How a $5B founder is using AI (3 tutorials)

How Wade uses AI (steal his prompts): https://clickhubspot.com/efcd Episode 856: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Wade Foster ( https://x.com/wadefoster ) about how he uses AI to save himself hours of work every day. — Show Notes: (0:00) intro (2:27) The sales pitch (7:04) My Robot Executive Staff, Waking Up Like The President (14:13) Evening brief (17:39) AI that argues with you (19:32) War Council skill (31:53) How to use AI to hire better (48:15) being a billionaire before 40 (51:17) a case for not having a chip on your shoulder (54:36) 1-dimensional winners (1:00:55) recommended reading — Links: • Zapier - https://zapier.com/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Media Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Wait, wait, Sam, you gotta click bait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life.

• 0:06Sam Parr?

  Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now?

• 0:09Speaker 02

  Who knows?

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  You know, you know, you, you.

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  All right, we should do a little intro. So first, do you, is it? I've been saying Zapier my whole life. Is it Zapier or Zapier?

• 0:31Speaker 02

  Zapier makes you happier is the trick.

• 0:34Sam Parr?

  It rhymes with happier.

• 0:35Shaan Puri?

  Happier. Wow. Dude, how is that not your slogan? Here's your, here's what your slogan is on your site. The automation layer for agentic AI. It doesn't really flow the same way as Zapier makes you happier.

• 0:45Speaker 02

  It doesn't. We could, so there's two things from the name. Week one, we just couldn't afford the second P when we started. The domain was available. But the other, like, we were too clever for our own good is it has API in the name, which we always thought like, oh, that's neat. Cause it's all connecting all the these APIs and all that good stuff.

• 1:03Sam Parr?

  I didn't even notice that.

• 1:04Shaan Puri?

  Didn't notice that.

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  Honestly, didn't even notice the P was missing.

• 1:09Sam Parr?

  But it also, if you put Zapier makes you happier, I would have read it as Zapier makes you happier.

• 1:16Speaker 02

  Just gone off of your day.

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  But we're happier here.

• 1:21Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  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 kind of 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 like universal plugs and you could 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 bootstrap or you at some point took some money?

• 2:07Speaker 02

  I think the word people call it now is seed strap. 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.

• 2:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So just incredibly to raise a million bucks and then get to five billion in value is just pretty, 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 makes your Claude or chat GPT usage more powerful, whatever. I haven't been using that. I also, here's the other caveat, I'm kind of dumb. So like, imagine talking to somebody with half the IQ of yours.

• 2:57Sam Parr?

  He's like, can you give me a pitch to someone who's sort of dumb and doesn't listen?

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  But things are smart at the same time. The confidence of a smart man.

• 3:08Speaker 02

  I have really good news for you though. Like, I think AI is this incredible gift to people who are kind of dumb. Because you can just

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  Agreed.

• 3:17Speaker 02

  talk to it and say like, hey, I didn't understand that answer. Explain it to me like I'm five. And so you can keep like going down the dumbness stack, I guess, for like, lack of a better word, until you understand it and then go, okay. Now like 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, you know, 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, you know, Kodak's or Cursor or, you know, Open Claw 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 is a chatbot is valuable, but it's only generally smart.

• 4:01Speaker 02

  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 in to the AI. Now, when you start asking it 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, that's the first thing, the first bit of value. And the first thing that people sort of experience is like, oh, connecting stuff makes sense. But like, you can do native connectors and all that other stuff.

• 4:44Speaker 02

  So, you know, use Zapier or 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 like back and forth conversation. It's when you're actually deploying automations and agents to actually go operate for you while you sleep. Like that's where you start to get the real magic. And the reason you want to use Zapier to do that versus like any of these generic agent builders.

• 5:08Sam Parr?

  What's an example?

• 5:09Speaker 02

  I mean, like, you know, Claude has routines or chat GPT has scheduled stuff. Like, you know, there's a bunch of these things that can kind of 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.

• 5:33Shaan Puri?

  Climbing up the IQ scale.

• 5:34Speaker 02

  I know, I know. Hang tight, hang tight, hang tight. Agents, 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 probably heard token maxing, right? And 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 you're going to get, 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.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  Got it.

• 6:11Speaker 02

  And you've got this, you can host it on zapier.com. So you don't have to sit here and like, keep your laptop open to run these agents in the background. And so you just get this like rock solid infrastructure that Zapier has always been great at. Hook up of everything that we've always done. But you can build, you know, inside Claude, which is like really nice because Claude just kind of, the natural language style of building is, I don't know, it's just like way better than the no code style stuff that we were doing in the past.

• 6:40Shaan Puri?

  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, that was good.

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Well, and here's the magic, you can, 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.

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  Talking about.

• 7:02Speaker 02

  Tell me what he was really saying. And that's like the cool part of AI.

• 7:06Shaan Puri?

  That is cool.

• 7:07Sam Parr?

  You gave us a list of stuff. So we said, Wade, what do you, what are you making? And it doesn't always have to be like this, like crazy, like game changing stuff. But what are you making with AI? And you gave us a list of like three or four things. You said you have robot staff.

• 7:22Shaan Puri?

  Sam, you gotta click bait it up. How a $5 billion founder is using AI to change his life.

• 7:30Sam Parr?

  Well, are you a five? What are you guys worth now?

• 7:32Speaker 02

  Who knows?

• 7:33Sam Parr?

  You.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, you do.

• 7:37Speaker 02

  I don't know how the markets behave right now. They're like up and down all sorts of ways. Like, I think the

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  What would your guess be?

• 7:43Speaker 02

  I don't think about it, honestly. Like, I'm just like, how do we build stuff that makes our customers successful?

