[HN Gopher] Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier
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Learnings of a CEO: Wade Foster, Zapier
Author : alexzeitler
Score : 99 points
Date : 2022-08-15 18:02 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ycombinator.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ycombinator.com)
| clement_b wrote:
| Zapier's impact in the broader ecosystem isn't unlike AWS' in the
| sense that it has enabled so many orgs to build faster without
| the hassle (connectors, APIs, event processing, ...). I wonder
| how many startups got where they are now thanks to good old
| Zapier-based workflows built by sales ops & marketing teams
| keen/forced to bypass eng :)
|
| Kudos to the team; What a success this is!
| dwb wrote:
| The word is "lessons".
| zkid18 wrote:
| Curious, how does hn community use Zapier? I tried it couple of
| times, but it's tough to build anything sophisticated there than
| basic trigger-based scenarios Imo, integromat (make.com) or n8n
| are way more powerful.
| soared wrote:
| As a no code but very technical person zapier is incredible.
| I've posted about it before but in the adtech world a lot of
| people are technical but don't code and automate lots of
| tasks/integrations/alerts/ etc with zapier.
| nlstitch wrote:
| hmm, too bad, nothing about holacracy / self steering teams, how
| it failed them and what they learned from that.
| kzh_ wrote:
| Wade gave a memorable talk during our YC batch. When asked how he
| ran Zapier remotely, which was unusual at the time, he said
| something along the lines of "When I want to talk with the team,
| I open Slack. When I want to file a support ticket, I open
| Zendesk."
|
| Ironically, we were the last in-person batch that was cut short
| by COVID, so his comments turned out to be quite helpful.
| mdorazio wrote:
| If nothing else, this interview shows that massive venture
| funding and hiring bonanzas are not the only way to build a
| successful company. I feel like that message gets lost too often
| in the startup sphere.
| marcinzm wrote:
| No but it's much harder to compete when your competitors are
| fueled by nearly unlimited VC money. They can pay better
| compensation, hire more people, have lower prices and so on.
| code_biologist wrote:
| The combo of more _and better_ people is really a one two
| punch of being well funded.
| pbreit wrote:
| With n=1, not sure if conclusive.
| qbasic_forever wrote:
| Atlassian bootstrapped to a billion dollar public company
| without any VC: https://www.indiehackers.com/post/how-
| atlassian-bootstrapped...
| [deleted]
| phren0logy wrote:
| Can we just never say "learnings" again, please?
| eskatonic wrote:
| As soon as I see the word "learnings" in the title, I know that
| whoever wrote the article has nothing of value to say.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Is that an official ask?
| Loughla wrote:
| The issue here is that we have the evaluate the impact of
| boiling that ocean. Is it a robust, punt of an appropriate
| learning? Should we reach out and leverage that decision to
| ensure we're giving 110% before we sent it over the wall?
| Best practice, the bleeding edge of best practice, is to
| empower employees. There are far too many moving parts to
| avoid the low-hanging fruit. One of our core competencies is
| leveraging out of pocket individuals to avoid jumping the
| shark, because as we all know, when it's time to make hay,
| make hay. Just some blue sky thinking from our last thought
| shower is to drill down into our core values before sending
| the key takeaways over to our tiger team. That way, the
| S.W.A.T. team can make sure we're not moving the goalposts.
| What we really need is the bandwidth to gain traction on this
| aha moment ensuring this becomes a game changer, not just
| short term. We need to bring to the table any mission
| critical silver bullets, while keeping our stakeholders in
| the loop. In the end, we should consider trimming the fat,
| hard stop.
|
| I hate business lingo, and it's everywhere. Constant.
| rcurry wrote:
| Drop the last sentence and post this on LinkedIn. You'll be
| a Sales Leadership Influencer in no time.
| petsormeat wrote:
| I have many coworkers with English as their next languages.
