Zapier wants to be the AI hub where all your agents connect

0:01Hi, everyone. I'm Rana el Kaliouby, host of the Pioneers of AI podcast. And I'm here to share some exciting news. Masters of Scale Summit is returning this October 20th to 22nd in San Francisco. If you've been to Summit before, then you know that it's unlike any business or tech conference in existence. The room feels really intimate, the attendee list is highly curated, and the stage program is unparalleled. I've experienced it from the audience and from the stage, where I sat down with some of the most exciting voices in tech for a special live episode of Pioneers of AI. This year, I want you to be in the room with me.

0:38Join us. Visit mastersofscale.com slash summit.

0:47Wade Foster:On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights. The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Death and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever else you get podcasts.

1:29I think it's really hard to be the CEO of a software company right now. What's your experience been?

1:35Wade Foster:I had another CEO friend say 10 out of 10 fun and 10 out of 10 anxiety right now. Okay. I was like, yeah, that kind of resonates. It is not hard to find individuals that have like, quote unquote, 10x their productivity with AI. It is much harder to go look around and find the companies that are 10x productive because of this. And so why is that? We have the technology, but we don't know how to build the organizations around it quite yet. And so there's going to have to be a lot of changes, not just with adopting the technology, but also rethinking how these organizations work from the ground up.

2:18That's Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier. 15 years ago, he co-founded Zapier on a simple idea, to link thousands of apps that were never designed to talk to each other, so that users could work seamlessly between them. Now, Zapier is doing that for AI agents, and that has changed everything for the company. I wanted to talk to Wade because he saw an opportunity in AI and scaled AI across his entire organization and totally redesigned his product, thinking about AI from the ground up. I'm Rana Elkal-Yubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

3:07Hi, Wade. Welcome to Pioneers of AI. Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm so excited to have you on. So I am a Zapier customer.

3:16Wade Foster:Thank you. We use Zapier to integrate all our different AI agents. We're going to talk about that. But before we go there, I would love to hear the origin story of Zapier. Did you always know you wanted to be an entrepreneur? I did not. I grew up in central Missouri, Jefferson City. It's the capital of the state. And my exposure to jobs where you could either work for the state, you could be a doctor, a teacher, a police officer, right? As a young kid, I'm like, man, the number of jobs that exist is very, very small. My worldview was quite small. And so I didn't really get exposed to entrepreneurship until much later.

4:00Wade Foster:And what really kind of was the wake-up call for me was the tail end of university when the financial crisis hit. And so while I was a good student, it didn't matter. No one was hiring. No one was taking jobs. And I think that was when I realized like no one's waiting to give a handout to me. No one's waiting. Even if you do a good job, like you kind of have to make your own path. And I was fortunate enough to find a local entrepreneur, had a small software shop in Columbia, Missouri, and got hired as an intern there. And that's where I fell in love. I was like, oh, building software is really fun.

4:35Wade Foster:And I started to have that itch where I'm like, man, I think I would really like to start my own company someday. So this is 2011. SaaS is on the rise. There's a year that Stripe launched, Twilio launched, things like that. And if you would go to the forums of these companies, you would see a very common type of customer requests. And the customer request would always be, when will you integrate with X? And it was, yeah, it was followed by, you know, a bunch of customers saying, plus one, me too. Yes, I want that. And eventually a product manager saying, hey, everybody, like, thank you for the feedback.

5:08Wade Foster:Seems like an interesting idea. We'll take a look. And if you've ever worked at one of these companies, you know, that's code for, yeah, probably not going to happen. And so Brian sees this and is like, hmm, I think we can make sort of like a nice, simple UI. So you don't have to know how to use the APIs and connect this stuff. My day job, I am working with the Marketo API doing email marketing, and I'm a bad engineer. And so I'm having a tough time. So anywho, we've got this local hackathon coming up, startup weekend. We go, we team up with Mike. We hold up into like a garage in the back of this building all weekend and came out and had a prototype.