• 7:48Sam Parr?

  I knew you were a sweet guy. I didn't think you were a liar though.

• 7:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:51Sam Parr?

  Because I know you think about it.

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  Under oath, you know that.

• 7:54Speaker 02

  There's the, there's the old saying, right? Like in the short term, the markets are a voting machine. In the long term, they're a weighing machine.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  I'd rather you just tell me F off than give me these lies. Cause I know you think about it. But don't, don't piss on my back and tell me it's rain, Wade.

• 8:09Speaker 02

  I honestly don't.

• 8:10Sam Parr?

  Just tell me, just tell me it's out of my business and I'd accept it.

• 8:13Speaker 02

  All right. It's none of your business, right?

• 8:14Sam Parr?

  Okay, that's fair.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Since the last time you guys got value, where did you, where'd the five billion number come from in the first place?

• 8:21Speaker 02

  That was a secondary number sale that happened in 2021, maybe?

• 8:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay, are, are revenues slightly up, way up, down, way down since then?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  Revenues are up, yeah.

• 8:34Shaan Puri?

  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, as a high functioning CEO.

• 8:43Speaker 02

  Okay, let me share a screen on some of this stuff. So we'll get into the, to the fun bits. One of the cool things is, you know, because I work with my agent all the time, I can say, hey, I'm, you know, going on my first million, like, help me, help me demo this stuff. And so this is, this is what it came up with. It's like, here's the stuff you should actually go, go demo. And so you can see I've got, you know, four potential things we can show off. One is the robot staff. This is kind of like my chief of staff that does like 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.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  I've got them like an AI that argues back. I think this is a really important thing that every like leader needs to, 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, um, like, there's a few ticks and tips and tricks you can do to like, force it to like scrutinize your thinking rather than just tell you, yeah, you're, 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 like cool to, to dig into. The first thing, and we'll, we'll, I'll show the complete version of this. Where I think most people start is kind of the morning brief. You know, it's super simple.

• 10:07Speaker 02

  It's a good, it's a good way to experience like your first agent. You know, you hook it up to your calendar, you hook it up to your email, you hook it up to your, you know, any meeting, like notes you've got, any prioritization, like a to do list that you have. And then, you know, in this case, it runs at 6:00 AM in the morning and then it sends me a Slack message.

• 10:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I call, I call this waking up like the president, like the president wakes up, gets a, gets a daily brief. Here's what, sir, here's what you have on your, your plate today. 9:30, you're talking to this person, 10:00 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.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so, you know, these things run, like 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.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  I have it set up so it prints, but it doesn't, it doesn't do it all the time. And I also have this woman named Ari, conveniently, because I told, uh, I, I wanted to make it come from like a, a person and the person they made.

• 11:08Shaan Puri?

  Is that weird for you that Sam named his agent after you?

• 11:11Sam Parr?

  The person they selected looked, it looked like Ari. So I was like, it's Ari. So I have Ari that sends me like a pump up speech as well for the day. So I love these daily briefs.

• 11:22Speaker 02

  There you go. Now, so the cool thing, I'll actually show you. So I, I have the link out to this one. This is, you know, this is running on Zapier and you can see what this actually looks like. You know, it kind of looks like, you know, classic Zapier a little bit, you know, runs every day at 6:00 AM. It goes and fetches all the calendar events. And then here it's, um, writing some specific code and hitting the AI to like 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, like you couldn't do this with Zapier. Now, I've not actually looked at any of this code. Like 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 kind of speaks to the value prop of Zapier is it's turning all of this stuff into a deterministic workflow

• 12:07Speaker 02

  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, than most agents. So.

• 12:18Sam Parr?

  But can I use this instead? Like 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.

• 12:28Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 12:28Sam Parr?

  And it's a pain in the ass. Would, would doing it on Zapier just be like in lieu of using like open claw or having a Mac mini?

• 12:36Speaker 02

  There you go. Exactly the, the point. You can just deploy these to Zapier and we run them in the cloud for you.

• 12:41Sam Parr?

  That sounds way better than using open claw or having a Mac mini.

• 12:44Speaker 02

  It's way, way simpler, right? You can look up here, it's also agent managed. So one of the nice things is.

• 12:50Sam Parr?

  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 kind of 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 could just copy and paste all this stuff. Just click the link in the description or scan the QR code. All right, back to Wade.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  While it is running deterministically, if for whatever reason it breaks, like say an API is down or, you know, something doesn't work right, it falls back to having an AI try and troubleshoot for you. And so it automatically apply fixes, you know, when things don't work quite the right way. And so there's this like really nice blend of like traditional software and like agentic software here that is just, you know, super well done by, by the team over here. So I, I definitely would say, hey, if you're, if you're struggling with your open claws, if you're like keeping your laptop open all the time, you should definitely install Zapier into like your, you know, agent or AI of choice and, and give this a try.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay, what else? So you get the morning brief, that's pretty standard, I would say.

• 14:19Speaker 02

  So let's talk about, so I think the morning brief is pretty standard, but the one that I really like is the, the evening brief in the Scribe. So, you know, I've had, I played with a couple of 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, you know, it, 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 do's 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.

• 15:01Speaker 02

  And it, 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 what, how the day went, I basically 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. But the second thing that it's doing is it's actually taking action on them stuff, on stuff. So it says, hey, you know, 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 this other things. And so this is where AI starts to get really helpful is it's not just

• 15:47Speaker 02

  giving you a brief and sort of 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 is when you can actually put it to work. So I love Scribe, those sort of like post meeting follow up or the end of the day wrap up because it just, I don't know, I used to spend like two hours at the end of my day, just like, you know, just trying to catch up on every little tiki tack thing that I sort of got roped into. And now that like two hours at the end of the day is down to like 15 minutes.

