$5B founder: How I automate my entire work with AI (3 tutorials)

Transcript

Wait, wait, Sam, you got to clickbait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life. Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now? Who knows? All right, we should do a little intro. So first, is it? I've been saying Zapier my whole life. Is it Zapier or Zapier? Zapier makes you happier is the trick. It rhymes with happier. Wow. Dude, how is that not your slogan? Here's what your slogan is on your site: The automation layer for Argentic AI. It doesn't really flow the same way as Zapier makes you happier. It doesn't. So there's two things from the name. One, we just couldn't afford the second P when we started. The domain was available. But the other, we were too clever for our own good, is it has API in the name, which we always thought, oh, that's neat. Because it's all connecting all these APIs and all that good stuff. I didn't even notice that. Didn't notice that. Yeah. Honestly, didn't even notice the P was missing. But also, if you put Zapier makes you happier, I would have read it as Zapier makes you happier. Just gone on with your day. But we're happy you're here. Thank you. The short story is you're this guy who's built this really cool, started off as a very simple idea where you can make different apps connect with each other. What does that really mean? Let's say I have a business and people submit a form over here on my form thing. But then I need that form thing, I need all the people who submitted the form, I need that data to go over here in this other unrelated app. And you guys built those universal plugs. And you can just plug in anything to anything else. And it was just incredibly useful. Sam used it. I used it. We didn't realize, or I didn't realize, how monstrous of a business this had become. I believe you guys are worth several billions. Maybe five billion was a number that I had seen at some point in time. And I think you had bootstrapped a very long way. Is it purely bootstrapped or you, at some point, took some money? I think the word people call it now is seedstrap. So we did go through YC and we raised about a million and change. But that's all the primary capital we've ever taken. Yeah. So just incredibly, to raise a million bucks and then get to five billion in value is just pretty wild. So super cool. But you're here not to necessarily tell the whole story of how Zapier makes you happier, but to show us what you're doing with AI. Can you give me a public sales pitch real quick? I'm requesting a sales pitch. And what I want is, I know how OG V1 of Zapier worked, where you connect one app to another. You're saying, hey, we have this new AI product that you use with Claude. Presumably, it makes your Claude or ChatGPT usage more powerful, whatever. I haven't been using that. Also, here's the other caveat. I'm kind of dumb. So imagine talking to somebody with half the IQ of yours. He's like, can you give me a pitch to someone who's dumb and doesn't listen, but thinks they're smart at the same time? The confidence of a smart man. Yeah. I have really good news for you, though. I think AI is this incredible gift to people who are dumb because you can just talk to it and say, hey, I didn't understand that answer. Explain it to me like I'm five. Right. And so you can keep going down the dumbness stack, I guess, for lack of a better word, until you understand it and then go, okay, now teach me back up to where I need to go. So, okay. The sales pitch. You want the sales pitch. In the old world, you know Zapier. Come in, build integrations, connect apps. The new world has a lot of the same things, but it's different. Nowadays, you're hanging in Claude. You're hanging in Codex or Cursor or OpenClaw or whatever it is that you like using. Right. And you're just talking to it, going back and forth. Most people start with that. AI as a chatbot is valuable, but it's only generally smart. It knows everything that the internet knows. It doesn't know anything about your business. So the next step that you need to go to is to start connecting your tools. You start connecting your CRM, your help desk, your email, your team chat, all this stuff. And you feed that context into the AI. Now, when you start asking questions about My First Million and all this other stuff, you get not just generally smart answers, you get hyper-specific answers around how your business works. Okay. So if you install Zapier into this, you can hook up any of the tools that we have. Right. So that's the first thing, the first bit of value, and the first thing that people experience, is, oh, connecting stuff makes sense. But you can do native connectors and all that other stuff. So use Zapier, use the native connectors, do whatever you want. The next layer, and where this gets really powerful, is not where you're sitting, having this back-and-forth conversation. It's when you're actually deploying automations and agents to actually go operate for you while you sleep. That's where you start to get the real magic. And the reason you want to use Zapier to do that versus any of these generic agent builders. What's an example? I mean, Claude has routines or ChatGPT has scheduled stuff. There are a bunch of these things that can do agents or pseudo-agents these days. But the nice thing about Zapier is that if you use us, we are going to make it so that whatever you build is optimized to run more deterministically than agentically. And I don't think people have caught up on this yet, but you've probably experienced it. Climbing up the IQ scale. I know. I know. Hang tight. Hang tight. Hang tight. Agents, they kind of just guess what to do. Right. And if they're smart enough, they guess right most of the time. But sometimes the agents guess wrong. And the second thing is agents are using tokens. Right. We've probably heard token maxing. Right. So they're really expensive. But if you use Zapier, we're going to write code for you and we're going to write workflow logic for you, which means that it's going to run like a machine runs. And so it's not going to burn tokens. It's going to be reliable and accurate. And it's only going to use AI exactly where it needs to use AI. And you've got this. You can host it on zapier.com. So you don't have to sit here and keep your laptop open to run these agents in the background. And so you just get this rock-solid infrastructure that Zapier has always been great at and the hookup of everything that we've always done. But you can build inside Claude, which is really nice because Claude, the natural-language style of building is, I don't know, it's just way better than the no-code style stuff that we were doing in the past. Well, you're not the Wolf of Wall Street, but that was a pretty good sales pitch. I gave you the sell me this pen test, and you did a pretty good job there. So I appreciate that. I feel like I now actually understand it. So that was good. Well, and here's the magic. If you didn't and you're just pretending and being nice, you can take the transcript of this and you can plug it into Claude and say, Wade said this weird thing. I think I did it. Tell me what this guy was talking about. Tell me what he was really saying. And that's the cool part of AI. That is cool. You gave us a list of stuff. So we said, Wade, what are you making? And it doesn't always have to be this crazy, game-changing stuff, but what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of three or four things. You said you have robots. No, wait, Sam, you gotta clickbait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life. Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now? Who knows? You. I mean, no. I don't know how the markets behave right now. They're up and down all sorts of ways. What would your guess be? I don't think about it, honestly. I'm just like, how do we build stuff that makes our customers successful? I knew you were a sweet guy. I didn't think you were a liar, though. Yeah. Because I know you think about it. Just under oath. You know that, right? No, no, no. And it doesn't always have to be this crazy, game-changing stuff, but what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of three or four things. You said you have robots. No, wait, Sam, you gotta clickbait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life. Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now? Who knows? You. I don't know how the markets behave right now. They're up and down all sorts of ways. What would your guess be? I don't think about it, honestly. I'm just, how do we build stuff that makes our customers successful? I knew you were a sweet guy. I didn't think you were a liar, though. Yeah. Because I know you think about it. Just under oath. You know that, right? No, no, no. There's the old saying, right? In the short term, the markets are a voting machine. In the long term, they're a weighing machine. I'd rather you just tell me F off and give me these lies because I know you think about it, but don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain, Wade. I honestly don't. Just tell me it's none of my business and I'd accept it. All right. It's none of your business, right? Okay. That helps. That's fair. Since the last time you guys got value, where did the five billion number come from in the first place? That was a secondary number sale that happened in 2021, maybe? Okay. Are revenues slightly up, way up, down, way down since then? Revenues are up. Yeah. Okay. All right. Good. So we're doing well. All right. The clickbait headline holds. Okay. Continue on. So, how you're actually using AI as a high-functioning CEO. Okay. Let me share screen on some of this stuff so we'll get into the fun bits. One of the cool things is, because I work with my agent all the time, I can say, hey, I'm going on My First Million, help me demo this stuff. And so this is what it came up with. It's like, here's the stuff you should actually go demo. And so you can see, I've got four potential things we can show off. One is the robot staff. This is my chief of staff that does a whole bunch of different automations and agents for me. I've got the CEO CRM that I built that helps me stay really close with our enterprise customers. I've got an AI that argues back. I think this is a really important thing that every leader needs to build. I think there's a lot of CEOs out there, a lot of leaders out there, that are talking to an AI that just agrees with them all the time. And so you need to, there's a few tips and tricks you can do to force it to scrutinize your thinking rather than just tell you, yeah, you're totally right all the time. And then I've got a bunch of skills that I run for a whole bunch of random tasks internally. So, yeah, I would probably start with the robot staff. I think this is cool to dig into first thing. And I'll show the complete version of this, where I think most people start, is the morning brief. It's super simple. It's a good way to experience your first agent. You hook it up to your calendar, you hook it up to your email, you hook it up to any meeting notes you've got, any prioritization, a to-do list that you have. And then, in this case, it runs at 6 AM in the morning and then it sends me a Slack message. Yeah. I call this waking up like the president. The president wakes up, gets a daily brief. Here's what, sir, here's what you have on your plate. Say 9:30, you're talking to this person. 10 AM, this person's here. Here's what they want to talk about. That sort of thing. And so waking up like every, now everybody gets to wake up with a presidential briefing. Exactly. And so these things run. In my case, I have it send me a Slack message. You can have it send you an email. I mean, heck, you could probably have it fax you something if you really want to feel like the president. I have it set up so it prints, but it doesn't do it all the time. And I also have this woman named Ari, conveniently, because I told, I wanted to make it come from a person, and the person they made. Is that weird for you? That Sam named his agent after you? The person they selected looked like Ari. So I was like, it's Ari. So I have Ari that sends me a pump-up speech as well for the day. So I love these daily briefings. There you go. Now, so the cool thing I'll actually show you. So I have the link out to this one. This is running on Zapier, and you can see what this actually looks like. It looks like classic Zapier a little bit. Runs every day at 6 AM. It goes and fetches all the calendar events. And then here it's writing some specific code and hitting the AI to write the Slack in a very particular way. Now, what is different about this is we can poke over here. This is all code, which in the past, you couldn't do this with Zapier. Now I've not actually looked at any of this code. This is actually the first time I popped this open and even taken a look at what this is. So you don't have to know what's going on here. But again, it speaks to the value prop of Zapier. It's turning all of this stuff into a deterministic workflow, and it's only using AI in the places that you really need to use AI, which means this runs way more reliably, way more consistently, and way more cost-effectively than most agents. But can I use this instead? The problem that I have with Claude or Perplexity or whatever is that my computer has to be open for a lot of these routines to run. Exactly. And it's a pain in the ass. Would doing it on Zapier just be in lieu of using OpenClaw or having a Mac Mini? There you go. Exactly the point. You can just deploy these to Zapier and we run them in the cloud for you. That sounds way better than using OpenClaw or having a Mac Mini. So way, way simpler, right? You can look up here. It's also agent-managed. So one of the nice things is... All right, hold on just a second. I know what you're doing. Wade, who started a company, grew to a $5 billion valuation, he's telling you all these amazing AI prompts that he uses for his business. You're probably taking a lot of notes right now. That's exactly what I was doing. And so what we decided to do was take all of those notes, all of the scripts that he's talking about, and we put it into a really easy document. So you just copy and paste everything. So there's the prompts where he talks about AI arguing back with him, where he can stress-test different decisions by having a seven-person AI executive committee help him figure things out, and then your own life coach so you can have a better day. So if you want this exact AI workflow, again, you can just copy and paste all this stuff. Just click the link in the description or scan the QR code. All right, back to Wade. While it is running deterministically, if for whatever reason it breaks, say an API is down or something doesn't work right, it falls back to having an AI try and troubleshoot for you. And so it automatically applies fixes when things don't work quite the right way. And so there's this really nice blend of traditional software and agentic software here that is just super well done by the team over here. So I definitely would say, hey, if you're struggling with your open clauses, if you're keeping your laptop open all the time, you should definitely install Zapier into your agent or AI of choice and give this a try. Okay, what else? So you get the morning brief. That's pretty standard, I would say. So let's talk about... So I think the morning brief is pretty standard. But the one that I really like is the evening brief and the scribe. I've played with a couple versions of it. One is it runs after every meeting. And then I have another version that runs at the end of the day. I actually think this is way better than the morning brief. And so there's this really nice blend of traditional software and agentic software here that is just super well done by the team over here. So I definitely would say, hey, if you're struggling with your open clause, if you're keeping your laptop open all the time, you should definitely install Zapier into your agent or AI of choice and give this a try. Okay, what else? So you get the morning