Lessons from Mike Knoop

Mike Knoop, a co-founder of Zapier, has shared numerous insights on entrepreneurship, remote work, artificial intelligence, and product development throughout his journey of building a multi-billion dollar company.

On the Co-Founder Mindset and Entrepreneurship

On the role of a non-CEO/CTO co-founder: "To do great work as a co-founder, define your identity as 'co-founder' with the job description 'do the thing no one else can do.'" [1]
On adaptability and ego: "The main way to do great work as a cofounder is by consistently and repeatedly identify the most important gap and then solve it. In order to repeat, you have to replace yourself. And in order to replace yourself, you can't have your identity wrapped up in the role you created." [1]
On personal growth within a startup: "I have fired myself from important roles 5+ times at Zapier. As engineer, platform manager, product & design manager, Chief Product Officer, and even as President of the company... Each role could have been its own career and I personally found it tempting to take off-ramps early on." [1]
On the pressure to define your role: "The most common piece of feedback I received from 10+ years at Zapier has been 'do a better job defining your role'!" [1]
On the early days of Zapier: "When we were getting started we were just not exposed to the Silicon Valley mindset... the way you build a company is you make a product people really like and you sell it." [2]
On the value of charging from day one: "That was our default you know from the very beginning we charge money out of on day one uh you know we got profitable really really quickly." [2]
On the power of a horizontal strategy: "Honestly to date it still is a very horizontal strategy. We have mostly focused over the last seven years about getting more and more apps on Zapier." [3]
On the importance of an open platform: "Looking back that was definitely one of the better decisions I think we made in the earliest." [3]
On owning your schedule and goals: "Part of the reason... of wanting to like start Zapier in the first place was we kind of wanted to own our own schedule and like set our own goals and not be beholden to like a giant organization telling us what to do." [3]
On the "co-founder" identity: "To do great work as a co-founder you must keep your identity small." [1]
On filling execution holes: "When your startup is smaller, this often means figuring out execution holes in your startup and being hire #1 for lots of new jobs." [1]
On identifying the most important gaps: "When your startup is bigger, this often means identifying the most important gap across the business in product, tech, strategy, or leadership." [1]
On the pain of solo founders: "Startups without cofounders must hire their way out... comes with execution pain and risk (hiring is slow, hiring someone bad/mediocre is even slower) all the while the underlying issue persists." [1]
On the iterative nature of finding your place: "Later I even fired myself from not writing code, to go write code again." [1]
On making bold moves: "I gave up the President role to go all-in on AI in Aug 2022, three months before ChatGPT was released." [1]

On Remote Work and Company Culture

On the key to successful remote work: "Smart companies smart managers pick a default right they either are going to say we're default remote or we're default not." [2]
On the importance of transparency in a remote setting: "Transparency is really really important internally all of our public information that gets shared around the business strategy all that's completely internally public." [2]
On the purpose of company retreats: "The advice I always gave to people in Zapier was set aside your normal work and just focus on like what are the things you can only do in person right getting to know each other building trust doing team building." [2]
On hiring for a remote culture: "Talent is very distributed across the world but opportunities are not." [2]
On the social aspect of remote work: "Your work can't be your family... you have to find a social network that's like outside the company." [3]
On the qualities of a successful remote employee: "I think the biggest, one of the biggest things I look for in interviewing, that tells me whether someone's going to be effective or not is how much they can uphold that first value of like defaulting to action." [4]
On the surprising benefit of remote work principles: "The types of things you have to do in order to be a successful remote company, make you with just a generally better company. They are not unique to remote however, you do have to figure them out earlier." [3][4]
On communication in a remote environment: "In a remote organization, the default is a hundred percent the opposite in the spectrum which is people don't communicate at all... we have to be way to figure out when are the right moments when to raise the bandwidth on communication." [3]
On the benefit of deep work in a remote setup: "One of the number-one benefits is of course from recruiting you get to hire the best people anywhere in the world a secondary benefit that I think isn't as obvious is that when you're actually doing your job like the best work gets done not when you're like sitting next someone and like collaborating all day." [4]
On creating pockets of talent: "We actually had this interesting effect where we started building um like talent pockets in cities like Austin and Portland and Vancouver not intentionally we just like having to hire a friend and then they refer them to their co-workers." [2]

