Zapier’s CEO: Being a SaaS company leader right now is ’10 out of 10 anxiety’
About Wade
- Co-founded Zapier in 2011; CEO since day one
- Built Zapier into a platform connecting 8,000+ apps
- Scaled Zapier to 3M+ users, incl. Disney, Meta & Samsung
- Repositioned Zapier as an AI orchestration hub for agents
- Led a company-wide AI reset after GPT-4 to transform ops
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On Pioneers of AI, host Rana el Kaliouby talks with Zapier co-founder and CEO Wade Foster about what it feels like to lead a software company right now. He says a fellow CEO put it best: 10 out of 10 fun, 10 out of 10 anxiety. Boring? Definitely not.
Transcript
Note: Transcripts may be automatically generated and are not fully corrected for spelling, grammar, and formatting.
There's been times in Zapier's history where things have been much more stable, less chaotic, et cetera, but kind of more boring. Yeah. Yeah. You can say a lot about this time period, but boring it is not. I think it's really hard to be the CEO of a software company right now. You're at a moment where a company's valuation could swing on a headline and this whole idea of SaaS is dead. What's your experience been? I had another CEO friend say 10 out of 10 fun and 10 out of 10 anxiety right now. OK, I kind of chuckled at that. I was like, yeah, that that kind of resonates. This is a period of intense creative disruption. Like you've been gifted this incredible technology. You get to rethink everything from first principle. And that's just like so excited if you're like entrepreneurially oriented, like creative oriented, et cetera. There is a lot of work you have to do to sort of make sure that you're painting a clear picture of the future when you yourself are trying to figure out like, what exactly is this going to look like? You kind of know the direction, but you don't know the final form factor yet. And then ultimately, something new emerges, being willing to call it quickly and then get everybody to go, oh, not that way, more this way.
