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Comment by samuelbrashears | Hacker News Reader

Zapier is definitely trying, but they're not there yet. That feature unfortunately doesn't do much to configure the blocks for you (it just selects which to use) -- you're largely left to sift through the same menus to set it up.

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Zapier has actual experienced software engineers and real budgets, would not rule out their ability to perform the same: text to IFTTT like auto-execution. Or consider your company right now, your current company is essentially a single team at Zapier, and you've got some free-way to mix research and product development. I suspect this is more an acquisition target -- small team develops larger idea in better way, Zapier says thanks and hooks it into their own stack, networks, and customers.

It took Zapier ~12 years to become a ~$5B company and build the book of revenue supporting such a valuation. For the right price, certainly, cash out (time value of money/time). But it's also reasonable to build and see how far you can run organically, depending on what you're optimizing for as a founder. You might be able to run faster because you're not carrying a decade of technical architecture to today's market, regardless of current cashflow and engineering capacity.

Zapier is a great company from a product and financial fundamentals perspective, big fan in all honesty, but I wouldn't sell upstarts short (that they can't execute).

That's the whole point of a startup. And we know startups fail. And Zapier is a YC company. This is a 2 person team using LLMs, I doubt they are building their own, nor building some "foundational connect-the-internet" agent nor have built for any scale beyond an internship. Still, they are definitely going to make something, and good luck to them.

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