#2299 Zapier is using AI to sell to AI

12:50Wade Foster:and that was valuable well I love using them for hiring decisions because it is very critical and so you know I find that humans when you go through hiring processes have all sorts of like biases built into them. I think one, it, you, you find this, it's hard for humans to say no to like candidates that are good. It gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So like two people before you said yes, now are you going to be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are not often as like critical. And so, you know, they'll ask like a surface level question and then kind of move on to the next thing.

13:32Wade Foster:And they don't necessarily dig as much to be like, is this person really, really good? And so as a result, when you score against the rubric, I find that human graders on average tend to be a little softer. Now that's not generally, that's not universally true. I've seen like human evaluators be like very, very strict too. But yeah, I think, uh, the, the war council is like it, it, it plays its role and it tells you exactly what it sees. It's not influenced by, you know, these other things. It just said, it just calls it like it sees it. And as a result, I find it to be a really helpful tool at keeping the panel honest, keeping me honest on a decision where I can find myself sort of like feeling one way or the other.

14:16Wade Foster:And then you talk to it and it like really grounds the decision. And you're like, then you have to think about it. Like if it disagrees with you, you're like, hmm, why does it disagree with me?

14:25Andrew Warner:What's another decision that you took to it?

14:28Wade Foster:uh let's see i've i've got um what was a recent one that i was working with it on uh i had um oh i was i was reviewing a bunch of um sales data and uh i was trying to um figure out like like some of the stuff was good some of the stuff we were doing wasn't so good and i was like trying to figure out what kind of feedback I needed to give. And so I first like went back and forth with it without invoking the skill, just like pulling in a bunch of contacts, loading in a bunch of data. And then finally I was like, okay, I want the war council to advise on this. Like, what is, like, where are we winning and where are we losing on this?

15:10Wade Foster:Like, what do you see? And like, what kind of feedback do you, you know, needs to be given? And so it like quickly summarized, it was like, here's the three things that are like most important. You're killing the first two. The third is like a bloodbath. You need to fix it. And so you're like, oh, okay. Like that, it like, it put language to a thing I was maybe feeling, but couldn't quite articulate yet.

15:33Andrew Warner:Can we give people your skill? Sure. Okay. I would love, by the way, at some point to see how you set up cursor because you're essentially using it the way that some people use chat GPT, but with invoking different skills and different context. I guess you're kind of using it the way that Claude wants people to use Claude Co-Work. When can we see that?

15:54Wade Foster:Yeah, I mean, I use it as like a second brain. And so, you know, as part of this, I have a bunch of context inside a thing I call my co-pilot. And the co-pilot has the company strategy. It has our product strategy. It has the company values.

16:07Andrew Warner:Can you show us without even, I know you've got some things that are open or private. Can you just show us the layout, the setup, and how you use it?

16:17Wade Foster:Sure. Sure. So look, I like, you know, there's a lot of these tools. I like using cursor because you can switch between a bunch of different models. So you can see here, I have like Clopas Claude 4.6, but I can switch into, you know, 5.3 codecs, Gemini 3, et cetera, like very fast, which I find to be pretty useful. And, you know, you just have this like chat tool here.

16:37Andrew Warner:Before you do, what are you finding that's more useful in one versus the other?

16:42Wade Foster:so i think the i find switching is really useful when you're working on a problem and you want to get again different perspectives so like i'll have it critique its work um one thing i've found is that like opus is like more enjoyable to just like talk to and go back to it like sort of is it is an easier conversation list but like when i'm having it work on hard problems it sometimes just like bugs out and doesn't do as good of a job and so oftentimes for those i'll switch over to Codex 5.3, which is the OpenAI model. And that, again, it's not as good conversationally, but it is just like much, much better.

