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Andrew Warner: Are you marketing to agents now?
Wade Foster: the agent is actually choosing what products to buy on behalf of a human, and so you are no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me, pick me. Pick me.
Andrew Warner: Is SaaS dead?
Wade Foster: Our CPTO vibe coded like a meeting recording software. It’s a cool proof of concept, but we’re not canceling our subscriptions anytime soon to our meeting recording software,
Andrew Warner: you have a Claude skill that helps you lead.
Wade Foster: He calls it his war council. What the skill is, is if you have a particular problem or a decision you’re making, you can just say, Hey, I wanna invoke the War Council to like, advise me on this.
Andrew Warner: Do a screen share. Let’s see how you work.
Wade Foster: Sure. Okay. Here we go.
Andrew Warner: Wade Foster is the founder of Zapier, the AI automation company.
Yay. Let’s get it. The next new thing you told me about someone who you hired recently who impressed you. This agent marketing guy. What’s agent marketing?
Wade Foster: Well, so I, I think this is a new thing that folks on the cutting edge are paying attention to, which is the agent is actually choosing what. Products to buy on behalf of a human.
And so you are no longer advertising to the human. You are trying to get the agent to say, pick me, pick me, pick me. And that is often a very different skillset than marketing to a human. You know, with human, there’s all sorts of like. Advertising history around like consumer psychology and like how do you position these things?
And the way an agent makes a decision is somewhat different than how a human makes this decision. And so, you know, this person is building all sorts of tools to like track like, you know, when does Chachi BT recommend this tool or not? When does like, you know, Claude recommend this or that, and why do they recommend it?
Uh, and then trying to figure out how do you like, you know, structure your content, structure your APIs, structure, your CLI tools such that. More often than not, it’s gonna say, oh, when I have this problem, I wanna go use that vendor versus that other vendor.
Andrew Warner: You know what, I had that experience. I used cloud code and I said, okay, now how do I publish it?
It said, I can just publish it to Elle. I go, I never heard of Elle before, but okay, go ahead if that’s what you can do. And it did it. Um, and then a few days later I was at a CloudFlare event and they talked about how they can do the same thing but better. And I said, wait, I would’ve preferred all those features, but I had no idea you even existed.
Yeah. So what are you finding that is effective for marketing to agents?
Wade Foster: Well, so agents care a ton about like clean documentation, like fast webpages. So you know, if it’s like, the thing I’m seeing a lot of folks do is serve up a separate version of their webpage that is meant just for the agent. And so that content is like plain text.
It’s served up like really fast. It’s like written like very, um. It’s like very descriptive, uh, uh, almost like mechanical because like, that’s what the agent prefers. It’s like, I wanna have just like gimme just the facts in like an easy to consume way. Um, very clear, um, very direct. And as a result, like it, you know, it, it’s able to like understand what you’re offering much better.
Um, whereas like, you know, a human cares a ton about the design, like the visual design and things like that. Agent. It’s not so much, right? So it’s a different, you just kind of have to like figure out like what is the thing that it’s actually optimizing. And I, I’ll be honest, like a lot of this is, you know, very much like a more art than science right now.
Yes. People are building evals and you know, things like that to kind of track it. But, um, it, yeah, when you ask like, people who are really good at this, their answers are like very hand wavy still.
Andrew Warner: So what did he say or do that made you think, okay, he’s got this.
Wade Foster: Well, I think just the level of experimentation is just much, much more.
Andrew Warner: But he’s experimenting so much.
Wade Foster: Exactly. Exactly.
Andrew Warner: But how do you even figure it out, Wade? You do a test, it takes a while for the agent to even know that you existed, let alone to know that you’ve made the te the change. What do you do to test and know quickly?
Wade Foster: I mean, they’re just like running a bunch of queries.
They’re having their friends run a bunch of queries. They’re trying to pay attention to these things. There’s like automated techniques that they’re using. Um. So there’s, there’s, you know, uh, it’s, it’s just like a lot of trial and error.
