EP 022 - What is Procurement with Reba Cox, Global Head of Procurement at MongoDB

Rohit Hey, Reba. Welcome to Strategy of Finance podcast. Really great to have you here. Reba Hello, yeah, nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me. Rohit Why don't we kick it off with a little background on you? Tell us who is Reebok Hawks. Reba Well, we don't have all day, do we? But listen, I was born and raised in Oklahoma, kind of moved around the US, ended up in New York City after college, had a bit of an interesting career journey. I actually started out trading base metals futures and then ended up getting into base metals procurement. And now I work in tech. So it's been a little bit of a windy road, but a good one. And lived all over the US and have been here in New York for almost 20 years. Rohit Awesome. What brought you, what made you to make the move from Oklahoma to New York? Reba I don't know, something about being a Reba from Oklahoma, reading Vogue magazines and just really wanting to sort of live where the action was. And I'm from Norman, Oklahoma, so a big university town. We had lots of diversity. And I think I just really wanted to be in a more diverse environment and be somewhere where I could sort of dress up every day and not be out of place. But I love that I'm from Oklahoma. I feel like I grew up with a lot of nice, like, nice sort of, like, good values, I think. And so I think that I've made a lot of friends who grew up in places like the Midwest or down south that have moved to New York. I think it's a certain type of personality that leaves that type of environment. But yeah, I mean, I just love living here. Since I was eight, I think I wanted to live in New York. So glad I've been able to make that happen. Rohit Well, I can certainly appreciate the nice vest that you are wearing. Quite cool. Are you into fashion? Did you try to go into fashion? Reba Yeah. Yeah, no, actually I did. I went to college to study art. I wanted to do wardrobe -ing. And eventually it became a little too subjective and I realized that a subjective thing was not something I worked well in. I remember it was like my second semester in college and I got a B in a class and my friend got an A and she did her work about an hour before it was due and said, I'm going to spin a story to the professor just to watch me. And that was kind of when I had a little reality check with myself. I was like, you know what? Subjectivity is not something I want to sort of have my paycheck based on. So I actually moved into international econ. And that was kind of nice because it was just global history and economies and stuff like that. But yeah, I originally would have loved to have done wardrobe-ing, but I found myself at least in situations where... Like every day when I had my first job I used to walk by Bergdorf. So that was kind of always like a nice start and end to my day. So I just try to pretend and dress like I work in fashion but I don't actually. A very non -artsy, non -fashion job, quite frankly. Rohit I would have imagined given sort of your procurement work that you have done later on, as well as this inclination on fashion, like merchandising or merchandising rather should have been actually a pretty interesting work profile to think about where you were able to perhaps do both. Reba Yeah, I think so, but I, you know, it's, there's something to be said about working in an industry that maybe you're not so emotionally connected to. Like being able to maybe make like clear decisions based on a business, a business opportunity. Like I think that it's actually made me be able to excel at my job. You know, maybe one of these days I'll find my way back to a company or a product that's like, I think it's kind of worked out well. And I think it's been able to make, allowed me to make clear business decisions rather than things that maybe I would have a bias about. So. Rohit No, makes sense. Tell us how did the move to the base metal procurement happened? Reba Yeah, well, you know, listen, I joined, I moved up to New York City in February of 08. So if you remember what happened in the spring of 08, it was a very interesting time to be sort of coming into the workforce. I'm very, very glad and appreciative that I actually graduated college in December, which allowed me to get my job. I think if I'd have graduated in spring of 08, I wouldn't have gotten that job. It was a pretty choppy market. I learned a lot, but I was 20 years old. I was the only female on the trading floor. I used to use words like dang it. And I remember the first time I said that, some guy, some trader turns around and looks at me and is like, come on, you got to use real words if you're going to set with us. And they thought I was so Southern. It was just a very interesting environment. I think that as a young female, I really felt like ultimately I worked in that industry for about four or five years. I just really wanted to make a move. And coming out of the financial crisis, it was a tough. You know, a lot of consolidation was happening. And again, I just really wanted to be in an environment where I could work with other females, not be the only female in the room. And so I started looking around to say, what can my skill set be transferable to? And I actually saw a job. I worked for Phillips Lighting. And I saw the job, and I was like, you know, this seems like I've never done procurement before. But like, I know how to read contracts. I know how to price metal. Like, I understand manufacturing. You know, because I had... in my base metals days, we were sort of like, our customers were the miners all the way to the car manufacturers, right? And so I sort of knew the market, I knew the industry. And that boss at the time, he was like, you're gonna be great at this. I was like, I don't know, but sure, you wanna hire me? Let's do this. But I had never heard of procurement before. Because back in the day, people of my generation, we wouldn't have had... a procurement or supply chain degree, right? It's like everyone who I know that's sort of of my age and older, it's like an accident, like a happy accident to use Bob Ross, but it's a happy accident that it happened. And honestly, I think it's the skill sets are super, super cross -functional. You're thinking outside of the box, you're almost a program manager and a consultant at the same time. And you have to know how to read contracts, you know, how can you protect things legally, etc. So it's sort of like a skill set for people who really like to be involved with a lot of different things and people who are good problem solvers. So yes, I made the transition and sort of never looked back. I think it was a nice way for me to change up my environment. Again, I wasn't the only female in procurement. That's what I kind of like about it. I feel like it's... It's a role where lots of different types of personalities can thrive. And I learned so much, quite frankly. I just feel like I was involved in so many good projects. And for the age that I was at the time, it was just the best move I could have ever made, quite frankly. Rohit Were there one or two interesting things that you felt like just naturally came to you that were relevant from a procurement perspective? Reba Yeah, I think knowing how to problem solve, or knowing how to find a problem and problem solve. When I was working in manufacturing and procurement, sort of the way you got your projects is that you go walk a factory floor. And I'm naturally inquisitive, and so I'm asking questions, and then I'm thinking in my mind, well, how could that be done better, right? And so I think that that was one of the sort of transferable skill sets or things that's innate in me, right? not to question things, but to be inquisitive. I think that's different than questioning things. I just love that. I've walked factory floors all over the world. And actually in tech now, it's mainly direct procurement or indirect procurement. I kind of miss that because you learn how things are made. You're kind of watching different jobs evolve. When I started, there wasn't much robotics. And then robotics became very popular. seeing a factory in China versus Mexico versus the US, like, it's all very interesting. And I think an inquisitive mindset really works well in that space. Rohit Makes sense. So you got to travel to all these different places and visit these facilities and so on. Very cool. Interesting. Reba Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, it's like every time I pick up even like a pen, right? I'm like, I, I can fundamentally understand how that is made. Um, and I, I just, I love that even like packaging today, like when something ships to me and it's in like nice, like, uh, recyclable packaging. And I think about like, Oh, the, all the engineering and the logistics that went behind that packaging design. Like, um, it's kind of cool. It's like, you never lose. If you move out of direct procurement, you sort of never lose that mindset of just thinking about how something is made or manufactured. So I love that. I love that I have that background. Rohit Makes a ton of sense. Tell us now sort of how your move to tech procurement really happened. What made you look at this kind of sunshine industry? Reba Yeah, well, you know, it's, I was traveling about 90 to 95 % of the time. I was based in New York City, which really wasn't the best, quite frankly, to be in like procurement, manufacturing procurement. So, you know, I was oftentimes like the number one guest at the DoubleTree in Beechwood, Ohio, or the Holiday Inn Express in Texas, you know. It was just, it was a lot of strain on my body, quite frankly, traveling to China for three days and coming back or you know, different locations around the world. And I just kind of felt like I wanted to make a switch so I could actually live in New York City. You know, I think we started this by talking about how much I wanted to live here. And I felt like I was paying New York City rent and had this New York City life for like two days of the week. So I really sort of like did my research. At the time I was getting my MBA, I sort of used some of my MBA classes for market analysis to figure out what would actually be a great space for me to move into where I could be based in New York City, have good market growth potential, et cetera. And that's actually how I found the job at Mongo. I did a lot of research on Mongo to figure out how it was growing, et cetera. And sometimes you're better to be lucky than good, I think. But I had a hunch that it was a great company, and that's turned out to be true. But yeah, I just really wanted to be based in New York and not travel as much. And when you move into tech, it's mostly direct procurement. And so a lot more of that, it's good and bad that I don't get to walk factory floors, you know, but it would just much better fit my lifestyle, I think. Rohit Make sense. Let's talk about a little bit in terms of, this is a very, as you said, uncommon job profession as such, right? There is not a certain kind of trajectory that has been built through that says, hey, you do this and then you do this and then you get to become a procurement professional and this is kind of how you grow and so on. As you think about someone getting into the, Reba Right. Rohit profession for the first time. How should they think about joining a procurement team and then kind of building up their career from there? Reba Yeah, well nowadays, most of my hires that are, I think, under the age of 30 have supply chain or procurement degrees. Some of them have profiles where they've worked in consulting, because project management, et cetera. So I think getting in is significantly easier today than it used to be, because most companies will have procurement teams. And even Mongo, like when I joined, hardly any of our peers had procurement functions. Now they all have procurement functions. So significantly easier to get into the space today than in the past. But you know when you kind of come in you're at that junior level, you're an analyst. My biggest advice is soak up information. If someone wants you to look at a contract or look at a project, do it. Because you're sort of collecting these bits and pieces of information from different areas, different category managers, different people in product or engineering. or marketing, just be a sponge. Because the more you absorb, especially when you're younger in your career, the more you'll be able to understand and piece things together. Because procurement, by nature, is a function of functions, meaning that we don't just represent ourselves. We represent legal, security, internal audit, marketing, product design. We represent everyone, sort of. And it depends on if you're in direct or indirect procurement. The more you actually understand about the other functions around you, the more you'll be selected to lead projects or the more