YouSaid · the spoken record

Rujul Zaparde

lines on the record: 62
first: 2024-04-24
most recent: 2024-04-24
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“You have limited information, you do the best that you can with it. Okay, so What is Zip then? And where are you in twenty forty four? Well, I sure as hell am I still here thinking about procurement at Zip. You know, where I think we can be as a product, if you think about it, right, think about the notion of an approval significantly over 90%, even over 95% of the time, people are approving things. Like if there's an approval, they're approving. You bet they're approving it. Like the rejection rate just across the board, extremely low. And so when you think about that, you're like, well, that's kind of a deficient process. Like you basically have this thing where people approve stuff. so that they can see it and then they like basically approve it anyways uh so can you actually instead of managing that process can you just not need to do approvals because the software can do it for you we're not there today but there's definitely a world i mean and hopefully a lot sooner than 20 2044 where you can say no i actually like right like you don't need to have a human go in there review the thing and then approve it in 20 years i think people would be like really you had humans like reading these documents like thinking about them”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A world class product for this segment. You have done differently then as a result of having known that? That's a good question. I think we would have probably made some investments in our architecture that would have allowed us to build out, you know, we have a platform today, but to build out more of a platform without having to expend a lot more resources that we've had to do as of the last six, eight months. To be fair, to be fair, maybe the answer is actually no, we wouldn't have done that because it would have just taken more time and we wouldn't have put in the engineering resources because it wasn't the right thing to do at the time. I could see the alternative too. My favorite thing is kind of like nothing is ever as good or as bad as it seems and just Life goes on Do you know what I mean”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know now that you wish you'd known when you started Zip how hard it is to actually build a world-class product in this space and how complicated it can be. When Lou and I were at Airbnb at different points in time, we both worked on search. And I thought that was complicated. And boy, was I wrong. I mean, this can be gloriously complicated. I mean, some of our customers in the enterprise, for example, like over a thousand types of questions that can get asked with all sorts of different logic based on the thing that it is that you're buying. And, you know, 20 plus different types of risk reviews alone. I mean, it can just be so complicated. Why do you wish you'd known that? Because when you think about the, I wish I'd known this because then I would have done this differently. So if we start, if I give mine an example, I wish I'd known the importance of video.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Add to your board who's not on your board today. It can be anyone. Would it be and why then? Frank Slutman. I'm a huge Frank Slutman fan and read Amp It Up recently Frank Slootman. What's the biggest sin of the zero interest rate environment you were born in COVID so to speak? Was the biggest sin of that time period? I think hiring to solve problems, so many companies, like, oh, you have this problem, great, hire. And it's like, whoa, wait, wait a minute. Wait a minute. Like, do we really need to go hire a whole human just to solve the problem, or is there some other better way? And I think it just was easy enough to do that. There was enough capital. It was just, it was the easy, lazy answer. And so I think a lot of companies were impacted by that.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You think of the biggest ways VCs and founders are misaligned? It's like the time horizon, maybe, how much the outcome matters, right? I mean, ultimately, like for an investor, this is one of whatever number of portfolio companies they have. Of course, the dynamics are such that only one may be multiple. Lucky will return the fund or whatever. And they don't need every single one to work. And as a founder, I mean, this is your life. Just fundamentally, there's got to be some level of misalignment. Again, it's not like an incorrect intention. It's just different. Choose some”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I take the view that bluntly we always overestimate adoption in a year and underestimated in 10 years. And I think it's like, oh, everyone's going to have no jobs and all of the gross over-dramatizations. I think 94% of European corporates don't know what notion is. No, no, I actually, I agree with you. I think adoption in the enterprise, all of that will be slow. No, I think what actually concerns me is just like adoption for like malicious intent, like imitate somebody's voice for fraud or, you know, like stuff like that. It's like, yeah, that's actually really concerning. I don't know what the solution is to that. And for people that want to commit that, I bet the adoption is not, it's pretty quick.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's probably my like how I manage my day to day. So there was a point early on when we had a huge spreadsheet and every single person in the company would just literally write out their two dues for the day in each tab in the spreadsheet. Obviously that broke after like 10, 15 people. My current thing is I have a note card and I actually write out what I'm going to do for the day on the note card. It goes in my pocket and I cross it out and then I throw it out and then I have a fresh one tomorrow. What are you most concerned about in the world today? Well, this might be trite. I mean, we've got a lot of tracks of work obviously going on around generative AI. And I'm not going to open up a whole can of worms, but you just read such concerning headlines in the news about things that can happen, things that we're now going to be able to do that you sort of wonder where does that leave us, even just a handful of years. Does that worry?”