Leadership Lessons with Wade Foster, CEO Zapier
No matter what we’re talking about at Enrich, the conversation inevitably veers toward what’s going on with AI. How people are using it, how their organizations are adopting it, and what’s real versus hype. So it was a no-brainer to invite Zapier cofounder and CEO Wade Foster to speak to our members about how the ground-breaking company has pivoted quickly to being the go-to AI automation platform, how they keep culture strong even while working remotely and what he looks for in hiring new teammates.
First things first, we need to know how to pronounce the name of Wade Foster’s company. With a grin he says: “Zapier makes you happier. That’s all you need to know.”
If you’d been there, here’s what you’d still be thinking about: Zapier’s “automation company for everyone” hit a turning point in early 2023. Curiosity projects with GPT-3 turned into a company-wide pivot when GPT-4 landed and Wade pulled the fire alarm about AI — a “Code Red” as he describes it.
The “Code Red” drove urgency + reallocation: After GPT-4, Wade and co-founders declared a Code Red, which wasn’t tied to a single metric, but to a conviction that pace had changed and that the ground was going to shift. They ran a hackathon, rewrote parts of the roadmap, and re-swarmed teams toward AI bets. Upon reflecting, Wade noted that about ~10% of the org struggled or opted out; leadership treated that as the cost of a real but necessary pivot.
AI adoption cannot just be a top-down mandate: The biggest failure pattern Wade sees: CEOs say it’s time to adopt AI in the org and get caught in the delegation trap. He says that everyone from the C-suite down needs to dig in. “There's a lot of executives that haven't been hands-on for a long time. Basically I call this the delegation trap, where it's the CEO delegates it to a C-level person, they delegate it to their direct, they delegate it to their direct, and then there's some poor IC in the company who's just like, ‘I guess I'm supposed to figure this out for everybody?’ How do you think that's actually going to go? It's not actually going to work very well.” For leaders who want to see transformation, they need to talk the talk and walk the walk.
Make AI infused into every part of the org: Engineering using AI is a no-brainer. But what about the rest of the org? Marketing, sales, etc? Zapier uses tactics like hackathons (which everyone participates in), show-and-tell at all-hands (not just engineering), etc to make AI adoption everyone’s job.
For complete event notes and the event recording, apply to join Enrich.
