddit or X or LinkedIn or whatever. So it just knows way more than you as a human is ever going to know. And so that's going to make it way more useful for certain types of decisions. Like to start right now, it's like you use it as an assistant to sort of help you make these decisions.

31:24Wade Foster:But it seems pretty plausible to me that you might start saying, hey, I'm going to take its suggestion more often than not in certain places. Yeah, I think that's not true. I wonder if AI is going to have like, because the upside would be AI is not going to have the emotional rollercoaster that a human would have or fears that would hold it back from doing the right thing or avoiding conflict or different things that humans have as their biases. And then I wonder if we're going to have to come up with the cognitive biases of AI to watch out for. Or like, okay, we know we have this sort of sunk cost fallacy and we have this bias for recency bias.

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32:56Sam Parr:So you run a company that's worth billions of dollars. How many decisions are you making a day that it's actually weighed versus AI?

33:03Wade Foster:Well, I would say like any high stakes decision, the AI is weighing in on now. Like, you know, there's sort of a seat at the table and, you know, the exec meeting and the board meetings and all that sort of stuff where we're asking the AI to like surface those things. Is there an example where AI kind of changed your mind or got to the right answer that you weren't at and you decided to go with it? Here's an example of a place where I find AI to be really useful. Let's come back to the hiring example. So, you know, we run a bar raiser process where I approve every job offer that goes off. But like exec team member sort of is on the final part of the hiring loop.

33:41Wade Foster:and it's intended to audit the hiring process in addition to sort of figuring out, hey, is this person going to elevate the culture, the work, et cetera, here at Zapier? Now, in the past, pre-AI, when I would go through those approvals, I would often, you know, if I would come across a candidate where I was not so sure on, I could kind of smell something is wrong. I've just done enough interviews now. I've interviewed thousands of people. I've looked over thousands of applications where I just have more reps than most hiring managers have. Like most hiring managers hire one or two people in a year.

34:11Wade Foster:it's like I'm I'm I've just looped over like way way more volume and so I don't always have the language to say like why it's wrong but I can still smell it I'm like are and so I would often go to these folks and be like are you sure something is off like I don't I don't think they have this this or that and it was interesting that interaction with my staff was always a little bit fraught like folks would be like well I stand by this person like wait are you just going to make the hiring decision if so like you just if you don't want to hire them don't hire them and And it sort of would be like, and I'd kind of be like, well, that's not really what I want, right?

34:43Wade Foster:Like, I want you to make the decision. I'm just trying to like give you some guidance here. And I want you to sort of be able to, you know, reason through this problem. And if you've answered it, like if you have confidence that you have, you know, efficiently answered it, then I will back you. Let's go hire this person. But if you haven't, then I want you to like take this into account and go figure out like, you know, is there more information you need to get or do you need to adjust your course, et cetera. But that's not often how it would play out. It would just sort of play out as like, well, does Wade want me to hire this person or does Wade not want me to hire that person?

35:13Wade Foster:And I'm like, like, so anyway, that's kind of what was happening pre-AI. Post-AI, I'd run the War Council or like my hiring committee over these folks. And then I would notice like it's just more articulate than me. It could sort of say, hey, I noticed that, you know, this person has these traits and the panel did not scrutinize this. so you need to go scrutinize this and it would you know it give like a score of like here compared to everyone you've hired at zapier here's how here's how likely i think they're going to be successful or not and so now i could take that to the hiring panel and say like hey the the ai said this i agree like what what's going on here and i noticed all of a sudden the behavior shift where people would go like oh interesting i think the ai did get this and this right but i think it's wrong on this.

36:03Wade Foster:And here's why, because I have this other context that it doesn't have. And I'm like, great. That's all I was wanting to know. It's like, I want to like, what else, what else am I missing? What am I not seeing here? And I just found that like, maybe because it's not, maybe because it feels like arguing with an AI is easier than arguing with the CEO, or maybe because it's more eloquent and it like actually has a way of talking that makes it like easier to address the specific points. I'm not exactly sure, but I did notice the way we made decisions around hiring got better in part because we added the AI to the loop.