Andrew Warner: It’s a lot of trial, and then going in and doing a query and seeing what the response is.
And then there are tools that you use to figure that out. Yeah. We did a, I did an interview frankly with people on your team who talked to me about some of the software that you use. We’ll have it up on the channel for people to see that. Okay. So it’s trial error, keep measuring and seeing the results and start to get some clear understanding of how they think.
And one of the things that you said is. Clear doc. A lot of documentation, clear writing, serve up even a second page just for the agents. What else, what am I missing?
Wade Foster: Uh, you know, those are, those are kind of the, the, the big things that I’ve heard of. Um, right now,
Andrew Warner: Wade, everyone, uh, is talking about whether companies are gonna be buying SaaS or are they gonna be building everything internally.
You told me about someone on your team who built something really cool internally that you could have bought. What is it? And who is
Wade Foster: it? Well, our CPTO like vibe coded, uh, like a meeting recording, like software, you know, sort of like a, like a fathom or a, a granola or, you know, a grain or something like this.
And, uh, you know, it’s, it’s a cool proof of concept. Um, but we’re not canceling our subscriptions anytime soon too. Uh, our meeting recording software.
Andrew Warner: Why not? Why not? You can build it. You can save yourself some money.
Wade Foster: You can, you can’t, like the maintenance on this stuff, like the tokens you burn, setting it up like, you know.
At the end of the day, like these products are not that expensive and the teams behind them are just putting so much effort in polishing them, making them better, advancing their capabilities, and those are all things that we would have to staff engineers to keep working on them. And yes, it’s gotten so much cheaper to build things, but I think we would rather deploy that engineering power to making our stuff better versus, you know, improving our internal tools.
Andrew Warner: You know what? I have an example of that. I built myself the ideal calorie counting app and weight. It is so perfect. It’s like right on my watch, which is the, the app that I use all the time and still there’s always like an edge case, random thing that comes up that I have to go and handle. It makes me realize, oh of course that company already thought of that.
That’s what you’re talking about. You don’t wanna divert your people.
Wade Foster: Yeah, exactly. It’s like for, you know, for, for, I think vibe coding is fantastic. For building tools that you can’t buy or these like, um, like smaller utilities where it’s like, hey, this is core to sort of like a one-off piece of software that I need to use to solve a particular job.
Fantastic. We’re seeing so much more of that stuff happen, but for like load bearing infrastructure inside of a company, there’s not a lot that we’re building and replacing. Like there’s a lot of really good software out there that we’re very happy to continue being customers of.
Andrew Warner: And overall software is, what would you say?
What percentage of the business spend?
Wade Foster: It’s minimal. You know, it’s, it’s like a single digit percentage. Uh, it’s so small compared to like headcount
Andrew Warner: essentially. Really that is what it comes down to for enterprise. Mm-hmm. It’s one thing for an individual like me to say, I don’t wanna spend money on a calorie counting app that’s gonna charge me 20 bucks a month.
It’s another thing for a company to say it’s, it’s just a small price and a big distraction.
Wade Foster: Yeah. It’s a drop in the bucket of, and another thing to maintain support. Pay attention to, et cetera. Um, let another company who cares about that deeply, um, be awesome at that thing.
Andrew Warner: You know, let me be honest with you.
Wait, I’m kind of shot out of a cannon right now. Like this energy is a lot of high energy and I’m trying to restrain it, but I have to be honest with you, even when I’m off mic, I’m talking like this all the time. I’m like, Hey Olivia, check out what I could just do right now. This is amazing. Look, my claw bot just did this and that, and she’s like.
I, I get it. Tone it down a little bit, but I can’t, I’m so freaking excited about it that sometimes, and honestly it clouds my judgment. Before we got started, first of all, do you feel any of this or is it just me?
Wade Foster: Well, I’ll tell you what I built. So I, a guy who runs all our social stuff, built a, a skill, uh, that’s going viral inside the company right now.
It’s, it’s something you’ve been able to do for a while. So it’s not actually new, but it’s the, the, the way in which he deployed it is somewhat novel and he calls it his war council. And so what the skill is, is, um, it’s sp if you have a particular problem or a decision you’re making, so say like you’re trying to, uh, decide on hiring a new PE person, or say you’re trying to decide whether you should enter a market or not, or buy a company or not, or you know, just think of any like type of decision you might make on a day-to-day basis, no matter how big or how little.
And so, you know, you can give it all the like. You know, research you’ve done on the decision and then you can just say, Hey, I wanna invoke the war council to like advise me on this. And so what it does is it spins up subagents that represent personas and they’re standing members of the council. So like I have the ruthless, the ruthless CFO, the wartime operator.
The, like compassionate, you know, customer support person. And then for each scenario, it will also spin up dynamic personas. So if you ask it about hiring, it will spin up like a hiring expert. It will spin up a dome main expert for the role. If you’re asking about like a product ex, you know, uh, experience, it’ll spin up a CTO.
It’ll spin up like a, you know, like a Steve Jobs, like, you know, uh, design visionary type person. And then all these like subagent go out. Like debate and critique the problem and they come back and they give, each one gives like their response to it. And then there’s a master agent, like the head of the council that sort of summarizes it and says, here’s what I think it should do.
And then it says, if I had a thousand dollars, like here’s what I would bet, you know, that the answer happens to, to be, and again, like you could, you could have done this like the, you know. Anytime in the last couple years you could have spun it up. But like the new skills, like techniques, the ability to launch subagents, the ability to think for longer makes the experience so much more fun.
And so, like, you know, I was like telling my wife, I was like, Chelsea, like, can I show you my workouts? It’s just, it’s, it’s just, I don’t know. Like I feel like a kid playing video games again.
Andrew Warner: Right. So is this like an internal tool that they built using, uh, using Opus?
Wade Foster: Well, so I’ll tell you how I built it.
Um, my, uh, the, the guy that’s runs social for us, we catch up, uh, 15 minutes every other week and he’s always like building crazy stuff. And so I’m always asking him like, tell me what new thing you built. And he’s like, wait, I gotta tell you about my war council. And so, you know, he, he explains what it is to me.
And I was like, that’s incredible. And so here’s how I built it. I got off the call and I have cursor hooked up to granola and so the, the meeting was recorded with granola and so I said, Hey, granola, or, or go, go fetch That meeting I just had with Ryan and in it he describes the war councils he built.
Build that for me. And it just went and did it. And it just did it. It just did it. Yeah. And like, you know, I, I popped open the skill and looked at it, and I was like, all right, looks good to me. Like, I didn’t, I didn’t have any other critiques, but it was like, it was perfect. And that’s all I had to do is like, I, I never actually saw what he specifically built.
I literally just had him describe it to me, and then I just told Cursor. I’m like, Hey, can you take the notes and just, just do the same thing? Please. That
Andrew Warner: it, and the way that you do it is you do it as a skill, not as like. Just a a, a software.
Wade Foster: Yeah. This is a skill like, which is just a, like a markdown file that, you know, I can call anytime I want to use it.
So like if I’m going back and forth on a particular decision, I can say. Hey, I want the War Council to advise me on this. And then the skill fires in and like launches all these subagents and, you know, goes and does the debate.
Andrew Warner: You know, funny, I’m actually talking to a guy, I can only talk to him at 7:00 PM seven 30 ’cause he works during the day, but he’s been selling skills online as a subscription.
Um, SaaS skills is subscription. I’m wondering what do you think of that? Do you think that skills will eventually be anything near the, as nearly as valuable as software?
Wade Foster: Uh, I think skills are, um, the inspiration behind skills is way more useful. They’re not hard to build at all. Like they’re, they’re just a document with instructions, right.
