Zapier

**LIVE from the Transform Conference in Las Vegas**

In this episode of Culture Uncovered, Jena Dunay sits down with Brandon Sammut to go behind the scenes of one of the original remote-first companies, long before it was the norm.

From pioneering distributed work across 40+ countries to building a culture rooted in automation, ownership, and transparency, Zapier is redefining how modern teams work in the age of AI.

They also get into what it really means to “build the robot,” why transparency isn’t just a buzzword, and how high-performing teams thrive in a demanding but deeply empowering environment.

What you’ll learn:

•  What Zapier does and how it’s bringing AI + automation to everyday work 
•  What “Don’t be the robot, build the robot” actually looks like in practice 
•  How a fully remote, globally distributed company operates at scale 
•  The difference between transparency and oversharing in modern teams 
•  What it takes to succeed in a high-impact, high-expectation environment 

Zapier highlights:

• Founded: ~2010 
• Team Size: ~800 employees 
• Work Model: Fully remote, globally distributed (42+ countries) 
• Industry: AI, Automation, SaaS 
• Culture: Builder-first, transparent, high-ownership, outcomes-driven 

Unique perks & programs:

•  Fully remote and globally distributed work model 
•  High autonomy with an outcomes-based performance culture 
•  Strong internal culture of building with AI and automation 
•  Radical transparency (public Slack channels, shared company updates) 
•  Hands-on builder mindset embedded in hiring and onboarding 
•  High-impact roles due to lean teams powered by automation 

To learn more about Zapier:

•  Careers Page (They’re hiring!) 
•  LinkedIn Page 
•  Brandon’s LinkedIn

Transcript

Jena Dunay: Welcome back to another episode of Culture Uncovered where we go behind the scenes of cool companies to work for. And I am super familiar with this company. I have utilized this company before, their tools, and I’m really excited for us to go behind the scenes of what the culture looks like to actually work there. Thank you, Brandon Sammut, the Chief People and AI Transformation Officer at Zapier. Thank you for coming today. 

I love that we’re here at Transform. So if you hear some background noise, you’re like, where are they doing it? Are they at a party? Are they at a rave? No, we are at a conference and it’s a really fun conference.

Brandon Sammut: Great to be here.

Jena Dunay: And so why don’t you just give us kind of an overview, what does Zapier do? Let’s start there.

Brandon Sammut: Zapier is an AI automation company. And what we do is help anyone in an organization take an idea about how work can be better. And we give folks the tools to use AI and automation to make that real. And we do it in a way that is safe, that your IT team or your CIO can feel great about, but it’s really all about bringing these AI and automation superpowers wall to wall throughout an organization.

Jena Dunay: So it’s so funny. I have a small business. Obviously, I’m doing this podcast. I’ve utilized your tools and your product for my own benefit. So I can say that I really love what you guys are doing. So tell us, I think a lot people may have heard of you as an organization, but maybe you don’t really understand much about your culture, like how big you are. Tell us a little bit about the infrastructure of the organization. How many employees do you have and where you’re located?

Brandon Sammut: A couple amazing things about Zapier. So Zapier started 15 years ago. Three graduates of the University of Missouri came together with this idea to do exactly what we do today. Of course, not with AI. And one of the most remarkable things that’s had a lot of influence on our culture is the fact that they started the company as an all remote company 15 years ago. So this is before the pandemic. They’re like other times. Well, yeah. I mean, back then it was so novel. It was considered a terrible way to start a company.

But these three founders had a point of conviction about this. They grew up in the middle of the US where a lot of tech companies like literally fly right over. I grew up in the Midwest too. I grew up in Michigan. So, you know, if you grew up in these places, you know that talent is pretty darn evenly distributed. Even if tech jobs, for example, are not evenly distributed. And that was one of their big ideas. Now they did Y Combinator in the Bay Area. All of their freshly minted founders, you know, they’re all out trying to hire the same small pool of talent in the Bay Area. And they’re looking around like, I don’t know if we’re that much better at hiring than any of these other great founders. So while they’re doing this, we’re going to hire great talent anywhere we can find it.

And that is why Zapier started all remote. And today, 15 years later, the team is 800 strong, still all remote, and importantly, it’s very distributed, right? Remote does not necessarily tell you anything about how spread out the team is. This team is all over the world. We have folks in 42 countries.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, can you actually explain that? Like, if a job seeker is listening, they’re like, what’s the difference between remote and distributed? Like, how would you describe that?

Brandon Sammut: Well, with remote, remote is kind of where individual people do the work. So for example, I work from home. Some people travel and work from wherever they happen to be at the time. So that’s like remote versus office. That’s like one dimension of the workplace model. When I say distributed, that’s more about where the teams are, if that makes sense. So remote is like an individual model. This is where I, that’s how I work.

But for example, you could technically have an all remote company that all lives in the same city. Yes. And everyone just works from their own home, right? But they’re not distributed. They’re actually very concentrated. So that’s why we try to separate those two things. Because if you look at them together, they give you a little bit more detail on what that company is really all about. And we benefit a ton from the distributed part of our model with such a global team.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, tell me how did you come across the organization?

Brandon Sammut: Well, I knew, don’t know about you, Jena, but I was, I use Zapier as a product. I use Zapier as product, means Zapier has millions of customers and I was one of them. But the other way I knew Zapier, you know, when I was at my last company, a great company called LiveRamp, was mainly office based. And then the pandemic happened and like a lot of other chief people officers, we’re all looking online for like the few companies that actually knew how to work from home.

Zapier was one of the few scaled companies that had been doing this for a long time. And they had open sourced this document, their playbook. It’s still available today. It’s called the ultimate guide to remote work. And me and everybody else like stumbled across this. I like read it like cover to cover one evening, like right when everything was shutting down. And that was like the second way that I got to know Zapier. And for me,

when actually, Wade, our founder CEO reached out to me to talk about becoming Zappiers for his Chief People Officer, it was, the product is very cool, but it was less the product and more that guide and what it told me about the culture that got me interested in possibly coming over and working with the team.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, I think you make a great point there where I have found that the organizations that are transparent about some of their like playbooks, their best practices, tend to attract really great talent who respects kind of how they approach certain things. And like what you were saying, they had the playbook for remote work. And so that made me really attractive for me to come work there. So was it the CEO who reached out to you that you found the job or kind of how did that how did that happen?

Brandon Sammut: It was Wade. Yeah, it was Wade. He’s our original founder CEO, still running the company today. And he reached out to me in the kind of like very earnest quintessential tech recruiting model of, hey, I’m hiring for this role. It’s my first time doing it. I got your name from someone I respect. And I just want to get your perspective on how to approach the search.

Yeah. And again, because like you, like I knew Zapier, I knew about Wade, he has a reputation for being an amazing leader. It’s like, of course, you don’t not take that phone call. Yeah. I should have known better.

Jena Dunay: Now here you are. So tell us, how would you describe the culture at Zapier?

Brandon Sammut: Well, part of the culture of Zapier is born out of the mission and part of the culture of Zapier is born out of how we work. So that remote and distributed model. So I’ll break it down piece by piece. So tell me. So, the mission of Zapier is to make automation work for everyone. So what’s in that mission? Well, there’s a builder ethos within that. This notion that everyone can and should have agency over how their work works. You can build your way of working and how can we give people that ability?

The second part of the mission, the for everyone part of the mission is all about access and inclusion. So let’s make that true and let’s make it true for everyone. I have a lot of affinity for the everyone part of the mission. The first half of my career was not in tech at all, it was in education. I’ve always been really interested in like, how do you maximize human potential? And then how do you better map potential to opportunity? And it’s kind of what I get to do today. As a CTO with everything going on with AI.

One piece of the company culture that stems from the mission is this builder ethos, right? This notion that I am in control of how my work works. And if there’s a better way to do it, not only can I conceive of it, but I can probably actually make it happen myself. In fact, one of our values, which plays to that piece of the culture is called build the robot. And the full value is don’t be the robot, build the robot. So that’s a piece of the culture that comes from the mission.

Brandon Sammut: There are other pieces of the culture that come from the fact that it’s all remote and very global. For example, Zapier cares a lot about writing things down. Okay. So that anyone, no matter what time zone they’re in or when they log on for work or what have you, you know this notion that, you know, what makes people great at work? Well, one thing is having context on how to do your job or having context on what’s going on around your job so you can make great decisions and so on.

This is true for any company, no matter whether they’re in the office, whatever the case may be. It was just so obviously important for Zapier starting remote that the company got really good at making sure that things are written down. Now, another value that plays to this that’s really important, we call default to transparency. Default to transparency is not a value that’s about transparency for its own sake, but what we’ve seen, especially for a growing distributed team, is that working in public and being transparent about those meeting notes from that meeting you just had or this thing you tried that didn’t work, what can other people learn is one of the best ways to make sure that everyone in the company does have the information they need to be great at their job.