17:20Wade Foster:And so like I was dealing with this like annoying bug with the, I had to build this like old MCP server for a tool that I was using. And Claude was just like, it just, I just like kept, I just kept going and going and just couldn't seem to get it right. And so I toggled over to GPT 5.3 Codex and I said, hey, critique the prior agent's entire work and tell me where it's getting stuff wrong and then go fix it and it was like it's making this dumb mistake i've got you oh that is such a great idea you know what

17:52Andrew Warner:even when i with my little programs there are times when it's just stuck and it can't solve it to be able to go say hey go critique figure out what it's missing okay brilliant okay so now i see your setup here i see the beginning of it what else how else do you get context into it well so

18:06Wade Foster:So basically, you point cursor at a file system, which the file system is just like files on your machine. And I usually keep the file system closed. But you can see here all the context that I've got into this thing. And so I have it create a daily brief and a daily review for me. So you can see a whole bunch of stuff there. I've got a bunch of strategy stuff in there. I've got – oh, gosh, I can't show you this.

18:37Andrew Warner:Oh, goodness. Because it has all your meeting notes?

18:40Wade Foster:Well, it's just like some of the file names are just like a giveaway on certain stuff as well, too. But you can see I've got like strategy, decisions, leadership, people, meetings, initiatives. All this stuff is probably fine.

18:51Andrew Warner:It doesn't look at all of those, does it? To consider any one question, it just has the ability to, and you invoke it with an at symbol.

18:59Wade Foster:Well, so here's the thing. All this stuff is in the context because it's pointed at my co-pilot. So it can go like crawl the system and find it on its own. But I can also say, you know, hey, like, you know, let's see. What's an interesting example?

19:19Andrew Warner:I'm trying to decide whether to continue this interview with Andrew.

19:21Wade Foster:Yeah, I want to figure out if I should keep working with Andrew or not. Remember, so like I could just ask it like this. And it will, you know, sift through all of the context that I have shared. But I can also say, remember to keep in mind the, you know, company strategy, right? Something like that. So if I really want it to like, hey, like really index on this, I can do something like that. Okay. And do you usually do multiple skills at once?

19:56Andrew Warner:Like would you, or sorry, would you say company strategy and use this skill? Or are you just picking one type?

20:01Wade Foster:Because you can, skills usually just have like keywords that you can invoke them on. So I can say, you know, should I work with Andrew or not? Whoops. It probably doesn't know. We'll see. It's just thinking. We'll X out of that. You picked the wrong Andrew. I know. There are multiple Andrews. So should I work with Andrew or not? And then please invoke the War Council. So like that, I didn't have to do anything fancy. It just knows that I have a skill in here somewhere. that is the war council and i actually don't know where it is in this system but it's in here somewhere uh and you know the the reason um you know like there's sort of like like the fancy thing about like that i see a lot of people doing is you know a lot of people will get caught up on like the file system they're like how am i supposed to organize all that stuff what is that all over there it's like very confusing honestly it doesn't matter just like ask the agent to like build all that stuff for you.

21:02Wade Foster:And so, you know, if I'm building out a skill, I'll just say like, Hey, make me a skill for this and put it in the skills, like put it where you think it goes. And so it just organized, it keeps everything organized for me. And when I, when I built out this whole structure, the way I built it out was I said, Hey, I want to build out a system that makes me amazing as a CEO, like help me build out, like create you to be an amazing co-pilot, amazing, like chief of staff for me as a, as a, a system and build out a whole set of like markdown files and files and systems and all that stuff that like helps you help me and you should get better as we work together more.

21:37Wade Foster:And that's all I told it. And so it organized that entire file system for me. I don't really look at it all that often. It just, it's just there.

21:44Andrew Warner:You know, my one frustration with all this is that it's not in the cloud. And I know that that's a benefit too, but sometimes I'm on a different device or I want to be on, I want to be on my phone. Okay. What, one other thing that I'm wondering about with your setup is do you use MCP, like Zapier's MCP to be able to, for example, draft an email. So once you come to a conclusion, you will, how do you invoke that? How do you say use a Zapier MCP and draft an email for me?

22:11Wade Foster:So you, um, you just can turn on like a bunch of, um, uh, you can create your Zapier MCP server and then you add tools to it. So you could add like Slack, Gmail, calendar, you name it. And then you don't usually, you don't have to like, again, you don't have to do any fancy stuff. You can just say, draft me an email, please. Add this to my calendar event. Now, if you do say, use Zapier MCP to draft a email inside of Gmail for you, you will find that it like definitely gets it right. Sometimes if you don't like, if you're not that like verbose with it, it will forget that it has access to use those tools and you'll have to remind it and say like, hey, remember you have access to these tools.