And guides to them. They, they kind of remind me of. Like this. Remember, like, I mean, shoot, this would’ve been like 15 years ago. There was all these like WordPress theming businesses,
Andrew Warner: right?
Wade Foster: Where, you know, you could go find like a, a skin for your WordPress site and people would sell ’em for like, you know, buy, buy this one for $10, buy this one for $15.
Things like that. I could see skills kind of having like a business model like that where it’s like you could buy, you know, buy one for five bucks, 10 bucks, there’ll be a bunch of free skills out there. Um, you know, it’s, it feels kind of like a very commodity thing at a certain point in time. But there is value in just seeing what other skills people have have built, because, you know, like the creativity of these users is what’s so cool is you’re like, oh, wow, I like the way you did that.
I, I wanna use that too.
Andrew Warner: What’s an example of a question that you took to your war council skill and what’s the outcome that you couldn’t have gotten to without that was valuable?
Wade Foster: Well, I love using ’em for hiring decisions, um, because it is very critical. And so, um, you know, I find that humans, when you go through hiring processes have all sorts of like biases built into ’em.
Um, I think one, it you, you find this, it, it’s hard for humans to say no. To like candidates that are good, it gets harder to say no as the interview goes along. So like two people before you said Yes, now are you gonna be the person that says no? So you get more of that. And also humans I find are not often as like critical.
And so you know, they’ll ask like a surface level question and then kind of move on to the next thing. And they don’t necessarily dig as much to be like, is this person really, really good? And so as a result when you score against the rubric, I find that human graders. On average tend to be a little softer.
Now, that’s not generally, that’s not universally true. I’ve seen like human evaluators be like very, very strict too. But, you know, I think, uh, the, the War council is like, it, it, it plays its role and it tells you exactly what it sees. It’s not influenced by, you know, these other things. It just, it just calls it like its season.
And as a result I find it to be a really helpful tool at keeping. The panel honest, keeping me honest on a decision where I can find myself sort of like feeling one way or the other. And then you, you talk to it and it like really grounds the decision and you’re like, then you have to think about it.
Like if it disagrees with you, you’re like, Hmm, why does it disagree with me?
Andrew Warner: What’s another decision that you took to it?
Wade Foster: Uh, let’s see. I’ve, I’ve got, um, what was a recent one that I was working with it on? Uh, I had, um. Oh, I was, I was reviewing a bunch of, um, sales data and, uh, I was trying to, um, figure out like, like some of the stuff was good.
Some of the stuff we were doing wasn’t so good, and I was like trying to figure out what kind of feedback I needed to give. And so I first like went back and forth with it without invoking the skill, just like pulling in a bunch of contacts, loading in a bunch of data, and then finally I was like, okay. I want the war council to advise on this.
Like, what is, like, where are we winning and where are we losing all this? Like, what do, what do you see? And like, what kind of feedback do you, you know, needs to be given? And so it like quickly summarized, it was like, here’s the three things that are like most important. You’re killing the first two. The third is like a blood bath.
You need to fix it. And so you’re like, oh, okay. Like that. It it like it put language to a thing I was maybe feeling Yeah. But couldn’t quite articulate yet.
Andrew Warner: Can we give people your skill?
Wade Foster: Sure.
Andrew Warner: Okay. I would love, by the way, at some point, to see how you set up cursor because you’re essentially using it the way that some people use chat, GPT, but with invoking different skills.
Mm-hmm. And different context. I guess you’re kind of using it the way that, that Claude wants people to use Claude Cowork. When can we see that?
Wade Foster: Yeah, it’s, I mean, I use it as like a second brain and so, you know, as part of this, I have a bunch of context. Inside a thing I call my copilot. And the copilot has the company strategy, it has our product strategy, it has the company values.
Can
Andrew Warner: you show us without even, I know you, we got some things that are open or private. Can you just show us the layout, the setup, and how you, how you use it?
