Brent Beshore: Alright. Now I get to welcome, I get to welcome Wade to stage. You know, Wade is, he's just quite the guy. I I don't know what to say.

I the the level of success that Wade has had I'm gonna come snuggle over here with you. I don't know what they were they were they were talking about it over there. I don't know. Am I supposed to be sitting over there? Can you guys see me back here?

The little success he's had I I got to watch him. I mean, I knew you in college. It's been a long time that that we've also known each other, and to see what he has done and his cofounders have done with Zapier has just been been nothing short of remarkable. I mean, I don't think most people they keep such a low profile. Most people have no idea, 1, that I think you live in this area.

Most people have no idea. And then 2, they built a $5,000,000,000 business. $5,000,000,000 with a b, the last publicly public valuation I'm aware of, and it's absolutely incredible. The story was you started at startup weekend. It was crazy.

It was the 1st startup weekend in Colombia, and you guys decided you were working together and you decided to build. Take us back to that moment. What did you think? What were you doing? What was the intention?

Take us back there.

Wade: Yeah. So, we started the company here in Columbia, Missouri. I have 2 co founders, Brian and Mike, And, Brian and I were, all 3 of us worked at, Veterans United, so shout out to Brant if he's in here. You know, Brian and I would play, you know, we play music together. We met playing, in the the jazz school over here, and I play saxophone, Brian plays bass, and we had a blues and jazz quartet.

So, we were always just spending a lot of time together, and, you know, in between, you know, practice some gigs and playing gigs and things like that, we would, you know, be pitching each other ideas. Maybe this would be a cool thing to work on, maybe that would be a cool thing to work on. And we would take some, clients in here and there to freelance, make a little bit of extra money, things like that. And, you know, sort of felt like, hey, maybe one day we would we would do something and perhaps we do something together. And then but never sort of like, you know, had the exact thing to go after.

And then one day, you know, Brian shoots me a message on I chat and says, you know, I think I I think I found something. All these different small businesses are using tools like Mailchimp and Zendesk and Quickbooks and Salesforce to run their businesses, but they really have a tough time getting them integrated. And, you know, you should need links to at the time there was these forums, customer forums like Get Satisfaction, UserVoice were really popular. And they were all public, so you could see what all the customers were asking for. And if you would look on any of these forms, integrations was one of the most commonly requested things.

A customer would come in and say, when are you going to integrate with x? And then a bunch of customer would say, plus 1, plus 1, I'd love to have that, I'd love to have that. And eventually, a product manager would come in, and they would say something like, hey, this is a great idea, really appreciate you all suggesting it, we'll take a look at this and get back to you. You've ever worked in a company like that, you know that this is code word for never gonna happen. And so, we looked at that and like, that's interesting.

And my day job at the time, I was working in email marketing, and I'm like a very bad engineer, self taught. And I was struggling with the Marketo API. It's this like old school, which if you're not in tech, this equates to just old and clunky basically. And I was really struggling when so when Brian pitched me this, I was like, if this thing exists, I would be doing that instead. And, you know, it happened to be that there was a startup weekend coming up, and so we thought, hey, you know, maybe we'll go over to that and we can build a prototype of this thing and see if anything comes of it.

Brian knew Mike as well from, they'd actually met on Hacker News of all things. And, you know, 3 of us just sort of holed up all weekend, just working on building a prototype. And, you know, it was really fun, just like hacking, building a thing. And, once the weekend finished, you know, we met up that Monday and said, you know, we we just had a lot of fun doing this. This is the kind of thing we were always trying to do.

Do do we want to keep working on it? And you know, I don't know at the time that we were like, yeah, this is going to be a business, we're really going to make something of this, We just were like, This is fun to work on. Let's just keep doing it and see how far we could go with this thing. And, you know, we're here in Central Missouri, there's no such thing as like, you know, venture capital or things like that. So for us, it's just like, I guess we're just going to work on it, like that's the choice we make.

