Rujul Zaparde: Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | E1144

Summary

In this insightful conversation with Rujul Zaparde, the emphasis is on the potential and original thinking that hiring inexperienced individuals can bring to a company. Zaparde argues that such hires are more likely to come up with original ideas by tackling challenges from first principles. With experience gathered from working at Airbnb and now founding Zip, Zaparde shares stories from his entrepreneurial journey, highlighting the importance of being customer-focused, understanding procurement challenges, and the continuous need for innovation and speed in business.

Highlights

• Zaparde believes hiring inexperienced people brings fresh ideas as they approach challenges from a first principles perspective. 🤔
• Speed can be a major advantage, allowing companies to pivot quickly and efficiently without being bogged down by complex strategies. ⚡
• Rujul emphasizes the need to avoid being too scattered and the importance of focusing on core business functions to succeed. 🎯
• One of the key aspects of success is ensuring your solution truly addresses customer pain points. 📌
• Streamlining processes, especially approvals in procurement, can drastically improve organizational efficiency. 🚀

Key Takeaways

• 1. Hire for potential: Inexperienced individuals can offer fresh perspectives and original ideas by approaching problems with first principles thinking. 💡
• 2. Embrace speed: Faster iteration beats having the perfect plan, especially in fast-paced business environments. 🏃
• 3. Focus is key: While speed is essential, ensuring high-quality product and service delivery necessitates focus and prioritization. 🎯
• 4. Understand your market: Learning from customers and iterating on feedback can lead to stronger product-market fit. 📈
• 5. Avoid overcomplicating processes: Streamlining approvals and reducing unnecessary bureaucratic steps can enhance efficiency. 🔄

Overview

In this engaging interview, Rujul Zaparde shares why hiring inexperienced individuals might be the key to unlocking a company’s innovative potential. Drawing from his own experiences, Zaparde suggests that fresh minds are more likely to tackle problems from a new perspective, resulting in unique solutions that seasoned thinkers might overlook.

Zaparde also discusses the critical importance of speed in business, noting that companies must iterate rapidly to stay ahead. The essence, he argues, lies in executing swiftly on ideas and learning quickly from mistakes, as opposed to sticking to rigid, exhaustive plans. This mindset, he believes, is crucial in maintaining a competitive edge.

The conversation further delves into the intricacies of product-market fit and the challenges of scaling a product. Rujul emphasizes learning directly from customer feedback and iterating to meet their needs. With a focus on procurement processes, he highlights the inefficiencies in approvals and advocates for more streamlined, digital-first approaches to drive productivity.

Rujul Zaparde: Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | E1144 Transcription

• 00:00 - 00:30 I would much rather invest in the person that has potential that maybe hasn't done the job before they don't have the experience what are they going to do they're going to first principle the problem and so they're just generally more likely to have more original ideas speed is actually really really an advantage and it helps you like you're not going to be right so you might as well just Ln quickly and move on ready to go [Music]
• 00:30 - 01:00 rul listen I I heard so many good things from Anna Khan from Ali Rani thank you so much for joining me today no thank you so much for having me now I would love to start I always think great entrepreneurs are shaped early in their career if we think about people who saw you earlier in yours how would your parents how would your teachers have described the young rajul so what I do remember uh is that I was always um even like certainly high school but even in in Middle School like
• 01:00 - 01:30 as always with my friends like we're always doing some like business thing you know we're always doing something like that on the site like I remember at one point we like figured out how to make some really terrible really really terrible uh video games I I'm not even sure what we were using back then this is in you know early 2000s uh and then we would like sell them to other people in different schools and like I remember we even started something that was like uh you know when you're driving around sometimes you've seen those bumper stickers that say like hey am I driving poorly like you can report me at this at
• 01:30 - 02:00 this number most of them are for commercial vehicles uh uh like trucks and you know Vans and things like that it's and we had started something like that for teen drivers we certainly couldn't drive at that at that time uh and so we sold some bumper stick you know so it was like that was the type of thing that uh uh uh we were working on it was always something or the other do you agree that you should always be embarrassed by your V1 do you agree or do you actually think that no you do need to put out good product today a given product quality
• 02:00 - 02:30 uh I I honestly think you'll learn so much more with number one like just put something out there because chances are what you're building probably not right you just don't know what's not right about it uh and you won't know until you like put it out there uh and and one you know one thing I think you can always do is like if you lack something you can always make up for an ins servance you can ask better questions you can learn you can iterate faster and people really appreciate that that that's of your value I totally agree and you can build such customer advocates in the early days by actually just being so
• 02:30 - 03:00 responsive and so intuitive to that feedback totally agree tell me dude how we're going to get on to learnings from past but just in terms of zip why did you choose this what was the aha moment for you when it came to founding zip so it was a problem that my co-founder Lou and I uh that we had both experienced so we had you know we actually met we both worked together at Airbnb uh Lou was an engineering leader at Airbnb I I worked as a product manager uh and uh you know what happened uh was that you know I remember actually one day uh we we woke
• 03:00 - 03:30 up to to an email message saying hey uh rul and and Lou uh you know someone so has left the organization you guys have been designated uh as uh the the business owners uh of our contract with this it was a large large contract software contract yeah know there's a renewal coming up and we were assigned somebody from the procurement organization because it was such a large contract uh and we said sure you know we'll be the business owners like tell us what we need to do uh and the first
• 03:30 - 04:00 thing we heard we had to what we had to do was um we were told hey you have to go to our Erp system uh and create a PR uh and I remember we were both we both looked at each other we like sorry what uh and and the person was like oh it's it's a purchase requisition uh you know at the time the only PR that we did was a was a poll request uh and and so we're like oh well purchase requisition okay I mean I can understand what that means and and so of course I remember we go to the Erp and the first question is so select your cost center uh and there's
• 04:00 - 04:30 thousands and thousands of options in there and no one has ever asked us or told us what cost center we're in like we have no idea what to select uh and so we picked something uh and then of course later on and asked what's the what's the GL code and we're like we don't even what is a GL Cod at you know at the time uh and and of course it's an accounting classification is what what it is right but we have no idea thousands of options we select something get submit I remember we distinctly went back uh to to to the procurement uh person side to say hey we're done thumbs
• 04:30 - 05:00 up like just just let us know when it's improved and he said no no no no you're not going anywhere that's just that's just the pr uh you know once you get the contract it's got to get uploaded over in this system because that's where the legal team reviews contracts and oh also it's a software renewal so you have to go raise you know an IT ticket over here because the IT team needs to review and also we're sharing all this customer data so now you've got to raise a security request over here uh you've got to raise a privacy request over there um
• 05:00 - 05:30 and so we actually do five or six different intakes uh if you will of this information uh and then of course of course as you would expect you know in a month or two months it's it's very hard to understand exactly like exactly what's happening with this request is it blocked and if so where uh and I remember anytime I would have to ask uh uh the gentleman we were working with in procurement the poor guy would have to like he would be like hey you know I'm really sorry I really don't know I'll get back to you tomorrow because what he was doing is just paying these people