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  So you think this is legit saving you two hours a day almost?

• 16:20Speaker 02

  I, yes, yes. And furthermore, that like, you know, what's good about my day, what's bad about my day part? It just helps me stay like focused on the things that matter. So both the AI is helping me with that, but I also will send, um, like I remember 90, like about, about 90 days after I started doing this, I said, hey, I had this thought, I was like, you know so much about like what makes me have good days and bad days. Can you like summarize like what is common about my good days and what is common about my bad days? And it was like, sure. And it did all that stuff. And then I gave it to my assistant and I said, hey, here's like, please make my days look like more good days versus bad days.

• 16:58Sam Parr?

  What, what were your good days and what were your bad days?

• 17:00Speaker 02

  So for me, like 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. Um, you know, once, once after lunch comes around, you know, I, I'm just not going to get anything like serious done. And so the most important thing is I don't want a meeting until 11:00 AM. And so you just give me that morning time where I can knock out the most critical things and the day's going to go great. Like I will win the rest of the day. But if I have to like, you know, if, if that time starts to get sucked into like firefighting mode, you can tell I'll just be grumpy at the end of the day where I'm just like, ugh, like I'm not, I'm not being successful. And you'll notice this podcast started at 11:00 AM.

• 17:43Shaan Puri?

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• 18:11Sam Parr?

  Can you show us how to get the AI to challenge you instead of?

• 18:15Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. Let's do that. So coming back, AI that argues back. So this is pretty simple, right? I use, I use Cursor as my daily like agent, but if you're using Claude, if you're using ChatGPT, if you're using Gemini, they often have like a system prompt or a way that you can sort of tune like how it talks to you. And so in Cursor, I have a file as the agent's MD. That's kind of what it uses everywhere. Claude has a Claude MD. And basically I have a file that's like how to work with me. And, you know, I, you know, 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 like

• 18:58Speaker 02

  goal-seeking entities. And so if you tell it like, what I want from you is this, it's going to say, okay, well, that's what Wade's wants. So I'm going to try and give him that goal. But if you don't tell him this, if you don't make this configuration, it's going to just genuinely try and like placate you because it thinks that's what you want. And so you do have to tell it, you know, it's sort of guided a little bit. So like, here's an example of like, you know, 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 competitor raised prices. Help me draft the announcement, right? So this is like something that it should definitely like say, hey, press pause. Like that's a, that's a bad idea. And so when I do that, here's the, you know, pushback that it gives me.

• 19:42Speaker 02

  It's like, hey, that's a big move off a pretty thin signal. Before you draft anything, I want you to, I want three things on the table. So like, you know, bring me the data, you know, tell me like what the actual problem you're trying to solve is, you know, pricing announcements are wrong. Like, you know, is there a smaller experiment you can run?

• 19:58Shaan Puri?

  That's great.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's just like helping you think through, you know, these problems. And then, you know, I have this other skill that I've made, which I call my War Council skill. And so this is like an even like more specific version of this that I will often invoke. So I could say, hey, y'all, I'm thinking about hiring this person. Here's all the like notes that I've got on them from the interview panel. Like, 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 is a, actually, let me poke back. I think I have the War Council skill in here. Ah, yeah, here it is. Okay, it didn't actually pull the skill up. So this, if you go to Zapier's GitHub, you can get a copy of the War Council. But what

• 20:40Speaker 02

  this does is it spins up subagents. And these subagents take on personas. There are seven subagents that get spun up, so seven personas. Some of them are standing members. So for example, I have the wartime COO is a standing member of the War Council. There's the ruthless CFO is a standing member. There's a contrarian board member that are standing members of the War Council. Then I leave four personas to be generated dynamically. So based on the prompt, it will decide who else, who else do I need to get advice from?

• 21:16Shaan Puri?

  That wartime COO, you created the persona, you described its characteristics, or you trained it on like Travis Kalanick transcripts or something like, what did you, how did you do that?

• 21:26Speaker 02

  In my case, I, it's a, it's a generic version, but you could do whatever you want, right? If you wanted to have like Travis.

• 21:33Sam Parr?

  What does generic version mean, though? You just said you be a wartime COO.

• 21:36Speaker 02

  These are the traits of, I said, this is a traits of a wartime COO. And it like, I said, actually, what I did was said, I want a wartime COO, you know, generate that persona. And then I looked at what it created and just made some like.

• 21:48Sam Parr?

  Do you have like a pretty chill, generally happy, positive outlook? Like, like?

• 21:55Speaker 02

  This is, this is, you're seeing the like, the, the, the internal competitor inside of me, right? Like, this is the, the Kobe Bryant Mamba mentality, like, you know, like coming through. I like having this like, you know, this sort of thought partner that is a little bit more like ruthless because that's not my, that's not my default mode, right? I want to have that kind of checks and balance there.

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  And as a CEO, you're not always going to have people who are comfortable, available, skilled in that way around you, right? Like, this is, this is like 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 you're, it sounds like you're using it to chat, make decisions. Am I just wrong about what Cursor is, or?

• 22:38Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean Cursor, you can use Cursor, Claude Code, Codex, like, these are all ostensibly coding agents. But they have this like 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, 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, you know, engineers to build stuff. Think of it as like, you're hiring Cursor or Claude Code or Codex to be the engineer you delegate things to. Where it's like, you, you probably have engineers you've worked with. You like to tell that engineer, go build this for me, or go build that for me. Like, that's why I use Cursor is 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.

• 23:22Shaan Puri?

  Wait, so your default, when you just need to like, talk to an AI or chat or ask a question, you go straight to Cursor? You don't do ChatGPT or Claude or anything?

