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

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

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

Who knows?

You know.

[laughs]

You know. You. You. [laughs]

[laughs]

[upbeat music] 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?

Zapier makes you happier is the trick. It rhymes with happier.

Zapier makes you happier.

Yep.

Wow. Dude, how is that not your slogan? Here's your s- 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.

It doesn't. It doesn't. We could-

[laughs]

So there's two things from the name. We... One, we just couldn't afford the second P when we started [laughs] when the domain was available.

[laughs]

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 m- connecting all the A- these APIs and all that good stuff.

I didn't even notice that.

Didn't notice that.

Uh, yeah. [laughs]

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

Like I said-

[laughs]

[laughs]

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

Zapier makes you happier. [laughs]

What?

Just go on with your day.

[laughs] But we're happy you're here.

Thank you.

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 kinda 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 d- m- 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. I don't... Is it purely bootstrap, or you at some point took some money?

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.

Yeah, so just incredibly... To, 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-

[laughs]

... is I know how OG V1 of Zapier worked, where you-

Yeah

... 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 ChatGPT usage more powerful-

Yeah

... whatever. I haven't been using that. I also, here's the other caveat, I'm kinda dumb. So, like, imagine talking to