36:33Sam Parr:I don't know if you guys were ever like believers in some of these personality tests. Like there's this thing called CultureAmp, I think it's called, where it's like a software where you do personality tests before you hire someone. Ray Dalio has his version of it, whatever. And there's like, tends to be, it's like a scale where people fall in where they're like, I don't believe in anything involving like personality tests. I've noticed with AI, I have fallen closer to the side of like, I follow what it says because I've done some of these personality tests and I've used it to train my AI and it's helped me a lot.

37:03Sam Parr:But when it comes to hiring, do you guys buy into this at all when it comes to personality tests and like figuring out if a person could be good for the job? Because that makes, with AI, it makes the process so much easier. What do you think, Sean? I go the other way, meaning it's not really about personality tests per se, but I find that, you know, like with self-driving, one approach was, let's put all the sensors on the car. Let's get cameras. Let's get more cameras. Let's get LiDAR. Let's get radar. Let's get sonar. Let's, you know, put a, what else do we do? Taste test. What are all the different possible sensors you can put on the car?

37:40And the Tesla approach was basically like, it needs vision. It needs eyes only. And one of the reasons why, people thought it was for cost, which was, I think, a factor that like LiDAR was very, very expensive. So it was not practical in the long term. But the reason that Elon says that he did it was because when you have too many sensors, You get too much conflicting data and you don't know which one to trust. It makes it more faulty, more error prone. And actually what you should do is take only the minimum number of sensors needed, but then train the hell out of them. That's kind of my approach to hiring where I now simplify.

38:16I need less time to spend with somebody and I look for fewer things, but those have to be home runs. Otherwise, I'm just not going to hire the person. So what do I mean by that?

38:25Sam Parr:Yeah, yeah. Answer the question though. So like, how do you get, okay, what you're saying is instead of looking at like hundreds of questions, you're looking at three questions. Are you good at this, this, or that? Okay, so how do you gather that information? So again, stealing from Elon, he talks about you want evidence of exceptional ability. So all I'm looking for, I'm not looking for like, the first filter is just evidence of exceptional ability. So I'm not trying to assess culture fit right now. I'm not asking, do I like them? I'm not asking like, do they have the relevant experience? All I want to know is, have you done some exceptional shit before?

38:55And then tell me that story. And in that story, I'm going to try to understand, did you do it? Or were you on a team of people doing it? Or were you riding somebody else's coattails doing that thing? And if you really haven't done anything exceptional, the odds of this being the place where you have the first exceptional thing of your career is not really a bet I'm excited to go take. And so that's the very first filter that I'm looking for. And that's not personality test driven. Then after that is a kind of personality test of like, I try to do something with them where I get the gut feel of like, do we have creative chemistry?

39:28Do I feel like this person is good to have in the room when I'm trying to figure something out? Or do I feel like they're not elevating that conversation when that happens? And so I'm really just kind of like a two-step filter and that's it. And that's all I want to signal. But obviously, I'm not running the size of org that way it is. And I'm working with people who are working directly with me in a very, very small team where everybody has to be 10x or better. Otherwise, it's just not worth having them on the team. And so that's the, I've learned that kind of the hard way because I used to do it very differently.

40:00Wade Foster:Yeah, we, so we've done some work with this. So like we've done like Myers-Briggs type stuff internally at times we've done, there's this one called Berkman that we've done at times. I have found it to be moderately useful. I have a CEO buddy who runs this public company in Columbia that does disc profiles for every hire. And he's like insistent where it's like, if I have an accountant, they need to be this profile, this da, da, da, da. And it's like, if they're not, they're not going to be a good fit on the team. I'm not gone that far. I think what I, where I net out is that, I mean, you do need somebody who is exceptional first and foremost, like everybody's got a personality type, but it doesn't tell you if you're good or not.

40:38Wade Foster:Like, you know, you, you can score whatever you're going to score, but you still need to be good. But I do think that like teams matter. Like, and when I look at my, my personality or my way of working, there are things where I am exceptionally good at. And there are certain defaults that I have where I know that if I am partnered up with somebody who has like a complimentary traits, I'm going to be way better because they're going to have my backside in places that I don't know if like there's any science behind this. But if you look at my EA versus my like Myers-Briggs, she has three different letters than I do.