• 23:30Speaker 02

  I mean, mostly, especially when I'm at my desktop, I'm mostly talking to Cursor most of the time. It has like different models that you can sort of toggle back and forth on, which I like. So I can, you know, test a bunch of different models and things like that.

• 23:42Sam Parr?

  Are you a typer or a talker?

• 23:44Speaker 02

  I, I'm, I do a lot of voice to text these days. So I use this, this app Monologue.

• 23:51Sam Parr?

  Why Monologue?

• 23:52Speaker 02

  I don't know. I like it. Like, I've tried a few of these. I've tried like Whisperflow and Super Whisper and Monologue. I don't know. It just like, it just gets me. Like, I don't know, like, I don't know of a better way to describe it. Quick side note, I think this is going to be like an interesting thing about software for the future. Like, when it is so cheap to build software, I think you're going to see more software that has like a personality to it. You think about like consumer goods. It's like, how many places can you buy jeans from? Or how many places can you get, you know, whatever from? There's like, not that many differences, but you choose, like, you might choose one brand and I might choose a different brand. And it's just

• 24:34Speaker 02

  because like, I like it better. But it functionally does the same thing. I think there's going to be more software that kind of like feels that way.

• 24:42Sam Parr?

  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 like, you know, or like t-shirt brands. Like, do you remember, I was watching this Blink 182 documentary last night? Do you guys remember Hurley? Sean, you remember Hurley shirts? They're everywhere. And I, and I was watching this 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.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's, I think it's a really fascinating point because it always was differentiated on either features or price, right? Those are kind of the, the two main axes of competition. And then design got layered in. And I feel like there was like a wave where better design, better UI UX became a differentiator. And then design, you know, got a seat at the table. And then, but if you look at like other products, non-software, it'll be either kind of brand or like status, you know, 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. You know, who do I like to feel of when I'm going to interact with it versus which

• 25:57Shaan Puri?

  model has more parameters and, you know, a higher, you know, benchmark score on the evals is not going to be how people are going to choose these things. Because I'm already doing that. You're, I think you're absolutely right.

• 26:06Speaker 02

  Well, and I certainly feel it like, you know, as someone who plays around with a lot of the models, I'm starting to find myself have some preferences for like different tasks. Like, if I'm asking it to actually go do an engineering task where I don't need to talk to it, there's models I like for that. You know, like Fable is fantastic. Like, you're going to give it a really complex, like, you know, engineering task. I'm like, great, have Fable go take a, take a swing at this. It's going to nail the thing. But man, I do not want to talk to Fable. Like, it is, it is not fun to talk to at all.

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  We all have coworkers like that. They crush it at some tasks, but you're not, not a great hang.

• 26:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly. But then there's other like models where you're like, hey, if I want to sort of like go back and forth and have like a discussion and a debate around like what we're doing. I'm like, okay, I feel like I can, you know, tolerate that discussion a lot better than like trying to talk to Fable where I'm just like, oh my God.

• 26:58Sam Parr?

  Are all the phrases, like when Claude talks to me, it's like, what are the, what are its phrases? It's like, um.

• 27:05Speaker 02

  It's not this, it's that.

• 27:07Sam Parr?

  Or here's, here's the thing that's quietly really the problem.

• 27:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, the honest truth, the load-bearing, you know.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, all right, here's, let's get to the spine. Are those specific to AI or to the model?

• 27:21Speaker 02

  To the model, for sure. Like, you can tell, most models, I think, are derivative of either, either the, you know, like Anthropic series or GPT series. And so like, you know, those two kind of have two distinct personalities. But if you go use, you know, any of the like open source tools or things like that, you can kind of see like who they've been distilling a lot. And like, it sort of inherits the personality of, you know, the one above.

• 27:44Sam Parr?

  Dude, I've noticed that my coworkers are starting to say, like, the Claude, like, someone the other day said, like, let's get to the load-bearing part, or like something like, of like.

• 27:53Speaker 02

  Like when they're talking out loud, not in writing?

• 27:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I've noticed that. Where they start saying things, I'm like, that's Claude. And these, and it's sort of like.

• 28:02Shaan Puri?

  You unplugged them.

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, or, or they're trying to talk that way. So then they can like use Claude's writing and be like, no, it's really me.

• 28:10Speaker 02

  Who is training who, right? Are we training the AIs or the AIs training us? And, and I think, like, 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. You know, I have a real version of it. It's got a list of accounts and you can kind of click into the accounts and see what's going on with it. So if we click into, you know, Acme Logistics here, you can see, you know, a bunch of stuff about it. It's like, oh, you know, 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 then like, here's the interesting part. It's got the suggested CEO outreach where it's like, you should email Jordan and, you know,

• 28:52Speaker 02

  check in on him, see what's up. And so this is where, you know, I think AI gets really interesting because in some respects, who's the boss now? Like, am I the boss or is the AI the boss? You know, every Sunday morning now, I wake up with a list of, you know, 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 sort of stuff. And I candidly love it. Like, this is stuff that was really hard for me. Like, I'm not naturally a person who's just like, you know, ultra networker like you guys are, where I'm just like, I gotta keep in touch with everybody. And so now I've kind of put an agent in the loop and said, like, hate me, help me be better at this stuff. And yeah, I just, I literally wake up in my Sunday morning briefing. It says, here's all the accounts you

• 29:37Speaker 02

  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 like something to this where, you know, if you, if you do a good job of like building these tools up, they'll kind of 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.

• 30:02Sam Parr?