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Listen, I want to dive into a quick fire round. So I say a short statement, you give me your immediate thoughts. Does that sound okay? Okay. Okay. So what have you changed your mind on most in the last 12 months”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yourself running zip in 20 years' time? Yeah, absolutely. We wanted to start a company that was going to be a generational company. At the time, this was 2020 when we started a company. In 2040, it would not only be around, but people would know what it is. It's so funny. One of my biggest turnoffs when investing is when you hear like a founder say, hey, I do my next company. I'm doing that as well. And I've interviewed so many of the best. And this is that life's work. This is the only thing they focus on. And that is such a big success. For me, I mean, not one survivor thought of something after. Like there is no after. Like there's no not quite.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Up for assets that are great with great founders. Worried about Price Just being very, very high in such a short space of time. It means you have to live into that valuation. It's hard, and we see a lot of people struggle with that today. How did you think about that at the time? We were just so confident that there's like so much market need and like the growth rate that we had and have, it was more just an opportunity to like do something that we maybe would have done a little bit later and just do it now. And that's how I thought about it. So we had that confidence and we have the confidence now. Russell, you're constantly speaking to people, investors, employees, customers, Question Do you not? Get asked that you should get asked more. That's a really tough question.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can do that because you have the trust. But when you have 20 people, you cannot possibly have that type of relationship with the other 19 of you. And you're just sold them. You were like, oh, look, this is awesome company. Like it's great. And like, blah, blah, blah. You know, if you're at that point in time, you can't actually, I was just wrong. And even though that was two weeks ago, right? Because of course you have that in your head. Like, yeah, maybe this isn't the right one. We'll figure it out, but maybe it's not the right one early on. And so, you know, we certainly raised a lot of money then and then later, obviously, well, past we passed that point, but we were very disciplined. Like no matter what money we had in the bank, we were not going to hire more. I mean, there was a point where we were a small company and cash flow positive because we had just held back hiring so much. And then we really unlocked the gates when we felt like we had confidence.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, if this were my first company, I certainly should have worried. We didn't worry quite as much because we knew we were going to maintain the discipline. Another mistake I think a lot of founders make is just hire too much too early before they like know without a doubt that they have like clear product market fit. I think that's so important though to really keep a small team because at that point in time because say the thing isn't working, right? Like if you know like if you're working with five, six people, you're hanging out all day, you're all working together, you can be like, hey guys, like actually like this is a bad idea. We should do this.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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. You're not giving the person an opportunity to like you haven't detected it early enough, I guess, and given them an opportunity to course correct earlier.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think that's probably true eight out of 10 times. And the challenge is that it's probably not true two out of 10 times, but is it worth continuing to see if it's...”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a tough question. We've been slow in the past, or you always feel like you could have been faster. Look, I think the way I see it, like if I feel like that's the case, I'm the last one to know, right? Because their team probably has figured that out already for months. Their peers have figured it out for months. So it's like, how do you find out faster? One of the things that we do is like there are obviously trusted OG people that like I trust that I know are great and you know trying to maintain a close dialogue with people like that so that they can temperature check right it doesn't mean that they're always right certainly not the case there's always like gray areas and a lot of nuance but if you start to hear feedback that somebody's not performing from like a lot of people that you know are high performers that's a massive red flag uh and so can you use those types of people who are sort of spread out throughout the organization to like give you just better signal earlier”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'll tell you if I think it's not working. And let's just both keep the finger on the pulse. It's not, that's not the right quote all the time. But I think it's actually the right call much more often than people realize. And you never get recognized for it.