Zip

“You need to partner with folks that are similar to you in order for it to be successful. It can't be one really large company and one really small one or one that serves companies in one space and one in the other, because then again, it's like, what's in it f…”

“Zip and Navon, I think are both examples of potential Shopify's because they're both growing extremely quickly. We're growing extremely quickly. Everyone grows together.”

“I have friends who started this company, Zip, which is a procurement, a really good procurement platform. And I don't know if they're growing up wanting to be building a business that helps procurement experiences be better, but in there, and they pivoted six …”

“Yeah, so the company is about 300 fifty-ish people we've raised about three hundred seventy million dollars now, and the most recent round was our Series D at 2.2 billion post last month.”

“Candidly, Zip for us was a mid YC batch pivot. We actually were working on a series of different ideas”

“If you can get 10 different people and 10 different companies in the world to, you know, take out their proverbial credit cards and buy your thing when they don't owe you anything in the world, that means like you're more likely to have market fit.”

“Even today, we're a significant majority outbound for urban business today, not inbound”

“If we have a board meeting, which obviously we have board meetings, like, I'd rather we just focus on what's broken in the business, because ultimately, that's how we get better. Like, I don't want us to spend a lot of time talking about what's going well, bec…”

“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 o…”

“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 learn quickly and move on.”

“And one, you know, one thing I think you can always do is like, if you lack something, you can always make up for it in service. You can ask better questions. You can learn, you can iterate faster and people really appreciate that. That's under value.”

“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.”

“When things get distributed, user experience matters a lot more because you're not, you know, if it's a small group, you can just train them. But if it's, you know, thousands of employees, you can't train all your employees on how to buy something.”

“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. And that's okay because if they all got it, somebody would have, you know, started a company already. And so you have to like filter out. Oh…”

“When we were about a year old we signed, or not even a year old, as a company, we signed a our customer that had hundreds of thousands of employees. And it was, you know, to be fair, it was a, you know, sort of a pilot-type engagement, and, you know, I realize…”

“We decided, Hey, we don't want to like, look at the end of the 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 gonna make sure that the first 10 custo…”

“And initially I w I was 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 then we realized…”

“I think for me, it was like, Hey, you know, I have 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 f…”

“For me as a second time founder, I was very, very determined Lou and I both were to work on a company, work on an idea that had high execution risk, low fundamental market risk and sort of product risk.”

“So when we, up to like, 20 or so people, we just had a Zoom meeting with everybody just hanging out. 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…”

“Like, I'm not saying that can't work. It totally can. But you incur a lot of risk doing that. Cause it also, I mean, every business is very different. Every situation is extremely different. Like the same playbook certainly won't work.”

“I actually don't agree with that. And I'll tell you why. If that is the case, that means you probably are doing the performance review too late or the performance plan. I assume that's what you meant too late. And you're not, you know, you're not giving the pe…”

“I mean, there was a point where we were a small company and, you know, cash flow positive because we had just held back hiring so much.”

“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.”

“There's definitely a world, I mean, and hopefully a lot sooner than 24, 24, where you can say, no, actually, like, it just gets done right? Like, you don't need to, like, have a human go in there, review the thing, and then approve it. Like, that's actually, l…”

“My suggestion was to start by looking at what companies are publicly traded and or owned by private equity that are large and that also are hated by their customers. And to try to intentionally find where there's a knowable big market within a comment. Combine…”