that you'll have visibility or sort of be able to execute things significantly better. I just think like when you're sort of like coming in, you're just being a sponge. Like I said, nowadays most people enter with a supply chain degree, but I don't even think that's a prerequisite. Someone who, for tech procurement, like someone who worked in sales would be potentially a good candidate for a procurement role because you're - sort of the opposite of a sales rep. There's lots of different ways, but the best thing to do when you come in is just absorb, ask questions, learn about other functions because your job as procurement is to make sure that everybody else's functions are basically happening and being protected. Sure. Rohit Very cool. With that, why don't we move into a master class on procurement? Before we dig into the long list of questions that I have that I want you to answer, let's level set. You are at MongoDB right now. Let's level set maybe what the company is. Reba Yeah. Rohit maybe how many team members that you have in your procurement team. I think that'll give a context in terms of the rest of the questions that you are talking about. It may not be specific to Mongo, but just contextualizing it, I think, will be helpful to all the audience. Reba Okay. So, yeah, so at Mongo, listen, I joined here six years ago to build out that function. Today we have, you know, we have about 12 people on the team. I'd say that that's a pretty large size for a team because we have a zero dollar touch on all of our contracts. What does that mean? Zero dollar touch means that we don't have a high threshold for spend at the company that doesn't go through procurement. I've worked at large manufacturing companies that had the same amount of people doing procurement, but in manufacturing you have buyers that do some of that work, and then the more strategic projects are going to the procurement team. In tech you don't really have that buyer function, so that means that if you have a sort of strict policy like we do, at Mongo, then you'd have a larger team. I have peers that have smaller teams because they have maybe 25K of spend doesn't go through the procurement team. It just really depends on the risk profile of the company. But again, in manufacturing, you'd have a smaller number of people for dollar spent on a category than you would in tech because procurement and manufacturing is much more project oriented, strategic based, because you have that buyer function that's doing the day to day work. And tech procurement is kind of doing that buyer day -to -day function. So it's kind of odd. You think, oh, well, at an XYZ company with $35 billion in spend, you'd have 50x the size that you'd have at a tech company. But it's not necessarily true, because the inputs and outputs are different. Rohit Got it, makes sense. So with that, why don't you maybe kick this master class with demystifying what is procurement in terms of the business parlance. Reba Yeah, so I mean, procurement, we're quarterbacks, right? We are quarterbacks for so many different areas of the business. is why I really love the job, quite frankly. I think if you're an inquisitive person, it's a great place to be because you kind of know everything about everything that's going on. Yeah, so procurement handles contracting and spend and vendor sort of management at the strategic level for all the dollars that the company spends that's not on salary. So if you think about this glass that we drink in the office or the office itself or the chairs or the software that we're using to have this podcast, like... That is all managed by procurement. In manufacturing, it's a similar thing. In manufacturing, you have what's called indirect and direct procurement. In tech, it's mostly indirect procurement. Direct procurement is if I'm making this pen, all of the inputs that go into the pen that I'm selling. Indirect procurement is I need to have health insurance for the workers at the factory that put this pen together. I need to have software for my website where I sell the product. So indirect procurement is anything that supports the manufacturing or the company as it runs. Direct procurement is anything that goes into the actual good that's being produced. So it's, you know, that's sort of like the mix there. Sorry, what was the question? I'll have to pause here. I think I was on track there. Okay. Yeah. Rohit No worries. I think that's a good level setting in terms of what is procurement and how does the direct versus indirect procurement differ. Tell us, how does a day in the life of a procurement leader look like? Are you negotiating deals with vendors all day or are you just reading contracts all day? What does it look like, an average day look like to you? Reba Yeah. Yeah. I guess it depends on if it's Tuesday at 10 a .m. or Wednesday at 7 p .m. For procurement leaders, right, we, on a day -to -day basis, you should be following a strategy as a leader, right? So you should have your category managers answering questions for them. Maybe it's quarter end or year end. So it really does kind of depend on the day. But let's say it's quarter end. I've got, you know, four deals that I need to close, or my team does. You know, maybe I'm the escalation point for those meetings, so I'm going in. On average probably you know four times a week to do a negotiation with a vendor my team would be everyday negotiating with a vendor but as a leader you know I want to be an escalation point I want to be making sure that I've got relationships across the business I want to be reviewing my process maybe. I'm probably in a meeting with the business systems team to make sure that my process is being automated so the leadership level you definitely want to be more strategic you're not in a contract every day, you're not in a negotiation every day, but on the way up there, you certainly were, right? So like as a category owner, every single day you're looking at contracts, you're working with stakeholders to meet their needs, or you're walking a factory floor, sort of coming up with different ideas, et cetera. So I think there is quite a difference between a procurement leader and a procurement, like a category owner or an analyst, but at the leadership level, you know, you want to be automating, you want to be escalation point. You want to be building relationships with different stakeholders across the business, I think, on a day -to -day basis. And that is a day -to -day thing. I think that where some of my peers go wrong is that they don't build relationships either internally or externally. Every week, I'm trying to talk with a peer around the market to figure out what are they doing, what vendors are they personally using, what difficulties are they having with contracts. I think that that's one area where I think a lot of... A lot of my peers, not just in procurement, but I see my peers within the company, they don't really lean into that. That's a really important part of being a procurement leader. I sort of need to understand what the marketing team strategy is. If I don't understand what that is, how can I guide my category manager for what her workflow is going to look like for the year and solve problems, right, help them be more efficient, et cetera. So I think that's one, I think, unique thing for procurement leaders. You really have to be a good relationship builder internally and externally. Rohit Makes sense. Are there particular categories that take more of your time? Whether it's software versus hardware versus, I don't know, real estate versus consumables or utilities. Is there sort of some kind of a picture, some kind of a framework that you have that, okay, this is maybe like 50 % or 40 % of the time that you and your team has to spend just managing those vendors? Reba Yeah, definitely in a tech company, it would be software, software and real estate. I say in a pre-COVID world, definitely real estate. In a post-COVID world, definitely real estate. I say that because now we're trying to decide what kind of team, what our teams in office or remote, we need to flex up for meeting space. Really in a post-COVID world, the need for offices is changing actually quite a lot. And then software. When you're at a tech company, the inclination is, I need a software for this, I need a software for that. So we're kind of constantly reviewing security measures for the different software vendors that we have. We are, you know, things like when AI happens, right, it's like all hands on deck. How do we implement this at our company? How do we put guardrails around it to make sure that we can launch this but safely and securely as possible? So it just sort of, it just depends. But I think those are the biggest buckets on it. tech standpoint of you. And in manufacturing, it's sort of spread out depending on if you've got a new product launch or whatnot. If you've got a new product launch, those category managers are probably spending a decent amount of their time focused on the new product launch. Because in manufacturing, once you get a vendor with quality standards and repetitive nature, it's sort of like onto the buyers to be executing, getting volume in every day. So as procurement, you're sort of focused on the new products that are coming out. you know, making sure that the suppliers order tooling, negotiating whether, you know, you or the supplier pay for tooling, et cetera. So it does vary, honestly, depending on what role you're in. I'd be surprised if my peers in tech don't say real estate and software, quite frankly, because I know that we're all kind of struggling with how do we go back? How do we, you know, how do we, if we're not going to be in an office five days a week together, Do we then pivot where we're doing team meetings in our office space? You know, we go from needing desks to needing more meeting room space. So it's pretty fluid right now, quite frankly. Rohit Makes sense. Question on the SaaS side. I'm sure you're looking at a lot of contracts where it's a fixed price based on certain number of seats or some other metric, right? And then on the other end, where things are getting much more interesting more recently is pure consumption -based pricing, where you have... you know, certain maybe gigabytes per gigabyte or some other metric that you are consuming, right? Maybe per API, but that could balloon quite a lot, right? As a procurement professional, how do you think about those two very different kind of business models and the implications that that's gonna have on your spend ultimately? Reba Yeah, well I think that I love this question because I think we've done a really great job at this here. So when I joined, there was one guy that they had hired before me and he also came from manufacturing. He came from Danone. And he and I kind of put our heads together. Neither of us had worked in tech before. And we said, well, how do we, just kind of like that, how do we stop ballooning cost? We were also in a high growth area, right? Where like our head count was growing 30, maybe 40 % year over year. So we sort of took it back to the basics. We said, we're going to do almost demand planning, right? So I'm going to work with FP &A. I mean, I get a head count for it. If it's a fixed cost product, I'm going to get a head count forecast. We also focused on what we call like birthrights. So I, as Reba, on a procurement team, I need this login. I need that login. I need these 10 things to do my day to day. There's the everybody at the company has a certain... you know, Slack or Zoom or whatever, and then individuals based on their country and their job title. So we created like almost demand planning for, you know, per head software. And it was pretty, I will tell you that we kind of hit the sales reps with something that they had never seen because most teams would buy upfront. I need 100 at the end. I need 100. I'm going to buy 100, but I'm only using 60 today. Well, like I come from a world where every penny counts, right? And so did the gentleman that was working for me at the onset. So we said, well, we're not going to pay you for 100 today. I'm going to pay you for 60. And I'm either going to come back to you every month and add 2, 4, 6, 2, whatever I need for the months coming. Or we can cut a deal upfront that allows me to flex up into that. And so at first they were like, no, well, sign a deal for 60 and come to me every month. And so we did that. And we annoyed them, right, until they understood what we were trying to do. because I'm not going to pay a penny for something I'm not going to use today. So, and you know, that worked really well for us, I think. And it did what we tried to do as we got more mature is that we then not only did we do that, but we also built in price breaks for additional usage because we were finding that we were actually growing faster than we had projected. I mean, this is, world's different from