How a $5B founder is using AI (3 tutorials)

August 26, 2026

AI Summary

5 min read

Wade Foster, the CEO of Zapier (a company valued at around $5 billion), walked through three specific AI workflows he uses daily. The conversation quickly moved past general AI hype and into the mechanics of how a busy CEO actually delegates thinking and action to software.

The "Presidential Briefing" and the Evening Scribe

The most basic but effective workflow Foster uses is the automated morning brief. He calls it "waking up like the president." A Zapier automation runs at 6 AM, pulls data from his calendar, email, meeting notes (from an app called Granola), and his to-do list, then sends him a Slack message summarizing his day. The key technical detail is that this workflow is built with code, not just a simple trigger-action. Foster explained that this makes it "deterministic" rather than purely "agentic." It runs reliably in the cloud without burning tokens on guesswork, and if an API fails, it falls back to an AI to troubleshoot.

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What you'll learn

1 (00:02) **Episode Setup & Wade's Background** - The hosts introduce Wade Foster, CEO of Zapier, and discuss the company's origins and valuation.
2 (02:30) **The New AI Pitch: From Chatbot to Agent** - Wade delivers a sales pitch for Zapier's new AI layer, explaining how it moves beyond a simple chatbot.
3 (08:43) **Tutorial 1: The Morning & Evening Brief (Robot Staff)** - Wade shares his screen to demo his "robot staff," starting with a presidential-style daily briefing.
4 (14:18) **The Power of the Evening Scribe** - Wade explains how the evening brief proactively takes action and helps him optimize his life.
5 (18:11) **Tutorial 2: The AI That Argues Back** - Wade demonstrates how to configure AI to challenge your assumptions instead of placating you.
6 (20:08) **The War Council: Seven AI Personas** - Wade introduces his "War Council," a skill that spins up seven sub-agents with specific personas to debate a decision.
7 (22:28) **Wade's AI Stack: Cursor as the CEO's Engineer** - Wade reveals his primary AI tool is Cursor, a coding agent, which he uses as a "delegated engineer."

+ Full timestamped outline available in the app

Show Notes

How Wade uses AI (steal his prompts): https://clickhubspot.com/efcd

Episode 856: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk to Wade Foster ( https://x.com/wadefoster ) about how he uses AI to save himself hours of work every day.

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Show Notes:

(0:00) intro

(2:27) The sales pitch

(7:04) My Robot Executive Staff, Waking Up Like The President

(14:13) Evening brief

(17:39) AI that argues with you

(19:32) War Council skill

(31:53) How to use AI to hire better

(48:15) being a billionaire before 40

(51:17) a case for not having a chip on your shoulder

(54:36) 1-dimensional winners

(1:00:55) recommended reading

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Links:

• Zapier - https://zapier.com/

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Check Out Sam's Stuff:

• Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm

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Check Out Shaan's Stuff:

• Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com

• Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents.

• Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/

Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N.A., Members FDIC

• I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out:

beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge

My First Million is a HubSpot Media Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /