The Zapier Blog

JULY 1, 2025

From each node, you then repeat the process, drilling deeper into the different concepts. "BBQs" Mind mapping is a creative way to brainstorm and find connections between different ideas. While it can be done as a group, it's often a solo practice. It's a weird hybrid approach, but it works for me.)

collaboration 106

collaboration support education creativity 106

The Zapier Blog

JULY 11, 2025

AI Artificial intelligence is the broad field of building machines or software that perform functions we normally associate with human intelligence, from pattern recognition and language understanding to planning and decision-making. Try Zapier's AI features Discover how AI gives you automation superpowers.

mix-use 69

mix-use networking development enablement 69

The Zapier Blog

JULY 20, 2025

I order groceries, get food delivered, map out how long the drive is to Barnes & Noble, and check the weather to confirm that staying inside is the best course of action—all from my cozy corner of the couch. It relies on APIs to fetch real-time weather data from meteorological services and deliver it to your device.

development 52

development enablement consulting SaaS 52

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 14, 2015

I noticed this post today from Ezra Galston titled “ Dear Brad, Fred & Mark: How The Hell Do You Do It? I don’t know Ezra yet but since he’s taking the time to blog (which I hugesly respect) and share thoughts I thought I’d take him up on his challenge and also spill the beans on my secrets. I answered.

VC 347

VC entrepreneurs creativity advice 347

Both Sides of the Table

OCTOBER 31, 2015

And actually if you have ADD you may just want to watch the videos I’ve embedded below because it’s easier to concentrate on that than reading a blog post. I’m not a doctor so everything you’ll read and listen to here will be my point-of-view from what I’ve read and from doctors I’ve consulted.

creativity 384

creativity consulting entrepreneurship energy 384

Haystack

MAY 19, 2018

Social networks were not much of a thing, email was about work, telco’s charged for texting and we had feature phones which were definitely not computers. The marine layer of fog that draped Dolores Park shielded us from the world. I’ll likely finish this tonight after putting the kids to sleep.

coworking 60

coworking transportation networking energy 60

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 13, 2013

His father came from Romania. Not just because meeting Clayton was influential in shaping my thinking about markets but also because Derek Andersen (who founded Startup Grind) is such an awesome host and runs a very informative events. Last month they turned the tables on me. Here is the link to the video interview.

startup 337

startup entrepreneurs consulting board 337

Y Combinator

MAY 29, 2019

00:45 – Where did the idea come from? 4:00 – From project to company. 19:00 – Data examples from their blog. 20:30 – Post: Fashion retailers have nothing to fear (yet) from the rise of Stitch Fix. 29:00 – Finding good data scientists who work from first principles.

investment 63

investment investing VC pitching 63

Y Combinator

MAY 15, 2019

Chris Best is the cofounder and CEO of Substack. Substack makes it simple for a writer to start a paid newsletter. They were in the Winter 2018 batch of YC. You can check them out at Substack.com. Jonathan Gill is the cofounder and CEO of Backtracks. Backtracks is a podcast analytics and hosting platform. You can check them out at Backtracks.fm.

culture 63

culture education mix-use media 63

TechCrunch

AUGUST 12, 2022

DALL-E 2, OpenAI’s powerful text-to-image AI system, can create photos in the style of cartoonists, 19th century daguerreotypists, stop-motion animators and more. But it has an important, artificial limitation: a filter that prevents it from creating images depicting public figures and content deemed too toxic.

startup 107

startup mix-use communities media 107

Startup Grind

AUGUST 13, 2018

Ann Miura-Ko has been called “ the most powerful woman in startups ” by Forbes and is a lecturer in entrepreneurship at Stanford. The child of a rocket scientist at NASA, Ann is a Palo Alto native and has been steeped in technology startups from when she was a teenager. Pitch your startup for an opportunity to meet with Floodgate.