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Number one thing is over indexing on someone that's done it before at like a similar level of scale, right? Like I think for even for a lot of investors, I think it's like people love the press release higher. Oh, this person did it. They did this and they took it from 100 to 250 of AR or whatever it is. And so like we should just get them and plug them in here. And like it would be perfect fit and like similar sales cycle or whatever. Like I'm not saying that can't work. It totally can, but you incur a lot of risk because it also, I mean, every business is very different every situation is extremely different. Like the same playbook certainly won't work. It's just like, will the person be able to figure out how to change the playbook enough? Right versus, you know, maybe you bet on the person that like has proven themselves out in whatever thing they're doing and they have a lot of potential to just get one level above and you have an honest conversation about, look, you're going to step into these bigger shoes. We're taking a bit of a risk here. So are you. And so you tell me if you think it's not working.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Portals, which I think just now, I don't think Facebook sells those anymore. I still have minus right there. And we would keep a Zoom meeting going the entire day because we're in different locations during the pandemic. So for 12, 14 hours, 16 hours a day, we just had just the Zoom meeting. Then as we grew the team, we had more team members join. Every morning you would just, if you worked at Zip and you would just join the same Zoom meeting and keep it on video and on mute. And so it was kind of cool. 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 just me doing sales. And so whenever I was doing sale, any sales call, I would leave myself unmuted. So even if you were an engineer at Zip really early, you would be listening to every single sales call. There's only one happening at one time because it was just one of me. And so you'd listen to everything. Like, I think we really accelerated like internal enablement and learning at that time. But anyways, I think that's part of the reason why people were craving some level of.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, it's such a tough thing, especially for companies like ours that were born right in the heart of the pandemic. And it's challenging because it varies by function. And one of the things we do is for engineering product and design, we mandate two days a week, specific day is Mondays and Thursdays, in the office. That actually was born from what we found was that it was actually, I mean, a lot of engineering is like a makerage job, right? Like you're writing code. You have to really focus. I think what we found from a lot of our early folks is that it was kind of just like lonely to just do that. Like they were craving some more like some more social engagement, some more engagement in some way, shape, or form. And we decided, and then they were drowning in meetings, of course. And so what we decided to do is we prioritize in office days and then try to push all the meetings to happen in office days so that there was like other times you get like a really healthy balance. I think an interesting thing that we did is so early on when we started the company, Lou and I both bought these Facebook.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't see it quite as a complete removal, although look, maybe in 20 years, who the hell knows. But I do think there's an opportunity to increase the leverage of the team. And we're trying out a bunch of stuff using ChatGPT. I mean, there's just so much manual work that goes on that you can actually start to automate even today. I mean, we'll see. I'll probably have a better read in six months or a year.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Completely agree. And especially when you sort of add to that different geos, different countries, like it just gets even more complicated. Very hard to tell.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, I think a lot of enterprise sales and enterprise go to market is given how top-down it is, is actually quite, quite outbound. And it will shift over time for us too. And I can already inbound this at a larger percentage than it's ever been in the history of the company, but the majority is still outbound, especially after we go after different industries into the enterprise, so forth, right? Like it's also about like, hey, we talk to somebody in an organization. We understand there's a problem, but we have to get to the right person, like literally the right person. And that's very hard to do when you're targeting an account in an organization in an inbound way.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I mean, there are always things not working. One of the things we're working through is how best to scale subportions of our sales organization, like our business development organization. It's a tough job to cold call people, to email them, to send a message to something, get interest. And how do you sort of scale that team, you know, maintain productivity and allow that team to have like a great career path into the AE role, which is something we're really proud of.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“My job, I think, in many ways is to focus on what's not working. There's an area of the business that seems to be doing just fine. That doesn't mean it won't break because it probably will. But right now, it's not the thing that's on fire or it doesn't look like there's some smoke there. You kind of let it go.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know, I think I spend a lot of time in the actual, like, I mean, we were talking about sales, just like how human the problem is and how at some point you have to look into the anecdote. Spend a lot of time, a lot of time on that. Everything from gone call, listening to like getting into the details of like what exactly was said, like what exactly is happening? Like, why is this person, you know, performing better than that person? Can we take something that they're doing? Really double clicking on that and not trying to manage the go-to-market organization by metrics alone because it's so hard to actually affect change that way. That's probably the number one.