Wade Foster

Wade Foster is co-founder and chief executive of Zapier, a workflow automation company whose software lets people connect thousands of web apps and pass data between them without writing code. He grew up in Jefferson City, Missouri, and started Zapier in 2011 in nearby Columbia, Missouri, with Bryan Helmig and Mike Knoop. He is also known for running Zapier as a fully remote company from its first year.

Growing Up in Jefferson City

Foster was born in January 1987. On his personal site he writes that his father worked for the state and his mother was a pharmacist, and that his extended family had “teachers, lawyers, doctors, insurance agents, but no entrepreneurs.” He took up the saxophone in middle school, playing along to Cannonball Adderley and John Coltrane records, and in ninth grade he was paid $50 for a three-hour gig at the Missouri Governor's Mansion. He calls that job “my first foray into entrepreneurship.”

Studying Industrial Engineering at Mizzou

He earned a bachelor's degree in industrial engineering from the University of Missouri in 2009 and an MBA in 2010 through a dual engineering and business program. He picked the major, he writes, because he knew “it had something to do with efficiency and that's something I could get behind.” A summer internship at a major telecom provider taught him he hated corporate life, since he could do the work in about an hour a day. In his last year he read a Seth Godin book and talked his way into a marketing internship at a small tech company in Columbia.

Starting Zapier at Columbia Startup Weekend

After school he worked on email marketing at Veterans United Home Loans in Columbia, where Helmig was a colleague, and the two freelanced on the side. “We got asked to build these one-off integrations from time to time,” Foster said on the Eventual Millionaire podcast in 2019, recalling a WordPress forms plugin that pushed data into Salesforce and a QuickBooks and PayPal connector. Helmig suggested a site where people could set up those connections themselves, and the two first talked it over on September 8, 2011.

At the end of that month they took the idea, then called API Mixer, to the first Startup Weekend held in Columbia, where Knoop joined the team. In a 2012 post on the Zapier blog Foster wrote that API Mixer “was dangerously close to not getting picked” in the sticky-note vote, and that by Sunday night, “with a nearly failed demo,” Zapier won the weekend.

The three kept their day jobs and built a beta on nights and weekends. Foster quit his job in January 2012, and Zapier was accepted into the summer 2012 batch of Y Combinator. In May 2012 he moved to California with his wife.

Running Zapier as a Remote Company

Zapier has never had offices. “We started as a side project… and side projects can't afford offices,” Foster told TechCrunch in 2020, when the company had about 300 employees in some 27 countries. After the Y Combinator summer Knoop moved back to Missouri, and the first hires were former colleagues in Chicago, Illinois, and Columbia. When the team saw that products still shipped and customers stayed happy, it kept working that way. He told TechCrunch that remote work takes discipline: “you have to commit to writing things down.”

In March 2017 Zapier began offering new hires $10,000 to move away from the San Francisco Bay Area. Foster told TechCrunch the “de-location” package brought something like a 50% increase in applications, and that about half of the people Zapier hired in the Bay Area later moved.

Zapier raised a $1.2 million seed round in 2012 and became profitable in 2014 while taking little other outside money. In 2021 Sequoia Capital bought shares from early investors in a deal that valued the company at $5 billion, and Foster told Forbes that none of the founders sold.

Calling a Code Red on AI

In spring 2023, after OpenAI released GPT-4, Foster called Zapier's first company-wide “code red” and paused normal work for a week so that everyone, including marketing, sales, HR and finance, could build something with AI. “We went from just under 10% of people using AI weekly in their job to over 50% in one week,” he said on the Modern CTO podcast. Zapier later reported that 97% of its staff used AI in their day-to-day work.

In May 2025 Zapier began requiring new hires to be fluent with AI. His team studied how the strongest people in each role used AI and built hiring tests and a four-level rating scale from what they found. “When you say, 'hey, show me what you're doing with AI,' you can sniff it out pretty quick,” Foster said on Modern CTO.