Zip CEO Rujul Zaparde - procurement, AI agents and YC insights

Rujul Zaparde is the co-founder and CEO of Zip, the $2.2 billion AI platform for procurement trusted by OpenAI, Anthropic, Snowflake, and hundreds of leading enterprises. He previously co-founded FlightCar, which raised over $40 million and was acquired by Mercedes-Benz. A former Airbnb product manager and Y Combinator visiting partner, Rujul has built Zip into the category-defining leader in procurement orchestration. In this episode of World of DaaS, Rujul and Auren discuss: Why everyone ha...

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:02Auren Hoffman?

  Hello, fellow data nerds. Welcome to World of DAS. I'm your host, Orin Hoffman, CEO of Incubate and GP of Flex Capital. Discover more episodes, get weekly data as a service news, original content, articles on data and more at worldofdas.com. That's world of das, D-A-A-S, dot com. Hello, data nerds. My guest today is Rujul Zaparde. Rujul is the co-founder and CEO of Zip, a leading intake-to-pay procurement platform used by companies like Snowflake, Coinbase, and Canva. He previously co-founded Flightcar, which raised over $40 million and was acquired by Mercedes-Benz. Before starting Zip, Rujul was also a product manager at Airbnb and a visiting partner at Y Combinator. Rujul, welcome to World of DAS.

• 0:48Speaker 01

  Thanks so much, Orin, for having me.

• 0:50Auren Hoffman?

  Procurement is kind of like this weird thing. What is it? A startup doesn't have procurement, per se. Do you need to have like 2,000 people before you have procurement?

• 0:59Speaker 01

  So I would say every organization in the world does procurement, whether it may or may not have a formal procurement function. If you think about any business in the world and how a company operates, typically, the second-largest area of spend after payroll is this. It's procurement. It's how any employee at that organization actually buys the things that they need, whether it's the software, hiring contractors, or buying a billboard on the highway, in order to do their jobs better and to help the company drive growth, drive savings, bottom line, etc.

• 1:32Auren Hoffman?

  At some point, there is a department called procurement that shows up somewhere. We're in a company's lifecycle. Do we start to see that department show up?

• 1:41Speaker 01

  We typically see that in the high hundreds of employees. So at least 500, 600, 700 employees. Once the company gets to that size, then they'll start to staff a procurement function. It's also interesting to see, if you go to the all the way the other side, some of the largest companies in the world, they'll have 2,000 or 3,000 people working in procurement. These can be very, very large functions in the large enterprise, too.

• 2:03Auren Hoffman?

  Does it often report into the CFO? Does it report into the head of product? Cause I assume procurement could also be like buying raw materials to go into your battery or something. It could be like very strategic or it could be less strategic.

• 2:18Speaker 01

  That's a great point. And that'll typically fall under supply chain, which may be part of procurement or might be forked. There's really two types of procurement. There's indirect procurement and there's direct procurement. Direct procurement is like supply chain. It's buying all the things that you need to make the product that you literally sell to customers. And then indirect is all the software you buy and all the IT equipment and all that.

• 2:41Auren Hoffman?

  So when Apple is buying chips and glass for their phones, that's more supply chain. But when they're buying airplane tickets and chairs and other types of things, that's procurement.

• 2:54Speaker 01

  That's exactly right. That's indirect spend, which is what we mean by procurement. Exactly. You're right. Procurement typically reports into the CFO is what we find. Sometimes it'll be the CIO. Procurement sits in between so many teams that have so many different systems that it becomes like a systems thing, not just a driving savings and tracking spend thing, which I can get into, but that's why sometimes it sits with the CIO. But probably 80% of the time CFO.

• 3:20Auren Hoffman?

  When I talk to people who work at companies that have procurement, so these are large companies, I would say by and large, all those people hate procurement. They hate the idea of it. They hate the department of it. They think it slows them down and makes them stop what they're doing. What are the companies who do procurement well do well? And why do so many people hate it?

• 3:42Speaker 01

  I totally hear them too. It's such a challenge because procurement is just such an underappreciated, a really unappreciated function in general. I think it's also because the procurement organization is typically not set up for success because they're using these antiquated systems potentially. It's really hard to actually engage with the process the right way. And so I used to be product manager at Airbnb. When I have to go through procurement, it was super confusing for me to be like, oh my God, where do I go? What do I need to key in? And it's like, oh, what is a commodity code? I have no idea what that means because I'm just a product manager. The function starts to get a bad rep, but it's not the fault of that function.

