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Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

forbes.com

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Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#141

Post by marketingtech »

Silhouette wrote: post #94
marketingtech wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a distinction between being a data controller and a data processor. The businesses that use these platforms are the data *controllers* and are responsible for implementing consent, "do not sell my information", "show me my data", or "delete my data" flows as required by law. The platforms generally offer APIs to implement these required data flows in a centralized way, which is another major value prop for th…

The sustainability of that model of responsibility must be in doubt, though. Take a simple case like a website that loads a resource from somewhere else. Given how the technology works, any model where the original site is responsible for everything and the user's data is supposedly protected is obviously misleading, because very often it's the third party services that are run by the bigger, more powerful, data-hoov…

In that situation, the third-party that is actively collecting and transmitting the data becomes a controller and is subject to regulation.

Under the predominant data transfer model, the third-parties cede responsibility by making the data transfer an active behavior by businesses. Ad tech companies can say "We didn't actively collect the data from customers - we passively received it from businesses." That makes a huge difference in term of regulatory compliance.

That said, this has been the most common data transfer model for years. "Data hoovering" is a misconception that allows millions of businesses who actively send customer data to Google/FB to shift privacy criticism onto the platforms.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#142

Post by neximo64 »

staunch wrote: post #21

Zapier is a good example of copying a good idea (IFTTT) and fast-following with good execution. Sure, copying can seem lame, but Google was copying Alta Vista, Facebook was copying Friendster, Microsoft was copying everyone, etc. Good ideas are important but good execution is more important.

Whats the idea you copied?

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#145

Post by hervature »

rtpg wrote: post #136
xwolfi wrote: post #128

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dentists lack empathy: they cant understand how most people think and never explain how they think outside of their bubble. Our startup, Dentir, makes you do things dentists do :p

The core difference being that “put value X from system S into value Y in system V” is actually conceptually extremely simple, and is mostly encumbered by machinery around it and “incidental complexity”. Dentistry _is_ all the complexity and the skill of , like, drilling into your mouth or whatever.

To me, you just proved the GP’s comment about “empathy” (in quotes because imagining yourself in someone else’s shoes isn’t empathy, but that’s what they call it). The difficulty with programming has almost nothing to do with the machinery around it and entirely to do with the ability of the general population to understand statements like the one you just made with 4 variables. The direct proof of this is that Word is much more complex than Sublime Text which I use to program. Yet, everyone knows Word. Of course, if someone starts programming with an IDE, they have an additional tool to learn.

For what it’s worth, I think it’s easier to teach someone to be precise with a drill than it is to teach computer literacy.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#146

Post by selcuka »

nojito wrote: post #140
narrator wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. This is because you lack the most overlooked and most difficult to teach skill in investing: empathy. Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do. Many programmers have poor empathy and thus make bad salespeople and investors. If you can understand how most of the planet thinks…

>Twitch.tv is something that amazed me that it became so big. Monetizing loneliness is how social media companies grow. twitch just has a strangle hold on a specific community that no one else thought of.

To be fair they didn't think of it either. It was a natural pivot from justin.tv when they see that the majority of their users were using the platform to broadcast games.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#147

Post by bradlys »

ghiculescu wrote: post #124
bradlys wrote: post #16

Congrats to the founders for not taking much funding but for employees... this has to suck unless they get to sell their shares to Sequoia as well. (If they even got any options...) Maybe they don't compete for SV talent and most employees aren't used to even getting options as part of compensation. Is there a specific reason a company would have IPO in mind but wouldn't say they are looking to do an IPO eventually?…

Most people would prefer to be paid a good salary for doing good work, rather than uncertain lottery tickets and an obligation to understand how they work. I think most companies would prefer to operate this way, too.

Once companies start paying $500k-1mil/yr liquid - fine.

But as it stands, I make a lot of money off those "uncertain" lottery tickets and demand a lot of them wherever I go.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#149

Post by cosmodisk »

hooande wrote: post #95
djrogers wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m not surprised that people on a developer focused forum would find little to no value in something that enables automation without programming. Y’all can probably automate interactions with hundreds of web based services in your sleep, using multiple languages, with unit tests, and a Turing complete ML-based proxy server for high availability. For the rest of us, Zapier is a little like magic. Granted there are ot…

why wouldn't someone just hire a developer to do this? My understanding is that the market for contractors is oversaturated right now. You could probably pay someone hundreds of dollars to write software that interacts with web services etc if you look hard enough Like the grandparent comment, it's hard for me to imagine that there are enough people in need of this service to justify a $5B valuation

I'm in a similar boat thinking where are all those people in need of these things but then I look around and realise that 99.99% of the population will ever go as far as using Zapier and not because there's something wrong with it but because it's a good choice for most. Just last week had my colleague with zero tech knowledge connecting Zapier to a couple of systems in minutes savings the company money and more importantly,not delaying pretty important integration.

Re: Zapier reached a $5B valuation with $1.3M of funding

#150

Post by chii »

ByteJockey wrote: post #114
chii wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What's the point of owning the stock? to sell for capital gains when it is higher in the future. Dividends aren't the only way to generate a profit. And for a lot of high income earners, dividends are very tax inefficient as well.

There's a term for when everyone buys something just because you can sell it to someone else for more later. It's called a bubble.

It's only a bubble if it busts. And stock does have value, and if the business it represents have growth, the equivalent value must also grow.

And in any case, if someone else feels that the stock is worth more, and thus pay more for it, what's the problem?

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