INSIDE How AI Startups hire, AI Roundtable with Wade Foster, Mikey Schulman, and Ali Ansari | E2225
December 18, 2025
AI Summary
5 min read🎙️ The Speakers & Context
- The Format: Weekly roundtable interview with AI builders delivering a high-energy talent wars and agent roadmap dissection.
- The Key Players:
- Wade Foster (Zapier CEO): Scaled Zapier to 750 employees over 14 years, adapting pre-AI integrations into agentic workflows with proprietary 14-year data corpus.
- Ali Sari (Micro1 CEO): Pivoted from AI recruiter to human data engine for LLMs, supplying synthetic datasets in high-value domains like finance and legal.
- Mikey Schulman (Suno CEO): Bootstrapped AI music generator to 120 employees, navigating IP litigiousness while launching breakout AI-assisted artists.
🎣 The Executive Hook
- The "One Big Idea": AI tools democratize prototyping and shipping, flooding the talent market with high-agency builders who bypass traditional gates via spec work, while reliability gaps in agent chains demand hybrid workflows—unlocking agentic workflows as the bridge to autonomous ops. This shifts hiring from resumes to demonstrated output, creating asymmetric edges for remote/global teams over SF researcher bottlenecks.
- Why It Matters: Amid Fed rate cuts fueling AI capex (e.g., Meta's poaching sprees), this compresses software lifecycles 10x, pressuring incumbents to retrain while startups leverage evals/data flywheels—positioning 2026 as the year enterprises allocat
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What you'll learn
- 1 **(00:00) 🎙️ Introduction: Wade Foster (Zapier CEO), Ali Sari (MicroOne Founder), Mikey Schulman (Suno)**
- 2 **(05:31) Talent Wars & Hiring Challenges**
- 3 **(14:28) Developer Pipeline & AI Coding Tools Impact**
- 4 **(21:13) Hiring Shifts: High Agency, Show Don't Tell**
- 5 **(30:04) Training Data Landscape**
- 6 **(41:16) Suno & Music Industry Dynamics**
- 7 **(49:34) Acceleration vs. Deceleration: Bernie Sanders Critique**
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
This Week In Startups is made possible by:
LinkedIn Ads- http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups
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Enterpret - http://Enterpret.com/twist
Today’s show:
How do top tech CEOs hire? AI has thrown out the playbook for getting hired — so what are the most innovative firms looking for? Anyone can learn any skill and automate much of it, what is to be valued in the modern labor market?
On our first AI Roundtable episode of TWiST, Jason is joined by three top tech CEOs: Wade Foster (Zapier), Mikey Schulman (Suno), and Ali Ansari (Micro1). They each give their perspective on the tech talent wars and how to get hired in 2026.
The resounding answer on how to get a job? JUST START DOING THE JOB! If you want to be a designer, start sending designs to companies you want to be hired by — don’t just sit around waiting to be hired. The biggest value you can bring is a “high agency” mindset to your company and the role. Show you get after it!
They are also hitting on:
- How AI is getting used to make music today
- The tech industry’s communication problem
- How to raise kids in the age of AI
Timestamps:
(00:00) It’s our first ever “This Week in AI” Roundtable, and we’ve got an amazing panel
(05:50) How Meta and OpenAI skew how everyone thinks about compensation
(09:37) The importance of looking beyond SF for talent
(10:24) LinkedIn Ads: Start converting your B2B audience into high quality leads today. Launch your first campaign and get $250 FREE when you spend at least $250. Go to http://linkedin.com/thisweekinstartups to claim your credit.
(14:39) Is AI making more people seek out developer jobs?
(18:36) Squarespace - Use offer code TWIST to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain at https://squarespace.com/twist
(19:36) When design becomes its own bottleneck… and some workarounds.
(22:37) It’s not how much you know, it’s how adaptable you are
(24:10) The best way to get hired: just start doing the job
(30:09) Why Ali says we’re entering the "Post-Training"
(31:34) Enterpret - Enterpret turns feedback noise into Customer Intelligence, so your team knows exactly what to fix and build next. Head to More from this podcast