And so, we keep our day jobs, we're working over at Veterans United, Mike is still in school here at the university and we just decide, okay, nights and weekends, we're going to make this happen. And so, we'd finish work and then you know, get some take out Chinese from Hy Vee and, you know, from 6 pm, 7 pm, we would work till midnight, 1 am, 2 am, just sort of wherever we felt we could, and we rinse, wash and repeat this for more or less 6 months until we have like an MVP, a prototype that works pretty well. We feel like we're starting to get some customers using this thing, and you know, at that point in time, we sort of launched the thing, and it was you know, you know, the the sort of early innings of Zapper were very much a labor of love, I guess, is what it boils down to.

Brent: Well, what's what's really interesting too is you didn't build it the traditional Silicon Valley way. I remember having conversations with you back then, and they'd be like, oh my gosh, We're getting money thrown at us left and right. People are telling us that, you know, they're gonna fund the next round, the round after that. What was the total amount of capital that you raised, and how many rounds of capital did you raise?

Wade: We, so we applied to YC about a year after. This is our second time applying.

Brent: That's Y Combinator. Y Combinator. For whoever's not aware, it's an accelerator.

Wade: And YC gives you, at the time, they give you 25 k, and then another 120 k, and then at the end of YC, there's a demo day. And at the end of demo day we raised about 1,200,000. So in total about 1,300,000 that has been raised and that's it. Today, Zapier's 700 person company, and yeah. So

Brent: It it was incredible. I, I I I begged Wade. So so I I was I helped ring Star Week in town, was was one of the judges when they won. So and Wade and I know each other a while. And so when he was saying they're raising capital, I was like, can I please can I put please put in a little a little bit of money?

And he was like, I mean, the round's kind of I was like, just 25 just 25, please. Just just a little bit. And he was like, okay. Fine. So anyway, he he gave me so I got to see the front row of this entire build, and it was really an education for me in watching, you know, you all didn't spend the money.

Like, you just you were, like, basically profitable from day 1, and and was there pressure from the investors that you took on to spend money and to do differently, like, when you were doing?

Wade: Well, you know, I think there was we're just like it felt like if you're gonna run a business, you're trying to make money, not lose money. And, Woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah, woah. I know it's a wild idea, but you know, I grew up here in the Midwest, and you know, my parents are like, Penny saved as a pity urn, like pull yourself up by the bootstraps. These are the things that I sort of like grew up around. Sure.

You know, to my to my mom, to my grandparents, like the idea of, you know, not paying off your credit card debt, like that was, you know, you you might as well be going to hell. You're like a bad person. You're like a bad person. That was a sin. And so, you know, we felt like, you know, when we're running Zapier, we just watched our bills like a hawk, and we just felt like, you know, if we don't have to spend the money, why would we do it?

And when we took even the seed money, we felt like, gosh, I remember we had a sort of a check coming at the end that was somewhat sizable. And I remember talking to someone like, do you really wanna take it? It's not a lot of money, you're sure that we're selling a lot of the company. Do we really think that this is a good idea? We did it.

You can debate whether that was a good idea or not, but, you know, we sort of just said, hey, we're just gonna treat this like it's the last money we've ever got. As time went on, we definitely had some of those people who are invested early on wanting to put more money, we had people coming up to us left and right, wanting to put money on, which was a little bit weird because zapper the seed round was not something that we had a lot of people wanting to do. We had a lot of no's. We got obviously enough yeses, but it it was not a conventional yes thing early on. But as we showed progress, we had more people wanting us.

And then the more people we told, no, we're not taking the money, the more people were interested. And we definitely heard like, hey, you could build such a big business if you were willing to take more risk, if you're willing to take more capital. No big company has built this way. And we always just scratch our head a little bit at that, in part because we'd had the Veterans United experience here in Columbia where I was employee 500 at Veterans United, and by the time I left starting Zapier 10 months later, they were at 1,000. And so we're just looking at that and like, well, that's just not true, because there's an example right here in Columbia that has done that thing.