• 4:23Speaker 01

  It's just a byproduct of the software that they have and the fact that they sit in between all these teams and they're almost playing traffic cop. You've got to get legal to approve the contract. You've got to get risk involved. You've got to get budget. And so they're just sitting there and so it may not be sitting with procurement, but it's sitting with somebody.

• 4:39Auren Hoffman?

  What's the goal? Why do you even have that function? Obviously you want to spend money well. You want to reduce the risks in companies. You have certain things you need legal look over. I assume when you bought something as a product manager, you weren't trying to overspend. You're trying to use the company's money relatively well. Why even have that function?

• 4:58Speaker 01

  There's two reasons. You touched on both of them. One is savings and the other one is risk. From a savings perspective, when I worked at Airbnb, I didn't know what suppliers Airbnb already had. For example, if I'm trying to buy something from EY, maybe Airbnb already did business with Deloitte and there's a negotiated rate, but I don't know that. Procurement can help guide me. They can help negotiate because they're professional negotiators.

• 5:21Auren Hoffman?

  And they can see just company wide what you're doing. And if you want to get another seat of LinkedIn or something, they're like, well, we already have this many seats or something.

• 5:30Speaker 01

  Exactly. I can get you hooked up with IT. And then the second component though, is critically risk. The stat that I always share is 90% of data breaches come from suppliers. If you remember that large target breach a couple of years ago, that was an HVAC supplier of Target that leaked all this credit card data. And then you think, well, when did that company decide to do business with that supplier? And the answer is it was in the procurement process. And so if the right checks and balances aren't being met and the right reviews are not happening, and then there's a breach. Well, you have to blame the process then. Procurement is actually protecting the organization, making sure that the right checks and balances are followed, which of course adds process and can delay things.

• 6:13Auren Hoffman?

  I've dealt with dozens of procurement people in my life. I have never once dealt with one that I thought was even remotely competent. Those people, even at a big company like Airbnb and Google are attracting the most talented people to go into that particular department. Am I completely off base? Would you disagree?

• 6:33Speaker 01

  I would disagree. It's just a very hard job to do if you really think about the skillsets that are required, because for example, you have to be really good at driving savings, at negotiating, which is a very specific type of probably more soft skill. But the way that the function is built today, you also have to be really good with systems and processing records across different systems, managing workflow. You have to be able to drive really good operational rigor. And at least the people I've worked with, someone who's really great at driving process may not be the best person to like negotiate. And the inverse, I think, is often true. And so you just have so many different skillsets and flavors of skills that are required that it's hard for someone to be really good at all of those things.

• 7:15Auren Hoffman?

  If I go to Airbnb right now and just throw a dart at the engineering team, at the product team, at the sales team, I'm likely to get a pretty talented person, literally just by throwing darts there. My guess is most of the product managers are pretty good. There's some bad ones, but like most of them are pretty good. Most of the engineers are pretty good at Airbnb. There's very, very talented people end up there. But if I throw a dart at the procurement team or the HR team, even at a great company like Airbnb, I'm somewhat skeptical that I'm going to get someone who's really talented. I'm sure there is somebody talented there somewhere, but I'm skeptical that they're getting the most talented people. My guess is the most talented people go into product at Airbnb, or they go into design, or they go into engineering or something.

• 7:58Speaker 01

  I hear what you're saying. They're just different skillsets and they're different types of people that work in different functions in different roles. It's hard to compare like a great HR person with a great engineer.

• 8:08Auren Hoffman?

  For any great employee, you want someone who's proactive, who works hard, who's smart, who has agency. Those types of people go into product at a company like Airbnb. They're just super talented people and they kind of go into that. And they're not going into like the side functions.

• 8:25Speaker 01

  I had the pleasure of meeting some really great procurement people over the last five years since we started Zip and you realize that it's less the case in the US, but in Europe, there are universities that I can get my degree in procurement, in supply chain. That's less of a thing here in the States. It's different in other parts of the world. And if you think about the procurement function at Airbus or something, what those functions deliver literally moves the EBITDA number for these large organizations and that is how they're valued. It's a different skills, totally different than growth and R and D, but ultimately, most of the enterprises, actually, they're kind of valued on their profitability and procurement is a very, very core function to that. I hear you literally worked at Airbnb, companies, we focus so much on growth, don't think so

• 9:09Speaker 01

  much about EBITDA and bottom line, but for most companies in the world, it actually matters a ton and it's very, very critical and people actually study this stuff.

• 9:17Auren Hoffman?