5:43Wade Foster:It worked, demoed well. So ended up winning the hackathon. And then, you know, after the weekend, it was like, well, what do we want to do with this thing? We're in central Missouri. It's not like there's a lot of investors in the area that are just like Jones and to put dollars towards a bunch of just recently college kids. And so we're like, OK, well, we want to keep working on this. We're having fun. So we said, we'll do it nights and weekends. Kept our day jobs and just, you know, we'd meet up after work. We'd stack some Hy-Vee Chinese, which is the local grocery store. So just get some takeout.

6:15Wade Foster:And then we would just get to work. At what point did you realize, oh, my God, we're onto something interesting here. We need to quit. I had this gig at this local software company, which was doing like some like natural language processing. In fact, it was a professor trying to like automatically grade student papers, which now seems quaint. It's like ChatGPT could do that. But in 2011, it was like, how? how do you do this? And I remember trying to sell this product and just, even though the product was slick, well-designed, good engineering, I just couldn't get anyone to buy this thing. I just thought I was bad at my job.

6:55Wade Foster:That was kind of like my recent history is like, man, selling software is hard. Then with Zapier, I remember the first customer we had, guy Andrew Warner I'd emailed him he ran a podcast Mixergy at the time and I come across his name in a forum where he was looking for a PayPal HiRise integration just emailed him said hey he's still looking for one of these and he said no but you know or did you did you build a plugin for it or something I said well sort of you know can hook up PayPal and HiRise and then I did some snooping and found like what other tools he uses realized he used Wufu AWeber and a few other things and said, you know, can hook that stuff up too.

7:34Wade Foster:And he pretty much bit hook, line, and sinker. It was like, oh, I need something to take my Wufu contacts and put them in my newsletter that runs on AWeber. And so I was like, okay, great. Like we do that. And I was like, Brian, Mike, build the Wufu AWeber thing, right? We got to go. So, you know, give him access to the thing. And the next thing I remember is he's like, Wade, this looks cool, but I can't get anything set up. Can you get on Skype and show me how to do it. I'm dating myself with all these product names. I've used Skype. Yeah. Yeah. It's okay. I'm coaching him through setting all this stuff up.

8:08And every step of the way,

8:10Wade Foster:like the product just barely works. Like it is rough. We've not been working on it, but for like a few weeks at this point in time. So it is not very good yet. But we get to the end, the zap is turned on and we go to test it. So he fills out his form on Wufu, hit submit and we go refresh the web page and see like, hey, is there an email address in there? Sure enough, there's the email address. And his reaction is like, oh, this is incredible, Wade. Like, how much money do I owe you? Like, this is going to save me hours every single day. And that was when I knew I was like, holy cow, like this product kind of stinks.

8:48Wade Foster:It barely works. And yet his reaction is like, how much do I owe you? Whereas in the past, I was working on this quote unquote slick software, the software that's like good, well-designed, all this other stuff, and couldn't get a taker. And so I was like, man, if we could just get this product to not totally stink, like I think we're onto something. It was like early December that this happened. And by January, I'd quit the day job and was like, all right, let's go figure out how to go faster on this thing. I'll be right back with more of my conversation with Wade Foster.

9:32Hi, I'm Molly Graham, host of Work Life, a podcast from TED. The most important lessons about work usually aren't the ones anyone teaches you. They come from experience, from uncertainty, from figuring things out as you go. On this show, my expert guests and I explore how careers really unfold. through change, through doubt, through the decisions that shape who we become over time. Because those moments aren't the exception. They are the work. Listen to Work Life wherever you get your podcasts.

10:09Wade Foster:The business world is moving faster than ever. And when change hits, we need to learn in real time. On Rapid Response, you'll hear candid conversations with CEOs and leaders making tough calls about AI, human talent, responsibility, and the bottom line, how they navigate uncertainty, pressure, and high stakes moments. I'm Bob Safian, former editor-in-chief of Fast Company, and I'll be your host as each episode breaks down what you need to know right now. You can find Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts.

10:56So I want you to take us back to this moment in 2023 when basically Zapier's relationship with AI changed. So ChatGPT4 just launched and you called for an internal code red. What did you see about ChatGPT4? You saw both a concern and an opportunity. And what did you do with that?