manufacturing where it's almost the opposite. Sometimes you think you're going to grow and then you don't. So it was fun for us, to be honest. It was a very unique experience, and I'm very thankful for that. But that really worked for us. So we did demand planning, and then we sort of replicated that model for also the consumption-based contracts that we had. Much tougher, especially there are some products that are consumption-based that we don't want to stop. I don't care that I go over that contract, because that means my product is selling, my product is being used, So we tried to separate, I think it's really important, you want to separate consumption based products into things that have hard limits, that are inefficiencies in your own business. Like maybe an engineer, I'm just making stuff up now, an engineer has a shortcut that drives up some usage on something. Well, like what's the value add? Maybe it's worth that engineer having that shortcut, but there might be a business case that says, sorry, engineer, you can spend 10 more seconds. I don't want my cost to be spiking. But if it's... customer-based, like let's say an education platform, right? I never want to limit how many education classes are being taken. And so you want to mentally separate those two out and build the contracts accordingly, right? So if I want to limit my engineer that his shortcuts can only cost the company $10, I need to lock that in the contract. I need to have something that sort of has an on-off mechanism. But for consumption-based things for customers or product-related like You want to have pre-negotiated, like when you hit such level of consumption, you get an additional discount, et cetera. And that works sometimes. It doesn't work all the time, especially if you're a new customer. You'll have a harder time getting those deals, which is honestly why I prefer, I would never, never say never, but I try never to have a new vendor with more than a one-year deal. Because I, as procurement, need to understand the utilization. I as a customer need to have them understand me as a business so that way we can do a better longer-term deal together. But yeah, to me it's all about demand flow and we took a lot of those manufacturing ideas into tech. I think we've done a really good job. We're finding where, you know, now we're, I'm six years into the role here and some of the vendors of ours are saying, oh, this is like the, this is the worst deal that we have. And I'm like, oh, great. Like. I did a good job six years ago, you know? And so it's been interesting, but I know that more of my peers are doing this now. But at the time, like they were not, they were buying either for the future and just spinning up or buying for today and then having to add on. But I think we did something really unique here and I'm really proud of that. I think it's a nice way to merge the demands of a low margin business in manufacturing with, you know, high tech, high growth together. So. Rohit My belief is no one does a deal that they're not happy with at least at that point in time. So people can go and crib about the fact that this was, you know, that was the worst deal ever. So be it. Reba Yeah, exactly. Well, it made some sales reps day happy back a couple of years ago. But yeah, I mean, it's really important that first deal you do set your baseline for all renewals. And I think that a lot of people don't, especially in a software deal, a lot of people don't understand that. Like if I take list price, then I'm always going to be behind, right? Or if I think I've got a good deal for my volume and I grow 50 % like, Rohit Sure. Reba I'm only going to get so much additional discount, right? So like the first deal you do, you have to think about where's this tool going to be in five years? Because if I don't think about five years from now, like I'm already behind it and in five years I'm going to be overpaying by probably 100 % or more. Rohit I think that makes a ton of sense to me. And yeah, that's kind of at least I also hold on to that our getting in price needs to be the lowest possible price ever because you're not going to get that price anytime. And because everyone, you know, if it's a software business, they are looking for that net retention ratio. They want to, you know, get if you're paying 100, they want to get to maybe 105 or 110 or 120. Right. And so there is no way they're going to reduce the price on you. Reba Yeah. Yeah. Right. Yeah, and I really, like, I never want pricing to be an issue that I, a reason why I don't renew a contract. Because we've spent, you know, many teams have spent times implementing, maybe building integrations. Like, I don't want to have to not renew a contract because it means I have to spend all of that invested time on a new vendor. You know, and if you set yourself up bad from the beginning and then you realize, oh man, I'm overpaying product ABC and XYZ or half the cost. It just causes an enormous amount of friction, even with the vendor themselves. They're pegging you at an annual run rate that's higher than you want to be paying. Well, when they're forecasting you to their chief revenue officer, they're going to project growth off of a baseline that you would disagree with. And that's when, honestly, the worst case scenario for a software deal is that your sales rep... has forecasted a number that's just well beyond anything that you would spend because they're getting that delta close to closure is almost impossible, quite frankly. Tons of escalations and like, listen, procurement and sales actually have the same goal. We wanna close the deal as fast as possible, right? Like, I don't wanna be talking to them at midnight. I don't wanna be talking to them on the last day of their quarter or their year end, but like, I will, you know? Like, I will take them to that point, right? But yeah, I think it really like if your baseline set too high, you're just, you're going to have a huge delta between what that sales rep is forecasting for you and what you're actually willing to pay. And you know, we're not here to mess up a vendor's forecast. You know what I mean? But we are here to not get a bad deal. And that bad deal could not just be pricing based. Like I think we're talking a lot about money here, but like sometimes a bad deal is I don't have the right SLA. or I don't have the right security measures in place, or it's not an open API and I needed an open API. There are a lot of non -financial things that make a deal bad. And so I think that that's something to also think about. And we did a lot of that when we were sort of developing how do we manage our software contracts. We sort of said we're never going to accept an auto renew, where there's going to be barriers, we're going to put price caps in. And we're going to have to do that. I will be honest, we weren't perfect about price caps back in the day, but it's something that we sort of like quickly, I think three years in, realized we needed to have. So now I think 99 .5 % of our contracts would have price caps. And that helps that sales team forecast as well, right? Like they know that like 2 % is the maximum I can increase that price no matter what volume the team comes with. So I think that's actually helped us out a lot on both sort of like... us closing a deal, but also like the sales rep feeling like they understand what deal is coming up on the next renewal. Rohit Makes a ton of sense. We would talk to us about the OKR that a procurement team is going to have. It's certainly related to the amount of spend that a company is making. And procurement teams, it's squarely in the center of it in terms of saving many of those dollars that might otherwise go out, whether it's... just oversight or just a bad deal or many other things that could be part of it, right? So I'm sure some certain kind of dollar savings or percentage savings is part of the equation. But tell us about what are the OKRs for a procurement team? And then how does some of those non -financial elements also bake into it? Because as you said, it's not always about just the price that you are paying. There are so many other things that might come back to haunt you later in the future. Reba Yeah, I think that, let me pause here. Do you want me to just lean totally into tech going forward, or do you want me to straddle the fence a little bit like I have been doing? Rohit Yeah, both. I think your answers have been quite balanced, so yeah, you can continue to do so. Reba So that's a great question. In manufacturing, it is much more heavily leaned towards savings. But things like making sure you have, know your customer, things like that done, right? Because you want to make sure that you have zero security risk with your vendor. I think an interesting business case for OKR for manufacturing is Peloton during COVID, right? all of a sudden, savings were out the window, right? They had to figure out, how do I, I've got a spike in demand, how do I keep those factories in China manufacturing the goods and how do I ship them to the United States? And so I think that like, there's just a variety of ways that procurement can add value that are not savings, but in manufacturing, it is really actually heavily weighted towards savings because margins are so tight. You know, I think that... in manufacturing, if you're saving 5 to 8 % year over year, like you're a rock star. And most of that comes through projects, not negotiation. And what I mean by that is how can I, how can I, you know, if I just stick with plastics, how can I use a different plastic mold to make this that produces 50 % more of these at the same time? You know, so that's like, so it is savings heavily weighted in project base, but like there are times, when that goes out the door and it's like, how do I get product in today? I've got a spike in demand, I've got a hot product. And so I think that I often like during when COVID hit, when everything happened with Peloton, when everyone's working out at home, I was like, man, that's gotta be the best procurement job in the world right now. Like I was jealous that I wasn't working in procurement at Peloton at that time. So it does fluctuate. But like certainly if you're working in Mexico or some other higher risk countries like, You've got to make sure that your vendor locks down product, that anything that's in a complete box is totally locked away, can't be touched. You do not want to be in a situation where you're working for a well -known company and you've somehow gotten something into the country that you don't want. That's actually a real risk that I think a lot of people don't talk or think about. As you manufacture in cheaper countries, the likelihood of that happening raises. So you want to think about that. In tech, security is the number one thing we actually focus on. Security, pushing legal paperwork, it's quite the difference. So savings takes a backseat to making sure that we have the right contract for growth. Because I want to future protect myself more. Whether it's SLAs, making sure that my vendors have all the security measures that they need. You know, in tech we are like, we're only as successful as the internal external auditors think we are. We're only as successful as like, if something happens, you know, the ability to be able to react. We are much more the face of about 13 different teams internally, you know, and we just really want to be able to scale. Like our number one goal is how do we scale in the most efficient, secure way possible? And that's, that's. fun to be honest, you know? Or maybe we want to put on a big marketing event and we want to make sure that our cost per attendee is lower this year than next year. That's when kind of that like savings methodology comes in. But it's much more about like, how do I actually put on an event of that scale in a market where my audience will attend and how can I make it like a fun experience because branding is more important. than the dollar, if that makes sense. So it is quite different, but both have their ability to have a lot of fun, if you ask me. But yeah, it's, I think, you know, secure environment, making sure you can vet your vendors appropriately on the tech side is crucial. And you'll see that there are a lot of different products that have been popping up over the last five years just for that. I think that when I first joined, there was no real product for vetting vendors. Most of my peers use homegrown tools, et cetera. I can't name a single, I guess maybe Workday has some tools that have been around for a while. But only really recently, as procurement's been a larger function within tech companies, do we now have resources to be able to put a vendor through a tool with a tight review process? And that's been really actually fun to watch. And it's actually... It's made our team be able to show more visible value to those functions. Whereas before we were kind of like the