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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

#191

Post by duxup »

narrator wrote: post #103
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

>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…

" Zapier lets non-programmers, the vast majority of the planet, do things that programmers do"

I doubt that's the reason for the evaluation, that's hardly unique.

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

#192

Post by iambateman »

superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

Despite the replies, I thought this was a good take.

$5,000,000,000 is a truly unimaginable amount in both senses of the word unimaginable. I couldn’t tell the difference between a $5B and $7B company, for example.

And it’s especially hard to tell for a service which is, somewhat by nature, invisible.

But my smart, non-programmer friends love Zapier and I imagine many of their customer relationships will be multi-decade. There really are so many odd businesses in the world.

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

#193

Post by nickfromseattle »

As a non-technical founder my company pays Zapier thousands of dollars per year.

We've automated a lot of tedious, manual tasks that you would typically assign a VA.

I think we save some money, but even if it was break even, or more expensive than manual labor, the mental overhead of not managing another person, wondering whether the tedious work was done, and according to specification justifies the cost.

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

#194

Post by JohnJamesRambo »

superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

Maybe valuations are just way astronomically off right now.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2021-02-12/warren-bu...

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

#195

Post by TheSmiddy »

freeqaz wrote: post #168
devoutsalsa wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I was a non-programmer trying to build a business that needed software, the last thing I wanted was to rely on something I couldn’t maintain myself. For example, I could wire up DNS by hand, but the last thing I’d want is to have to learn Terraform just so I could update my email MX records. Using Herkou because I didn’t want to manage a server was another example. Using something like Zapier to add a row to a s…

Would you mind elaborating on this? I'm not sure what you're saying here. Is Zapier a positive or a negative for you?

I think they're clearly saying that Zapier is a positive for them.

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

#196

Post by ipaddr »

djrogers wrote: post #182
hooande wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Why would I pay someone hundreds of dollars to build something that I don’t know how to maintain, when Zapier can do the same thing for free or $20/mo?

Free is free.

Your return on investment at the $20.00 per month level is a year or less. So it depends on how long you need it for.

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

#197

Post by sicromoft »

staticassertion wrote: post #188
IAmGraydon wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

His reply is a textbook example of psychological projection. He clearly lacks empathy and is attempting to attribute it to someone else as a defense mechanism.

Is this intended to be ironic? You're doing the exact same thing.

That's because he lacks empathy. (Only someone lacking empathy would accuse someone who accused someone else of lacking empathy of doing so due to lack of empathy.)

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

#199

Post by dgavey »

_jxdz wrote: post #107
ralph84 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wow, this should be the headline. Bootstrapped unicorns are somewhat rare. But bootstrapped unicorns with no employee equity is a whole other level.

To be fair to them, they do a pretty decent profit share every year. It is compensation based, so it's nothing life-changing (only say, 5-10% of your total compensation) but it was nice! First and only place I've ever participated in profit sharing.

I've always thought profit sharing was more fair overall than shares/options for most employees. I'm really glad to hear that this happens at relatively larger companies too.

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

#200

Post by user3939382 »

narrator wrote: post #103
superbcarrot wrote: post #29

Sometimes I get shocked by these numbers and it reminds me how little I know about business. Like if you showed me the wikipedia page for Zapier and asked me give it some value, I would be way off. Or if you pitched the business idea to me, I would tell you do something better with your time.

>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…

I've been a programmer for over 20 years and I still use Zapier because I find it relatively quick and easy. Dealing with writing code for authentication, various API versions, debugging, deploying and maintaining the code is all a PITA that I'm happy to avoid where possible.
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