41:12Wade Foster:So there's four letters in that and three of them of hers are different and she does like have she like likes doing things that i don't like doing and she's good at those things that i don't like doing and it ends up being like pretty helpful because it gets kind of like in sports where it's like you know if you basketball team it's like well you need somebody that's gonna you know michael jordan's gonna shoot all the shots well you need dennis rodman who's gonna like lock down d and grab boards but are you doing that for when you guys are hiring we don't do it no we don't actually have people like take a test and say like, hey, what are you going to do?

41:46Wade Foster:Different hiring managers are probably doing it somewhat like by like organically, but it is not a science for us. I have an idea for how I think companies could use AI to improve their hiring. I don't know if this was like fully like legal. I don't know if you could do this exactly the way I'm going to describe it, but here's the exercise. I'm in. You go through your team. So you have all the past hires you've made in the last, let's call it three years. and you could stack rank who's exceptional, who's acceptable, and who's kind of like been a source of kind of hit or miss performance, let's say.

42:22Cool. So you could stack rank employees in your team and you could say, great. You also have maybe the transcripts or the recordings of all the interviews that they did, right? So you have this historical pattern that you have with all of them. And then you have new people that are coming in. And like, so, because when I was at Twitch, which they use the Amazon bar raiser thing that you described. And they're trying to do like the human version of this. It's like, here's this guy who's seen a thousand interview panels who will come in and kind of like standardize the hiring process, but also like provide the most experienced voice on hiring.

42:58And then they're kind of checking this candidate against this pattern of past candidates, as well as against your values and the role in mind. And I just think AI is going to be way better at that than people. I think it's going to be like dramatically better at that. And I'm surprised that people aren't using like kind of the training data of your existing team to inform the next hire. Do you think it would work? Like, I don't know for sure if AI would be good at that, but I kind of think that would be helpful.

43:29Wade Foster:I mean, I remember Google sharing like a lot of their hiring insights where they did a ton of tests around this stuff like this. And I think what they found was that no hiring managers were like had an edge over any other hiring managers with one exception. And the one exception was that there was like this hyper specific specialized group of like technical talent where there was like only like an in of like 100 people in that domain. And it's just like their hit rate was better because it was like, well, there's just only 100 people to do this thing. And so I don't find that a very satisfying answer.

44:03Wade Foster:like it feels like there should be something to what you were saying also something that i've

44:08Sam Parr:been thinking about a bunch like i was thinking a large percentage of the people who work at my company which is like 35 or something they we work here in this office out here and they're here because basically i'm bored and i want someone to hang out with most days like that's like probably 70 of the reasons why i have a company is just because i like want someone to hang out with Because I'm not good at friends. Friends are hard.

44:31Wade Foster:Employees are easier.

44:32Sam Parr:Friends are hard. Starting LLCs is easier. Which sounds like a joke, but I'm sure, Sean, you agree. Sean has a guy who works with him. He's like, you can work for me if you move here and we hang out every day. Dude, yesterday I was like, I'm kind of done working. You want to play Fortnite? We just played Fortnite for a couple hours. I was going to say,

44:51Wade Foster:I need a pickleball partner. Can you come be my employee?

44:55Sam Parr:I mean, that's kind of how it is. I just want to hang out with people. But when you have, okay, now I'm not, I want you to put like, let's be the CEO war console. And I need you to be like crazy Wade, not real Wade. So anything said for the rest of the section, you can be, you can kind of go unhinge.

45:10Wade Foster:Unhinge mode. Okay. Yeah.

45:12Sam Parr:War Wade. Yeah. I don't know how many employees you have now, but you used to have 700. What do you have now?

45:18Wade Foster:It's like 730 or something like that. It's not that many.

45:21Sam Parr:So when you have like remote employees, like for the most part, you only know them as just like Slack avatars, right? Like you don't know all 700 people and many of them don't know you other than like this guy on Zoom and someone who blogs occasionally. It kind of like begs the question, like what if they were all just like, or like can like one person just be like 10 or 30 different agents that they monitor and you only have like 20 employees?