quarterback information gatherer. Now we're like the key team that keeps controls on things. It allows the right review to happen. So that's been really exciting for me as a leader in procurement to watch our tools evolve over the last five or six years. Because it is pretty incredible. Five or six years ago, we had Coupa and SAP. That was it. and Workday had the product. But now we have plethora of tools in the market. A lot of top engineers maybe didn't like their procurement tools and then left to go start their own company. And I think that's actually really interesting. That just shows you how much procurement has actually evolved in a rapid time in the tech space. So that's kind of allowed us to keep up with those OKRs and actually to create new ones. So that way we were adding even more value for those teams that are a part of our process. Rohit Makes a ton of sense. How do you respond to someone saying, oh, you know, we don't need gatekeepers for everything. We want to, you know, remain agile. We want to be quick in terms of decision and actually ship product faster. So, you know, talk to customers more and all those things. I want to not be looking at, you know, these procurement contracts and having those negotiations and all that kind of stuff. How do you respond to all that? Reba Yeah, I mean, I think that you have to work really hard to build a brand in the company to fight that sentiment. Here, I think it was week two, we put in a motto that said, we want to be the friendliest, most helpful, most can -do team you work with at this company. And that's sort of like, if you disarm someone with that kind of attitude, they become your biggest champion. And so now, actually, What we built here is a team that's a key stakeholder in conversations. Now, not every conversation, right? It's never going to be perfect, but you do not want to be a procurement team that's seen as a hindrance. You want to be seen as the people that get stuff done and represent your voice in a way that a stakeholder cannot. And so I think that becoming... That's why having those meetings with different functions and really understanding them, that's how you're going to get away with that gatekeeper, eliminate that gatekeeper thought or mindset. We are not gatekeepers. We are actually conduits to make you operate better. Allow us to do our job and negotiate. Let us know what your requirements are so we can make sure it's in the contract. We're not here just to check boxes. If my team is checking a box and they are doing the wrong thing for the business and they're a gatekeeper and they don't add value quite frankly. With AI today, we don't need gatekeepers. We can put that in a system. You know, my team is here to protect the business, to ensure that we're getting what we need, and to be a true stakeholder, and to sort of almost be embedded with the different teams so we can anticipate their needs and help them build contracts or source tools that actually meet their needs. And I think that one of the things that we've really fought, or I've really fought over my entire career, like, we're not here to take your job away. We're here to make sure that you're doing what you're good at, and we're doing what we're good at. and take sort of like not your job, but take the stuff that's not natural to you off your plate. So an example of that would be a team that may needs to make a switch in a software vendor, right? They don't look at software contracts all day. They don't understand that, they sort of don't understand the pitfalls of choosing the wrong vendor or how do you even like get into the room with the right vendors. And we are all day every day. gathering requirements through RFPs or whatnot, we have seen tools go right and tools go wrong. And we know behaviors that are more likely to end you up with the wrong tool than the right tool. So, you know, allow us to do that, and we won't be a gatekeeper. We'll be an extension of your team. We'll be your right arm in those conversations. So we worked really hard to build that reputation here, and I think it's one of the things that I'm most proud about. Is that procurement is not a gatekeeper and we're not a blocker. We are a conduit for you to do your job better and I think that a lot of that just comes with a certain personality and a certain willingness to be Better than anyone expects you to be. Because if you just try to go down that rabbit hole of I'm just a paper pusher. I'm here to check boxes Like that's what you'll be but if you change your mentality You put in the old elbow grease, like all of a sudden you're embedded with a team, you're adding value, you can anticipate their needs. And so it's not just about the stakeholders that are in our process, like security or GRC or legal. It's also about, legal can also be a customer of mine as well as a part of my process. I want to make sure legal understands that I can add value to them, whatever it is. Whether it's a tool, an offsite, getting swag, like... They come to us and they come to us because we built that reputation. And they see us as a great partner. But that takes time. It didn't happen overnight. I'll never forget when I joined, I had a meeting with an engineer. And I won't use the words that he said exactly because they're not PG. But more or less he said, I'm never going to work with you because I'm going to handle my own stuff. And I said, OK. You know, it was week three on the job. I said, OK. Like, You know, I just say it with a smile and I say to myself, in two years, that person is going to be slacking me all the time. And it took, you know, two years. And, but you know, now we're there and it's great, right? Like it's a mutually beneficial relationship. And I think that you have to work towards that and not get deterred by people telling you no. And also, you know, I've seen it happen the opposite way where people, you know, muscle their way into a position and force something to happen. And I think that, you know, I definitely had peers where I've seen that happen and then they end up not getting included in conversations because people don't want to work with them. And they haven't proved their value before they tried to implement a policy or whatnot. So I think that was probably helpful for us. We also, like I said, we launched our policy, but we made sure that we had people and process in place and evolved our policy as that grew because we never want to do have a strict policy that we couldn't then support with that level of customer service. So we did a smart job at like increasing our policy as we increased our process and our tools and our team size to be able to cover things, which I think is important. A wise boss once told me, never say yes to something you can't actually deliver. And I think that I've kept that in mind this whole time here. So. Yeah. Rohit Very cool. I think having a lot of trust before you can influence is quite important. Makes sense. How do you align? Yeah. Reba Especially for a function like procurement, to be honest. Because most times you're seen as that blocker. So you have to almost retrain people. Like as they join the company, we have to retrain them that we're different than any procurement team you've worked with before. Rohit Makes sense. How do you align your procurement strategy with the overall business goals of your organization? Reba Great question. I think AI is a good example for that, right? We, mid -year, kind of last year when everything started happening with AI, we had to change our intake process. We had to change the way that we worked because AI was effectively almost a new category, if you will, right? Because you have internal AI sandboxes, internal tools that you're building, et cetera. And, you know, it became top priority for the company. And so we as procurement, the number one thing is how do we get AI into our process? How do we allow the business to move fast, allow the business to do what it needs to do, but have security measures in place? So we, the gentleman on the team that was doing software, he was in weekly, maybe even twice a week calls with security and legal and engineering and a bunch of the different teams trying to figure out how can we align our controls with the pace that we need to grow as a business. So I think that's like a big example. We actually had to change our strategies mid -year. We were in the process of, we were going to launch like a pretty strict software policy that was on our roadmap, aligned with business requirements, and then we had to scrap all of that. So I think like you have to, you have to set your goals at the beginning of the year, aligning with those like teams that you're supporting, et cetera. And also aligning with leadership, right? Because they set the tone for, you know, how conservative are you with your contracts or with what comes through your team? And then once you have that set, you're sort of trying to say, all right, so the business goal is to automate, automate, automate, okay? All right, well then I need to figure out what does that mean for our contracts? What does that mean for our software strategy? Or maybe, this is not what we're doing, but maybe we're going all in office. And that's the company goal. Oh, great. I need to think about everything differently. I need to rebuild some of my real estate policies and process. So we do try it. I would have overall strategic goals that I want that procurement team to be hitting based on the categories, because each category would have its own strategy. But I would suggest waiting until company goals are announced and then making sure that any... externally visible projects that you're working on as a priority are aligned to the business needs. So AI is an example. Maybe you're changing from in -office to remote working, something like that. We really have to mold ourselves as a business is growing and changing. And if we don't, then we're definitely going to become gatekeepers. So I would suggest waiting until company annual priorities are out to sort of set your... I view it as two layers. You've got your category strategies. So whether you're in manufacturing or tech, you want to have a category strategy every year. If your leaders are not showing you a year over year strategy, whether it's consolidating or putting in different ways to negotiate, et cetera, then those leaders are not, those category owners are not doing their job and they don't need company direction for that. And so once that company direction comes in, as a procurement leader, you're able to sort of merge together what the category owners need to accomplish on a yearly basis with what the company needs. And it might mean tweaking of those category manager strategies, but in most cases, they're kind of separate but related. So it's one example of separate but related. What do I mean by that? Is that we're going to launch a certain software policy throughout the year. AI comes in mid -year, right? It's not that as a category manager, the software category doesn't... Reba put in policies or much more strict procedures, we have to tweak it though, right? So the category strategy remains the same, but at a strategic level, like we had to build a whole new process of intake that, you know, spanned not just procurement, we added in a couple of additional stakeholders and then communicate out that to our employees, like how do you use AI? And I thought that was really, it was a good year for us with that, I think stressful. I think all of my procurement peers would say, wow, AI came in and like we had two weeks to figure out how to put it into our process. But that's again what makes the job fun in my humble opinion. So. Yeah. Rohit Very cool. You mentioned intake as one of the stage in the last comment that you made. Can you walk us through the various stages within the procurement process that one would usually find? Are they relatively set or can be moved around based on certain different industries or whether you are doing indirect versus direct procurement? How to think about that? Reba Yeah. I think that whether you're an indirect or direct procurement, you still have a level of due diligence you have to do on your vendors. So if you're a new vendor coming in, ideally you've gone through an RFP. In indirect procurement, if you're launching a new product, you should have thoroughly vetted and narrowed down those vendors through a really extensive RFP. You would have probably done product testing already. no matter whether it's a new product, old product, indirect, direct, you should always have your vendors going through some type of a vetting process. And so that's sort of like entry point into what I would call procurement space. So you either come through an RFP or you'll be sort of like a solo selected vendor and going through a review process. And that can include legal and could include a lot of the examples of maybe we need to do a factory tour