• 05:30 - 06:00 they uh and and so we felt like there had to be a better way okay the thing you learn about the shows is we have schedules and then I just go for it so one of my biggest things that I look for in investing today is like massive markets obvious but with very low competition that's a a strange one that other people don't necessarily have when you look at this market like as a newbie or like gosh you just type in you know procurement or spam management and it's like add add add with big names when you you looked at it were you not like well
• 06:00 - 06:30 Christ there's a lot of players this is not attractive because it's so competitive oh I I mean in a sense absolutely um but there's there's a there's a pro and a con the pro is that well if there's a lot of parties in the space in general that means it's a big space and there must be some real pain here so for us it was like huh there's enough here there's clearly you know uh like we're not taking on like Market risk uh in a sense uh but but what's our like what's the unique insect we have based on the problem uh that we
• 06:30 - 07:00 experienced uh when we were working together uh and and what we realized and what that unique Insight was was hey wait a minute in the last 10 years 15 years two changes have occurred in the world you know one buying has become much more distributed I mean it's hard for us to believe you know but 20 years ago there was a time when the IT department for example would be like hey folks the this is all the software we're buying this year it's going to come to us in CDs and we decided we're going to buy it and then people would be like cool and no one else would be buying anything uh obviously that's not the
• 07:00 - 07:30 world that we live in today it's gotten so much more distributed and so when things get distributed user experience matters a lot more because you're not you you know if it's a small group you can just train them but if it's your you know thousands of employees you can't train all your employees and how to buy some how do you think about the centralization of budgets you know with budgets generally Contracting or being frozen a lot of people say CFOs are much more active in terms of the buying process you like actually that's not at all what we're seeing and that's how do you think about the centralization budgets given what we
• 07:30 - 08:00 just said there yeah yeah uh it's it's what I would say is it's decentralization of the initiation of the spend and centralization in many aspects of the review of the spend uh and so so you're totally right uh I mean one of the things we see across the hundreds customers we have today is you know C our customers control their delegation of authority in the in in zip right so hey if it's above the simple example is hey it's if it's above you know $100,000 then I want my CFO to versus another company might say it's a
• 08:00 - 08:30 million another company might say it's 10,000 um and I think it was interesting to see with the macroclimate of the last 18 you know months or or whatever it's been you know delegation of authority certainly came down uh across the board in in many many organizations um because they wanted to see if wants to see more by how much in general is it like a 25% reduction where it used to be hey for 100k contracts it's now 75 or is it like a 75% reduction generally speaking so I would actually say there extremes I think it's like no reduction to
• 08:30 - 09:00 extremely substantial reduction I'll give you one example uh that that uh one of our customer Champions had shared with me there this is a a champion that works at maybe a 32500 prison company he said for for a handful of months the CFO had reduced uh uh their budget all the way down to $5,000 which is really low right I mean that's really really low uh because the CFO was just concern we're spending too much money wanted to just see everything um they then later increased it it was just you know too much throughput once
• 09:00 - 09:30 they've gotten some some view of it um because the CFO died yeah yeah they pble uh right with the level of requests but you know I think I think actually part of the value too is or I think it's important to be able to like be fluid with these decisions right a lot of the changes in older school systems I mean it's hard to make changes like that online totally is it a product marketing challenge so again when I'm investing I'm like okay so competitive market but actually rual Lou have a unique Insight
• 09:30 - 10:00 then it comes to well how the do we stand out in such a crowded Market how do you think about a product marketing challenge when the keep buzzword are kind of the same and you need to stand out it's an education problem it's challenging and you have to select in people in and out like most people won't get it uh and that's okay because if they all got it somebody would have you know started your covery already and so you have to like fil through out oh I think this person's just not they're not there yet they're a later adopter whatever it's okay one day they'll buy but not today it's a big problem to go
• 10:00 - 10:30 after you're like this schedule was useless Harry it's a big problem to go after I'm just so interested it's a big problem to go after like first off from day one how do you think about the product decision of whether to go in with a kind of feature that solves one specific pain point or a much broader platform play which really tries to address a lot of the problems from day one how do you think about that you'll eventually get to the ladder uh but I think for first off like I mean given how much capacity do you have which is
• 10:30 - 11:00 basically nothing when you're starting out you have to find and it's actually it's actually healthy that you don't have that many resources because it's the forcing function to say what is that one thing the one pain point that somebody will be like you're right I need that thing and like it doesn't exist otherwise in the world for me that because what what actually happens is when you have a platform other people have platforms too and they all do everything but then the question becomes how do you differentiate your platform from somebody else's platform and do actually always come back to that one
• 11:00 - 11:30 thing that you started with which is hey no no no this is the thing that makes us special in the world no one else does this at anywhere near the level that we do that's why our platform is better we sure we do a lot of things that they do too but this thing is different uh and it's your wedge it'll always be a wedge with the first wedge that you had that first pain point that you identified did it immediately sell like was there immediate Market pull and you were like okay great we have early product Market with first pain Point um
• 11:30 - 12:00 I would say I would say it was it was relatively quick but it took us maybe six seven months to sort of convince ourselves and be able to better explain what we're doing to our prospects so to your point about product marketing it's you know you have to start with the positioning and the messaging and it and that probably took us six months once we started to figure out how to like explain what we're doing and clearly differentiate it it certainly certainly accelerated how did you learn to explain
• 12:00 - 12:30 it for Founders listening today who don't feel like it's resonating who don't feel like it hits what lessons do you have from that six month period of exploration to your ultimate it started to hit that you'd share with them yeah yeah no it's a great question so what we actually did so we were actually quite grot in in our approach here uh every week actually initially it was every day because we had so many calls and then we were like we don't need to review this every day we did it every Sunday uh we would write out our quote unquote investor pitch which is like you know
• 12:30 - 13:00 couple sentences of like what zip does but the investor view of it you know talking about like the market that kind of thing and then the customer pitch uh and we would keep at one point we were looking at both of those and one Google doc every single day uh and we' be like what did we learn today like would we change how we frayed it uh and then we would test it for all the calls that we would would we would do the following day then it got to a point where we're like no we don't need to change it that much let's review this every week and so we basically had this process where we were constantly reviewing then as we
• 13:00 - 13:30 started to talk to more people we sort of morph this and literally built an Excel like a Google sheet and morphed it into ICP like we had different IC potential icps as the row as each row because we didn't know like are we going to sell the it legal procurement which ended up being the case Finance right like all these people have to approve things that people are buying but who's going to really like be the actual ICP buyer it might sound intuitive that yeah of course you would be selling yourself gr to procurement
