Name: Values Are the Binding Principles of Our Organization, Says This Software CEO
Uploaded: 2019-09-11
Duration: 6 min 29 s
Description: 'We've been on a number of missions over the last 10 years, but what has been consistent are our core values,' says Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa CEO.

[ MUSIC ] So Rob can you tell us about what the company does, what Coupa does and obviously we know that you're in the expense software business but kind of the types of things that you were able to pioneer that really weren't being done in this space when you got started. Well Coupa offers a cloud based platform for business spend management. And we're high differentiated in this marketplace. Because traditionally you've seen paper used, phone calls, faxes for ordering. Expense reports done in some old arcane, incumbent technology providers. We offer very different approach to business management. In fact, the C stands for Comprehensive. So we attack procurement, we attack invoice processing, we support expense management sourcing, inventory management. The O stands for Open, we integrate to any earpiece system that the company might have. The useness for user centricity. It's a very, very easy- to- use application and because of that we have over $ 1 trillion now running through [ UNKNOWN ]. The P stands for Prescriptive. We give our customers insights, intelligence as to Which suppliers to work with, which supplies to stay away from due to risks with those suppliers. And A stands for Accelerated. We get companies up and running very very quickly, mid- market customers, four months. Large enterprises, eight, nine months. So we've just approached this in a very different way and offer this value all through the cloud. I know that you make life easier and more streamlined for companies in terms of your Your products, but let's focus on how you deal with your employees internally. How do you describe your company's mission and how do you explain that, or get buy in for your employees on that mission? Well, what's interesting is that we've been on a number of missions over the last ten years. But what has been consistent, are our core values. We've had dozens and dozens of monthly all hands meetings. And at every one of those meetings we review our values. And we recommit to our values. And those values are ensuring customer success, focusing on results, and striving for excellence. We motivate our employees to rewards we evaluate them annually based on their adherence to those values. They're really the binding principles of the organization And do your employees bring you ideas just by virtue of being internally in these companies and seeing how they work? That can enhance the new products that you might introduce. Absolutely. How do you encourage them to do that? I'll give you a statistic over the last 12 months, more than 300 new capabilities that we built. We're inspired by our customers. And we do that by. Through your employees. Exactly the employee interaction with our customers. And then putting pulling in those insights and. Around problems we want to solve with our customers and encoding them into our platform. Right? You mentioned that you you view the your constituency as stakeholders and not just shareholders. Can you go into who those stakeholders are and what your responsibilities are to them? Sure was everyone that is in some way. Interacting with the with the coop ecosystem. It's our suppliers we support thousand companies but they interact with more than 4 million suppliers. So our suppliers, a part of that ecosystem, of course our employees a part of that ecosystem, our community, both locally where our headquarters is and we're all of our offices are a part of that. We have a Cooper keras program that goes out and Make sure that we dedicate significant amount of time to helping our communities. We care more than just shareholder return of which of course we're focused on, we care also about every stakeholder that we touch. You feel it's your responsibility to speak, we've see Delta Airlines, right? Speak out on gun control, and Getting a lot of good publicity for doing so. Or, CVS ending tobacco sales. A lot of stances that have been good for companies, and then on the other hand you have CEOs when they antagonize part of their customer base by taking a stand. What's your view on that, Rob? Well to the extent that it begins to affect our colleagues at the company or our ecosystem we would take a stand. But generally speaking we try to steer clear of politics. We're in the business world and our focus is serving our customers to the best of our ability first and foremost. So. That's how we generally think about it. What's you view on kind of the social impact of capitalism and whether it's the positive that we as Americans always thought it was ?. Whether that's changed, whether there has to be some adjustments to the more of these stakeholders benefits or whether The more interference you have with it the less it benefits. I think the system is obviously incredible. It's created opportunity for those that would never have had it and I've stand to benefit from that in a big big way. I came to this country with my parents and $ 1, 000 and we got an apartment. [ INAUDIBLE ] The other side is you have to be very very thoughtful about social welfare as well. You can have a situation where the 1 % are getting stronger and stronger and stronger. And we'd forget about the American dream, the American dream that allowed me to get to where I am and I hope many, many others will have the opportunity to get to where they would like to go. So that balance is important and if we get too far ahead of ourselves and we let capitalism run amok if you will we stand to create a very A difficult situation in our culture. When you see for example the low unemployment rate that we have and especially in your industry where you've got programmers in tremendous demand. That's a good thing right. The economic growth that we've seen has created or helped to create an extremely healthy job market. How do you view that. Silicon Valley and how do you view what you have to do to get these people on board? What kind of concessions you have to make, the kind of raises you got to give etc. Well, we've tried to steer clear of the war for talent and Silicon Valley we see ourselves as an entry point, frankly. Programmers all over the world to technologists all over the world. Many cases people come to Silicon Valley through their entrance into Cooper. That's their first job in Silicon Valley. So we don't typically compete based on things that really don't matter in the long term. Things like. Snacks and small benefits and we really compete based on finding people that share our values and are interested in helping the world you know, spend a lot smarter through the technologies that we're building right. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

Values Are the Binding Principles of Our Organization, Says This Software CEO

Leadership

"We've been on a number of missions over the last 10 years, but what has been consistent are our core values," says Rob Bernshteyn, Coupa CEO.