45:50Wade Foster:I think... there's definitely a school of thought where I've heard that. I do think there's limits to this. And the way I think about the limits is that it's kind of like how a manager has like an ideal span of control where it's like, oh, I can only have like, you know, I don't know that the rule book says eight. I think, you know, you're seeing people push the limits now to have like, you know, 10 or 12, or if you're Jensen, you've got 60 or whatever. but there's still a limit where it's just like i just cognitively cannot like keep up with like

46:23Sam Parr:this many people but you don't keep up with that many people anyway like um when you have a company like there's stuff happening that you don't even know about well why wouldn't you just have it be

46:35Wade Foster:one of your agents well so you could but the thing is you're only going to be able to keep up with what 20 agents because it's going to keep assigning you tasks and more things to do and more things to do. And so there still is like a, there still is like a limit.

46:49Sam Parr:But I'm not saying that it would be like just Wade, but I'm saying like, do you think that there's a world where, let's just say that hypothetically you guys do close to half a billion in revenue? Is there a world where like 20 people could do that?

47:03Wade Foster:For a company like Zapier, I'm not sure, but definitely like a company could certainly do that. In fact, we've already seen companies that have gotten to like that size on very small numbers of revenue.

47:14Sam Parr:Which ones?

47:16Wade Foster:Well, I mean, shoot, like Minecraft back and before Microsoft bought it was like, I don't know how many people, but it was like less than 100, I think. And it made it, you know, a whole bunch of money. There was that New York Times story that came out this summer about that guy who was selling like GLP one stuff.

47:33Sam Parr:Yeah, we had him booked as a guest on the podcast. And then that article came out the day before and he canceled on us.

47:38Wade Foster:well so yeah like you know he's doing like i don't know how many employees he has but i think it was like maybe one or two yeah how many inmates does he have now he's got two inmates yeah how many cellmates does he have but i mean you also could think of someone like uh like taylor swift like taylor swift has a very very small team from what i understand and is you know printing you know billions a year or something like that or at least at her peak was so I think it just kind of depends on the business. Maybe just the philosophical thing of like, do you think that the way, so the way work worked before was you start off as an individual contributor and then you can become a manager where you manage a fleet of individual contributors.

48:20Yeah. And maybe in the corporate world, your value was proportional to how good you were at managing people. Yeah. Is the new world where your value, the amount you get paid is based on how well you manage AI agents, right? How big of a fleet can you manage and how effective is that fleet? Is that the new managerial skill?

48:40Wade Foster:Yes. I feel pretty confident that that is the direction we're heading to.

48:45Sam Parr:Sort of saying, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you said the same thing. You're saying I'm right and I'm genius. Yeah.

48:52Wade Foster:We got there. We got there.

48:54Sam Parr:And again, this is ruthless wait. So I don't want you to think that you have to hedge or apologize.

49:00Wade Foster:There's still different roles in a company, right? Think of your sales team. I still think that for certain purchase categories, we still want to talk to a human. We still want to buy from a human. Do you want your sales reps every day waking up and managing fleets of agents? Or do you want them talking to your customers and helping build those relationships and close that trust and all that? For that role, I'm like, I think I kind of want you building the human relationship more so than doing a bunch of AI stuff. I definitely want you to do some AI stuff, but it's not necessarily like, hey, you know, Mr.

49:31Wade Foster:or Miss, like sales leader or like frontline sales AE, like go manage these 20 reps that are going to actually do the sales for you.

49:38Sam Parr:Can I switch gears for a second? How old are you? I turned 40 this year. Okay. So you were, if$5 billion is your value, you were in the ballpark of being a under 40 billionaire, give or take. Does that feel strange? Because you seem like a guy who does not particularly, even though I was teasing you, you seem like a guy who doesn't particularly care about money or success other than having a good time.

50:05Wade Foster:I mean, it feels, honestly, it feels a little fictional to even hear you say that, where I'm like, I don't think of myself like that way. And it sort of is, like so much is like tied to like the paper, the paper worth of Zapier at any given moment in time. It's like the voting machine. Like I don't have liquid dollars that look like that. You know, I have some amount that's liquid. Describe your psychology around money. So how do you think about it? How do you use it in a way that improves the quality of your life? How do you avoid it so that it doesn't mess up certain parts of your life? Make us a little smarter.