• 13:30 - 14:00 and fight as people which is the case but it it didn't feel that way in fact our first handful of customers were it which was actually yeah interesting signal it's totally interesting signal does that tell you something in terms of sometimes you need to say no to customers it's like sometimes big early customers can distract your product Road mapap can take you away from what you're actually meant to be doing I find sometimes early signals can be misleading like you said there the fact that it people bought you does not mean that that the buyers ultimately
• 14:00 - 14:30 procurement is your home do you know what I mean 100% 100% um and it's you're absolutely should uh if you need to you should not close a certain type of customer you should firey a customer it it happened to us maybe uh when we were about a year old um we signed or not even a year old as a company we signed a a customer that had hundreds of thousands of of employees uh and it was you know to be fair it was a a you know sort of a pilot tip engagement and you know I realized in the company was 15 people or so 12 12 to 15 people very
• 14:30 - 15:00 quickly at implementation I realized wait a minute CU I would go to Every implementation call at the type we're not going to be able to make this company successful without sacrificing an extremely extremely large percentage of our road map and it's just not the right thing for us to do as a company and so I had a really great call with our champion there and and and just no you're I appreciate I respect the fact that you're telling me that you guys can't you know make us successful right now and
• 15:00 - 15:30 call us uh when when you're ready then we call them later uh uh you know year after that but but that was a tough decision at the moment it's bold and a lot of people take it because the validity that it brings to subsequent customers and to investors is is real signing a massive contract really brings confidence and momentum to to especially investor bases I do want to just hone in on like the right problem I find a lot of Founders aren't actually solving the right problem you mentioned that actually it was pretty early that approvals was the right entry wedge what
• 15:30 - 16:00 advice do you have for Founders on how to know whether they're solving the right problem and that Discovery process I think it comes down to repeatability right like really everything about building a company is about in some ways it's about repeatability it's like okay can you do this then then can you do more of it and then can you have other people do more of it and then can you have even more people do more of it you know and maybe quality degrades but it still works because there's a fit all from the market uh and so really the question would be are you able to repeatedly use that same type of pitch
• 16:00 - 16:30 and narrative to the same type of person and yield the same type of result and if the answer is no then that means you kind of have to figure it out in some way I totally agree with you what do you think the biggest mistakes are that Founders make then is it the fact that they don't nail the repeatability of that pitch so to speak or is it the fact that they just go after the wrong problems I think there a couple of common mistakes are uh one getting free customers or design Partners um which is I think a eism for a free customer wait wait wait but this is a this is like a a
• 16:30 - 17:00 boom you and I both know dude every founder is like I've got 12 design partners and I'm always like what does that mean I've got a blow up girlfriend like I don't understand this why did you not why did you not agree with design Partners well you know so so Lou and I were very uh strict in our thinking we decided hey we don't want to like look at the end of day if we pick an idea we're going to work on it more than anybody else like we don't want to waste our own time so what we're going to do is this we're going to make sure that
• 17:00 - 17:30 the first 10 customers we close we're going to close them cold off of LinkedIn they're not going to be people we know they're not going to be warm introductions they're not going to be referrals nothing they're going to be cool because if they buy it they owe us nothing in the world then they actually have this problem and they're willing to pay and we're GNA charge real money for it now of course you know when you're starting out you have zero customers of course you don't charge that much money and it goes up over time but they're going to pay uh and and something material for us at at the time uh and uh and and I think a lot of the times uh
• 17:30 - 18:00 you know this is my second company but I can just see how different my mindset has been this time around in the first go around but like you know early on you're like trying to keep your investors happy you want to like make it feel like it's working and the second time or at least for me it was like look we're just here we want to build a generational company like we'd rather just know this is a bad idea quickly so we can go work on something else how do you do it differently when you are just trying to make your investors happy versus doing it for you and doing it to build a big company oh it's easy well you care about things like Optics you
• 18:00 - 18:30 care about you know are the metrics all going up consistently and you know like all these little things and and and when you when you actually are just like you know what I just want to build a really big company I just want the thing to work you just don't care like right like why do you why would you care like what happens this like you're just here to make the thing work and you want to protect your own time uh and and actually when you do that everything actually does start to look good uh uh but it's the m so I cut you off you said like design Partners number one people make mistakes with that any other glaring mistakes mistakes in terms of
• 18:30 - 19:00 solving the right problem and actually how they articulate the repeatability of that you said repeatability being the most important thing oh yeah I I think I think like design partner and I think like being very clear like it's so easy to fall into like slightly customizing the product um for each different type of customer you have and you have so few at the text you care about a lot of them right you don't want to have it some and then you like you start to like it's you have you've built something that's like a different slightly different thing to
• 19:00 - 19:30 five different people this I think goes back to the theme about repeatability I've seen so many Founders do that too uh and and you don't you know you can talk yourself into it but then that that makes it makes it really harder right because every like how do you prioritize feature rek requests how do you message your product on your website like are you speaking to this Persona or that Persona or this problem or that problem it's like you know getting more customers is like you know you're like you need like a weapon that you're like you know going into the world with and you want the sharpest possible points you you know what something that's what
• 19:30 - 20:00 I totally agree with you I love that analogy you mentioned repeatability time and time again there and for investors they say it's when you have repeatable and scalable processes that is when you have product Market fit and I just think product Market fit is the most thing ever because you scale to a new channel you scale to a new audience you scale to a new pricing level and you don't have it again and so I'd love to just hear your thoughts like how do you think about product Market fit having had it with zip having seen it
• 20:00 - 20:30 firsthand no completely agree product Market fit is certainly not binary uh it's like it's like a you know complicated Matrix uh and like the first cell in that Matrix is like the first set of product Market that you have but as you distribute I mean like you said you know we're talking about platforms you add more capabilities more products right you have to go through product Market fit for every subsequent product that you watch as a company uh uh and then you have to do the same thing for every Persona you speak with every channel uh that you have every industry
• 20:30 - 21:00 I mean it can get gloriously complicated every vertical right you might you might you know if you sell the retail verance you sell the financial services I mean just because you have Market fit in Tech doesn't mean you have Market fit in financial services and so forth do you build out a verdict sales Playbook then because you can have very distinct customer profiles that you can go after with that sharp sharp Spear and it's much more effective to do that than have a horizontal product marketing approach and just kind of going at with the same message and for Founders listening is
• 21:00 - 21:30 that the best way to do it so we don't do that at zip and and I think it maybe like we don't verticalized our sales organization today and it might uh and it's some of this is I think product specific but it is extremely extremely expensive to verticalized your sales team and and and at least from from other Founders uh that are much ahead of us that I've spoken to like it's when people do it it is at a much much much different level uh of of scale uh uh and uh and ideally what you want actually is can I just can I just ask you sorry why