VC 111

VC entrepreneurship pitching strategy 111

The Zapier Blog

APRIL 4, 2023

From AI-powered image generation to natural language tasks (like generating or summarizing text), AI tools are disrupting the workforce. With it, you can generate images from text using a pre-trained model, fine-tune models to generate images with your own data, and edit existing images using AI.

media 64

media communities creativity disruption 64

Both Sides of the Table

DECEMBER 19, 2011

Fred Wilson recently posted a great video on his blog with the CEO of Forrester Research, George Colony. Colony’s presentation is intriguing (and worth a watch if you have a few minutes) because I love to see when informed people make arguments that are different than you ordinarily hear (and different from my own views).

networking 355

networking frameworks development innovation 355

OurCrowd

AUGUST 21, 2019

Quantum computers are one of the hottest buzzwords today. Developed by governments including the United States, Russia, and China and companies like IBM, Google, Microsoft, and Alibaba, quantum computers may offer computing power that far exceeds anything we have seen to date. Quantum computers use qubits.

networking 58

networking enablement innovation technology 58

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 14, 2014

If you follow the tech media you would be subject to a lot of narrative biases that are completely off base – and this includes the value of email and phone calls. Tech news keeps proclaiming “phone calls are dead,” which is useful except that the data suggests the exact opposite. Calls are changing but not dying.

SaaS 339

SaaS VC real estate board 339

Both Sides of the Table

APRIL 30, 2011

I guess from there we had nowhere to go but down. The fundamental problem with banner ads is a condition called “banner blindness&# meaning that our eyes are really quickly trained to look at what is most relevant on the page – the content we want to see. It shows that our eyes are trained to focus on the text, not the ads.

media 352

media real estate data analysis investment 352

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 28, 2012

” Part of the beauty of blogging that in two sittings Fred was able to influence what was built over the next 12 months. I’ve wanted to write a blog post called “Mobile Second” for a long time to make this point more forcefully. They are often one click away from buying. The power of a keyboard.

real estate 334

real estate strategy development enablement 334

This is going to be BIG.

MAY 19, 2011

When you take kids off the streets and out of the playgrounds, locking them… err… protecting them from the dangers of the outside world, you force them to turn to the computer in their room and now, the one in their pocket. that's right. It's not the tech. I think about that when I do my job as a venture capitalist.

media 358

media networking opportunity technology 358

The Zapier Blog

APRIL 13, 2023

See, unlike Stable Diffusion and DALL·E 2 , you can't install Midjourney on your own computer or use a nicely designed web app. There is a reason that Midjourney uses Discord—even if it seems a little convoluted from the outside. Midjourney is one my favorite AI image generators —and I've used a lot of them.

communities 98

communities creativity development support 98

Angel Capital Association

JULY 23, 2020

By: Lance Cottrell, North Bay Angels Editors Note - The following article shares points from one investor to founders. In this blog, I will share with you my five-step process for building a killer pitch. ACA wants to know – does your group have similar expectations? These steps are a process, not a recipe. What is the business?

pitching 65

pitching angel investing investment investing 65

Smart Hustle Magazine

JUNE 17, 2021

We believe that everybody has God given talents and experiences that they can use, knowledge that they can pour out of their head from their lips and their fingertips into some kind of product that they can go out there and serve the world. Many people want are looking to earn a living for their families. Ramon Ray: I love that.

communities 102

communities entrepreneurs energy investment 102

Both Sides of the Table

AUGUST 21, 2011

“People still want calls …&#. My background was 8 years of telecoms & mobile and 8 years of cloud computing & SaaS – so these two themes were a given. Two big themes have emerged in my head in the past 3 years: offline / online integration and mobile computing. Or can they?

media 329

media disruption VC construction 329

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 2, 2011

It’s apropos because there is so much noise these days with email, Twitter, Facebook, blogs, web shows, etc. But aside from choosing the time of day to focus on signal vs. noise, Brad’s post got me thinking about another question – what is signal and what is noise? I enjoy that. Are these signal or noise?

peer-to-peer 287

peer-to-peer VC entrepreneurs board 287

Both Sides of the Table

JANUARY 12, 2010

I recently wrote a post about avoiding the “ Deferred Life Plan &# and some related thoughts about personal productivity that came from Tim Ferriss’s book, The Four Hour Workweek. Unfortunately my wife reads my blog and she’d log in and add comments to dispel this rumor (she keeps me honest.

