Practical AI and Keeping the Founder Spirit Alive

Ankit Gordhandas has been optimizing his career for impact for more than a decade. As a founder who joined Zapier through the acquisition of his company Intersect Labs, he’s continued scaling his potential for impact by bringing new products to life for Zapier. DTC investor Radhika Malik spoke with Gordhandas about his founder journey and what he’s up to now at Zapier. Spoiler: there’s a strong focus on AI.

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Key Takeaways on AI at Zapier

Zapier fully embraced AI as a co-worker in early 2023. From engineering to content, accounting to HR, they’re streamlining processes and publishing their results. More than half the company is using AI to improve their work efficiency for day-to-day tasks.

Bring on the natural language conversations: Zapier’s launched features to generate Zaps from a conversational description, to easily create user-facing chatbots for websites, and to automagically build out spreadsheets (“Tables”) and webpages (“Interfaces”).

New product development is driven by user demand and feedback.

Success of external products and features is determined by adoption and revenue. For internal features, the company focuses less on immediate cost optimization and more on experimentation and learning.

“Talking to users is not just highly encouraged at Zapier, it’s required. If you don’t have data from conversations you’ve had with customers, then you don’t have any ground to stand on.”

Founder Learnings

YCombinator: As a first-time founder and engineer up until starting Intersect Labs, YC was invaluable. The ethos of building fast, and shipping fast has stayed with him. Would highly recommend YC.

User discovery is paramount. Never stop talking to users or prospective users. And don’t be afraid to pivot, even if it means walking away from revenue.

With VC money comes expectations. Raise only when you need to. Next time around, he’ll focus on getting to revenue earlier and raising only when capital is a true constraint.

Starting a company isn’t the only way to be entrepreneurial. Finding the right company like Zapier that gives you the ability to experiment and build and the platform to scale is immensely satisfying.