50:40Just share your perspective.

50:41Wade Foster:Yeah, I think, look, it's a lot of this stuff is like highly personal. And like, what do you care about in life? And for me, the like things one, two, and three are my family. And so, you know, I want to be around my family, have like, you know, provide for them, you know, make sure that they sort of are able to sort of live a good life by whatever definition I have of that. And truthfully, like once you get to like a certain amount of wealth, like more wealth doesn't change that equation. What do you think that level is? I mean, shoot, if you come live in central Missouri, it's not that much.

51:16Wade Foster:yeah i think you could do just fine with like a million bucks and you know do quite well i mean shoot when i when i was i remember when i just got out of college my my dream was if i could only make a hundred thousand dollars a year that was my dream it's like if i could make a hundred thousand dollars a year i i was like man i'll be set that was mine too by the way it was yeah it

51:37Sam Parr:was like if i can get out and work at kpmg and get 60 grand i might get to 100 grand before i'm 30 then I am set, baby.

51:45Wade Foster:Yeah.

51:45Sam Parr:That was the goal.

51:46Wade Foster:And I don't know, like partly that's, you know, I don't have like a lot of vices. I don't have like a lot of expensive hobbies and things like that. Do you do anything cool with your money? You know, when I go to a restaurant, I don't look at how much the items cost.

51:59Sam Parr:Nice.

51:59Wade Foster:Like that kind of stuff.

52:01Sam Parr:And so you've raised money. So you have to have some type of likely, presumably you're going to, you want to have some type of exit event, whether that's IPO or selling the whole thing. Is there anything that you have on your bucket list that you'd want to, like, if you're like, okay, if I get over a billion dollars liquid, I want to change this about my life or there's something interesting I want to do? No, there's like nothing that I couldn't already do.

52:25Wade Foster:You know, like I remember my grandpa, like his dream was always to go on a safari and he never got to go on one. I always thought like that was an incredible thing. And so when my girls are old enough, I'm like, let's go on a safari. But I do that now. I don't need billions of dollars to go on a safari.

52:40Sam Parr:the reason i like asking you about this stuff is because you are very well-rounded and you seem like we had this like joke called like the total man it was like like like a buddy of ours or a podcast guest who was like kind of like the perfect package like they were like ruthless when they need to be ruthless they were sweet when they needed to be sweet they were smart when they needed to be smart but they were still a good hang and like i said like dharmesh has that and you definitely have that too. So I like hearing your opinion on topics where most of the people, ourselves or myself included, talk about it from a, they're broken, they have a chip on their shoulder perspective.

53:17Sam Parr:Whereas I don't think you have that. You have a, you have a far more wholesome and a positive outlook when it comes to a lot of this stuff. So that's why I like hearing you talk about some things where you don't typically peer an emotionally healthy person, give their perspective on.

53:29Wade Foster:I, you know, I was really lucky. Like I grew up, you know, with a, a family that was all sort of like, my parents were married, my two grandparents that were married. I have aunts and uncles and cousins that were all sort of just really tight knit. But if I was to give a shout out to any of those, I got to talk about my granddad. My granddad is a World War II vet, but I didn't know him as that. I just knew him as this guy who always had time for his grandkids. He died his 98 and a half, and he basically lived by himself the entire time I knew him. He drove himself up until two weeks before he died.

54:04Wade Foster:He walked three miles a day every single day until two weeks before he died. He did the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen every single day. And I remember going to, you know, after he died, we were at the funeral home and they were trying to like plan out all this stuff. You know, most 98 year olds when they die, it's like they don't got any friends. There's nobody going to be there because everybody who's everybody who would have been there has already died. You're 98. Like they just he just made it a long time. And I remember the staff saying like, okay, like, you know, we'll probably just do like a, you know, the receiving line or whatever will be, you know, like, we'll just do like 30 minutes or an hour or whatnot.