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think so, but it's because you have to focus on different things. You can't micromanage, you have to be selective, I guess, is the right framing about what you micromanage because it has to be, you have to micromanage the few like critical things that are very, like their core values for the company. That doesn't mean you can't be quick in other areas.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It was just so helpful for me to see Brian Chesky of Airbnb just how the level of attention to detail when it comes to the Airbnb product. Remember design reviews where to his credit he would be able to detect that some of the spacing is off just on our mobile app or just like really, really focus on detail. And what that does is, of course, do those extra, you know, I don't know, 10 pixels of white space in and of themselves matter? No, but they matter a ton in terms of what that says to the company and where the bar is for quality of the product. Just like speed, right? I think, I mean, product quality, design bar, like all of that also, I think ultimately is a cultural thing and it comes from the founders.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually would say that if you take what we work on at Zip and Procurement, I mean, there's like 11 times as much money that moves hands between businesses than moves hands between consumer and a business. So much money that moves hands. And if you can make that just a tad bit more efficient across the board, you actually create so much value in the economy that's being lost. And that ultimately, I mean, this, of course, takes many steps, but that does carry over to consumers.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Me as a second time founder, I was very, very determined, Lou and I both were to work out a company, work on an idea that had high execution risk, low fundamental market risk and sort of product risk. I think as a first time founder, you're actually much more okay. Maybe because you don't know any better to take on a lot more market risk. And so you can actually have really large outcomes, right? Like a lot of the social media companies, I guess, are great examples, but Snap is not a company that carried a lot of market risk, right? Like the whole thing. And like, I'm not sure someone would do that as a second time founder. But it's obviously a wildly successful company. And so like you can have outcomes like that, but like you almost can't have as a second time out. Maybe because you're just too jaded about the world or too burned.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Mean so many things, man. But one was do a B2B SaaS company next by far. Two, I think you don't, this is something that I think I learned later at Airbnb, but like, you know, the bar of like what a really good product designer is like. When you go into a cold, you've never worked anywhere. Like you kind of don't really know. You're just feeling your way around things. And so I think understanding the hiring and the talent bar was something that working at Airbnb later on I think really personally helped me with, which is something that I didn't have back then.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, no, yeah, exactly. Like, there are easier paths to success. And that was totally. I mean, that's the analogy that I used in that business. It's like, you know, the margin you make, it's like squeezing all the juice out of a lemon. The last drop that falls out is your margin. So if you screw up halfway through squeezing the lemon, you don't need to squeeze the rest of the lemon to understand how the movie ends. And that was the business. That was the business.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's like one of those things where, like, I would do everything differently but have no regrets. I mean, what I learned from that company was it was a very operational business. I mean, at our peak, we had 17 different airport locations, hundreds of hourly workers, washing cars and picking up people and dropping them off at the airport, right? I learned so much in terms of like what it takes to be an operational business. And boy, is it, I mean, is it easy to run a P2B SaaS company? We have our problems, but like it's not like we're constantly going to be running out of money. You don't have to worry about any of these things. Like, you don't have like 24-7, 365 support needed with like emergency situations. Like, just not that.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“By definition And so that was the idea that we came up with in that one hour. We did it for five years. Literally, I would never do that again. Like we took exactly the opposite approach when we started zip. But like, I mean, that's like once you pick your idea and you're like working on, I mean, you're like, of course you can change, right? We didn't. I mean, you're just so deep in. So that was one like if you're going to do a company, don't time box yourself to one hour.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's so funny. Actually, I'll give you a great example. So Zip is my second company. It's my first company. It was a company called Flight Car, TLDR. We would give you free airport parking by renting out your car to somebody else fully insured. And I dropped out of cost to the company. And I remember I called my friend at the time, say, hey, you know, we're both bored like, are you down? Like, why don't we do a company? And he was like, sure. And I remember I grew up in New Jersey. And so, of course, New Jersey, sort of at the time, at least, you know, you would go to Panera Bread. Like that's where you would go hang out. And so, you know, we were like, all right, let's go meet up with the Panera bread tomorrow for an hour. Whatever the best idea is that we can come up with in an hour, let's just do it. And I remember that hour, this was in 2012, I think. He was telling me, he's like, hey, there's this thing called Airbnb. And, you know, people are sharing their houses with each other. Like, really? Like, I never heard of that. And then we showed one thing led to another. We're like, well, what would they do with their cars? And if they're going to do it with their cars, maybe they'd do it at the airport.