brief. That's pretty standard, I would say. So let's talk about... So I think the morning brief is pretty standard. But the one that I really like is the evening brief in the scribe. So I've had... I played with a couple versions of it. One is it runs after every meeting, and then I have another version that runs at the end of the day. I actually think this is way better than the morning brief. And the reason why is you could actually have the AI help you do stuff. So this loops over all of my meeting notes from the day. So I'm using Granola for all of my meetings. It loops over all of the to-dos that are still in my to-do list for the day. It loops over all of the outstanding emails that are in my inbox for the day. And then it prompts me and says, hey, how did the day go? So there's two key things that it does for me. One, when I say how the day went, I said it was a good day for this reason, or it was a bad day for this reason. So now all that stuff is getting logged, and it's learning how to tune my day to help me have more good days than bad days. Oh, that's interesting. The second thing that it's doing is it's actually taking action on stuff. So it says, hey, you were in a meeting with Sam and Sean yesterday, and they asked for an intro to your buddy over at this company. 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 these other things. And so this is where AI starts to get really helpful. It's not just giving you a brief and 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, when you can actually put it to work. So I love Scribe, those post-meeting follow-up or the end-of-the-day wrap-up, because it just, I don't know. I used to spend two hours at the end of my day just trying to catch up on every little ticky-tack thing that I got roped into. And now those two hours at the end of the day are down to 15 minutes. So you think this is legit saving you two hours a day almost? Yes. Yes. And furthermore, that what's good about my day, what's bad about my day part, it just helps me stay focused on the things that matter. So both the AI is helping me with that, but I also will send, I remember about 90 days after I started doing this, I said, hey, I had this thought. I was like, you know so much about what makes me have good days and bad days. Can you summarize what is common about my good days and what is common about my bad days? And he was like, sure. And it did all that stuff. And then I gave it to my assistant and I said, hey, please make my days look like more good days versus bad days. What were your good days and what were your bad days? So for me, 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. Once after lunch comes around, I'm just not going to get anything 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 is going to go great. I will win the rest of the day. But if I have to, if that time starts to get sucked into firefighting mode, you can tell I'll just be grumpy at the end of the day, where I'm just like, oh, I'm not being successful. And you'll notice this podcast started at 11 a.m. Can you show us how to get the AI to challenge you instead of? Oh yeah. 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 ChatGPT, if you're using Gemini, they often have a system prompt or a way that you can tune how it talks to you. And so in Cursor, I have a file that's the agent's MD. That's what it uses everywhere. Claude has a Claude MD. And I have a file that's like how to work with me. And I have it be direct and honest. I need the truth my coworkers are afraid to tell me. I need you to challenge my assumptions. I need you to poke holes in my thinking. I need you to disagree when you genuinely disagree. And these things are goal-seeking entities. And so if you tell it what I want from you is this, it's going to say, okay, that's what Wade wants, so I'm going to try and give him that goal. But if you don't tell it this, if you don't make this configuration, it's going to just genuinely try and placate you because it thinks that's what you want. And so you do have to tell it. Guide it a little bit. So here's an example of a live prompt I ran ahead of time for this. I said, hey, I'm thinking we should kill our entire free tier this quarter because one of our competitors raised prices. Help me draft the announcement. Right? So this is something that it should definitely say, hey, press pause. 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 three things on the table. So bring me the data. Tell me what the actual problem you're trying to solve is. Pricing announcements are wrong. Is there a smaller experiment you can run? That's great. Yeah. It's just helping you think through these problems. And then I have this other skill that I've made, which I call my war council skill. And so this is an even more specific version of this that I will often invoke. So I could say, hey, I'm thinking about hiring this person. Here's all the notes that I've got on them from the interview panel. 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. 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 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 as a standing member of the war council. There's the ruthless CFO as a standing member. There's a contrarian board member that is a standing member of the war council. 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 Travis Kalanick transcripts or something? What did you, how did you do that? In my case, it's a generic version, but you could do whatever you want. If you want it to have Travis... What does generic version mean, though? You just said you be a wartime COO. I just said these are the traits of a wartime COO. Actually, what I did was say, I want a wartime COO. Generate that persona. And then I looked at what it created and just made some... Do you have a pretty chill, generally happy, positive outlook? Yeah. Yeah. That wartime COO, you created the persona. You described its characteristics, or you trained it on Travis Kalanick transcripts or something. 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 want it to have Travis. What does generic version mean, though? You just said you'd be a wartime COO. I just said these are the traits of, I said, these are the traits of a wartime COO. And I said, actually, what I did was say, I want a wartime COO, generate that persona. And then I looked at what it created and just made some. Do you have a pretty chill, generally happy, positive outlook? Like. Yeah. Yeah. This is, this is, you're seeing the internal competitor inside of me, right? This is the Kobe Bryant Mamba mentality coming through. I like having this thought partner that is a little bit more 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. This is who you would want on your team when you want them to spin up. Quick, 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 and make decisions. Am I just wrong about what Cursor is, or. Yeah. I mean, Cursor, you can use Cursor, Cloud Code, Codex. These are all ostensibly coding agents, but they have this 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 you're hiring Cursor or Cloud Code or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to. Right. It's like you probably have engineers you've worked with. You tell that engineer, go build this for me or go build that for me. That's why I use Cursor, 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 talk to an AI or chat or ask a question, you go straight to Cursor? You don't do Chat, you see your Cloud, or. And I mean, mostly, especially when I'm at my desktop, I'm mostly talking to Cursor. Most of the time, it has different models that you can toggle back and forth on, which I like. So I can test a bunch of different models and things like that. Are you a typer or talker? 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 Whisper Flow and Super Whisper and Monologue. I don't know. It just gets me. I don't know. 