Wade Foster: Sure. Um, so I look, I like, you know, there’s a lot of these tools. I like using Cursor because you can switch between a bunch of different models. So you can see here I have like CLOs.
Uh, Claude four six, but I can switch into, you know, 5.3 Codex Gemini, three et cetera, like very fast, um, which I find to be pretty useful. And, you know, you just have this like chat tool here where you can talk to it,
Andrew Warner: but before you do, what, what are you finding that’s more useful in one versus the other?
Wade Foster: So I think the, I find switching is really useful when you’re working on a problem and you wanna get, again, different perspectives. I see. So like I, I’ll have it critique its work. Um, one thing I’ve found is that like Opus is. More enjoyable to just like talk to and go back to it, like sort of is, it is an easier conversation list, but like when I’m having it work on hard problems, it sometimes just like bugs out and doesn’t do as good of a job.
And so oftentimes for those, I’ll switch over to Codex five three, which is the. Um, open AI model. Mm-hmm. And that, again, it’s not as good conversationally, but it is just like much, much better. And so like I was dealing with this like, annoying bug with, um, the, I had to build this like old MCP server for a, a tool that, uh, I was using.
And Claude was just like, it just, I just like kept, I, I just kept going and going and just couldn’t seem to get it right. And so I toggled over to, uh, GPT five three Codex and I said, Hey, critique the prior agent’s entire work. Tell me where it’s getting stuff wrong and then go fix it. And it was like, it’s making this dumb mistake.
I’ve got you.
Andrew Warner: Oh.
Wade Foster: Which is why? To fix it.
Andrew Warner: That is such a great idea. You know what, even when I, with my little programs, there are times when it’s just stuck and it can’t solve it to be able to go say, Hey, go critique. Figure out what it’s missing. Okay. Brilliant. Okay, so now I see your setup here. I see the beginning of it.
What else? How else do you get context into it?
Wade Foster: Well, so you know, basically you point cursor at a fi at a file system. Mm-hmm. Which, you know, the file system is just like files on your machine. And, you know, I usually keep the file system closed, but you know, you can see here, um, all the like, context that I’ve got into this thing.
And so, you know, I, I have all my, like daily I, I have it created daily brief and a daily review for me. So you can see a whole bunch of stuff there. Um, you know, I’ve got, uh, a bunch of strategy stuff in there. Uh, you know, I’ve got, uh, oh gosh, this is, I can’t show you this Oh goodness. Because
Andrew Warner: it has all your meeting notes.
Wade Foster: Well, it’s just like some of the file names are just like, uh, like a giveaway on certain stuff as well too. But you can see I’ve got like strategy decisions. Okay. Leadership, people meetings, initiatives. Okay. Uh, all this stuff is probably fine to show. It
Andrew Warner: doesn’t, doesn’t look at all of those, does it to consider, uh, any one question.
It just has the ability to, and you book it with an at symbol.
Wade Foster: Well, so here’s the thing. I have, it does all this stuff is in the context because it’s pointed at my copilot. Okay? So
Andrew Warner: it
Wade Foster: can go, like, crawl the system and find it on its own. But I can also say, you know, uh, hey, like, um, uh. Let’s see, what’s a, what’s an interesting example?
I’m
Andrew Warner: trying to decide whether to continue this interview with Andrew.
Wade Foster: Yeah, I, I want to figure, let’s go to the, figure out if the, uh, I should keep working with Andrew or not. Uh, remember, so like I could just ask it like this and it will, you know, sift through all of the context that I have shared. But I can also say, remember to keep in mind.
Uh, the, you know, company strategy, right? Something like that. I see. So if I really want it to like, hey, like really index on this, I can do something like that.
Andrew Warner: Okay.
Wade Foster: Um,
Andrew Warner: and do you usually, so do multiple skills at once, like would you, or sorry, would you say company strategy and use this skill? Or are you just picking one
Wade Foster: type?