22:52Wade Foster:Where do you give it the tools? Where?

22:55Andrew Warner:Yeah, where?

22:56Wade Foster:So you can go to mcp.zapyr.com and just start turning on tools.

23:02Andrew Warner:And then how do you tell Opus 4.6 in this case or Codex? How do you tell them that they have access to it?

23:10Wade Foster:So they will know because you authenticate your client with Zapier MCP.

23:15Andrew Warner:On Zapier's site, you press the button, you connect it into Claude. It now has it forever and ever. Exactly.

23:21Wade Foster:just like if you were connecting like you're you know authenticating your gmail account to a tool or your twitter account to a tool or whatever it's like big window pops up and says i grant access and then it sort of can go work with it honestly i found it so much easier we can stop sharing soon

23:35Andrew Warner:i found it so much easier to connect it to claude than i did to connect it to uh to chat gpt like the other day i just said to claude do you have access to this can you do it goes yeah you gave it to me and I gave it to, gave it via Zapier MCP. Chat GPT is kind of frustrating that way. All right. Yeah.

23:52Wade Foster:They're all kind of at different like, uh, parts in their journey on how good they are at working with connectors right now.

23:59Andrew Warner:You told me a few months ago, I'm not a developer, but I'm getting really into cloud code. You've gotten into it. Now you've got a team of how many people working at Zapier?

24:06Wade Foster:There's 800 people at Zapier.

24:08Andrew Warner:How do you get them to feel this level of it's not me, but I'm going to try it. And ideally the level that where you are, where you want to go say to Chelsea, you got to find out, you got to see what I'm doing. How do you get them to that?

24:21Wade Foster:So, you know, at Zapier, we have this value. Don't be a robot, build the robot. So like, I think we have a culture where the employee base is probably more leaned in on this stuff than probably most, even still, we try and have a like very vibrant culture of show and tell. And so we had a big summit last a couple of weeks ago where everyone came to LA. At the summit, we did all sorts of workshops. And so at the workshops, people were showing off, here's my AI chief of staff. And those workshops were like standing room only because people are like, I want to learn how to do this stuff. We had hackathons where people are sitting around learning from each other, training notes on this.

24:58Wade Foster:This week now, we are rolling out company-wide. We're getting everybody in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, HR, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or codex. One of the three. It's like, you need to be using a tool like this as a daily driver of your work because the power of these tools is just so, it's so incredible. And especially when you hook them up to something like Zapier MCP and give it access to your tools and your data, the types of things you can do, it's just like jaw dropping.

25:32Andrew Warner:Like what? So now I'm understanding what you're doing. I wouldn't have thought of it two years ago, but go ahead.

25:37Wade Foster:I'll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did, I had the war council help me out with on, uh, analyzing our sales data. What that was, was I had four different spreadsheets. Those each spreadsheet had like 10 or 12 tabs in it. They all had like hundreds of rows of data in it. And so I don't know about you, but like, I don't consider like a spreadsheet, my natural habitat and so i'm looking at all this stuff and i can like i can start to like poke out some interesting things going on in there but i'm like it's hard for me to spot it all and so i just fed all four of those spreadsheets into my ai system and i said help me review first i said just like help me review this stuff like walk me through what's in in these these spreadsheets because i don't i'm not exactly sure how to go through them and so as it's going through it's like pointing out different things to me.

26:35Wade Foster:I always like to start here too, because I don't want to assume, I don't want to try and one-shot the thing thing. Like I like to, I like to check its work. And if I say like, Hey, help me review it. Like step-by-step, I can sort of get a feel for the files in the same way that it has a feel for the finals. But then eventually when I get to the end, I'll just say like, analyze all the themes that you see in here that you think are important for me as the CEO to know. And then it just loops over all this stuff. And it says, you know, here's your top performing reps. Here's reps that haven't closed a deal in the last six months.