  Well, Brian Halligan, one of the founders of HubSpot, he, he either came up with this idea or it was in an interview where Jack Dorsey from Twitter came up with the idea and it was on Brian's podcast. But they basically 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 be actually be making the hard decisions because it's likely going to do a better job. And so that kind of like changed how I thought about it. And it sounds like that's sort of what you're saying without saying it that way.

• 30:46Speaker 02

  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. Like, it just can. Like, it can, it could 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 just knows way more than you as a human is ever gonna know. And so that's gonna make it way more useful for certain types of decisions. Like, like to start right now, it's like you use it as an assistant to sort of help you make these decisions. But it seems pretty plausible to me that you might start saying, hey, I'm gonna take its suggestion more

• 31:30Speaker 02

  often than not in certain places.

• 31:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's true. I wonder, I wonder if AI is gonna have like, because you know, 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, you know, avoiding conflict or, you know, different things that humans have as their biases. And then I wonder if we're gonna have to come up with the cognitive biases of AI to watch out for. Like, okay, we know we have this sort of sunk cost fallacy and we have this bias for recency bias. What is AI's gonna be? Because we're gonna need to be aware of those. The more we sort of turn over decision making to AI.

• 32:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:06Shaan Puri?

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• 32:49Shaan Puri?

  not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum NA, members FDIC.

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  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?

• 33:03Speaker 02

  Well, I would say like, any high stakes decision, the AI is weighing in on now. Like, you know, there's sort of a seat at the table and, you know, the exec meeting and the board meetings and all that sort of stuff where we're asking the AI to like surface those things.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  Is there an example where AI kind of changed your mind or got to the right answer that you weren't at and you decided to go with it?

• 33:24Speaker 02

  Here's an example of a place where I find AI to be really useful. Let's come back to the hiring example. So, you know, we, we run a bar raiser process where I approve every job offer that goes off, but like exec team member sort of is on the final part of the hiring loop and it's intended to audit the hiring process in addition to sort of 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, I would often, you know, if I would come across a candidate where I was not so sure on, I could kind of 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. Like, most hiring

• 34:09Speaker 02

  managers hire one or two people in a year. It's like, I'm, I'm, I've just looked over like way, way more volume. And so I don't always have the language to say like, why it's wrong, but I can still smell it. I'm like, and so I would often go to these folks and be like, are you sure? Something is off. Like, I don't, 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. Like, folks would be like, well, I stand by this person. Like, Wade, are you just gonna make the hiring decision? If so, like, you just, if you don't want to hire them, don't hire them. And it sort of be like, and I'd kind of be like, well, that's not really what I want, right? Like, I want you to make the decision. I'm just trying to like, give you some guidance here. And I want you to sort of be able to, you know, reason through this problem. And if you've answered it, like, if you have confidence that you

• 34:53Speaker 02

  have, you know, efficiently answered it, that I will back you. Let's go hire this person. But if you haven't, then I want you to like, take this into account and go figure out, like, you know, 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 just sort of play out as like, well, does Wade want me to hire this person or does Wade not want me to hire that person? And I'm like, ah, like, so anyway, that's kind of what was happening pre-AI. Post-AI, I'd run the war council or like my hiring committee over these folks. And then I would notice, like, it's just more articulate than me. It could sort of say, hey, I noticed that, you know, this person has these traits and

• 35:32Speaker 02

  the panel did not scrutinize this. So you need to go scrutinize this. And it would, you know, it'd give like a score of like, here, compared to everyone you've hired at Zapier, here's how, here's how likely I think they're gonna be successful or not. And so now I could take that to the hiring panel and say like, hey, the, the AI said this, I agree. Like, what, what's going on here? And I noticed all of a sudden the behavior shift where people would go like, 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, like, what else, what else am I missing? What am I not seeing here? And I just found that, like, maybe because it's not, maybe because it feels

• 36:16Speaker 02

  like arguing with an AI is easier than arguing with the CEO, or maybe because it's more eloquent and it like actually has a way of talking that makes it like 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.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  I don't know if you guys were ever like believers in some of these personality tests. Like, there's this thing called Culture Amp, I think it's called, where it's like a software where you do personality tests before you hire someone. Ray Dalio has his version of it, whatever. And there's like, tends to be, it's like a scale where people fall in where they're like, I don't believe in anything involving like personality tests. I've noticed with AI, I have fallen closer to the side of like, 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 like figuring out if a person could be good for the job? Because that makes, with AI, it makes the process so much easier.

• 37:15Speaker 02

  What do you think, Sean?

• 37:17Shaan Puri?

  I go the the other way, meaning it's not really about personality test per se. But I find that, you know, like with self-driving, one approach was let's put all the sensors on the car. Let's get cameras, just get more cameras, let's get LiDAR, let's get radar, let's get sonar, let's, you know, put a, what else we do? Taste test, what are all the different possible sensors you could put on the car? And the Tesla approach was basically like, it needs vision, it needs eyes only. And one of the reasons why, people thought it was for cost, which was, I think, a factor, that like LiDAR was very, very expensive. So it was not practical in the long term. But this, the reason that Elon says that he did it was because when you have too many sensors, you get too much conflicting data.

• 37:59Shaan Puri?

  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, train the hell out of them. That's kind of my approach to hiring, where I now simplify, I need less time to, to spend with somebody. And I look for fewer things and, but those have to be home runs. Otherwise, I'm just not going to hire the person. So what do I mean by that?

• 38:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, answer the question, though, like, how do you get, okay, what you're saying is, instead of looking at like hundreds of questions, you're looking at three questions. Are you good at this, this, or the, okay, so how do you gather that information?

• 38:35Shaan Puri?