54:39Wade Foster:And that receiving line is there for three hours. People just like coming through nonstop. and you know just members from every single walk of life like he had you know when he was a teacher he had all these teachers that were coming through that remembered him he was like big with the dare program so like all these highway patrolmen coming through all these members of the church coming through all his extended family coming through and i remember that like standing out a lot to me where it was like here's a guy who you know was was great at family and great at professional stuff and I just that that to me was like just a really good example of you know someone who got their like priorities doubled like like dialed in really really well you know he didn't have it all but he didn't need it all it's like the things he cared about he he nailed them and so to me that's always like stood out as like what what a good life looks like sounds like a good role model I think that

55:35Sam Parr:you definitely seem to embody that where like like I said you are great at business and also like don't have this jackass side that most people who are where you are seem to have. Right, Sean? Yeah. First, I love that story that you just told. That was actually a really awesome, an awesome story. And also, I think that the value of what you just said, you said two things that stood out to me. You said he didn't have it all, but he didn't need it all. And I think, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, which is that you're really only as rich as what you don't need. You know, basically like if you don't, that's whether that's material things or other, right?

56:15If you don't need the approval or attention of others, you're free, you're rich, you know, because you just don't need that. It's not one of the things that you have to go pay the cost to go get, right? Like, you know, you don't have to go be super flashy on social media because you just don't care for it. And so I think that's like such an underrated attribute. And when you said that, it kind of reminded me, it sounds like your grandpa had that kind of that way of life. And the other was, you know, defining what winning is. So it's like, if winning is just in the work domain or winning is just in one, you know, just in one of them, you have to kind of decide what it is for you.

56:50And it sounds like pretty early on, you got clear on that. And the clearer you are, the less likely you are to be blown around with the wind. You know, if the media portrays Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever as like the Titans, and then you say, oh, I guess that's what winning is. And then you're, you know, soon enough on your, you know, multiple divorces and your kids don't like it, whatever, whatever you can go. It's easy to go down a certain path if you didn't have like a really grounded belief system around what winning is and have examples of people who've won that way, because you'll get a lot of examples of what I call one dimensional winners.

57:25Michael Jordan, the ultimate, I'm a basketball fan. So I grew up being like, Jordan is the goat. He's the greatest. He's the best. And he is when it comes to basketball, but he also had many things in his personal life that I don't want to emulate. And so as much as I wanted to be like Mike on the court, I did not want to be like Mike off the court. I think it's worth the time to do what it sounds like you've done, which is kind of like find whatever that North Star is for you so that you kind of have a clear picture in your head. It makes all future decisions really easy.

57:53Wade Foster:Totally. I love that. Like, you know, define your own definition of winning. And, you know, know, if you do that, well, like some of your decisions might look odd to others. They'll be like, why are you doing that that way? You could do this. You could do that the other. But you'll be a lot happier when you're just like, this is what I want to be doing. And, you know, if what you want to be doing is, you know, running a software company and you know, great, go do that. If what you want to do is, you know, be a teacher and, you know, help students do that. Like if what you want to do is, you know, I don't know, live on the coast or live in the it's like, what is it that sort of is winning for you?

58:25Sam Parr:Do you have any examples of that? I mean, you are very successful and you moved from San Francisco back to Jeff City. So that's like an obvious one. But like, are there any other like strange Zapier or Wade decisions that you've made that you think that the normal Silicon Valley guy would be like, that's insane.

58:41Wade Foster:I mean, like, I mean, the sort of remote work story is one where we've just never had an office way before anyone thought that that was normal. You know, we only raised the one round of money. Like that was like pretty odd at the time. Like, you know, we're we're building this business for like the long haul. And so, you know, I constantly get questions around like, well, what about, I mean, heck, you guys are asking me about it. It's like, well, what about the X or what's the valuation or what's the, and I'm like, it'll be what it will be. Like, we're here to grow it for our customers. Like, that's the thing I care about, not these other things.