to make sure that you're actually following the different ISO certifications that we need. Again, that's a big one for manufacturing. I think the factory floor walk is really important. You get to see the signs that says how many days since an accident. You need to be choosing your vendors basis, a number of different criteria. And those are different for indirect versus direct. But it always starts with some type of review. You should not be utilizing a vendor or or even selecting a vendor until a review to a certain level is done. I think a lot of where a lot of people go wrong, right, is that they spend a lot of time selecting a vendor and then they loop in procurement. Well, maybe that's not a secure company. Well, maybe you have to start over, right? So I think being being aware of that is really important because it always needs to start with some type of thorough review, setting legal boundaries. In that review, you want to set the boundaries legally. You know what? What does that mean? So indemnification, IP ownership, et cetera, right? You want to set that before you're touching the product itself. Even if you're going to do a POC, you should have all of that done because I shouldn't be doing a POC wasting resources or even getting sample in the manufacturing world. I shouldn't be getting a sample from a vendor that I haven't gotten to a certain point, right? This is not a marriage at first sight, right? Like we can do some due diligence here before we sort of like start working with a vendor. And then from there, you want to have some commercial negotiations as part of that because you don't want to have any surprises. But yeah, so once the vendor onboarding is done, if you've done a POC or you're doing any sample testing, then you just really dive in based on your supply and demand and working on the commercials and getting financial approvals. What I find helpful is that, especially in the tech space, having a close relationship with your FP &A team. because you want to make sure that the stakeholder has budget before you're wasting time, right? Again, I do think, I think it's silly that procurement and sales get pit against each other because we have the same goals. Sales needs to make sure that Sally has budget to buy their product. Procurement needs to make sure that Sally has budget to buy the product or both of us are wasting our time. So that kind of all happens a little bit mixed together, but I want to make sure that I'm working with a vendor I want to be working with before I invest. And then on it for annual products or maybe manufacturing as you're buying more goods, it becomes a little bit more rinse and repeat. And you might want to have strategic conversations from here or there or here and there depending on if volume is spiking or maybe volume is going down. But the biggest time investing you should make is through an RFP, reviewing that vendor, doing those initial commercials as we spoke about. Because if your baseline is bad, forget about it. you'll be replacing that tool in the future, which is not good for the sales rep or the procurement person, right? Like we do not want to be replacing a tool. We want to do proper due diligence, get a tool in and let it just like hum along and provide value. Rohit Let's assume Sally wants to deploy MongoDB or something like MongoDB to solve a problem. Should she directly approach you as soon as she get that thought in mind that, hey, I'm not able to work through without this kind of a solution? It seems like MongoDB or someone else is solving this problem. I need this kind of a solution. That's the point that they should immediately reach out to you. Reba Yeah. Rohit and then work hand in hand to figure out who are the right kind of people, create that RFP, and then go through that process. Reba Yeah, I think it's tricky to know when to loop in procurement, right? You don't want to loop us in too far in advance. You want to make sure you have the budget. You want to make sure that you have resources. And so I think that it can be tricky to know when to loop us in, which is why that, those relationship building, those hours that you spend on that are really important. But I think that, you know, once you sort of have confirmed timelines and financial resources, that's when you should reach out to procurement, because then you, you know, we can help you gather requirements appropriately. We can work with any operations teams that you have. Looping us in sort of delicately on the boundaries is a tough, a tough decision to be honest. But the tighter that relationship is, the more that will happen. And if you're new at a company or new to your procurement team, loop them in early. You'll eventually figure out what that Goldilocks situation is. But if you need to run an RFP, don't do it without procurement. That would be the number one thing I would say because... The great thing about an RFP is that we can collect your requirements and we can tell that vendor, hey, not only are these our requirements, but these are the security measures we need. This is our legal paperwork. This is our process. Like, if you don't want to work with us, do not submit a quote back. And it sort of like gets some of that uncomfortable situation out of the way when that vendor is most likely to sort of like accept those requirements. If I'm trying to push security or legal requirements later after the vendor knows they've been selected, like, it's going to take three times as long to close a contract. So I think that, like, people sort of, like, do it too early, do it too late. They see the negatives of both of those, and they'll eventually sort of get into a flow with the procurement team as to when to loop it in. But it's not... Procurement is not A, B, C, D. Sometimes procurement is A, Z. Sometimes it's B, A, D. And I think that that's like the nuance that a lot of people don't understand. And a question like that is hard to answer because it is not, every day is not the same. You know, like I say, if it's a Tuesday at 5 p.m., I could have a different answer than Wednesday at 10 a.m. And that's like, that's why I actually think procurement is one of the more interesting jobs on the market because it's, you have to use problem solving skills every single day. And the more you know your stakeholders, the more you can understand like, what answer do I need to give? I know who they are. I know what they're trying to achieve. And I think it makes the job hard for some personalities. But if you're inquisitive, man, this is the role for you because you've got to be questioning everything and really being a problem solver. Yeah. Yeah. Rohit If it is that kind of unstructured and rightfully so, there's no kind of very specific one right answer here. How do you think about creating the policy around procurement that is able to provide those guardrails or tracks which people should follow? Because I'm sure if you're running such a large spend and 12 people team, they also don't want to go haywire and kind of crazy in terms of, hey, someone is calling in on at the 11th hour that I'm going to buy this software or buy this piece of real estate or whatever, getting into a particular contract. At the same time, they don't kind of really waste your time when even they don't know if they really want something. Reba Right. Yeah. I think a policy is a direct reflection of what leadership wants, like a high-level procurement policy. You know, procurement is there to set guardrails. So my policy are the guardrails. But I, as procurement, look to my leadership to say, where do you want those guardrails? Do you want them here, or do you want them out here? You know? And so I think that, you know, some companies have a very strict procurement policy and they would, you would be able to know exactly when to reach out to them. I do not think my peers in tech have that. I do not think it's, I do not think that is how like the procurement function will evolve. I think that, you know, especially for a high growing company, you want to keep agility and you want to stay true to the core of what's most important to you as a business. And that might mean that you have freedoms in one area and no freedoms in another area. So policy is really set by the tone of the leaders and the strategy, right? Like, I don't know if I'm, I can't even think of a fun, good example, so I won't give one, I guess, but you're following a tone. And if I'm not aligned with my leadership, then how could I ever set a policy that allows me, the controller of the money spent at the company, to get where it needs to be? And I oftentimes think about that because there are hard lines with any type of control or security measure, hard line. And that should be at every company, whether you're manufacturing, no growth tech, low growth tech, high growth tech. Those are like the... the fundamental bedrocks and then the rest of that is really what does my leader want to do this year? And leader being often times the CEO or the CFO quite frankly. And so it just kind of depends but there's always a bedrock and the bedrock needs to be something that everyone at the company can respect because if it's not something that people at the company can respect, you're sort of building that negative relationship and they won't come, they won't say hey I need to Reba in the room for this conversation. They'll say, hey, do not invite Reba for that conversation. But if your bedrock is something that everyone respects, then no one will ever question that. And it will never be a problem for a process. So sorry you picked a vendor that doesn't meet this bedrock foundation for our company. But I'm not going to move on it. And they'll say, you know what? Thank you for protecting me. I wish I'd looped you in sooner so I'd have found that out earlier. Right? If you've got some crazy strict policy, they'll just override you. And I never want my, as a procurement leader, you never want your policy getting escalated above you and getting overwritten because you lose all controls. You lose all, you know, any like faith that your stakeholders have in you. And then they'll question everything and you're a done player. Like you're a totally done player. So you want to walk a fine line with your policy of what are the bedrocks? Where does my leadership want me to set my guardrails? And I will say that there are very few times in my career where something's been escalated over me where I was overridden. And I think that if that happens to you, you have to learn from that. It meant something was fundamentally wrong with your policy and where the company wanted you to be. And I think just as a macro statement here, when you're someone like a procurement leader, you have to make sure that you're aligned with your... leadership team because if not you will be in turmoil every single day and you will be you know right or wrong you will be being asked to do something that violates your values and that's not a good place to be that puts you where you're making possibly bad decisions decisions you don't feel comfortable with and you know that can really spiral out of control and I've seen that happen. And I think that's important like specifically if you're interviewing you need to really make sure that your values line up with the values of that leadership team because That's what your policy is going to be and that's what you're going to be sort of acting on every day. Rohit Absolutely. Tell us when should a company think about hiring a dedicated procurement person and what seniority level should that be? Reba In manufacturing, I think that if you are struggling with your margins, you should have already had a procurement person in there, quite frankly. I think manufacturing is a bit of a no-brainer. You have to have that as a function. Just a little bit of a history lesson, I think, we talked about this 20, 30 years ago, that those roles wouldn't have existed in manufacturing. When lean manufacturing and Six Sigma came over from Japan, that was in the automobile industry, you know, really, you know, they were doing that without procurement. And like, I believe my theory and someone corrected me if I'm wrong, but procurement stems from the fact that we needed someone in those manufacturing roles to sort of like build that cross-functional effort and drive not only cost efficiencies, but also, you know, security efficiencies, et cetera. And that role really came out of lean manufacturing coming into the automobile industry. In fact, my first boss was a product of Toyota manufacturing. And honestly, I think I can attribute a lot of the skills that I learned from that. It's like they are gold standard for procurement. And I think that that really taught manufacturing companies how important it was to just have somebody walk on the floor. Someone who is not motivated by head counts on a floor, someone who is not motivated by unions, you're almost like an