Feb 22, 2023 · 41m · we-live-to-build
They Thought the Equipment Vendor Could Handle the Cash Too
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gold bands on the timeline = statements, start to end. Hover to read, click to jump. CC turns on captions
In this episode of We Live to Build, host Sean Weisbrot interviews Focal Point founder and CEO Anders Lilivik to explore the evolution of enterprise procurement from manual spreadsheets to modern risk-aware workflows. Lilivik shares real-world vendor audit disasters, due diligence frameworks, B2B SaaS scaling strategies, and the emerging role of AI in spend management.
How this conversation actually went
Every chapter scored 0–10 on four independent dynamics. Hover any point for the reasoning behind the score. Sean holds 23.6% of the talking time here. How this is scored →
Sean as informed peer 3.8 Guest teaching 5.3 Guest disagreement 1.2 Sean pushing back 0.4
speaking balance: gold is Sean, purple is the guest (3 minute bins)
Sharpest disagreement ▶ 35:10 Throwing inflexible enterprise vendors out of the office
Anders recounts his past role as CPO, describing how he aggressively kicked out legacy enterprise software vendors who refused to adapt to regulatory compliance requirements.
Hardest push from Sean ▶ 23:12 Calling out non-technical CEOs who ignore operationsSean strongly criticizes startup founders and CEOs who claim technical ignorance and fail to understand how their own software infrastructure functions.
Biggest teaching moment ▶ 8:20 The $20M equipment vendor Ponzi auditAnders educates Sean on how catastrophic procurement governance failures happen, detailing how a bank lost $20M by assuming an ATM hardware vendor could safely transport cash.
Sean holds their own ▶ 11:12 Sean's international trade due diligence breakdownSean demonstrates practical operational expertise by detailing how he ran strict vendor vetting and reputation protection across cross-border agricultural trade and payment processing.
the scores for every segment, with the reasoning behind each
| Chapter | Topic | Sean as informed peer | Guest teaching | Guest disagreement | Sean pushing back | Why |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Defining Procurement Beyond Purchasing and Tactical Sourcing | 1 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Sean openly admits ignorance and asks a basic foundational question ('What is procurement?'). Anders provides a detailed masterclass explaining the evolution of procurement from simple cost savings to managing supply chain risks, ESG goals, and operations. | |
| Avoiding Procurement Pitfalls and Aligning Enterprise Stakeholders | 2 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Sean asks exploratory questions regarding common procurement pitfalls and stakeholder management. Anders explains how procurement teams often over-engineer processes or fail to align critical divisional stakeholders early. | |
| Case Studies in High-Stakes Procurement Failures and Audits | 2 | 7 | 1 | 0 | Sean asks what audits look like when things go wrong. Anders delivers a vivid case study about a bank losing $20M in a Ponzi scheme after assuming an equipment vendor could also manage cash delivery. | |
| Due Diligence Best Practices for Third-Party Providers | 6 | 5 | 1 | 1 | Sean shares his extensive background in international trade conducting due diligence on meat exports and high-risk payment processors. Anders builds upon this by detailing enterprise due diligence standards including underwriting and compliance certifications. | |
| Navigating SOC 2, ISO Standards, and Modern Auditing Technology | 3 | 6 | 1 | 0 | Sean asks for clarification on SOC 2 and ISO standards and looks up automated compliance platforms like Drata in real time. Anders explains compliance procedures, price points, and modern data-driven auditing workflows. | |
| Procurement Adoption Milestones and Software Deployment Rigor | 5 | 4 | 1 | 1 | Sean brings up software development staging environments and mocks enterprise failures like Twitter's deployment practices. Anders shares Focal Point's rigorous multi-tier testing pipeline and redundancy architecture. | |
| Scaling Focal Point and Navigating Seed Capital Dynamics | 5 | 3 | 1 | 1 | Sean and Anders engage in a collaborative peer exchange discussing CPU optimization, investor sentiment shifts, and Focal Point's funding dynamics during a downturn. | |
| Navigating Complex B2B Enterprise Sales Cycles and Legacy Tooling | 4 | 5 | 2 | 0 | Sean asks about enterprise sales cycles and communication strategies. Anders explains BANT qualification, multi-stakeholder navigation, and pushing back against prospects who mistakenly think generalist tools like ServiceNow can manage complex procurement spend. | |
| Flexible Software Frameworks, AI Benchmarking, and Category Management | 6 | 5 | 2 | 1 | Sean describes his startup's architectural approach to customizable frameworks and his experience tracking commodity protein pricing. Anders translates Sean's experience directly into the procurement concept of category management and gently tempers Sean's utopian vision of automated zero-human AI networks. |
Statements from this episode (12)
Lilivik: Most important procurement work happens pre-contract and is poorly managed
“Most of the work, if not all of the important work it's done before stuff turns into a contract. So gathering your requirements, deciding which suppliers to invite, deciding which internal stakeholders to involve in a process that all gets done manually, proba…”
Lilivik: Procurement teams frequently over-engineer processes and stall operations
“I think procurement people try to solve for world hunger and world peace all at the same time, and they tend to over-engineer the process so that make it overly complex and kind of grind things to a halt.”
Lilivik: Applying complex acquisition methods to commodity buys is a common error
“And the mistake people sometimes do. Is take that commodity low criticality scenario and apply the more complex type or acquisition method to it.”
Lilivik's Former Bank Lost $20M in an ATM Vendor Ponzi Scheme
“And at some point in time, four years into the agreement basically it turns out that there was a Ponzi scheme going on and we were out 20 point, some twenty million dollars, right? The music stopped, the Ponzi scheme couldn't, it couldn't, couldn't keep up any…”
Lilivik: Vet critical third-party vendors as if underwriting a loan
“If the company's critical, pretend the pretend as though you're lending them a bunch of money. And that kind of puts a whole different lens on it to say, well, would we underwrite this company to lend them money?”
Lilivik: Companies mistakenly treat outsourced functions as no longer their problem
“The worst thing that you can think about is I've outsourced this now, so this is no longer my problem. And I've seen that so many times is companies outsource things and then they don't have the proper governance in place to manage that relationship.”
Focal Point Spent One Year and Low $10Ks on Drada Compliance
“So for us, it took us about a year. The service for Drada is it's in the low 10,000 and the audit basically depends on who you pick, right?”
Companies Should Expect to Pay $25,000 for SOC 2 Type II
“You know, a company should expect to pay 25,000 dollars to get a sock to type two.”
Procurement Orgs Become Necessary at $50M to $100M in Supplier Spend
“Typically what I've seen are procurement organizations can be relevant in some way, shape, form or fashion. As you start managing expenses, For suppliers in the 50 to one hundred million dollar range, right?”
ServiceNow Cannot Handle Complex Enterprise Procurement Spend, Says Lilivik
“Yeah, it is, but it's an IT ticketing system. It's never meant to ingest, you know, billions of dollars of procurement spend and, you know, Few 100,000 suppliers and payment terms and all these kinds of things, right?”
Slack and Microsoft Teams Are Inflexible and Fail to Scale
“Which was, you look at Slack, you look at teams, they built something that worked for them and everyone else has to use it that way, but it wasn't flexible and it was horribly it wasn't scalable. It was horrible at scale.”
Lilivik: Focal Point lacks the data scale to deploy AI currently
“Not as of yet. We are, you know, we're crowdsourcing a lot of data. And what we're looking for are trends and patterns that we can sort of say, all right, in, in IT services, or, you know, you picked on Slack, so I'm going to pick on Slack too, right? You can …”