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 a personality to it. You think about consumer goods. It's like, how many places can you buy jeans from, or how many places can you get whatever from? There's not that many differences, but you might choose one brand and I might choose a different brand. And it's just because I like it better, but it functionally does the same thing. I think there's going to be more software that feels that way. Yeah. It's, yeah. No, I mean, I think that's a good point. It's like the Adidas and the Nike shoes do the exact same thing, but, or like T-shirt brands. Do you remember, I was watching this Blake 182 documentary last night. Do you guys remember Hurley? Sean, you remember Hurley shirts? Yeah. They're everywhere. And I was watching the show last night. I'm like, why did we love those shirts so much? Isn't that crazy that we got obsessed with it? 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 B2B, even B2B boring software. Well, that's, I think, a really fascinating point because it always was differentiated on either features or price, right? Those are kind of the two main axes of competition. And then design got layered in. And I feel like there was a wave where better design, better UI/UX became a differentiator, and design got a seat at the table. And then, but if you look at other products, non-software, it'll be either brand or status, 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. Who do I like the feel of when I'm going to interact with it versus which model has more parameters and a higher benchmark score on the evals is not going to be how people are going to choose these things. Because I'm already doing that. I think you're absolutely right. Well, and I certainly feel it. 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 are models I like for that. Like 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. It is not fun to talk to at all. We all have coworkers like that. They crush it at some tasks, but not a great hang. Yeah, exactly. But then there are other models where you're like, hey, if I want to go back and forth and have a discussion and a debate around what we're doing, I'm like, okay, I feel like I can tolerate that discussion a lot better than trying to talk to Fable, where I'm just like, oh my God. Are all the phrases, 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. Yeah. The honest truth, the load-bearing. Like, let's get to the spine. Yeah. Are those specific to AI or to the model? To the model for sure. You can tell most models, I think, are derivative of either the Anthropic series or GPT series. And so those two kind of have two distinct personalities. But if you go use any of the open source tools or things like that, you can kind of see who they've been distilling a lot, and it inherits the personality of the one above. Dude, I've noticed that my coworkers are starting to say the Claude, like someone the other day said, let's get to the load-bearing part, or something like that. I'm like, when they're talking out loud, not in writing. Yeah. I've noticed that where they start saying things. I'm like, that's Claude. And it's sort of like, 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. Who is training who, right? Are we training the AIs or 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. Dude, I've noticed that my coworkers are starting to say “the Claude.” Someone the other day said, “Let's get to the load-bearing part,” or something like that. When they're talking out loud, not in writing. Yeah. I've noticed that, where they start saying things. I'm like, that's Claude. And it's, 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. Who is training who, right? Are we training the AIs or 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 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. But here's the interesting part. It's got the suggested CEO outreach where it's like, you should email Jordan and check in on him, see what's up. And so this is where I think AI gets really interesting because, in some respects, who's the boss now? Am I the boss or is the AI the boss? Every Sunday morning now I wake up with a list of 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 stuff. And I candidly love it. This is stuff that was really hard for me. I'm not naturally a person who's just an ultra-networker like you guys are, where I'm just like, I got to keep in touch with everybody. And so now I've put an agent in the loop and said, hate me, help me be better at this stuff. And yeah, I literally wake up, and 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 something to this where, if you do a good job of building these tools up, they'll start telling you what to do. 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. Well, Brian Halligan, one of the founders of HubSpot, 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 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. And 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. And so that changed how I thought about it. And it sounds like that's what you're saying without saying it that way. 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. It just can. 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 knows way more than you as a human are ever going to know. And so that's going to make it way more useful for certain types of decisions. To start right now, it's like you use it as an assistant to help you make these decisions. 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, because the upside would be AI is not going to have the emotional roller coaster 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. Like, okay, we know we have this sunk cost fallacy and we have this bias for recency bias. What is AI going to be? Because we're going to need to be aware of those, the more we turn over decision-making to AI. Yeah. 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? Well, I would say any high-stakes decision, the AI is weighing in on now. There's a seat at the table in the exec meeting and the board meetings and all that stuff where we're asking the AI to surface those things. Is there an example where AI 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. We run a bar-raiser process where I approve every job offer that goes off. But an exec team member is on the final part of the hiring loop. And it's intended to audit the hiring process in addition to 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, if I would come across a candidate where I was not so sure on, I could 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. Most hiring managers hire one or two people in a year. It's like I've looped over way, way more volume. And so I don't always have the language to say why it's wrong, but I can still smell it. And so I would often go to these folks and be like, are you sure? Something is off. 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. Folks would be like, well, I stand by this person. Wait, are you just going to make the hiring decision? If so, if you don't want to hire them, don't hire them. And it would be like, and I'd be like, well, that's not really what I want, right? I want you to make the decision. I'm just trying to give you some guidance here. And I want you to be able to reason through this problem. And if you've answered it, if you have confidence that you have sufficiently answered it, then I will back you. Let's go hire this person. But if you haven't, then I want you to take this into account and go figure out, 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 play out as, well, does Wade want me to hire this person or does Wade not want me to hire that person? And I'm like, ah. So anyway, that's what was happening pre-AI. Post-AI, I'd run the war council or my hiring committee over these folks. And then I would notice it's just more articulate than me. It could say, hey, I noticed that this person has these traits and the panel did not scrutinize this, so you need to go scrutinize this. And it would give a score of, compared to everyone you've hired at Zapier, here's how likely I think they're going to be successful or not. But that's not often how it would play out. It would just play out as, well, does Wade want me to hire this person or does Wade not want me to hire that person? And I'm like, ah, so anyway, that's what was happening pre-AI. Post-AI, I'd run the war council or my hiring committee over these folks. And then I would notice it's just more articulate than me. It could say, hey, I noticed that this person has these traits and the panel did not scrutinize this. So you need to go scrutinize this. And it'd give a score of here compared to everyone you've hired at Zapier, 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, hey, the AI said this, I agree. What's going on here? And I noticed all of a sudden the behavior shift where people would go, oh, interesting. I think the AI did get this and this right, but I think it's wrong on this. 