11:18Wade Foster:Yeah. You know, so we basically had noticed a couple things with GPT-4. So first, it came out roughly six months, I think, after 3.5. Two, the capability improvement was obvious. Just talking of GPT-4 was just a lot smarter than 3.5. And the cost had come down meaningfully. And so it was one of those things where it felt like, you know, what happens when 4.5 comes out? What happens when 5 comes out? You know, does that happen six months from now? What happens if it happens four months from now? Are they going to launch these things faster and faster? Are they going to get better and better? Are they going to get cheaper and cheaper?

12:04Wade Foster:Even if one of those things is true, this is very impactful to the whole industry and to what we work on. If all three of those are true, then this is the most important technology that has maybe ever been invented, certainly since the internet, certainly in my active career. And, you know, we weren't exactly sure what to do with that yet, but we were like, we need people to pay attention internally. And we never called the code red. We didn't even know what a code red, no one even had any sort of like, oh, when Wade calls a code red, here are the steps that you take. It was just like code red.

12:39Wade Foster:And people were like, okay, I hear that that's important. What do we do? and so you know we were figuring out what we were what to do and i remember teeing up like a handful of things that we were like okay this is what like i want to change in terms of how we operate a lot of it was like here's how the product needs to change here's how operations needs to change here's a list of stuff that's really important when i look back at that time though i would say there was really one thing that stood out as being more effective than anything else we paused the company for an entire week and ran a hackathon.

13:11Wade Foster:Didn't matter if you're in engineering or not. That's awesome. It's like everyone's going to put your hand on a keyboard and you're going to build something with AI. And at the end of that week, we went from about 10 % of people using AI as part of their daily job to over 50%. Amazing. And as a result, like more and more of the company started to build an intuition around what is this technology? What is it capable of? How might we build in tandem with the technology for our customers how can we use it ourselves to improve our own operations and i think that just company pause where it was like hey we need to just go do some sense making together um i have since seen be like productive for almost any other company that does one of these like they they all cite that like hands-on learning time being way more impactful than, you know, the CEO memo or the AI committee or any of that kind of stuff.

14:05So a few things came out of that hackathon, one of which I imagine is this new product strategy. So the reason why we use Zapier is, as I said, we use CloudCode and we have a whole bunch of AI agents doing work on our behalf. But to really have these agents work for you, you need to connect them to your other tools. And so we wanted to connect Claude to our email and our calendar and Airtable and like PitchBook and all these other platforms. And that led us to Zapier. So you've become like the AI connector or the AI integration hub. How did that idea come about and what did it take to do that?

14:45And I would love for you to also explain what an MCP is, because that's basically how agents talk to each other. Yeah, yeah.

14:53Wade Foster:Well, you know, I think some of this was a little bit fortuitous, right? You know, in 2011, we set out to just integrate stuff. We're going to make integrations really easy for people. And so our integration story is, you know, 15 years old. We've just gotten really good at integrating any tool that you have on the internet far better than anyone else. Pretty quickly, we started to notice, and as did many others, that these AI models are incredibly smart on, you know, a bunch of like textbook information. You know, they're trained on the internet. And so, you know, if you want to ask it like, hey, how should I think about a marketing campaign?

15:31Wade Foster:Or how should I think about, you know, this strategy? Or how should I think about building a product like this? It will give you a very generally good answer. But it kind of leaves you wanting. You're like, well, I don't want a generally good answer. I want something that's great for the environment that I operate in. And so what a lot of folks started to notice is if you gave it that context, if you let it see your CRM data, if you let it listen to your like closed one and closed loss gong calls, if you gave it access to your email, your Slack, like just all this stuff, and then started asking questions and then started building automations, you got very specific and very good answers.

16:15Wade Foster:Stuff that you start to go, that's as good as I'd get from like a good teammate internally, or maybe better in some cases, because it's able to read over all this stuff that most humans can't do and hold in context. And so that was where it was like, oh, Zapier really has a role here because we can bring the integrations into these model capabilities and help you orchestrate the workflows, the agents, like however you want to sort of go build those out. And so we sort of just doubled down on that. In the past, the integrations were all done through APIs. Well, now there's this new thing, MCP, you called it, stands for model context protocol.