So the skills, you can, skills usually just have like keywords that you can evoke them, invoke them on. So I can say, you know, uh, you know, should I work with Andrew or not? Uh. Whoops. Uh, it probably doesn’t know. We’ll see. It’s just thinking you picked go wrong
Andrew Warner: Andrew.
Wade Foster: I know. Uh, there are multiple Andrews, so should I work with Andrew or, or not?
Uh, and then please invoke the War Council. So like that I didn’t have to do anything fancy. Oh, it just knows that I have a skill in here somewhere. Uh, that is the war Council. Okay. And I actually don’t know where it is in this system, but it’s in here somewhere. Uh, and. The reason, um, you know, like there’s sort of like, like the fancy thing about like that I see a lot of people doing is, you know, a lot of people will get caught up on like the file system.
They’re like, how am I supposed to organize all that stuff? What is that? All over there? It’s like very confusing. Honestly, it doesn’t matter. Just like ask the agent to like build all that stuff for you. And so, you know, if I’m building out a skill, I’ll just say like, Hey, make me a skill for this and put it in the skills.
Like, put it where you think it goes. I see. And so it just organi, it keeps everything organized for me. And when I, when I built out this whole structure, the way I built it out was I said, Hey, I wanna build out a system that makes me amazing as a CEO. Like, help me build out, like create, create you to be an amazing copilot, ama amazing like chief of staff for me as a, as a, uh, a system and build out a whole set of like markdown files and, and files and systems and all that stuff that like helps you help me and you should get better as we work together more.
And that’s all I told it. And so it organized that entire file system for. I don’t really look at it all that often. It just, it’s just there.
Andrew Warner: You know, my one frustration with all this is that it’s not in the cloud and I know that that’s a benefit too. But sometimes I’m on a different device or I want to be in on, I wanna be on my phone.
Totally. Okay. What, one other thing that I’m wor wondering about with your setup is, do you use MCP like Zapier’s, MCP to be able to, for example, draft an email? So once you come to a conclusion, yes you will. How do you invoke, uh, that. How do you say used a zappy or MCP and draft an email for me.
Wade Foster: So you, um, you just can turn on like a bunch of, um, uh, you can create your zapper or MCP server.
Mm-hmm. And then you add tools to it. So you could add like slack, gmail, calendar, you name it, and then you don’t, usually, you don’t have to like, again, you don’t have to do any fan fancy stuff. You can just say, draft me an email, please. Add, add this to my calendar event. Now if you do, say you zap your MCP to draft a email inside of Gmail for you, you will find that it, like definitely gets it right sometimes if you don’t like, if you’re not that like verbose with it, it will forget that it has access to use those tools and you’ll have to remind it and say like, Hey, remember you have access to these tools.
Where
Andrew Warner: do you give it to tools? You, uh,
Wade Foster: where
Andrew Warner: Yeah, where?
Wade Foster: Um, so you can go to cp.zapier.com. And just start turning on tools.
Andrew Warner: And then how do you tell, uh, Opus four six in this case or. Or, uh, codex, how do you tell them that you’ve got, that they have access to it
Wade Foster: so they will know because you authenticate, uh, your client with Zapier, MCP.
So on
Andrew Warner: Zapier, your site, you press the button, you connect it into Claude. It now has it forever. And
Wade Foster: exactly. Just like if you were connecting like your, you know, authenticating your Gmail account to a tool or your Twitter account to a tool or whatever it, like big window pops up and says, I grant access.
And then boop, it’s sort of. Can go work with it.
Andrew Warner: Honestly, I found it’s so much easier we can stop sharing soon. I found it so much easier to connect it to Claude than I did to connect it to, uh, to chat GPT. Mm-hmm. Like the other day, I just said to Claude, I Do you have access to this? Can you do it? He goes, yeah, you gave it to me and I gave it to, gave it via Zapier MCP chat.
GPT is kind of frustrating that way. Alright. You got,
Wade Foster: yeah. They’re all kind of at different like, uh, parts in their journey on how good they are at working with connectors right now.