27:07Wade Foster:You know, here's where your lead handoffs are failing. You know, here's all this stuff. And I say, okay, great. We're in the, like, which, which sheet tells you that? And so then I go in and look and look, it's not perfect. So like, um, you know, the, for, for example, it, it came back. One of its feedback was like, you have five reps that haven't closed a deal. Now, of course, like for me i'm like whoa five people that have not closed a single deal like i'm immediately like that that's not acceptable right and so i'm like okay give me the names and so then i went and looked and checked all five names turns out one was on maternity leave the last three months okay like it's freaking out but that's that makes sense of course she's not closing deals uh turns out two of the other people had one had joined less than a month ago and the other had joined less than two months ago.

27:56Wade Foster:And so I was like, okay, like that's tolerable. Like that, that, that sort of makes sense based on sales rep signs. And then there was two that had joined seven months ago. And so those were the two where I was like, okay, what's going on here? And so, you know, it was freaking out over five. It should have been freaking out of two, but like I would have, the time it would have taken me to get to that answer would have been, I don't know. Like, I don't know if I would have even gotten to it. And in this, I went back and forth with it for like 15 minutes and immediately had like, you know, not just one example like that.

28:31Wade Foster:I probably had like three or four like very critical things sitting on my desk where I was like, okay, I need to go figure out how to solve these problems next. And that's the kind of stuff that you can do with these tools.

28:43Andrew Warner:I see. And so if I'm thinking about even your assistant, Michal, she'd be able to use this to analyze a spreadsheet or to analyze something that was sent over to her.

28:52Wade Foster:Yeah, you can just like you can kind of like you don't like the thing I'm finding is you still need to have some level of like like if you've never used a spreadsheet before, if you have no like data fluency at all, you're probably going to make mistakes with these tools. but like if you're like just okay and I consider myself like an amateur like you know data analyst um I don't spend all day every day inside of spreadsheets but like I kind of like sniff out BS when I see it I find that now with these tools I'm it's like putting like a rocket booster on my back where I'm like oh my gosh I can work so much more effectively with this stuff because it does all the things that I would want to do but just can't because I don't spend all my day doing this stuff.

29:38Wade Foster:And so I'm just slow and, you know, not as like my intuition isn't as strong. All right.

29:46Andrew Warner:I'm, I'm going to ask you for software that you're excited about recently. And then I'm going to close it out with a quick personal question, but I'll tell you one of mine. I just tried something called wide frame. I got early access to it. It's a wide combinator company. You, that does vibe video editing. I essentially throw a bunch of video at it. And then in the chat box. I say, I want you to do this. It analyzes the video. It says, okay, I see he's got this. I see he's got that. I'm going to put it in this order. I think the hook should be that. And I didn't even tell it it's going to be a social post.

30:14Andrew Warner:It just found what the opening was. It was fantastic. It's 50 % there. Little quirks have to be worked out, but boy, it's so beautiful. And largely I don't want it for work. I want it for all the family videos that I have. Like here's family vacation, 30 hours, go do something. Anything that you're especially excited about? I mean, I am like, it's, I don't know that I have anything beyond just like, I am using

30:38Wade Foster:cursor and the models and all these MCP servers to do just like more and more stuff. And so I find that like the CLI tools, these MCP servers are where I am getting more and more value, which is, which is odd for me as a non-developer to say like, those are the tools that I'm finding really, really great.

30:56Andrew Warner:I do too. All right. The final personal question is, why do you have a hat behind you that says, know.

31:01Wade Foster:So that was a gift from Brian Halligan. So Brian Halligan is the founder and former CEO of HubSpot. And one of the things he was coaching me on is he said, you know, HubSpot, we would go through these periods where we do all our planning, we come out with our priorities, and you know, the new year would hit. And immediately, you know, we would have new ideas and we'd start to get distracted with all sorts of other stuff. And so he said, I started wearing a no hat just as a way to remind people, like, we know what we got to go do, stay focused, like go execute on the stuff that we said was important.

31:41Wade Foster:And, um, so he gave me a no hat cause I have that exact same problem. I just get too excited about the new thing. And I need to remember to be like, stop. Like, that's a cool idea, but we have cool ideas. Let's go execute on those.

31:56Andrew Warner:It does fit really well in the frame here in the video all right wade hell yeah thanks for doing this and i'm gonna hit you

32:01Wade Foster:up for that skill all right i love it andrew bye everyone bye