16:54Wade Foster:But effectively, it's just a way for agents to talk to other agents. I think for most folks, it doesn't matter to know much more than that. But the nice thing you can do about it is it allows you to talk in natural language to an agent or to something else. And then behind the scenes, the AI knows how to convert that into structured requests, aka an API call or something like that. Maybe we can give an example here. So if I'm talking to my chief of staff, Blue, we call it Blue, on Claude, and I'm like, oh, like, can you add this new potential investment to the Airtable? Here's the name of the founder.

17:33Here's the website of the thingy, or actually even better, go find, you know, details on the founder, go find the website, blah, blah, blah, and add it to the CRM, right? that then gets converted to a language that Airtable can understand. That's you guys or that's the MCP, I guess. Exactly.

17:52Wade Foster:Basically, it takes this like unstructured request, which is like, hey, do this thing and do it this way, etc. Which when you're talking to another human, another human knows like, oh, I know exactly what you mean. But a computer, computers need very structured requests to be able to do those well. And so what the MCP does is sort of takes that, you know, human language and it converts it down into something that a computer knows how to do, but it allows it to talk to other agents that are like not part of its core systems. Kind of called tools is what a lot of people call this stuff. With the Zapier MCP, you can talk to all of your tools.

18:26Wade Foster:You can talk to all your apps. So you can, you know, hey, pull out the, you know, five biggest customers we have out of the CRM, draft an email, inviting them to this event. You can do that sort of like natural language type stuff. But you can also go a step further. Like that's where you are like talking to it. You can also say, hey, now every time this happens, I want you to build an agent that does this workflow for me. And it can go, oh, great. I'll make sure to set up an agent for you or a workflow that does that. So you don't always have to be reminding it. Well, hey, it happened again. Can you please do it again?

18:56Wade Foster:Or it happened another time. Can you please do it again? It could just always be listening and paying attention to the environment and then taking actions for you. And that's where I think, you know, a lot of folks started with AI as a chatbot. Now we're starting to get a lot of AIs, like an assistant, talking to these things. I think the next era is like, oh, AI truly taking action, delegating it to these agents, these bots, these workflows, etc. And that's what I'm really excited, where I think Zapier can be like a huge unlock for, you know, individuals and companies. Can you talk through the business model?

19:24What does it look like?

19:26Wade Foster:Yeah, I mean, for Zapier, it's pretty simple. It's a subscription with usage-based credits associated with it. I think a lot of this is pretty standard in the AI era. I think what's very different about these AI products is in the past, when you were working with software, you would have an interface where the human still has to do all the work. So I'm still the person in there like writing the email, logging, doing the data entry, all that sort of stuff. I think with these AI tools with things like Zapier, the value is it can do the work for you. And so it is closer to having this entity that does work on your behalf when anything pops up.

20:01Wade Foster:And so it sort of makes sense for it to be closer to like this credit based like style system where it's like, hey, every time, you know, this event happens, like it's doing real work for me. Is the right way to see Zapier is like the middle layer or the middleman? And if so, is this a vulnerable position to be on? And I'll give an example. I did mention that we are using you guys. And in one particular instance, we wanted to integrate PitchBook. We use PitchBook a lot. We're investors, right? We couldn't find their MCP on Zapier. So we asked PitchBook and they were like, no, no, no, you can just like use our MCP directly.

20:32And that made me wonder, like, what is the role that Zapier does? And how do you future proof yourself so that you're just not taken out of the equation?

20:42Wade Foster:Yeah. So I think there's a couple ways that folks should set up their AI stack. And I think getting this right is strategically important to companies. So right now, I see a lot of companies, organizations going all in on one AI stack. Maybe it's, hey, I'm a Claude shop, or maybe it's I'm a ChatGPT Kodak shop, or maybe I'm a Gemini shop, or maybe I'm a co-pilot shop, etc. The savvy companies are not doing this. And the reason why is that the frontier is changing super duper fast. And so just because one of these labs has the best model at a particular job at any given moment in time does not mean that they will always have it.