59:08Wade Foster:And, you know, I think if we do a good job of that, then sure, the numbers will follow. But that's not the point. Like, the point is, like, the work itself. And I think that's, you find that with anyone who loves what they do, you know, you ask them, this is where I feel like the media gets a lot of this, like, narrative around billionaires wrong. as they're like, you know, they're hoarding their money. They're in all this stuff. I mean, look, I don't know all billionaires, but I've gotten to meet a couple. And, you know, Dharmesh, Halligan, like, you know, guys like this who, I don't know, they genuinely just seem like they like what they're doing.

59:38Wade Foster:And like, they're going to keep doing that whether or not they make, you know, a little bit of money or a lot of money. The test has played out. They did it before they were making any money and kept going when there was no clear line of sight to money. Exactly. Then when they made the money, they kept doing it. They kept doing it. Clearly it wasn't about the money. I just like doing it. I think athletes are the same way. Like you look at like Olympic athletes. Olympic athletes don't make a lot of money, but they just love doing it and they're just going to keep doing it. No matter what. You see it in, you know, professional sports where like guys are, you know, at the tail end of their career and they probably should be retiring, but they keep playing because they just love playing and they'll take the lesser contract.

1:00:17Wade Foster:They'll do all this other stuff because it's like, I just can't. I just love this game. Like I love doing that thing.

1:00:22Sam Parr:So, Sean, listen to this. One time, I think in 2000 and maybe 2019, Wade spoke at HustleCon in Oakland, California. And this was right, I think, before you raised your round, I think. But you guys were the hottest thing going. And you came and talked, and I thought it was awesome. And I don't know if you remember this, Wade, but you and I sat backstage for like 10 hours. And all the speakers would come and go, and they would have to pass through this room. And I think, I don't know exactly if this is how you felt. I think you did the same thing I wanted to do, which is like these people would come in and we would just stare and like observe how they were behaving because it was kind of fun to have like, you know, billionaires or like these big shot CEOs just like interacting with you, having a normal conversation.

1:01:11Sam Parr:It was really exciting. It was like people watching on steroids and we were just, we're kind of staring at them. But I remember you sat with me, I don't know if you remember this, for like, it was like eight or 10 hours. It was like the entire day. And I was like, do you got somewhere to be? And you're like, nope, I just like being here. And I remember that you doing that. And it seems like you have a change where it was like, you were very, you were successful then. Now you're incredibly successful, but it was a very similar personality where you're still very curious.

1:01:38Wade Foster:Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember it was all day.

1:01:42Sam Parr:Like you got at nine and I think we left at four. So however long that is.

1:01:46Wade Foster:Maybe it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you, you got good, you pulled good guests, man. Like who wouldn't want to just like sit backstage and like listen to how all these people are running their companies and what's working for them and what's not i mean shoot i'm i i'm almost certain i had a notebook of ideas that i sort of took back and was like all right we're gonna try this we're gonna do this yeah i mean the awesome thing is like you know back when you were doing that like i feel like podcasts weren't quite as big of a deal but now like god you can just like pour over this stuff and you just have like notes for days on things that you can just go try and just like

1:02:17Sam Parr:all right see if this works for me what do you what do you listen to and what do you consume on a regular basis books well my podcast whatever my favorite podcast i gotta give a shout out to

1:02:24Wade Foster:the acquired guys like i mean it's just 10 out of 10 like you know most of those things they do a deep dive on are just these legendary entrepreneurs who have like you know did it for decades leave us a leave us with a recommendation give us an acquired episode we should listen to and maybe a book that you liked well the nfl episode if you like sports at all like you know that is a good entryway into acquired though probably my favorite series is all the retail ones so there's like a like a cot like i think it's costco walmart and amazon and there's sort of like a trifecta right in there that are like all really really good as for a book um i i recently finished this book make something wonderful it's a steve jobs like in his own words it's a really good one you know i think steve jobs you sort of he has like a larger than life reputation this book is literally just emails, speeches, literally just like his own thinking.

1:03:23Wade Foster:And it's sort of organized roughly chronologically. And so you get to kind of just see his progression of like, you know, V1 Apple, the Pixar years, V2 Apple. And you kind of just see how he changes sort of like over time.