But also there are some other really positive cultural side effects. Working in public and transparency are also great ways to maintain and build trust, especially between management and the rest of the team. So this is something about Zapier that really stood out to me even when I was getting to know the team before I joined that now, like I think this is a value that was again very important for Zapier being distributed all these times, but wow, would pay dividends for any organization.

Jena Dunay: And I think that’s helpful for a people leader who’s listening, who’s like, how do I do if I have a more remote team or even if I don’t, what do I do to make communication better? And how do I equip my people to be more effective at their jobs? It sounds like this is a strategy that’s really worked for your

Brandon Sammut: Well, I think so. And you know, again, what makes what makes these pieces of the culture isn’t what we say, it’s what people actually do. I’m sure you’ve read this book. What you do is who you are. That’s a really shorthand definition of culture.

Jena Dunay: Yeah. Well, I think it’s true for like a lot of job seekers, I feel like have been disenfranchised in the past X amount of years because companies will say their culture is X, but they actually like you look under the hood and it’s actually Y. And so can you give me some other examples of like kind of how these things that you’re talking about ownership, like all of these pieces, all these pieces of your values and about the mission for your employees, like how does that actually play out on a day to day basis?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, let’s talk about the specific, like where the rubber hits the road. So let’s actually even start with that build the robot value. How does that show up? It actually starts before people even start at the company. When folks are interviewing at Zapier, we often have them build or show something they have built with automation and AI as a way to better understand their work and their expertise that they’d be bringing in the company, but also understand how they think about using technology to be amazing at the thing that they do best.

So that’s a very practical thing we’ve embedded in our hiring process. When someone joins the company as part of our onboarding, we do a ton of builder skill building and enable folks to further sharpen people’s builder skills so that they can in fact build the robot. So that’s an investment that we make in onboarding to map those words to actual action.

Other things on transparency, that part of the culture, you cannot create a private Slack channel at Zapier without like three layers of approval. So it’s like a literal in Slack itself, like you default to transparency. Everything’s public. So that’s one example. Meeting notes from board meetings and exec meetings are shared in public channels. Financial statements are shared in public channels. The list goes on and on. But again, really defaulting to making sure people have information.

And it’s not just information about their explicit job. It’s information about all the moving pieces of how the company operates. Another thing, we have another value called grow through feedback. And so we have a couple of specific rituals around that too. One of them, which is kind of a common thing that people talk about, but very few companies do this routinely, and we’re not perfect at it either, by the way, but it’s really good, it’s just a retrospective or a retro.

Your team, you have a working group, they come together, they ship a feature or they deliver a project or whatever the case may be. Before we move on to the very next thing, let’s take a quick pause and reflect on what we did and how we did it and what the outcomes were. And let’s chronicle that in a way that anyone at the company can see so that collectively we didn’t just do a thing, but we learn. We’re kind of like notching up the wisdom and skillfulness of anyone who touches that retro, not just the people who worked on the project.

Jena Dunay: I’m actually curious your perspective on this because there might be a people leader who’s listening who’s like that’s great that you do transparency, but I’m not allowed. Like I don’t have that type of culture. What is the difference between transparency and oversharing at a senior leadership level?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, it’s a great question. And I think, you know, there was a time at Zapier where transparency was kind of misunderstood as transparency for all things at all times. But transparency is a tool. It’s a means to an end.

And transparency, just like any other tool, can be misused and can actually have some negative effects. So for example, if I’m a senior leader and I just like publish every meeting note from every meeting that I have without any context, without any explanation, without any sense of what this means or what this doesn’t mean, it can actually create a lot of confusion. It can create a lot of anxiety. It can create a lot of second guessing.

So transparency is not just about sharing everything. It’s about sharing the right things in the right way with the right context so that people can actually use that information to be more effective in their roles.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that’s really helpful. So if I’m a job seeker who’s listening, tell me a little bit about what are some of the reasons why people love working at your company? What are some of the perks or benefits that stand out?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, I think it starts with the mission. And I know that sounds like a very kind of like high level answer, but it’s actually very true. People who align with the mission of Zapier, they thrive here.

It’s not a cushy job. It’s not a place where you come to just kind of like hang out. It’s a place where you come to do really meaningful work. And if that resonates with you, then you’re going to love it here.

We also offer a ton of flexibility because of our remote and distributed model. So people have a lot of choice in how they work and where they work. It’s very much an outcomes based culture. So we care about what you produce, not necessarily how you get there.