  As companies get more visibility and control over their spending, who are going to be the winners and losers? If I assume that this is going to happen, how would you allocate your dollars as an investor to winners and losers there?

• 9:30Speaker 01

  Well, I think the winners are certainly the leadership of the company because they get earlier visibility into the spend. I also think the winners actually are like the employee base. There's totally a world where procurement can drive business velocity and if it's an easier experience to follow, I actually get the thing I need faster in order to do my job better. So there's like a real element to that. The losers are some software that's been around since the eighties, maybe it's that flavor. There is some semblance of more control, completely moving faster, breaking things and not following process. I think if you're trying to do that, I think maybe then you come out a loser and that.

• 10:09Auren Hoffman?

  My guess is a lot of companies have more Microsoft Office licenses than they have employees. There's probably like those types of things where a company like Microsoft is going to get caught or they have a lot of Salesforce licenses, but they're just not using them in the right way, those types of things.

• 10:29Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I do think that there's less waste and so the companies that are benefiting from the waste end up sort of losing out, but I think that's just actually better for the world. Procurement has become more front and center, certainly in the last couple of years with the macro sort of environment. But also, if you look at the last 100 years, when Ford was really growing sometime in the early to mid 1900s, they had this whole initiative to try to fully verticalize. And so they like wanted everything to be built in Michigan. They would train everything over. They would try to get fully vertically integrated from the steel involved in the cars to everything. And that ended up failing miserably. It totally did not work. Today, you look at a company like Tesla, for example,

• 11:11Speaker 01

  it's all supply chain and procurement. Just every single thing is coming from a different supplier. They're pulling it together and that's how they drive cost savings and get the car to the consumer at the lowest rate. How supply chains evolve, you sort of see the direct procurement component change and value of procurement actually changes for organizations. There's like a macro trend there, too. And so I think ultimately in all of that, you could argue that the consumer is actually the winner.

• 11:36Auren Hoffman?

  World of DAS isn't just a podcast. World of DAS membership is a private invite-only community for founders and executives of important data and AI businesses. It's a place for off-the-record, high-trust conversations focused on the biggest questions data leaders are facing. The community is about peer learning, curated intros, and access to private events. Everyone in the group is building or leading something meaningful in data. If that sounds like you, apply to join at worldofdas.com. That's world of D-A-A-S dot com.

• 12:18Auren Hoffman?

  Part of what you've been working on is just agenticing things. If you just think of just general corporate workflows, what workflows do you think are going to be more likely to be agenticed? And what do you think are going to take a longer time to be figured out?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I think that it's workflows that are comprised of relatively repetitive, predictable outcomes within the workflow. And procurement is a great example of that because if someone is buying software, they're going to go through certain types of legal reviews, IT reviews, budget reviews. A budget review for any purchase is very similar to a budget review for another purchase because it's what is it? What cost center?

• 12:58Auren Hoffman?

  Who has to look at it? What documents have to be reviewed, et cetera?

• 13:03Speaker 01

  Each review is narrow in scope. Where LLMs are today, where the capabilities exist today. I think you can actually handle narrowly scoped tasks really well with an agent. And that was part of at Zip, we announced 50 plus pre-configured agents about five or six weeks ago. That can be deployed into the procurement workflow. And so I think procurement is actually a great place to start, which I'm, by the way, personally excited about because I feel like a lot of this type of innovation starts with the front of the house. It starts with revenue. I can't drive on the one on one without seeing AI BDR or SDR billboard ads. But people don't want to take much risk in accounting and in finance because you can't get the numbers wrong.

• 13:41Speaker 01

  Generally, there's more aversion to risk, but procurement is a great place to start because in the back of the house, I mean, because there are so many reviews happening that can be fairly repetitive.

• 13:54Auren Hoffman?

  Where do you think agents are today where they're not yet working? But we can be pretty confident in one to two years, they're going to work.

• 14:03Speaker 01

  I think it's in certain types of legal reviews because take a legal review. High stakes, but also high context. What types of risk are you willing to take? What does it mean to have a certain type of risk? It's document based. LLMs are actually quite good at flagging discrepancies with documents. Hey, this is non-standard to this company's like internal policy around indemnity caps. But how risky is that or not? You need a human to do that. And I think over even just the next three years, I think you'll see agents become really good at that. And humans, more importantly, trust agents to take more action in the legal area. But I don't think. Were there today.

• 14:43Auren Hoffman?