Andrew Warner: You told me a few months ago, I’m not a developer, but I’m getting really into Claude Code. You’ve gotten into it. Now you’ve got a team of how many people working at Zapier.
Wade Foster: There’s 800 people at Zapier.
Andrew Warner: How do you get them to feel this level of, it’s not me, but I’m gonna try it. And ideally, the level that where you are, where you want to go, say to Chelsea, you gotta find
Wade Foster: out,
Andrew Warner: you gotta see what I’m doing. How do you get
Wade Foster: them to
Andrew Warner: that?
Wade Foster: So I, you know, at Zapier we have this value, don’t be a robot, build the robot.
So like I think we have a culture where the employee base is probably more leaned in on this stuff than probably most even still. We try and have a like, very vibrant culture of show and tell. And so we had a big summit last, uh, a couple weeks ago where everyone came to LA at the summit. We did all sorts of workshops.
And so at the workshops people were showing off, here’s my AI chief of staff. Like, and you know, those, some, those workshops were like standing room only. ’cause people were like, how do I, I wanna learn how to do this stuff. We had hackathons where people are sitting around learning from each other, training notes on this.
Um, you know, this week now we are rolling out. Company-wide, we’re getting everybody, uh, in every function, not just engineering. So like marketing, sales, accounting, hr, all set up on either cursor, cloud code, or Codex one of the three. It’s like you need to be using a tool like this as a daily driver of your work because the power of these tools is just so, um, it’s so incredible and especially when you hook ’em up to something like Zapier, MCP and give it access to your tools and your data, the types of things you can do.
It, it’s just like jaw dropping.
Andrew Warner: Like what? So now I’m understanding what you’re doing. Sure. I wouldn’t have thought of it two years ago, but Go ahead.
Wade Foster: I’ll give you an example. So that, um, analysis I did, I had the war council help me out with on, uh, analyzing our sales data. What that was, was I had four different spreadsheets.
Those, each spreadsheet had like 10 or 12 tabs in it. They all had like hundreds of rows of data in it.
Andrew Warner: Mm-hmm.
Wade Foster: And so. I don’t know about you, but like I, I don’t consider like a spreadsheet, my natural habitat. And so I’m looking at all this stuff and I can like, I can start to like, poke out some interesting things going on in there, but I’m like, it’s hard for me to spot it all.
And so I just fed all four of those spreadsheets into my AI system and I said, help me review. First, I said, just like, help me review this stuff. Like walk me through what’s in in these. These spreadsheets because I don’t, I, I’m not exactly sure how to go through ’em. And so as it’s going through, it’s like pointing out different things to me.
I always like to start here too, because I don’t wanna assume, I don’t wanna try and one shot the thing thing, like, I like to, I like to check its work. And if I say like, Hey, help me review it, like step by step, I can sort of get a feel for the files in the same way that it has a feel for the finals. But then eventually when I get to the end, I’ll just say like.
Analyze all the themes that you see in here that you think are important for me as the CEO to know. And then it just loops over all this stuff. And it says, you know, here’s your top performing reps. Here’s reps that haven’t closed a deal in the last six months. You know, here’s where your lead handoffs are failing.
You know, here’s all this stuff. And I say, okay, great. Where in the, like, which, which sheet tells you that? And so then I go in and look and look. It’s not perfect. So like, um, you know. The, for, for example, it, it came back, one of its feedback was like, you have five reps that haven’t closed a deal. Now, of course, like for me, I’m like, whoa, five people that have not closed a single deal.
Like, I’m immediately like that. That’s not acceptable, right? And so I’m like, okay, gimme the names. And so then I went and looked and checked all five names. Turns out one. Was on maternity leave the last three months. Mm, okay. Like, it’s freaking out. But that’s, that makes sense. Of course she’s not closing deals.