And we're also just looking at how our business is growing, and our growth rates were good, the customers were happy, the team was happy, we were happy. And we looked at the bottlenecks, the things that were holding the business back. It never felt like raising more money was the thing that was holding our back. And so it was just, you know, like, it just never seemed like the thing for us to do was to go get out and go do a series a, series b, series c. It was like, we have other problems to fry, which was a little bit, I think of just a weird like we just were we just ended up looking really weird to most, you know, venture capital folks.

They just didn't know what to make of us. And then, you know, along the way, I think they just sort of mostly just gave up on us. That's kinda odd.

Brent: It turned out okay. I think I think you'll be fine.

Wade: It's gone fine so far.

Brent: Yeah. Yeah. Fine so far. Yeah. It's good.

5,000,000,000 fine. Yeah. So in hindsight, everything looks obvious. Right? And and I think there's a lot of people who'd look at that and say, oh, yeah.

Like, to having something that connects all of these applications is, of course, like, something obvious. And there's a firm that was out there doing that, called If This Then That. And I still remember at the time, you guys were talking about them, and maybe you could talk about, like, it didn't always go up in the right. There were fears, there was concerns about competition, like, what what were those early days like? And then when did you realize it was gonna be a something?

Wade: Yeah. I think, the best way to talk about this, I'd actually worked at a relatively small startup here in town before that, and, you know, that experience was pretty different than the Zapier one. The team I got to work with is incredible, great engineering, great design, but we really struggled to sell a product. And we tried a lot of stuff, I got hired in to help with some of that stuff as an intern and ended up learning a whole bunch of things. I learned content marketing, social, SEO, product management, sales, business, all those things.

Or maybe I didn't learn them because none of them worked. And I sort of felt like, gosh, sooner or later they're gonna figure out I'm not very good at my job, and let me go. I'm grateful that they didn't, but along the way, I started realizing, I think the biggest hurdle we have here is that just not enough people want what we're doing. And it didn't matter how good we were at all these other different things, which, when you contrast that with the Zapier experience, it felt just kind of a 180 in some weird ways. You know, I remember the first customer we got, and I found them on one of these forums, I sent a cold email and said, hey, you know, would you wanna connect this app and this app?

I noticed you're asking about it, you know, I think we have something that could help you out. They emailed back and said, no, we found a solution for that, but is that something you're working on? So I went and looked at their website and realized, oh, they're using Wufoo for forms on their site, they're using Aweber for email marketing. So I might pitch them on that idea, see if they bite on that. And he emails back and he said, oh, I'd really love that.

I said, great. Brian, Mike, can you go build that? No, yeah, we got it. So next day, we sort of come back, I'm like, hey, we got something that works for you, and, you know, I'll send it over to him and say, here, you got access to it. And, you know, wait about 24 hours and he emails back and says, Wade, you know, this is great, it looks pretty cool, but I'm really having a tough time getting this thing set up and working.

And so I jump on Skype, it was Skype at the time, and start to help him set up his first app. And I still am embarrassed to this day, every step of the way he's struggling. And it's not because he's bad, it's because the product is just generally not very good. It's candidly pretty awful. Here's the kicker, we get all the way through the, painfully, we get all the way through the setup step of setting up his first app, and he goes to test it out.

So, you know, he wants to take you know, folks that are filling out this form on his website, and automatically add them to his email list. And so we go test it out, and the email address automatically comes into Aweber. And he turns to me, he goes, wait, this is so awesome. Like, I cannot believe, I spend every day porting these contacts from here into Aweber. You've literally saved an hour of my day.

And I remember just like, after that call going like, oh, my gosh, this product was awful. The experience was so awful, and yet, here this person is saying, like, this is the best thing that has happened to me. And so I just felt like, if we can just make the product not awful, I think this might work. And so we spent I mean, we're now 13 years in, still trying to make it not awful, but along the ways, we got to a point where it was good enough, and every step of the way, we would polish things up, we'd work on getting more integration partners, we'd get on trying to find more distribution channels, and the flywheel just kept working. And I don't wanna pretend like it wasn't up into the right thing.