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, what else am I missing? What am I not seeing here? And I just found that 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 actually has a way of talking that makes it 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. I don't know if you guys were ever believers in some of these personality tests. There's this thing called Culture Amp, I think it's called, where it's a software where you do personality tests before you hire someone. Ray Dalio has his version of it, whatever. And there tends to be a scale where people fall in, where they're like, I don't believe in anything involving personality tests. I've noticed with AI, I have fallen closer to the side of, 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. But when it comes to hiring, do you guys buy into this at all when it comes to personality tests and figuring out if a person could be good for the job? Because 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 with self-driving, one approach was, let's put all the sensors on the car. Let's get cameras, get more cameras, let's get LiDAR, let's get radar, let's get sonar, let's put a, what else do we do? Taste test, what are all the different possible sensors you can put on the car? And the Tesla approach was basically, it needs vision and it needs eyes only. And one of the reasons why, people thought it was for cost, which was, I think, a factor, that 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 my approach to hiring, where I now simplify. I 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? Yeah, yeah. Answer the question, though. What you're saying is instead of looking at 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, 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, do they have the relevant experience? All I want to know is, have you done some exceptional shit before? And 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, do I try to do something with them where I get the gut feel of, do we have creative chemistry? Do 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 Wade 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 I've learned that kind of the hard way because I used to do it very differently. Yeah, so we've done some work with this. We've done Myers-Briggs-type stuff internally at times. 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 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 going that far. I think where I net out is that you do need somebody who is exceptional first and foremost. Everybody's got a personality type, but it doesn't tell you if you're good or not. You can score whatever you're going to score, but you still need to be good. But I do think that teams matter. And when I look at 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 complementary traits, I'm going to be way better. Because they're going to have my backside in places that I don't know if there's any science behind this, but if you look at my EA versus my Myers-Briggs, she has three different letters than I do. So there's four letters in that, and three of hers are different. And she 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 pretty helpful because it gets kind of like in sports where it's like, if you have a basketball team, it's like, well, Michael Jordan's going to shoot all the shots. Well, you need Dennis Rodman, who's going to 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 take a test and say, hey, what are you going to do? Different hiring managers are probably doing it somewhat 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 fully 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. Well, you need Dennis Rodman, who's going to 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 take a test and say, "Hey, what are you going to do?" Different hiring managers are probably doing it somewhat 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 fully 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 been a source of hit or miss performance. Let's say. Cool. So you could stack rank employees on 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 when I was at Twitch, they used the Amazon bar raiser thing that you described. And they're trying to do the human version of this. It's like, here's this guy who's seen a thousand interview panels who will come in and standardize the hiring process, but also provide the most experienced voice on hiring. And then they're checking this candidate against the 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 dramatically better at that. And I'm surprised that people aren't using the training data of your existing team to inform the next hire. Do you think it would work? I don't know for sure if AI would be good at that, but I think that would be helpful. I remember Google sharing a lot of their hiring insights where they did a ton of tests around stuff like this. And I think what they found was that no hiring managers had an edge over any other hiring managers, with one exception. And the one exception was that there was this hyper-specific, specialized group of technical talent where there was only an N of a hundred people in that domain. And their hit rate was better because it was like, well, there are only a hundred people to do this thing. And so I don't find that a very satisfying answer. It feels like there should be something to what you were saying. Also, something that I've been thinking about a bunch, I was thinking a large percentage of the people who work at my company, which is 35 or something, work here in this office out here, and they're here because I'm bored and I want someone to hang out with most days. That's probably 70% of the reasons why I have a company. It's just because I want someone to hang out with. Because I'm not good at friends. Yeah. Friends are hard. Employees are easier. 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 done working. You want to play Fortnite? We just played Fortnite for a couple hours. I was going to say, I need a pickleball partner. Can you come be my employee? I mean, that's how it is. I just want to hang out with people. But now I want you to put on the CEO war console, and I need you to be crazy Wade, not real Wade. So anything said for the rest of the section, you can go unhinged. Unhinged mode. Okay. Yeah. War Wade. I don't know how many employees you have now, but you used to have 700. What do you have now? It's like 730 or something like that. It's not that many more. So when you have remote employees, for the most part, you only know them as Slack avatars, right? You don't know all 700 people. And many of them don't know you other than this guy on Zoom and someone who blogs occasionally. It begs the question, what if they were all just, or one person could be 10 or 30 different agents that they monitor and you only have 20 employees? 