  So again, stealing from Elon, he, he talks about, you want evidence of exceptional ability. So all I'm looking for, I'm not looking for like, 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, like, 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, that thing? And if you really haven't done anything exceptional, the odds of this being the place where you have the, the finally, you know, 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.

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  Then after that is a kind of personality test of like, do, I try to do something with them where I get the, you know, gut, gut feel of like, 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 don't, they're not, 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 as signal. But obviously, like, I'm not running the size of org that way it is. And I'm, I'm, I'm working with people who are working directly with me in a very, very small team where everybody has to be, you know, 10x or better. Otherwise, it's just not worth having them on the team. And so that's the, I've learned that kind of the hard way, because I used to do it very differently.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, we, so we've done some work with this. So like, we've done like Myers-Briggs type stuff internally at times, we've done, 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 Colombia that does this profiles for every hire. And he's like insistent, where it's like, if I have an accountant, they need to be this profile, this dotted it on. 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 what I, where I net out is that, I mean, you do need somebody who is exceptional, first and foremost. Like, everybody's got a personality type, but it doesn't tell you if you're good or not. Like, you know, you, you can score whatever you're going to score, but you still need to be good. But I do think that, like, teams matter.

• 40:44Speaker 02

  Like, and when I look at my, 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 like a complementary traits, I'm going to be way better, because they're going to have my backside in places that, I, I don't know if, like, there's any science behind this. But if you look at my EA versus my, like 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 does, like, have, she, like, likes doing things that I don't like doing. And she's good at those things that I don't like doing.

• 41:24Speaker 02

  And it ends up being like, pretty helpful, because it is kind of like in sports, where it's like, you know, if you basketball team, it's like, well, you need somebody that's gonna, you know, Michael Jordan's going to shoot all the shots, well, you need Dennis Rodman, who's going to like lock down D and grab boards.

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  But are you doing that for, when you guys are hiring?

• 41:40Speaker 02

  We don't do it, no, we don't actually have people like, take a test and say like, hey, what are, what are you going to do? Different hiring managers are probably doing it somewhat like by, like, organically. But it is not a science for us.

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  I've, I've an idea for how I think companies could use AI to improve their hiring. I don't know if this is like fully, like, legal, I don't know if you could do this exactly the way I'm going to describe it, but here, here's the exercise.

• 42:06Sam Parr?

  I'm in.

• 42:06Shaan Puri?

  You, you go through your team, so you have all the, all the past hires you've, 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 kind of like, been a source of kind of hit or miss performance, let's say. Cool, so you could stack rank employees in your team, and you could say, great. You also have maybe the, the transcripts or the recordings of all the interviews that they did, right? So you have this historical pattern that you, that you have with all of them. And then you have new people that are coming in. And like, so, because when I was at Twitch, they use the Amazon bar razor thing that you described, and they're trying to do like the human version of this.

• 42:44Shaan Puri?

  It's like, here's this guy who's seen 1,000 interview panels, who will come in and kind of like, standardize the hiring process, but also like, provide the most experienced voice on hiring. And then they're kind of checking this candidate against this pattern of past candidates, as well as against your values and, you know, the, the role, 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 like dramatically better at that. And I'm surprised that people aren't using, like, kind of the training data of your existing team to inform the next hire. Do you think it would work? Like, I don't know for sure if, if AI would be good at that, but I, I kind of think that would, that would be helpful.

• 43:29Speaker 02

  I mean, I, I remember Google sharing like a lot of their hiring insights, where they did a ton of tests around this stuff like this. And I think what they found was that no hiring managers were like, had an edge over any other hiring managers, with one exception. And the one exception was that there was like this hyper-specific, specialized group of like technical talent, where there was like, only like an in of like 100 people in that domain. And it's just like, their hit rate was better, because it was like, well, there's just only 100 people to do this thing. And so I don't find that a very satisfying answer. Like, it feels like there should be something to what you were saying.

• 44:06Sam Parr?

  Also, something that I've been thinking about a bunch, like, I was thinking, a large percentage of the people who work at my company, which is like 35 or something, they, we work here in this office out here, and they're here because basically I'm bored and I want someone to hang out with most days. Like, that's like, probably 70% of the reasons why I have a company, is just because I, like, want someone to hang out with.

• 44:29Shaan Puri?

  Because I'm not good at friends.

• 44:30Speaker 02

  Friends are hard, employees are easier.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  Friends are hard, starting, starting LLCs is easier.

• 44:35Sam Parr?

  Which sounds like a joke, but like, you know, I'm sure Sean, you agree, like, you, Sean has, Sean has a guy who works with him, he's like, if, you can work for me if you move here and we hang out every day.

• 44:45Shaan Puri?

  Yesterday, I was like, I'm kind of done working, you want to play Fortnite? We just played Fortnite for a couple hours, like, yeah, absolutely.

• 44:51Speaker 02

  I need a pickleball partner, can you come be my employee?

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  I mean, that's kind of how it is, I just want to like hang out with people. But when you have, okay, now, I'm not, I want you to put like, let's be the CEO war console, and I need you to be like crazy Wade, not real Wade. So anything said for the rest of this section, you can be, you could kind of go unhinged.

• 45:09Speaker 02

  Unhinged mode, okay.

• 45:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but.

• 45:12Shaan Puri?

  War Wade.

• 45:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't know how many employees you have now, but you used to have 700, what do you have now?

• 45:18Speaker 02

  It's like 730 or something like that, it's not that many more.

• 45:22Sam Parr?

  When you have like remote employees, like, for the most part, you only know them as just like Slack avatars, right? Like, you don't know all 700 people, and they, many of you, them don't know you, other than like this guy on Zoom and someone who blogs occasionally. It kind of like begs the question, like, what if they were all just like, or like, can like one person just be like 10 or 30 different agents that they monitor? And you only have like 20 employees?