We also have a relatively small team for the scale that we operate at because we use a lot of automation and AI internally. So that means that every person can have a really big impact.

And we pay well. We pay well because we expect a lot. So it’s a high reward, high expectations environment. And we try to be really clear about that upfront so that people can self select into that.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, that makes sense. So it sounds like somebody who is really ambitious, who wants to do meaningful work, who wants to be challenged would really thrive there.

Brandon Sammut: Exactly. Zapier is a team of builders. And that doesn’t mean that everyone comes in as an expert. It just means that if you come here, you’re going to build. You’re going to build the future version of your job.

And we try to be really transparent about that so that people can make an informed decision about whether or not this is the right place for them.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, so who would not be a good fit?

Brandon Sammut: I think people who are fundamentally skeptical or opposed to AI and automation are probably not going to be a good fit because that’s such a core part of our mission.

And I also think people who are not comfortable in a demanding environment. And I want to be clear about what I mean by demanding. There are some organizations that are very supportive but not very demanding. There are some organizations that are very demanding but not very supportive.

We try to be both. But there are seasons in people’s lives where they might not want that level of demand, and that’s totally okay. It just might not be the right fit at that moment.

Jena Dunay: Can you describe what demanding actually means?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, I think it starts with a mindset of excellence. So what does excellence look like in the work that we do, whether that’s product, whether that’s customer support, whether that’s people operations.

And then it’s about setting goals that are ambitious but achievable. And then it’s about holding ourselves accountable to those goals.

And part of that is being really honest about where we’re falling short and having the conversations that are necessary to improve. And that’s where feedback comes in. That’s where coaching comes in.

It’s not always comfortable, but it’s really important if you want to get better.

Jena Dunay: Yeah, it reminds me of like elite athletes who want to be coached, who want to get better, who want that feedback.

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, exactly. And I think what makes that work is trust. So if you know that the person who’s giving you feedback actually believes in you and wants you to succeed, then you’re much more likely to receive that feedback in a constructive way.

And I often say, I believe that people are capable of greatness, but we don’t always do great things. And part of my role is to help close that gap. And I expect the same from everyone else at the company.

Jena Dunay: As we’re closing up, we talked about all the wonderful things about your organization from a people leader standpoint and for job seekers who are thinking this sounds like a great place to work. What do you not do well and what are you working to improve?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, I think Zapier is right in the middle of the AI space right now. And we’re operating at a pace and in an environment that is very dynamic and very uncertain.

And for a company that previously had a very clear product and go to market strategy, we’re now doing a lot of innovation. And that means that we’re kind of creating certainty as we go.

And that can be challenging. So when we hire, we look for people who are comfortable in that kind of environment and who actually get energy from it.

Jena Dunay: If someone is interested in working at your company, how can they learn more and get their resume seen?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, a couple things. I think first and foremost, Zapier now requires some level of AI fluency for every role. That doesn’t mean you have to be an expert, but it is important.

And one of the best ways to build that is to actually use Zapier. There’s a free plan. You can use it for your own personal productivity. You can use it at work.

And that gives you a really good understanding of what we’re trying to do and also helps you build those skills.

Jena Dunay: That’s awesome. Where should people go to learn more?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, our careers page is a great place. You can also follow Zapier on LinkedIn. We share a lot of content there about AI and about how we’re thinking about transformation.

And then you’re also welcome to follow me. I post pretty regularly about just kind of like practical ways to use AI and how we’re thinking about work.

Jena Dunay: I usually end there, but I have one more question for people leaders. What encouragement would you give to those trying to implement AI in their companies, especially if they’re not AI forward yet?

Brandon Sammut: Yeah, I would say two things. One is AI is a means to an end. It’s not the end itself. So don’t lose sight of what you’re actually trying to accomplish as an organization.

And then the second thing is leaders need to lead from the front. So if you’re asking your teams to experiment with AI, you should be doing it yourself.

Jena Dunay: That’s really good. Brandon, I’m so glad we got to meet in person today. I love what you all are doing.

If you’re interested in learning more about Zapier, go to their LinkedIn, their careers page, or follow Brandon on LinkedIn. Thank you.

Brandon Sammut: What a pleasure, Jena.

Jena Dunay: Thanks for listening to this episode of Culture Uncovered. If you enjoyed this episode, subscribe and leave a review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. Share this podcast on LinkedIn or with a job seeker friend.

If you think your company should be featured, send us an email at hello@recruittheemployer.com. We’ll see you next week on another episode of Culture Uncovered.