unbiased opinion walking a factory floor. In tech, like I said, when I joined Mongo six years ago, my peers did not have procurement as a function. And I personally really struggled setting my guardrails on my policy because I didn't have anyone to talk to about it. When I talked to, I won't name names here, but a company you'd be shocked didn't have a procurement organization, their VP of FP&A was negotiating the top 10 % of their contracts, and that was procurement. And I think that that's really evolved now. You'll see most every pre-IPO company would at least have one procurement person. I think if you've got a pre-IPO company that's not growing that fast, you can get away with hiring someone. You can call them a director, but they're more probably like a manager level that's worked at a high growth company. Like they've seen their boss implement tools. They've seen how it could go wrong, how it could go right. That's a perfect hire for like a 600 to 1,000 employee company that's pre-IPO. Someone who's hungry, who's seen their boss do it, who was the best person on that team, they're gonna come in and know how to implement a light tool for you guys to be able to then do what you need to do to go public. If you are a public company and you haven't hired a procurement person, like you've done something wrong. Like... I think that like in the last five or six years that has become gold standard. If you're going public, you have to have a procurement person. And I'd say it's not just about the money. It's about SOX controls. Who do you have helping your accounting team control everything that's critical for the business? Security. Maybe you are, you know, getting... getting FedRAMP or HIPAA compliance, you've got to have a procurement team. So if that is on your roadmap and you don't have a procurement team, you've done something horribly wrong. Start recruiting today, basically. But I do think that for that role, for that 1,500 employee plus company that's public, you've got to hire someone that's worked in a larger environment. I definitely have seen peers who've been in smaller environments and... and then they're plopped into something large, it becomes very difficult. And I think that there's a benefit, I honestly think one of my greatest contributions to this company, because I've worked at $35 billion companies, I know how wrong it could go. I know how inefficient it can be, I know how wrong it can go, I know what it's like to squeeze out 2% margin on if you're buying 50% less. You know how hard it is to negotiate a deal to get savings when your consumption is going down by 50%? That type of background is really important. No matter what type of growth you have at a public company that's 1,500 employees. Because if you have never been through the trenches and seen how bad it can be, you'll never be able to do it right. And I think that it's just such a critical function for a public company for different reasons for tech versus manufacturing, you know, and it's like, reach out to me if you need to find some good procurement leaders if you're a public company because you're probably, you're probably honestly missing out or going to see some future struggles because of that. Rohit Just given the sheer understanding and knowledge of negotiating skills, shouldn't procurement leaders be the highest paid leaders in the company? Reba Well, I wish, you know. I often say procurement is sales without the quota. And in some cases, we do have a quota if you have a savings target. I wish, but it is a more highly paid function than many other areas of the business. I think that it's not an area to try to be cute with compensation. because the value on the market, I'd say it actually, especially right now, like it is one of the hottest in demand jobs out there. And I will say that the compensation has really changed in the last, just in the last two to three years. I think COVID really taught people that you need, like when something drastically changes with your business, you've got to have a cross -functional team that sort of knows how to make things happen. And, you know, like so many companies were caught with bad leases during COVID, right? And if you didn't have a procurement team, like who was responsible for getting out of some of those deals? Who was responsible for saying, I have 52 leases and I only need 10, right? And someone that could talk to acumen with the business, with the CEO, with the CFO, et cetera. And I just, yeah, I think it's critical. Rohit Make sense. Should the procurement team always report into the CFO or there could be nuances where the reporting could be into other leaders? Reba Yeah, I think in manufacturing, I've seen it work both ways. I think in manufacturing it works significantly best under COO because in manufacturing you're like 80% direct procurement and 20% indirect procurement. And what does that mean? That means that if procurement makes a financially based only decision, what if it shuts one of those lines down? I've been in many situations where the plant manager was so nervous about a change procurement was launching because he couldn't afford to have a line go down. Because every day that a factory is not outputting is a day that money is not happening. And so I think that in manufacturing, it's really critical for it to be under operations because a COO will care about margin and how that margin happens. A CFO, now I'm not, I'm making a generalization here, but a CFO more cares about revenue and margin, but a COO cares about how that margin happens. And so I think it works so much better under COO because there's an appreciation for sort of both sides of the fence there. In tech, where you're 80% indirect, 20% direct, it's best under the CFO, I do believe. There is a large aspect of operations attached to it. But you know the COO role in tech is not as prevalent I think as a CFO. So it sets better under there. I have when I first joined I reported into FP&A. I think that's a nice place for the procurement function to start if you're at a smaller company because you don't want your CFO building a procurement function. You want him doing higher level things. And I ultimately ended up reporting into the SVP of Finance and Operations which I think is a nice place for procurement to land. But in a smaller company under the FP &A team, it's really good because you're getting used to the different accounting rules of the company. That FP&A team is the forecast, the budget, and the brains behind any financial decision. So you're lockstep with each other. And I really enjoyed and learned a lot from reporting into our head of FP &A here. So that's kind of how that would involve, I think, in a tech company. So you'd start, let the FP&A lead build out that function based for financial reasons with a side of a lot of the other functions that need that support. And then eventually, as you become a larger organization and you're getting different certifications, it becomes a position you really do need to elevate up because it's much more strategic and it's super cross -functional. But I do think like I said in manufacturing COO is a better spot, but in tech I think the CFO is a good spot for it. Rohit Very cool. What are the biggest challenges facing procurement today? And how can an organization prepare to tackle that? Reba Yeah, the biggest challenge is definitely our tools. And I'm surprised to see you surprised by that, quite frankly. Procurement does not have one tool that can do everything. Like there is no tool that can do everything. There are companies that say that they can. But there's no tool that can do everything. And why is that? That's because until five years ago, you only had two products. You know, you had SAP. and Coupa. And there wasn't willingness by businesses to spend money for procurement tools. And only in the last couple of years did that willingness pick up when it became much more critical. Like I said, I believe my theory is expedited by COVID. And now we have good tools, but none of them are on the same platform. And... So if you are not a visionary and if you are not strongly operationally minded, your team is getting killed by millions of stabs from five different tools. You've got your CRM, you've got your CLM, you've got your, you know, whatever you're using for your POs and whatever you're using for your vendor onboarding and then, you know, how are you collecting banking details? I mean, it can become, it can quickly become death by a thousand paper cuts. And you have to think about how can I build a process with these different tools that allows controls to happen, that allows automations to be doing things. So I can have 12 people, not 25 people. It really is like I've said on many calls, with our investors, they kind of bring smaller companies together and they bring me in. The number one thing we talk about is there's not a single tool. And... I think that that is really the biggest issue. I think that in a couple of years that will not exist anymore, or I'd like to hope, but that definitely still exists today. And there's a couple of people that are out there trying to make it happen. I haven't seen one that I would feel comfortable using for everything, but it's the biggest issue. And then you have data in different places. You've got vendor lists in different places. It's a real problem. Rohit Make sense Beyond this let's say a unified platform that solves for the whole journey of procurement what kind of other technology transformation do you foresee around procurement? Reba Automation and AI for sure. We started using automation last year, tools like UiPath. Love it. If my team has to click a button, then I can automate it. So I think that's really, really powerful for people to do that, especially in tech because we don't have buyers, right? So procurement, a highly paid function is operating at two levels all the time. And so I need to automate as many of those little lower level actions as possible. The other one's AI, and this is an area where I personally haven't spent much time in, but being able to read and dissect a contract has always been something you couldn't automate. Now we're in a world where I can have AI scrape all my contracts and look for auto -renews. I can look for no price caps. I can have it weed out little wordings that maybe get missed by the human eye. And so I'm really looking forward to how AI actually evolves the space. I was just talking to some of the gals on the team this morning about how we're going to build it into our Slack bot. So that way when people ask us questions, like we can have some auto responses, et cetera. So I think that's really going to change some things. And I think what it's going to do, it's going to allow the teams to remove hopefully 20 % of their work. So they can use that 20 % to be more strategic, embed themselves more within the teams. I'm really excited where AI is going to take procurement, quite frankly. Rohit Very cool. How do you think about building relationships with suppliers and how important maybe is a supplier collaboration to your procurement strategy? Reba Yeah, in manufacturing, it's everything. Because if I go back to that Peloton during COVID example, I need someone to do me a favor. And I need to understand what their limitations are. So if I'm asking that favor, I better understand what limitations that they have, and I better make sure it's a realistic one. And that comes through strong relationship building. New product launches, et cetera, I really need to know those vendors. In tech, these stakeholders have the better relationships with the vendors. And we're not talking to them on a day -to -day basis. In tech, we are only brought in when something goes wrong. So it's kind of like they're always a little bit of an adversary conversation. There are certain vendors that, if we're doing a strategic project, we did one a couple years ago where we consolidated our swag vendors. And we were having problems where the... the vendor we wanted to consolidate into wasn't respecting the fact that we needed to have a PO issued before they started production. We worked with them so much that eventually the vendor started educating our stakeholders for what the process was. But I think that's a little rare. And that happens when you're actually doing strategic procurement work where you're consolidating things. But in... In manufacturing, man, you better be best friends with whoever you need to pull a favor from. You need to be able to have a type of relationship where if something hits a fan, you can fly over there and you can roll up your sleeves and get to work with them. But in tech, it's really the stakeholder who manages that relationship unless there's a strategic consolidation happening. Procurement is never going to be a champion in tech procurement. It's just never gonna happen. And if are a sales rep, don't waste your breath trying to make