Coupa Software

So it's obvious to say we need a Salesforce integration because everyone does the CRM integration.

But our biggest integrations today are actually procurement tools like Coupa and Zip.

And we discovered that because we're sitting there watching someone drag an agreement out of Coupa download it, drop it into Sandstone, then use Sandstone to work on it, and then drop it back into Coupa.

And then we said, okay, that's something we're going to automate.

We sat there, we worked with them to figure out how to automate it through Coupa.

And now that integration is powering tens of thousands of contracts or agreements a month.

a lot of times the clients or customers just don't, they don't know the art of the possible yet.

We have a general framework, but it's like it leans on workflow complexity and embeddedness.

It leans on stakes and precision, right? How important is it that this answer be 100% accurate? And then it leans on proprietary data and domain knowledge, right? And I think of To use one more example, sorry, I'm on so many boards and we have so many discussions, but I'll use Coupa, which is a company we've talked about in your prior life.

But they are a network that connects buyers and suppliers.

And over 25 years, the company has accumulated $10 trillion of transactional data around those transactions.

We have hundreds of thousands of suppliers on the network.

you know, if you're a head of procurement at an enterprise company, a general model can probably tell you what a good procurement contract looks like and how to get a contract done with a supplier.

But Coupa can tell you whether you're overpaying by 10%, you know, and whether that supplier delivers on time or is generally late, right? So it's got so much intelligence from this data and they have really broad and good data rights, which is also quite unusual.

So you mentioned something earlier about how there's that trade-off being made in terms of how much a company spends on AI.

...

there are these, uh, venture capital funds who, uh, pay these Stanford students, usually upperclassmen, to identify the most promising freshmen the second they arrive on campus, right? And so these guys, it is their job to go and, you know, take you out for coffee at the Coupa Cafe.

I describe in the book this whole Coupa circuit, uh, of, of, you know, all these investors-

Mm

... and, and, and professors and students who are hanging around all day at the, the totally unassuming Coupa Cafe doing huge volumes in deals.

Um, you know, s- so that's one option is, is you know the right people, and once you know the right person, you're introduced to another, and suddenly you're just in.

The other way is you find a sort of secret access point, right? So Stanford, you know, uh, the, the Stanford inside Stanford is very conscious now that there are a lot of pretenders, a lot of wantrepreneurs and whatnot.

It's usually an Ariba or an SAP, which are now the same thing.

Or there's that one, a Coupa.

You probably

know them better than I do.

But so I'd say it really kind of started in the biotech space where it's like, hey, if you know somebody who needs help with kind of a system implementation, I can help you.

So whether it's implementing Coupa for purchasing or you know, NetSuite for the accounting side.

There were a couple other different systems that I was kind of helping people with and kind of doing some ad hoc type services.

But what really ended up happening is that when a company decides to implement NetSuite, you know, the company will hire a third party implementation firm to kind of lead the implementation.

And I think two or three months into COVID...

I got my first inquiry and then I was like, oh man, well, this is definitely something that people are interested in if people are reaching out in the website.

And then it kind of slowly narrowed down to where I think I started in the biotech industry, but slowly realized like, oh, well, I don't want to implement Coupa.

It's much easier if I just have one kind of playbook to implement NetSuite.

So I hope this one's not too complicated of an example.

But Thrive has a portal that's come out in the last year or so called Coupa is how I call it.

So if you navigate to their payments pane, they'll list all your payments below and what invoices were associated with them.

the date,

That's one path.

Coupa or Ariba or one of those could build a catalog API layer that sits on top of PunchOut and EDI and normalizes replacement semantics.

They have the relationships with Granger and Uline.

They could define the standard and push it down.

Maybe.

Or they'd be building a moat.

If Coupa has the best replacement mapping, buyers stay on Coupa.

The replacement data becomes the asset.

And it's like, you know, my dad's a CFO.

And it's like, you have a Coupa shirt.

Like there's a whole bunch of these procurement platforms and it's like, you get one and it does you, everything runs through it.

It's gotta be comprehensive.

The reason for that is because each of the partners operate differently.

Some of them are just as big of software companies as we are, right? A couple of the really big ones we're working with right now are companies like Sage and Coupa and Tungsten.

These are massive software companies already.

And what they do in some cases is take our software and embed it in their software and So when you think about technical troubleshooting there, there's three steps, right? You've got to understand is the environment the customer's working in, working appropriately, is the partners, and then what's going on with ours.