But compared to what we've done before, it certainly felt like everything we were doing was just tapping into this extreme product market fit. And so there was a lot of things that did just work really, really well. And I do think, like, for folks who are working on these things, that experience is like, paints such a stark contrast in my mind, because you know, for folks who are trying to figure these things out, like, the reality is when you do have something people want, yeah, there are still a lot of hard things, but the hard things are usually things that come because you're being successful, versus when it's not working, just nothing works. And so to me, there yeah. Yeah.

There was doubts, there was tough things, but the core bit always worked. One of

Brent: the things that that you're also well known for is being one of the leaders in having distributed team. So you guys have never been in office together, and this is a trend that I mean, you you were doing this way, way, way before this was sort of a popular thing, and, obviously, way before COVID. Why did you decide to go down the the route of not having a centralized office with an office space and all that? Like, why did you distribute the team out? What advantages has it given you?

And I there's a lot of people in this room. I think if you said, hey, the advantages are, which I assume you're gonna say, is, like, you to recruit talent from anywhere in the world. There's a lot of smart people who don't live in your locale, and it's really hard to move places. Like, you could tap into them. I think a lot of people would be interested, and yet it's not very popular, and there's a lot of people who struggle with it.

I would say my firm included. We've tried it, and we can't get it to work. So, like, help us to understand why did you do it? What has been the advantage, what are some of the disadvantages, and for the people in the room that are thinking about trying to hire remote workers, like, what is that? How does that work?

Wade: Yeah. So, Zapier started as a side project. Side projects don't have money, so you need money to buy offices. And we didn't have that, so we started with just laptops. And, you know, we would work on chat, and we you know, Brandt was gracious enough to sometimes let us go over to VU.

But more or less, we were just like working on chat, getting things done that way. And so, that was sort of the first phase of Zapier. 2nd phase was when we got into Y Combinator. The 3 of us lived in a 2 bedroom apartment, and we converted the kitchen into a makeshift, 3rd bedroom. So, not a super glamorous lifestyle, but that's the one time in the entire company's existence everyone was in one spot.

The tail in the YC, Mike comes back here to Columbia. His then girlfriend, now wife, was wrapping up law school here and so, so there's an inflection point, a decision point here which is, how do we wanna start running this thing as a company? And we start to think through hiring our first folks and none of us have management experience, none of us have hiring experience, we just don't know what we're doing. And so, we asked some folks for some advice and one mentor says, hey, one way you can derisk this, make this a little easier for you is to hire folks that you've already worked with. Former colleagues that you know and trust and can expect they'll do good work.

And we say, yeah, that kind of makes sense. We're mostly Brian and I are out in the Bay Area and we're like, well, we actually just don't know anyone in the Bay Area. And candidly, we're a little skeptical of our ability to hire folks there, especially when you're competing against Facebook, Google, Netflix, what have you for engineering talent. The salaries are just like sky high for entry level folks, and, we're tiny little startup with not that minute much money and not really wanting to spend all that much of it. But what we do have is a few folks that we know who are back here in Missouri.

And so we got a former roommate of mine that was, I think in Chicago, another former colleague that I'd worked with, one I'd gotten to know from the local meetup that was here in Columbia. So he said, hey, let's see if those folks would be interested in joining. And over the course of the 1st year, those 3 folks came in and they were pretty staged out. So it was like, you know, one and then, you know, 3 months later we added another and like all along our revenue is sort of like ticking up just like slowly and steadily and we're learning how to like manage a team and a business and do some of these things, ourselves. And there's other people that are doing this too.

So while it is definitely an atypical thing and not the conventional thing at all, there are companies like Base Camp, like GitHub, like buffer that are all starting to do this. And so while it is not the norm, there are folks doing it, they're writing about their experiences, they're sharing those things, and we're saying like, okay, maybe we can do this too. And we're giving it a shot, and it's working for us. So we're able to tap into really great talent at a cost basis that's way more effective than Silicon Valley. We don't have to, spend all this time and resources on managing an office and figuring out leases and doing yet another thing that I have no idea what to do.

In fact, someone the first person I walked into says, So, I hear you know a lot about real estate. I am not your real estate guy. I have no idea about real estate. Wouldn't even know the first thing about figuring out a lease. And so, we just didn't do it.