us a champion, because we're never gonna be a champion. And manufacturing, yeah, you become a little bit of a champion, because you have to. Rohit Makes sense. In manufacturing, do you happen to know the processes or the bills of materials a lot more intimately just for the nature of work that you are doing? I guess that's a little more just involved with that function. Reba Yeah. Yeah, if you're a good procurement leader, you are actively involved in, man, I can't remember what it's called, taking me back to my manufacturing days, but we basically put a product on a table and tear it apart. I forget, it's called a BOM review or something like that. Yeah, but it's like a BOM review where you literally put a product on a table and take it apart. Rohit Bills of material. Reba And in that room, you'd have engineering, you'd have whoever the marketing person was, the product person. In procurement, sorry, procurement in tech, it's harder. And the one area where I think you have to do it is you have to do it with your cloud contracts. Like you've got to. If you're a procurement leader and you're negotiating a cloud deal, you better understand what an instance is. You better understand what all the little nuances are. And I will say like it took me a long time and I'm still not even not an expert today. But like you like I'd say your cloud contract is the one contract you want to know what your you know what your BOM cost is. And but that's actually direct spend if you think about like a cloud contract is direct spend for a tech company. But but yeah like in if I'm negotiating a health care contract. You know like I know the bones right I know that last year. Like we had certain level of like, I'm making up numbers here so don't quote me on this, but 5 % of our employees had cancer. And cancer for an employee cost X, Y, Z dollars, right? So I need to know the odds of my employee base versus the age, right? But like I can't, it's nothing physical that I can see, you know? And it's based on predictions. It's not like every time I have an employee, like they're gonna cost me exactly $50,000 a year because there's an exact time chance of all these things happening with their medical life or whatever. And so it is harder, but you still got to take a good shot at it. Because how can I negotiate something if I don't understand the core mechanisms for how pricing is built? And if I actually go back to like my first year on the job in procurement, I remember, because I traded base metals futures, I knew how to talk to them in metal. And if you're looking at a metal part, like a stamped, let's say like a like let's use a door hinge. Everybody knows what a door hinge is, right? It weighs a certain amount of, like maybe it's a steel door hinge. 80 % of that cost is steel. So like, you know, you got to understand like what is the cost of steel today? When are those products being delivered in six to nine months? Well, do they buy today's steel or do they like, do they hedge, et cetera? So it's, it is much easier to do with a physical product and it was real fun actually negotiating deals with those vendors. They're like, How does she know this? It's like, well, I understand the core mechanisms of finance of base metals, and it's 90 % of the cost of your product. So I'm negotiating with you on 10%, not 90%. You and I know the 90%. And it kind of blew their minds. It was really fun. I'd be calling my old boss, what's the price of aluminum today? What's the three months price? But it's not dissimilar to what I do for a salary and benefits for an insurance contract. Like I need to know what are those inputs. It's just that you might, they're super variable. So manufacturing, it's not that variable and in tech it's pretty variable, quite frankly, except for cloud, which if you are a procurement leader or a CFO and you don't have some base knowledge of what builds up your cloud contract, like take a beat and go back and do that because you know, you probably got some inefficiencies there. Rohit You have a secret sort of cloud negotiation tactic that you can share. Reba Well, I call it the fruit basket. So you have a fruit basket. You've got apples, bananas, pineapples, et cetera. The biggest spend is on the apples and the apples are your instances. It's probably 60 to 80% of your contracts. So like, if you're doing anything, understand your instances, you know, like, you know, work with your cloud provider on, you know, savings plans, et cetera. A lot of the cloud providers have really evolved over the last couple of years. It used to be you'd have to make commitments. Now, sometimes you're auto-enrolled in it if you spent more than a year on an instance, but you gotta know those instances. The bananas and the pineapples that make up the other 40 to 80% you'll get to later, but if you're not focused on the apples and that fruit basket, AKA the instances, you're overpaying by significant amount of money. Rohit Makes a lot of sense. Why don't we now demystify negotiation a little bit? Most people would think, isn't negotiation just about haggling on the price? So can you kind of unpack that a little bit and maybe enlighten us in terms of whether this statement is a myth or a truth? Reba Yeah, I think if you're haggling on price, you've done a bad job. That means that you have zero business case if it's just a haggle. Now those can be fun, right, if you have the upper hand. I wouldn't say that they don't happen from time to time. Sometimes you have zero business reason why you're asking for what you're asking for, right? That would be a scenario where like volume is down 50%, but you're coming to them and asking them for a 10 % price decrease. Although even in that case, right, you might say, hey, if you don't... you have volumes down, but if you don't give me the 10 % price decrease, we're gonna discontinue the product and you get no business. So you get to make a decision, like discount or no product at all, right? But I think that like, you've gotta be fighting with facts. I say this all the time. If you fight with feelings, you will lose all day every day. And we all know what those are. Those are emotionally led conversations. And you know what those are. They're with your spouse, your partner, your kids, your... you know, your friends, right? Like, we're just like, oh, we're going nowhere with this argument. Like, if you are not going into a meeting with understanding your facts, not only what your facts are, but what are their facts? So I'll just use that example about the volume's down 50 % and you need a 10 % discount. If you're a business, you say, hey, if I can't get 10 % discount, it's not worth me selling this product because customers aren't willing to pay that, right? So those are your facts, right? But before I go into that negotiation with that tactic, I need to know, well, what is their margin? Can they actually do this? Right? If I know that they can, I'm going to push them hard. If I know that they can't, you know, I'm going to say, hey, like, this is a business decision for you guys. I'm going to go walk their factory floor. I'm going to help them. I'm going to do my job to help them reduce their cost of product. And I've actually done that in my current role where, you know, I was working on a consumption-based contract, and they sort of used their cloud contract. against me and I said, well, let me help you, right? Because I know how to negotiate those cloud contracts and I think they hadn't developed that skill set. I needed them to be at a certain price point. I had to go walk their virtual factory floor and help them with their cloud contracts so I could get to the price that I could achieve. So if I know my facts, where my business stands, where it makes sense for me, and I know what their situation is, like that's when I'm best positioned for it not to be a negotiation. Well, it's always going to be negotiation, I guess, but it's going to be more of a productive conversation. And I can always tell when I'm working with a sales rep that's fighting with facts versus feelings. If they're fighting with feelings, I'll end up being able to destroy them. When they fight with their own facts, it becomes a real conversation. But it's not just haggling, right? If I do a deal with you and it's bad for your business, then I've actually done a bad deal. A mutually beneficial deal is really where I want to aim to be. And I don't want to be, especially in tech, I do not want to be doing a deal on New Year's Eve. I think this is our first year that we didn't do a deal on New Year's Eve. I think the year before last, I was signing a deal at like 9.30 PM, like I don't want to be doing that. It's like I want a mutually beneficial deal. I want to be making sure that my sales rep, especially in tech, hasn't forecasted some kind of revenue that's unrealistic. And so it's... If I'm haggling, either I've done something really wrong or that vendor has done something really wrong. I hate those types of conversations. They're not fun. But we will do them if we have to. Rohit Makes a ton of sense. Let's assume I'm a sales rep. How should I best sell to a procurement leader? Reba So, procurement leader. Well, I think you should have worked. You really don't want to be working with a procurement leader. Like, if you got to the procurement leader, you've probably, you've been escalated, and it's not going to be good for you. But I think if you're working with your category managers, like, they're never going to be your champions. So don't try to make them your champion. But don't block them out. I think that, and I've done some internal training here at Mongo, like, depending on the size of the company, you as a sales rep need to make the decision on when I'm going to loop in procurement. Because if your stakeholder hasn't, if you're working with a mature company, let's say, you know, 2,500 employees, if your stakeholder hasn't mentioned the word vendor review or procurement, you are going to get locked into a situation where your stakeholder has possibly blocked out the procurement team and procurement may throw a wrench in your whole plan. And I have an epic example of this quarter end, big software deal. They had iced out procurement. This wasn't even a new vendor, it was a renewal. They iced out procurement. The stakeholder iced out procurement. Guess what? That sales rep didn't make their quarter end. They could have involved us three weeks, four weeks sooner, told the stakeholder, hey, let's loop in your procurement team, and they would have gotten that deal closed. So if you're a sales leader and you are icing out the procurement team at a mature company, you're putting your whole deal at risk, your whole entire deal at risk. And so I would say that... You know, as a sales leader, like, just remember, procurement has the same goal as you. And we want to execute a deal fast. But like, if you, like, there's only so many, like, if you come to us last minute, especially if you're a new vendor, and you're asking procurement to pull favors, like, procurement, like, category owners only have so many favors with the legal team or with HR to review a contract, right? And so like, if you want us to use one of those favors, you better come with some kind of sweet deal with a good excuse. Because like, we're going to dole out those favors only when necessary. If not, we're going to say, sorry, can't do it. Our SLA is eight days, seven days. You know, like I can't make a miracle happen for you. Rohit Very cool. Makes a ton of sense. Can you share, I'm sure these negotiations could get quite funny, bizarre at times. Do you have one of those crazy stories where it was just maybe something random that you were asking or something random that the salesperson was asking and it was just like laughable, staggering in terms of how that ended up. Reba Yeah. Well, I will say, I don't want to get into any details, but I have definitely quoted Linda Evangelista when I said, I'm sorry, I don't, just like Linda, I don't get out of bed for less than $10,000. So, that was in a particularly contentious conversation. And that's one of my favorite lines that I've ever used, you know, if you know the big supermodel. She actually hates that she's known for that quote, but you know, I don't mind being known for the quote. If I'm on a call as a procurement leader, if I'm on a call, like, like, come on, you're sorry, like you've made it to the point where like, you're gonna have to give us what we want, quite frankly. You know, so like your goal really should never be to get on the phone with a procurement leader, quite frankly, because they're gonna beat you down. But, but yeah, no, that's one of my personal favorite lines. You know, I don't get out of bed for. less than 10,000. Basically, I was saying, I'm not getting on this call for less than $100,000 of additional savings. And then I walked out of that room. But in that negotiation, it was where