1:03:37Sam Parr:Sean, do you have a book that you read recently you want to recommend? Yeah, there's a book called The Score. Have I talked about that here? C. Tai Nguyen is the guy's name on the cover. But it's called The Score, How to Stop Playing Somebody Else's Game. And this is a guy who, the fundamental premise of the book is amazing. So he's talking about the power of a game. So he's like, imagine a game. Let's say we take Pictionary. We open up a game of Pictionary. Games are this incredible thing because they tell you what winning means. So they tell you the rules, what you're allowed to do. They tell you the scoreboard.

1:04:17So like how you win in this game and like what your goal should be. So they dictate your goals. They dictate your behavior. And then they also sort of dictate who you need to be to be good at this game. And he's like, let's take a game like charades. To be great at charades, you're going to have to be loose. You're going to have to be highly communicative. You're going to have to be a great team player, whether you're the guesser or you're the actor, it doesn't matter. But then let's say you play Risk. It's like, you're going to have to be like ruthless, dominating. And so he's like, it's amazing if you just take the idea of a game, how it will change your behavior.

1:04:51And he basically extends that to the games we play in life. And so he describes when he was a professor, he's like, I got into teaching philosophy because I love philosophy. Of course, who else becomes a philosophy teacher? He's like, but then I discovered this leaderboard. And it was all the philosophy professors in the country. And he's like, suddenly I started, well, how do you get on that board? I don't want to be not on the board. And so he kind of innocently is like, oh, you got to get published. He's like, well, then I realized like the way to get published the most and the fastest is in these obscure publications about these types of things.

1:05:20He's like, suddenly a few years in, I hate what I'm doing. He's like, why am I even doing this? Like I'm doing studies about shit that I don't even care about to get published, to get on a leaderboard that doesn't even matter. Why? Because I play games, we all play games. And so you have to be really careful about like games and the different types of ways you play. There's like striving play, which is like you play for the joy of playing, versus like outcome-based where you're playing to win. And like, you know, you want to be a striver for these reasons and that strivers actually tend to win more too, but they didn't play for that reason.

1:05:50And like, you can't just say, well, I'm not going to play any game because like, it's no fun. Let's say we're playing charades. And if you don't care at all about winning, we're not going to have a good time. Like the trick is to care about it in the moment and then completely let it go afterwards. When you remember that, oh, the reason we're playing charades is so that we could have a fun time as a group hanging out, not so that I got the most points in the game. And so, you know, There's all this nuance around games. And I think the biggest decision you make in life is what game you're deciding to play and how that will shape the next 10 years of your behavior.

1:06:22Looks like it just came out too.

1:06:23Sam Parr:The book came out like six months ago. Yeah, so I'm digging that book right now. I just finished. I'll wrap it up with this one. Wade, you might like this one. I think if I had to guess, did you listen to Blake 182 as a kid? I did. Did you, Sean? I mean, who didn't?

1:06:40Wade Foster:I read the biography

1:06:44Sam Parr:of the memoir of Mark Hoppus who is one of the lead singers of Blink-182 such a good book I read it in three days I couldn't put it down it was one of these books where like I had to force myself to put it down when I was going to bed at night because I was like staying up too late dude why are musician biographies so good I'm desperate for more the life of the memoirs or whatever of musicians and comedians what else do you have the Red Hot Chili Peppers guy Anthony Kiedis was that good long time ago I was like in college I read this thing and I loved it well his is his is good I think because he had a messed up and he partied yeah a messed up childhood leading to a messed up adulthood so it was like riveting these guys they weren't really that messed up but they got really famous like really fast and he talks about it and he's like you know a lot of I'm gonna this is really the chapter where I complain about fame and he's like just joking I love being famous it was awesome like people come to me all the time and they say they love my work It feels amazing.

1:07:38Sam Parr:And then he also, later in life, he got cancer. He talks about his cancer treatment. Oh, such a good book. If you guys want something fun to read, Mark Hoppus has a biography. And if you want the cliff notes. What's it called? Fahrenheit 182, I believe. But anyway, wait. You're the band. We appreciate you. You have an invite whenever you want. And thank you for everything.

1:07:57Wade Foster:You bet. Thanks for having me, guys.

1:07:59Sam Parr:All right. That's it. That's the pod.

1:08:10All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network, and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real-world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.