And for us, there's a lot of like, you ask like, how do you make it work? How do you not make it work? Well, for us there was just a lot of trial and error, like we were learning from some of these other folks, but we were also just trying to figure out what works for our team, and a big part of making that work was just paying attention to what we liked and what we disliked. You know, there's a certain amount of intention that has to come with it. You know, when you're in an office, you can kind of get away with, you can get away with some stuff, you can cheat on some things, because you don't necessarily have to write everything down.

You can lean on the fact that you can tap someone on the shoulder, but when you're in these disordered environments, you do need to be pretty disciplined. You have to write down, here's how our processes work, here's how you need to do this x y z thing. You have to work on camaraderie, you have to work on building relationships. And so, we built in rituals to make some of that stuff happen, like our team retreats. So we still get people together every single year.

We invest a lot in the employee experience. We pay attention to what is working inside the company, what isn't working inside the company, and we try and respond to, the most important ones of those. We can't fix everything, but the most important things, we try and make sure that we're addressing those. And, you know, I think at the end of the day, if you treat your culture in the same way that you treat your product, a lot of that stuff works out. And it turns out, I think a lot of this stuff applies to working in an office too, this is not sort of a remote only thing.

If you do these things for any business, they generally work out and make sure that you build a more successful thing over time. It's just paying attention to what's working and what's not.

Brent: Well, we unfortunately are running out of time, and I'm sure there's some people who are gonna hungry in here. I The the last thing I wanna say, so, I mean, if I was gonna give the the high level flyover is you you took less than $2,000,000 of capital. You built a 5 +1000000000 business, and you did it not being in Silicon Valley, not being in a big city. There's a lot of people in here who aren't from big cities, some are, and who want to build things. What advice do you have for them about bucking the norm, building something in different places than you would expect, and doing it with less capital than you'd expect?

Wade: Well, I, how do I boil that down into, here's my next thesis, so you all won't get to eat dinner tonight. No. How how would you do that? Well, you know, let's start with the like, how do you do it with less capital piece? Because that's in some ways easier to answer.

So I think first one, you just sort of have to have the aptitude for wanting to do that. If you don't want to raise a bunch of money, that means you're going to have to just put a lot of sweat equity in. So like you and the founding team are probably gonna have to grind on a certain amount of work because you probably can't afford to pay people, you probably can't afford certain other things, and that means within the founding team, you got to be able to roll up your sleeves and get a lot of stuff done yourself. And so you have to have like the just like mental fortitude, the like buy in, the want, the desire to sort of do it that way. So that's maybe thing 1.

The second thing is, you do need some like structural advantages. You know, we're building pure software. Pure software is really easy to build these days, and it doesn't cost a lot of money. You know, if you're in a different type of business that has, you know, big fixed upfront costs, that's probably gonna like make it a lot tougher to do something in a purely bootstrap way. You're probably gonna need to find a way to finance that somehow.

And so it sort of just puts you at a structural disadvantage. And so, I do think the type of business you're in matters in the way that you're gonna sort of finance it at the end of the day. So that's sort of how I think about the financing side of it. In terms of like building a successful business, you know, a lot of, I mean, there's a lot that's been written on it, but you like need a good idea, something that customers want, you gotta figure out how, to make that happen. And, you know, I I generally think a lot of that stuff can come from anywhere in the world, you don't necessarily need to be in a Silicon Valley to get that done.

What you get from being in a place like Silicon Valley, I lived there for about 10 years, is you get to be around like minded people, and you get to be around people that raise your ambition level, and you get to be around folks that push you and challenge you to get to the next level. But that doesn't only happen in Silicon Valley, that can happen in a lot of places. And also the Internet exists, and so there's tons of online communities as well now where you can sort of expose yourself to different ideas, different ways of building things, different ways of pushing it. And so you know, at a certain point, like, the biggest limiting factor is just your own desire to wanna go make some of this stuff happen, I guess. So that that's probably the main thing

Brent: here. And Wade, thank you so much. I really appreciate it.

This transcript was generated with Transistor AI