Wade Foster on hiring
From Zapier’s Wade Foster on AI Automation, No-Code Tools & the Future of Work · · Matt Britton
“We had a very different approach to hiring than I think most companies did which was we just didn't hire till it hurt. And part of why we did that is we wanted to make sure that every person that joined the company, there was a very real and visceral need for them. And we knew exactly what task assigned them cuz you'd hear these stories of these companies that would raise a bunch of money and then they'd hire 10, 15 people and then it was like a mess. Like you know that no one knew what each other was doing. They're all trying to figure all this stuff out and you know it's not this thing where you can just take a small company and toss bodies at the problem and expect the machinery to all keep working.”
On , Wade Foster, CEO & Co-Founder at Zapier, spoke about hiring during Zapier’s Wade Foster on AI Automation, No-Code Tools & the Future of Work on Matt Britton.
About Wade Foster
Wade Foster, CEO and co-founder of Zapier, has been discussing the company's internal adoption of AI and its implications for the future of work. Foster stated that after the launch of GPT-4, Zapier called a "code red" internally, leading to a company-wide AI hackathon that raised daily AI usage from under 10% to over 50% in a single week, and later to 97%. He described the creation of an "AI fluency rubric" used for hiring and performance reviews, and said the company's headcount is around 800 people, all remote. Foster has also commented on the distinction between deterministic workflows and AI agents, which he described as software that can be given a goal and its own reasoning to complete tasks. He has said that "the most important shift that is happening right now is software will predominantly be built and used by an agent and not a human." Foster has also reflected on Zapier's early history, noting that the company was bootstrapped and raised only $1.3 million in venture capital before reaching a $5 billion valuation. He described a "don't hire until it hurts" philosophy and an early SEO distribution strategy borrowed from a creator of bingo card websites. Regarding the broader AI landscape, Foster said that while AI may be overhyped in the short term, he believes it is "being underhyped" over the next decade. He has also argued that the declining cost of producing software will lead to more niche products being built, and that AI systems with access to all of a company's tools can know the business "better than any individual in my company."