• 21:30 - 22:00 why is it say you have incredible pull from I'm just using this as an example it large restaurant chains they have a huge amount of buyers across different segments and procurements and Nightmare just saying uh why not have someone to go after Hospitality it can be 100 Grand a year quite young person your job boof boof boof Hospitality does it need to be expensive I'm I I don't know no it's a great point I mean I think you can I think you could like I actually think that's the right approach I think you actually bootstrap
• 22:00 - 22:30 it by having like a smart like zero to one type maybe an exf founder right like that type of person like figure out because what you need to figure out is what's the messaging like are there any like specific systems they use that like we've never heard you know like just get all that stuff working build up the right assets and positioning just so you know your team is can be successful but then ideally you can just fold that into the rest of the organization uh and maybe you have a pocket of people that are focused on it if it's very specific specific um but but it depends on how
• 22:30 - 23:00 hor like whether the horizontal messaging fundamentally lands or not and it depends on the product um if it's not that horizontal then you may need to Vertical ASE sooner did you find it hard building out the sales team you you're a very product Le organization you're a very product I've founder as well was it hard building out the sales team in the way that you had to and have done yeah I mean absolutely uh it's it's and it continues to be right I mean uh there are always uh uh changes how so but yeah I mean look we both for Lou and me I
• 23:00 - 23:30 mean we came from consumer we came from Airbnb we you know worked on consumer companies in the past so this was our first you know roote Awakening to hey this is how it works with sales teams uh so this was new new for us what was the root Awakenings so many different things but to actually be able to um you know understanding every first it was like understanding every component of a sales cycle right I remember we have a you know so many awesome sales Engineers uh and today and initially I I I was
• 23:30 - 24:00 completely skeptical I was like I don't understand why would you anybody ever need a sales engineer we can just have the account executive do the demo and you know they should be able to answer the questions and we realized like we were running into limit like limitations around like technical questions and like you know you you actually do need somebody that has a more technical person so it's a lot of first principles learning around how the actual process works and it's also I think the other big thing is it's it's hard to assess right like product like you can look at metrics uh uh not to say you can't in sales but every metric you look at the
• 24:00 - 24:30 more you zoom into it you realize like actually maybe you should be looking at the anecdote like let's go listen to the gong call of where this actually happened or is happening and it's like a human problem it's not like a software problem uh and and that's just harder I love it the the CPO of Spotify says the details are not the details they are the product and it makes me think of that when you say about kind of drilling down and going into the weeds of a Gong cool that's where the importance is like the details are important yeah and it's also
• 24:30 - 25:00 hard like you know one of the things I've learned is like confidence for a salesperson talking to a prospect one of the most important things is confidence how do you measure that but two how do you fix that uh uh it's very hard that's what makes it so complex So Soft how do you fix that is it a case of ging everyone up and saying hey you know rajul you're a rockar how do you give them the confidence to crush it on gonal it's it's it's better
• 25:00 - 25:30 enablement more at bats uh right it's like like when you're in this type of situation you know what to say and you can say it with confidence like you can say that yes this thing yes our like our product does that and it does it really well here's here are the two reasons why here's what makes this different right it's all it's just a lot of enablement um and and at bats which is actually kind of like repeatability did you bring in a sales leader first and they built out the team or did you bring in reps first and then lay it on top of sales
• 25:30 - 26:00 leader the latter uh uh we we hired uh uh we hired one uh a sales salesperson who was uh an A in his past and held a number of different roles uh who basically I fired myself from a lot of the sales job right because I I was just doing sales at that point and then we brought him in and then I would like you know he would just Shadow everything then I would like let him do the first call Deck but I would do the demo and then he started doing the demos so we so moved that way what stage did you hand off sales what was that like and for
• 26:00 - 26:30 Founders listening I think that founder Le sales transition to you know someone else is so hard what stage did you hand it off and do you have any tips or advice on how to do that well yeah yeah really challenging I think for me it was like hey you know I've actually I feel like I've gotten to the point where now I'm doing first calls and I'm not really learning anything like I was I honestly felt like I'm not really learning anything new I'm just having the first call to go get the deal uh and when it started to feel like that
• 26:30 - 27:00 that's when I was like and blue and I were both like okay like now it's time because learning anything new let's try to get a little bit more skill right with one more person uh uh and and then in terms of you know I mean of course like we certainly had you know it was it's a trust building exercise right because you need to get the person ramped of course you have no documentation you don't have anything I mean it's just a m you know four five person company at the time at most uh and so you just like spend a lot of time you Shadow everything and and get more and more comfortable so
• 27:00 - 27:30 it's it's It's Tricky and and thankfully it worked out really well uh at zip but uh but I don't think it always does I have other founder friends who hire like too uh so there's some competition and then go from there we didn't do it's it's really hard and then sometimes you have two not work and then you're really in trouble because it's like is it them is it me could just be them it could be you it's it's it's a night and then you lose time can I ask you on the losing time element I've had so many Founders on the show before say speed is the most
• 27:30 - 28:00 important thing in a company's success it's the biggest determinant of whether they get prod is that true do you think or not absolutely I mean you know if you think about it right like you were you were to bet on you know one of two horses one horse is like really thoughtful you know is really like sort of planning and they've got a whole strategy they're like you know they're going to execute it but they're slower and the other horse like actually doesn't have the best strategy but it learns quickly and just like keeps changing path like which one's going to
• 28:00 - 28:30 get to the destination faster unless the first one is perfectly right which almost certainly is not that that first horse is not going to be I would bet on the second horse uh and and and I think that's the mindset you know we have internal like I would much rather bet on a on a zip that you know we all we sometimes joke internally but but it's a way for us to push ourselves to get better we sort of talk about you know what like how do we compete with the other zip like in an alternate reality there's a clone of art like clone of zip uh in the alternate reality how how would we beat that clone and usually the
• 28:30 - 29:00 answer is we do something we would just iterate faster uh like speed is actually really really in Advantage uh and and it helps you like you're not going to be right so you might as well just learn quickly and move on the other thing is as companies grow they just get slow uh and so we really really wanted to establish as high as possible because when we were five person comp person company I mean we're certainly way slower than we were when we were 5% company uh right and just like we're much slower than we were when we were 100% company dude you'd be the most mythical CEO if you could actually
• 29:00 - 29:30 retain speed with scale so don't worry about that I've never met anyone like 700 of the biggest CEOs never has anyone done that my question to you though is like as much as one possibly can what would be your biggest advice on how to retain some form of speed with scale one it has to come from you you have to lead by example as as a as a Founder like the founders have to leave by example it bleeds into the rest of the company and you have to reward that you have to reward that and call it out and shout it