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 an ideal span of control where it's like, oh, I can only have, I don't know, the rule book says eight. I think you're seeing people push the limits now to have 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 keep up with this many people. But you don't keep up with that many people anyway. When you have a company, there's stuff happening that you don't even know about. Mm-hmm. Well, why wouldn't you just have it be 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 a limit. But I'm not saying that it would be just Wade, but I'm saying, 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 20 people could do that? For a company like Zapier, I'm not sure, but definitely a company could certainly do that. In fact, we've already seen companies that have gotten to that size on very small numbers of revenue. Which ones? Well, I mean, shoot, Minecraft back before Microsoft bought it was, I don't know how many people, but it was less than a hundred, I think. And it made a whole bunch of money. There was that New York Times story that came out this summer about that guy who was selling GLP-1 stuff. We had him booked as a guest on the podcast. And then that article came out the day before, and he canceled on us. Well, so yeah, he's doing, I don't know how many employees he has, but I think it was maybe one or two. Yeah. What 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. Yeah. 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? Like, how big of a fleet can you manage and how effective is that fleet? Is that the new managerial skill? Yes. I feel pretty confident that that is the direction we're heading. Saying, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you just said the same thing. You're saying I'm right and I'm a genius. Yeah. I. We got there. We got there. And again, this is ruthless Wade, so I don't want you to think that you have to hedge or apologize, but there are 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 want you building the human relationship more than doing a bunch of AI stuff. I definitely want you to do some AI stuff, but it's not necessarily like, "Hey, Mr. or Ms. sales leader, or frontline sales AE, go manage these 20 reps that" So I don't want you to think that you have to hedge or apologize, but there's still different roles in a company, right? You're, 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, that, that, that, for that role? I think I want you building the human relationship more than doing a bunch of AI stuff. I definitely want you to do some AI stuff, but it's not necessarily like, "Hey, Mr. or Miss sales leader, or frontline sales AE, go manage these 20 reps that are going to actually do the sales for you." Can I switch gears for a second? How old are you? I turned 40 this year. Okay. So if $5 billion is your value, you were in the ballpark of being an 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. I mean, honestly, it feels a little fictional to even hear you say that. I don't think of myself that way. So much is tied to the paper worth of Zapier at any given moment in time. It's like the voting machine. I don't have liquid dollars that look like that. 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. Just share your perspective. Yeah. I think, look, a lot of this stuff is highly personal. What do you care about in life? For me, things one, two, and three are my family. I want to be around my family, provide for them, make sure that they are able to live a good life by whatever definition I have of that. Truthfully, once you get to a certain amount of wealth, 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. Yeah, I think you could do just fine with a million bucks and do quite well. I mean, shoot, I remember when I had just gotten out of college, my dream was if I could only make a hundred thousand dollars a year. That was my dream. If I could make a hundred thousand dollars a year, I was like, man, I'll be set. That was mine too, by the way. It was like, if I can get out and work at KPMG and get 60 grand, I might get to a hundred grand before I'm 30, and then I am set, baby. Yeah. That was the goal. And I don't know, partly that's, you know, I don't have a lot of vices. I don't have a lot of expensive hobbies and things like that. Do you do anything cool with your money? When I go to a restaurant, I don't look at how much the items cost. Nice. That kind of stuff. And you've raised money, so you have to have some type of, likely, presumably, you're going to 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, 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 nothing that I couldn't already do. I remember my grandpa, his dream was always to go on a safari, and he never got to go on one. I always thought that was an incredible thing. So when my girls are old enough, I'm like, let's go on a safari. But I'd do that now. I don't need billions of dollars to go on a safari. The reason I like asking you about this stuff is because you are very well-rounded, and you seem like, we had this joke called the total man. It was a buddy of ours or a podcast guest who was kind of the perfect package. They were ruthless when they needed 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, 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 broken, they-have-a-chip-on-their-shoulder perspective. Whereas I don't think you have that. You have a far more wholesome and 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 hear an emotionally healthy person give their perspective on them. I was really lucky. I grew up with a family that was all sort of, my parents were married, my two grandparents were married. I have aunts and uncles and cousins that were all just really tight-knit. But if I was to give a shoutout to any of those, I've 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 when he was 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. 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. I remember after he died, we were at the funeral home, and they were trying to plan out all this stuff. Most 98-year-olds, when they die, it's like they don't have any friends. There's nobody going to be there because everybody who would have been there has already died. You're 98. He just made it a long time. And I remember the staff saying, okay, we'll probably just do the receiving line or whatever for 30 minutes or an hour. That receiving line was there for three hours, people just coming through nonstop, just members from every single walk of life. When he was a teacher, he had all these teachers coming through that remembered him. He was big with the DARE program, so all these highway patrolmen were coming through, all these members of the church coming through, all his extended family coming through. I remember that standing out a lot to me, where it was like, here's a guy who was great at family and great at professional stuff. That, to me, was just a really good example of someone who got their priorities dialed in really, really well. He didn't have it all, but he didn't need it all. The things he cared about, he nailed them. To me, that's always stood out as what a good life looks like. Sounds like a good role model. I think that you definitely seem to embody that, where, like I said, you are great at business and also 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 story. And also, I think 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. he didn't have it all, but he didn't need it all. It's the things he cared about, he, he, he nailed them. And so to me, that's always stood out as what a good life looks like. Sounds like a good role model. I think that you definitely seem to embody that where, like I said, you are great at business and also don't have this jackass side that most people who are where you are seem to have. Right, Sean? Yeah. Yeah. We, I, 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. If you don't, whether that's material things or other, right? If you don't need the approval or attention of others, you're free, you're rich, 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? 