On AI and Automation

On the intersection of AI and automation: "The promise of AI and automation are kind of the same thing." [5]
On the future of automation: "This RPA based sort of future is a much better one if we can figure out how to get it to work because you get anything that a sort of human could do with a given piece of software." [5]
On the necessity of AGI for better automation: "My belief today is that we need weak forms of AGI in order to get the reliability and the setup ease of use high enough on let's call it the RPA style of automation." [5]
On the mission of Zapier and AI: "The mission of Zapier and sort of the mission and purpose of AI intersect in an interesting way, which is you know the promise of AI is software that's just going to do more work for you." [6]
On the nature of Large Language Models (LLMs): "Effectively what large language models do today is they are highdimensional memorization systems... and memorization is a form of intelligence I would claim um but it's not a form of general intelligence." [7]
On the limitations of current AI: "Progress toward AGI has stalled out. Many people don't know or believe this yet." [8]
On the need for new approaches to AGI: "We need radically different approaches and benchmarks to achieve true general intelligence." [6]
On the existential nature of AI for Zapier: "It's either we're going to figure this stuff out and we're going to like you know 10 100x our business or we're not and other folks are going to catch up and they're going to surpass us." [9]
On encouraging AI adoption internally: "We're going to give everybody one week to go like step out of your day job and figure out how to use language models for yourself." [9]
On the accessibility of automation: "I think the thing most folks don't understand is that they can actually take advantage of it themselves now." [2]
On the democratization of software: "No code software is a mindset, a principle, which means that you don't have to learn to program, nor write lines of code late at night to create something powerful." [10]
On the evolution of automation: "The history of automation has been something done TO people, he wants to make it something done FOR people." [10]
On the future of work with AI: "AI becomes an assumed skillset for all knowledge workers." [9]
On regulating AI: "On the AGI front I think it's just really really dangerous to put in prescriptive legislation ahead of seeing any empirical evidence of what the systems can or cannot do yet." [7]
On the role of open source in AGI: "I think the best way to generate those ideas is through open source and open sharing at this point." [7]

On Product Development

On the path to product-market fit: "The shortest path to P/M fit is not a straight line... the right thing to optimize for... is to increase the number of learning moments per week." [11]
On early-stage product development: "Support your own product. Avoid the temptation to put people or processes between users and builders at this stage. Super critical because rapid iteration is still necessary." [11]
On the importance of the PM and designer relationship: "I think the one of the most important relationships in the organization is the relationship within product managers and product designers." [3]
On the lifecycle of online businesses: "You start off with like I need like a presence... then people need to figure out like how do I collect data... and then the next thing is like oh and now I have all this new data what do I do with it and that's like zapier is like the next step." [3]
On building for a growing user base: "There's a subset of our users are growing subset that are if you look and kind of ask them and investigate like what are they really using it for they're really using it to build things that look like software." [2]
On simplifying complex processes: "Language models offer an escape hatch on that S-curve where hey we actually could use natural language to help users both discover what they should use language models to automate as well as build it." [9]
On the initial focus for new products: "The critical things to focus on first are: What is the shortest path to P/M fit? What is the opportunity cost for this idea?" [11]
On validating a new product idea: "Look for revealed preferences, do they proactively ask for access every day after hearing about the new product?" [11]
On the importance of a horizontal platform: "The explosion in SaaS software... there's no one player in that marketplace that's going to be incentivized to go build thousands of integrations." [3]
On the initial vision of Zapier: "We didn't realize this when we started but we've understood this later on was that like oh then people need to figure out like how do I collect data from all these people that are coming to us." [3]

Learn more:

Lessons from Mike Knoop

On the Co-Founder Mindset and Entrepreneurship

On Remote Work and Company Culture

On AI and Automation

On Product Development

Written by Antoine Buteau

Lessons from Francois Chollet

Lessons from Art Levy