• 29:30 - 30:00 out inside the company like if somebody does something quickly and like they achieve some result even if it doesn't work out you should reward them for it and you should make sure other people see that that happened uh and that they were rewarded for it uh that like that sort of sets the DNA and the culture again you know we're just one data point I don't know if that's quite worked here either I'm not maybe even I'm a biased party to ask obviously but that's at least what we try to do I I get you I I I think kind of repeatability can also
• 30:00 - 30:30 solve for some form of speed because it makes things more known um my question to you that I really struggle with is like we actually have a pretty repeatable process in in media companies in terms of how we do shows what obviously every guess is there an individual snowflake uh but shows are relatively the same in terms of structure and how they're composed we can never lose creativity though like it's so important that our social team is so creative with each show how do you retain creativity where people bring fresh new
• 30:30 - 31:00 ideas and they're not just like rul set the repeatable Playbook I think it's a couple of things I think one um and this is much easier so than done frankly uh but it's empowering people to like speak up and rewarding like more like more off-the-wall ideas and like alternative approaches uh uh right and rewarding first principles thinking uh and a lot of that relies on like what at least I found is that I would much rather invest in the person that has potential that maybe hasn't done the job before but
• 31:00 - 31:30 like has a high ceiling because that person is more likely to Think Through they don't have the experience what are they going to do they're going to first principle the problem and so they're just generally more likely to have more original ideas uh and so I think a lot of this is like you can sort of culturally set this up if you have more managers and leadership in the organization that's actually cut from the DNA of the company and and you know high potential but maybe is it like taking a Playbook from somewhere else and cutting and pasting it into your company there's a time of claim for that maybe two so you have to balance it but
• 31:30 - 32:00 I think like if you only do that you don't you don't get as much creativity out of your organization the other thing we try to do is have a lot of brain storms what does that look like like a weekly brain how like how does that look in reality oh if we've got a problem like some hairy like complicated problem what we'll do is try to get not not a very large group right because then is not productive but a good group of like pretty diverse cross functional people that are working on are touching this problem in for an hour and like at least what I found work out is like all right
• 32:00 - 32:30 everybody takes 15 minutes and write all your ideas out one-on-one and we just go around and then try to whittle that down and then we end end the meeting with like you know five ideas maybe maybe two of them we would have thought of anyways but there's three like pretty interesting ones that maybe we wouldn't have thought of uh you know and that's like one way how important is focus everyone's like focus focus focus but then you also want to encourage creativity people come up with great ideas how do you think about where to really focus your attention and
• 32:30 - 33:00 resources versus when to focus it really I think it really depends on the problem and the function like for example I think marketing uh is such a diverse function right because it encapsulates product Reckoning and growth and like content Mar like all these different things like I actually think like having marketing be quite on focused is is actually okay in its execution messaging needs to be focused to to be fair uh right messaging to the world because otherwise it sounds like you're saying you know a thousand different things but execution actually can be unfocused um
• 33:00 - 33:30 and I think it's actually okay uh in in in some cases like that uh and I don't know maybe that's a controversial statement but I don't think you have to be that focused in every function can I ask you when you think about speed being the most important thing what was a decision you made with speed that with hindsight should have taken more time and should have had more consideration or thought put into it I asked someone the other day and they said marriage I said you are [Laughter] that's so funny actually I'll give you a
• 33:30 - 34:00 great example um so my uh so zip is my second company so my first company uh was a company called flight car uh tldr we would give you free Airport parking by rening out your car to somebody else fully insured um and I dropped out cost to the company and I remember I called my friend at time say Hey you know we're both bored like are you down like why don't we do a company uh he was like sure uh and I remember uh I grew up in New Jersey uh and so of course you know New Jersey should at the time at least you know you would go to Panera Bread
• 34:00 - 34:30 like that's where you go hang out and so you you know we were like all right let's go meet up at the Panera Bread tomorrow uh for an hour and let's just whatever the best idea is that we can come up with in an hour let's just do it uh and I remember in that hour this was in 2012 I think uh he was telling me like hey there's this thing called Airbnb and you know people are sharing their houses with each other like really like I never heard of that uh and uh well and then we show it one thing left another we're like well would they do it with their cars uh and if they're going to do it with their cars maybe they're
• 34:30 - 35:00 do it at the airport because they're not by definition traveling they're not using their car and so that was the idea that we came up with in that one hour and then we did it for five years literally uh right I would never do that again like we took exactly the opposite approach uh when we started zip but like that's like once you pick your idea and you're like working on I mean you're like of course you can change right we didn't but like then you're I mean you're just so deep in uh so that was one like if you're going to do a company don't type Bo yourself to my hour should you have quit earlier it's like one of
• 35:00 - 35:30 those things where like I would do everything differently but have no regrets uh you know uh and like and I think like I mean what I learned from that company was it was a very operational business I mean at our Peak we had 17 different airport locations hundreds of ourly workers washing cars and picking up people and dropping them off on the airport right I learned so much in terms of like what it takes to be operational business and boy is it I mean is it easy to r p SAS company like we have our problems with like you know it's not like we're constantly going to be running out of money like you know
• 35:30 - 36:00 like you don't have to worry about any of these things like you don't have like 247 365 like support needed with like emergency situations like just not that so I have this with Founders a lot who will pitch and you're like I understand I understand the premise of flight it's just a really hard business to work with all the different aspects that need to come into play together for it to work for that margin to drop to the bottom line I'm not saying it won't work there's just easier things to go after to build a massive business and I always
• 36:00 - 36:30 feel quite guilty saying that yeah exactly uh like there are easier paths to success uh and that was totally I mean that's the analogy that I used in that business it's like you know the margin you make it's it's like squeezing all the juice out of a lemit the last drop that falls out is your margin so if you screw up halfway through squeezing the lemon you don't need to squeeze the rest of the lemon to understand how the movie ends uh and and that was that that was the business that was the business were there any other big lessons from that business I mean so many things man uh but one was do a B2B SAS company NeXT
• 36:30 - 37:00 by far two you know um I think you don't this is something that uh I think I learned later atbb but like you know the bar of like what really good this what a really good product designer is like or what a really good engineer is like like you know when you go into it cold um you've never worked anywhere like you kind of don't really know uh you're just feeling your way around things and so I think understanding the high ing in the talent bar was something that working at
• 37:00 - 37:30 Airbnb later on I think really personally helped me with uh which is something that I didn't have back back then I agree with you which is why I have this kind of investment thesis which my team killed me for especially for saying it out loud um they're terrified the firsttime founders won't come to us like I don't like first-time Founders like I like serial entrepreneurs because you've just seen it you know how to do hiring processes you know what Great Looks like you've avoided you've seen the mistakes you've made them and we we we're l aaging the mistakes you've made before do you agree