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 such an underrated attribute. And when you said that, it kind of reminded me, it sounds like your grandpa had that way of life. And the other was defining what winning is. So it's like, if winning is just in the work domain or winning is just in one, just in one of it, you have to decide what it is for you. And 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. If the media portrays Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk or whoever as the Titans, and then you say, oh, I guess that's what winning is. And then you're soon enough on your 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 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. Michael 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 find, find whatever that North Star is for you so that you have a clear picture in your head. It makes all future decisions really easy. Totally. I love that. Define your own definition of winning. And if you do that well, 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 if what you want to be doing is running a software company, great, go do that. If what you want to do is be a teacher and help students do that. If what you want to do is, I don't know, live on the coast or live in the, it's like, what, what is it that is winning for you? 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 an obvious one, but are there any other strange Zapier or Wade decisions that you've made that you think that the normal Silicon Valley guy would be like, that's insane. I wouldn't do it that way. I mean, the remote work story is one where we've just never had an office way before anyone thought that that was normal. We only raised the one round of money. That was pretty odd at the time. We're building this business for the long haul. And so again, 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. We're here to grow it for our customers. That's the thing I care about, not these other things. And I think if we do a good job of that, then sure, the numbers will follow, but that's not the point. The point is the work itself. And I think you find that with anyone who loves what they do. You ask them, this is where I feel like the media gets a lot of this narrative around billionaires wrong. They're like, 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, Dharmesh, Halligan, guys like this who, I don't know, they genuinely just seem like they like what they're doing and they're going to keep doing that whether or not they make 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. It wasn't about the money because. I just like doing it. I think athletes are the same way. You look at 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 professional sports where guys are 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. They'll do all this other stuff because it's like, I just can't, I just love this game. I love doing that thing. So Sean, listen to this. One time, I think in 2000 and maybe 2019, Wade spoke at Hustle Con in Oakland, California. And this was right, I think, before you raised your round. I think. But you were, 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 don't know exactly if this is how you felt. I think you did the same thing I wanted to do, which is these people would come in and we would just stare and observe how they were behaving because it was kind of fun to have billionaires or these big-shot CEOs just interacting with you, having a normal conversation. It was really exciting. It was like people watching on steroids, and we were just, we were 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 were like, nope, I just like being here. And I remember that, you doing that. And it seems like you haven't changed, where it was like you were very successful then, now you're incredibly successful, but it was a very similar personality where you're still very curious. Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember it was all day. You got at nine, and I think we left at four. So however long that is. Maybe it was. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you got good, you pulled good guests, man. Who wouldn't want to just sit backstage and 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 almost certain I had a notebook of ideas that I took And I was, do you got somewhere to be? And you were like, nope, I just being here. And I remember that, you doing that. And it seems like you have a change where it was like, you were very successful then, now you're incredibly successful, but it was a very similar personality where you're still very curious. Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember it was all day. You got at nine, and I think we left at four. So however long that is. Maybe it was. Yeah. Yeah. You got good, you pulled good guests, man. Who wouldn't want to just sit backstage and listen to how all these people are running their companies and what's working for them and what's not. Shoot, I'm almost certain I had a notebook of ideas that I took back and was like, all right, we're going to try this. We're going to do this. Yeah. The awesome thing is, back when you were doing that, I feel like podcasts weren't quite as big of a deal, but now, God, you can just pour over this stuff and you just have notes for days on things that you can just go try. I'm just like, all right, see if this works for me. What do you listen to, and what do you consume on a regular basis? Books? Well, podcasts, whatever. My favorite podcast, I gotta give a shout-out to the Acquired guys. This is just 10 out of 10. Most of those things they do a deep dive on are just these legendary entrepreneurs who have did it for decades. 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, that is a good entryway into Acquired. Probably my favorite series is all the retail ones. So there's a, I think it's Costco, Walmart, and Amazon. And there's a trifecta right in there that are really, really good. As for a book, I recently finished this book, Make Something Wonderful. It's Steve Jobs in his own words. It's a really good one. I think Steve Jobs, you sort of, he has a larger-than-life reputation. This book is literally just emails, speeches, literally just his own thinking. And it's organized roughly chronologically. And so you get to just see his progression of V1 Apple, the Pixar years, V2 Apple. And you just see how he changes over time. 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? See, Ty 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. 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, so how you gain, how you win in this game and what your goal should be. So they dictate your goals. They dictate your behavior. And then they also 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. You're going to have to be 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. And he basically extends that to the games we play in life. And so he describes when he was this professor. He's like, I got into teaching philosophy because I love philosophy. Of course, that's why. 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, right? I don't want to be not on the board. And so he innocently is like, oh, you got to get published. He's like, well, then I realized the way to get published the most and the fastest is in these obscure publications about these types of things. He's like, suddenly, a few years in, I hate what I'm doing. He's like, why am I even doing this? 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 games and the different types of ways you play. There's striving play, which is like you play for the joy of playing, versus outcome-based, where you're playing to win. And you want to be a striver for these reasons. And strivers actually tend to win more too, but they didn't play for that reason. And you can't just say, well, I'm not going to play any game because 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. 