• 45:49Speaker 02

  I, I think that there's definitely a school of thought where I've heard that. I, I do think there's limits to this. And the way I think about the limits is that, it, it's kind of like how a manager has like an ideal span of control. Where it's like, oh, I can only have like, you know, I don't know, the, the rulebook says eight. I think, you know, you're seeing people push the limits now to have like, you know, 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 like, keep up with like this many people.

• 46:25Sam Parr?

  But you don't keep up with that many people anyway, like, um, when you have a company, like, there's stuff happening that you don't even know about. Well, why wouldn't you just have it be one of your agents?

• 46:37Speaker 02

  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.

• 46:45Shaan Puri?

  More things to review.

• 46:46Speaker 02

  There still is like a, there still is like a limit.

• 46:49Sam Parr?

  But I'm not saying that it would be like just Wade, but I'm saying like, 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 like 20 people could do that?

• 47:04Speaker 02

  For a company like Zapier, I'm not sure, but definitely like, a, a company could certainly do that. In fact, we've already seen companies that have gotten to like that size on very small numbers of revenue.

• 47:14Sam Parr?

  Which ones?

• 47:16Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, shoot, like Minecraft back in, before Microsoft bought it, was like, I don't know how many people, but it was like less than 100, I think. And it made it, you know, a whole bunch of money. There was that New York Times story that came out this summer about that guy who was selling like GLP-1 stuff.

• 47:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we had him booked as a guest on the podcast, and then that article came out the day before and he canceled on us.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  Well, so yeah, like, you know, he's doing like, I, I don't know how many employees he has, but I think it was like maybe one or two.

• 47:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:45Shaan Puri?

  How many inmates does he have now? He's got two inmates?

• 47:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. How many cellmates does he have?

• 47:52Speaker 02

  But I mean, you also could think of someone like, uh, like Taylor Swift. Like Taylor Swift has a very, very small team, from what I understand. And is, you know, printing, you know, billions a year or something like that, or at least at her peak was. So I, I know, I think it just kind of depends on the business.

• 48:09Shaan Puri?

  Maybe just the philosophical thing of like, do you think that the way, so the way work 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?

• 48:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 48:21Shaan Puri?

  Is then, and maybe in the corporate world, your value was proportional to how good you were at managing people? Is the new world where your value, the thing you get, the amount you get paid is based on how well you manage AI agents, right? Like, how, how, how big of a fleet can you manage? And how effective is that fleet? Is that the new managerial skill?

• 48:40Speaker 02

  Yes. I, I feel pretty confident that that is the direction we're heading to.

• 48:45Sam Parr?

  Sort of saying, I mean, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but you just said the same thing.

• 48:48Shaan Puri?

  You're saying I'm right and I'm genius.

• 48:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 48:52Speaker 02

  We, we got there. We got there.

• 48:54Sam Parr?

  And again, this is ruthless weight. So I don't want you to like, think that you have to like, hedge or apologize, but.

• 49:00Speaker 02

  There's still different roles in a company, right? Like you're, you know, you're, think of like your sales team. Like, 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 kind of want you building the human relationship more so than like doing a bunch of AI stuff. I definitely want you to do some AI stuff, but it's not necessarily like, hey, you know, Mr. Or Miss, like, sales leader or, or like frontline sales AE, like, go manage these 20 reps that are going to actually do the sales for you.

• 49:38Sam Parr?

  Can I switch gears for a second? How old are you?

• 49:41Speaker 02

  I turned 40 this year.

• 49:43Sam Parr?

  Okay. So you were, if $5 billion is your value, you were in the ballpark of being a 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 have it a good time.

• 50:06Speaker 02

  I mean, it, it feels, honestly, it feels a little fictional to even hear you say that. Where I'm like, I don't, I don't think of myself like that way. And it, and it, it's sort of is, like, so much is like tied to like the paper, the paper worth of Zapier at any given moment in time. It's like the voting machine. Like, I don't have liquid dollars that look like that. You know, I, I have some amount that's liquid.

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  Describe, describe your psychology around money. So how do you think about it? How, 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.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  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, then 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.

• 51:10Shaan Puri?

  What, what do you think that level is?

• 51:12Speaker 02

  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, 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, I was like, man, I'll be set.

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  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 100 grand before I'm 30, and then I am set, baby.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 51:45Sam Parr?

  That was the goal.

• 51:46Speaker 02

  And I, 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.

• 51:52Shaan Puri?

  Do you, do you do anything cool with your money?

• 51:54Speaker 02

  You know, when I go to a restaurant, I don't look at the, how much the items cost.

• 51:59Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 51:59Speaker 02

  Like, that kind of stuff.

• 52:01Sam Parr?

  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, um, 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 of liquid, I want to change this about my life, or there's something interesting I want to do?

• 52:21Speaker 02

  No, there's, there's like, no, nothing that I couldn't already do. You know, like, I, 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.

• 52:40Sam Parr?

  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 Darmesh 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, you have a far more wholesome and, um, a positive outlook when it comes to a lot of this stuff. So that's why I like hearing you talk about some things

• 53:25Sam Parr?

  where you don't typically hear an emotionally healthy person give their perspective on.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  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, my two grandparents that were married. I have like aunts and uncles and cousins that were all sorts of just like really tightened in. 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, I, I, I didn't know him as that. I just knew him as this guy, you know, who 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, until two weeks before he died. He did the New York Times crossword puzzle in pen every single day.

• 54:11Speaker 02

  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. And, 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 non-stop. 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.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  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.

• 55:33Sam Parr?

  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?

• 55:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. We, um, I, at first I love that story that you just told. That was actually 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. 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.