that sales team was not prepared. They had overstated something totally unrealistic. I don't want to be that person in those calls. I do not want to be. In fact, I have a joke like... The next person that calls me, I'm just going to say yes to because I'm tired of saying no. So it's not like we want to be that. But if you've been escalated to the procurement leader, then most likely what you're doing is not based on facts. Rohit Very cool. To not ultimately reach to Reba. Looking back, what advice would you give to your younger self starting a career in procurement? Reba Yeah, I think I kind of said it earlier, just be a sponge. Like, say yes. Work on all of the hard projects. My boss, not my boss, but one of my finance leaders recently quoted as run towards the grenade. You know, just, and I really believe that. I think that like I, the more complicated the project was, the more I wanted to do it. And the more I learned and the more visibility that got me. You know, it helped me learn when to know, like, know when to quit, know when to keep going. It taught me perseverance. And it really, it sort of like sparked my want for more, if that makes sense, and more in the sense that like, I want to be solving more, like more problems, harder problems, more complicated things, things that somebody else failed at, you know? And so I really leaned into that as a kid and I would give that advice and I would also, you know, listen, my career has been base metals trading, procurement, now I'm moving into sales operations. Like, you know, like it's okay to be making shifts in your career and you should always be reflecting on, am I learning? What's my end goal here? Do something hard, make a lateral move if you have to. And, you know, I think that like every big transition I've ever made has ended up you know, with me learning more and me really like getting promoted more and getting more opportunities, more visibility. So I'm just saying don't lean away from doing something that you haven't done before. Because every time I've made that risk, it's really paid off for me personally. And it may not pay off, right? Like you have to be okay with it paying off and with it not paying off, but always take the chance, you know. Rohit Yeah, that's kind of what I was about to ask, that with high rewards, there is always that high risk. And so when you're running to grenade, you kind of have that fear of failing as well, right? So is it just that you're going to accept that, that that is an eventual outcome that could happen? Reba Yeah, I think. Yeah, I think you have to embrace failure. Like, the biggest failures in my life have been the ones that have taught me the most, you know? Now, you don't want to fail at the same thing twice. That's like, was it, fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me. But like, every time I have failed at something, I've come out significantly better. And I won't talk about it here, but one of my biggest failures has really shaped how I've thought about things and actually, helped me understand that I am strong operationally and like I've done so many incredible things since that first happened and I actually, in interviews, right, like I wanna know what was your biggest failure? Forget about what you did right, like what was your biggest failure and how you reacted to it. So I think don't be scared of failure, don't be scared of doing something wrong. You know, you have to know what those rubber bumpy lanes are, right? And your leaders should give you that. But if you foster that environment within yourself and within your team, and if you're a leader, you should be fostering that environment as well. I just think it's the best place to learn. You gotta be okay with it. Failure is okay. I just shouldn't fail at the same thing twice. Rohit Very cool. In your opinion, what is the future of procurement? Reba Yeah, I mean, I think that procurement will continue to be a pillar of companies. I like to cite the current CEO of Apple. He was chief procurement officer, you know, and he followed Steve Jobs, right? So I think procurement as a function, you know, is really about how do I make sure the company is scaling, growing, having revenue at certain levels, like it touches all aspects of the business. And I just, I think that... You'll see more and more chief procurement officers become CEOs at manufacturing companies. I think it's a great space to be in to just learn so many things. So I really see the CPO role sort of evolving and growing at companies, having a bigger seat at the table. So I'm looking forward to seeing how it evolves over the next, I mean, it's evolved so much over the last five years. I can't imagine what it's gonna be like in 10 years from now. Rohit Very cool. Reba, we understand that now you're moving to sales ops leadership, right? Tell us a little more, how did you think about that change? Reba Yeah, well, I think that as I've personally developed throughout my career, I've realized that I am quite ambitious of a person, super operationally minded, and I'd really love a shot at being a CEO or COO someday. So I really, I've launched most of the tools that we use in finance. So even if it was outside of procurement, I actually run the procurement travel and sustainability teams here. And I've, you know, launched all the other tools, even if it wasn't in those areas. And I just kind of felt like it was time to get some different experience if I really wanted to take a shot at getting to the top. And so in tech, really, product, engineering, and sales are really where most of those leaders, most of the CEOs come from. It's not to be said that you can't move up from some other angle, but I'm a girl all about odds. So I want to be getting my odds all in my favor. And so, yeah, I took a look around and thought, you know, my personality, the procurement and sales were really similar type of personalities. And I really respected the leaders that we had in place over on the sales ops side. So, yeah, I'm going to be working for the SVP of sales operations, leading strategic initiatives, ironically, still heavily involved with the finance side. So I really think it's a, if you're a leader, you know, on the sales or finance side, like it's great to be pulling people from those different orgs because even myself, I was talking with the CRO the other day and being able to banter with him about the finance perspective versus his perspective, I think that there's a huge value add there. And I'm really excited about my rounding out my experience. I'm just ready to be that sponge again, ready to ask all the questions. At my level, ready to challenge too, right? hey, here's what I know, I'm gonna take this and make both sides better. And so I'm really looking forward to that. Some of my initiatives are annual planning, which is really a finance-led role, so some of those synergies are gonna play really nicely together. But yeah, I'm just looking forward to it, and my biggest advice out there is just never say no, and always take a chance on yourself. I've done that a lot in my life. I've been lucky, I will say, it's better to be lucky than good sometimes. But you know, there have been mistakes along the way, but I've been pretty lucky in some of these transitions. So personally optimistic and really looking forward to rounding out my operations experience, quite frankly. Rohit Very cool. How does a successful career looks like to you? Reba to me personally. Yeah, I think. Rohit Yes. Is it becoming CEO or something else? How do you define that? Reba Yeah, I'd like to say it's becoming CEO, but I think more importantly, it's whatever environment or team is under me or around me, I want to see people achieve their dreams. I know that sounds corny, but you can ask my team. I lead in a way that I never, I try never to ask someone to do something that doesn't personally benefit them. And my real motivation is to be a leader. or lead an organization that has that type of culture. And I am not here to ask you to do easy things. I'm here to ask you to do hard things, but I need to make sure those hard things that I'm asking you to do line up with what you want. And that could be, I want to leave at 5 p .m. today because I want to go home to my family, right? Or, hey, I'm ambitious. Give me that work. I'm going to do it. Like, I'll burn the midnight oil. I want to learn X, Y, Z. I'm here to give that to you. And I think my real motivation to being a leader, hopefully a CEO, is to have a company that has that type of culture. I think that that's pretty rare. And I really love, the most proud thing that I've accomplished is that building my team of, up the three teams here at Mongo, I can see how people start to believe in themselves and start to develop their own career path. And that is really the biggest thing for me. I love mentoring, especially young females, helping them get their voice. And so I really want to make it to the top so that way people can see that you can lead like that and get to the top. Because I think sometimes there's negative connotations for people who get to the top and how they get there. So I just kind of want to prove that wrong. And I want to help people get to wherever they want in life, however, whatever that is. So I'm very motivated by that. Rohit Awesome. Well, that brings us to our lightning round. Should be a lot more fun than all the heavy lifting that you have done so far. All it takes is basically I'm going to ask you quick questions and I need immediate answers. All right, let's get going. Reba Okay, I'll do my best. Rohit Sweet or Savory? Reba Sweet. Rohit Books or podcasts? Reba Podcast. Rohit Thinker or doer? Reba Doer. Rohit Introvert or extrovert? Reba Extrovert. Rohit Whiskey or wine? Reba Martinis? Is that an option? Rohit All right, sure. How does someone impress you? Reba Showing up, showing up, in whatever way. Rohit If not a procurement leader, what would you be, maybe other than sales officer leader? Reba A stylist. I think we talked about that at the beginning. I'd love to be doing wardrobe-ing for movies. I love watching like an Emily in Paris type of TV show that's just so fun and put together. So yeah, definitely a stylist. Rohit Very cool. If you could be the head of procurement for any company, which company would you choose? Reba Apple. I think they've got a nice mix of indirect and direct. And there's something about direct procurement that's just really fun, walking those factory floors. Rohit Makes sense. Ideal place for you to retire. Reba Paris. Rohit If you could teleport yourself right now, where would you go and why? Reba I can't answer that question as a rapid question. Am I on vacation? Rohit Wherever vacation in history. Reba Oh, in history, well that's too broad. But if it was in today's world, definitely I would teleport myself to the Maasai Mara and be out on safari. In history? I don't know. History didn't fare too well for women, so maybe I'll stay into today's age. Rohit All right. Number one item on your bucket list right now. Reba Visiting a hundred countries. I'll be at 39 by the end of this year. Rohit Wow. If you could un-invent something, what could it be, or what would it be rather? Reba Social media. Rohit Who is your role model? Personally or professionally? Reba I really like Diane von Furstenberg. She's a bit of like, most people don't know her background, but she went bankrupt, I think twice. So she's got a lot of perseverance. She, you know, she doesn't come from money. And she just, you know, was a gal with an idea in the seventies. And I just, I really love her story. And now she gives back to the community. She actually, if you know the Highline in New York City, she, she basically built that through a foundation. So she just gives back a lot. And I just. Her story is really incredible to me. Her and Apollo Anton Ohno, the short track speed skating athlete, is probably my two biggest role models. Rohit Okay, penultimate question. One thing that can make you 10x more productive. Reba Hmm getting rid of social media Rohit And the last one, describe yourself in three words. Reba I'd say that. Hello Kitty Maximalism is kind of how I would describe myself. And I think that can apply to both work and in my personal life. I like to have fun. I live a life of color. And I try to bring joy to people around me. But I'm definitely going to maximize whatever. If I'm doing it, I'm going to do it hard. And I'm going to ask other people to work hard around me as well. Rohit Well, Reba, this has been an amazing show. Thank you so much for all the time and your insights. I look forward to chatting again sometime. Reba Yeah, no, thank you so much. It was a great chat today. And, you know, feel free to reach out to me if you want to chat about any of these topics. And if there are any other female Hello Kitty maximalists out there, please reach out so we can create a big crew of us. Have a good day, guys.