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, 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. Looks like it just came out too. The book came out 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. If I had to guess, did you listen to Blink-182 as a kid? I did. Did you, Sean? Who didn't? Yeah. I wasn't going to concerts. Yeah. I read the biography, 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 I had to force myself to put it down when I was going to bed at night because I was staying up too late. Dude, why are musician biographies so good? I'm desperate for more. The memoirs 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 in college. I read this thing, and I loved it. Well, 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 riveting. These guys, they weren't really that messed up, but they got really famous really fast. And he talks about it. And he's like, a lot of, this is really the chapter where I complain about fame. And he was like, just joking. I love being famous. It was awesome. People come to me all the time, and they say they love my work. It feels amazing. 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, Wade, you're the band. We appreciate you. You have an invite whenever you want. And thank you for everything. You bet. Thanks for having me, guys. All right. That's it. That's the pod. 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. 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 was like, man, I'll be set. That was mine too, by the way. It was, it was like, if I can get out and work at KPMG and get 60 grand, I might get to a hundred grand before I'm 30. And then I am set, baby. Yeah. That was the goal. 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 you do anything cool with your money? You know, when I go to a restaurant, I don't look at the, how much the items cost. Nice. Like that kind of stuff. 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. 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. 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. 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. I, you know, I was really lucky. Like I grew up, you know, with a, like a, you know, a family that was all sort of like, you know, like my parents were married by two grandparents that were married. I have like aunts and uncles and cousins that were all sort of just like really tight knit. But if I was to like, give a shout out to any of those, like I, I gotta talk about my granddad. Like, you know, my granddad is a world war II vet, but you know what? I, I, I didn't know him as that. I just knew him as this guy, you know, who would like always had time for his grandkids. He died. He's 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. 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, um, 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, the receiving line or whatever will be, you know, like we'll just do like 30 minutes or an hour or whatnot. 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, 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 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. Yeah. We, um, I, first, I love that story that you just told. That was actually like a really awesome, an awesome story. And also, you know, 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, you know, I've been thinking about this a lot lately, which is that you're, you're really only as, 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? If 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. Um, right? Like, you know, you don't have to go be super flashy on social media because you just don't care for it. Um, 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 it, you have to kind of decide what it is for you. And it sounds like pretty early on, you got clear on that. And then 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. Michael 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, 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. Totally. I love that. Like, you know, define your own definition of winning. And, you 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, what is it that sort of is winning for you? 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. I wouldn't do it that way. 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 again, 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. 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, the, 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 is they're like, you know, they're, they're hoarding their money. They're in all this, this stuff. I mean, look, I don't know all billionaires, but I've, 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 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. It wasn't about the money because. 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're probably should be retiring, but they keep playing because they just love playing and they'll take the, they'll take the lesser contract. 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. So Sean, listen to this one time, I think in 2000 and maybe 2019, Wade spoke at hustle con in Oakland, California. And this was right. I think before you raised your round, I think, but you were, 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, 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. Cause 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. 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 were like, nope, I just like being here. And I remember that you, 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. Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember it was all day. Like you got at nine and I think we left at four. So however long that is. 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 going to try this. We're going to 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. I'm just like, 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, I mean, podcasts, whatever. My favorite podcast, I gotta give a shout out to the acquired guys. Like, I mean, this is 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. The, 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, oh, 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, his own thinking. 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, he changes sort of like over time. Sean, do you have a book that you read recently you want to recommend? Yeah. Um, there's a book called The Score. Have I talked about that here? See, Ty 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, like the fundamental premise of the book is amazing. He's, so he's talking about like the power of a game. So he's like, imagine a game. Um, let's say we take, uh, 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, the scoreboard. So like how you gain, 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. You're going to, and so like, he's like, it's amazing if you just take the idea of a game, how it will change your behavior. And he's like, basically extends that to like the games we play in life. And so he describes like when he was this professor, he's like, I got into teaching philosophy because I love philosophy. Of course, that's why, who else becomes a philosophy teacher? He's like, but then I discovered this leaderboard. And it was like all the philosophy professors in the country. And he's like, suddenly I started, well, how do you get on that board? Right? 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. He'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. And 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 like nuance around games. And I think like, because 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. Looks like it just came out too. 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 you, if I had to guess, do you listen to Blake 182 as a kid? I did. Did you, Sean? I mean, who didn't? Yeah. I wasn't like going to concerts. Yeah. I read the biography 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? There's so, 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 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 going to, this is really the chapter where I complain about fame. And he was 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. And then he also later in life, he got cancer. He talks about like 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 like 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. You bet. Thanks for having me, guys. All right. That's it. That's the pod.