  I think there's sure digs. We probably could get there really quick. Historically, whenever I get an NDA, I send it over to my lawyer or company, Jero calls whoever. They look at it super quick and then they say it's okay to sign. But that could be a day later before I get that thumbs up and it takes a lot of time. It's probably hundreds of dollars if you think of all of it that went into it. That just seems something where I could like point it to my legal bot or something and it could probably tell me based on what you've told me in the past, this is fine. Nothing really to push back on or something.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  You're totally right. It's a question of trust, which is really a question of stakes. And an NDA is low stakes.

• 15:21Auren Hoffman?

  Good point. It's a low stakes. Every once in a while, there's like a weird gotchas. You just have to make sure, okay, it doesn't have these six crazy gotchas in there or something.

• 15:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. But you're right. You start there. You'd all start with the 49 page MSA.

• 15:34Auren Hoffman?

  Yeah, interesting. Where else where we're not quite there, but you're pretty excited about?

• 15:39Speaker 01

  I'll give you a couple of examples of agents that we recently announced and launched that customers are using. One, we call it the intake validation agent, which sounds really not sexy. But what it is, is anytime someone puts in a request, right? Hey, I want to buy this thing. Typically, the first step is a triage step. Someone in procurement goes in, they check, oh, whoops, they selected the wrong category. It's actually this category. And by the way, that matters because it impacts how it hits the general ledger and the P and L leader. Or, oh, they said it's a hundred thousand dollars, but it's actually 100K per year for three years. So it's really 300K. We have to update that. So our intake validation agent is configured to all of the company's policies.

• 16:20Speaker 01

  And it immediately detects all the discrepancies and human can review it and say, yep, I agree, I agree, I agree. And it automatically updates the workflow. Humans are reviewing tens of thousands of requests a year for a given customer potentially. So it can be really high throughput. But the thing that I think will get better over time is we still need to do a decent amount of configuration. A lot of this is prompt engineering. We got to get the prompts right. We got to get the configuration right. Otherwise, it doesn't yield good result for the customer that's actually using it. And I think the configuration elements will get easier over time because right now there's still a decent amount of implementation, configuration work that's required. You can't just expect the agent to produce good result. You really have to explain to it what you want and maybe that changes and gets better.

• 17:04Auren Hoffman?

  How are you using these tools for yourself to write software better or do sales better? Or how are you guys using, maybe not the tools that you're developing, but tools that other companies have developed?

• 17:16Speaker 01

  So we use a tremendous number of tools internally in engineering. Of course, we use Cursor. We use some of the prototyping tools, which I've had the pleasure of playing around with. B0 and Super Cool and have really helped.

• 17:28Auren Hoffman?

  Well, dot new, Levelball, like all those guys, yeah, great tools.

• 17:31Speaker 01

  I don't know how enduring some of these things are because every other week that I ask, it's something new that we're using. And I don't know if we are still using the old thing or we changed.

• 17:40Auren Hoffman?

  They're high velocity, high churn right now, right?

• 17:43Speaker 01

  I would totally believe that. In other functions, we're using a bunch of tools. You can imagine in VDR, we tried, by the way, some of the like AI VDR things and those did not work for us. And maybe it's because we sell into the enterprise and we just require a certain level of quality.

• 17:59Auren Hoffman?

  You would think they should, but are you just working on things that help you write more personal emails? Or respond to people quicker or sales engineering agents on the calls?

• 18:12Speaker 01

  That's right. We basically realized that you can't have like an AI VDR with broad scope today, or at least not for our business. It didn't work for us. We had to churn the solutions that we tried there. But if you narrow the scope, a salesperson, they're like prospecting an accountant. They get all the information. They get a pre-written email with what zip is and everything's ready to go for them. Make it easy. And then they can be like, oh, this email is terrible. Let me change it and then I'll send it out. That type of sort of experience has seemed to work well and we use some pretty small startups and things that we use to test. In sales, we're much more open to trying different things in sales. We've also built our own props and chat GPT that our team has. They all have access and they can put that in and they're all in an environment and tweak it.

• 18:56Speaker 01

  So we're pretty liberal and go to market. But just like the comment I was making, when it comes to anything to do with customers, anything to do with finance, accounting, our internals, we take much less risk there. There's definitely much, much, much less AI adoption in those areas.

• 19:10Auren Hoffman?

  Are you changing how you interview people?

• 19:13Speaker 01

  I don't think we have, but we probably should. The real question is actually the question before the interview, which is. Do you really need this role? Does the role change?

• 19:23Auren Hoffman?

