Wade Foster

And so there's gonna have to be a lot of changes, not just with adopting the technology, but also rethinking how these organizations work from the ground up.

That'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.

Um, and now, like, we also understand this is really, really dangerous, like, that we are quickly moving in a realm where we just don't even understand these models and how, how they're doing what they're doing.

Okay, so now we'll come back to, like, the reality of just, like, all right, so early user comments, what are people saying? Wade Foster, CEO, Zapier, "We see LLMs drop so often we go numb.

We shouldn't be numb to GPT-6 Astra.

It set the new record score on Zapier's Automation Bench, the benchmark we created to gauge how these models perform on real workflows.

You can check him out at fullscale.io. Matt, before I formally introduce you, I always like to point out other episodes of the podcast people should check out.

um melissa kwan who big thank you that's how we met actually um you could check out the interview i did with her in the e-webinar it was fantastic uh john ferrara uh he's founder and ceo of nimble he has some good mark cuban stories in there i had the co-founder of zapier wade foster on that was also a great one and um one of my favorites too was jotform And he talks about, you know, Matt has a great book, which we will talk a little bit about, you know, product driven.

And, you know, really with the JotForm founder, we talked about how he grew to 25 million users on the back of a kind of a product driven business.

marketing uh really for his company so it was really interesting there this episode is brought to you by rise 25 at rise 25 we help businesses connect their dream relationships and partnerships uh we do we are an easy button for a company to launch and run a podcast uh you know matt and i were talking about mixer g shout out to andrew warner who i was done work with in 2008-ish for like seven, eight years.

The goal is to give AI agents as much context as possible.

At Zapier, CEO Wade Foster encourages employees to communicate in public channels.

He even tracks the percentage of public messages sent by executives.

His own rate is 79%, while his chief marketing officer is at 98%.

[laughs]

... and say, "Wade said this weird thing.

I think I get it."

Tell me what this guy was talking about.

And that's, like, the cool part of AI.

That, that is cool.

You gave us a list of stuff, so we said, "Wade, what are you, what are you making?" And it doesn't always have to be, like, this, like, crazy, like, game-changing stuff.

But what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of, like, three or four things.

They also have investors coming in.

So I was thinking, you know, one of the interesting episodes, I had one of the co-founders of Zapier on the podcast, Wade Foster.

That was an interesting episode.

One of the co-founders of Pipedrive was also good.

You want each product to bring a new audience to the bundle, not just deepen engagement with an existing audience.

There's this term, the SaaS apocalypse, right? And we actually had, uh, Wade Foster, founder of Zapier, who I know you know well as well.

He was one of our first guests on the show.

And back then we were talking-- It was this term usage, usage-based pricing had just kind of like come out, and he started talking about it.

Literally, there's a running counter on their website.

And Wade Foster co-founded Zapier in 2011, and he has led it ever since, turning a scrappy Y Combinator startup into the $5 billion plumbing of the SaaS era on barely a million dollars raised.

Now comes what may be his most exciting chapter yet, deliberately disrupting his own company before AI does it for him.

Welcome to the show, Wade.

I was just playing around with it recently, but where can people, you know, find you and learn more?

Yes.

Uh, I mean, you can follow me on, uh, LinkedIn or X. I'm Wade Foster there.

But, you know, if there was one thing I'd recommend that's different about Zapier is I would try and install it into your agent harness of choice.