Uh, turns out two of the other people had join. One had joined less than a month ago, and the other had joined less than two months ago. And so I was like, okay, like that’s tolerable. Like that, that, that sort of makes sense based on sales rep signs. And then there was two that had joined seven months ago.
And so those were the two where I was like, okay. What’s going on here? And so, you know, it was freaking out over five. It should have been freaking out of two, but like, I would’ve, the time it would’ve taken me to get to that answer would’ve been, I, I don’t know, like, I don’t know if I would’ve even gotten to it.
And in this, I went back and forth with it for like 15 minutes and immediately had. Not just one example like that. I probably had like three or four like very critical things sitting on my desk where I was like, okay, I need to go figure out how to solve these problems next. And that’s the kind of stuff that, um, you can do with these tools.
Andrew Warner: I see. And so if I’m thinking about even your assistant Mihal, she’d be able to use this to analyze a spreadsheet or to analyze something that was sent over to her?
Wade Foster: Yeah. You could just like, you can kind of like, you don’t like, the thing I’m, I’m finding is. You still need to have some level of like, like if you’ve never used a spreadsheet before, if you have no, like data fluency at all, you’re probably gonna make mistakes with these tools.
But like, if you’re like, just, okay, and I consider myself like an amateur, like, you know, data analyst. Um, I don’t spend all day every day inside of spreadsheets, but like, I kind of like sniff out BS when I see it. I find that now. With these tools I am. It’s like putting like a rocket booster on my back where I’m like, oh my gosh, I can work so much more effectively with this stuff because it does all the things that I would want to do, but just can’t because I don’t spend all my day doing this stuff.
And so I’m just slow and you know, not as like, my intuition isn’t as.
Andrew Warner: Alright, I’m, I’m gonna ask you for software that you’re excited about recently and then I’m gonna close it out with a quick personal question. But I’ll tell you one of mine, I just tried something called Wide Frame. I got early access to it.
It’s a wide Combinator company, you. That does vibe video editing. I essentially throw a bunch of video at it, and then in the chat box I say, I want you to do this. It analyzes the video. It says, okay, I see he’s got this. I see he’s got that. I’m gonna put it in this order. I think the hook should be that.
And I didn’t even tell it. It’s gonna be a social post. It just found what the opening was. It was fantastic. It’s 50% there. Little quirks have to be worked out. But boy, it’s so beautiful and, and largely I don’t want it for work. I want it for all the family videos that I have. Like here’s. Nice family vacation, 30 hours, go do something.
Anything that you’re especially excited about?
Wade Foster: I, I mean, I am like it’s, I don’t know that I have anything beyond just like I am using Cursor and the models and all these MCP servers to do just like more and more stuff. Uh, and so I, I find that like these CLI tools, these MCP servers are where. I’m getting more and more valuable, which is, which is odd for me as a non-developer to say like, those are the tools that I’m finding really, really great.
Andrew Warner: I do too. Alright, the final personal question is why do you have a hat behind you that says no?
Wade Foster: So that was a gift from, uh, Brian Halligan. So Brian Halligan is the, uh, founder and former CEO of HubSpot. And one of the things he, uh, was coaching me on is he said, you know, HubSpot, we would go through these periods where, um.
We do all our planning, we come out with our priorities and, you know, the, the new year would hit and immediately, you know, we would have new ideas and we’d start to get distracted with all sorts of other stuff. And so he said, I started wearing a no hat. Just as a way to remind people like, we know what we gotta go do, stay focused.
Like, go execute on the stuff that we said was important. And um, so he gave me a no hat. ’cause I, I have that exact same problem. I just get too excited about the new thing and I need to remember to be like, stop. Like that’s a cool idea, but we have cool ideas, let’s go execute on those.
Andrew Warner: It does fit really well in the frame here in the video.
Alright Wade. Hell yeah. Thanks for doing this and I’m gonna hit you up for that skill war room.
Wade Foster: All right. I love it, Andrew.
Andrew Warner: Bye everyone.
Wade Foster: Bye
