YouSaid · the spoken record

Wade Foster

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70
first
2025-12-18
most recent
2025-12-18
sittings or episodes
1
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podcast

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  1. “Wait, what happens to Gen Xers who had like a more verticalized approach where like, I'm a designer, I am a product manager when you have these, I'll assume, 30-something Gen Z's, you know, elder millennials or younger millennials even who can just kind of wrap the whole thing up in a bow and bring it to management.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “Does this mean we're going to a singularity in terms of startup employees who are valuable, Ali, where the person who can identify a problem, vibe code a solution, cloud code a solution, whatever it is, and then the design is perfunctory and done at the end, it's kind of like we're moving towards one type of person who is the identifier and builder of the solution and just good enough so I don't have to hire some verticalized SaaS product, yeah?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “Off your first website or domain purchase. Ollie, what are you seeing game on the field in terms of rank and file employees participating in the creation of prototypes? More importantly, I guess, what are your customers telling you?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

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    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “750. So, Mikey, tell me how do you think about the pipeline, training, and maybe people who are developer curious being able to digitally with a vibe coding tool or clog code make these little solutions that maybe aren't production ready, but they certainly around the table make the conversation move faster. Are you seeing that as well inside of Suno?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “What are you seeing in terms of the developer pipeline? Is it increasing or is it not a major issue for you because you've intentionally kept the company, I don't want to say small, but sort of a tight operation? How many total employees do you have weight and how many do you have, Mikey?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “So it's in a way these tools replace the whiteboard session at a company where some product manager or some frontline salesperson is like, hey, we should have this feature. Let me draw for you on the whiteboard. It's like, well, let me just make my own wireframes, yeah?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “Tell me about the pipeline of developers. Do we think, and we'll go around the horn here, the co-pilots and how easy it is to onboard and become good at UX using these different tools and the onboarding at Replit and just being able to sort of become a developer? Are we seeing an increased weight in the number of developers and number of people who are developer curious? And is that pipeline increasing? Because that was the bottleneck previously is we just didn't have enough people going for computer science degrees and becoming developers. Is that increasing radically because of AI or less so than you would think?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “And in the beginning, people thought this was like a very niche idea. I remember one of your investors when you hit like some crazy milestone. I don't know if it was 250 million dollar valuation or $500 million valuation asking me, should I sell? And I was like, not if wage running the company because this is a tool people are going to need for some time to come, but maybe you as the elder statesman here, sort of a twofold question. One, how do you frame the company as an AI company now having started as a tools company, a SaaS company? I'm not sure how it was originally framed. And then how do you, are you losing all of your developers to these crazy offers and how do you keep people engaged in year 14 as a startup? So there's two questions there. Take them however you like. Yeah.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “When you spend at least $250, go to LinkedIn. com slash this week in startups to claim your credit. All right, Wade, you've been running Zapier for how many years? Is this year 12, 13, or 14?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “If you're selling a business to business product, you're looking to reach professional customers who are doing business. And the question you have to ask yourself is where do those business leaders spend their time? And the answer is obvious. LinkedIn and these are the real decision makers. So when you advertise on LinkedIn, you're not wasting your money. You're going to target your ads based on job title, based on industry, based on skills. So maybe you want a CFO in the technology space who has been in their job for five years, right? You want to zero in on those demographics and behaviors. LinkedIn has over a billion members, and ten million of them are C suite executives. They're going to help you reach exactly the right person with the authority to pay for your product, right? Go right to the top. Use LinkedIn. And we've got a special offer just for twist listeners. Launch your first campaign and get $250 free.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “And so, what is the international pipeline looking like? Because we've now, we're in year, I would say two or three of this very vibrant competitive landscape. It has to have changed a bit in terms of developers becoming more attuned to being attractive, Alio. I'll hand it to you since you were recruiting developers. Is the pipeline of people who are qualified to work at an AI startup increasing dramatically? Are all developers basically retraining, reframing, getting focused on AI now? And is there hope that this bottleneck will be released or is it going to continue for some time?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “What is the pitch you give them to come work at Suno as opposed to, say, taking a crazy open AI or meta offer? How do you counter that in the marketplace, practically speaking?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “All three of you have to compete for talent. And we had an insane moment in 2025 in the summer, which seems like, I don't know, 10 years ago at this point, when OpenAI was losing developers to Meta's $250 million offers. And then just this week, OpenAI decided to end Vesting Cliffs for new employees, which is a pretty aggressive move for people who don't know what a vesting cliff is just briefly. When you join a startup, Your first year of equity vests, you basically get it in the at the end of month 12. Why do we do this? Well, you don't want to give equity to people who don't even make it to year two. That would seem profoundly unfair. So maybe, Mikey, you could explain to us what it's like on the front lines right now hiring people and what impact meta over the summer had and now maybe what impact open AI's new offer is because”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “So now you're helping major language models with their training data. We're going to talk about training data as well. And Mikey Schulman is with us. He makes an incredible protocol called Suno, which allows you, and we've did a demo on this on this week in Stardus a couple of weeks ago. It is absolutely extraordinary that civilians can now, in the same way, Canva enabled people to make beautiful invites to their birthday party. Now Suno is allowing people to make incredible music. Welcome to the program. Mikey. Thank you. Excited to be here. Yeah, and we have a lot to talk about as well with training data. Yeah, working with the music industry, which is always fun. So let's start with the talent wars. All three of you are dealing with the fact that we have an investment cycle that is unprecedented in our industry, maybe only comparable to the fiber build out. And as part of that, not just startups, but also the major companies, the metas of the world have been on a tear in terms of hiring people.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “One of the first investors, and I know one of the most cherished, I assume on the cap table. But the company started, if my memory serves me correct, using machine learning and AI to find the world's greatest developers, yeah? Then something happened during that three year journey and you pivoted. Tell everybody about that briefly.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “And we're going to get into that in the program because the year of the agent was supposed to be 2025. And we're going to talk about why it didn't happen exactly and what's going to happen in 2026. Also with us from my portfolio, one of my breakout founders, Ali Ansari is here. He's from Micro One, which we invested in three years ago, Ollie, I think.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “Nine years ago, which when you're doing podcasts for 15 years ago, like it's you're overdue, Zapier makes you happier, as everybody knows. And you started in the integration space where if people wanted to, this silly example, but Gary Tan at YC started with this with posteris back in the day, hey, you're posting something to Instagram. What if that could automatically go to your Twitter handle or you posted something to Twitter? What if that could go into a Google spreadsheet and you would have a record of all your posts? But since then, a little thing called AI happened. Yeah, Wade.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “All right, everybody, welcome back to this week in startups and this is a new podcast we're launching in 2026. It's going to be called This Weekend AI. Yes, that's right. A new podcast is coming in 2026. We'll be doing this week in startups three days a week, one day a week. We're going to do our roundtable only with experts, only with builders in the AI space. So think of this as a weekly roundtable in the spirit of what I did at all in or when we do the venture capital roundtable here. And I am stoked for our first roundtable because we found some of the great guests we've had here on the program and people who are building in AI. So no journalists, no analysts, just people who are actually building. And we've got a full docket today. Wade Foster is here. He's the co-founder and CEO of Zapier, who I have known for a decade. Yeah, I'm Wade.”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “It is true that people are getting isolated and that people aren't leaving their homes. I think it's a double whammy of the addictive nature of this technology and COVID just making people into home bodies. What are your thoughts, Mike?”

    2025-12-18 · This Week in Startups · INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225 · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source