advice 280

advice entrepreneurs networking innovation 280

Both Sides of the Table

JULY 10, 2011

Twitter’s significance stems from the fact that it is a real time, open, asymmetric, social, viral referral network that is often location aware and provides both explicit and implicit interests and preferences. Think of DataSift as turning the fire-hose into a cost-effective and manageable tap of running water. What does that mean?

peer-to-peer 307

peer-to-peer development networking investment 307

Derek Sivers

JANUARY 28, 2019

If digital, use only plain text. Don’t use the cloud, unless you’re also going to download it weekly and back it up in plain text outside that cloud. This is important because years from now you might be looking back, wondering if you were as happy or as sad as you remember during this time. Companies shut down. AppDevelopment.

health 58

health financing finance entrepreneurs 58

Both Sides of the Table

MARCH 1, 2010

I call it the entrepreneur thesis. It’s what I call the “entrepreneur thesis.” He invested $8 million in a company in the computer networking space. Steven knew that from a fund perspective he wasn’t going to earn the amount of money that a typical VC might look for since we were selling early. I have a philosophy.

entrepreneurs 321

entrepreneurs VC capital investment 321

The Zapier Blog

JUNE 23, 2025

But even with Copper, you might still have to manually copy leads from forms, update contact records, or notify teammates when a deal's status changes. But even with Copper, you might still have to manually copy leads from forms, update contact records, or notify teammates when a deal's status changes. Here's how.

opportunity 52

opportunity 52

The Zapier Blog

JUNE 26, 2025

ElevenLabs keeps popping up on my feeds both from content creators in my network and from vibe coders embedding it into their work. Meet your new AI teammates Try Zapier Agents So I spent time testing everything from creating dragon voices to building interview agents. But it's more than just text-to-speech here.

enablement 40

enablement networking support technology 40

The Zapier Blog

JUNE 16, 2025

Last year, I got a security alert that someone tried to log in to one of my accounts from halfway across the world. For example, if you've never visited Boston and someone is trying to access your account from there, your app might flag this and notify you to confirm it's really you trying to log in. How does 2FA work?

enablement 52

enablement support networking media 52

The Zapier Blog

JULY 10, 2025

Let's make one thing clear: unfortunately, there's no one best texting app. Unless you absolutely require one or two specific features or are a real stickler for security , the best text message app will be the one that the people you want to text also use.

mix-use 98

mix-use communities enablement support 98

The Zapier Blog

JUNE 29, 2025

It not only secures your device's connections and your online identity, but it also lets you browse the web from another location and access content that may not be available where you live. month if you pay for 2 years upfront) Starts from $15.45/month month if you pay for 2 years upfront) Starts from $15.45/month

networking 52

networking disruption support 52

This is going to be BIG.

JANUARY 18, 2011

The bain of any Windows user is how long it takes for their computers to load. Not only is the little magnifying glass and little draggable two sticks a tremendous pain in the ass to use, but the text on some websites, like Meetup, can't be highlighted. When I first bought my iPad about two weeks ago, I took quite a bit of ribbing.

financing 268

financing finance enablement technology 268

Smart Hustle Magazine

MAY 3, 2022

Are you running in circles trying to field phone calls, read emails, send your texts in time, and record videos for your podcast all while answering the call of a crying toddler hitting the moon because their applesauce isn’t the right color? Making phone calls. It’s time for a virtual assistant! Managing email accounts.

advice 108

advice entrepreneurs energy ventures 108

Tomasz Tunguz

JUNE 4, 2013

I’ve never measured how many words each day I type but I imagine it’s probably a few thousand each week between my laptop and my mobile phone and across emails and blog posts. In the past week, I’ve been suffering from some carpal tunnel pain particularly as I’ve been coding more. And no one can deny the toll this takes on our wrists.

startup 40

startup 40

Tomasz Tunguz

AUGUST 17, 2017

One of my partners recently switched from an iPhone to an Essential phone and was stunned by the accuracy of the voice interface Google offers. This blog post is dictated and edited entirely by voice. If I make a mistake, I can say “insert semicolon after dictated” and the computer will insert the; after the word dictated.

enablement 74

enablement technology 74