• 56:33Shaan Puri?

  And when you said that, it kind of reminded me, it sounds like your grand, 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 them, if you have to kind of 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. 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

• 57:12Shaan Puri?

  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.

• 57:53Speaker 02

  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?

• 58:25Sam Parr?

  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.

• 58:42Speaker 02

  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. Yeah, 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 questioned around like, well, what about, I mean, heck, you guys are asking me about. 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 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 did feel like the media gets a lot of this, like narrative around billionaires wrong. Is there like, you know, they're hoarding their money, they're in all this stuff. I

• 59:27Speaker 02

  mean, look, I don't know all billionaires. I've gotten to meet a couple. And, you know, Darmesh, 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 gonna keep doing that, whether or not they make, you know, a little bit of money or a lot of money.

• 59:44Shaan Puri?

  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. Then when they made the money, they kept doing it. Clearly, it wasn't about the money, because.

• 59:55Speaker 02

  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 gonna 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 probably should be retiring. But they keep playing because they just love playing and they'll take, 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.

• 1:00:23Sam Parr?

  So Sean, listen to this. One time, I think in 2000, and maybe 2019, Wade spoke at HustleCon in Oakland, California. And this was right, I think, before you raised your round. I, 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. Because it was kind of fun to have like, you know, billionaires or like

• 1:01:07Sam Parr?

  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, no, 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.

• 1:01:38Speaker 02

  Yeah. I don't remember it being eight or 10 hours, but I do remember.

• 1:01:42Sam Parr?

  It was all day. Like, you got it at nine. I think we left at four. So however long that is.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  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'm almost certain I had a notebook of ideas that I sort of took back and was like, all right, we're gonna try this. We're gonna 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. And just like, all right, see if this works for me.

• 1:02:18Sam Parr?

  What do you, what do you listen to and what do you consume on a regular basis?

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  Books?

• 1:02:21Sam Parr?

  Well, my, I mean. Podcasts, whatever.

• 1:02:22Speaker 02

  My favorite podcast, I gotta give a shout out to The Acquired guys. Like, I mean, it's just 10 out of 10. Like, you know, most of those things they do a deep dive on are just these legendary entrepreneurs who've like, you know, did it for decades.

• 1:02:35Shaan Puri?

  Leave us a, leave us with a recommendation. Give us an acquired episode we should listen to and maybe a book that you liked.

• 1:02:41Speaker 02

  Well, the NFL episode, if you like sports at all, like, you know, that is a good entry way into acquired. Though probably my favorite series is all the retail ones. So there's like a, like a, 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,

• 1:03:05Speaker 02

  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, he 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.

• 1:03:37Sam Parr?

  Sean, do you have a book that you read recently you want to recommend?

• 1:03:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Um, there's a book called The Score. Have I talked about that here? See Tai 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. 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 game, how you win in this game and like, what your goal should be. So they dictate your goals, they dictate your

• 1:04:23Shaan Puri?

  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 gonna have to be loose. You're gonna have to be highly communicative. You're gonna have to be a great team player, whether you're the guesser or you're the actor, doesn't matter. But then let's say you play Risk. It's like, you're gonna have to be like ruthless, dominating. You're gonna, 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. That, 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

• 1:05:08Shaan Puri?

  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, he's like, oh, you gotta 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 like, strivers actually tend to win more too, but they didn't play for that reason.

• 1:05:50Shaan Puri?

  And like, you can't just say, well, I'm not gonna 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 gonna 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.

• 1:06:11Sam Parr?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:06:12Shaan Puri?

  Games. And I, 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.

• 1:06:22Sam Parr?

  Looks like it just came out too. The book came out like, six months ago.

• 1:06:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I'm digging that book right now.

• 1:06:27Sam Parr?

  I just finished. I'll, 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 Blink 182 as a kid?

• 1:06:35Speaker 02

  I, I did.

• 1:06:36Sam Parr?

  Did you, Sean?

• 1:06:38Shaan Puri?

  I mean, who didn't? Yeah.

• 1:06:40Speaker 02

  Millennial, like, yeah.

• 1:06:42Sam Parr?

  Uh, 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.

• 1:06:57Shaan Puri?

  Dude, why, why are musician biographies so good?

• 1:07:01Sam Parr?

  They're so, I'm desperate for more.

• 1:07:02Shaan Puri?

  Whatever of musicians and comedians.

• 1:07:04Sam Parr?

  What else do you have?

• 1:07:06Shaan Puri?

  This Red Hot Chili Peppers guy, Anthony Kiedis.

• 1:07:09Sam Parr?

  Was that good?

• 1:07:10Shaan Puri?

  Long time ago. I was like, in college, I read this thing and I loved it.

• 1:07:13Sam Parr?

  Well, his is, his is good, I think, because he had a messed up, and he partied.

• 1:07:17Shaan Puri?

  Messed up childhood, leading to a messed up adulthood.

• 1:07:20Sam Parr?

  So it was like riveting. These guys, they weren't really that messed up. Um, but they got really famous, like really fast. And he talks about it and he's like, you know, a lot of, I'm gonna, this is the chapter where I complained about fame. And he was like, just joking. I loved 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, uh, Mark Hoppus has a biography. And if you want like the Cliff Notes.

• 1:07:47Shaan Puri?

  What's it called?

• 1:07:49Sam Parr?

  Fahrenheit 182, I believe. But anyway, Wade, you're the man. We appreciate you. You have an invite whenever you want. And thank you for everything.

• 1:07:57Speaker 02

  You bet. Thanks for having me, guys.

• 1:07:59Sam Parr?

  All right. That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:08:10Shaan Puri?

  All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Hsu. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.