• 37:30 - 38:00 with that thesis of like yep serial entrepreneurs you've just made the mistakes or you're like no there's Beauty and naivity in youth in upside thinking for me as a second typ founder I was I was very very uh determined Lou and I both work to to work on a company work on an idea that had high execution risk low fundamental Market risk and and and sort of product risk I think as a first time founder you're actually much more okay maybe because you don't know any better uh like me to take on a lot more Market risk and so you can actually
• 38:00 - 38:30 have really large outcome I mean a lot of the social media companies I guess are good examples but snap like Snap is not a company that like like it carried a lot of Market risk right like the whole like the whole thing uh uh and like and like I'm not sure someone would do that as second time founder but it's obviously a wildly successful company uh and and so like you can have outcomes like that but that that like you almost can't have as a second type um maybe because you're just I don't know too jaded about the world too briad I'm going to go there even though I thought
• 38:30 - 39:00 that I wouldn't you said number one lesson was D B2B um I had Trey on from Founders fund and he said um serial entrepreneurs in SAS are like George Clooney selling to Keila in the way that seriously you have a massive opportunity with your skills and talents and you decide to do B2B Enterprise SAS like that is not serving the world what do you say to that well I I would say it's it's a little bit different
• 39:00 - 39:30 than S tequila uh and I would you know I actually would say that like if you take what we work on at zip and procurement I mean you know there's like there's like 11 times as much money that moves hands between businesses then moves hands between consumer and a business in the global economy so it's actually so much so much money than and if you can make that just a tad bit more efficient across the board you're actually creates so much value uh in the economy that's being lost and that
• 39:30 - 40:00 ultimately I mean this of course takes many steps but that does carry over to Consumers but but I hear you I mean it's it's it's like you you lose the anecdote of like the person that got something that made them happy like you know I mean I guess you have that but inside of an organization yeah no listen I I I get you actually I think you can actually very clearly articulate that that by helping people spend more you're empowering job creation you're empowering productivity in the economy in a massive way I think to be fair this is a case where you could argue pretty
• 40:00 - 40:30 sufficiently well uh my second question to you is I spoke to Addie Rani and he said to me to to double click on what you just said there which is the lessons learned from Airbnb what were some of the lessons learned from Airbnb on you mention what great looks like so maybe that and any others oh it was just so uh helpful for me to see Brian chesy uh you know see bbnb just how the level of attention to detail uh when it comes to the Airbnb product uh I mean I you know you remember design
• 40:30 - 41:00 reviews where to his credit he would be able to detect that you know some of the spacing is off or right like just just just on our mobile app or like just like really really focus on detail and what that does is of course do those extra you know I don't know 10 pixels of whitespace in in of themselves matter no but they matter a ton in terms of what that says to the company and what you know and where the bar is for quality of the product um just like speed right I think I mean product quality design bar
• 41:00 - 41:30 like all of that also I think ultimately is a cultural thing and it comes from the founders but can you have that can you have that micromanagement that intense focus on the pixel spacing and the speed of execution that is required I think so but it's it's because you have to focus on different things like you have to like you can't micromanager you have to be selective I guess is the right framing about what you micromanage because it has to be you have to micromanage the few like critical things that are like very like their core
• 41:30 - 42:00 values for the company um that doesn't mean you can't be quick in other areas what are you selective in the areas that you micromanage and what areas are you deliberately not selective in what you micromanage oh uh you know I think I spend a lot of time in the actual like I mean we're talking about um sales just like how how human the problem is and how at some point you have to look into the anecdote spent a lot of time a lot of time time on that everything from you know gong call listening to like just
• 42:00 - 42:30 just like spending a lot of time getting into the details of like what exactly was said like what exactly is is happening like why is this person you know performing better than that person like can we like take something that they're do it really double clicking on that and not not trying to to manage the go to market organization by metri so long because it's it's so hard to like actually effect change that way that's probably the number one and which one are you like it I'm happy to not micromanage that I can clearly delegate
• 42:30 - 43:00 that and it's not a it's not a problem you know my job I think in many ways is to focus on what's not working right so it's like if there's an area of the business that seems to be doing just fine that doesn't mean it won't break because it probably will but right now it's not the thing that's on fire or it doesn't look like it's there's some smoke there you know you kind of let it Let It Go but it's what's not working right now oh I mean there are always things not working one of the the things we're working through is um best to scale uh some portions of our sales organization like
• 43:00 - 43:30 our business development organization right it's a it's a tough job to to cold call people to email them to send a message to LinkedIn get interest how do you sort of scale that team uh and you know maintain productivity uh uh yeah and allow that team to have like a great career path into the AE wall at which something we're really proud of how much of net new client acquisition is from that team today we're largely an out business so largely outbound business yeah wow that's so interesting though
• 43:30 - 44:00 for me as like someone in this industry I think the brand is so strong the investor sentiment is so strong I think it would largely be an inbound strength of brand business thank you for saying that uh but uh no I mean I think a lot of uh you know Enterprise you know sales uh and Enterprise go to market uh is given how top down it is is actually quite outbound and it will shift over time for us to and I I can I mean it's inbound is you know at a larger
• 44:00 - 44:30 percentage than it's ever been in history of the company uh but the majority is still still out that especially after we go after different Industries into the Enterprise so forth right like it's also about like hey we talk to somebody in an organization we understand there's a problem we have to get to the right person like literally the right person uh and that's very hard to do when you're targeting an account in an organization in an inbound way it's also super hard because you don't have like clean data I find on titles within companies what is one thing in one company is another thing in another
• 44:30 - 45:00 company and actually buyers a very differently plac according to different companies so do you see what I mean it's not like great them no completely agree and especially when you you know sort of add to that different GEOS different countries like it just gets even more complicated it's very hard to tell well we may be getting T suiz but I am just interest like scaling the outbound side I am just like I think AI will actually destroy outbound in many cases because it would just create infinite supply of
• 45:00 - 45:30 messages or infinite supply of whatever channel that is and so I think you actually see the complete removal of it I don't know how you think about that I don't see it quite as a as a complete removal although look maybe in 20 years like who the hell knows uh right uh you know uh uh but but I do think like there's an opportunity to like increase the leverage of the team uh and we're we're trying out a bunch of stuff uh uh using you know chat gpta to just I mean there's just so much manual work that goes on that you can actually start to automate even today uh
• 45:30 - 46:00 so I mean we'll see I I'll probably have a better read in 6 months for year in terms of like giving the team that trajectory you mentioned from like BD and outbound to AES and you know other parts of the sales function it's really hard to motivate teams when they're not together physically um I know that you've been a proponent of back to office can you talk to me how do you get excited about people going back to office and returning to physically colloca yeah it's it's such a tough thing especially uh for companies like ours