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it really depends on the problem and the function. Like, for example, I think marketing is such a diverse function, right? Because it encapsulates product marketing and growth and like content marketing, like all these different things. Like, I actually think like having marketing be quite unfocused is actually okay in its execution. Messaging needs to be focused. But execution actually can be unfocused. And I think it's actually okay in some cases like that. And I don't know. Maybe that's a controversial statement, but I don't think you have to be that focused in every function.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“If we've got a problem, like some hairy, like complicated problem, what we'll do is try to get not a very large group, right? Because then it's not productive, but a good group of like pretty diverse cross-functional people that are working on or touching this problem in for an hour, at least what I found work out is like, all right, everybody takes 15 minutes and write all your ideas out one-on-one, and then we just go around and then try to whittle that down and then we end the meeting with like five ideas. Maybe two of them we would have thought of anyways, but there's three like pretty interesting ones that maybe we wouldn't have thought of. And that's like one way that we solve.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's a really good question, but it's empowering people to speak up and rewarding more off-the-wall ideas and alternative approaches, right? And rewarding first principles thinking. And a lot of that relies on like, I would much rather invest in the person that has potential, that maybe hasn't done the job before, but like has a high ceiling because that person is more likely to think through 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 original ideas. And so I think a lot of this is like you can sort of culturally set this up if you have more managers and leadership in the organization that's actually cut from the DNA of the company. And high potential, but maybe isn't like taking a playbook from somewhere else and cutting and pasting it into your company. There's a time and place where that maybe too. So you have to balance it. But I think like if you only do that, you don't get as much creativity out of the organization. The other thing we try to do is have a lot of brainstorms.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But one it has to come from you. You have to lead by example as a founder. Like the founders have to lead by example. It bleeds into the rest of the company. And you have to reward that. You have to reward that and call it out and shout it out inside the company. Like if somebody does something quickly and like they achieve some result, even if it doesn't work out, you should reward them for it and you should make sure other people see that that happened and that they were rewarded for it. sort of sets the DNA and the culture.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“They just get slower. And so we really, really wanted to establish as high of a watermark as possible because when we were a five-person company, I mean, we're certainly way slower than we were when we were a five-person company, just like we were much slower than we were when we were 100% company.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Absolutely. I mean, you know, if you think about it, right? Like you were to bet on one of two horses. One horse is like really thoughtful planing and they've got a whole strategy. They're like, they're going to execute it, but they're slower. And the other horse actually doesn't have the best strategy, but it learns quickly and it just keeps changing half. Like, which one's going to get to the destination faster unless the first one is perfectly right, which almost certainly is not that that first horse is not going to be, I would bet on the second horse. And I think that's the mindset, you know, we have internal. Like, I would much rather bet on a zip that, you know, we all, we sometimes joke internally, but it's a way for us to push ourselves to get better. We sort of talk about, you know, like, how do we compete with the other zip? Like in an alternate reality, there's a clone of art, clone of zip in the alternate reality. How would we beat that clone? And usually the answers would do something, we would just iterate faster. Speed is actually really, really an advantage. You're not going to be right. So you might as well just learn quickly and move on. The other thing is as companies grow.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, really challenging. I think for me, it was like, hey, 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. I'm just having the first call to go get the deal. And when it started to feel like that, that's when I was like, and Lou and I were both like, okay, now it's time because we're not learning anything new, let's try to get a little bit more skill, right? With one more person. It's a trust building exercise, right? Because you need to get the person ramped. Of course, you have no documentation. You don't have anything. It's just a four or five person company at the time at most. And so you just like spend a lot of time. You shadow everything and get more and more comfortable. So it's tricky. I have other founder friends who can hire like too. So that there's some competition and then go from there.