| I feel terrible for them when they use phrases like these,
| innocently assuming they're becoming more sophisticated in
| their usage of English.
| thatnerdyguy wrote:
| Can we double-click into that?
| rcurry wrote:
| We should at least drill down.
| [deleted]
| criddell wrote:
| The article contains five learnings.
| elcomet wrote:
| What would you say instead?
| williadc wrote:
| "lessons" almost always fits better. In this case "Lessons
| for a CEO" or "Lessons from a CEO" would be preferable.
| gms wrote:
| You don't need the 'almost' qualifier :)
| ggm wrote:
| you have to fight forest fires when you see the camper dropping
| the butt. Smokey says, hit 'em hard at birth, they don't re-
| offend within reaching distance.
|
| At least, thats the lesson I teach.
| RyanShook wrote:
| Can we watch the feedback course Wade teaches? This is an
| important topic that I've found varies greatly from manager to
| manager and would appreciate a framework.
| howmayiannoyyou wrote:
| Zapier. Brilliant when it started and good for small integrations
| today. I say that as a heavy user. Not brilliant and torturous
| with complex integrations due to the linear zap creation UI in my
| view. Doesn't handle failed connections well in my opinion.
| Integromat's object UI is much easier to work with (but also far
| from perfect).
| victor106 wrote:
| > because of Zapier's network effect on our developer platform
| side
|
| what exactly is Zapiers network effect?
| sharps_xp wrote:
| I cannot imagine they are getting a good return on 700 people
| weekly all hands meetings..
| epolanski wrote:
| Yeah, like, who's gonna seriously follow those? One in ten? PMs
| and POs?
|
| I honestly think that in all the companies I've been the all
| hands should've been a 5 minute read email, rather than yet
| another meeting that is splitting my day.
| alexpotato wrote:
| These types of blog posts/articles always make me curious:
|
| How were these people able to transition from founders of a tiny
| company to successfully running and managing large (people or
| revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before so
| how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?
|
| I often think of Zuckerberg or the Collison brothers as examples.
|
| They hadn't done anything like this before so how did it work out
| for them?
|
| - Is it survivor bias?
|
| - Were the ideas and the execution so good at the beginning that
| once the company was up and running it didn't matter if they made
| mistakes?
|
| - Did they have excellent advisors/mentors? If so, how did they
| know who to listen to? (I think of the scene in The Social
| Network where Justin Timberlake advises Jesse Eisenberg to go in
| wearing pyjamas to a VC meeting)
|
| - First mover advantage? (not the case for FB or Stripe as far as
| I can tell)
|
| All of the above comes from reading this article:
| https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2018/10/andrew-mason-on-grou...
|
| In it, Andrew Mason talks about how Groupon "followed the data"
| into offering more and more deals to the point that they imploded
| the company. He, like Zuck and the Collisons, had never done this
| before and seemed intelligent and was acting in good faith. Yet
| things went south for him.
|
| Genuinely curious to hear people's responses.
| P5fRxh5kUvp2th wrote:
| Critically thinking and not being afraid of getting it wrong.
|
| 1. You can't move from a small company to running a large
| company without being able to identify (eventually) where it
| works in one but not the other, so you must think critically.
|
| 2. Not being afraid to get it wrong also means not shying away
| from an admission that you need to improve and then doing so.
|
| I think where a lot of people get it wrong is more static
| thinking. Applying what worked for you at the small company to
| the large and expecting it to work.
|
| ---
|
| As an aside, I see this all the time, it's not just a founder
| problem. I'm of the opinion that the reason agile mostly
| doesn't work is because well-meaning people don't actually know
| what good software dev looks like and reach out to
| prescriptions such as scrum. They form the belief that's the
| right way to do it and hang onto it, when in actuality if
| they'd make a few non-agile adjustments they may find
| themselves with a lot more success.
| time_to_smile wrote:
| Only a partial answer to your question (there's plenty of good
| ones), but it reminds me of the time I reached out to the CTO
| of a small startup looking to hire a director of data science.