  I imagine for certain roles, whether it be engineering or marketing, et cetera. If they're not using these tools, it's probably a good sign that they're not the right person for your company or something.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  No, completely. I think there's an element of how much they're personally using AI, how technically forward they are. Not technical, but just they're like with it more because there's such a rate of change. You want people that are going to adapt and they're going to evolve and they're going to change how they work and get better over the coming years.

• 19:50Auren Hoffman?

  A couple of YC questions. Do you think the median YC startup today is better or worse than it was five or 10 years ago?

• 19:59Speaker 01

  My first company was in the winter 2013 batch, 12 and a half years ago. And then Zip was in the summer 2020 batch. There's a seven year delta for me between the two batches. I think it's better and I think it's because YC has also gotten better over the years. Because really, if you think about the ethos of YC, the advice that YC gives, there's way more pattern recognition now in 2025 than there was in 2013. And it's simply because way more companies have gone through YC, way more founders have gone through YC. The partners learn more, the advice only sort of improves with time and there's only more pattern recognition. And I also think there's better support systems post YC today as well. Cause I remember back in 2013, you know, YC has, there's demo day, it's awesome.

• 20:43Speaker 01

  If things work out, you get funded. If not, it's more challenging. And then after that, it's okay, now here's the desert. YC is over. You don't get the hug anymore and the world's tough and you're shown the desert. You're given a bottle of Poland spring and that's it. And most of you don't make it kind of a thing. And today there's more support effort from YC and from others in the community. And so I think it's different. I feel like it's easier to do a startup today than it was, and I would credit a lot of that to YC.

• 21:09Auren Hoffman?

  Do you think the median Harvard student today is better also than it was 10 years ago?

• 21:14Speaker 01

  Well, I dropped out, so I don't know if I'm the right person to chime in there, but I don't know. Even with YC, there's a bit of a distinction in has YC improved? Absolutely. Has the average founder improved? I think so because of the advice they receive, but there is a solution bias issue. I remember back in 2013, people that were doing startups, it was still early days. It was getting to be cooler to be a founder, but it wasn't that cool. Today it's more cool, which is not a great thing because it attracts people who are trying to start something to be cool. And that's not why you should start something. You should start something because you want to build something. You cannot start a company to add something to your resume. That really stings.

• 21:54Auren Hoffman?

  What is a YC advice that you might disagree with?

• 21:58Speaker 01

  I went through YC twice. I worked at YC briefly as a visiting partner. I could not agree more deeply with the advice that YC puts out there. So I really don't know. I'm just such a firm believer in YC and the advice that it puts out there.

• 22:14Auren Hoffman?

  There's definitely like a go to market advice that's pretty common. There are certain things that are like, okay, we've already seen 20 people try this company. So don't do this company type of thing, which maybe is good advice.

• 22:26Speaker 01

  It's possible that maybe YC was wrong the 21st time. But do you want to be the founder that has to find out? YC's advice is also sort of Darwinian. It's like, look, here's the advice. We'll tell it to you straight. And if you want to ignore it, fine. It's your company. It's just so rare to get feedback like that because you talk to a VC, they don't want to invest. Let's say they're not going to tell you your idea is bad. Why would they? They'd say something polite and then move on. But you are the one as the founder that ultimately pays that price. Not that you should listen to an investor. You should listen to your customer first and foremost. But if you're really early, you're still trying to figure out what sticks. And so there's just so much of the YC ethos that we try to live by it at Zip2. Another one is you've got to be really clear about what you do. And it should be really simple to explain.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  You realize that so many people use so many fluffy words.

• 23:14Auren Hoffman?

  You go to a website of most software companies and you have no idea what they do.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Exactly. And I personally try to live by more of that.

• 23:21Auren Hoffman?

  Back to recruiting, is there any like philosophies you have that are a little bit against the grain? Are you looking for how you recruit or the types of people you recruit?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  I personally really value scrappiness.

• 23:32Auren Hoffman?

  How do you see that in the recruiting thing?

• 23:35Speaker 01

  It's about hearing the other person's story. Double clicking is all in the follow up and the follow up to the follow up question.

• 23:42Auren Hoffman?

  And that's like a story of what they did in eighth grade? You're going into their life or something or?

• 23:47Speaker 01

  No, no, just in their most recent job or their current job. I also just ask, what's the scrappiest thing you've done in the last 12 months professionally? Sometimes, you know, you get great answers and sometimes you get something that's like, I don't know. Is that really scrappy? And you're putting the person on the spot. You can ask the follow up, but you can really push. But as dumb as it sounds, it's really important to hire people who can actually do work.

• 24:07Auren Hoffman?