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The latter. We hired one salesperson who was an AD in his past and held a number of different roles. Basically, I fired myself from a lot of the sales job, right? Because I was just doing sales at that point. And then we brought him in. And then, you know, he would just shadow everything. Then I would let him do the first call deck, but I would do the demo. And then he started doing the demo. So we sort of moved that way.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Better enablement, more at bats, right? It's like when you're in this type of situation, you know what to say and you can say it with confidence. Like you can say that, yes, this thing, yes, like our product does that and does it really well. Here are the two reasons why. Here's what makes us different, right? It's all, it's just a lot of enablement at bats, which is actually repeatability.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“One of the things I've learned is like confidence for a salesperson talking to a prospect, one of the most important things is confidence. One, how you measure that, but two, how do you fix that? It's very hard. That's what makes it so complex.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So many different things, but first, it was like understanding every component of a sales cycle, right? I remember we have so many awesome sales engineers at Zip today. And initially, 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 deba. You know, they should be able to answer the questions. And then we realized we were running into limitations around technical questions and like, you know, you actually do need somebody that has a more technical person. So it's a lot of first principles learning around how the actual process works. And it's also, I think the other big thing is it's hard to assess, right? Like product, like you can look at metrics, not to say you can't in sales, but every metric you look at, the more you zoom into it, you realize maybe you should be looking at the anecdote. Like, let's go listen to the gong call of where this actually happened. And it's like a human problem. It's not like a software problem. And that's just harder.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I mean, absolutely, it continues to be, right? I mean, there are always changes in how you sell. But yeah, I mean, look, both for Lou and me, I mean, we came from consumer, we came from Airbnb. We had, you know, worked on consumer companies in the past. So this is our first rude awakening to, hey, this is how it works with sales teams.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I actually think that's the right approach. I think you actually bootstrap it by having a smart zero to one type, maybe an expounder, right? Like that type of person, like figure out. Because what you need to figure out is what's the messaging? Like, are there any like specific systems they use that like we've never heard of? You know, like just get all that stuff working, build up the right assets and positioning just so, you know, your team can be successful. But then ideally, you can just fold that into the rest of the organization. And maybe you have a pocket of people that are focused on it if it's very specific, but it depends on how whether the horizontal messaging fundamentally lands or not. And it depends on the product. If it's not that horizontal, then you may need to verticalize sooner.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, we don't do that at ZIP, and I think it may be like we don't verticalize ourselves. It is extremely, extremely expensive to verticalize your sales team, and at least from other founders that are much ahead of us that I've spoken to, when people do it, it is at a much, much, much different level of scale.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“No, completely agree. Product market is certainly not binary. It's like a complicated matrix and like the first cell in that matrix is like the first set of product market that you have. But as you distribute, I mean, like you said, you know, we're talking about platforms as you add more capabilities, more products, you have to go through product market fit for every subsequent product that you launch as a company. And then you have to do the same thing for every persona you speak with, every channel, every industry. I mean, it can get gloriously complicated, every vertical, right? You might, you know, if you sell the retail versus you sell the financial services just because you have market fit and tech doesn't mean you have market fit and financial services.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think design partner, and I think being very clear, it's so easy to fall into slightly customizing the product for each different type of customer you have. And you have so few at the text you care about a lot of them, right? You don't want to have it somebody churn. You've built something that's like a different, slightly different thing to five different people. This, I think, goes back to the theme of repeatability. I've seen so many founders do that too. You know, you can talk yourself into it. That makes it really harder, right? Because every, like, how do you prioritize feature requests? How do you message your product on your website? Are you speaking to this person or that persona or this problem or that problem? You want to just make the edge getting more customers is like, you need like a weapon that you're like, you know, going into the world with and you want the sharpest possible point. You don't want something that's blunt.”
2024-04-24 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20VC: Is Speed the Most Important Thing from 0-1 | Why Hiring Inexperienced People is Better | The Biggest Lessons Scaling Zip to $1.5BN Valuation with Rujul Zaparde, Co-Founder and CEO @ Zip · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source