|
| I've lead a few teams before and have a decade+ plus of
| experience at a range of companies so I had a pretty reasonable
| idea about what's out there, and I figured it was a small
| startup so I might be a good fit.
|
| I got a pretty blunt response that they were looking for
| someone that had managed teams for over 5 years, preferably at
| a single org. Not unreasonable but when I looked at the CTO's
| linked in they had only ever managed their current startup and
| only for 3 years at the time of the discussion.
|
| I just found it curious that they felt the job of CTO could be
| learned pretty much as you go, but anyone without their target
| experience wasn't even worth talking to.
|
| It looks like they had major layoffs a year ago, and aren't
| making much of a dent in their space so it's quite possible
| that "survivorship bias" is a big part of it as well.
| myownpetard wrote:
| It makes sense in another light though. You should try to
| hire people that will bolster your weak areas. In this case a
| lack of experience managing larger teams.
| ren_engineer wrote:
| >How were these people able to transition from founders of a
| tiny company to successfully running and managing large (people
| or revenue) companies? Many of them had never done this before
| so how did they figure out what to do and how to do it?
|
| lots of mentorship from investors and others with experience.
| Even the most famous young founders had a veteran executive
| running a lot of things behind the scenes. Steve Jobs had Mike
| Markkula, Eric Schmidt was running the show at Google, Facebook
| had Thiel and Sean Parker. This applies to pretty much every
| one of these companies
|
| most of the startup myths about these companies are embellished
| because having a young prodigy founder is good for marketing.
| Of course some are never able to make the jump and get replaced
| by the board
| tmpz22 wrote:
| Once you have even a small amount (say $500k) of perceived
| success you find yourself meeting "helpers" constantly, people
| who want to mentor you, people who want to be your friend, and
| magically all these people want something from you.
|
| As your perceived worth goes up you start meeting more
| "interesting" people who want to help more, and of course they
| ultimately want something more from you.
|
| So you eventually have a big network through this process, and
| at a certain level its not even about trading favors, but
| trading the potential for a favor. And with this support group
| you can answer almost any question, market trends, merger
| opportunities, fund raising access, its all there for you.
| silexia wrote:
| As someone who has also successfully done this, I think it is a
| matter of experience. You make mistakes and learn from them.
| Lots of BSers get hired into executive positions, it's best to
| simply do it and learn yourself along the way.
| jrvarela56 wrote:
| My impression is these people are great learners and upgrade
| themselves to do what's required of them to grow the company -
| most importantly how to hire, empower and motivate talented
| people. We're (HNers I guess; assuming dev-focused mentality)
| bound to think it means reading the manual and cracking complex
| problems, but it's more towards prioritizing, figuring out who
| knows what and how to manage people.
|
| I'm not an investor so this is all anecdata from going through
| YC and having a close friend get to 100Ms in funding. My friend
| has obv hired an amazing exec team, but like thousands of
| things, he learned how to do it by reading, asking for advice
| and asking for help. Early stage he figured out how to get a
| 'technical cofounder' - literally got on the phone with 100
| engineers (got me to screen like 3-5 to get a gist of what I
| was looking for). Of course, I was only just one source: for
| everything he had to figure out/study he got input from many
| sources.
|
| They learn, they figure out what's important enough for them to
| put their time/attention, they delegate to talented people. I
| guess the quote 'A players hire A players and B players hire C
| players' applies too. They can tell who's an A player by
| setting the bar high enough to their standard.
|
| I think there wont be a straight answer to this question -
| people who figure it out make huge companies and a lot of money
| as a reward for cracking this puzzle. Re:groupon then on top of
| that you have a couple of dice rolling and if your number
| doesn't hit you're out.
| epolanski wrote:
| Imho: once you have a product it's all about luck into meeting
| and selecting the right people to help you.
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