• 46:00 - 46:30 that were born right in the heart of the pandemic and it's challenging because it varies by function and one of the things we do is for engineering product and design uh we we mandate two days a week specific days Mondays and Thursdays uh in the office uh and uh that actually was born from you know what we found was that it was actually I mean a lot of engineering is like a maker job right and design like you're like you're writing code and you're like you have to really focus uh in yeah and it's just I think it just I think what we found out from a lot of our early folks is that it
• 46:30 - 47:00 was kind of just like lonly to like just do that like they were craving some more like social engagement some more uh uh engagement in some way shape or form uh and uh and we DEC and then they were drowning in meetings of course and so what we decided to do is prioritize in office days and then try to push all the meetings to happen in in office days so that there was like other times you get like a really healthy balance uh one of the things actually this is uh I think an interesting thing that we did is so early on uh when we started the company
• 47:00 - 47:30 Lou and I both bought these Facebook portals which I think is now I don't think Facebook sells those anymore I still have M right there uh and uh and we would uh uh keep a zoom meeting going uh the entire day because we're in different locations during the pandemic so for 12 14 hours 16 hours a day we just had just a zoom meeting uh then we as we grew the team and we had more uh team members join every morning you would just if you worked at zip and you know would just join the same Zoom meeting and keep it on video then on
• 47:30 - 48:00 mute and so it was kind of cool so when we up to like 20 or so people we just had a zoom meeting with everybody just hanging out uh but what really helped was initially was just me doing sales and so whenever I was doing sales any sales call I would leave myself unmuted so even if you were an engineer at zip really early you would be listening to every single sales call this only what happening at one time because it just wanted me and so you listen to everything uh and so was actually really like we learned so like I I think we really accelerated like you know internal enablement and learning at that
• 48:00 - 48:30 time but anyways I think that's part of the reason why people were sort of you know craving some level of social engagement can ask what have been your biggest hiring mistakes we talked about kind of uh motivating teams to get back into the office I I think you learned so much from your mistakes what have been your biggest hiring mistakes and how did that change your thinking on acquiring and retaining great talent yeah I think I think we touched on this a little bit before but I think the number and the number one thing is like like more indexing on someone that's
• 48:30 - 49:00 done it before at like a similar level of scale right like I think I think for even for a lot of investors I think it's like people love the like press release higher or the like hey oh this person did it you know they took them they did this and they took it from you know uh 100 to to 250 of AR whatever it is and so like we should just get them and plug them in here and like it would be perfect fit and like similar you know sales cycle or whatever like I'm not saying that can't work it totally can but you incur a lot risk uh doing that because it also I mean every business is
• 49:00 - 49:30 very different every situation is extremely different like the same Playbook certainly won't work it's just like will the person be able to figure out how to change the Playbook enough uh uh right now versus versus you know maybe you bet on the person that like has proven themselves out uh uh in whatever thing they're doing and they have a lot of potential to just get get one level above uh but you and you have an honest conversation about look hey you're gonna step into these you know bigger shoes we're taking a bit of a risk here so are you and so you tell me if you think it's not working and I'll tell you if I think it's not working and
• 49:30 - 50:00 let's just like both keep the you know finger on the pulse and like mod uh and uh and I you know it's not that's not the right call all the time but I think it's actually the right call much more often than people realize and and you never get recognized for it right because like Mo most of the time an investor somebody external be like oh like sorry who is that like what experience do they have how quickly do you know about high we've been slow uh in the past or you always feel like you could have been faster it depends on the
• 50:00 - 50:30 situation depends on the function um if look I think the way I see it like if I feel like that's the case I'm the last one to know uh right because their team probably has figured that out already for months uh their peers have figured it out for months like so it's like how do you find out faster um part one of the things that we do is like you know we you know there are obviously trusted OGG people that like I trust uh that I know are great uh yeah and you know trying to maintain a close dialogue with people like that so that they can
• 50:30 - 51:00 temperature check right it doesn't mean that they're always right certainly not the case there's always like gray areas and a lot of nuance but if you start to hear you know feedback that somebody's not performing from like a lot of people that you you know know are high performers that's a massive red flag uh and so can you use those types of people who are sort of spread out throughout the organization to like give you just better signal earlier I always remember Max Levin telling me when there's doubt there's no doubt and I'm not sure if
• 51:00 - 51:30 it's right but it just always stuck with me you know when you doubt someone's ability there's no doubt that they're probably not the right person for the job um I don't know if that's true I I think I mean I think that's probably true eight out of 10 times uh and the challenge is that it's probably not true two out of the 10 times but is it worth is it worth continuing to see if it's yeah do you agree when someone's on a performance review just just don't bother it's always a slippery slope I actually don't agree with that uh and I'll tell you why if that is the case
• 51:30 - 52:00 that means you probably are doing the performance review too late uh or or the performance plan I assume that's what you met too late uh and you're not you know you're not giving the person an opportunity to like like you haven't like detected it early enough I guess and given them an opportunity to course correct ear clear did you worry about raising too much money too quickly so if this were my first company I certainly should have worried we didn't worry quite as much because we knew we were going to maintain the discipline uh I mean one of the things another mistake I think a lot
• 52:00 - 52:30 of Founders make is they like just hire too much to early before they like know without a doubt that they have like clear product Market fit and I think and just to be clear like initial product Market fit right from the earlier parts of our conversation I think that's so important though like to to really keep a small team because at that point in time because say the thing isn't working right like if you know like if you're working with five six people you're hanging out all day you're all working together you you can be like hey guys like actually like this is a bad idea
• 52:30 - 53:00 like we should do this or we should change it right you can do that cuz you have the trust uh but when you have 20 people you cannot possibly have that type of relationship with with you know the other 19 of you uh and you just sold them you were like oh this is awesome company like it's great and like blah blah blah uh and you know if you're at that point in time you can't be like actually I was just wrong even though that was two weeks ago right uh uh because of course you have that in your head like yeah maybe this isn't the right one we'll figure out but maybe it's not the right one early on and so uh you know we certainly raised a lot of
• 53:00 - 53:30 money uh uh then and and then and then later obviously well pass we pass that point but we were very disciplined like no matter what money we had in the bank we were not going to hire more I mean there there was a point where we were a small company and and you know cash flow positive U because we had just held back hiring so much um and then we really unlocked the gates when we felt like we hadit confidence in 2021 pricewise investors will pay up for assets that are great with great Founders like you and Lou were you worried about the price
• 53:30 - 54:00 bluntly just being very very high in such a short space of time it means you have to live into that valuation it it's hard and we see a lot of people struggle with that today how did you think about that at the time yeah I think for us it was like we were just so confident that there there's like so much Market need and like the growth rate uh uh that we had and have uh uh we just it was more just an opportunity to like do something that we maybe would have done a little bit later and just do it now um uh and and that's how I thought about it we have that confidence and we have confidence now R you're constantly
