Zapier Inc.
Leadership History
1 leader · 2011 to present
Wade Foster is the CEO of Zapier, in the role since 2011.
| Name | Role | From | To | Years in role |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wade Foster | Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder | 2011 | Present | 15 |
Zapier started from a problem the founders kept running into while doing freelance integration work: they were building the same connectors between apps over and over. They turned that into a general-purpose tool. Zapier went through Y Combinator in 2012, raised a single small seed round, and became profitable in 2014. It has never had offices. Its platform is built around Zaps, which pair a trigger in one app with actions in others, and has since added a no-code database, an app and form builder, a diagramming tool, and AI agents. Co-founder Wade Foster has led the company as CEO since it was founded. The company is headquartered in San Francisco, California (Fully Remote).
Zapier sells tiered subscriptions priced mainly by task volume, where a task is one action that an automation completes. A free plan with a limited monthly task allowance brings users in. Paid Professional and Team plans unlock multi-step Zaps, branching logic, premium apps, and shared workspaces. Enterprise contracts add SAML SSO, admin controls, and governance features. AI steps, agent runs, and MCP calls draw on the same task allowance as regular Zaps. Software vendors build and maintain their own integrations on the Zapier Developer Platform, which keeps the catalog growing without Zapier writing every connector itself.
Chief Executive Officer & Co-Founder
2011 – Present
15 years (current)
Co-founded Zapier and has led it as CEO since its inception in 2011. He deliberately kept the company fully remote from its earliest days, well before remote work was normalized, and scaled the business profitably by funding growth almost entirely from software-as-a-service revenue rather than raising successive rounds of venture capital after the initial 2012 seed round.
Zapier faces competition from Microsoft Power Automate, which comes bundled with Microsoft 365, and from open-source or self-hostable tools such as n8n, which SAP valued at $5.2 billion in 2026. Customers running high-volume workflows push back on task-based pricing. Zapier also relies on third-party APIs that can change or restrict access. And as AI models gain the ability to call software tools directly, Zapier has to show that a dedicated orchestration layer is still worth paying for.
Co-founder Wade Foster has served as Zapier's Chief Executive Officer continuously since co-founding the company in October 2011, guiding it from a Missouri startup to a $5B+ entity.
Foster graduated from the University of Missouri with degrees in industrial engineering and business administration, working in marketing and business development at Veterans United Home Loans.
Foster prioritized operational autonomy and customer focus; because subscription revenues exceeded operating costs by 2014, he realized taking more venture capital would introduce unnecessary dilution.
Foster advocates for radical transparency, documentation-heavy asynchronous communication, output-driven performance reviews, and trust, establishing best practices for distributed work.
Foster mobilized Zapier's engineering teams immediately after ChatGPT launched, spearheading Zapier AI Actions and Zapier Central to keep the company at the forefront of AI workflow orchestration.
Foster collaborates closely with co-founder and CTO Bryan Helmig, President Jenny Bloomfield, Chief Financial Officer Elena Gomez, and Chief Revenue Officer Sheryl Sandberg alumni.
Foster frequently cautions founders against the 'growth at all costs' mindset, preaching that sustainable unit economics, profitability, and customer delight build enduring corporate value.
Foster envisions Zapier becoming the universal nervous system of the modern economy, where every human and AI agent can automate complex multi-app tasks without writing a single line of code.
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