  How else can you determine if they can actually do work before you hire them?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  I think it's tough. The thing that I feel like I've found to be the most valuable is honestly doing enough backchanneling and reference checking. I'd strongly recommend, of course, doing like a working session with the person, getting into a complicated prompt and having them dedicate some hours and you kind of go through it together live. So that definitely helps. It doesn't give you perfect signal, I don't think. There's definitely false positives that you get.

• 24:34Auren Hoffman?

  Couple of personal questions. What is a conspiracy theory that you believe?

• 24:38Speaker 01

  I don't know if I believe any of this stuff or not, but there's certainly a lot of conspiracy theories that float around about how COVID got started and whether it's truly an organic thing that happened or not quite so much and run or whatever. And again, I don't necessarily believe one way or another, nor do I really care that much, but I'm not convinced one way or another just yet.

• 24:56Auren Hoffman?

  All right, last question we ask all of our guests. What conventional wisdom or advice do you think is generally bad advice?

• 25:02Speaker 01

  Paul Graham, PG, actually wrote an essay on how all traditional management advice is actually wrong for founders. The classic, you're a manager. What's that book? It's like a one-minute manager.

• 25:15Auren Hoffman?

  I've heard of it, but I've never read it.

• 25:16Speaker 01

  Well, it takes like five minutes to read it or 10 minutes, maybe.

• 25:20Auren Hoffman?

  Maybe I should read it then.

• 25:21Speaker 01

  It's not really worth reading, but it talks about this manager who starts in one job, he gets promoted, promoted. And I read this years ago, so I could be misremembering, but it kind of ends with, and then the manager is looking out the window, doing nothing because he has delegated his work and his teams are doing it and he has become a manager or something like that. Why would that be good advice? The point that PG made was that management advice is written for companies with CEOs who are not founders, with hired CEOs. You're hired to be the CEO of like a company that makes blenders and now you get moved, now you run a company that makes toaster ovens. You don't know anything about the product. It's like a management thing. You probably run the company the same way. You maybe don't care that much about the product and where the company is headed. And so you run the

• 26:03Speaker 01

  company in a certain way, but you don't do that as a founder in 20 or 30 years. And this is the point he was making, management advice might be the opposite because you'll have more big companies that are founder/CEO led companies. The prevailing advice will be like literally the complete opposite.

• 26:19Auren Hoffman?

  Even when they're not founders, CEOs, ideally, the CEO should have a deep interest in the products and be creating the products. And if you're the CEO of Walmart today, you're probably really going to the stores and trying to understand how the stores are going. If you're the CEO of Starbucks, you're probably tasting the coffee. If you're the CEO of Microsoft, hopefully, you're like a software developer. You understand what's going on. My guess is that even those types of CEOs are not like the older school CEOs.

• 26:51Speaker 01

  I don't know either. And I think maybe it has gotten better. Maybe it has changed. But I think a lot of the management advice out there, I think, lacks like two or three decades, probably, because it gets into books. It takes decades to cycle through a change.

• 27:02Auren Hoffman?

  It is interesting how like, there was a time where so many engineering managers weren't really in the code. And many of the managers turned out to be not the best software developers. They were good at people, or they're good at advocating for their teams. And it does seem like there's been a shift there where even at bigger companies, they're much more in the code now.

• 27:26Speaker 01

  I agree with that. And I think that's totally net positive for the world. And so I do think that the prevailing advice would change here pretty significantly. But I think it'll be a total night and day from conventional wisdom and sort of advice.

• 27:38Auren Hoffman?

  What you're talking about is this founder mode meme, in a way. You got to get into details more.

• 27:43Speaker 01

  That's why I think it's founder mode and not CEO mode.

• 27:46Auren Hoffman?

  You have to care deeply about it. All right. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for joining us on World of DAS. I follow you on LinkedIn. You're not on X, by the way.

• 27:55Speaker 01

  I'm not.

• 27:57Auren Hoffman?

  I follow you on LinkedIn. I definitely encourage our listeners to engage you there. This has been a ton of fun.

• 28:02Speaker 01

  Thanks so much for having me, Orin.

• 28:06Auren Hoffman?

  Thanks for listening. If you haven't already done so, please subscribe to World of DAS wherever you consume your podcasts, YouTube, Apple, Spotify, and more. And please help us get discovered by leaving a review. And check out worldofdas.com. That's worldofdas, D-A-A-S, dot com. And of course, connect with me on Twitter, at Auren. That's A-U-R-E-N. Would absolutely love to hear from you.