• 54:00 - 54:30 speaking to people investors employees customers what question do you not get asked that you should get asked more huh that's a really that's a tough question do you see yourself running zip in 20 years time yeah absolutely I mean we wanted to start a company that was going to be a generational company like a company that like you know at the time this was 2020 when we started a company in 2040 it would not only be around but people would know what it is it's so funny one of my biggest turn offs when
• 54:30 - 55:00 investing is when you hear like a fan say hey when I do my next company or or I'm doing that as well yeah exactly and I've interviewed you know so many of the best and this is their life's work like this is the only thing they focus on and that is such a big sign for me yeah no I mean not not one Survivor thought something after like there is no after like there's no not one uh listen I want to dive into a quick fire around so I say a short statement
• 55:00 - 55:30 you give me your immediate thoughts does that sound okay okay okay so what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months oh gosh I think uh I think it's probably my like how I manage my dayto day uh so there was a there was a point early on where we we had like a huge spreadsheet and every single person in the company would just literally write out their two D for the day in each tab in the spreadsheet obviously that broke up for like 10 15 people my current thing is I have a note card and
• 55:30 - 56:00 I actually write out what I'm going to do for the day on the note card goes in my pocket and I cross it out and then I throw it out and I have my freshwood tomorrow uh we'll see how long that lasts and if I need to change it but yeah know I haven't figured out like something that works what are you most concerned about in the world today this might be TR uh I mean we've got you know a lot of tracks of work obviously going on uh around generative AI uh and and I don't I'm not going to open up a whole can of worms but you know you're just read s such concerning headlines in the news about you know things that that can
• 56:00 - 56:30 happen things that uh uh we're now going to be able to do that you you sort of wonder where does that lead us even just a half full of years does that worry you or do you like I take the view that bluntly we always overestimate adoption in a year and underestimated in 10 years and I think it's like oh everyone's going to have no jobs and all of the gross overd dramatizations like you know 94% of European corporates don't know what notion is like AI good luck no no I actually I agree with you
• 56:30 - 57:00 like I think adoption in the Enterprise all on that will be slow uh no I think what actually concerns me is just like adoption for like you know malicious intent like like you know can imitate somebody's voice for fraud or you know like stuff like that it's like yeah that's actually really concerning I don't know what the solution is to that and for people that want to commit that I bet the adoption is not it's pretty quick what do you think are the biggest ways VC's and Founders are misaligned it's like the time Horizon Maybe maybe uh and like how much the outcome matters right I mean ultimately like for an
• 57:00 - 57:30 investor this is one of whatever number of portfolio companies they have that you know of course the Dynamics are such that you know only one maybe multiple they lucky will return the fund or whatever uh and they don't need every single one to work uh uh work so to speak uh uh right and as a Founder I mean you're this is your life uh so just just fundamentally there's got to be some level of Mis alignment again it's not it's not like uh an incorrect intention it's just it's just different
• 57:30 - 58:00 totally it absolutely is also there's fees associated with like fund management which generally make it a little bit more comfortable for Venture investors so 100% um if you could choose someone to add to your board who's not on your board today it can be anyone who would it be and why them Frank slman um I'm a huge Frank slman fa that right amp it up recently bra tell me what's the biggest piece of BS advice that you hear most often oh I think it's got I think it's got to be uh around all the stuff around
• 58:00 - 58:30 hey you've got product markets in and you now you're after the racist it just it just ain't that it just ain't that what's the biggest sin of the zero interest rate environment you were born in uh covid so to speak um what was the biggest sin of that time period oh I mean I think like hiring to solve problems I mean again this is obviously a topic that has been touched on many times but I think even culturally like so many companies like oh you have this problem great hire uh and it's like wait wait a minute wait a minute like do we
• 58:30 - 59:00 really need to go hire a whole human just to solve the problem or is there some other better way uh and I think it just like was easy enough to do that there was enough Capital it was just you know uh uh like it was the easy lazy answer uh and so I think a lot of companies uh were affected by that what do you know now that you wish you known when you started zip how hard it is to actually build a worldclass product uh in this space and and how complicated it can it can be I mean when when Lou and I
• 59:00 - 59:30 were at rbb we at at different points in time we both worked on search you go to Every how what the search experience is like and I thought that was complicated uh you know search platform and ranking and some of these things and and boy was I wrong I mean you know this can be gloriously complicated I mean some some of our customers in the Enterprise for example like you know over a thousand types of questions that can get asked with all sorts of different logic based on the thing that it is that you're buying and you know 20 plus different types of risk reviews a lot I mean it
• 59:30 - 60:00 can just be so complicated why do you wish You' known that because I when you think about the I wish I'd known this because then I would have done this differently so if we start if I give M examp I wish I'd known the importance of video in this age of media because I would have started YouTube very much earlier if if that was your answer how difficult it is to build a worldclass product for this segment what would you have done differently then as a result of having known that I think we would have probably made some investments in our architecture that would have allowed
• 60:00 - 60:30 us to to like build out you know we have a platform today but to build out more of a platform without having to you know expend a lot more resources that we've had to do as of the last six eight months uh uh but that look but to to be fair to be fair maybe the answer is actually no we wouldn't have done that uh because it would have just taken more time and we wouldn't like have put in the engineer ter just because it wasn't the right thing to do at the time I could see the alternative too you know uh so so so I don't know my favorite thing is kind of like nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems and just life
• 60:30 - 61:00 goes on do you know what I mean yeah y you you have limited information you do the best that you can with it okay so we're 20434 2044 what is zip then and where are you in 2044 well I sure as hell I'm I'm still here uh thinking about procurement uh at at Z you know in terms of uh you know where I think the where I think we can be as a product if you think about it right think about the notion of an
• 61:00 - 61:30 approval significantly over 90% even over 95% of the time people are approving like if there's an approval they're approving you bet they're approving it like the rejection rate just across the board is naturally extremely low and so when you think about that you're like well that's kind of a deficient process like you basically have this thing where you know people approve stuff and then so that they can see it and then they like basically approve it anyways uh so can you actually instead of managing that process can you just not need to do approvals uh because the software can do
• 61:30 - 62:00 it for you we're not there today uh but there's definitely a world I mean and hopefully a lot sooner than 20 2044 where you can say no actually like it just gets done uh right like you don't need to like have a human go in there review the thing and then approve it uh like that's actually like in 20 years I think people be like really you had humans like reading these documents like thinking about them and then approving them that seems dumb listen the reason why I do the schedules I have no reason for they I used to stick to them as you
• 62:00 - 62:30 can tell but nowadays they Ser have zero point thank you so much for joining me Ral this has been such a fascinating and varying discussion but you've been fantastic no thank you so much for for ad it